i

Propaganda and Conflict

ii

ii
 iii

Propaganda and Conflict

War, Media and Shaping the
Twentieth Century

Edited by

Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel

and Ulf Schmidt
iv

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt, 2019

Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt have asserted their
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 v

This volume is dedicated to Professor David Welch, an inspiring colleague, teacher,

mentor, collaborator and friend. He is not only a pioneer in the field of propaganda
studies, helping to carve it out as a discrete area of investigation in its own right, but
also a constant innovator as he developed, refined and reconsidered his approaches.

After starting his academic career at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the
University of Westminster), following on from his undergraduate and postgraduate
studies at Swansea and the London School of Economics, David Welch moved to the
University of Kent at Canterbury, where he established the Centre for the Study of
Propaganda and Persuasion. The very deliberate inclusion of the terms ‘propaganda’
and ‘persuasion’ in the naming of the Centre revealed fully his desire to bring subtlety
and depth to the research of these subjects. Under his energetic leadership, the Centre
has flourished. Conferences, lectures and seminars are held on a regular basis, and he
has attracted a wealth of PhD students. Publications have flowed from members of
the centre, with David always generous in his support and encouragement. The Centre
now has eleven permanent members of staff and continues to recruit large numbers of
masters and research students. Evolving to meet the research interests of its members,
the Centre altered its title to War, Media and Society, with propaganda studies still
deeply embedded in its remit and approach.

David Welch’s work has formed the basis of many of the ideas expressed in this volume.
The essays that follow are authored by those tutored or inspired by David, from long-
term colleagues to his newly qualified doctoral students. Collectively, they represent a
tribute to the extraordinary impact David’s work has had on the field in the past, today
and into the future.
vi

vi
 vii

Contents

List of illustrations ix
Notes on contributors xi
Acknowledgements xv

Prologue: ‘Power and Persuasion’: Propaganda into the twenty-first

century  Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt 1

Part 1  The First World War and inter-war period 13

Introduction  Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt 15

1 Strategy and propaganda: Lord Kitchener, the retreat from Mons and the
Amiens Dispatch, August–September 1914  Stephen Badsey 21

2 ‘Thank God for the French Army’: Churchill on the French Army

between the two world wars  Antoine Capet 39

3 Art under dictatorship: Propaganda, plunder and provenance

Ulf Schmidt and Katja Schmidt-Mai 57

Part 2  The Second World War 91

Introduction  Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt 93

4 ‘False hopes and airy visions’? Dylan Thomas and British film
propaganda in the Second World War  Richard Taylor 99

5 Hitchcock as propagandist  James Chapman 115

6 The films we forgot to remember: The other side of Second World War

propaganda  Jeffrey Richards 137

7 The Special Operations Executive and covert propaganda during the

Greco-Italian War, 1940–1  Marina Petraki 149

8 The interplay between diplomacy and propaganda: The Foreign Office

and the discovery of the Katyn massacre, 1943  Gaynor Johnson 163
viii

viii Contents

Part 3  Postwar and Cold War 183

Introduction  Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt 185

9 A wartime medical experiment as propaganda: The malaria case

Katja Schmidt-Mai and Jonathan D. Moreno 191

10 The Undefeated: Propaganda, rehabilitation and post-war Britain

Julie Anderson 209

11 The British Council behind the Iron Curtain: Cultural propaganda in

early Cold War Poland  Edward Corse 229

12 From Civil War to Cold War: The Model Worker in Chinese film

propaganda  James Farley 253

13 Counter-propaganda: Cases from US public diplomacy and

beyond  Nicholas J. Cull 269

14 ‘Men of Action’: Printed propaganda in the recruitment of the regular

British armed forces, 1960–85  Peter Johnston 285

15 Love, Hate and Propaganda: Reflections on the making of a documentary

series  Fabrice d’Almeida 303

Epilogue: ‘We are all propagandists now’: Propaganda in the twenty-first

century  David Welch 311

Select bibliography 325

Index 341
 ix

Illustrations

3.1 Gurlitt’s invoice to Professor Dr Voss, 1944. 70

3.2 Paul Klee, Sumpflegende (Legend of the Swamp), shown on the

so-called ‘Dada Wall’ (not displayed in its entirety). 73

3.3 Max Liebermann, Zwei Reiter am Strand (Two Riders on the Beach) (c.1900). 77

9.1 LIFE Magazine’s original caption: ‘Army doctor watches malaria-

carrying mosquitos bite stomach of Richard Knickerbocker, serving
10 to 14 years at Illinois State Prison’. 196

9.2 Postcard of Panoptic guard tower and interior view of cell house, new
Illinois State Penitentiary at Stateville, IL (probably 1940s). 197

9.3 LIFE Magazine’s original caption: ‘Testing new drugs, prisoners are

examined for ill effects. Convict assistant second from left is Nathan
Leopold, still imprisoned for his part in the Leopold–Loeb case’. 199

10.1 First World War veteran: A First World War veteran with worsening
bronchitis attends a Ministry of Pensions local office to gain assistance
with his pension. 216

10.2 The end: Joe Anderson at work as a Disablement Resettlement

Officer with a client. 217

10.3 Gymnasium: The gymnasium where men exercise their stumps. 218

10.4 Couple: Joe Anderson and his wife leaving Roehampton Hospital. 223

11.1 Number of books, British Council library in Poland, 1947–50. 238

11.2 Number of library members, British Council library in Poland, 1948–50. 239

11.3 Total books and periodicals presented by the British Council to

Polish institutions, 1946–8. 239

11.4 Viewers at British Council film showings in Poland, 1947–8. 240

14.1 ‘Royal Signals: Today’s communicators equipped for tomorrow’s

world’, 1983. 294
x

x
 xi

Notes on contributors

Julie Anderson is Reader in Medical History at the University of Kent. Her interests
centre on the history of medicine and sensory and physical disabilities. She has
published books and a number of scholarly articles on British disabled servicemen
and women in the First and Second World Wars, including Soul of a Nation (2011),
which focuses on rehabilitation in the Second World War. Her forthcoming work, The
Science of Seeing, explores the role of blind ex-servicemen and their role in creating and
understanding blind identities in the First and Second World Wars.

Stephen Badsey is Professor of Conflict Studies and co-director of the First World
War Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton. Educated at Cambridge
University, he has held research positions at the Imperial War Museum and for the
BBC, and on the academic staff at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He appears
on and advises frequently for television and other media, and for academic, defence and
governmental organizations in many countries. His most recent books are The British
Army in Battle and Its Image 1914–18 (2009) and ‘The German Corpse Factory’: A Study
in First World War Propaganda (2018). He is also the editor of the Wolverhampton
Military Studies Series for Helion publishers.

Antoine Capet was Head of British Studies at the University of Rouen until 2014.
After submitting his Doctorat d’État on the British governing classes and social reform,
1931–51 (1991), he continued to concentrate his research on Britain in and before
the Second World War. He contributed to the catalogue of the major ‘Churchill–de
Gaulle’ exhibition at the Invalides in 2015. His latest contribution to Churchill studies
is his Encyclopédie Churchill (Éditions Perrin, 2018). A Fellow of the Royal Historical
Society, he has been editor of the ‘Britain since 1914’ section of the Royal Historical
Society Bibliography since 2001 and he sits on the international board of Twentieth
Century British History.

James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and

editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. His research focuses on
British cinema and cultural history, including The British at War: Cinema, State and
Propaganda, 1939–1945 (1998), Past and Present:  National Identity and the British
Historical Film (2005), Licence to Thrill:  A Cultural History of the James Bond Films
(2nd edition, 2007) and A New History of British Documentary (2015). His latest book,
Hitchcock and the Spy Film: Authorship, Genre, National Cinema, will be published by
I.B. Tauris.

Mark Connelly is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Kent and
Director of ‘Gateways to the First World War’, an Arts and Humanities Research
xii

xii Notes on Contributors

Council-funded centre for public engagement with the First World War centenary. His
research interests encompass the military and cultural history of the two world wars,
in particular the commemoration and memorialization of the First World War. His
recent works include The British Army and the First World War (with Ian Beckett and
Timothy Bowman, 2017) and Ypres (with Stefan Goebel, 2018).

Edward Corse is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for the History of War,
Media and Society at the University of Kent. His PhD thesis explored the work of the
British Council during the Second World War and he published A Battle for Neutral
Europe: British Cultural Propaganda during the Second World War with Bloomsbury
in 2013. Edward Corse currently works for the British government and maintains an
active interest in the history of propaganda.

Nicholas J.  Cull is Professor of Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern

California, President of the International Association for Media and History and a
member of the Public Diplomacy Council. His research and teaching interests focus
on public diplomacy and the role of media, culture and propaganda in international
history. His books include Selling War:  The British Propaganda Campaign against
American ‘Neutrality’ in World War II (1995) and The Decline and Fall of the United
States Information Agency: American Public Diplomacy, 1989–2001 (2012).

Fabrice d’Almeida is Professor of Contemporary History at the University Paris II,

Panthéon-Assas. His expertise lies in the history of the media, visual propaganda and
manipulation. He has also published books on the history of the Third Reich. His
major works are High Society in the Third Reich (2008) and Ressources inhumaines: Les
gardiens de camps de concentration et leurs loisirs (2011). He is also a documentary
film-maker, with output including Magda Goebbels (CPB Films) and US Welcome, US
Go Home (Flach Film). He was a historical consultant, together with David Welch, for
the Canadian TV series, Love, Hate and Propaganda (CBC, Société Radio-Canada).

James Farley completed his PhD at the University of Kent in 2016. He worked in China
for several years in the education sector and is now an assistant with the China Policy
Institute at Nottingham University. In 2016, he organized an international conference
on ‘China’s Propaganda System:  Legacies and Enduring Themes’. He is currently
working on a monograph for Routledge. James Farley’s academic research interests
focus largely on modern Chinese history, particularly the use of propaganda for the
purpose of nation-building. He is a member of the British Association of Chinese
Studies.

Jo Fox is Director of the Institute of Historical Research and Professor of Modern

History, University of London. She specializes in the history of propaganda in the
twentieth century. Her publications include Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi
Germany:  World War II Cinema (2007) and Justifying War:  Propaganda, Politics
and the Modern Age (ed. with David Welch, 2012). Her present research focuses
on rumour in the First and Second World Wars, and she is currently working on a
 xiii

Notes on Contributors xiii

Leverhulme-funded project on ‘The Political Warfare Executive, Covert Propaganda,

and British Culture’ with James Smith and Pat Waugh (Durham).

