The Tyee

'The Fog of War'

Media censorship was rampant during wartime Canada, reveals new book. Has conflict reporting changed?

Crawford Kilian, 19 Oct 2011, TheTyee.ca

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GIMP-FogofWar-300.jpg

Second World War poster. Source: Library and Archives Canada.

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Second World War poster. Source: Library and Archives Canada.

  • The Fog of War: Censorship of Canada's Media in World War Two
  • Mark Bourrie
  • Douglas & McIntyre (2011)

Think about Canada in the Second World War, and you likely think about overseas battles and campaigns: Hong Kong, Dieppe and the liberation of the Netherlands. Think about Canada at home during that war, and you likely won't think about much: Conscription, the deportation of Japanese Canadians from B.C., convoys from Halifax.

That's because the propagandists in both wars emphasized heroic combat (with the messy bits airbrushed out), and the censors made sure that Canadians at home heard as little as possible that might be of value to the enemy. But they also made sure we wouldn't hear anything that would discourage young men and women from enlisting.

As a result, news of many important events was suppressed. After the war, those events seemed too stale to make public, or to remember. So one of the surprises of this excellent book is that, between 1939 and 1945, Canada was fighting a deadly and complex struggle here at home.

Another surprise is that censorship in the Second World War was also a complex struggle: The censors (themselves professional journalists) had to deal with a military that wanted to censor everything, politicians trying to stay in office and news media that wanted to cooperate but often considered censorship absurd and pointless.

In the First World War, Canadian censorship had gone overboard, even banning recordings of Deutschland Über Alles. Mark Bourrie argues that when war broke out again in September 1939, prime minister Mackenzie King had two key goals for news censorship: To keep military and economic intelligence out of the hands of the Axis and to keep civilian morale from breaking down.

These goals were hard to achieve. The Americans, neutral for two years, freely reported information that Canada wanted suppressed. After the fall of France, the puppet Vichy regime sent diplomats to Ottawa who kept the Nazis informed. Much of the Quebec media strongly supported Vichy, while opposing Canada's role in the war.

Bourrie reminds us that we were losing for the first three years. The Nazis and then the Japanese triumphed again and again. So the censors had to ensure that the war news scared Canadians into accepting rationing and other measures, without scaring them into despair.

He makes it clear that the censors' worst enemies were not the journalists but the military -- especially the Navy, which didn't want to release any news at all. Most of the Canadian media, however, tried hard to cooperate. But what was the point of silencing a CBC or Montreal Gazette report if the locals could tune in to an American station carrying the same story?

Life for the censors was complicated still further by some of Quebec's francophone media. Important papers like Le Devoir were openly hostile to the war and friendly to fascism and anti-Semitism. While Mackenzie King had promptly shut down communist papers across the country, he let Quebec fascists print almost anything they pleased. (Montreal Mayor Camillien Houde was thrown in jail for his political statements; that ensured him re-election after the war.)

How could a national government, fighting for its democratic life, allow these wannabe quislings to support the enemy and subvert the war effort? Mackenzie King understood Canada's politics better than anyone, and he knew that a crackdown on Quebec's fascist intellectuals would only make matters worse.

Bourrie's book is valuable for such insights, and his description of wartime Quebec helps to explain postwar separatism. Ironically, the right-wing nationalism of the 1940s turned into the left-wing social democracy that first inspired the Parti Québécois and then handed Quebec to the New Democrats.

The censored war at home

Bourrie also describes some astonishing events in wartime Canada that I had known little or nothing about. For example, Nazi U-boats attacked ships anchored off Newfoundland's Bell Island and its iron mines -- just a few minutes' drive from St. John's. The Battle of the St. Lawrence was a grim and bloody struggle between the Canadian and German navies. People living on the shore could watch freighters being sunk and U-boats pursued -- but they wouldn't read anything about it in their papers.

Nor did they read much about German espionage. One spy, dropped off by a U-boat, was almost immediately identified by a 14-year-old hotel clerk: The spy was using obsolete Canadian cash and smoking German cigarettes. The RCMP tried to use him as a double agent, but so many American news sources spilled the beans that the Germans must have known; the spy was kept in jail and sent home after the war. He even got back the $9,000 he'd arrived with.

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