Mind-Munitions

The Second World War
211
Christmas. But neither did they succumb to panic or despair. If
anything, those feelings were more evident in government circles,
where it was believed that, if only the knock-out blow could be
survived, the British Empire might – just might – win a long war of
attrition against the German military phoenix. This First World
War type of thinking, with its emphasis on blockade, was matched
by the government’s attitude towards propaganda which placed
initial emphasis on separating the German people from their
leaders, as in 1918, but which soon developed into a much more
sophisticated and even dirtier war of words.
The Luftwaffe did not arrive in hordes over British cities in that
first winter. 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 MOI an invaluable
opportunity to prepare itself adequately for the tasks to come.
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.
If the term ‘Total War’ can first be applied to the First World War,
it became even more appropriate a description of the 1939-45
struggle. Indeed, this was the first British war in which enfranchized
men and women were called upon to determine its outcome,
a genuine People’s War. The bomber attacked civilians as well as
military targets, and just as peacetime involvement in mass politics
had increased, so now would the entire population become