Stefan Goebel is Reader in Modern British History and Director of the Centre for
the History of War, Media and Society at the University of Kent. He specializes in
the cultural history of the two world wars and in the urban history of modern
warfare. His publications include The Great War and Medieval Memory:  War,
Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (2007), Cities into
Battlefields:  Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War
(ed. with Derek Keene, 2011) and Ypres (with Mark Connelly, 2018).

Gaynor Johnson is Professor of International History at the University of Kent.

She is the author of a number of books on British diplomacy, including The Berlin
Embassy of Lord D’Abernon, 1920–1926 (2002) and Lord Robert Cecil: Politician and
Internationalist (2003). She is currently working on a major AHRC-funded project that
examines the way in which prosopography can be used to uncover the lives and careers
of middle-ranking and junior British diplomats and permanent officials between 1919
and 1957. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of executive
committees of the British International History Group and the Transatlantic Studies
Association.

Peter Johnston is Collections Development and Review Manager at the National

Army Museum in London. He studied at Durham University before completing his
PhD at the University of Kent in 2013 under the joint supervision of David Welch and
Mark Connelly. His doctoral thesis focused on the cultural and social history of the
British professional armed forces at war in the Falklands, with a particular focus on
recruitment propaganda, combat and veterans. His current research interests include
the British Army in Germany since 1945 and the presentation of conflict and war in
museums.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University
of Pennsylvania. He works on various aspects of the history of bioethics, ethical issues
in the life sciences and biopolitics. Moreno frequently contributes to such publications
as New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Psychology Today and Nature.
He often appears on broadcast and online media and was a commentator for ABCNews.
com. In 2008–9, he served as a member of President Barack Obama’s transition team.
Moreno is an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine. His books
include Undue Risk (1999), The Body Politic (2011), Mind Wars (2012) and Impromptu
Man (2015).

Marina Petraki holds a PhD from the University of Kent, Canterbury, and has
written articles, contributions to newspapers and books on propaganda and war. Her
publications include The Metaxas Myth: Dictatorship and Propaganda in Greece (2005).
She appears regularly on Greek television and radio.

Jeffrey Richards is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University. He

is general editor of the ‘Cinema and Society’ series for I.B. Tauris and the ‘Studies
xiv

xiv Notes on Contributors

in Popular Culture’ series for Manchester University Press. Among his books are The
Age of the Dream Place (1984), Films and British National Identity (1997), Hollywood’s
Ancient Worlds (2008), Cinema and Radio in Britain and America 1920–1960 (2010)
and China and the Chinese in Popular Film (2016).

Ulf Schmidt is Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent, where he is

Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine, Ethics and Medical Humanities.
His research interests are in the area of the history of modern medical ethics, warfare
and policy. He is the author of, among others, Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia in
Germany, 1933–1945 (2002), Justice at Nuremberg: Leo Alexander and the Nazi Doctors’
Trial (2004), History and Theory of Human Experimentation: The Declaration of Helsinki
and Modern Medical Ethics (with Andreas Frewer, 2007), Karl Brand: The Nazi Doctor
(2007) and Secret Science:  A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments
(2015). He is the principal investigator of a Wellcome Trust-funded project on ‘Cold
War at Porton Down’.

Katja Schmidt-Mai holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Sussex and
an MA in Art History, Classical Archaeology and Pre- and Early European History
from the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, Germany. She is an Associate
Lecturer at the University of Kent’s Tonbridge and Medway and Canterbury Study Plus
Centres. Her PhD explored the influence of paintings and sculptures on contemporary
photography and its role in the wider art world. Her current research interests focus on
the history and theory of photography and the influence of photographic aesthetics in
the fine arts from realism to postmodernity.

Richard Taylor is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Russian Studies at the University
of Swansea. He is an internationally renowned expert in the history of propaganda,
particularly in Germany and the USSR. His extensive list of publications includes the
I.B. Tauris titles Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (1979; 2nd edition,
1998), Battleship Potemkin (2001) and a three-volume collection of Eisenstein’s writing
(2010).

David Welch is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent. His
research interest is in modern and contemporary political propaganda. His latest books
include Justifying War:  Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age (ed. with Jo Fox,
2012), Germany and Propaganda in World War I (2014), Persuading the People: British
Propaganda in World War II (2016) and World War II Propaganda:  Analyzing the
Art of Persuasion during Wartime (2017). In 2013, he co-curated the exhibition on
propaganda at the British Library and authored the book that accompanied the
exhibition, Propaganda: Power and Persuasion (2013). He is currently working on a
companion volume for the British Library on propaganda during the Cold War.
 xv

Acknowledgements

This volume has grown out of a symposium organized by the Centre for the History of
War, Media and Society at the University of Kent and held in the splendid premises of
Canterbury Cathedral Lodge.
There are many people and institutions to which we owe thanks for encouragement
and support. Crucial financial assistance came from the Faculty of Humanities,
the Centre for the Study of War, Media and Society, and the Centre for the History
of Medicine, Ethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Kent; and the
Department of History at Durham University. The School of History at the University
of Kent provided sterling administrative help, and for research assistance we are
grateful to Dr Charlie Hall.
It has been an absolute pleasure to work with Virginia Catmur, the model of a copy
editor. Her total commitment to this volume, her keen eye for detail and her relentless
insistence on linguistic clarity deserve a special note of thanks.
xvi

xvi
 1

Prologue
‘Power and Persuasion’: Propaganda into the
twenty-first century
Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries declared ‘post-truth’ to be its ‘word of the year’. The
compilers suggested that the definition ranged far beyond the ‘circumstances in which
objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and
personal belief ’; rather, the phenomenon had become ‘a general characteristic of our
age’.1 The politics of passion rather than of informed opinion had become de rigueur.
Even official sources, including the new US administration under Donald Trump,
denounced uncomfortable truths as ‘fake news’, with the effect that policy seemingly no
longer required justification or explanation. According to Matthew Norman, writing
in the Independent in November 2016, ‘The truth has become so devalued that what
was once the gold standard of political debate is a worthless currency.’ We are now,
apparently, ‘free to choose our own truth’, released from the alleged tyranny of expertise
and objective reality.2 The Guardian reported in September 2016 that the so-called
liberal metropolitan elite were left scratching their heads: political campaigning had
‘spiralled into a debate about how to better appeal to “post-truth” citizens, as though
they are baffling and lack reason’.3
One might be forgiven for thinking that this is a uniquely twenty-first-century
problem brought about by Brexit, the election of Trump to the US presidency, the
psychological and hybrid information warfare campaigns orchestrated by Vladimir
Putin’s Russia and the resurgence of the far right. Yet the resonance to post-1918
debates is profound. How very different is our current unease over the politics
of communication from the emergent propaganda anxieties following the First
World War? Arthur Ponsonby’s supposed ‘revelations’ of ‘wholesale lying’ on the
part of wartime governments in his 1928 book Falsehood in Wartime, itself a work
of propaganda, led to intense debates centred on the politics of truth, the place of
propaganda in liberal democracies, the role of expertise in guiding the sentiments of
the ‘unthinking masses’ and public mistrust in official sources.4
2

2 Propaganda and Conflict

Fearful of emerging extremist politics in Europe, progressive commentators during

the inter-war years, such as Stephen Tallents, Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays and
John Grierson, wrote of the necessity for a new ‘managerial aristocracy’ to guide and
manage the ill-informed masses, who, deluged by the flow of information caused by
advances in modern communications, required a technocratic elite to ‘supply needed
ideas’.5 They advocated that democracy was hierarchical, dominated by a cadre of
‘experts’, characterized by Bernays as ‘invisible governors’, who ‘pull the wires which
control the public mind’, ‘shrewd persons who worked behind the scene’ engaged
in a process of ‘conscious and intelligent manipulation’.6 Ultimately, to guide the
public in this way, they argued, was to protect democracy. The masses, wrote the
psychologist Leonard Doob, were unable to defend themselves against malicious
propaganda disseminated by extremists, unless knowledge were interpreted for them
by designated propaganda leaders, without whose instruction ‘establishing new social
values becomes impossible’. Only with their guidance, he professed, ‘will they be able
to destroy the evil and buncombe of society; only then will they be ready to recognize
the leaders whose values and whose propaganda are neither deceptive nor illusory’.7 In
this context, information management was seen not to be weakening democracy but
protecting it. For Bernays and his contemporaries in the United States, propaganda
became, in the words of historian J. Michael Sproule, ‘mass-mediated democracy’s last,
best hope’: ‘from this vantage point, propaganda technique could be seen as a matter of
efficaciously solidifying the polity as opposed to wantonly manipulating citizens.’8 For
this reason, paradoxically, the masses simply had to accept some degree of supervision.
As political scientist and communications theorist Harold D. Lasswell remarked, ‘If the
mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept chains of silver.’ Democracy, after all,
he claimed, citing Anatole France, ‘is run by an unseen engineer’.9
The idea of the ‘unseen engineer’ binding the masses in ‘chains of silver’ caused
alarm in the liberal mind of the 1920s and 1930s. Aldous Huxley, the author of
Brave New World, decried such processes as anathema to liberal democracy. If a state
propaganda organization ‘ “projects” itself skilfully enough’, he wrote,

the masses can always be relied upon to vote as their real rulers want them to
vote . . . This will undoubtedly make for peace and happiness; but at the price of
individual liberty. A really efficient propaganda could reduce most human beings
to the condition of abject slavery.10

Control was not the answer; it was incumbent upon those able to decode the mystic
force of propaganda to provide the public with a means of immunizing themselves
against its sinister influence. In the United States, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis,
formed in 1937, devised a seven-point schema to categorize propaganda activity in
order to assist a bewildered public to navigate the new ‘treacherous’ communications
landscape, much like recent attempts by organizations such as FactCheck.Org to
provide ‘strategies to shield yourself from fake news’.11
As the introductions to each of the parts in this volume, and several essays within
it, confirm, the scientific and popular study of propaganda, commencing in earnest in
1915, has never really left us: we continue to want to understand propaganda’s inner
 3

