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The reporter who had been sacked for defying the censors to break news of German World War II surrender has finally received an apology from the Associated Press. In the final moments of World War II in Europe, Associated Press correspondent Edward Kennedy gave his news agency perhaps the biggest scoop in its history. He reported, a full day ahead of the competition, that the Germans had surrendered unconditionally at a former schoolhouse in Reims , France . For this, he was publicly rebuked by the AP, and then fired. Kennedy had defied military censors to get the story out. Winston Churchill and American president Harry Truman had agreed to suppress news of the capitulation for 36 hours in order to allow Stalin to stage a second surrender ceremony in Berlin . Kennedy was accused of breaking a pledge that he and 16 other journalists had made to keep the surrender a secret for a time, as a condition of being allowed to witness it firsthand. 67 years later, the AP’s top executive is apologizing for the way the company treated Kennedy. “It was a terrible day for the AP. It was handled in the worst possible way,” the Daily Mail quoted president and CEO Tom Curley as saying. Kennedy, he said, “did everything just right,” Curley rejected the notion that the AP had a duty to obey the order to hold the story once it was clear the embargo was for political reasons, rather than to protect the troops. “Once the war is over, you can’t hold back information like that. The world needed to know,” he said. Curley, who is retiring this year, has also co-written an introduction to Kennedy’s newly published memoir, ‘Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship and The Associated Press’. Kennedy, who died in a traffic accident in 1963, had long sought such public vindication from his old employer. His daughter, Julia Kennedy Cochran, of Bend , Ore. , said she was “overjoyed” by the apology. “I think it would have meant a lot to him,” she said. The German surrender happened at 2.41 am on May 7, 1945. Kennedy was one of 17 reporters taken to witness the ceremony. He and the others were hastily assembled by military commanders, then pledged to secrecy by a U.S. general while the group flew over France . As a condition of being allowed to see the surrender in person, the correspondents were barred from reporting what they had witnessed until authorised by Allied headquarters. Initially, the journalists were told the news would be held up for only a few hours. But after the surrender was complete, the embargo was extended for 36 hours - until 3 pm the following day. Kennedy was astounded. “The absurdity of attempting to bottle up news of such magnitude was too apparent,” he would later write. Nevertheless, he initially stayed quiet. Then, at 2.03 pm, the surrender was announced by German officials, via a radio broadcast from Flensburg , a city already in Allied hands. That meant, Kennedy knew, that the transmission had been authorised by the same military censors gagging the press. Furious, Kennedy went to see the chief American censor and told him there was no way he could continue to hold the story. Word was out. The military had broken its side of the pact by allowing the Germans to announce the surrender. And there were no military secrets at stake. The censor waved him off. Kennedy thought about it for 15 minutes, and then acted. He used a military phone, not subject to monitoring by censors, to dispatch his account to the AP’s London bureau. Notably, he didn’t brief his own editors about the embargo or his decision to dodge the censors. The AP put the story on the wire within minutes. To some of Kennedy’s competitors, the scoop was a betrayal on the scale of Pearl Harbor . Compounding their anger, military censors continued to refuse to allow any other news organization to send their own stories, meaning the AP would continue to have an exclusive for a day.

AP apologises for firing reporter who announced end of WW II