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Richard Fine, "The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany" (Cornell, 2023)
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Dr. Andrew Pace
Today is why we wear the uniform.
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Richard Fein
Abc. Tonight, the rookie returns to ensure the safety of all Angelenos. Try not to mess it up. I'll do my best. But don't do your best. Do my best. And for the first time ever, this is a global operation. It's an international sting.
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Marshall Poe
LAPD has agreed to help the FBI.
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Richard Fein
Track down terrorist targets. Nothing like a day in the job to remind you how quickly life can change. Get out of there. The rookie season premiere tonight, 109 Central on ABC. Next day for Hulu subscribers.
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Marshall Poe
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- [01:37]
Dr. Andrew Pace
The surrender of Nazi Germany in World War II was one of the biggest stories of the 20th century. The story of how we got that news and the enormous controversy it provoked has been largely forgotten. However, now a recent book reveals critical details about what was called the Ed Kennedy affair or the surrender fiasco, and writes a new chapter in military media relations and the tensions between the government's need to control information and the people's right to know it. Hello, and welcome back to New Books in Diplomatic History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Dr. Andrew Pace, the host of the channel. Our guest today is Richard Fein, a professor emeritus in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Today we'll be talking about his recent book, the Price of the Journalist who Defied military censors to report the fall of Nazi Germany, which was published in 2023 by Cornell University Press. Richard, welcome to the show.
- [02:33]
Richard Fein
Thank you, Andrew. Thanks for the invitation.
- [02:36]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Richard, would you mind by telling us a little bit about yourself, some of your background, and then also, how did you become interested in the Ed Kennedy affair?
- [02:49]
Richard Fein
Sure. Thanks. I grew up in a town, Wayland, just west of Boston. Went to Brown University as an undergraduate, and then did my graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania in the field quaintly known at the time as American civilization. So my PhD is in American Civilization. I was then hired to coordinate the American Studies program at Virginia Commonwealth University VCU in Richmond. And 42 years later, I retired from there as a professor of English, having been in the English department that entire time. Most of my research over my career actually concerned the profession of authorship and issues of intellectual property and various intellectual property regimes. But I kind of got into this issue of the press's relationship to the military years ago, in fact, when I was had a Fulbright to France, a junior lectureship to teach in France for the year. And I was assigned to Caen C, A, E, N, which is the city in Normandy just back from the invasion beaches. I knew nothing about Caen. I knew nothing about Normandy really, even though I'd been to France once before. So I went to the VCU library. And the only book in the library that I could find that had Normandy in The title was A.J. liebling's Normandy Revisited. Liebling was a New Yorker reporter who covered World War II as well. So it was through Liebling that I got interested in this, because Liebling was a bit of a skeptic about the Army's relationship with the press and also very skeptical about the press's relationship with the Army. So I was sort of curious about this over the years, became a real fan of lieblings. But about 15 years ago, I just decided that very little had been written at that time about the actual process by which reporters in the field in World War II got their copy to an audience, to their readers. This started at the library or at the National Archives, and over the years was doing more and more research in this particular field, not only at the National Archives, but at a bunch of other archives as well. In the course of that, I ended up at the Associated Press corporate archives in New York. And that's where I first learned about Kennedy, where the archivists there clued me into this. And it was partly because Kennedy's own wartime memoir, which he wrote in the late 40s was not published until 2012, I think by LSU Press. And it was the occasion of the appearance of that book and the Associated Press's public apology to Kennedy apostrophe that they made at the same time for their treatment of him after the Kennedy affair that got me. But they convinced me that there was a substantial project here, a book length project that was worth pursuing. So from about that point on 2012 on, I was pretty much focused on this particular episode and not on media military relations during the war more generally. So that's sort of how I got to Kennedy. You know, it's that sort of circuitous. Well, not circuitous. The kismet involved where I was doing research at the, at the Associated Press archives. None of it had to do with Kennedy. Much of it had to do with the AP's reporting during the war. But then this archivist suggested that I participate in this panel that they were putting together around the publication of Kennedy's memoir and the AP's own apology to him. Yeah, so that's it. Yeah.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
This is a really interesting story that really requires some background and some context. In World War II, the Allies were slowly closing in on Berlin. The Americans and the British pushing from the west, the Soviets advancing from the east. They get to Germany, they take Berlin, and the highest ranking Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler, commit suicide or are captured. And I, I think we often have this sort of assumption that surrender is something that just kind of happens, that when you have defeated the other side, they wave the white flag, they send a representative, you send one, and you figure out how one side gives up to the other. But there's a lot going on. There's a lot of logistics and negotiations and communication that has to take place. And sort of. My point is that surrender isn't something that just happens. It's something that has to be worked out. There's an entire process involved.