‘Power and Persuasion’ 3

workings and, in doing so, to control and confine its influence, reassuring ourselves
that we will, in time, become immune to malicious persuasion. We remain anxious
about pernicious information warfare campaigns, especially those that seemingly
endanger liberal democracy or freedom of thought. Such contemporary widespread
propaganda anxieties are not so very different from those in the aftermath of the Great
War. Then, as now, as Sproule has noted, liberal democracies struggled to balance ‘the
right to persuade [and] the right of the public to free choice’.12 The fear that the masses
find themselves in the grip of illogical emotional impulses, that the authorities are
losing control of the media environment, that the place of expert opinion in society
is contested and that the sheer volume of information ensures that objective facts are
buried or lost are at the heart of the decision of the UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture,
Media and Sport Committee in January 2017 to launch a public enquiry into ‘fake
news’ and its implications for the future of Western democratic traditions.13 At a more
global level, national governments and international agencies such as the Organisation
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons are keen to assess whether recent cases of
hybrid information warfare, for instance in relation to the use of chemical warfare
agents in Syria and the attempted assassination, via a nerve agent, of the former Russian
spy Sergei Skripal in the city of Salisbury amount to a major paradigm shift in the
practices of propaganda in which any semblance of ‘truth’ no longer seems to matter to
the propagandist; instead, the aim seems to be to confuse the public by ‘flooding’ the
public sphere with ‘alternative narratives’.14
One area of special concern in recent years has been the loss of official control
over the basic instruments of mass communication. David Welch, whose work in
propaganda studies has inspired this volume, was among the first historians to point to
the changing dynamics of communications prompted by the sheer volume and plurality
of information circulating in cyberspace, asking whether we are all now propagandists.
Welch has questioned whether those participating in the Twittersphere are operating
with impunity within a largely lawless environment and how the mainstream media
should respond to an online news culture created ‘from below’. This dilemma was
vividly shown in a compelling exhibit capturing live Twitter feeds from across the world
in the British Library exhibition on ‘Propaganda: Power and Persuasion’ he co-curated
in 2013.15 This is not to suggest that the twenty-four-hour stream of ‘infotainment’ has
negated the prevalence of dominant ideas and ideologies; rather that they converge
in an environment where it is increasingly difficult to decipher fact from fiction. This
process may well aid the deepening of ideological mindsets, where we seek out or are
presented with information only from those who already share our views, where we
are trapped in a global echo chamber that simply legitimizes rather than challenges
our existing patterns of thinking, and where we silence those views we do not endorse.
Arguably, this has already damaged the very notion of liberal democratic free speech,
normally characterized by a plurality of and regard for alternative opinion. Our stock
response to dealing with the circulation of ‘fake news’, or indeed views that we do not
support, is to control the info-sphere further still. Our dilemma – balancing the right
to freedom of expression with the need to limit our exposure to harmful views or false
information – is not so very different from that of our inter-war predecessors, even
though the global scope and scale of communications has changed.
4

4 Propaganda and Conflict

Equally, the social anxiety surrounding ‘fake news’ (the latest label for rumour
and ‘black’ propaganda) has, in some senses, become entangled in a post-crisis
reconciliation of events, a coming to terms with how and why things happen, just
as it did after the First World War. After 1918, propaganda became a comfortable
scapegoat for the losses of war, characterized as a mystical, unseen force that prompted
nations to eschew rational thought in favour of patriotic fervour. After the war, liberal
democracies simultaneously celebrated their propaganda triumphs (in, e.g., the post-
1918 writings of Campbell Stuart or George Creel) and chastised themselves for
deceptive practices that injected ‘the poison of hatred into men’s minds by means of
falsehood’;16 Ponsonby denounced the use of state propaganda as ‘a greater evil in war-
time than the actual loss of life’ and concluded, ‘The defilement of the human soul is
worse than the destruction of the human body.’17
Among the vanquished, the vulnerability of the German forces and home front to
Allied propaganda became the standard narrative of the far right, excusing military
losses in favour of explanations that prioritized the underhand psychological tactics
of the victors. ‘Propaganda’ was a word to conjure with in the aftermath of the Great
War. General Erich Ludendorff ’s My War Memories, published in 1919, described ‘a
certain decay of bodily and mental powers of resistance . . . resulting in an unmanly
and hysterical state of mind which under the spell of enemy propaganda encouraged
the pacifist leanings of many Germans’. At the front, ‘poisonous weeds grew’, for enemy
propaganda encouraged revolution, Bolshevism and dissent. ‘We were hypnotised by
the enemy propaganda as a rabbit is by a snake’, he proclaimed, since Allied propaganda

was exceptionally clever and conceived on a great scale. It worked by strong

mass suggestion, kept in the closest touch with the military situation, and was
unscrupulous as to the means it used. The German people, who had not yet learnt
the art or the value of silence, had, with their mistaken frankness, shown the
enemy propaganda, in their speech, writing and actions, the best line of attack.18

The veracity of this explanation was taken up by David Welch in his 2000 monograph,
Germany, Propaganda and Total War, 1914–1918: The Sins of Omission. Here, Welch
has persuasively shown that not only were the authorities in Imperial Germany fully
aware of the need to employ propaganda in wartime, but that they had developed
a sophisticated apparatus for doing so, including a mechanism for gauging popular
opinion. Indeed, it was German scholars who first started the systematic examination
of the relationship between the press and popular opinion.19 It was not, then, a lack of
understanding that resulted in the apparent loss of the propaganda war from 1914 to
1918; rather, German failures, Welch has argued, were characterized by the symbiosis
of propaganda and military success and the dominance of the military authorities in
the creation of wartime mobilization campaigns. The ‘sins of omission’, he concluded,
‘came unquestionably from above – not from below’.20
Propaganda, then, was and continues to be controversial and contested. But what
exactly is it, and why do we need to understand the phenomenon? David Welch
has devised one of the few functional definitions of propaganda that stands up to
scrutiny: ‘the deliberate attempt to influence public opinion through the transmission
 5

‘Power and Persuasion’ 5

of ideas and values for a specific persuasive purpose that has been consciously
devised to serve the self-interest of the propagandist, either directly or indirectly’. He
has contended that it is possible to determine what propaganda might be by setting
out some basic descriptions, arguing that it is a ‘distinct political activity that can be
distinguished from cognate activities such as information or education’: ‘Information
and education are concerned with broadening our perspectives and opening our
minds, whereas propaganda strives to narrow them and (preferably) close our
minds. The distinction’, he states, ‘lies in the ultimate purpose.’21 Significantly, Welch
has consistently argued that propaganda is an ethically neutral phenomenon: that it
has been considered otherwise may be regarded more as a reflection of its historical
context (one might, once again, look to the politically charged debates of the 1920s
and 1930s as evidence for this) than of its inherent character. Welch’s intervention has
forced a reconsideration of propaganda’s moral baggage and the critical question as to
how propaganda came to be regarded as pejorative, forcing scholars to move beyond
binary notions of positive and negative propaganda.
Historians’ interventions in the field of propaganda studies have long tested
theoretical models developed over the twentieth century, and the foundations of a
thriving engagement with the history of propaganda were established by Welch and
his collaborators, such as Richard Taylor and Philip M. Taylor.22 Their research findings
have demonstrated that propaganda is complex and multifaceted: in this sense, to offer
any definition was an act of scholarly courage. Doob reluctantly admitted towards
the end of his career that ‘a clear-cut definition of propaganda is neither possible nor
desirable’.23 More recent historical work is trapped within the same dilemma:  how
to encapsulate the inner workings of propaganda and its multiple effects on society,
culture and politics without artificially constraining them. It is perhaps for this reason
that historians of the First World War have sought an alternative vocabulary to capture
the diverse nature of propaganda. We would suggest that this is a reinforcement of the
need to move away from limited and restrictive definitions. Arguably, as those same
historians recognize, the better question is (and always has been) how propaganda
works, and here Welch’s studies of global propaganda in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries pose a series of questions that challenge scholars to move beyond simplistic
notions of cause and effect.
What are the challenges, then, of propaganda studies as it moves into the twenty-first
century? Much scholarship remains locked into the study of state-led campaigns. For
the Great War, this approach may be limited in some cases by an archival deficit, forcing
a more varied consideration of surviving cultural propaganda. Where that deficit is less
apparent, as in the case of the historiography of the Second World War, scholarship has
suffered from a rigid focus on state-driven activities, performed through formal state
agencies and structures. It is certainly easier, from a practical research point of view, to
consider propaganda as a ‘vertical’ and hierarchical process. However, this approach
tends to focus solely on the originator of particular campaigns and consequently
omits the various agents involved in the transfer and reinterpretation of propaganda,
including its ‘horizontal’ dissemination by different agents across society. This process
naturally affects the final format in which propaganda is received and reconfigured.
The history of propaganda during the First World War, in particular, is replete with
6

