Allied Communication to the Public During the Second World War

National and Transnational Networks

Simon Eliot, Marc Wiggam, Simon Eliot, Marc Wiggam

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350105140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica moderna

In the Second World War, the home fronts of many countries became as important as the battle fronts. As governments tried to win and hold the trust of domestic and international audiences, communication became central to their efforts. This volume offers cutting-edge research by leading and emerging scholars on how information was used, distributed and received during the war. With a transnational approach encompassing Germany, Iberia, the Arab world and India, it demonstrates that the Second World War was as much a war of ideas and influence as one of machines and battles. Simon Eliot, Marc Wiggam and the contributors address the main communication problems faced by Allied governments, including how to balance the free exchange of information with the demands of national security and wartime alliances, how to frame war aims differently for belligerent, neutral and imperial audiences and how to represent effectively a variety of communities in wartime propaganda. In doing so, they reveal the contested and transnational character of the ways in which information was conveyed during the Second World War. Allied Communication during the Second World War offers innovative and nuanced perspectives on the thin border between information and propaganda during this global war and will be vital reading for World War II and media historians alike.

1

The Ministry of Information on the British Home Front

Henry Irving

In July 1945, Cyril Radcliffe (director general of the MoI) was asked by the historian W. K. Hancock to provide an overview of his time at the MoI. Hancock was the editor of the civil series of the official history of the Second World War, and hoped to gain an understanding of the ministry’s role in the conflict. Radcliffe’s conclusion was that the ministry

is not there to take over activities or direct them: its job is to be sponsor, provider and supplementer for the free publicity activities of its country. . . . It has no wardenship over the “morale” of its fellow citizens: to claim it is to lose the power to obtain it. But it has sufficient privilege in being authorised to minister to the special hunger for knowledge that is evoked by war-time conditions and to demonstrate on behalf of the State the community of interest and sentiment that should unite governed and governors in time of crisis.¹

Radcliffe, who was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the most powerful intellects of his generation, was uniquely well placed to express a view on this subject.² He had been recruited by the British government in 1939 to produce a workable procedure for newspaper censorship and served under each of the ministry’s five wartime ministers.³ After he was appointed director general in December 1941, he was responsible for the ministry’s day-to-day management until the end of the Second World War. There was simply nobody as familiar with the MoI as he was.

The MoI was central to the management of information in wartime Britain. Conceived as “the centre for the distribution of all information concerning the war,” it dealt daily with facts, opinions, appeals, observations, and commands. These were sifted, sorted, packaged, re-repackaged, and released to a variety of audiences. It controlled the flow of official news, commissioned thousands of posters and newspaper advertisements, produced almost two thousand films and shorts, organized exhibitions that were attended by millions, organized public meetings, published illustrated books, and helped to influence the tone of wartime radio. The potential size of the ministry’s audience can be illustrated by a series of surveys undertaken by its Wartime Social Survey unit in 1943. They estimated that 77 percent of the public frequently read a morning newspaper, 79 percent had been to the cinema at some point in the year, and 56 percent had read one of the ministry’s official war books.⁴ The pressure group PEP (Political and Economic Planning), which reviewed the ministry’s activities in February 1945, was not being facetious when it posed the rhetorical question: “Can there be any person in wartime Britain who has not seen or heard one or other manifestation of the Government’s information services?”⁵

As David Welch suggests, the MoI was an experiment with government propaganda on an unprecedented scale.⁶ However, as Radcliffe and PEP realized, the experiment was frequently misunderstood. The ministry’s activities were subject to numerous changes of policy, its purpose was only defined retrospectively, and its powers were often overestimated. There was particular confusion early in the war, when the ministry sought to assert itself without gaining support from other parts of government. The resulting missteps have had a profound impact on the historiography of Britain’s wartime information policy. Indeed, while the scale of its activity has impressed, the MoI has earned a reputation for failure. This reputation owes much to Ian McLaine’s hugely influential study Ministry of Morale, which was the first detailed history to use official documents kept by the then Public Records Office. McLaine’s main argument was that the ministry began the war as an irritant and only improved when its attempts to influence opinion through exhortation were abandoned.⁷

There has recently been a renewed interest in this history. A new generation of scholars has sought to understand the influence of the MoI’s activities at home and overseas, influenced by debates in social, cultural, and media history.⁸ Other chapters in this book demonstrate that there is still scope for the reappraisal of the myriad ways that the ministry operated: from its work in neutral countries to its ambitious use of printed publicity. There remains, however, a degree of misunderstanding about the way that the MoI operated on the home front. This chapter will build upon McLaine’s argument that its domestic publicity only became effective when it abandoned exhortation, by demonstrating ho w Radcliffe’s vision of the ministry worked in practice. I will show that the ministry never had a monopoly on wartime information and suggest that its work needs to be viewed within an ecology of communication.⁹ I will also suggest that the ministry’s relative success after 1941 formed a bridge between the prewar world of commercial advertising and a postwar acceptance of government public relations. To show how, it is necessary to begin by considering how and why the ministry came into being.