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Richard Fein
Yeah, it's a process, not an event. Right.
- [09:13]
Dr. Andrew Pace
So can you sort of briefly walk us through the events of the surrender? This is in the first week of May 1945, and really we're talking about May 7th. That's kind of the critical date here.
- [09:27]
Richard Fein
Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. The German surrender had been anticipated for weeks, and in fact, the army had been planning for it for years. In fact, it's sort of alarming how early on in the war that the, the War Department was setting people to the task of figuring out what would happen if Germany surrendered at any point. The biggest holdup was that the Germans, to the bitter end were Desperate to try to fashion a separate peace with the Western Allies and to really, in fact, they had this kind of fantasy that the Western Allies would then engage with them in a battle against the Soviet Union. And the Allies continued to insist that no, that it had to be an unconditional surrender to all of the Allied powers. They had to surrender on both fronts at the same time. The German army facing 21st Army Group, General Bernard Montgomery's force in northwestern Europe, the German army forces there surrendered to Montgomery on May 4th on Lunenburg Heath. What was left of the German government had fled from Berlin to the town of Flensburg, which was just on the Danish border or just south of the Danish border. So they'd sort of gone to the farthest corner if they could at that time. And after the surrender to Montgomery, Montgomery had told the Germans who were surrendering to him that if they wanted to pursue a wider surrender, the only person who could do that was Eisenhower. And they would need to contact shaef, the supreme headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, which was Eisenhower's command. The forward headquarters of SHAEF was in the French city of Reims, more familiarly referred to by English speakers as Reims is one of those French words that's pronounced quite differently in France. This is a large town City about 100 miles northeast of Paris. So over a couple of days, German emissaries went to Shaff Forward headquarters in Reims. The main shaft headquarters had remained in Paris. And the press corps, in fact that was covering all of this was headquartered at the Hotel Scribe in Paris and was supervised there by SHAEF's Public Relations Division, oftentimes referred to as the PRD reporters there in Paris on the 6th of May, I think, got wind of the fact that something was going on in Reims and they wanted to go there. But in fact there was only one reporter at the time in harass itself at Shaff Forward headquarters, this was Sergeant Kiley of Stars and Stripes. Eisenhower had insisted that there only be one reporter at his forward headquarters. So much was going on, et cetera, that he just didn't want to press underfoot at the time.
- [13:45]
Marshall Poe
The.
- [13:48]
Richard Fein
SHAFE officials responsible for the press in Paris on May 5 and May 6 mulled over a variety of different alternative ways in which this surrender could be covered. Eisenhower's chief of staff, who was a kind of brusque, no nonsense officer, General Walter Bettle Smith, didn't want any press there at all. But he was convinced by General Frank Allen, who was head of the prd, the public relations division, that that just wasn't going to work, that there needed to be some sort of press witnesses to this surrender or else the press would really, really get their nose out of a joint. So Alan and his deputies agreed that a contingent of 17 reporters would go to Shape Forward to witness the surrender. They followed a kind of strategy that they had used in the past, which was to privilege those news organizations that had the widest audiences, the greatest audiences reached the most people. So it was basically the Allied Press Agency and news agencies, the ap, the UP ins, the International News Service, which was the Hearst News Agency, Reuters, et cetera, and the radio networks, NBC, CBS, ABC, the BBC, et cetera. 17 in all the press. Later, among the reporters who were excluded were many who were like New York. There was no New York Times reporter that witnessed the surrender. For example, those 17, it was actually 16 because the 17th was Kylie who was already there, the Stars and Stripes reporter, the, the army newspapers reporter. The 16 who were in Paris were blown up on the morning of May 6th to Reims. On the plane, General Allen pledged them to not divulge anything that they would see or hear in rents until the army gave the okay. So a sort of typical kind of you need to withhold, you know, you need to withhold this information, not release it until the army gives you permission to do so. These kinds of holds had been, had been held, had been done frequently in the past, but often it would be short term holds, you know, a few hours or so before the information could be released. Other reporters, then this group that was dubbed the Lucky 17, got wind that something was afoot. And a number of reporters, not many, but maybe as many as a dozen other reporters went up to, to reims on the 6th, hoping that they would be allowed in to witness this supporter. So they were milling outside of Shea Forward for hours on end trying to get into the building and cover this. The surrender itself occurred in the early morning hours around 2:30am on May 7 in a small room in the Ecole Professional Big school building in Reims. That was the building used to shape forward. The 17 reporters witnessed this. It was a short and spare ceremony. It was conducted by Bettel Smith, Eisenhower's chief of Staff. For protocol reasons. The German officer who had been deputized to surrender was Alfred Jodl, General Jodl, who was the German army chief of staff. So it was the Allied chief of staff who met with him. Ceremony lasted 15, 20 minutes and then the lucky 17 were led to another classroom where they were able to bat out their stories, have them censored but then were informed that the story could not be released for at least 36.