6 Propaganda and Conflict

examples where state-sanctioned propaganda themes were repackaged by multiple

propaganda agents – authors, artists, film-makers, advertisers, manufacturers, clergy,
journalists – acting on their own initiative to create numerous outlets for dissemination
that, due to the variety of form, had a greater chance of tapping into individual and
collective pre-existing beliefs, values, desires and predilections. The British and
Americans refined this process in the Second World War in which artists and ‘auteurs’
retained their individual creative inputs, but within a wider, more effectively controlled
central structure, as is shown in the essays by James Chapman and Richard Taylor
in this collection. Such a process also made state-sanctioned propaganda themes
ubiquitous, seemingly at a remove from the authorities, allowing the public to retain a
sense of scepticism.
The cumulative effect of official and unofficial propaganda created an intoxicating,
self-propagandizing environment. In attempting to harness this process, historians
face the challenge of locating the wide variety of propaganda sources in circulation,
capturing the multiple forms propaganda took, and understanding the dynamics
created by the interaction between formal and informal propaganda, specifically how
various strands of propaganda reinforced one another or indeed generated frictions. To
unlock this historical problem may well involve far greater cross-fertilization between
disciplines:  scholars need to understand the inherent properties of the propaganda
form (such as literature, art, material culture, etc.) before even beginning the process
of analysing interactions. That most scholarship continues to work within disciplinary
boundaries is all the more curious given propaganda’s interdisciplinary nature:  it is
simultaneously connected to the fields of political science, international relations, war
studies, psychology, social psychology, literary studies, cultural studies, film studies,
anthropology, philosophy, linguistics and, of course, history.24 Recent developments
in the history of psychology, such as Ben Shephard’s A War of Nerves:  Soldiers and
Psychiatrists, 1914–1994 and Mathew Thomson’s Psychological Subjects:  Identity,
Culture, and Health in Twentieth Century Britain, would suggest the great potential
of bringing together studies of mass psychology and propaganda to reveal the deeper
mental undercurrents of societies at war.25 Equally, new projects, such as the ‘Hidden
Persuaders’ initiative at Birkbeck, University of London, have renewed discussions
of the practice and cultural significance of the concept of ‘brainwashing’ which may
have implications for the study of propaganda, particularly in the Cold War era.26 In
this volume, medical historian Julie Anderson explores the intersections between
orthopaedics and film propaganda in post-war Britain, while bioethicist Jonathan
Moreno and art historian Katja Schmidt-Mai adopt an interdisciplinary approach in
their case study of a wartime medical experiment in the United States.
The dominance of vertical, hierarchical, state-led propaganda in existing scholarship
further obscures another of propaganda’s most elusive properties: that it is frequently
transnational. Historical analyses of propaganda have often been confined to state and
nation, and yet, frequently, propaganda is meant to travel, to influence far and wide and
to affect an international target or confront the propaganda of one’s foe, as demonstrated
in Edward Corse’s chapter on the cultural propaganda of the British Council behind the
Iron Curtain. But how should the historian map those information networks, establish
relationships between pieces of propaganda, determine the provenance of particular
 7

‘Power and Persuasion’ 7

propaganda and plot the wider terrain? The interconnectedness that lies at the heart of
propaganda becomes a challenge for researchers, especially when it is enmeshed in a
global communications network. Moreover, scholars of propaganda are asking one of
the most difficult and fundamental historical questions: how do ideas travel?
David Welch has always argued that to determine the success of propaganda is the
greatest challenge any scholar of the phenomenon will face. Indeed, at conferences,
seminars and workshops, this became his signature question. Scholars now recognize
the importance of seeing the transmission and ‘reception’ of propaganda as a series
of flexible interactions that invest both the propagandist and the recipient with
considerable agency. While propaganda has the potential to mobilize and contain
mass opinion, to provide structure to social relationships and communities and to
channel and prompt attitudes and behaviours, as a process it is reliant on a complex
dynamic that exists between the originator of the message and the recipient. Peter
Hofstätter’s identification that ‘public opinion and propaganda mutually limit and
influence each other’ continues to encapsulate both the power of persuasion and the
power of the public to accept or reject it.27 As Welch has recognized in his work on the
construction of the Volksgemeinschaft in Nazi propaganda of the 1930s, propaganda
is best characterized as a reciprocal transaction.28 After all, propaganda is, as Terence
H. Qualter has aptly put it, an ‘ongoing process involving both persuader and persuadee’,
responding to individual practical, spiritual or philosophical needs and contributing to
community formation; it is dynamic and responsive.29 Welch has argued in his seminal
works on the propaganda of the Third Reich that persuasive techniques were at their
most powerful when sharpening pre-existing beliefs and when they correlated to lived
experiences. The implications of this perception are significant and cut right to the
heart of intensely political debates over the psychological complicity of the German
people in the functioning of the Nazi regime.
Welch perceived that the success of the Third Reich’s extensive propaganda
operations depended on a complex interaction between the state and its people that,
regardless of the original propagandistic intent, ultimately resulted in maintenance of
the regime. While failing to revolutionize the national consciousness, the construct
of the Volksgemeinschaft ‘would continue to guarantee at least passive support for the
regime’ through a process of de-politicization and apathy.30 This indifference, Welch
has argued,

proved fatal. The idea of an organic Volk, resting on the purity of race and sustained
by permanent struggle became progressively exclusionary. Those individuals
and groups who did not fit into such a ‘community’ were ruthlessly suppressed
and/or murdered. The concept of Volksgemeinschaft represents an abhorrent,
utopian vision, yet the reality is that during the Third Reich ‘belonging’ to such a
community remained a powerful integratory force for many Germans.31

Such an argument has important implications for the study of propaganda, since it
questions the criteria for success. What determines ‘successful’ propaganda? If we
are to judge propaganda by the originators’ objectives, then, in failing to enact the
promised national revolution, Nazi propaganda did not achieve its intended goal.
8

8 Propaganda and Conflict

Yet propaganda created the unintended consequence of indifference and apathy that
provided for the stability of the regime. Here, we are left with the question as to whether
the propaganda succeeded or failed, and it seems rather superficial and unsatisfying to
simply make this assessment on the basis of the Nazis’ own objectives. We are forced to
consider the kinds of evidence we seek in pursuit of this question. How do historians
access deep, subconscious behaviours or attitudinal change, and how do we locate the
point of ‘inner acceptance’ of a message, campaign or narrative? This methodological
problem becomes all the more complex when we consider that not even the message
the propagandist projects is straightforward. Gaynor Johnson’s chapter reveals this
issue by demonstrating how different British agencies recognized a need to deliver a
particular message but could not quite define it nor how to express it. A similar theme
can be detected in Marina Petraki’s exploration of the work of the Special Operations
Executive in Greece during the Second World War. Fundamentally, as Ludmilla
Jordanova points out, ‘There is no such thing as unmediated transmission’: ‘messages’ –
a term that implies an uncomplicated communication – are not necessarily imparted,
let alone received.32
There is also the question as to the length of time required for a holistic assessment
of success. We suggested earlier that scholars of propaganda should be concerned
with how propaganda transcends national borders. But what of the transcendence
of chronological boundaries? How long is a ‘propaganda memory’, and why do some
propaganda campaigns remain in the consciousness while others fade? What makes
for enduring propaganda tropes? Why would a campaign not only resonate in its
own time but also hold additional significance for some future circumstance? These
questions resonate in Ulf Schmidt and Katja Schmidt-Mai’s chapter on the complex
interconnections between Nazi propaganda, the plunder of art during the Second
World War and its repercussions today in understanding the provenance and market
of cultural artefacts. Arguably, the true success of propaganda might be found in its
endurance and how propaganda intended for a specific purpose in a specific historical
context might shape subsequent propaganda narratives. Take, for example, British
propaganda campaigns centred on the notion of the ‘People’s War’ between 1940 and
1945. For contemporaries, ‘People’s War’ narratives were contested and ambiguous,
and exposed tensions. As the historian Sonya Rose has argued, contemporary appeals
to class, gender, nation and region could both unite and divide, often at the same
time. Similarly, the combatant nations found that, although propaganda campaigns
might be highly controlled, the message was often sufficiently ambiguous to speak to
most, yet also volatile enough to have potentially adverse consequences, bolstering or
triggering currents that ran counter to it.33
Here Rose considers the volatility of the propaganda message to be an inherent
weakness, but it may also be the case that the more multidimensional and unstable the
message, the more powerful and enduring the narrative. The many faces of ‘People’s
War’ propaganda campaigns, like those associated with the United States’ ‘Good War’
or the Soviet Union’s ‘Great Patriotic War’, allowed for complex, layered propaganda
that had the potential to appeal to the mosaic of individual and collective attitudes,
values, perspectives and opinions at work within modern societies. Significantly,
these campaigns work within, rather than against, cognitive dissonance, permitting
 9

‘Power and Persuasion’ 9

the comfortable coexistence of contradictory views for individuals and the polity as
a whole.
Moreover, the effects of inherent tensions were short-lived. Over time, implicit
frictions were eroded through the retelling of Britain’s wartime story, ‘[lending] the
desperate months of 1940, in retrospect, a “terrible beauty” built of nostalgia’ and
demonstrating that propaganda’s most profound effects may be felt in the longer term
rather than in the moment.34 Beyond the immediate historical context, this erosion
formed a central component of post-war national identities that increasingly came to
stabilize, anchor and explain the present and are remobilized in the service of new
conflicts or in order to mitigate the effects of change. These propaganda narratives
are at once familiar and nostalgic, a warning or prescient in some way, grounding and
disruptive. It is unsurprising to find that, in the aftermath of the 7/7 terror attacks
in 2005, the British media turned to familiar visual and textual tropes for comfort.
Tony Parsons’ piece in the Daily Mirror on 8 July 2005 was redolent of Harry Watt
and Humphrey Jennings’s 1940 film London Can Take It and the broader propaganda
campaigns that surrounded it. Parsons asked readers to

send out the message that they famously hung on the front of a destroyed
shopfront in the London of the Blitz – business as normal [sic]. Three little words
that said:  Up yours, Adolf. We will mourn our dead and we will grieve for the
families and innocent lives that have been shattered forever. But we will carry on.
Business as usual. London can take it. The British can take it.35

Such sentiments were evoked across the national media. Front covers mobilized the
Churchillian language of ‘we shall never surrender’. The Star deployed the word ‘blitz’
to make the connection to the wartime experience, while the Express put the phrase
‘business as usual’ to work to prompt a calm, stoic reaction among the British people.
‘Those three words’, its editorial stated, ‘summed up that rare quality of formidable
strength that Londoners, be they wise-cracking Cockneys or smoothies from
Chelsea, manage to summon up when they are threatened – as they were yesterday.’
The Independent took Noel Coward’s London Pride for its theme, quoting the lyrics
‘London Pride has been handed down to us; London Pride is a flower that’s free.’36
This replicated a similar response in the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11
attacks of 2001. Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, speaking in October
2002, pronounced:

Although September 11th has taken its place alongside December 7th [the attack on
Pearl Harbor] as a date that will live in infamy, the larger lesson we may draw from
these attacks, remains unchanged and clear: we must be prepared for surprise –
from wherever it may appear and however it may threaten . . . Fifty years ago, when
we said, ‘home front’, we were referring to citizens back home doing their part to
support the war front. Since last September, however, the home front has become
a battlefront every bit as real as any we’ve known before. When terrorists attacked,
they brought home to us in the most literal sense that our people and our country
still remain vulnerable to attack.37
10

10 Propaganda and Conflict

That our politicians and journalists resurrect propaganda narratives, almost intact,
at times of crisis speaks to the deeper and long-term psychological effects of specific
campaigns and how those narratives continue to meet the emotional needs of
individuals and the collective.
Overall, it is more straightforward to look at short-term, rather than long-term,
and at direct, rather than indirect, effects of particular campaigns, and to consider
single campaigns rather than look at the ways in which campaigns interact  –
sometimes complementing, sometimes brushing up against one another – to create
rather different effects from those intended. In part because of these methodological
challenges, much scholarship on propaganda tends to work within existing paradigms
rather than shifting them. A shift can be achieved only if scholars break out of current
approaches and ways of thinking, if we fundamentally reconceptualize how we think
about propaganda as a historical problem, if we open up our understanding of the
many forms it takes and the many levels on which it operates without seeking to
falsely confine it or limit ourselves to the constant search for new descriptive labels.
Scholars need to abandon the search for linear, uncomplicated propaganda narratives
that simply tell one version of events from within a hierarchical, vertical structure,
and should instead regard propaganda as a complex confluence of ideas, messages
and themes, emerging from formal and informal sources, designed to appeal to
individual and collective belief systems. Scholars might also be encouraged to move
beyond assessing propaganda in the strict confines of its own time, and to think of
it as potentially timeless, rather than temporally bound, investigating not only its
immediate effect (the primary concern of the propagandist who creates it) but also
its afterlife.

