This is a live radio report of a Battle of Britain dogfight, broadcast on the following day it caused some protest at the nature of the commentary
Do you have any good examples of media that got wide coverage, that actually suggested that being involved in WWI or WWII was horrific? That covered things like the fact that we firebombed Tokyo and killed a hundred thousand people by incinerating them in horrific ways?
I’m sorry, but I just do not think the media was covering that kind of stuff in a way that people were real aware of at the time.
Rest assured no one knew at the time. I’m also not sure anyone would have cared if they had.
Edit: Also whatever you think of McNamara, Fog of War is one of the best documentary/interviews ever.
I think you may be exaggerating what you call a partnership between the media and the military in Vietnam. I read through this Wiki, and while I can’t vet it, it seems pretty specific on how the military and the press cooperated.
Barring a few calculated charm offensives by the military, which were also intended to influence reporting, it doesn’t strike me as being a more or less contentious or transactional relationship than it is today.
If anything, reading about how racist and chauvanist the Western media was towards the Vietnamese makes me thankful for modern journalists, who are willing to tell the stories of people like Shakira or the Yazidis.
I’m not sure what it is you expect from todays journalists, but I really think the quality of the reporting speaks for itself. We are getting into the minutiae of what our troops are doing sometimes, which absolutely wasn’t the case in Vietnam.
Sometimes our troops are the ones doing the reporting themselves. A lot of the most intense combat footage on YouTube comes from some grunts Go-Pro. “Look ma, an IED!”.
I’ve looked at some of the combat footage on YouTube from Vietnam, but the only real difference I see is that the reporters are able to stick a microphone in someones face 5 minutes after they nearly died, which isn’t ethical, and doesn’t tell me very much about the war.
It’s silly to expect news to have the same weight in an age with a 24 hour news cycle that’s full of junk, peoples phones that are full of junk, blogs that are full of junk, Facebook and Twitter that’s full of junk.
The average household used to have one screen, and the people who got to produce for that screen had to pass a pretty high bar. Now a household has seven or eight screens that any idiot can produce for, and so they’re mostly full of junk.
We should probably try to deal with that as a culture, but it’s a tall order when a lot of people are naive enough to get their news from Facebook, or sucking on the rage juice they get from cable news.
It’s fair to say that as a society we’ve opted not to care. That’s on us.
The stories are still there, the journalists are doing incredible work, and their reporting is being pushed by large news organizations. People can read them if they aren’t too busy watching college girls dance on TikTok.
It took reporters half a century to tell the story about this one.
It’s also featured in this very good documentary about Major Earl Gray, who served in WW2, Korea and Vietnam. Some pretty powerful stuff about what war does to people.
I certainly don’t mean to point to Vietnam as some halcyon period of love between the military and the press. There was, if anything, an often hostile relationship. The difference was that one, the press was still able to do their job most of the time, two, there was still a sense that there were limits to how much the military could stonewall the press, and three, there was a national sense that the nation and the military had a close relationship, and there were legitimate reasons for the public’s need to know. It didn’t always play out that way, but I find it better than today. Today it seems to me that the military sees itself as separate from society, and in many cases above society, and society for its part has given up really engaging with the military and doesn’t even try to understand what is involved in our global interventions.
Characterizing the war as horrific wasn’t necessary, as pretty much everyone had family or friends in the military and there was the experience of WWI that was still strong in many people’s minds. And the 1940s were not a time when modern-era shock journalism was even a thing. Taken in context, though, the basic coverage of the war was fairly realistic, and while actual numbers and details were usually left out, there was a generally honest attempt to report the good and the bad. You can go through the archives of most daily papers of the war era and follow along pretty well, though of course newspapers and magazines often ran puff pieces or feel good pieces too.
My point really though is more about the integration of the military and society (of which the press is also a part). The notion of reporters (and artists and filmmakers and photographers) going along with the soldiers during WWII was no big deal. It was expected, pretty much. Contrast that with today’s far more adversarial attitude, and the total ignorance of much of the public (and lack of interest) about the military we pay for.
Getting rid of the draft and going to all volunteers will do that, imo.
As bad as the draft is in a lot of ways, I think we’d be better off with it. For one it would put the kibosh on military adventures quite a bit. It’s a lot easier for the public to support fighting a 20 year war in some place they can’t find on a map when they know their kids aren’t ever going over there to fight it.
We couldn’t fight low casualty warfare with draftees. We’d have to change our doctrines entirely, and it would be a massive expense.
So the Ernie Pyle grit was absolutely there - journalism didn’t necessarily sugarcoat the experience of soldiers on the ground, though it didn’t indulge in excessive gore either.
This is the type of thing - not questioning the war itself, but emphasizing, if possible even exaggerating for rhetorical effect, the toll it takes on the soldiers (this a dispatch from Tunisia, May 1943):
Now to the infantry – the God-damned infantry, as they like to call themselves.
I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.
I wish you could see just one of the ineradicable pictures I have in my mind today. In this particular picture I am sitting among clumps of sword-grass on a steep and rocky hillside that we have just taken. We are looking out over a vast rolling country to the rear.
A narrow path comes like a ribbon over a hill miles away, down a long slope, across a creek, up a slope and over another hill.
All along the length of this ribbon there is now a thin line of men. For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.
The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.
On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing.
They don’t slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged.
In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory – there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.
The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men.
As to the real time coverage of civilian bombing a la Tokyo, that’s an interesting question and it makes me want to research a little more. I don’t think at that point the general American public gave a goddamn about the deaths of Japanese civilians, though. I could be wrong.
Edit: this headline from NY Times March 11 1945 (day after the Tokyo firebombings) gives an interesting sense of what they were concerned with:
A headline the next day reads:
(I think I’m paywalled from actually reading these, unfortunately.)
