by Heather Turner
As the Western world's greatest states fought for military dominance during the Second World War, a great ideological battle also waged. The outbreak of the war in September 1939 suddenly pitted the morale of the British Ministry of Information against the German Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Larson, 412). This psychological battle was waged using a variety of methods and mediums that had been honed or created since the end of WWI. The British at first found themselves at a disadvantage, as the British propaganda effort had largely subsided by the end of WWI (Larson, 412.) The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, however, had been operating since 1933, and was vastly sophisticated (Larson, 412). The war period coincided with an absolute proliferation of propaganda on both sides of the conflict. Government control of information and the production of propaganda had become as essential to the war effort as munitions. The British Ministry of Information initially had a clunky beginning, and it took refining its methods and structure in the early years of its existence before the MOI's efforts were considered by the press and historians as being truly successful.
In anticipation of the coming war, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain publicly announced the creation of the Foreign Publicity Department of the Foreign Office in June 1939. By September 1939, the "skeleton ministry" established by the new office was off to a shaky start under the leadership of Lord Hugh MacMillan (Larson, 416, 419). Nonetheless, the war of words, or rather, the war of narratives had begun.
For the second time in the early 20th century, whole peoples found themselves involved in a massive war effort. Everyone sacrificed for this purpose. In Britain, commodities were carefully rationed and even some varieties of unrationed food had become scarce (Creaton, 85). In addition, London was heavily targeted in air raids, forcing much of the population to take refuge in the cramped conditions in city's underground stations. A wave of criminal activity and domestic terrorism bombings ensued, accompanied by other great tragedies in the capital city. Freak accidents such as the Bethnal Green Tube Station incident in 1943, contributed to the gloom. (Creaton, 3-4). Throughout the conflict, there were waves of evacuations (Creaton, 3-4) and London fell into disrepair. In a manual intended as an advice pamphlet for American servicemen serving in England during the war, The United States War Department offered a vivid snapshot of conditions in the capital city in 1942:
It was of the utmost importance that the citizenry continued to contribute to the total war effort, despite the extreme conditions. In order to convince its citizens to continue making sacrifices, the MOI set forth to influence their thoughts and actions through its now well known use of propaganda, as well as through information censorship. The MOI started out as an impressive operation, with a massive budget and staff. 127 staffers worked in regional offices across the country and 872 operated from its skyscraper headquarters located in the Senate Building of the University of London (Larson, 422).The British people are anxious to have you know that you are not seeing their country at its best ... The houses haven't been painted because factories are not making paint - they're making planes. The famous English gardens and parks are either unkept because there are no men to take care of them, or they are being used to grow needed vegetables. British taxicabs look antique because Britain makes tanks for herself and Russia and hasn't time to make new cars ... There are no luxury dining cars on trains because total war effort has no place for such frills. The trains are unwashed and grimy because men and women are needed for more important work than car-washing.
One of the first and most difficult tasks the MOI faced was successfully controlling the flow of information to the citizenry. For this purpose, the Ministry had several divisions devoted to handling intelligence, censorship, publicity and press relations (Larson, 417-418). However, MOI had to deal with press requests from an unprecedented number of journalists who were concentrated in London, the "focal point for European news dissemination" (Larson, 419). According to Cedric Larson, a former member of the US War Department's morale division, as many as 10,000 newspapermen covered the war from the capital along with about 1,200 foreign correspondents (419). In its early years of post WWI re-existence, the Ministry's efforts in this regard was heavily criticized, Lord Macmillan being the first of several Minister's of Information to be slated by the press (Larson, 419).
The press was frustrated and unimpressed with the MOI's inability to function smoothly. At the start of the war, the MOI was initially divided into more than a dozen regional offices, each with separate service departments that controlled censorship autonomously (Pelling, 186). This resulted in uncoordinated censorship which was never quite resolved throughout the first several years of the Ministry's existence. Journalist's early complaints led to a more than year-long restructuring of the MOI, prompted by the confusion caused by the censorship of the landing of British troops in France in September 1939 (Pelling, 186). At first, the press was banned from publishing the troop movements, but the order from the MOI was rescinded hours before the daily papers were to be sent out at 3 a.m. Out of confusion, several papers, including the Daily Express, published the information (Pelling, 186). By 3 a.m., the War Office had again banned the information from being published a second time. The mix up meant that government officials had to seize thousands of newspapers just as they were being distributed throughout London (Larson, 421). The Ministry responded to the backlash by appointing additional censors that could offer 24 hour assistance on story filing (Larson, 421-22). Time had this to say of the Ministry's early efforts:
