Abstract
Germany did not fight in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. It sent only military observers to witness this first “total” war, which funneled hundreds of thousands of civilian-soldiers into close combat supported by machine guns, barbed wire, and artillery. The Germans paid close attention to how Japan won not only on the battlefield but also in the arena of public opinion, having smoothly fused censorship and propaganda into their objectives.
A United States Army observer, Captain Peyton C. March, also noted the success of Japan’s methods. Complete control of the foreign press corps kept reporters from initially seeing battles, which angered the correspondents and their editors. After Japan piled up victory after victory and seemed assured of winning the war, reporters finally gained access to the combat zone but were kept in closely guarded camps. They got tightly scripted tours that took place miles from the actual fighting. Japan’s key rule was to avoid doing anything that would hurt the spirit of harmony. And so, ironclad censorship suffocated any dangerous scraps of truth. Propaganda campaigns roused Japan’s civil population and its newspapers toward near-universal support for the war and its goal of dominance in East Asia.
March, who worked for Army’s Chief of Staff (and went on to serve as the Army Chief of Staff), correctly predicted that in the next war, all armies would copy Japan’s playbook. “One of the most striking things in connection with this war has been the way in which Japan has handled the question of the censorship,” March wrote at the end of a crucial siege in 1905. Foreign attachés surely would present that “object lesson” to their home countries “in such a way as to make some similar method a necessity in all future wars.”
According to Frederick McCormick, who reported from the Russo-Japanese front and became the chief American military censor during World War I, German observers—all of them army officers—loved the Japanese press controls. By 1905, it had become clear that Japan, once seen as backward, weak, and toy-like in much of the West, had found a way to defeat its giant Eurasian rival. In his 1917 book The Menace of Japan, McCormick wrote that after the war in the Far East, Germany quickly adopted plans to adjust its own war machine to copy that of Japan. Germany made one costly change: treatment of correspondents. Japanese officers looked down upon most reporters as individuals yet treated them cordially and valued the press corps as a whole as a conduit of Japan’s “truth” about the war. In an example of Japanese finesse, their censorship delayed the release of American accounts of battles until the army’s own version had been sent to the home islands. A day or two later, the “objective” accounts of Western reporters, scrubbed clean of nasty detail, arrived by wire in newsrooms in Japan and around the world. By seemingly verifying the official version, the censored Western versions encouraged trust in the government’s war information campaign.
Germany also disdained war correspondents, McCormick wrote. Government and military leaders often came from the elite classes of society, which looked down, far, far down, on ink-stained wordsmiths and could not imagine asking for their cooperation. Unlike Japan’s War Office, the German high command decided to work around journalists, not through them, when the next war came. And that would prove costly in the German war to win hearts and minds.
Much of the above can be found in a 2019 book that I co-authored with Natascha Toft Roelsgaard, Journalism and the Russo-Japanese War: The End of the Golden Age of Combat Correspondence. For nearly 30 years, I have contemplated why wartime press–military relations have varied from war to war and country to country, starting with my first academic book, Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and the American Press and Radio in World War II. After having read Dr. Elisabeth Fondren’s enlightening and much-needed monograph, “Fighting an Armed Doctrine,” I find myself thinking more about the idea of time-specific national culture/character as playing an important role in wartime communication. How do governments and military bureaucracies create organizational structures to shape information for domestic consumption? To what extent does national culture help explain why a particular war was won or lost?
I prefer the idea of national culture to national character. The former suggests something shaped by the world in which we live. The latter suggests something that springs from genetics. I do not wish to take this idea to extremes. Germany, which gave us von Bismarck, the Kaiser, and the Führer, also gave us Bach, Beethoven, and Albrecht Dürer, not to mention the modern higher education system.
To account for major cultural differences over time, and to understand national culture, requires a willingness to junk the idea that Some Big Things never change. The rabid Germany of the two world wars gave way to a country that was acutely aware of its history and proudly helped lead the free world during the abdication of the United States from many world affairs from 2017 to 2021. Japanese children born 120 years ago were socialized to worship the emperor as their national father figure, to treat military service (and death in combat) as the highest honor, and to not promote themselves as any higher or lower than any other child. If you want a brave and daring soldier for a special mission, one American correspondent asked his readers in 1904, just point randomly into a company of Japanese troops. Yet, Japan now is among the most peaceful nations.
In the United States, we also have been taught to respect our president and our national symbols. Like the Japanese, we (the 95%, at least) detest class and caste and are willing to fight to prove ourselves equal to others. Yet, like the French with their élan, Americans of a certain generation were taught to believe themselves set apart from the world. Many Americans of a certain age grew up feeling the United States would always be the world’s greatest nation, despite data about health, happiness, and so on that suggest otherwise.
National culture changes. That election in 2016 demonstrated that the dominant culture could be almost instantly flipped, at least in politics, to reveal the prevalence of the Ugly American. They are out of the White House for now, but as long as another election can change who is in charge, the threat of a feral resurgence remains real. When national culture appears to be clearly articulated, as particularly during wartime, it becomes easier to see what exists as well as what came before.
It is crucial to understand that Germans had a far different experience with censorship than did the United States and Japan. The Bismarckian empire had set up and nurtured a culture of political censorship. After the German censorship law of 1874, newspapers had a Sitzredakteur (sitting editor), a straw man who was legally responsible and would go to prison (sitzen, to sit, means being in prison) when a paper violated censorship laws.
