Censorship at Sea

In the first months of 1942, the navy exerted tight control over its war correspondents. While allowing them access to ships, it placed so many restrictions on what they could write about that a group of them, led by Robert Casey of the Chicago Daily News, began to complain vociferously. Stanley Johnston of the Chicago Tribune ultimately became the biggest troublemaker. After escaping from the USS Lexington before it sank during the Battle of the Coral Sea, Johnston used the slow journey home not only to write about this experience but also to learn that the navy had received advanced knowledge of the Japanese attack on Midway. His stories on both battles created a major sensation. With the navy convinced that the Tribune had divulged its secret codebreaking operation, the Roosevelt administration even made a failed bid to prosecute it under the Espionage Act.

Hungarian Accounts from the Ottoman Fronts of the First World War

Even though the annexation of Bosnia by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1908 raised the tension between the Monarchy and the Ottomans, Hungaro-Turkish political, economic, and cultural relations significantly improved from the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of the First World War. With the eruption of the Great War these friendly relations turned into a war alliance, where suddenly the battlefields became fields of joint effort. As a consequence, the outbreak of the war caused intensification of mutual visits and the arrival of Hungarian soldiers, journalists, and even artists and religious representatives in greater numbers in the Ottoman Empire. In this paper the author mainly focuses on Hungarian accounts of different Ottoman fronts during the First World War, while not forgetting to put all these activities in the frame of the wartime alliance. War correspondents like Béla Landauer, István Dobay, and Jenő Heltai from different Hungarian journals, soldiers from the Austro-Hungarian Army like Dr Emil Vidéky and Dr László Király, the painter Géza Maróti, and even a military chaplain, Pál Schrotty left behind detailed memoirs of environments ranging from the picturesque Bay of Izmir to the desert of Palestine. These mostly unknown depictions reveal the cruelty of the war, research the healthcare system of the capital, and provide detailed accounts of the Berlin-Bagdad line and historical sites in the Empire, while also raising questions regarding the situation of Turkish women.

Marie Colvin – The War Hero and the ‘Nasty Woman’

This chapter focuses on the iconic war correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed in a bombardment during the siege of Homs. Bringing together autoethnographic and scholarly modes of analysis, and drawing on the concept of the ‘nasty woman’ (Piotrowska 2019) and a Lacanian reading of Sophocles’ Antigone, the essay challenges normative accounts of Colvin’s life, and interrogates the narratives of transgression that circulate around women war correspondents.