Prewar planning

Secret preparations for the MoI had begun in 1935. Faced with the increasingly aggressive foreign policies of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the British government had agreed that it was necessary to develop plans for an organization capable of managing information in time of war. This proposal rested on a series of assumptions about the type of conflict that was to be expected, of which the most important concerned the threat of aerial bombing. In the mid-1930s, it was widely held that developments in military aviation would revolutionize warfare. Military strategists were especially concerned that future wars would begin with the devastating bombardment of civilian targets. Accepting the idea that “the bomber will always get through,” their calculations of the impact of such an attack were worryingly high. With little alternative evidence, estimates based on First World War Zeppelin raids were revised upwards in response to Italian bombing in Abyssinia and German raids during the Spanish Civil War. By March 1939 it was anticipated that 3,500 tons of explosives would be dropped on the day that war was declared, with around 600,000 casualties expected during the first fortnight. In this nightmare scenario, it was thought that existing methods of communication would simply cease to function.¹⁰

This bleak prediction convinced the ministry’s planners that civilian reactions would determine the outcome of the war. While the concept of civilian morale was notoriously hard to define (it was “the woolliest and most muddled concept of the war” in Paul Addison’s words¹¹ ), it was nevertheless thought that the First World War had been won because German civilians had been unwilling to continue a fight in which they had lost confidence. Extrapolating from this belief, the ministry’s planners identified high and steady morale as a requirement for victory in total war.¹² This appeared to justify the importance of information. Indeed, it was widely believed that propaganda had played a significant part in the outcome of the First World War by undermining faith in German military advances during 1918. To be successful again, it would need to be combined with censorship to ensure that no information of military value was leaked to the enemy, and with domestic publicity to steady the home front.¹³

Although the First World War was used to justify the power of information, the MoI’s planners maintained that a new approach was needed. Their argument was based on the multiplicity of different organizations that had been involved in matters of propaganda and censorship during the First World War. The longest-serving had been the Official Press Bureau, which was responsible for censorship and the release of news from 1914. A Department for Enemy Propaganda (known as Crewe House) had been directed against the Central Powers (except for the Ottoman Empire, which was dealt with by the Foreign Office). Until late 1916 the issue of material at home and in Allied territories was undertaken at arm’s length, under the supervision of the National War Aims Committee. This loose arrangement was ended with the establishment of an official Department of Information, which was transformed into a ministry under Lord Beaverbrook in 1918. With the benefit of hindsight, the ministry’s planners concluded that this piecemeal approach had resulted in frustration and delay. They agreed that “we should not merely start off in the case of a future conflict where we ended the last.” Their solution was a single, unified MoI.¹⁴

Unresolved questions

The vast majority of problems identified by McLaine can be traced back to the framework imposed on the MoI’s planners in 1935. Their proposal that a single body should manage all government information was unprecedented; most existing activity took place at a departmental level and calls to centralize government publicity were rejected outright in 1938 and 1939.¹⁵ Although it was generally accepted that there would need to be some change in wartime, the experience of the First World War still led to (somewhat exaggerated) fears about a unified MoI engaged in old-fashioned propaganda at home and overseas. This helps to explain why influential critics, like the Chamberlain’s chief adviser Horace Wilson, conspired to keep the ministry a secret lest it upset international relations that were already fragile. Their actions led to an ambiguous compromise whereby the ministry would be established in two stages: its planners were told to focus on news and censorship, leaving matters of publicity to existing departments. This two-stage plan left important matters unresolved, while the requirement for secrecy made it more difficult to establish the ministry’s position within the existing ecology of communication. It was for these reasons that it entered the war seemingly unprepared for the tasks for which it had been designed.¹⁶

The circumstances surrounding the declaration of war on September 3, 1939, caused further problems. While Nazi forces swept through Poland and the war at sea began in earnest, the British home front was relatively undisturbed. Not only did the devastating aerial bombardment fail to materialize but a strict interpretation of censorship by the three service departments also conspired to give the impression of inaction. At its most extreme, this resulted in the confiscation of newspapers carrying a story about the British Expeditionary Force that had been issued by the MoI.¹⁷ It was against this background that the ministry launched its infamous “red poster” campaign. This comprised 1.2 million posters bearing the slogans “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory” and “Freedom is in Peril; Defend It with all Your Might.” A further 2.45 million posters bearing the slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” were printed but not issued.¹⁸ The campaign had been designed to prove the ministry’s capability, but merely provided the press with a useful outlet for its...