In the Second World War, The Globe’s skirmishes with the censors nearly sent its publisher to jail

Canada’s first engagement of ground troops on a battlefield in the Second World War was a shocking, chilling disaster.

In November, 1941, Canada sent 1,975 troops to the then-British territory of Hong Kong, to help deter the Japanese against a possible attack. By Christmas Day, when the British surrendered the colony to the overwhelming Japanese invasion force, nearly 300 Canadians were dead and almost 500 more were wounded. The rest were prisoners of war.

In the months that followed, evidence emerged that the Canadian troops had received minimal training, and had arrived in Hong Kong without their vehicles or other equipment, which were delayed by logistical snafus. But the federal government’s wartime censorship offices, the legally empowered gatekeepers of what Canadian newspapers could and couldn’t say about the war, forbade the press from reporting the information.

Globe and Mail publisher George McCullagh, who had been tilting against the censors since early in the war, was now battering at the gates. At stake was the public’s right to know the truth about one of Canada’s biggest military tragedies. And a possible prison sentence for McCullagh if he dared to defy the censors. “For several days, Mackenzie King’s government seriously faced the prospect of sending the publisher of The Globe and Mail to prison,” author Mark Bourrie wrote in Big Men Fear Me, his 2022 biography of McCullagh.

The standoff marked a turning point in the relationship between Canada’s media and its government in wartime, a shift in the balance between the right to know and the duty to defend that had, in previous conflicts, tipped in favour of a secretive and controlling government. Newspapers had been a largely willing cog in the government’s censorship and propaganda machinery that suppressed, edited and spun the facts on the nation’s news pages in the name of national defence and patriotic duty.

But in the first global war of a truly mass-media era, The Globe was at the forefront of a new defiance of the government’s censorship machinery. Its outrage grew into a national pushback against overreach by censors, restoring space for important debate of wartime political decisions in the nation’s press.

The precedent for government censorship had been established in the First World War, when censors put an ever-tightening lid on any information considered “directly or indirectly useful to the enemy,” as the law broadly defined it. That not only included things such as transportation of troops, movements of naval and air fleets, and equipment manufacturing and shipment, but extended to criticism of military leadership, strategy and wartime policy.

Most English-language publishers eagerly complied; they saw it as their patriotic duty to suppress information that was potentially helpful to the enemy while promoting public morale and support for the war. The French-language Quebec newspapers proved harder to contain, particularly around the issue of conscription: They opposed it as stridently as English Canada supported it.

The press-censorship system in both world wars was, nominally, voluntary. News outlets would decide for themselves whether a story, or a passage within it, danced on or over the line drawn by Ottawa’s censorship regulations – and either self-censor or, if they were less sure, submit the text to censorship officers for a ruling. Most of the censors Ottawa hired were former newspapermen, who, the government hoped, could smooth over clashes with a collegial backslap over drinks at a local tavern.

But by the 1940s, publishers, reporters and editors proved much less pliable. Papers were increasingly willing to challenge censorship powers. None more so than The Globe and its young publisher, McCullagh.

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The charismatic but emotionally fragile McCullagh – a high-school dropout who made his fortune in mining stocks during the Depression – was just 31 years old when he took over The Globe and its competitor, The Mail and Empire, in 1936, merging them into The Globe and Mail.

His new creation entered the Canadian media fray at the dawn of electronic media. Both private and public radio had blossomed in the 1930s. Newsreels were a staple of the country’s movie theatres.

Newspapers still dominated the market, but many, including The Globe, had become stuck in an anachronistic rut. McCullagh was determined to revive his paper with a commitment to serious, modern, (relatively) non-partisan journalism, rooted in accurate and reliable reporting of the important issues of the day. He upgraded the quality and quantity of newsroom staff, and focused on political and business coverage that remains the paper’s foundation today.

One of that newsroom’s stars was columnist Judith Robinson. The daughter of long-time Toronto Telegram editor John (Black Jack) Robinson, she was ferociously intelligent, deeply principled and wielded a rapier pen. She was among the earliest mainstream journalists in the English-speaking world to see through Adolf Hitler’s smokescreen.

Robinson delivered her opinions with surgical wit. An example is her opening of a column in the fall of 1936, on the Nazi regime’s indignance over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned German dissident Carl von Ossietzky: “Official Nazi objections to the bestowal … are quite Nazi. He shouldn’t get a peace prize, Berlin says, because he is a pacifist.”

