Long before June 1944, the Allied armies had prepared for the information battle. Their public relations services will be used to carry out the largest communications operation of the war, during the landings in Normandy. War correspondents will be an essential cog in the information campaign by serving as a link between the soldiers at the front and theirs at the rear. It was a crucial role in integrating war reporting into the war effort.
Discreet and conditional accreditation
It was the Supreme Allied Command led by American General Dwight Eisenhower which had the authority to accredit the war correspondents of the landing. Thus, 530 journalists and photographers will be chosen in anticipation of the long-awaited invasion of the French coasts. The preparations for the accreditation had taken place in the greatest secrecy, and false departures of correspondents had even been organized to deceive the vigilance of German spies.
At the end of May 1944, the accredited correspondents were finally ordered to the south of England. Nine war correspondents will be assigned to the Canadian forces participating in the invasion. Dozens of public relations officers will also be deployed to monitor correspondents, censor their reports and facilitate the transmission of their dispatches.
All reporting had to be examined by censorship officers, who blocked any damaging or demoralizing information. Preemptive censorship was a condition of war reporting throughout the conflict.
Beyond the Channel
On D-Day, a small group of correspondents landed with the troops at the beachhead. After a crossing aboard a British frigate, Marcel Ouimet, from the French Radio-Canada network, and Ralph Allen, from Globe and Mail, among others, set foot on land in the village of Bernières-sur-Mer. In one of the cables he sent to Montreal, Ouimet wrote that the Normans had received the troops with “roses and smiles” despite the devastation of the Allied bombings.
At that time, Ouimet was with the Régiment de la Chaudière. The reception from the Normans was all the more enthusiastic as the liberation of Bernières-sur-Mer was materialized by soldiers who spoke French. The presence of Marcel Ouimet, the only French-speaking correspondent on D-Day, remains a remarkable fact to this day.
Correspondent Ross Munro, from the Canadian Press agency, achieved the feat of publishing the first dispatch from the landing which was taken up by the international press. Press correspondents had at their disposal various means of communication provided by the Allied military services, including maritime mail, wireless transmission and the use of carrier pigeons.
Three days after disembarkation, The duty will publish a box with photos of the five La Presse canadienne correspondents in Normandy, including Ross Munro and Maurice Desjardins, the agency’s French-speaking correspondent who covered the French-Canadian units. The box text describes: “They were trained with the troops, lived with them and went to the firing line.”
A broad information system
In addition to the correspondents on the front, the Allied communications system also included numerous other correspondents accredited to different headquarters and bilingual journalist announcers, whose role was to relay news of military operations and coded messages to the maquis in France. We can name among others the French Canadians Alain Gravel, who worked for the French broadcasts of the BBC, regularly broadcast in Quebec by Radio-Canada, and the young René Lévesque, who had also been recruited by the American propaganda services and who worked for the American Broadcasting Station in Europe under the direction of French journalist Pierre Lazareff.
In Canada, as in several countries, radio contributed significantly to war propaganda, with broadcasts aimed at raising the morale of the troops engaged and the morale of the populations whose participation in the war effort was essential.
Today, war correspondents who follow the armies are called “integrated”, or ” embedded “. The correspondents who took part in the great Normandy landings under perilous conditions helped pave the way for those who still cover conflicts on the ground around the world at considerable risk. In a war of national survival, war correspondents were certainly integrated into the heart of an information war carefully planned by the belligerents.