Military Censorship throughout History
Military censorship has played a significant role throughout history, particularly within the context of armed forces and their interactions with the media and public discourse. Beginning in the 1500s and 1600s, European nations established formal codes of conduct for military personnel, emphasizing principles such as subordination and loyalty, which inherently restricted free expression. This foundational approach can be seen in the American Articles of War, adopted in 1806 and in effect until 1950, which outlined limitations on military personnel’s speech and writing, including prohibitions against contemptuous remarks about government officials and disrespect towards superiors.
During the U.S. Civil War, organized military censorship emerged more prominently, impacting both military and civilian communications. The practice intensified during the Spanish-American War and World War I, where specific agencies were created to control press information and manage public perception of military actions. Post-World War II, the occupation of Germany and Japan saw strict military oversight of media, with censorship aimed at denazification and controlling narratives.
In more recent conflicts, such as the Vietnam War and the invasion of Grenada, the military's approach to censorship has evolved, incorporating methods like the National Media Pool to regulate the flow of information while attempting to maintain a semblance of press freedom. This ongoing tension between military imperatives and the rights to free expression illustrates the complexities surrounding military censorship across different historical contexts.
Military Censorship throughout History
Definition: Censorship exercised by military authorities
Significance: The rights of military personnel are almost always more restricted than those of other citizens, and the speech and writings of civilians are often censored by military authorities
During the 1500’s and 1600’s almost all European nations developed Articles of War, formal codes of law governing the behavior of soldiers and sailors. One of the key principles of these codes was the concept of subordination: Those in armed forces were subject to the power of their superiors and those below had to show respect for their superiors. Another principle was loyalty: Those serving in the armed forces were expected show much greater loyalty to the armed forces and to the nation than were civilians. These two principles gave military authorities a greater claim on the expression of those in the services than civilian authorities had on citizens.
The American Articles of War, which were adopted in 1806, were based on the British articles and carry the same principles of subordination and loyalty generally found in military codes. The Articles of War were in force in the United States until 1950, when the Uniform Code of Military Justice was adopted as the legal system of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. The 1950 code incorporated most of the old Articles of War.
Many of the passages in the American military code, and in the military codes of almost all other nations, restrict the rights of those in the military to engage in free expression of views in speech or writing. Article 82, for example, forbids anyone in any of the services to advise others to desert. The principle of subordination, as a limitation on freedom of speech, may be found in articles 88 and 89. Article 88 states that members of the military who speak or write contemptuously of U.S. government officials may be court-martialed. Article 89 states that those in the services may be court-martialed for showing disrespect toward their superiors.
Since the Uniform Code of Military Justice established a separate legal system for those in the armed forces, and since those who have served have been subject to constant oversight by their superiors, military bases have frequently been heavily censored places. The 1969 military publication Guidance on Dissent states that commanders cannot suppress publications that are critical of the U.S. government. Under Army Regulation 381-135, soldiers do have the right to receive written matter through the mail and to keep one copy of any book, newspaper, or pamphlet. If they have more than one copy of material that their superiors feel is objectionable for political or other reasons, however, this can be seen as reflecting an intent to distribute this material, and the soldiers can be prosecuted in a court-martial.
Just how heavily censored a military base should be remains a matter of debate. During World War II, a soldier who referred to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a “gangster” was court-martialed and sentenced to a year in the stockade. In 1969 at Fort Ord, California, Ken Stolte and Daniel Amick created leaflets protesting the Vietnam War and encouraging their fellow soldiers to form a union to express grievance. Stolte and Amick were court-martialed for conspiracy and for advising others to engage in mutinous behavior. They each received three years in military prison and were dishonorably discharged. If Stolte and Amick had been civilians, handing out such leaflets would have been seen as an expression of their constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech. Indeed, their defenders argued that the two men did not lose their constitutional rights when they were drafted.
The U.S. Civil War and Military Censorship of Civilians
Organized military censorship of civilians in North America dates from the period of the U.S. Civil War. At that time, the federal War Department, under Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, established its power of censorship over all telegraph lines. The military also exercised censorship over newspapers to an extent never before seen in American history. In March, 1862, Stanton ordered the military governor of the District of Columbia to seize the offices of The Sunday Chronicle, which had been printing news about troop movements. In Missouri, where Union troops had been placed because of the large number of Confederate sympathizers in that state, a newspaper editor was court-martialed and his office, press, and furniture were taken over by the army and sold. In Illinois, General A. E. Burnside seized the office of the Chicago Times and prevented the publication of an issue of the paper.
In several of these cases of military censorship during the Civil War, the censors were opposed by civilian authorities. In the case of the Chicago Times, for example, a federal judge issued an injunction to keep Burnside’s soldiers from carrying out his orders. This injunction was ignored, but civilian powers were often able to hamper the exercise of military censorship. The military enjoyed a freer hand in the conquered territories of the Confederacy, which were under the Union Army during the war and which were occupied by Union troops during the period known as Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877.