Fondren’s monograph does not directly examine national culture or character, but the idea exists throughout. For example, she writes, The first lesson German propagandists outlined, but never fully embraced, is that governments needed to overcome their autocratic attitudes about information and their contempt for the public. Public opinion—including audiences’ reception and trust—mattered during World War I and German leaders increasingly realized this. Their messages were for the most part instructional, which reflected the hierarchical state of German society. (Emphasis added)
Or this, “Notions of German idealism, morality and Kultur featured prominently in these writings of historians, authors and intellectuals. In 1914, for instance, even classicists gave lectures on cultural reasons why the Germans should fight.”
Given their frequent brilliance on the battlefield, Fondren asks, “Why did the Germans screw up so badly in their handling of censorship and propaganda during the First World War?” The answer, I think, is that they formed the firing squad in a circle. So many people in the government and the armed forces had a hand in shaping censorship—all of them sneering that they knew better than the public and the press—that they never spoke as one. Their efforts trod on others and were trod upon in return.
This was the furthest thing from what Germany expected. German militarism, Fondren writes: [R]ising nationalism and the admiration for Kaiser Wilhelm II and the royal family . . . characterized the German self-image. It only seemed plausible that authorities thought their wartime publicity and censorship efforts should work if they followed the long-established constitutional-monarchist and bureaucratic frameworks.
Furthermore, “The country’s botched military operations, the inability to acquire the trust of neutral countries, and the nationalist rhetoric all reinforced the international conviction that German wartime diplomacy simply continued the tradition of imperialistic goals.”
When things got bad—Lusitania, anyone?—the German response was to double down on its propaganda. It is startling to learn from Fondren that German censors kept for months the news of soldiers’ deaths from their families and that they attempted to “spin” away ugly truths about strikes and food shortages. Germany did have its publicity and censorship successes, as Fondren notes, but they were small in comparison with the more evident disasters.
I love this line in Fondren’s monograph: “No information campaigns, mass pamphlets, or other printed matter could compensate for not having food to eat.” Newspapers were not allowed to report on food shortages caused by the Allied blockade of the sea, yet every German alive knew they did not have enough to eat. And while the government tried to fill the gap with its own pamphlets about agriculture, Fondren wryly notes in another bumper-sticker line, “Information was not edible.”
When we compare German censorship and propaganda in World War I with the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI) in the same war, we find an interesting contrast. American reporters, unlike their German peers, had been steeped in a culture of independence from government. The First Amendment prohibited prior restraint of journalists in the United States (as opposed to the combat zone, where accreditation requirements included the regulation that all news stories be censored). The CPI published lists of news topics that would benefit the Central Powers and it asked journalists not to print such stories. This approach worked relatively well—and would succeed dramatically during World War II—because, well, try to imagine the opposite. If government censors tried to close newspapers or block certain stories from publication, Americans of the early 20th century would fight back, and hard. (Alas, how far we have fallen into the pit of slime amplified by recent political theater. The idea of a free press being the bulwark of freedom has become a joke to one third of Americans.) The U.S. system during World War II had its problems. Many of these problems begin with the bombastic head of the CPI, George Creel. He wanted his word to be law, but the press never saw him as the sultan of publicity. Stories abound of Creel’s ego getting in the way of smooth press–military–government relations. Fortunately, we now have an idea of how much Creel’s ham-handedness was softened or ignored by the man who oversaw daily supervision of American newspapers and magazines: Harvey O’Higgins. As I wrote in an American Journalism article in 2006, O’Higgins offered the calm voice of reason and truth. He persuaded newspapers to censor themselves on the most crucial issues.
Creel had the big office and the big title. O’Higgins ran the show day to day. We would know a lot more if, at war’s end, our national character had said to preserve the CPI documents rather than let so many of them be discarded as useless trash. Snobbish Americans might say, “What does history have to tell US, we who boldly reshape the future by our own cunning and skill.” Or, to quote the quintessential American success story, Henry Ford, “History is more or less bunk.”
In conclusion, I commend Fondren for a number of coups. First, mass media history has long needed a history of the German propaganda and censorship campaigns in World War I and this is the one we have waited for. Until now, only a few items have surfaced in general history books and the anecdotal memoirs of Allied journalists. Fondren has helped complete, or nearly complete the puzzle. To do so, she visited archives scattered around Europe and the United States; pieced together a narrative when none existed among a mountain of documents; and translated German, her first language, to English, her second.
Moreover, the analysis here is as clean and crisp as a starched dress shirt. So many competing campaigns of idiocy collide so feverishly in the German military—government arena that it must have seemed like chaos upon first inspection of the primary documents. Fondren has unraveled a mystery tucked inside an enigma from that mountain of data. And, she writes well, demonstrating a delight for arranging words for effect.
One more observation is in order, I think. This monograph thoroughly damns certain stubborn asses among the German elites. I applaud Fondren for having the courage to be the umpire correctly calling balls and strikes against her country. To point in part to the German culture of 1914–1918 as being the ruin of effective censorship and propaganda is impressive.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Dr. Bernhard Debatin of Ohio University for his feedback on an early draft of this commentary.