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Dr. Andrew Pace
Hours.
- [19:07]
Richard Fein
Which was the time it was going to take for the heads of the three main Allied governments and Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin to make public announcements. All of this. The Russians were insisting that this surrender not be made public until they could hold their own surrender ceremony in Berlin the next day.
- [19:38]
Dr. Andrew Pace
And it sounds like the Soviets sort of insisted that this surrender didn't count because they had not surrendered to all of the Allies. They had simply surrendered to Eisenhower's command. And so, in effect, they had surrendered to the British and the Americans, but the Soviets were left out.
- [19:56]
Richard Fein
The Russians had some legitimate reasons for wanting to be careful here. One was again, to the very end, they were suspicious that the Western Allies were going to do a deal with the Germans against them. They also wanted to make sure that the Germans were indeed surrendering on their front before this was announced. And they wanted all three arms of the German military to agree to the surrender. Because this had been an issue after World War I, where the German Navy was blaming the German army for, you know, giving up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And there was sort of a muddiness about the armistice and who was responsible for it. So the Russians wanted it to be very clear. They wanted the Germans to surrender in Berlin, and they wanted all three wings of the German armed forces to sign the surrender agreement, which they did the next day. The reporters, including Kennedy, who the importer. The reporters who had gone to grass to witness the surrender included Ed Kennedy, this AP reporter, who was one of the more experienced US Journalists in war reporters in Europe at the time, and who witnessed this arrest, surrender.
- [21:42]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Yeah, it sounds like he had been kind of all over the place. He had been in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe. He'd been in Africa, Yeah.
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Richard Fein
From the time almost of the Spanish Civil War, which he had covered. He had been in Europe and in Africa covering conflict of one sort or another. And had. He had a. You know, he had. Even before the United States entered the war, he was in Cairo covering the British army there and the fighting that was going on. He was in Greece for the fall of Greece. He then was after the Allied invasion of French North Africa, the Torch invasion in November of 1942. That spring, Kennedy was transferred from Cairo to Algeria and covered all of the fighting, basically supervised the AP's coverage of the end of the campaign in French North Africa and the invasion of Sicily and the invasion of Italy in 1943. He had then covered. He did not cover The D Day invasion. He was still in the Mediterranean, but he did cover the invasion of southern France that took place in August, I think, of 1944, before. He was then transferred up to Paris after the liberation of Paris and basically supervised all of the AP's coverage in Northwest Europe until the end of the war.
- [23:38]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Yeah, he was the AP's bureau chief, right. For all of Western Europe, basically.
- [23:43]
Richard Fein
Yes, he was. He was basically the Paris bureau chief, although I think technically the Paris bureau was not re. Implemented until 1945. But, yes, he was basically responsible for all that coverage, covered liberated France, French politics, covered SHAF from its headquarters in Paris. Didn't do much frontline reporting at that point, but was a very experienced and trusted journalist, I think, at that time, but. But was an agency reporter. And one of the things I learned or learned to appreciate, at least in doing this work, was just how competitive the news agencies were and how that competition could be cutthroat and ruthless at various times. And Kennedy had a reputation as someone who, you know, was a fierce competitor in that. In that environment, he was not beloved by the other agency reporters.