As to Dresden:
I’m not sure if I would call this sort of coverage sanitized. It feels more like ‘yep, the enemy are reaping the whirlwind, oh well, how does it affect the strategic picture?’ But this is obviously a very cursory sampling.
Something like the Chenogne Massacre was, as far as I can tell, covered up at the time, My Lai-style.
It just feels like that there was never any doubt past 1941 that there had to be a war - there just wasn’t any going back from Pearl Harbor. So guys like Ernie Pyle (who died with the troops near the end) could get access because everyone is on the same page. I think in WW2 restrictions of access were mainly about keeping troop movements and deployments secret rather than a worry that reporters would be hostile journalists.
Agreed. Though the isolationist sentiment was strong prior to Pearl Harbor, afterward I imagine any anti-war rhetoric was consigned to the extreme margins of society. What’s interesting is whether there was any questioning of how the war was fought, e.g. critiques of strategic bombing on humanitarian grounds.
There were of course draft dodgers, black marketeers, and people who just didn’t think the war was terribly important to them during WWII; humans be humans. And of course there were the flat-out fascist sympathizers, and hard-core Stalinists (before June, 1941 at least) who supported the Germans to some extent. After Pearl Harbor, most of that either disappeared or went deep underground, though the low-level stuff like avoiding conscription and violating rationing continued throughout the war.
Of course, it helped that the war was a long way away and it was actually possible for Americans to forget about it for a while, unlike for most folks in Europe or much of Asia. It’s interesting though to see how divided we were up until late 1941. Well into 1940, for example, you still could find editorials urging us to not back the Brits too heavily and to keep trading with the Germans.
Well, it’s important to remember the sequence. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, US declares war on Japan but not Germany, then Germany stupidly declares war on the US, then the US declares war on Germany.
There was certainly a substantial level of support for fighting Japan but not Germany, but Germany forced the issue.
Yes, I certainly agree with that. Though it isn’t clear to me how much of e.g. the disdain MacArthur’s troops apparently felt for him made it into the contemporary press.
There is a world where we sided with the Third Reich and that world isn’t that far off of the one we live in.
And by siding I mostly mean just not lend-leasing to the Soviets and the British. There are some historians who think the Soviets only made it because of lend-lease, which makes for a much different world than we know.
The world was in many ways lucky that FDR was around and interested in politics.
Amen to that.
But how has it actually affected reporting?
We have a pretty accurate account of what’s happening on the ground within the month, sometimes within days. That simply wasn’t true in Vietnam. We are vastly better able to know the war today.
In Vietnam the military gave journalists a ride to the front and let them roam around, so mr and mrs Smith could watch Johnny get shot up by the VC, but it didn’t actually say anything about the war, or about what the soldiers were doing when they weren’t on camera.
To me that sort of thing is basically pornography. As part of the coverage it’s fine, it shows you what the soldiers go through (The Battle for Marjah and Restrepo being modern examples of same) but it doesn’t get you what actually matters: Military and political thinking, the conduct of operations, the effects of operations, what people should expect going forward. We are actually getting that now.
Today we have a nearly real-time account of two wars, including some stunning detail on what goes on within some military units.
It can’t be perfect, and it won’t be complete until the historians dig in, but as a nerd I am stunned by what I’m able to learn just by reading the news, using a search machine, reading a book, or watching a documentary.
To this day you still can’t get that level of information on Vietnam. The press actually did get Tet wrong, according to both North Vietnamese and US commanders. It’s still not clear what happened at Thuy Bo or Thanh Phong. No one gave a damn what happened to the Vietnamese, including journalists, so god knows what else fell through the cracks along the way.
It has never been harder for the military or the politicians running a war to keep a secret than it is right now.
They despise it (at least until they develop an agenda worth leaking stuff for) but there’s not a whole lot they can do about it. I think it’s pretty clear that the journalists are winning that war.
Ah, I see where you are coming from. I would have to agree that the amount of info today is vastly greater than before. No question. As to the result, well, that’s another thing entirely, though there the differences are not that great. Americans have simply never really subjected our actions to careful, thoughtful reflection and scrutiny to any great degree. The fact that there is so much information out there about so many aspects of ongoing warfare does not necessarily mean there is a higher degree of awareness or knowledge. With so many competing sources of info, and no external filtering going on most of the time, there is a sort of overload on the one hand that meshes with the general disinclination of the public at large to look deeply at the big picture.
Maybe that’s the real issue–Americans in particular are willing to send our sons and daughters overseas to fight all sorts of battles, but really don’t seem to care much about the why, the how, or the cost, despite having access to information.
To be fair, for the vast majority of people, it’s other people’s sons and daughters.
100%. No two soldiers are alike, but one of my friends from the US who went despises parades more than pacifists, because in his eyes they’re being cheered on by people who have no idea what they’re cheering for.
No one in the media was questioning the morality of what we were doing in WWII, despite the fact that we were doing some fucking horrific shit.
Personally, I think our actions were absolutely justified, but if today’s modern media and social attitudes existed in 1942, we would never have taken those actions which we took to win the war.
If we were to kill the majority of civilians, intentionally, in dozens of major cities? How do you think the media today would cover that? Cause it sure wouldn’t be how the media covered it in WWII.
Even without being able to get through the paywall, we can see that those articles are fairly short, single column pieces… and they are on pages 14 and 18, respectively.
We burned 50 square miles of tokyo, killed a 100,000 civilians, and it didn’t merit more than a page 14 blurb.
The media of those days was not in the business of questioning the government much.
I don’t think that what changed after vietnam was that the military started acting differently. It’s that the media started covering them differently.