Notes
1 Oxford Dictionaries, ‘Word of the Year 2016’, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-
of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 (last access 18 May 2018).
2 Matthew Norman, ‘Whoever Wins the US Presidential Election, We’ve Entered a Post-
Truth World – There’s No Going Back Now’, Independent, 8 November 2016, http://
www.independent.co.uk/voices/us-election-2016-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-who-
wins-post-truth-world-no-going-back-a7404826.html (last access 18 May 2018).
3 Tracey Brown, ‘The Idea of a “Post-Truth” Society Is Elitist and Obnoxious’, Guardian,
19 September 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/sep/19/the-idea-
post-truth-society-elitist-obnoxious (last access 18 May 2018).
4 Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated
throughout the Nations during the Great War (London, 1928).
5 John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (London, 1979); Walter
Lippmann, Public Opinion (London, 1922); see also Scott Anthony, Public Relations
and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents and the Birth of a Progressive Media
Profession (Manchester, 2012).
6 Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York, 1928), pp. 4, 24.
7 Leonard W. Doob, Propaganda: Its Psychology and Technique (New York, 1935), p. 412.
8 J. Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and
Mass Persuasion (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 58, 69.
 11

‘Power and Persuasion’ 11

9 Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I [1927] (Cambridge, MA,

1971), p. 222.
10 Aldous Huxley, ‘Time and Tide’ [1932], in Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, vol. 3:
1930–1935, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago, IL, 2001), p. 394.
11 FactCheck.Org, ‘How to Spot Fake News’, 8 December 2016, https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=AkwWcHekMdo (last access 18 May 2018).
12 Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy, p. 271.
13 House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Disinformation
and “Fake News”: Interim Report’, HC 363, 29 July 2018, https://publications.
parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/363/363.pdf (last access 9
September 2018).
14 ‘The History of Nerve Agents and the Chemical Weapons Convention’, workshop,
University of Kent, University College London and University of Sussex, Canterbury,
1 May 2018.
15 David Welch, Propaganda: Power and Persuasion (London, 2013).
16 Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime, p. 18.
17 Ibid.; compare Campbell Stuart, The Secrets of Crew House: The Story of a Famous
Campaign (London, 1920); George Creel, How We Advertised America: The First
Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the
Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe (New York, 1920).
18 Erich Ludendorff, My War Memories 1914–1918 [1919] (London, 1940), pp. 349, 360.
19 Karl Bücher, Unsere Sache und die Tagespresse (Tübingen, 1915); Al[oys] Meister, Die
deutsche Presse im Kriege und später (Münster, 1916).
20 David Welch, Germany, Propaganda and Total War, 1914–1918: The Sins of Omission
(London, 2000), p. 256; new edition published as Germany and Propaganda in World
War I: Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (London, 2014), p. 267.
21 David Welch, ‘Introduction: Propaganda in Historical Perspective’, in Nicholas J. Cull,
David Culbert and David Welch (eds), Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical
Encylopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara, CA, 2003), pp. xv–xxi, our emphasis.
22 Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London, 1979);
Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient
World to the Present Era (Manchester, 1995); David Welch (ed.), Propaganda, Power
and Persuasion: From World War I to Wikileaks (London, 2014).
23 Leonard W. Doob, ‘Propaganda’, in Erik Barnouw (ed.), International Encyclopedia of
Communications, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1989), p. 375.
24 See, for instance, Vian Bakir et al., ‘Organized Persuasive Communication: A
New Conceptual Framework for Research on Public Relations, Propaganda and
Promotional Culture’, Critical Sociology (forthcoming; first published online 15 May
2018), http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0896920518764586 (last access 9
September 2018).
25 Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914–1994 [2000] (London,
2002); Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in
Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2006).
26 Daniel Pick et al., ‘Hidden Persuaders’, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders (last
access 18 May 2018).
27 Peter R. Hofstätter quoted in Marlis Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans: Public
Mood and Attitude during the Second World War (Athens, OH, 1977), p. 3.
28 David Welch, ‘Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People’s
Community’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39 (2004), pp. 213–38.
12

12 Propaganda and Conflict

29 Terence H. Qualter, Opinion Control in the Democracies (London, 1985), p. 110.

30 David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda [1993] (2nd edn, London,
2002), p. 82.
31 Welch, ‘Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft’, pp. 237–8; see also Michael
Wildt, ‘ “Volksgemeinschaft” – eine Zwischenbilanz’, in Dietmar von Reeken and
Malte Thießen (eds), ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ als soziale Praxis: Neue Forschungen zur
NS-Gesellschaft vor Ort (Paderborn, 2013), pp. 355–69.
32 Ludmilla Jordanova, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical
Practice (Cambridge, 2012), p. 168.
33 Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–
1945 (Oxford, 2003); Sonya O. Rose, ‘Sex, Citizenship, and the Nation in World War II
Britain’, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), pp. 1147–76; Jo Fox, ‘The Propaganda
War’, in Richard J. B. Bosworth and Joseph A. Maiolo (eds), The Cambridge History of
the Second World War, vol. 2: Politics and Ideology (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 91–116.
34 Richard Toye, The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II
Speeches (Oxford, 2013), p. 71.
35 Tony Parsons, ‘07/07: War on Britain. We Can Take It’, Daily Mirror, 8 July 2005,
pp. 16–17.
36 Allan Massie, ‘London under Attack’, Independent, 8 July 2005, p. 30.
37 Paul Wolfowitz quoted in Marlies Glasius, Mary Kaldor and Helmut Anheier (eds),
Global Civil Society 2005/6 (London, 2006), p. 142.
 13

Part One

The First World War and

inter-war period
14

14
 15

Introduction
Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt

It was during the First World War that the modern age of propaganda began. Even
though propaganda had a much longer tradition, the years 1914–18 marked a watershed,
heralding the onset of ‘the propaganda century’.1 Propaganda in all its shades – from
white to grey and black, from official to commercial and grassroots, from domestic
to international  – became a central plank of the war effort, increasingly pervading
both public and private lives. Propaganda was part and parcel of the totalization of
warfare between 1914 and 1918. The term ‘total war’, itself a product of the Great
War, was popularized by General Erich Ludendorff during the interwar years. From
a political rallying cry in wartime to a figure of memory in the war’s aftermath, the
term has mutated in recent years into a heuristic tool that historians use to trace the
radicalization of warfare between the 1860s and 1945. In a series of conferences, a
group of scholars led by Roger Chickering and Stig Förster has endeavoured to give
analytical depth to the concept. Although Chickering concedes that the conferences
might have left ‘total war’ more complicated than they had found it, the volume
Great War, Total War (2000) reveals the centrality of morale, public opinion and the
manufacture of consent in wartime.2 The connection between propaganda and total
war has been explored more systematically in David Welch’s monograph Germany,
Propaganda and Total War, 1914–1918 (2000). Subtitled The Sins of Omission, it argues
that the government ‘had constructed the means to read the mood of the people, but
failed to act upon what it read!’3
Among those who wanted to understand the formation of public opinion in wartime
Germany was a small group of enterprising academics. It is common knowledge that
university professors participated enthusiastically in the propaganda war; many an
academic gave stirring speeches or wrote patriotic pamphlets. What is less well known,
but of special significance in the context of this volume, is the fact that some scholars
began to examine how the war impacted on the public sphere and vice versa. It was
during the war that the contours of a new academic subject – propaganda studies –
began to emerge. In 1915, the economist Karl Bücher of the University of Leipzig
published a collection of essays entitled Unsere Sache und die Tagespresse (Our Cause
and the Daily Press).4 In the following year, Bücher founded the world’s first journalism
school with the aim of professionalising news reporting at a time of national crisis.
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16 Propaganda and Conflict