- [25:02]
Dr. Andrew Pace
In fact, there's a. Yeah, there's a. There's an anecdote in your book about another reporter recalling how he and Kennedy had been sort of in this, like, foot race, racing up the stairs or down the stairs to. To get their. Their stories out, their stories published and sort of, you know, jostling each other or, you know, tripping each other along the way to try and be first.
- [25:27]
Richard Fein
Yeah, there's a. It was Boyd Lewis. Yeah. And the. The art. Or no. Kil Gallen. Jimmy Kilgallen, who is, I think, an INS reporter. And the anecdote has Kilgallen throwing his typewriter at. At Kennedy's feet to try to slow him down, which never made sense to me because most reporters would rather lose an arm than lose their typewriter. You know, it's like. But.
- [25:54]
Dr. Andrew Pace
But Kennedy's one of the. The lucky 17. He's there to witness this surrender. He writes his story. And then, of course, the big controversy is that he disobeyed the order to withhold the surrender story.
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Richard Fein
Yes. Early in the morning, in the early morning hours of May 7, the Lucky 17 were flown back to Paris, where they rejoined the reporters who. The disgruntled reporters in the SHAF press corps who had not gone to. Not been invited.
- [26:31]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Were not invited.
- [26:33]
Richard Fein
And they're all told at that point that it's similarly that it's going to be at least the next day and probably 36 hours or more before any of their stories about the surrender can be released. And reporters are furious about this, particularly as the day goes on. The late morning, early afternoon. By early afternoon, an account by the French general who had witnessed the surrender had appeared in a French newspaper. It was already on the street. Banners and bunting were going up outside of 10 Downing street in Paris. It's like the whole world seems to know what has happened, but the reporters who witnessed it are prevented from getting the story out, from telling the story. The final straw for Kennedy was when he learned again, it's sort of mid afternoon of a radio broadcast cast from Flensburg, which at that point was controlled by the 21st Army Group by the Allies, by the foreign minister of the German government, a guy named von Krustig, I think his name was, announcing to the German people the surrender and telling them to cooperate and not to resist. So at that point Kennedy says SHAEF must have authorized this broadcast. Could not have occurred without shaef's acquiescence. Schaef has, by Kennedy's thinking at this point has released us from this confidence because this is the sort of journalistic bargain, if a source tells you something in confidence not to be released, you know, until they give him permission, but then if they release it, then you're freed of that responsibility of abiding by that confidence. So that, that was Kennedy's thinking. He then goes to the SHAF authorities and says that he no longer feels obligated to, to abide the confidence and he's going to get the story out. The SHAF authorities say, ah, we'll try, because they think they control all of the communication circuits that would allow him to get the story out. What they don't know is that he had discovered a phone circuit to London that was not controlled by censorship, by army censorship. It's a convoluted story. I tell it in the book. It was a mystery for years about how this story had gotten out. But in essence he was able to patch together a circuit from his office in the hotel scribe to the AP headquarters in London. And first he got out a flash bulletin, a 50 word note, basically flash, that the Germans had surrendered in Reims and the time, et cetera, and then dictated the lion's share of a longer bulletin, of a several hundred word bulletin that described what he had seen at the surrender. This then was held briefly in, in London until they could verify that it indeed was Kennedy. Then London sent it on to AP in New York. New York held it briefly, I mean by a matter of minutes before they then put it out on the wire. And so this became Kennedy's scoop of the surrender beating the competition by a considerable amount. It was Kennedy's story with a byline that appeared on the front page of the New York Times and elsewhere and during the time.
- [31:02]
Dr. Andrew Pace
And as you note, one of the big questions about this story was always how did he do it? How did he get around the censors and somehow get this leak to London and then to, to New York when nobody else did or could? But the other interesting question here is why did he do it? And you note the sort of evidence that he had and the logic of his thinking, but it's interesting to think about his motives. Was Kennedy a patriot who believed that he was fulfilling his journalistic responsibility to the American people to share this news that they needed and deserved to know? Or was he a cutthroat reporter who wanted to beat his competitors to the story and took the opportunity to share the scoop before anyone else? Because it's, it's curious to me that nobody else got the story out. And, and is that so much because they were, you know, honorably holding to the 36 hour censorship restriction from SHAEF, or is it simply because they did not have a circuit to get the news out that they would have taken had they could?
