Suez To Singapore – Cecil Brown, 1942 ★★★½

Making Waves, On and Off the Air

When the H. M. S. Repulse was sunk by Japanese aircraft near Singapore less than a week after the Pearl Harbor attacks, not everyone was happy American journalist Cecil Brown was one of its survivors.

The news correspondent for CBS Radio had made plenty of enemies in Singapore, including its British commander, Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival. The officer in charge of Percival’s press office made himself conspicuous by his cold silence when Brown reported back to duty.

Less than a month after his near-death experience, Brown was off the air, shut up by military order. It marked the end of a long period of mutual frustration. For the correspondent, there had been hours of debate arguing cuts made to his copy by British military censors. For the British command, there were too many cuts endured from this nettlesome nabob of negativity.

“The cumulative effect of the material submitted for censorship by Mr. Brown for the past few weeks showed a state of mind which makes him persona non grata,” was how it was explained to the rest of the media.

Published in late 1942 when the war was still undecided, Suez To Singapore presents an anxious narrative voice. Not certain how the chips will fall, Brown is often strident in his criticisms of military decision-makers.

“I am against blunderers,” he explains. “Men learn by mistakes; but if they do not learn, then the mistake is doubly, horribly tragic.”

Brown argues here for the freedom to criticize. As a passionate foe of fascism, he sees his candor providing an honest rationale for the fortitude and sacrifice needed to win.

He makes his case up front in an introduction:

We Americans, we of the United Nations, have the courage to die. We have the courage, too, to hear a reasonable report of this war in which we fight and die, and to know that we go to death with the high heart and firm spirit of men and women who die for a better world…

I report in this book, with the greatest objectivity there is in me, the deeds of the men who are fighting and guiding this war, as I found them before, during and after battle. I fought, as best I could, to report the war to the American people. A reporter has no higher duty than to provide his nation with an honest, accurate account of the sector of the war in which he finds himself.

Born in 1907, Cecil Brown was a former seaman who had gone to Europe in the late 1930s to ply a trade as a freelance journalist. By 1940 he was CBS News’ man in Rome, one of the “Murrow Boys” as the young reporters gathered together by Edward R. Murrow were called, pioneer celebrity journalists for the radio age.

CBS News chief correspondent Edward R. Murrow, far left, with some of his fellow CBS News correspondents during World War II. War correspondents like Brown, they wore uniforms and were subject to military authority. Image from https://dca.lib.tufts.edu/features/exhibit/boys.htm.

While in Rome, Brown became a strong critic of Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, a stance which got him kicked out of that country in early 1941. The book opens with Brown leaving Europe, en route to his next assignment, the war in North Africa between Great Britain and the Axis powers of Germany and Italy.

Disappointingly, little of this assignment makes the completed book. Brown never gets close enough to the war there for his satisfaction. Worse, he finds himself annoyed by the compromised nature of his reports, which are frequently “blue-lined” [i. e. censored] by military adjuncts:

All I’m doing up here is getting sand in my teeth. Besides, if its good they’ll censor it. They always do.

Initially Brown thinks he might be sent to Moscow, after the sudden German attack on the Soviet Union in June, 1941 opened a new front in the war. But the order eventually comes in from CBS News boss Paul White to go around the world and report for duty in Singapore.

It was like bringing a moth to a flame. A longstanding British colony with control of vitally desired rubber and fuel resources in surrounding Malaysia, Singapore was awaiting possible attack from Japan – more than a trifle too casually by Brown’s standards.

General Percival is more interested in making sure he is front-and-center in any news stories than sharing a realistic assessment of the Japanese. “Loaded with optimism,” Percival strikes much too rosy a note for Brown’s liking. He notes the nickname for a holding area being prepared for Japanese prisoners: “Camp So Sorry.” A blatant disregard for Asians, particularly those residing in the British colony, clouds everything.

The more he sees, the less Brown likes:

European women here live in the greatest ease. Most of them have four or five servants and have practically no work to do themselves. They spend most of their time, not with their children – an amah takes care of them – but gossiping, playing bridge, ruining someone else’s reputation, or eyeing other men. Almost everyone I talked to in Singapore volunteered the statement: “The thing here is to be unfaithful.”

The more Brown reports in this vein, for CBS Radio as well as Newsweek and Life magazines, the less the British leadership likes him.

You get the feeling Brown was a hard guy to be around. He has a lot of opinions about the war on Fascism, and isn’t shy about sharing them even when his own country was still on the sidelines. A couple of times, he comes off in his own account as a liberal variant of the time-honored Ugly American, lecturing people about lacking the necessary ruthlessness to win.