In the same year appeared what represents, arguably, the first significant attempt
at a study of public opinion in wartime, Die deutsche Presse im Kriege und später (The
German Press in the War and After). Its author, Aloys Meister, professor of medieval
and modern history at the University of Münster, had developed a side interest in media
history before the war, supervising the Habilitation thesis of Karl d’Ester, the future
doyen of journalism studies. Like many of his colleagues, Meister had contributed to
the university’s series of patriotic lectures at the outbreak of war. Although intended
as propaganda, Meister’s lecture had a distinct analytical edge. In the pamphlet based
on his lecture, Kabelkrieg und Lügenfeldzug (Cable War and Lying Campaign), Meister
condemned what he saw as an Anglo-French smear campaign against Germany,
facilitated by Britain’s control over the global telegraph network  – a weapon more
powerful than the Royal Navy’s high-seas fleet. Yet Meister was particularly critical
of the German press, its concentration on domestic politics and its failure to create a
positive image of Germany in the wider world before 1914. Expanding on these initial
thoughts in his 1916 monograph, Meister concluded that Germany required a new
system of educating journalists.5 Meister was, of course, not the only historian to ponder
on the propaganda war; but in contrast to others, such as the French historian Marc
Bloch, he combined reflection with impact, initiating a press archive and establishing
a commission on newspaper research.6 Moreover, Meister’s efforts gave an important
stimulus to the eventual establishment of Zeitungswissenschaft (newspaper science) at
Münster and other universities during the interwar years. Thus the scholarly study of
the press and the academic training of journalists have their origins in the modern
propaganda war.7
The roots of disciplines such as communication, media and journalism studies
can be traced to the era of the Great War. By no means did all efforts bear fruits.
At Cambridge, the university librarian initiated a special ‘war collection’ of books,
periodicals and ephemera, but after 1918 the material simply began to gather dust.
In the Anglophone world, the most significant contribution to propaganda analysis
stemmed from the pen of a US social scientist, Harold D.  Lasswell. However, the
author of Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927) himself became entangled
in, as Nicholas J. Cull suggests in his chapter, a pre-emptive counter-propaganda war.8
Such research was considered relevant outside academic circles and could draw on
institutional support from public and private endowments in the years between the
world wars. Unsurprisingly, academic interest in the lessons to be learned from the
Great War abated with the outbreak of the Second World War, although it survived in
pockets. The Weltkriegsbücherei (now Library of Contemporary History) in Stuttgart,
founded in 1915 to document the Great War of words, continued its work during the
Second World War, publishing the final instalment of its periodical, Bücherschau,
in 1944.9
In Britain, Arthur Ponsonby’s Falsehood in Wartime was (too) long considered an
invaluable source.10 Originally published in 1928, it was reissued in 1980 and 1991 by
the notorious ‘Institute for Historical Review’ in California. This book, written by a
politician critical of the British involvement in the war, aimed to unmask propaganda
lies about German atrocities. In truth, though, ‘Falsehood in Wartime is not an exposure
of the truth about propaganda lies, it is a propaganda lie.’11 Yet comprehensive research
 17

The First World War and Inter-war Period 17

into official propaganda in Britain has been hampered by the fact that the majority of
the records of the Ministry of Information were destroyed – in what may well have
been an act of propaganda in itself – around 1920. The full story of official propaganda
in Britain during the Great War could never be told, noted M. L. Sanders and Philip
M. Taylor in British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–18 (1982), a book
that has remained a standard work of reference.12 To be sure, important documentation
did survive, notably in the form of some 40,000 official photographs preserved in
the Department of Photographs at the Imperial War Museum. It was the keeper of
that department, Jane Carmichael, who published an as yet unsurpassed account of
First World War Photographers (1989).13 Thus, partly out of necessity, historians of
propaganda working in the 1980s were methodologically ahead of their peers who still
clung to the written record.
The ‘cultural turn(s)’ since the 1990s have proved both a blessing and a curse,
depending on one’s view, for the study of propaganda and the Great War. We now
know infinitely more about how propaganda targeted different social groups (such
as children), about patriotic rituals (such as ‘tank banks’ in Britain), about material
culture (such as trench art), about visual media (such as posters), about underlying
gender stereotypes, about differences between town and country, and about national
peculiarities and cultural convergences between nations.14 Important works include
Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau’s La Guerre des enfants 1914–1918 (1993) on how (French)
children were caught up in the maelstrom of total war;15 Hubertus F. Jahn’s Patriotic
Culture in Russia during World War I (1995), which showed that propaganda could be
genuinely popular;16 Jeffrey Verhey’s The Spirit of 1914 (2000), which examined the
making of the myth of ‘war enthusiasm’ during and after the war;17 and James Aulich’s
work on commercial advertising as a form of war propaganda.18 In addition, George
L. Mosse’s seminal study, Fallen Soldiers (1990), has stimulated much further research
into the cultural aftermath of propaganda during the interwar years.19
Some of the most innovative research into propaganda has been produced by
scholars of the First World War. This area of research is so vibrant and diverse that it is
difficult to sum it up in a few words. However, three features stand out: firstly, scholars
now tend to de-emphasize the coercive elements of mass mobilization (indoctrination,
censorship, surveillance), foregrounding instead the consensual dimension of waging
war. Secondly, they attribute agency to civil society, seeing ordinary people not as
victims but as participants in and facilitators of propaganda. Thirdly, and paradoxically,
they tend to eschew the term ‘propaganda’, which they often (wrongly) associate with a
top-down approach. To some degree, ‘propaganda’ has been replaced by concepts such
as culture de guerre, ‘patriotic culture’, ‘pleasure culture of war’, ‘mental mobilisation’ or
simply ‘representations’.20 The new analytical vocabulary is testimony to the emergence
of First World War Studies as a distinct, interdisciplinary field of enquiry, with its own
association, dedicated journal and regular conferences. Significantly, the Cambridge
History of the First World War (2014) does not contain a chapter specifically on
propaganda – and yet propaganda runs like a red thread through the three tomes.21 In
short, we are confronted with a paradox: a veritable boom in the study of propagandistic
forms, languages and practices has gone hand in hand with the demise of the concept
of ‘propaganda’.22
18

18 Propaganda and Conflict

The chapters included in this part discuss various different media of propaganda,
ranging from newspapers and popular books to artworks and exhibitions. Stephen
Badsey’s chapter offers an in-depth study of the Amiens Dispatch in order to highlight
confusion within the British government over propaganda during the first two months
of the conflict. Publication of the dispatch triggered the lifting of the news blackout
and, unwittingly, became a piece of recruitment propaganda. Antoine Capet examines
Churchill’s war experience in France during the Great War, how it informed his popular
histories published in the interwar period and how a nostalgia for the brotherhood in
arms coloured his assessment of France’s political stability and defensive capabilities
on the eve of the Second World War. In their chapter, Ulf Schmidt and Katja
Schmidt-Mai shift the focus from the written word to visual media, exploring, from
an interdisciplinary perspective, the connections between Nazi propaganda and art
plunder – and their much delayed repercussions in the 2010s.

Notes
1 David Welch, Propaganda: Power and Persuasion (London, 2013), p. 15.
2 Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds), Great War, Total War: Combat and
Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2000); see also Roger
Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (Cambridge,
2007), p. 1.
3 David Welch, Germany, Propaganda and Total War, 1914–1918: The Sins of Omission
(London, 2000); new edition under the title Germany and Propaganda in World War
I: Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (London, 2014).
4 Karl Bücher, Unsere Sache und die Tagespresse (Tübingen, 1915).
5 Al[oys] Meister, Die deutsche Presse im Kriege und später (Münster, 1916); Kabelkrieg
und Lügenfeldzug (Münster, 1914).
6 See Marc Bloch, ‘Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles da la guerre’
[1921], in Écrits de guerre (1914–1918) (Paris, 1997), pp. 169–84.
7 Bettina Maoro, Die Zeitungswissenschaft in Westfalen 1914–45: Das Institut für
Zeitungswissenschaft in Münster und die Zeitungsforschung in Dortmund (Munich,
1987); Bernd Mütter, ‘Aloys Meister (1866–1925)’, Westfälische Zeitschrift, 121 (1971),
pp. 173–247.
8 Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I [1927] (Cambridge, MA,
1971); see J. Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience
of Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge, 1997).
9 Weltkriegsbücherei, ‘Wichtige Mitteilung an unsere Leser’, Bücherschau der
Weltkriegsbücherei, 24: 1 (1944), p. iv; see also Theo Goebel, Deutsche Pressestimmen
in der Julikrise 1914 (Stuttgart, 1939).
10 Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated
Throughout the Nations during the Great War (London, 1928).
11 Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War
(Cambridge, 2008), p. 41, original emphasis.
12 M. L. Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War,
1914–18 (London, 1982).
13 Jane Carmichael, First World War Photographers (London, 1989).
 19

The First World War and Inter-war Period 19

14 For starters, see James Fox, British Art and the First World War, 1914–1924
(Cambridge, 2015); Pearl James (ed.), Picture This! World War I Posters and Visual
Culture (Lincoln, NE, 2009); Robert L. Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers of the First
World War (Cambridge, 2011); Nicholas J. Saunders, Trench Art: Materialities and
Memories of War (Oxford, 2003); Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, Capital Cities at
War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2007).
15 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, La Guerre des enfants 1914–1918: Essai d’histoire culturelle
(Paris, 1993).
16 Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY, 1995).
17 Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany
(Cambridge, 2000).
18 James Aulich, ‘Advertising and the Public in Britain during the First World War’, in
David Welch and Jo Fox (eds), Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern
Age (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 109–28.
19 George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York,
1990); see also Mark Connelly, Celluloid War Memorials: The British Instructional
Films Company and the Memory of the Great War (Exeter, 2016); Benjamin Ziemann,
Contested Commemorations: Republican Veterans and Weimar Political Culture
(Cambridge, 2013).
20 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914–1918: Understanding the Great
War (London, 2002); John Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe
during the First World War (Cambridge, 1997); Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites
(eds), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda,
1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1999); Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in
British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London, 2000).
21 Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols (Cambridge,
2014).
22 To be sure, Eberhard Demm has produced a new synthesis in his Censorship and
Propaganda in World War I: A Comprehensive History (London, 2019).
20

20
 21

Strategy and propaganda: Lord Kitchener, the

retreat from Mons and the Amiens Dispatch,
August–September 1914
Stephen Badsey

Among the dramatic events that marked the start of the First World War, British
political and military decisions and actions are particularly well documented and
researched. These well-known events include the complex political balancing act
conducted by Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith in the crisis of July–August
1914, in his successful attempt to minimize resignations from his cabinet and revolts
within his Liberal Party, and to lead both Parliament and the country united into the
war. They also include the creation before the war and the deployment in August 1914
of the British Army’s Expeditionary Force (redesignated the British Expeditionary
Force or BEF before the end of the month, which is how it is usually known) and the
confirmation of Field Marshal Sir John French as its commander-in-chief. Equally well
known is the appointment of Field Marshal Earl Kitchener to the post of Secretary of
State for War on 5 August, his call for volunteers to create a new mass British Army and
the unexpectedly large popular response. Yet another well-known story is the BEF’s
first battles at Mons and Le Cateau, the successful retreat from Mons and the decision
to turn the BEF to participate in the decisive Battle of the Marne in September. Most
accounts that follow the British military story that far – and many do not, preferring
to stop with the first declarations for war  – also acknowledge the importance of
the Amiens Dispatch (sometimes called the Mons Dispatch), a sensational account
of the battles of Mons and Le Cateau published in a special Sunday edition of The
Times newspaper on 30 August, which also features in most accounts of British
propaganda in the war, and of the British Home Front. It is often stated as fact both
that Kitchener’s personal call to arms was the principal motivator of British military
volunteerism in 1914 (often if incorrectly called ‘the rush to the colours’) and that
it was Kitchener’s personal animosity towards war reporters that largely determined
British policy towards the national press’s reporting of the BEF’s actions in this period.
But Kitchener’s actions were only part of a more complex story. It is the purpose of
this present account to assemble a narrative chronology of these events, so revealing
the critical interaction between politics and strategy, military operations and battles,
22

