The Second World War

Question 1

The scale of propaganda during World War II

Answer 1

The Second World War witnessed the greatest propaganda battle in the history of warfare. For six years, all the participants employed propaganda on a scale that dwarfed all other conflicts, including even the First World War.

Question 2

The reasons behind a high propaganda scale

Answer 2

There were several reasons why this was so. In the first place, this was a war between entire nations, even more so than in 1914-18. Modern democracy and totalitarian dictatorship had both emerged from the First World War and 1 9 3 9 was a testimony to their mutual incompatibility. There followed a struggle between mass societies, a war of political ideologies in which propaganda was merely one, albeit a significant, weapon.
Moreover, the continued development of the communications revolution had, since the advent of sound cinema and radio, provided a direct link between government and those they governed, and between the government of one nation and the people of another.
Propaganda was in this respect the alternative to diplomacy. The old rule that governments did not interfere with the internal affairs of others had been swept away by the Russian revolution. In addition, there was also the impact of modern technology on warfare, particularly the advent of the bomber which, for the first time, brought war ‘into the front garden’.

Question 3

The British view on propaganda when Germany was occupied with other front lines

Answer 3

While the Germans fought the courageous Poles in the East, and divided the spoils with Stalin’s Russia in accordance with the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, war seemed a long way off for the majority of the British people. Britain prepared and took advantage of the time bought for it by the Poles. The cinemas were reopened by the end of September to cater for the increasing boredom caused by the absence of any war action in the West. In the meantime, the propaganda machinery was primed for the crisis to come. Whether through civilian bombing or through a war of attrition, morale would obviously be a crucial factor and the Ministry of Information, set up on the outbreak of war, would have to compete with a German propaganda machine under Joseph Goebbels that had already had six years of experience. Planning for the Ministry of Information (MOI) had in fact begun as early as 1935, but it was far from complete by 1939. Again, the time provided by the ‘Phoney War’ allowed the M O I an invaluable opportunity to prepare itself adequately for the tasks to come.

Question 4

The British cencorship

Answer 4

Most attention had been devoted, perhaps typically for the British, to the question of censorship. Censorship as negative propaganda, designed not only to prevent valuable information from reaching the enemy but also to prevent news that might damage morale, had long been recognized as invaluable in the manipulation of opinion.

Question 5

British in the battle field

Answer 5

So keen were the authorities at the start of the war on censoring virtually all news of interest that film cameramen were not allowed to accompany the British Expeditionary Force to France.

The 1939 story was the victim of a total news blackout that was only lifted after a Paris radio announcement that the BEF had actually arrived in France; it Was then reimposed after the newspapers had actually gone to press.

Question 6

British pre-censorship

Answer 6

The essential point was that all quick (or ‘hot’) news was censored at source. The British news media - the press, BBC, newsreels - relied upon the news agencies for most of their information. Before the First World War, the Post Office had re-routed Britain’s world-wide cable network so that all commercial cables came together at a single point. The London headquarters of the Press Association (which supplied the domestic press) was also in the same building as Reuters (which supplied the overseas press). It was here that the censors controlled the bulk of news passing to the media before it actually reached them. It was, in other words, pre-censorship (newsreels were also subject to post- censorship). Once the censored news left the M O I , editors and journalists were allowed to do with it what they liked in accordance with their own house style. Their opinions were not censored, which gave the impression that little censorship was being imposed. It also gave the impression of a voluntary system, and this provided an effective disguise for official propaganda and a clearer conscience for a liberal democracy at war.

Question 7

The Daily Mirror supression

Answer 7

In May 1940, the government banned the export of communist journals. Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939 and Russia had to be treated as unfriendly, if not as an enemy, until June 1941 when the Germans attacked them. The ban was only lifted after the battle of Stalingrad. In July 1940, the Daily Worker was warned that its pacifist line contravened Defence Regulation 2D, which made it an offence under the Defence of the Realm Act ‘systematically to publish matter calculated to foment opposition to the prosecution of the war’. The warning was ignored, and in January 1941 the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, ordered Scotland Yard into the offices of the Daily Worker, together with those of The Week, to stop the presses. They were only allowed to resume publication in August 1942 when a comprehensive re-education campaign about ‘Our Soviet Friends’ was in full flight. Far more serious, due to the size and nature of its circulation, was the constant sniping of the Daily Mirror. In January 1941, Churchill summoned its owners and virtually ordered them to desist.

Question 8

British posters

Answer 8

And although posters were less important in 1939 than they had been in 1914, the country was nonetheless littered with examples that adopted this old-fashioned approach. This merely served to create an ‘us and them’ attitude, the folly of which was soon realized. This was, after all, to be the People’s War in which the previous gap between soldier and civilian and between politician and public was to be narrowed almost to the point of invisibility. The MOI quickly learned its mistake; hence the Churchill posters, ‘Let Us Go Forward Together’ and ‘We’re Going to See It Through’.
Posters were also used to convey information (‘Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases’), suggest economies (‘Make Do And Mend’ and ‘A Clean Plate Means a Clear Conscience’), prevent rumours (‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, ‘Keep it under your Hat’, ‘Tittle Tattle Lost the Battle’, and ‘Keep Mum - She’s Not So Dumb’), and reinforce the will to persevere and sacrifice, (‘Women of Britain, Come into the Factories’ and ‘Back Them Up’).

Question 9

Obstacles for propaganda posters

Answer 9

Propaganda posters had to overcome three obstacles:
Firstly, a general aversion to reading any notice of any sort, secondly a general disinclination to believe that any notice, even if it was read, can possibly be addressed to oneself; thirdly, a general unwillingness, even so, to remember the message long enough to do anything about it.

Question 10

British film propaganda

Answer 10

It was for these reasons that the spoken word, as conveyed by radio and, in conjunction with images, film was far more potent an instrument of propaganda.
The MOI was at first slow to act in the case of film propaganda. The first propaganda film of the war, The Lion Has Wings (1939), was made independently of MOI influence by Alexander Korda. But by 1940 the MOI had drawn up a programme for film propaganda and it had taken over the old GPO Film Unit, renaming it the Crown Film Unit, to produce its own official films. Going to the pictures remained what it had become in the 1930s - a normal part of most people’s life, an ‘essential social habit’, by far the most popular form of entertainment, particularly for the working classes who were now being called upon to fight the People’s War.

Question 11

The changing image of the working class in Britain

Answer 11

One of the reasons for this was that British films were now portraying ordinary working people - the bulk of their audiences - in a serious light. Before the war, the working man and woman had been largely caricature figures of fun. The People’s War, however, demanded that they were now taken seriously and in many respects the strict censorship of the pre-war years, as exercised by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), was now relaxed in its treatment of social issues.

Question 12

Film control in Britain

Answer 12

due to the fact that film stock (i.e. celluloid) was classified as a vital war material and was rigorously controlled by the Board of Trade, no film could actually have been made without government approval.

Question 13

Differences between official movies and newsreels in Britain

Answer 13

The official films were more like documentaries, short informational films explaining how to plant potatoes, how and when to wear a gas mask, how fires were extinguished, how tanks were built, and so on. They might not appear to be propagandist but they were designed to serve the war effort in its widest sense.
Like the newsreels, therefore, the official films presented, not reality but an illusion of reality, an illusion determined by the cameraman and where he pointed his camera, the director and where he placed his subjects.

Question 14

German potraylar in British propaganda

Answer 14

n a series of broadcasts made on the BBC’s overseas service in late 1940 by Lord Vansittart, former Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, the Germans were portrayed as historically violent and aggressive, with Nazism being merely the latest manifestation of this national characteristic.
The Casablanca conference of January 1943, it was no longer easy to distinguish between Germans and Nazis. Atrocity propaganda was never used on the same scale as in the First World War: that had long been discredited. But the underlying message of all this material was that Nazism itself was an atrocity and all Germans were guilty of it.

