Mind-Munitions

224
Propaganda in the Age of Total War and Cold War
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.
It is within this context that the work of the Political Warfare
Executive (PWE) is significant. The PWE formally came into being
in September 1941 to take charge of propaganda directed at the
enemy and enemy-occupied countries. It evolved from the early
wartime enemy propaganda department known as Department
EH, which was absorbed into the Special Operations Executive
(SOE) in the summer of 1940. SOE’s task was, in Churchill’s
famous phrase, ‘to set Europe ablaze’ and was divided into two
sections: S01, which handled propaganda, and S02, which handled
sabotage and subversion. PWE was set up following a series of
rows between S01 and the MOI over the control of overseas
propaganda, whereupon S01 and the enemy sections of the MOI
were merged into the PWE. Its brief was simple: ‘to deliver a
decisive blow at the heart of the enemy’s morale’ by any means
possible. This, in effect, meant leaflets and radio broadcasts, and it
was quite prepared to use both white and black propaganda
techniques. PWE was initially hampered by the war situation into
which it was born, but it was to have two major advantages: the
reputation that the BBC was building up in Europe, and, later, the
entry into the war of the United States with its huge arsenal of
leaflet delivery systems, better known as bombers.
PWE’s white propaganda was initially delivered either by the
RAF in its leaflet-bombing raids over Germany or by the BBC in its
European broadcasts. For BBC transmissions to be credible they
needed to be news based; objectivity and ‘the truth’ (but never the
whole truth) were axiomatic. At times, even good news was withheld
for fear of alienating a disbelieving audience heavily influenced
by a Nazi regime whose control over the news would have been total