22 Propaganda and Conflict

social and cultural responses at home including volunteerism and both the nature and
apparatus of British propaganda.
The first formal War Office recommendations regarding the press accompanying a
British Army in wartime date from 1878, while the first regulations for accreditation
of newspapermen to accompany a British Army in wartime were established in 1889.1
Like all subsequent British government regulations, these were based on negotiated
agreements with the influential London press rather than on dictated control
or censorship. The first large-scale British experience of the problems with such
agreements came in the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902. In what would be a reoccurring
theme of British propaganda up to the present day, an agreement reached between
the government and the media in peacetime only through compromises, with both
sides making their own interpretations of what had been agreed, broke down rapidly
under the immediate pressures of war. Kitchener as commander-in-chief in South
Africa for the later part of the Anglo-Boer War was particularly hostile to what he
saw as adverse press reporting. In July 1901, he had mused to the sympathetic Howell
A. ‘Taffy’ Gwynn, then of Reuters news agency, about one day appointing a solitary
official ‘chronicler of the war’, perhaps Gwynn himself, as the only correspondent
allowed with a future field army.2
Kitchener played no part in the subsequent development of British government
ideas on how to control the press in wartime, which were first prompted by the Russo-
Japanese War, 1904–5. The chief concerns came from the Royal Navy rather than the
British Army and arose in consequence of newspapers reporting the deployment
of British warships following the Dogger Bank incident, when, in October 1904,
Russian warships opened fire at night in the North Sea on British fishing trawlers,
somehow believing them to be hostile Japanese, and causing a brief war scare. From
1905 onwards, the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) attempted intermittently to
draft legislation ‘for the control of the publication of naval and military information
in cases of emergency’ (meaning war) and canvassed the views of numerous national
and provincial newspaper editors.3 In March 1910, the CID formed a ‘standing sub-
committee regarding press and postal censorship in time of war’, initially chaired by
Winston Churchill as Home Secretary, which liaised with government departments
including the Admiralty and War Office on planned wartime procedures, and which
also considered the possibility of setting up an official Press Bureau in peacetime.4 The
result of these deliberations was that, as on previous occasions before the Anglo-Boer
War, the government found that it was both impractical and politically unachievable to
establish in peacetime any legislation and institutions to regulate the press in a future
war. Instead, in August 1912, the Admiralty and War Office formed the ‘Standing
Committee of Official and Press Representatives to deal with the publication of Naval
and Military News in times of emergency’, a decision once more largely prompted
by Admiralty concerns over newspapers reporting movements of the fleet  – in this
case during the 1911 Moroccan Crisis  – coupled with government uncertainty and
reluctance to use the powers of the new 1911 Official Secrets Act directly against the
press.5 Shortening its name first to the ‘Joint Standing Committee of Admiralty, War
Office and Press Representatives’, and later to the ‘Admiralty, War Office and Press
Committee’, the resulting committee met regularly from October 1912 onwards, with
 23

Strategy and Propaganda 23

a core membership consisting of Sir Graham Greene, the permanent secretary for
the Admiralty; Reginald Brade, an assistant secretary from the War Office (later Sir
Reginald and permanent secretary from 1914 onwards); Edmund Robbins of the Press
Association as the committee secretary; and representatives of the Newspaper Society,
the Newspaper Proprietors Association, the Irish Newspaper Society, the Federation
of Northern Newspaper Owners and the Federation of Southern Newspaper Owners;
military and naval officers sometimes attended, including Brigadier General Henry
Wilson as Director of Military Operations. The chief function of this committee was
to provide government advice and guidance to newspapers regarding what might
constitute a security risk.
The Admiralty, War Office and Press Committee were chiefly concerned with higher
policy and with how newspapers rather than reporters might act. The role of individual
reporters if the BEF were mobilized for war fell within the remit of the War Office. In
this case also, before 1914 largely informal or negotiated peacetime understandings
prevailed, together with some practices established in the Anglo-Boer War, and the
continuing 1889 agreement on accreditation of newspaper correspondents. Prior to
the war, Henry Wilson’s Directorate of Military Operations already contained a small
staff group designated MO5(h) which was responsible for overseeing military press
and postal functions. Charles Callwell, who had been Assistant Director of Military
Operations 1904–7, had retired as a colonel in 1909 and was himself a notable military
writer, described in his post-war memoirs the existence in 1914 of a small War Office
staff grouping (presumably meaning MO5(h) or part of it) established in 1911 or 1912,
with its own transport and clerks, to function as the press escort and liaison for the
BEF in the event of mobilization, and headed by Major A. G. Stuart, who ‘had been
in control of the Press representatives’ in the 1912 Army manoeuvres and the smaller
1913 Army manoeuvres, both of which were accompanied by a sizeable number of
reporters.6
It is quite certain that the events that would lead to the publication of the
Amiens Dispatch were not planned or initiated by any official British propaganda
organizations, for the simple reason that no such organizations existed at the time.
The first government institution dedicated to wartime propaganda, which was based
at Wellington House in London, was established only in the week beginning Sunday
30 August 1914, the day that the Amiens Dispatch was published.7 But in a manner
entirely characteristic of British propaganda organization, although Wellington House
came eventually to be designated as the War Propaganda Bureau, it continued to be
known in official circles by its earlier name and to do much of its work through informal
or semi-official contacts. Indeed, the key to much of British propaganda was the very
close informal contacts that existed between members of the government, the civil
service and armed forces and the owners or editors of important newspapers, along
with other leading figures in society. This included pre-war ‘gentlemen’s agreements’
that were to be severely tested by the pressures of the July–August 1914 war crisis. On
Monday, 27 July, the day after the Serbian reply to Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum, the
Admiralty, War Office and Press Committee held a quick meeting at the Admiralty,
at which one member, Sir George Riddell as chairman of the Newspaper Proprietors
Association, complained that ‘it was very easy to make agreements in time of peace,
24

24 Propaganda and Conflict

but when the emergency arrives and the public is avid for news, the situation was
difficult’.8 The result of this meeting was a secret communiqué issued by the committee
next day, drafted according to Riddell by himself and Edmund Robbins as committee
secretary, addressed to all British newspaper editors and asking them not to report the
movements of British warships, troops or aircraft. At a further meeting on Thursday,
30 July, the committee noted that The Times had referred to one small naval movement,
and that the newspapers were pressuring the Admiralty and War Office with enquiries.
But other than these kinds of minor slips and leaks, the communiqué’s request was very
largely honoured, and in the following weeks British newspapers maintained silence
about the BEF as it mobilized and deployed to France. Only on Tuesday, 18 August, the
day after the BEF’s deployment was completed, did the British press announce that it
had crossed to France.
The Thursday, 30 July, meeting of the Admiralty, War Office and Press Committee
also discussed the matter of war correspondents being sent with the BEF if it should
deploy overseas. Robbins as secretary suggested that the War Office should form a
small committee with the press to discuss this, Riddell added that they should call
for newspapers to provide a register of correspondents to be given accreditation and
Reginald Brade for the War Office pointed out that no decision had yet been taken
on sending the BEF (in fact a cabinet decision on the previous day had been not to
send it, as no war had yet been declared); after this discussion, it was resolved ‘to
leave the matter over for the present’.9 The committee did not meet again until 20
August, by which date both circumstances and its role had changed considerably
with Britain’s entry into the war and the despatch of the BEF. The meeting on 30 July
showed clearly that both the War Office and the newspaper representatives expected
accredited reporters to accompany the BEF if it were sent overseas, and that this would
be a reasonably straightforward procedure, but that no practical decisions or detailed
planning had taken place, contrary to the impression given in Callwell’s memoirs.
The formal British declaration of war against Germany came into force at 11.00
pm on Tuesday, 4 August, and the mobilization of the BEF began next day. A severe
problem for other major powers in the war crisis, notably for Germany and Austria-
Hungary, may have been an excess of influence and authority by senior army officers.
But for Great Britain the opposite was true, and the problems lay in military weakness
and in a near power vacuum in the military high command. Since the Curragh Mutiny
(or Curragh Incident) of April 1914, the post of Secretary of State for War, the political
head of the Army, had been vacant, with Asquith notionally carrying out the role
himself. Field Marshal Sir John French, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and
professional head of the Army, had also resigned over the Curragh, being replaced by
the lesser and politically inexperienced figure of General Sir Charles Douglas. French
remained through summer 1914 in a kind of military limbo; he had for some years been
the designated commander-in-chief of the BEF if it were mobilized, but it was far from
clear in the July–August crisis that he would automatically be given the post. Kitchener
had arrived in Britain from Egypt on Tuesday, 23 June, to receive his earldom from
King George V, and it was largely by accident that he was available to be offered the War
Office as a political appointment. Asquith’s decision to offer Kitchener the War Office
and his confirmation of French as commander of the BEF were entirely politically
 25