Question 15

White propaganda: what in Britain was understood as white propaganda?

Answer 15

Thus far, we have been dealing with ‘white’ propaganda, namely propaganda emanating from a clearly identifiable source. The most potent source of white propaganda in Britain during the entire war was the BBC. The significance of radio depended not just upon its universality or its immediacy; like the other news media, its potency as a medium of news communication and of propaganda rested on the entertainment context in which it operated. The BBC’s wartime role extended even further, from monitoring to overt and covert broadcasting and even to the air defence of Great Britain.

Question 16

V for Victory campaign

Answer 16

White broadcasts to Europe proved just as popular, as was demonstrated by the famous ‘V for Victory’ campaign. This was unwittingly launched in January 1941 following an unplanned reference in a BBC Belgian programme. Before long, resistance fighters were daubing the ‘V’ sign on walls throughout Belgium, Holland, and France. The Germans tried to claim the ‘V’ for themselves and began broadcasting as their station identification the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which matched the Morse code for the letter ‘V’. But the British government was concerned that the campaign was encouraging premature hopes for victory and ordered an end to it in May 1942. Even so, the campaign had demonstrated the influence of radio and the role it could play in fostering resistance amongst the peoples of a continent dominated by Nazi news broadcasts.

Question 17

Black propaganda: what was black propaganda in Britain?

Answer 17

Black propaganda describes material emanating from an undisclosed source, so that the receiver either has no idea where it is coming from or incorrectly identifies the source. British black propaganda purported to originate in Europe when it in fact came from England, and because of its secret origin, much greater leeway could be made with the truth. But the BBC would have none of this and PWE accordingly established its own black radio stations.

Question 18

Anglo-American propaganda

Answer 18

The Anglo-American propaganda relationship was not without its tensions, but equally it was not without its successes. The Americans also distinguished between black and white propaganda. For this purpose, they set up two separate organizations.

Question 19

American propaganda successes

Answer 19

The Americans also set aside a special squadron of Flying Fortresses whose sole task was to carry out leaflet raids, and by the end of the war the Americans were dropping over seven million leaflets a week over occupied Europe.
The other great achievement of the American wartime propaganda effort lay in the contribution to both American and Allied morale played by Hollywood.
Most of the films contained some form of ‘Yellow Peril’ propaganda, although it is interesting to note by way of contrast that anti-Italian stereotypes are rare in the films about the European war. The Germans, on the other hand, were portrayed as gangsters and thugs, abusers of women and the innocent.
It was the new form of atrocity propaganda, more subtle perhaps, but with the same message: the Germans were the enemies of civilization and democracy.

Question 20

American film propaganda

Answer 20

Men all made films for the US Armed Forces, which had their own film units for training and indoctrination purposes. Hollywood would look after domestic morale, with a little guidance from the OWI. But there was still a need to target Americans joining the armed forces.

Question 21

American “Strategy of Truth”

Answer 21

Following the British lead, the Americans developed their ‘Strategy of Truth’ as a fundamental principle of their propaganda but, when all is said and done, even in their psychological warfare, the absence of any policies that could offer the German people any hope that they would be treated differently from Nazi war riminals hindered their efficiency.

Question 22

Soviet propaganda: look at the war and Germans

Answer 22

The Soviets to this day describe the Second World War as ‘The Great Patriotic War’. In many respects, patriotism was more significant than propaganda, and certainly the propaganda was directed at patriotic resistance rather than ideological or revolutionary change.
Stalin looked to the defence of Russia itself and it was to the Russian population that most of the official propaganda was directed. Lenin had, after all, stated that ‘a revolution is worth its name only when it can defend itself. In his ‘Holy Russia’ speech of November 1941, Stalin conjured up figures from Russia’s glorious past, military and cultural, and compared Nazi Germany with tsarist Russia. He was clearly at pains to undo the effects of his own propaganda during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact but, most significantly, he made a distinction between the fjazis and the German people.