Excerpts from Brown’s newscasts carry an unmistakably pungent air. They were short, and censors always had final say, but Brown pushed back with the argument he wasn’t giving up any secrets, just reporting on conditions as he saw them. As related in Suez To Singapore, he did this often, and with considerable heat:

I am convinced censorship here is one of abnormal fear. It isn’t fear of giving information to the enemy or menacing security or even creating alarm and despondency, but of giving a wrong chamber-of-commerce impression.

They seem to think that perhaps some tourists might not come to Singapore if the wrong kind of stories get out.

For the British, Brown’s presence served a specific purpose. They wanted Americans to know about the war they were fighting, and to help out. Brown, anti-fascist as he was, was pushing that message; the problem was Brown’s tone. “Of course we want the American fleet out here, and you know we do, so why don’t you say it,” Percival asks Brown at one point. In the United Kingdom, the general adds pointedly, they leave the editorials to editors.

Brown’s criticisms would be justified by Singapore’s failure to do much of anything once the Japanese did attack. Percival famously declined to have interior defenses built, believing any attack would come by sea and that fortifications were bad for morale. Even if the Japanese managed somehow to get through the Malaysian jungle, they were no match for British soldiers.

On February 15, 1942 some 80,000 British, Australian, Indian, and other Allied troops were netted when Japan accepted the surrender of Singapore. In terms of pure manpower, it was Great Britain's greatest loss of the entire war. Image from http://www.armchairgeneral.com/was-winston-churchill-to-blame-for-the-fall-of-singapore.htm 

By the time Percival surrendered, Brown was long gone. The sinking of the Repulse and the Prince Of Wales on December 10 seemed to strip any remaining illusions regarding the efficacy of the British military.

Brown’s account of the Repulse sinking is a book highlight. He relates every heartbreaking detail of the cruise around Malaysia, the grand notions of catching a Japanese convoy attempting a landing, the friendly sailors who spoke with pride of doing their part, and the puzzling failure of British aircraft to provide support.

The attack itself came in waves, and was over relatively quickly. As with Pearl Harbor, a surface fleet was defeated and destroyed entirely by air. Brown found himself floating in the Pacific, swimming with his right hand while his left clutched his wedding ring:

That ring helps save my life. Something like it must have helped save the lives of hundreds of men. Your mind fastens itself on silly, unimportant matters, absorbing your thoughts and stifling the natural instinct of man to panic in the face of death.

Less than a month later, the British succeeded where the Japanese didn’t by taking Brown off the air. You get the feeling he never recovered.

Sure, his negative tone looked a lot better in light of Percival’s subsequent humiliation. But Brown would be dogged by his blackballing and its repercussions. In his next stop, Java, Dutch authorities opted to honor their ally’s persona non grata ruling. Finally back on the air in Australia, Brown laid into his narrative of British ineptitude enough that it earned him a telegraphed reprimand from Paul White:

SOMEWHAT AFRAID YOU UNWITTINGLY TAKING CRUSADING ATTITUDE YOUR BROADCASTS. CERTAINLY HAVE NO INTENTION GLOSS OVER INEFFICIENCY DISPLAYED BY ANY ALLY BUT FEEL IN VIEW SINGAPORE BAN GENERAL PUBLIC WILL FEEL YOU ARE PAYING OFF OLD DEBTS. THUS PLEASE EXERCISE CAUTION…

Suez To Singapore suggests Brown would do no such thing. Indeed, a year after its publication, Brown would part ways with CBS News for good after White objected to “editorializing” of the kind Brown so freely does here. He went on to work for rival networks: Mutual Broadcasting, NBC, and ABC. According to Wikipedia, he retired from broadcasting in 1967. When he died in 1987, at age 80, he was working as a professor of communication arts at the California State Polytechnic University in Pamona.

You come away with the feeling that as a reporter with a cause, Brown was in many ways a man ahead of his time.

Mass media and warfare have never made easy bedfellows; Suez To Singapore shows how problematic the relationship can be even when the media person is completely on board with the war effort. Brown’s problem may have been an excess of enthusiasm; dunning officers and civilians alike about their failure to grasp the severity of the situation.

He was proven right in Singapore, of course, but in making his case proves himself a bit of a pill. Suez To Singapore is tinny that way, but at the same time illustrative. Where do you draw the line, between getting along with the subjects you write about and obeying your duty to report on them accurately and dispassionately? If there’s an answer in Suez To Singapore, it’s not one Brown himself can explicitly offer, but his book demonstrates why the question matters.