The Information Front: The Canadian Army and News Management during the Second World War by Timothy Balzer (review)

Warfare has been represented through communications media since at least the time of Thucydides, with important implications for who is perceived as the winner of a given conflict and who the loser, the reputations of political leaders and military commanders, issues of legitimacy and justice, and the morale of non-combatants. The Second World War, however, was the first major conflict to be fought in the age of widespread mass communication in print and on the air. Governments and their armies now had the means, and faced the necessity, for systematic mobilization of public opinion in a much more sophisticated way than the heavy-handed censorship and often crude propaganda adopted during the First World War. Timothy Balzer’s intelligent and well-researched study of how the Canadian Army managed news and information during the war is an admirable contribution to our understanding of how this was accomplished and what it meant.

Balzer’s main narrative traces the growing professionalism of army public relations operations during the war. Before 1942, bureaucratic turf wars – involving, among others, Lt. Gen. Andrew McNaughton (commander of the First Canadian Army), Canadian Military HQ in London, and the Defence Ministry in Ottawa – hindered efforts to establish a properly functioning military PR operation where none had existed before. Canada’s position as a junior partner in the Allied war effort added further layers of complexity. Unlike in the First World War, there would be no blanket censorship or official ‘eyewitness’ coverage. News coverage was to be left in the hands of regular journalists, now seen (as the press regulations for Canadian correspondents stated) as ‘valued colleagues with a most important mission to discharge.’ Compulsory military censorship was supposed to be limited to preventing militarily useful information from reaching the enemy, though as Balzer notes it was not always easy to distinguish this from information that might embarrass political or military leaders. In any event, particularly once army PR was taken over in 1943 by R.S. Malone (a former Winnipeg Free Press executive whose personal connections to the defence minister, Col. J.L. Ralston, and Gen. Bernard Montgomery gave him much-needed leverage within the Allied military hierarchy), efficiency steadily increased. By the time of the Normandy campaign in 1944, Canadian correspondents were considered to have the best-run press camps on the Western Front. This was a far cry from the debacle of Dieppe two years earlier, when a terrible and costly military failure, mostly involving Canadian troops, was mirrored by an inept and wilfully deceptive press campaign.

Balzer does not limit himself to the important and previously untold institutional story of army public relations, but thoughtfully addresses the larger question of how well (or how badly) the system served Canadians who relied on the war news thus provided. Here he reaches a more critical conclusion: under a censorship regime that filtered out graphic accounts of soldiers’ deaths and injuries (along with reports of Canadian cowardice, looting, or reprisals), and with correspondents often depending on official communiqués that systematically emphasized Canadian military gains and played down losses, ‘the war was sanitized not only with regard to its horrors but also with regard to elements that could have led to the public’s questioning the decisions of commanders as well as government and military policy.’ Under these circumstances, the idealized journalistic watch-dog became ‘a blind and partly deaf animal that barked loudly – often at the wrong things – and that sometimes remained silent when it should have raised the alarm.’ (This was not, in Balzer’s view, entirely the fault of military officers and government officials: while some correspondents were much more prepared to be critical than others, all approached the war as patriots and supporters of the Allied war effort.) It is one of the strengths of this book that it documents both how much was accomplished in establishing a well-functioning military PR...