The last days of freedom
Vancouver residents were fearful and cautious after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor
Lew Gordon walked out through the ornate doorway of the Dominion Building on Hastings and glanced across Cambie Street toward the Commercial Hotel. Friday afternoon – the boys from his old newsroom had put away the home edition and their week was done. They were sure to be in the beer parlour cracking wise. He could easily duck in the men’s entrance for a beer or two.
Sure, back upstairs there was no shortage of work for Gordon, the regional press censor. It never stopped coming in. A mountain of page proofs piled up daily on every desk in office 503504 overlooking Victory Square.
On a busy day, messengers jostled for deadline approvals, every passing minute a missed opportunity to make the next rolling edition of their newspapers – The Vancouver Sun and its rivals the Vancouver Daily Province and the News Herald, all located nearby.
With a war being fought, articles touching on anything to do with military matters had to follow rules laid down in the blue- covered book given to every newsroom in Canada. The list of banned topics and practices was long, but even under the War Measures Act the curbs on press freedom were not unlimited. Gordon’s boss in Ottawa liked to recount how, just two years earlier, newspapers in France were prohibited from talking about the Nazi danger, leaving citizens unprepared when the invasion came.
There was good reason for caution. Spies and foreign agents in Vancouver watched everything, pouncing on any scrap of information.
Journalists bobbed and wove around the rules, looking for fresh angles. If it were up to military men, newspapers would print only propaganda. The censor was in the middle. Gordon, formerly city editor of the
Vancouver Daily Province, was used to the pressure of a newsroom requiring constant snap decisions. It made no difference now that he was Ottawa’s man. He would look at The Vancouver
Sun later. It was Friday, March 13, 1942.
The streets were slick. It had rained nearly non- stop for two weeks. Weather was almost all anyone could talk about today — the hail last night, then waking up to sleet and snow. And only a week until spring.
Jammed B. C. Electric streetcars clattered and shuddered around the Hastings and Cambie bend, too full for more riders.
The gas and rubber shortage was bad enough, keeping cars off the roads. That, and the thousands of workers drawn by the shipyard boom, would add a million passenger trips to the overstretched transit system before the year was out.
Women were now being urged to finish their downtown shopping earlier to leave the streetcars free for workers coming off shift. It was commented that exhausted boilermakers no longer bothered to offer up their seats.
Pedestrians in Victory Square craned to observe aircraft circling above the port. For days and nights, the Air Force had been flying these patterns. RMS Queen Elizabeth — still the largest passenger liner ever built — had sailed into port for final touches as a troopship. The air cover was hers.
The city was keeping a little secret that wasn’t in any of the papers or on the radio. Directive 68 in the blue book was clear: “Editors are urged to handle all shipping news with the greatest possible caution.”
Ninety- six days since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it was one more sign Vancouver was not merely a bystander. The city was waking up to the realization it could be a front- line target in the Pacific war.
The thought was making people fearful and there were already signs of panic. Just to be on the safe side, the Army was keeping its soldiers on standby in local barracks, and not because of an external threat.
Blocks east, freedom had come to an end in Little Tokyo.
“Jap invasion thrust at Solomon Islands!” shouted the newsboys on Hastings. “Big U. S. offensive before Japanese attack Australia!”
War was good for the news. Bundles of The Sun were piled expectantly high at newsstands – 3,000 more copies a day had been selling since the Pacific war began before Christmas. At three cents apiece, a shipyard welder making the union rate of $ 1.12 an hour could not complain at the price.
Page 1 of the Friday afternoon Sun was almost exclusively on the war.
“Let All of You Who Are Fit Bear Arms,” urged a frontpage editorial.
At page bottom was a small item: “Derelict Defense Is Exposing B. C.” Readers were directed deep inside to page 19 and a “penetrating analysis” by Sun staff writer Alan Morley.
Inside the six- sided Sun Tower, a block from the censor’s office, a tall and debonair man who looked a little like Humphrey Bogart was at his typewriter. It was Morley.
Across the city, people began to read their afternoon Sun.
His article was explosive.