Question 23

Features of Soviet film propaganda

Answer 23

The Soviet film industry continued to pour out films that agitated and organized the masses. The war was presented as a conflict between two ideologies. The brutality of the Nazi invaders was never avoided; indeed, the hellish reality of war was a distinctive feature of Soviet wartime cinema, particularly in the feature- length documentaries, and Soviet film makers, unlike their western counterparts, did not shrink from showing death with all its horror on the screen.
Films with historical themes were particularly valuable.

The agit-trains accordingly once again took the message to the rural peasants. In the towns, posters took on a new lease of life. The old Civil War format of ROSTA (now TASS) windows was repeated with cartoon and caricatures being both popular and effective. Relations with the Russian Orthodox Church were patched up to help the domestic campaign and provide the patriotic cause with a ‘holy’ theme, while Soviet radio stations kept up the stream of State controlled information and exhortation. In order to smooth external relations, the Comintern was closed down although anti-Nazi groups and resistance movements were fostered with the aid of radio. All in all, Soviet wartime propaganda proved remarkably adept at improvisation and flexibility, but then this was necessary if the difficult problem of the subject nationalities was to be glossed over in favour of patriotic resistance.

Question 24

Japanese propaganda bodies

Answer 24

The very fact that the Americans were caught by surprise at Pearl Harbor was a tribute to the disinformation campaign the Japanese had been conducting between 1939 and 1941. Japanese propaganda, or the ‘Thought War’ as they preferred to call it, was carried out by a variety of organizations (not unlike those in Britain, Russia, and the USA).

Question 25

Japanese propaganda strategies

Answer 25

Short-wave radio sets were banned in Japan itself. Yet although the civilian population at home were thus to be denied access to foreign broadcasts, the longer ranges of short-wave broadcasting proved an ideal means for the government to spread its message hroughout the area it wished to control -
but only once the wireless sets had been adjusted to receive only Japanese transmissions. Listening to foreign radio propaganda was forbidden. The Japanese themselves broadcast in more than twenty-two foreign languages from transmitters in Batavia, Singapore, and Saigon, with Australasia and India being prime targets for their attention. The most famous Japanese broadcaster was ‘Tokyo Rose’, a Japanese-born American-educated woman who played on the homesickness of American troops serving in the Pacific by her suggestive voice and choice of American swing music. Much more explicit were the pornographic postcards and leaflets directed at Australian troops depicting their wives and sweethearts in various embraces with drunken British or American troops stationed in their homeland. The Japanese also used a method favoured by the Russians, namely the prisoner of war broadcast in which captured soldiers made unscheduled statements over the air about how well they were being treated. Anxious relatives were thus forced to listen to the entire programme in the hope that their son or husband might appear before the microphone at some point.

Question 26

Films and newsreels of Japan

Answer 26

Like the radio, film was rigorously controlled by the Japanese authorities. Again, strict censorship controls prevented the portrayal of images or messages that might have a critical or detrimental effect upon the regime or its emperor. Control was tightened by a 1939 Motion Picture Law that required the submission of scripts prior to filming, and production was dominated by two combines: the Shochiku company (producing about 85 per cent of all Japanese films) and the Toho company. Newsreels were produced mainly by the Nippon Eigasha, which had a budget of 7 million yen in 1943. Newsreels were produced depicting Japanese successes, often incorporating captured Allied footage.