- [32:20]
Richard Fein
Yeah, I think in terms of Kennedy's motives, it was a little bit of both. But I, and it was one thing I struggled for and struggled with was trying to figure this out. I do think that Kennedy sincerely felt that the story was being inappropriately censored, that a sort of wartime's worth of butting up against censorship, and particularly what he believed was what the Americans called political censorship, what the brics call policy censorship, which was censorship not for the purpose of military security, not to protect soldiers or to give away military secrets or anything like that, but was purely being done for political motives. And that's what he felt here. There was no security issue here to his mind at least. And so I think that was the principal reason. As I mentioned though, he was an intense competitor. So I'm sure here it was like two things aligned. He could successfully beat the competition, he could beat the competition while still upholding what he thought was his journalistic duty.
- [33:50]
Dr. Andrew Pace
There's a tremendous amount of, of fallout from this story though. I mean, the AP gets the scoop. Kennedy is the sort of hero journalist, at least for the ap, but everybody else is mad at him. The military is furious. Eisenhower's command is angry. The other colleagues in Paris are Furious with him.
- [34:16]
Richard Fein
It's hard to know whether other reporters of the lucky 17 in particular might also have defied the military and gotten the story out if they'd had the means. I do think that that's what stopped them. They really did. The other reporters did believe that the only way the story could go out was through the official communications channels and that only the AP had figured out this workaround.
- [34:46]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Yeah. So were they angry because he had violated his journalistic code, or were they mad that he really was just sort of more clever and inventive than they were?
- [34:59]
Richard Fein
I think there's a good bit of the latter rather than the former. I think that he beat them to the punch on this and was willing to defy the military to get the story out. And I, I, I do think as well that a number of reporters had. There's a theory called the index theory in communication studies that basically says that reporters index or frame stories based on their interactions with officials. So that often stories get indexed or framed by the what official political or military take is on something. And there were a number of reporters who did seem to me unduly, from our perspective in 2026, now they seem unduly cooperative, willing to accept military version of the story in a way, Kennedy wasn't, because he had seen that the British were notorious. British military was notorious for its political censorship, particularly in Cairo when Kennedy was there. There had been other episodes of it. The whole patent slapping episode in Sicily, if you know about that, was one that was covered up. The press in the field in Algiers, including Kennedy, had sort of agreed not to write about this, having been urged not to by Eisenhower. Then when the story eventually got out months later, their superiors in the States, you know, in A B, New York, et cetera, excoriated them for not reporting the story back to their headquarters and letting editors there decide whether it should be published or not. So Kennedy really had, by the end of the war, had had, I think, his fill of what he thought of political censorship. And I think that's kind of what motivated him more than anything else, that the surrender story was the final straw for him. And he determined, he later wrote, that he knew this was going to have consequences, but, you know, he didn't. You know, he, he was willing to accept the consequences of doing it well.
- [37:39]
Dr. Andrew Pace
And it sounds like he not only sort of butted up with the, the principle of censorship, but that this was also personal. He'd had lots of personal run ins with army censors and military restrictions and had, as you sort of know, had kind of built a little bit of a reputation for being a. A tough journalist, a good journalist, but for the military, a tough journalist to work with. And the reactions, though, I think are really natural and understandable from, you know, the other reporters from Eisenhower's command. The interesting, or I should say the most interesting response to me, though, is the AP itself, because there's this initial celebration and triumph that they scooped this story and when nobody else, not just sort of before anybody else, but they beat everybody to the punch and they were the only ones to release this story. And then pressure starts to build, and then eventually the AP president repudiates Kennedy's scoop. And by the end of. I think by. Basically by the end of the year, Kennedy's career is largely in ruins. So what happened there? You know, did. Did they fire Kennedy or did he resign? And why?
- [39:11]
Richard Fein
And.
- [39:12]
Dr. Andrew Pace
And how did they go from this, this initial triumph to ultimately repudiating their star reporter?
