ABSTRACT
Public press criticism of the Bureau was by now less vitriolic. In mid-November, the Daily Mail carried a wry article about ‘Our Comic Censor – Stupid Cuts in a Brilliant War Book’. This was a then much-praised American book about Italy’s part in the War, of which the Bureau excised large chunks; the publisher decided to publish it with many blank pages to show how much had had to be omitted. Reviewers pointed out the book had been censored “idiotically”, because the full version had been published six months previously in the United States and was therefore already available to the ‘sleuths of the Kaiser’s American intelligence service’; most of what had been censored was anyway public knowledge, eg that Spezia ‘is an Italian Naval base of the first importance’. Alas, similar blue-pencilling of books, articles and programmes, so conscientious and so logical purely from a security point of view, but so isolated from the realities of the wider world of information, is a propensity which junior officials to this day find hard to avoid.
