Sm,—" Another Captain " says the average soldier's contempt for
the B.B.C. and the newspapers cannot be questioned. It can. I question it very much after many close contacts with the troops, including a visit to fronts in Belgium and Germany. If, as " Another Captain " says, the B.B.C. and the newspapers are shockingly unreliable and crazily over- optimistic, why is Field Marshal Montgomery so eager that his men, even in the foxholes, shall get their newspapers? Why do soldiers write to their local papers the warmly appreciative letters they do? Why are correspondents and visiting editors given such a hospitable welcome from all ranks?
I submit that " Another Captain " is only partly right and that it would be fairer to say this: Some soldiers distrust the whole of the Press. Some soldiers distrust all the Press except their own local paper or some other favourite paper. Most of them look on the Press as a friend to the Forces, but are sometimes annoyed to find a statement in print (possibly based on official information) which does not agree with their own experience. Thus I found a major angry because he had read in a newspaper that a forest he was fighting in was full of German dead. He felt that this, an over-statement concerning his part of the forest, gave an unnecessarily terrifying impression to people at home. On the other hand, I have known soldiers who thought the Press cables gave too much the impression of a picnic, and did not bring home the horrors of war.
So the truth surely is (so far as one can compress it into a generalisation) that our millions in the armed Forces vary in their attitude to the Press
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