- [39:22]
Richard Fein
Right, yeah. And again, a lot of this was murky, some of it intentionally murky. Kennedy's fate at the AP within minutes, if not, or hours, if not minutes of the scoop of Kennedy's story being released. Shaef's first move was to suspend all AP operations in Europe, not just in Paris, but throughout Europe. They quickly revised that and just suspended Kennedy and a couple of his deputies in Paris. This all occurred on May 7th. In fact, by the end of that day, you're right that. That the AP's. Why am I. Kent Cooper, who was the. Basically the managing director of the AP in New York originally, you know, was really trumpeting this scoop left and right. Then after Eisenhower issued a statement a day or two later saying that Kennedy scoop had. Kennedy's making this information public had jeopardized the Allies relation. You know, his relationship with the Russians had threatened troops in the field, et cetera, et cetera, the AP started to pull back a little bit on this. And Cooper then said he was going to reserve judgment until he could talk directly with Kennedy. And at this point in the days right after the surrender, Kennedy was prevented from contacting the ap. So he was kind of isolated from the ap and Cooper couldn't talk directly to Kennedy. The shaft conducted its own little investigation of what had happened. Kind of figured it out, got embarrassed by the fact that there was this security lapse, that there did exist these communication circuits that were not being monitored, but ordered Kennedy to leave the theater. Basically kicked him out of Europe. It took him almost two weeks, I think, to get. He didn't really get back to New York until early June. He met with Cooper and with Robert McLean, who was the president of the board of the AP. McClain is the one who, a few days after the surrender itself, issued this kind of repudiation of Kennedy's action, Basically said the AP regretted that this had happened, et cetera. So this had happened before Kennedy got back. When McClain did that, he was also kind of undercutting Cooper, who was kind of in charge of the day to day operations of the ap, who was saying he's going to reserve judgment until he actually got Kennedy's side of the story came back. Cooper convinced Kennedy to basically take all of his accrued leave time, which we had months of vacation time that he could do. He had been reporting for a lot. You know, he hadn't really had a break from this high pressure job for better part of a year. So he was more or less. Kennedy himself was more or less happy to do this. The AP refused to comment on this at all. In the, in the fall of 1945, the board agreed with Cooper's recommendation that Kennedy be released, basically fired, but that this be done quietly and without any kind of public comment. And actually it was done so quietly that they never actually informed Kennedy. It's just all of a sudden one day he received a check from the AP for some life insurance, something or other that he had paid and that was being returned to him. It's true that there was. Over the summer of 94, for the, basically the month or six weeks after the surrender, Kennedy's actions were debated in the press and AP members. Again, the AP is a kind of cooperative at this time. So newspapers, a lot of newspapers were members of the ap. They were chiming in on it. And it was kind of a split decision about who was right here. A lot of newspapers felt that a lot of editors and people who were critics of Kennedy felt that Kennedy had substituted his judgment of what was involved in terms of military security for Eisenhower's that he had. And that always struck me as maybe the strongest argument against Kennedy's actions. But others, and I always found this a little bit more convincing, were sort of saying that two things. One, the army was ridiculous in thinking they could hold this news for 36 hours. You know, and this was partly what Kennedy was saying is the news is already out there. You know, it's like the, you know, the German Germans have announced this.
- [45:43]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Downing Street's already celebrating.
- [45:46]
Richard Fein
You know, they're celebrating in London. This French general is giving an account of the surrender. So they know people know this, and it's just ridiculous to think you could be held for 36 hours. There were many of the press officers in SHAF itself in the PRD who were arguing the same thing. There's no way we can hold this for 36 hours. So there was that sort of practical consideration. But a lot in the press also said the American people had the right to know. The Allied public had the right to know that after X number of years of war, four years for the Americans, six for the British, they had a right to know that the Germans had surrendered and that there was no militarily justifiable reason for withholding this news. So this was the debate that went on.
- [46:44]
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- [48:01]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Well, and there was a lot of controversy too, talking with the other the lucky 17 about what exactly had been said on the plane. How sort of binding was the restriction? Anyway, there's. There was a good bit of journalistic rivalry going on there too, but. But it's also interesting that then there also were these subsequent surrenders. There's a surrender with all of the Allies present the following day on May 8th. The Soviets are there. The Americans witness it.
