As individuals, members of our fighting forces require certain well-established elements to keep their morale at a high pitch.
The first is food. Man being an engine, he must have fuel to operate. Reduce the ration and you reduce fighting efficiency. Cut it drastically for a considerable period and a man loses the will to fight. Starve him and he weakens to the point of submission.
The fighter requires weapons. For years the officers of our Army and Navy have said that if the lawmakers gave them as good weapons as their enemies they would do a creditable job, and recently, where this situation has been true, they have made good their boast.
Food and weapons are not all. The fighter requires protection against the elements, warm clothing for the winter campaigns, suitable garments for tropical service, and no matter where the fighting may be, comfortable shoes.
But even if you feed a soldier or sailor well and provide him with good weapons and clothing, you still do not have an outstanding fighter. He needs a spark to keep him in motion, something to make him fight on—no matter what the odds.
The American fighting man is not a mercenary. Of itself, the recent pay increase did not do much to raise the morale of the fighting forces. What it did was to enable our men to supply their own personal needs, to pay for insurance, canteen purchases, movies, etc., and still have enough left to send some money home to mother or father or to other dependents.
It is always advisable to explain what men are fighting for in terms of the things they hold most dear. Freedom is an abstract sort of something to the man behind the gun, but he will understand if you reduce it to terms of his right to sell the farm, to vote without coercion, or to take the job he wants. And if you put the reason for requiring his services in words relating to his family life, his mother, younger sisters and brothers, his wife and children or his girl, you are then talking about the things he cares about and for which he is always willing to fight.
Leave is a big morale factor because it performs beneficial mental readjustments. It is necessary that the fighter be able to see for himself what his efforts will attain. We hear men say so often, “If I could only be home with my folks for a week end. If I could just talk to my girl again.” He wants to see how things are going at home with his parents, what his girl thinks about him. And if everything is all right, if his girl still waits for him, or if his wife and children are still safe and comfortable, he will return from leave a better fighter, and nothing can stop him in his enthusiasm to get the war victoriously over.
With our forces on many fronts, leave for the majority of the soldiers and sailors is now out of the question. Most of our men realize this and they will not grumble too much if they can hear regularly from their kin. Even though letters are a poor substitute for leave, it cannot be denied that mail is their biggest single morale booster. The proverbial wine, women, and song are secondary, and often a substitute for what the mail failed to do.
Not only does the fighting man want mail, but he wants it regularly. In addition, he likes to get it as soon after it is written as circumstances permit. Some months ago the Congress passed the free mail privilege for the personal correspondence of soldiers and sailors, but a letter is seldom sent “free” any distance if an airmail stamp will get it there sooner.
Unfortunately the morale value of regular fast letter correspondence has not been fully impressed upon certain groups who exercise control over the delivery of mail to men in the service. I refer to our censors.
Fighting men all agree that censorship is a necessity in time of war. All they ask is that it interfere as little as possible with the free flow of their correspondence—not an unreasonable request. And they think that once a letter has been censored it should be sent promptly to the addressee.
There are three groups of censors who pass on soldiers’ and sailors’ mail. They are the army censors, navy censors, and national censors.
Service censorship is carried out by the Army and the Navy within their own organizations, but the systems used in these two branches of the services are not alike. Soldiers’ mail is censored by their company officers, who rotate this unpopular duty. Army officers censor their own personal mail, but it is subjected to spot censorship by U. S. Army censors. Mail of enlisted men in the Army, once passed by an officer, is not censored again. To facilitate prompt receipt of mail from the States, the Army has established a system of (A.P.O.’s) Army Post Offices. Thus a soldier stationed aboard has his mail addressed to A.P.O. 694, c/o Postmaster (of some Eastern, Western, or Gulf port). In that way no information is given about his location and his mail is not censored before leaving the country because it has a United States address.
In the naval service, all the personal mail of both officers and enlisted men is censored by a designated censor, invariably an officer. Only a few senior naval officers are permitted to censor their own mail, Captains, Executive Officers, Flag Officers, and members of their staff, but all may be spot censored at any time. These differences in the censorship regulations between the Army and Navy for officer’s mail must not be construed as being indicative that our army officers exercise superior discretionary powers in their correspondence. It is just another difference between these two services.
National censorship is a factor in the life of the armed forces because it is this organization which censors the mail going to soldiers and sailors. Here we find a group of individuals, mostly women, with but a smattering of training, and with no military background, dictating, in a blundering way, what members of the armed forces may read in their letters about the thoughts of their family, the sentiments of their kin or the conditions of their country.
If a strike is called in the home town, some censors will snip any mention of it from letters to the armed forces, although clippings from the local paper enclosed in the same envelope and carrying the news in greater detail will be passed. Some censors object to criticism of national policies, others to mention of restrictions or inconveniences on the home front. If rising prices or scarcities are commented upon, it is a safe bet that they too will be deleted.
Not so long ago an officer received a letter from his wife which had been unusually slow in reaching him. Noting that there was about two weeks’ difference between the date on the letterhead and the cancellation on the envelope, the officer made a few inquiries. In the course of the investigation he learned that this letter, which contained a general discussion of conditions in his home town, was returned intact to his wife by one censor with the statement that it would be bad for the morale of the recipient. The writer, upon receiving the returned letter and mindful of the inconsistencies among national censors, did not alter one word but simply addressed the letter to her husband in a new envelope. The censor who received it on the second trip passed the letter in toto, presumably having different ideas about what was good for a fighter’s morale.
