Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 14, 1994 TAG: 9405160158
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By TERRY ATLAS CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
And to make certain that history got it right, the Army devised a public relations plan for that fateful day in 1944 when 132,500 U.S. and Allied troops waded ashore under German fire on French beaches.
But it didn't go quite as planned, judging from a top-secret memorandum declassified this week in connection with the 50th anniversary of D-Day. In fact, like Operation Desert Storm almost a half-century later, news reporting on D-Day became an early casualty in the chaos and confusion of the battlefield.
Actually, "it was a complete shambles," recalls John H. Thompson, a retired Chicago Tribune correspondent who waded ashore on D-Day with assault troops on what became known as Bloody Omaha Beach, where he spent most of his time trying to avoid dying.
Thompson, 85, of Evanston, Ill., is the last surviving D-Day correspondent.
This week's declassified Army memorandum reveals detailed arrangements by Col. David P. Page, then chief of the Army's Publicity and Psychological Warfare Section, for news coverage of the historic invasion on June 6, 1944. It was found in the National Archives as part of government research for next month's D-Day commemoration, when President Clinton will join British and French leaders to mark the day at Normandy.
Page's four-page plan, completed four days before the invasion, called for a group of 30 experienced war correspondents and photographers to go ashore accompanied by six Army public relations officers and 12 military censors. The strategy reflected the Army's intention to bolster morale at home with firsthand accounts of battlefield successes and heroism - but not casualties.
The plan was, in the military manner, detailed and orderly. It also woefully misjudged what D-Day would be like on the beaches at Normandy.
Page expressed his belief that journalists landing with the assault troops would quickly be able to use military radio equipment to transmit their reports. Military censors would be on hand to examine their copy before transmission, and reporters would take turns filing 125 words at a time to ensure that everyone got a chance. As a backup, fast Navy dispatch boats would stand by offshore to carry copy to England to be telexed to U.S. news organizations.
"Nothing like that ever happened," said Thompson, then a 35-year-old reporter.
He recalls spending most of the first day hunkered down in a foxhole on Omaha Beach, fortunate to survive a landing in which 2,000 Americans were killed by intense German fire.
The next day, Thompson encountered his first military censor, who enforced the rules barring correspondents from saying where they were, how the battle was going, or anything about casualties. And when he took his copy to an Army Signal Corps post, "they said they didn't know anything" about transmitting reporters' stories.
``They said, `Come back tomorrow or the next day.'''
On Day 3, Thompson and several other correspondents finally met up with a public relations officer "who maintained that he had been there on the beach the day before, but nobody ever saw him. It was impossible to do anything except survive, and they had this ridiculous idea that they were going to send these public relations officers to go up and down the beach like a copy boy, saying, `Have you got any copy ready?'''
Although Thompson gave his notes to a Signal Corps officer, he said that as far as he knows, none of that information was ever received by U.S. news organizations.
By Day 4, the Army finally had a teletype at the command post for correspondents to use. But, Thompson said, "nobody really knows if anybody ever got anything out at any time" during those early days - until a Press Wireless service transmitter capable of reaching the United States arrived on the beach at the end of the week, three days behind the Army schedule.
"Once that came ashore, we were in business," he said.
by CNB