The censoring letter during WWII became popular as it was used to protect the soldiers if the letters were to fall into enemy hands.
This censorship can be seen in the letter above from Natale Bellantoni to his wife Irene where Nat mentions his location when he says “from one of the natives at…” . This location is marked out as it was deemed unsafe if the letter managed to be obtained by the enemy. Any mentions of location or the size of the battalion was almost always redacted. Often the people censoring would not send letters in foreign languages as they couldn’t understand it and therefore couldn’t confirm its safety.
If the article passed censorship or was censored but is now deemed safe they marked the paper which would be found in the upper left corner of the paper. The photo above from hoovers.org represents the stamp of approval from the naval censor.
Masshist received a collection of a few letters from Norman A. Krtil written during WW2. The letter above shows the downsides that can and did come from censorship. When looking at the censored letter from Nat Bellantoni we can see how the censorship was light but effective. It only needed to cut out a few words. When comparing that censorship to the one shown above, the one by Norman A. Krtil was censored so much that there was no content to the letter at all. While there were definitely parts in there that needed to be censored, it was not necessary to get rid of the entire content of the article. Because of this the article lost any meeting as it was left with only an introduction. Censorship is often a good thing as it protects our troops in case the letters fall into the wrong hands but when it becomes this extreme it becomes a bad thing.
The United States weren’t the only ones practicing censorship. The United Kingdom’s interest in censorship led to Britain creating the Ministry of Information. The goal of the Ministry of Information is to attempt to create peace among the chaos caused from the war. One of the differences between the censorship used by the US and that of Britain is that Britain’s censorship seemed to focus on what the media said whereas the United States were more concerned with the letters falling into the wrong hands. When comparing the success of the different systems, that of the United States seemed to work better than that of Great Britains. Our secondary source from a blog page from the United Kingdom’s government talks about the rapid failure of the Ministry of Informations and how “it was only a week before it came to the brink of collapse.” Then later there a broadcast had “wrongly announced that British troops were engaged in offensive actions against the Nazi forces.” This quickly spread throughout the world.
When looking at these first few archives it demonstrates a skewed viewpoint of the articles that were being sent from the soldiers back to the homefront. Many articles focused on love and the hardships of war.
For example, this letter above from the National WW2 museum talks about how the new year is coming and all that the soldier is wishing for is to return to be with his wife. The letters written from soldiers give us insight on what it is like to be in their position in the war and were rarely censored as it didn’t contain problematic content. The tolls of the war can be seen from the letters about love and how they miss their loved ones but it can also be seen in the type of letter shown below.
This letter above shows the difficulties and death that comes with the war. His closest buddies and fellow soldiers were for the most part killed. This letter comes from the eastern front, more specifically Germany. Throughout WW2 Germany had practiced extensive censorship to protect information. One may ask then why there is no censorship of this letter above. The reason there is no censorship is due to the fact that this letter was written about events that occurred in the past and did not leak any sensitive issue since all of the things had already happened. This can be seen as he references “September 1, after two weeks of battle” and also the letter is dated December 29, 1942.
When looking at the artifacts we used, we tried to get a fair representation of the letters being sent proving how some were being censored while others were not. One of our sources “War Letters’” from Jeanne Yamonaco discusses the types of letters being sent throughout the second World War. She analyzed 237 WW2 letters and broke them down into different themes. Friendship/love and Combat were found to be the most common themes among the sample letters registering at about 20 percent each. For this reason we found articles about combat in the war, which often showed censorship, but also some love letters to demonstrate that not everything was censored.
Censorship has been in practice for a long time and can be very necessary for the safety of the soldiers. One downside that can be seen from censorship is that it can be done in extreme measures as the one example shown earlier where it is impossible to tell the meaning of the text. It can take out certain pathos and meaning from the letters. Part of this can be the soldiers’ fault as they are informed about censorship and the importance that some things remain secret. An upside of censorship is that it not only keeps the soldiers safe but can keep their loved ones calm. By not informing them of the dangers of their daily life they remain less worried.