In the great citizens’ Army and Navy that we are building today, there is an alertness and consciousness of community and national problems that differs greatly from the German or Jap fighters who are unconcerned with national issues in their blind obedience to a dictator. For this reason, censorship of things the man in the service is thinking about anyway and upon which he dearly desires home comment is apt to enrage him. He feels that he is being treated as a schoolboy, not as a voting citizen of the country. After all, it is his own country, in a peculiar democratic sense, the one for which he is fighting, possibly dying. His morale is strong enough to take the plain unadulterated truth. A badly “snipped” letter or newspaper may lead the recipient to imagine that matters are far worse or more serious than they are and this will have a distinctly unfavorable reaction on his morale.
Possibly much censoring and snipping could be avoided if the general and specific directives to censors were published for the country at large to understand. If the rules are clear and reasonable, they can stand the light of public scrutiny and will aid the home front in excluding questionable matters from their letters. Voluntary co-operation in this distasteful matter would doubtless lighten the censor’s burden and speed up the mail deliveries.
It is in the censorship of weather that censors make themselves ridiculous. Every schoolboy knows that in certain parts of the world weather migrates. A comment by a sports announcer that it is a beautiful clear autumn day at Chapel Hill is priceless information to the submarine command off the Virginia Capes. Similar information that a hurricane has swept over Martinique tells a Wolf Pack in the Caribbean that visibilities will be low until the storm blows itself out.
But weather does not migrate in all latitudes. In some not at all, and in others only during certain seasons. For a sailor stationed in the Canal Zone to remark in a letter that it was raining there in August, is to reiterate common knowledge. To say that it was raining hard, is also common knowledge. In fact there is nothing anyone could write about the weather in Panama that isn’t in every textbook on climatology, and the same thing holds true for most tropical latitudes, but the national censors will slit a letter to ribbons that makes any reference to weather anywhere. And should you begin a paragraph by saying that you are low and dreary, and feel as dull as the day, you may be assured that the addressee will never read that. Believing that you are transmitting secret weather information, the national censors will pounce on your sentence with a poised indelible brush or open scissors. More common sense directives could eliminate such inconsistencies.
The question logically arises then, why should incoming mail to our soldiers and sailors be subjected to national censorship? Are there any people anywhere more anxious than our soldiers and sailors to bring the war to successful conclusion as soon as possible? Is there any group more anxious than our officers to deny information to the enemy and in a better position, by virtue of their training, to pass on what may be said in personal correspondence? It is they or some part of the military organization itself rather than clerk censors, who should be given the responsibility of deletion. It must be borne in mind that it is not the censorship of incoming mail that members of the services dislike, but only the inconsistencies and the delay incident thereto, a delay which often neutralizes any advantages in time gained through the use of air mail.
“V” Mail has done much to improve the regularity of correspondence to the armed forces. But, while it gets the word back and forth, it lacks the personal element. In short, it is coldly mechanical. Men would like to receive their letters intact, to read from the stationery on which the letter was written. And of course they all would like to feel that what was sealed in that envelope was for their eyes and for no one else. It has long been recognized that people bare their souls in their letters, and private correspondence to members of the fighting forces should be kept as private as consistent with the interests of security.
Censoring mail is an irksome task. To make the job as light as possible some officers discourage their men about writing too often or putting their thoughts into too many pages. The post-card check-off list, as a substitute for letter correspondence, must be an answer to the indolent censor’s dream, for to discourage letter writing by insisting that such brief postcard forms be used or to encourage brevity in personal correspondence is to shake the keystone of morale.
A fighter must have an outlet for his sentiments. He needs some vehicle to get his thoughts to those he knows will value his opinions and who have a sympathetic understanding of his type of human nature.
Sometimes, of course, a man just likes to blow off a little steam. Letter writing is the least harmful way to reduce high internal pressure, for mental complications arise only when men are unable to get the load off their minds. Besides, when a man is writing letters he is using his powers of concentration and expression—a development most useful in his daily work. Writing helps to crystallize thinking and when men are writing letters their conduct is always exemplary.
Censors have two important missions. One is to preserve the security of information, and the other is to promote rapid delivery of correspondence. It is in this second category that many censors are deficient.
When a soldier or sailor deposits his mail for censorship on his post or ship he knows that his officer-censors will make an effort to get it out in the next mail. He knows that the officers realize the morale value of regularity in personal correspondence. He knows, too, that his officers have a full understanding of what should be deleted. And if inadvertently some information indiscretely slips from the point of his pen, he will be cautioned personally about his carelessness. Furthermore, his letter would not be delayed to insure that time would render the suspected information valueless. The officers and men of the Army and Navy know that the primary mission of service censors is to get the mostest mail through fastest. The national censors must learn that too.
Censorship is an indispensable, unpleasant feature of modem warfare, and the necessity for censoring the outgoing mail of the armed forces cannot be denied, but if censors strive to get the mail through as quickly as possible, the men in the field and on the high seas will not complain.
“Morale is a lot of little things,” as a popular advertisement quite truthfully states. Without doubt letters may be the greatest war-time morale builder in both service and civilian life. A service community is stimulated into renewed activity after a big overseas mail comes in. A commander in the Solomons writes that he wishes all battles could be fought after “mail day.” Letters supply the spark we all need to win this war. Encourage them, clarify the rules of censorship, and speed them to their destinations.