In November, 1938, when Hitler sent the Czechoslovakian government an ultimatum to hand over lands to Germany – just weeks after the Munich Agreement and Hitler’s assurances that he had no interest in taking in “other nationalities” – Robinson’s sarcasm was dripping: “It is sad for Herr Hitler. Who can doubt that it hurts him worse than it can hurt 850,000 Czechs, to have all those people he doesn’t want cluttering up his Fatherland?”

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Robinson could be just as critical of Canadian and Allied war preparations.

She railed against British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and his pursuit of appeasement with the Nazis, to the displeasure of her bosses. Even as the paper grew less optimistic about the prospects for appeasement to succeed, its editorial board remained charitable toward Chamberlain – in contrast to the star columnist, who persistently ridiculed both the leader and his policy.

She was also a vociferous critic of Mackenzie King. “The Prime Minister has many admirers,” she wrote, “but there is nothing in my record as a newspaper columnist to show that I am one of them.”

King was no fan of hers, either; in his diary, he called Robinson “a writer whom I thoroughly dislike.”

Early in the war, The Globe acknowledged the necessity of limits on press freedoms, at least in principle. “While the right to criticize is one of democracy’s priceless privileges, self-imposed censorship in the name of patriotism is also a priceless privilege obtaining only in a democracy,” a December, 1939, editorial asserted.

But soon, The Globe chafed at the restraints. Robinson and McCullagh were in the thick of it.

Through the fall of 1939 and into 1940, Robinson questioned the King government’s wartime preparations, the weak supports for soldiers’ families, and the recruitment of unemployed and homeless men into service. She accused the government of providing inadequate training and equipment for Canadian soldiers. And when the censors took issue with her references to manufacturing and troop deployment plans or her criticisms of King’s war policies, she went after the censors themselves.

“The war for liberty is only six months old, and already the system set up by a federal Liberal government can get away with liberty’s murder,” she wrote in the spring of 1940.

Robinson parted ways with The Globe not long after, following repeated clashes with senior editors over her relentless attacks. She and another outspoken Globe colleague, reporter and editorial writer Oakley Dalgleish, started a weekly paper, The News, which focused on Ottawa’s wartime policies and strategies. King had the Royal Canadian Mounted Police tail both writers for a time in 1940, on the pretense that they were threats to national security.

When the weekly magazine Saturday Night broke the story of the RCMP surveillance in early 1941, The Globe was no longer in a mood to go with the government’s flow. An editorial called the surveillance “beyond the bounds of what is right and proper” and accused authorities of trying to “intimidate writers who had been dissatisfied with and critical of the war effort of the Canadian government.”

If McCullagh stood on the moral high ground, his footing was muddied. Although he had supported Ontario’s Liberal premier Mitch Hepburn in the 1930s, he was now aligned with the Conservative Party, and had political aspirations of his own – many believed he wanted to be prime minister some day. He certainly considered himself a kingmaker, and had become close friends with George Drew, leader of the Conservative opposition in the Ontario Legislature and a fast-rising national Tory star.

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McCullagh’s relationship with Mackenzie King, a Liberal, was frosty. King confided to his diary that he believed McCullagh was part of a cabal of wealthy and powerful Toronto political and media elites who were out to destroy him. (He called them “a Nazi Fascist output with characteristics and methods comparable to those of Hitler.”) King’s paranoia aside, McCullagh was no political ally.

Drew frequently attacked King’s wartime performance, and had also taken up the censorship cause – often in op-eds and interviews in The Globe, which provided him a platform. He called the censorship system “a political machine for preventing effective correction of Mr. King’s misstatements,” and charged that the prime minister was trying to create “the machinery of a dictatorship.”

McCullagh and Drew’s censorship fight found its cause célèbre at Christmas of 1941, with the decimation of Canada’s troops in Hong Kong. What had contributed to the death or capture of the entire 2,000-strong Canadian force? The nation was grieving and wanted answers.

Under public and political pressure, King called a royal commission into the tragedy, but ordered that its hearings be held behind closed doors. He appointed a sole commissioner, Lyman Duff, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, who was also his friend and confidant.

The Duff commission report exonerated Canadian military and political officials. It issued no recommendations.

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Drew, who had acted as the Opposition’s counsel in the hearings, quickly labelled the report a whitewash. For the next several weeks, The Globe and Drew hammered away at the commission’s conclusions and its secrecy. Their campaign culminated in mid-July, when Drew wrote a 32-page letter to King, outlining evidence of failures in leadership decisions, training and equipment leading up to the Hong Kong tragedy. He sent copies to The Canadian Press wire service and the entire Parliamentary Press Gallery.