The Turn of the Century and World War I
In 1898 the United States went to war with Spain, and invaded the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In order to limit the publishing of strategic information about the war, General A. W. Greeley of the U.S. Signal Corps convinced the Western Union Telegraph Company in Florida to allow him to station military censors at telegraph offices in Tampa, Miami, and Jacksonville.
After the war, the United States continued to occupy all of the former Spanish colonies, and purchased the Philippines from Spain. Many of the Filipinos, who had been engaged in a war of independence against Spain, were displeased at this change of colonial masters, and guerrilla war in the Philippines followed. General E. S. Otis, the commander of American forces in the Philippines, began to censor dispatches to American newspapers. Otis’ censorship was heavily criticized because, it was claimed, he showed favoritism in allowing some press representatives to cable dispatches and did not allow others. Under the American military governor of the Philippines, military censorship was established over the telegraph system in that country.
In the years leading up to World War I, the War Department, the army, and the navy began pushing for legislation to control the press. The army chief of staff ordered a study of the methods of press control used by the English. In 1916 the secretary of war established the Bureau of Information, under the command of Major Douglas MacArthur. This agency was the only source of information from the War Department to the press. It was simultaneously a censorship of civilians by the military and a censorship of military personnel, since military personnel could only communicate with the press through the Bureau of Information. When a formal means of censoring media of communication during World War I was created, in the form of the Committee on Public Information (also known as the Creel Committee), it was headed by a civilian, but it contained representatives of the secretary of war and the secretary of the navy.
Occupied Germany and Japan
At the end of World War II Germany was occupied by the allied armies (the British, French, U.S., and Russian armies), and Japan was occupied by the armed forces of the United States. The British, French, and U.S. zones in Germany were combined into a single zone in 1947, which became West Germany. The American military government in Germany found itself caught between the ideal of a free press and the program of de-Nazification. Freedom of the press was to be granted to Germans only after Nazi influences had been largely eliminated.
The Information Control Division (ICD) was the agency of U.S. military government charged with controlling the German press in the first years of occupation. By the time of Germany’s surrender, newspapers, radio stations, theaters, and cinemas had been shut down by the invading allied armies. In June, 1945, the first German papers were licensed. These were subject to strict prepublication censorship by the U.S. military.
The ICD was especially interested in the censorship of German books, since Germans read at least four times as much as Americans, and books were therefore a critical means of communication in Germany. The American military wanted to avoid any burning of books, however, because this would recall Nazi book-burning activities. Therefore, pro-Nazi materials were taken out of bookstores and libraries and quietly turned into pulp. All authors of books had to submit their manuscripts to the ICD for clearance. Cinemas were encouraged to show American films, but some American films, such as gangster movies, were forbidden because they might seem to confirm the negative image of American society portrayed by Nazi propaganda. Exchange of views between American soldiers and German civilians was limited by strict regulations forbidding “fraternization” between the two.
In Japan the American military was the sole power, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, by then a general. During the first month of occupation, a code of censorship was put into place. American military officials, sensitive to the charge that they might be inhibiting freedom of expression, proclaimed the ideal of freedom of the press at the same time that the code was issued. All newspaper stories had to be submitted to American officers, who would decide whether the stories could be printed.
Modern Military Censorship
Compared to earlier wars, reporting on the Vietnam War was relatively free of censorship on the part of military authorities, but the American forces and their allies did try to exercise some control over the flow of information. The military did not forget what greater press freedom had wrought in Vietnam. When U.S. forces invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983, the military imposed a news blackout on events on the island and barred reporters from accompanying the invading soldiers. This created dissatisfaction and complaints among representatives of the news media, but generally the media’s portrayal of the invasion of Grenada garnered favorable responses about the invasion from the public. To respond to the complaints of members of the media, after the Grenada invasion U.S. military leaders attempted to develop a more sophisticated method of military censorship by creating the National Media Pool of rotating news organizations.
The pool system was first used during the American invasion of Panama at the end of 1989. The military chose which reporters it wanted to be part of the pool, and it provided “guides” to reporters once the reporters arrived in the invaded country, thus effectively censoring the news without resorting to direct censorship. The pool system continued to be used as a method of military censorship during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Reporters received news and videotapes from public information officers, and the authorities attempted to limit and control contacts between ordinary soldiers and the press.
Bibliography
Readers may find a description of the development of the Articles of War and of the Uniform Code of Military justice, and a summary of how military law limits the rights to free speech of military personnel in William B. Aycock and Seymour W. Wurfel’s Military Law Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955). For a critique of military limitation of the constitutional rights of military personnel, readers may examine Peter Barnes’s Pawns: The Plight of the Citizen Soldier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972). Military censorship in occupied Germany is described in John Gimbel’s The American Occupation of Germany: Politics and the Military, 1945-1949 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968). Russell Brines provides a description of occupied Japan under MacArthur, including a section on U.S. military censorship, in MacArthur’s Japan (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1948). John Schaller’s The American Occupation of Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) is a general history of the American military occupation of Japan.