- [48:37]
Richard Fein
Yeah, that's the one that was sort of orchestrated by the Russians and with grand ceremony and, you know, multiple vodka toasts. There are lots of stories of the Shaft personnel. And the reporters who were there sort of stumbling, traveling back to France the next day, completely hungover. But, yeah, the Germans or the Russians really wanted this to be a big affair. And they also wanted to orchestrate it so it looked like the Germans were surrendering to the Russians and almost to the Russians alone, because the Russians, with some, again, some legitimacy, felt that they're the ones who had broken the back of the, you know, German armed forces. Well, and.
- [49:32]
Dr. Andrew Pace
And to this day there, you know, in history books or in textbooks, you'll often read that the Germans surrendered on May 7, 7, 8 in 1945. Or you'll see. You'll see histories that talk about the preliminary surrender on the 7th and then the sort of definitive surrender on the 8th. But again, this speaks to the sort of process of surrender because there were German armies or army groups that were surrendering throughout the first part of May. And one of the sort of interesting, I think, historical questions about wartime is what does surrender mean? And when does surrender become official? Where's the boundary between war and peace? And it can be a lot more messy than, you know, the textbooks would have us, would have us think.
- [50:34]
Richard Fein
Yeah, yeah. I think I begin the book about with that notion that, you know, in the U.S. you know, the end of World War II is commemorated on May 8, or the end of the war in Europe is commemorated on May 8th. In Russia, it's on May 9th, and the actual surrender took place on May 7th. So, you know, it proves your point in some ways about how this is a process, not an event.
- [51:05]
Dr. Andrew Pace
In some ways, we're running short on time. But just to make a note about some of the conclusions here, there's a lot of really, I think, profound questions that your book raises about what does it mean to be an honest reporter and what's the relationship between the media and the military or the media and the government. What do you think is sort of one of the takeaways here about the tensions between the media and the military or the public's right to know and the media's responsibility to report and the government's need to control information?
- [51:48]
Richard Fein
Yeah, yeah. I kind of began this project and agnostic about a lot of these things. But in the end, I think what this book suggests is that good war nostalgia, this notion that somehow there's a meta narrative to media military, the history of media military relations in the United States that basically says that that the media and the military cooperated, they got along during World War II, and that this relationship only ran off the rails in Vietnam, that it was Vietnam was the thing. And what I end the book sort of suggesting is that actually media, military relationships relationship in World War II, when you wash away that good war nostalgia, looks a little bit more like the. The Vietnam War than most accounts would suggest. In other words, the archival research I did really suggested that there was a lot of tension between the military and the media during the Second World War. It didn't have to do with any notion of whether the war was just or not. The reporters all agreed with the war aims, but they often felt that censorship was being used not to protect the military security, not for the legitimate purposes, but to hide incompetence or error on the part of the military or was being done purely for political reasons, to try to forward political lens. So that was sort of my general takeaway. That said, it's also true that when you read the reporting from the Second World War, even though a lot of reporters were, that journalists were congratulating themselves, you know, the best reported war in history, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, it doesn't really seem that way. When you read the newspapers from the time, which often read as transcripts of official communiques and things like that, there's very little criticism of what's going on. Precisely. There are some people who have argued that the start of the military's suspicion of the press was this Kennedy episode. In other words, this is what sort of tripped off the military's mistrust of the media, which has sort of governed the relationship ever since. But I think it's more that the. That those relations were rockier in World War II than we imagine, again, because we have this sense that they cooperated. Everybody believed in the good war, everybody was unified, everybody's on the same page, et cetera. And it is true that Steinbeck, who was John Steinbeck, who was reporting from Italy, wrote later that he was just ashamed at the reporting that he did because it wasn't giving readers any real sense of what the fighting was like. It was totally sanitized in a way. So there's that. I think that is the sort of main takeaway for me is that, yeah, no, we so romanticize World War II and forget that. No, there was a lot more friction in media, military relations, just as there was a lot more friction in American society. Not everybody was gung ho for the war. It was like a lot of people had misgivings about the way it was conducted.
- [56:22]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Yes. Yeah. Well, we appreciate you being on the show. We've taken up a lot of your time, but thanks again for talking with me about your book.
- [56:31]
Richard Fein
Okay, thanks. Much appreciated.
- [56:33]
Dr. Andrew Pace
Thanks for being here.