Darkest Year : The American Home Front, 1941-1942 (9781250133182) by Klingaman William K

Author:Klingaman, William K.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

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“At night, when we get back to our prefabricated home,” wrote S. J. Perelman from southern California, “we just about have strength to pick up the evening paper, get the latest disaster straight between the eyes, and totter off to bed.” Surveys revealed that the average American was spending an additional thirty minutes every day reading the newspaper, and the news from the Pacific was—as German émigré Lotte Lenya put it—“so terrible discouraging.”

In late February and early March, United States naval forces suffered yet another defeat, this time as part of an ill-fated American-British-Australian-Dutch effort to slow the Japanese invasion of Java. Over three days, the United Nations fleet was decimated. Details emerged slowly through the cloak of Navy censorship, but by mid-March it was clear that the setback in the Java Sea represented “the most serious naval defeat … since Pearl Harbor.” Three months after the attack on Hawaii, Japan controlled the entire southwest Pacific except Australia. “And Australia,” warned Time, “is in peril.”

“We have been pounded by a barrage of bad news as new and shocking in our experience as if it were a range of bombs,” concluded the New York Times. In his diary, Charles Lindbergh noted simply that “at present we are losing the war about as rapidly as we can.” One journalist suggested bitterly that “the ban on new radios will be no hardship to the listening public. The old sets are plenty good enough for the third-rate news we are getting these days.”

Government censors’ persistent attempts to manipulate public opinion by selectively releasing war news left Americans wondering what even worse disasters remained hidden. “We are discouraged and dissatisfied with the kind of news which has been handed us since Pearl Harbor,” snapped the New Yorker, accusing authorities of vacillating between “the mysterious silence of the censor and the lyrical scream of the propagandist. It has been baffling, contradictory, and tentative.”

Few responsible reporters questioned the government’s right to withhold details of military encounters to avoid disclosing sensitive information to the enemy. But “unnecessary suspense, unwarranted delay and confusion over what the Navy Department actually does release,” claimed the New York Times, “is not calculated to stiffen American morale in a long, hard war. Democracy cannot function efficiently in the dark.” Playwright Maxwell Anderson discerned in Washington “an unfortunate implication that our fellow citizens and allies are to be told what is good for them, and that somebody should be delegated to decide what is good for them.” A democracy “will defend itself best when it knows what’s going on,” Anderson insisted. “A free people is capable of free discussion of uncensored news, and that’s its strength.”

Heavy-handed propaganda did not play well with the American public either. “Ballyhoo doesn’t win wars,” argued columnist David Lawrence. “Yet the tendency in Washington now is to turn on the ballyhoo.… It is nothing short of tragic that the Administration has failed to understand either how to get unity or to preserve it.” Artless patriotic appeals and

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