Question 27

Separate arm forces propaganda of Japan

Answer 27

The rivalry that existed between the Japanese army and navy meant that, both armed forces had their own propaganda organizations. The military control of the government also meant that all national propaganda was subject to the same control, and consequently was a victim of the same rivalry. Japanese overseas propaganda was also hampered by the shortage of broadcasters with appropriate accents and understanding of western civilization and it was too quick to invent unlikely victories and atrocities that once exposed, critically devalued future propaganda efforts. The absence of any clear philosophy concerning a ‘strategy of truth’ or a ‘propaganda with facts’ was to be a major weakness

Question 28

German propaganda and youth

Answer 28

the civilian population had been objected to the most comprehensive propaganda campaign the world has ever witnessed, a campaign that has even been described ‘the war that Hitler won’. However, as in the case of Japan, it is difficult to distinguish between the role of patriotism and the role n{ propaganda in making people fight to the bitter end. Those teenage members of the Hitler Youth who defended the streets of B e r l i n against crack Soviet troops in April 1945 were undoubtedly indoctrinated with Nazi ideas to such a degree that propaganda cannot be discounted. Young people were a prime target of propagandists in all totalitarian countries, particularly in one which was to last 1000 years. (It might be added that the youth of democratic systems were also susceptible to all forms of propaganda; in British wartime cinemas, children cheered at newsreels of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin and booed when Hitler or Mussolini appeared on the screen.) German youth had been wooed by the Nazis in the 1920s and after Hitler came into power in 1933 they were educated, organized, trained, and regimented by a Nazi education system that subordinated scholarship to ideology. Members of the Hitlerjunge (Hitler Youth) and Bund deutscher Mddchen (German Girls’ League) enjoyed a military education (Wehrerziehung), in which uniforms, bands, parades, rallies, and films played on their emotions, rather than cultivating their intellect. The teenagers defending the streets of Berlin in 1945 knew nothing else. They were indeed ‘Hitler’s children’.

Question 29

Parteitag or mass rally

Answer 29

Before moving on to Nazi wartime propaganda, it is necessary to mention briefly one of the most spectacular of pre-war German propaganda techniques, namely the Parteitag or mass rally. In a sense, all pre-war propaganda was geared towards the psychological rearmament of the German people, but the rallies held in Nuremberg held a special place in the annual calendar of the party itself.

These spectacular stage- m a n a g e d events provided an annual ritual for the party faithful to fe-dedicate themselves to the Fiihrer. Half a million or more members congregated from all parts of Germany to have their banners blessed by the Fiihrer, to pay their respects to the party martyrs (such as Horst Wessel), and to hear speeches in a regimented yet highly emotionally-charged open-air atmosphere that was enhanced at night by searchlights pointing vertically to the sky which one observer likened to a ‘cathedral of ice’.

Question 30

German films and newsreels

Answer 30

Of all the media, Hitler and Goebbels were most interested in film, and it was the newsreels that served to drive home the German cause and the glory of German military supremacy in the early years of the war.
As Roger Manvell has written, ‘Nazi newsreels were not informative, they were impressionist, emotive, all-conquering - a blitz in themselves of sound and image.’ Their message was clear: German military superiority was plain for all to see and the ease with which victory was achieved was testimony to the superiority of the German race and the will of the Fiihrer.

Question 31

Ani-Soviet propaganda in Germany

Answer 31

With the invasion of Russia, anti-Russian films once more began to appear. Beginning with GPU (1942), about the brutality of the Soviet secret police.

Question 32

The importance of radio in Germany

Answer 32

For Goebbels, the most important instrument of Nazi wartime propaganda was the radio, over which he exercised more direct control than the press (if not quite as much as the Wochenschau). For Goebbels, radio was ‘the first and most influential intermediary between movement and nation, between idea and man’. The German radio network consisted of 26 stations and was managed by the Reich Radio Society and, after 1942, supervised by Hans Fritzsche, who was also the most important German broadcaster of the war years. Foreign broadcasts were monitored so that rumours could be countered. All announcers and radio news editors were required to attend Fritzsche’s regular ministerial conferences so that they clearly understood the propaganda line, from which they were not allowed to deviate. A dramatic feature of German radio was the special announcement or Sondermeldung, which interrupted all programmes with a blast of trumpets to broadcast the latest communique about another military triumph.