The censors, on King’s direction, quashed any publication of the contents of the letter.

What followed was a torrent of outrage not only from The Globe, but from newspapers from coast to coast. The censors were now dealing with a mountain of columns and editorials criticizing the government suppression of the Hong Kong issue.

On July 24, 1942, The Globe published a full page of editorials from newspapers across the country condemning the government’s heavy-handed muzzling of press freedoms, under the all-caps headline: “GAGGING PROCESS OF CENSORSHIP DRAWS PROTESTS ACROSS CANADA.”

Meanwhile, McCullagh was weighing whether to defy censors’ orders and publish the Drew letter. He asked Toronto regional censor Bert Perry point-blank what would happen if The Globe published. Perry told McCullagh that the paper could expect to be prosecuted, and that he would face jail time.

While McCullagh was a bold personality who rarely shied from a good fight, he was also a recovered alcoholic who was prone to bouts of depression. Though we don’t know for sure (McCullagh never wrote a memoir), he may have been self-aware enough to know he would not fare well in prison. The Globe continued to push the issue as far as it could without revealing Drew’s arguments, but in the end, it didn’t publish the letter. In fact, the missive remained under the cloak of government secrecy for years after the war had ended.

The Globe’s decision to cede to the censors spared McCullagh a jail sentence, but it also spared top military and political decision-makers from a public airing of their mistakes.

Around the same time that Drew and The Globe were waging their censorship campaign, Harry Crerar – the army’s chief of the general staff whose fingerprints were all over the Hong Kong calamity – was lobbying the British to give Canada a leading role in a key military operation. The Brits agreed to place Canadians at the forefront of the raid on Dieppe in August, 1942 – an even bigger military disaster than Hong Kong.

In his 2007 biography of Crerar, military strategist Paul Douglas Dickson noted that the Hong Kong controversy was on the general’s mind during the planning for Dieppe. Perhaps Crerar might have been more circumspect in the lead-up to Dieppe had Hong Kong, and his role in it, received thorough scrutiny in the Canadian press.

Nevertheless, the showdown over Hong Kong was a watershed, and the government knew it. Afterward, censors were much more careful to stick to censorship that had a legitimate military objective and avoid clashes with the media over issues of political and public interest.

During the conscription crisis of 1944 – when King ordered that soldiers drafted for domestic duty be reassigned to the front lines – government censors pushed back against the military brass and the prime minister, who wanted to quash reporting on escalating protests among conscripts. The censors argued that the dispute was political at its root, and that media should be left relatively free to cover it.

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After the war, McCullagh expanded his newspaper empire, acquiring another cross-town rival, The Telegram, in 1948. Pierre Berton wrote in a 1949 Maclean’s profile that “at 43, [McCullagh’s] story is only half-told.” But with health problems piling onto his psychological demons, McCullagh died, probably by suicide, in 1952. He was 47 years old.

By then, Dalgleish had become McCullagh’s right-hand man, serving as The Globe and Mail’s editor-in-chief since 1948. He added the title of publisher in 1957, holding both jobs until his death in 1963.

Robinson revived her newspaper career in 1953, as The Telegram’s Ottawa columnist. She was still on the job when she died in 1961, at the age of 64. She was the first woman to win a National Newspaper Award in news reporting, in 1953.

The Canadian military conducted a review of the censorship program in 1948, and decided against developing a new censorship plan for future conflicts. When Canada participated in the Korean War in the early 1950s, the government made no attempt to censor Canadian media, although the United Nations, which commanded the multinational coalition sent to Korea, tried to clamp down on war reporters in the field.

Nearly seven decades after the Hong Kong affair, Globe and Mail reporters unravelling the Canadian military’s role in the torture of detainees in the Afghanistan war were met not with censorship offices, but with the stifling complexities of access to information requests and a sea of redacted documents.

“The Globe pushed harder than any other Canadian newspaper on the detainee story,” says former Globe foreign correspondent Graeme Smith, whose investigations on the ground in Afghanistan helped blow the story open.

The paper’s persistence led to military and parliamentary investigations, the public release of thousands of documents, and nearly brought down the government of Stephen Harper in 2009. Still, the final outcome contained regretful echoes of McCullagh’s campaign: The scandal never received an open public inquiry.

“On balance, could we have pushed harder? Probably,” Smith says. “The full story of what happened remains to be published.”

David Parkinson is deputy head of newsroom development at The Globe and Mail.

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