Strategy and Propaganda 25

based and took place in the context of considerable political and press lobbying. The
most cynical view of Asquith’s offer to Kitchener was that Asquith wanted a scapegoat
at the War Office in case of British defeat. As a less conspiratorial explanation, Asquith
needed both men as famous military figures to reassure his cabinet colleagues, so
minimizing resignations, and also to reassure the mass of the public.10
What is also clear, both from the two councils of war held by Asquith on Wednesday,
5 August, and Thursday, 6 August, and from the comments of several cabinet members
at the time, is that in comparison to their knowledge of finance or domestic politics
most of them had only the most general or vague understanding of the nature of the war
on which they were embarking, or of the strengths and weaknesses of the BEF. Recent
historical research has identified many of these weaknesses, largely stemming from the
small size of the BEF – six infantry divisions and five cavalry brigades – and the Army’s
efforts before the war to retain even this number by expedients and by duplicating
positions and functions.11 The only formation within the BEF that was genuinely fully
trained and ready for war was Aldershot Command under General Sir Douglas Haig,
which formed I Corps on mobilization, consisting of a higher headquarters who had
trained together, two infantry divisions and a cavalry brigade. Otherwise, much about
the BEF was a matter of hurried improvisation. The BEF’s other four infantry divisions,
making up II Corps and III Corps, were to varying degrees underequipped and more
heavily dependent on reservists than Haig’s I Corps. French’s own headquarters staff
was hurriedly improvised and changed as the BEF deployed, much to his frustration
and annoyance. There were also no pre-war permanent headquarters for II Corps, III
Corps or the Cavalry Division (comprising four of the cavalry brigades). Along with
other training institutions, the Army Staff College at Camberley was closed down not
(as some historians have suggested) from the conviction that this would be a short war
with no need for further trained staff officers but because its staff and instructors had
crucial designated wartime roles.12 The commandant at Camberley, Brigadier General
Lancelot Kiggell, moved on 5 August to become Director of Military Training at the
War Office; Charles Callwell, also, was recalled from his retirement of five years to
become Director of Military Operations at the War Office. The pre-war decision to
free experienced staff officers familiar with the latest developments in the Army to take
positions within the BEF on mobilization, and to replace them at the War Office with
others, caused considerable disruption within the War Office itself, even more so as
this was combined with Kitchener’s unexpected appointment, and with Douglas as an
inexperienced Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Neither Kitchener nor Douglas had
ever taken the staff officers’ course at the Army Staff College Camberley, and so neither
of them was ‘psc’ (for ‘passed Staff College’), the basic qualification for a trained staff
officer.
Both prior to Asquith’s two councils of war and during them, French and
Haig separately floated the idea that the BEF’s departure should be delayed or its
concentration area changed, which would have given more time for its training
deficiencies to be made good and perhaps for it to be increased in strength. Despite
this, once the decision was made that the BEF was to be sent with immediate effect,
the only plan for which the transport and supply had been pre-organized in detail was
that which was in fact implemented:  a deployment to Maubeuge and advance into
26

26 Propaganda and Conflict

Belgium in support of the French Fifth Army. But there was also a genuine fear within
the two councils of war both of a surprise German raid across the English Channel,
for which plans already existed to hold a division in reserve, and of possible riots if the
British financial system collapsed as a result of the war crisis. The decision that came
from the second council of war’s deliberations was that the BEF would at first deploy
only four infantry divisions and its cavalry division, plus the extra cavalry brigade.13
The 4th Infantry Division under Major General Thomas D’O. Snow was held behind
to reassure public opinion, deploying first to eastern England, and starting to cross to
France only on the night of 22/23 August, about four days behind the main BEF. In
consequence of this, the 4th Infantry Division did not arrive in time to take part in
the Battle of Mons on Sunday, 23 August. The 6th Infantry Division, the final infantry
division of the BEF, made up of troops based in Ireland as well as Britain, did not cross
to France until September.
On Friday, 7 August, the day that his appointment as Secretary of State for War
became official, Kitchener made his first public call for a mass volunteer army, starting
with 100,000 men. This appeared in newspapers in the form of an advertisement:

Your King and Country / Need You. / A CALL TO ARMS. / An addition of 100,000
men to His Majesty’s Regular Army is immediately necessary in the present grave
National Emergency. / Lord Kitchener is confident that this appeal will be at once
responded to by all who have the safety of our Empire at heart.14

Over the weekend, 8,193 men were attested; there were very few social groups who
could volunteer immediately and in a carefree spirit: chiefly, the unemployed from one
end of the social scale and the financially self-sufficient from the other, together with
anyone without personal or professional commitments to leave behind; there was no
immediate ‘rush to the colours’ on the outbreak of war. Kitchener’s cabinet colleagues
seem to have been largely bemused by his call for volunteers, some considering it only
as a convenient way of absorbing the surplus unemployed in the workforce.15 But there
was a precedent, well known to Kitchener for those who cared to notice, in the rush
of British volunteers for the Anglo-Boer War, not so much on its outbreak in October
1899 as two months later in response to the triple British defeats of ‘Black Week’, a
response that produced over 100,000 British volunteers in the course of that war (plus
nearly half as many again who failed the Army medical test).16
Despite his well-known public contempt for the press, Kitchener also knew from his
considerable previous experiences how to exploit it. A few days after his appointment,
he gave an interview to Colonel Charles à Court Repington, the military correspondent
of The Times, at the London home of Lady Wantage in Carleton Gardens.17 The old
cliché that in August 1914 the war was generally expected in Britain to be over by
Christmas has been convincingly overturned by historians, and the long article by
Repington that appeared in The Times for Saturday, 15 August, is important evidence
of Kitchener’s own views on this. The article explained that the call was now for up
to 500,000 volunteers, based on Britain expecting to fight a war that ‘may be long,
very long’, and stressed the size and power of Germany and its military forces. The
article also made reference to ‘the Policy of Pitt’, meaning Prime Minister William
 27

Strategy and Propaganda 27

Pitt the Younger’s strategy in the war against Napoleon, suggesting a chiefly naval war
with further trained British troops being deployed to the continent at some time in
the future, in support of the BEF. The article stated Kitchener’s intention that for ‘the
Regular Army little or nothing will be changed’ and described his plan (which was later
overtaken by events) to divide the Territorial Force into two categories, those willing
to serve overseas and those volunteering only for home defence. Also, the article
continued, ‘on this occasion, when public spirit is high and so many hands are thrown
out of work by the war, there has been a rush to join, and in a week or a fortnight
the first 100,000 will be made up’ to join what Repington called the New Army, with
Kitchener’s estimate that ‘the new army may possibly be nearly ready for the field in six
months’ – enough in itself to disprove the ‘over by Christmas’ story.18
The impact of this Times article made Repington’s prediction self-fulfilling, and by
next Saturday, 22 August (the day before the Battle of Mons), 101,939 men had put
themselves forward as volunteers. This was between twice and three times as many
men as the Army normally had volunteer in a year in peacetime, and already enough
to overwhelm the War Office’s ability to cope with the probable influx. Obviously,
not every volunteer’s actions may be attributed solely to Kitchener’s call through
Repington and The Times. Recruiting was at first patchy across the country and across
social groups; the relatively low figures from most rural areas in August may simply
have reflected the need to gather the harvest. But at least part of the foundation of the
belief that the men had all volunteered swiftly and in high spirits was a direct product
of Kitchener’s need to stimulate recruitment and Repington’s obliging propaganda. If
there can be said to be a typical response from the British population, it was shock
at the news of war, a growing sense of concern at their country in danger, a desire to
balance any willingness to volunteer against existing commitments to jobs and families
and – in a society that was highly socially structured and deferential – waiting for a lead
from their national and local leaders, which was first provided by Kitchener’s Times
interview.19 Repington later claimed that Kitchener told him that they could have no
more direct contact, since he was under pressure through his cabinet colleagues from
other newspaper editors, furious that he had given The Times such an exclusive.20 On
Tuesday, 25 August, Kitchener gave his maiden speech in the House of Lords on the
progress of the BEF so far, stressing that as a soldier he belonged to no political party,
that ‘our troops have already been for thirty-six hours in contact with a superior force
of German invaders’ and that

the Press and the public have, in their respective spheres, lent invaluable aid to the
Government in preserving the discreet silence which the exigencies of the situation
obviously demanded, and I gladly take this opportunity of bearing testimony to
the value of their co-operation.21

To continue the story, it is necessary to return to Monday, 27 July, and the meeting of
the Admiralty, War Office and Press Committee, where the press agreed to voluntarily
submit to restriction of the news in the event of British involvement in the war.
With war declared, on Wednesday, 5 August, immediately after his appointment as
Secretary of State for War, Kitchener together with Winston Churchill as First Lord of
28

28 Propaganda and Conflict

the Admiralty asked the prominent Conservative member of parliament F. E. Smith to
create and head a new wartime Official Press Bureau, to act as a mouthpiece for all War
Office, Admiralty and other government department statements relating to the war
and as a point of contact for the press to submit pieces for censorship. F. E. Smith was
an astute and experienced politician and was not only a friend of Churchill’s but even
an officer in the same Territorial mounted regiment, the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire
Hussars, meaning that he could take up his post immediately with the acting rank
of full colonel. Despite the pre-war plans, the role of the Press Bureau was not well
understood or agreed at first. The editor of the Manchester Guardian C.  P. Scott
described Smith ‘as press-correspondent in intimate association with the Admiralty
and War Office’ and his appointment as a minor example of Asquith already creating a
coalition government rather than a truly Liberal one.22 Asquith’s wife Margot recorded
her own understanding of how her husband described this agreement: ‘We’ve had a
Press Committee, which we have also decided to have at Committee of [Imperial]
Defence, to which papers can send a delegate; and we tell them what they may not
publish.’23 ‘Taffy’ Gwynn, now editor of the Conservative London daily Morning Post,
who generally approved of all things military, noted, ‘The secrecy is tremendous and
quite right.’24 Although increasingly frustrated, newspapers and their owners largely
remained sympathetic to the need for security, at least for the first four or five weeks
of the war.
The first communiqué from the Press Bureau appeared on Tuesday, 11 August,
the day that the first troops of the BEF crossed to France, although the British press
continued to observe silence on this matter.25 No accredited reporters crossed with
the BEF, and for a little over a week the London press was in a state of confusion as
to how to respond to the War Office’s behaviour. William Beach Thomas of the Daily
Mail, who in 1915 became an official war correspondent with the BEF, claimed in his
memoirs that his newspaper had no designated war correspondent in August 1914,
that the proprietor Lord Northcliffe (who also owned The Times) picked the sporting
editor as suitable, that the War Office then told the man to buy a horse and that he
and other correspondents-in-waiting were seen for a few days exercising their horses
in Hyde Park.26 However, no permission to join the BEF as accredited reporters was
forthcoming; instead the newspapers’ enquiries were met with various responses,
the burden of which was that the BEF was moving within a media cordon sanitaire,
a notional cocoon or bubble surrounding the troops within which any reporters
were liable to military arrest. Both at the time and ever since, this has been seen as a
deliberate policy laid down by Kitchener. Despite the absence of firm evidence, there
seems no reason to doubt that Kitchener’s attitude played a very large part in it; but
account needs also to be taken of the chaotic state of the War Office at the time, its
many higher priorities than worrying about the press and the unfamiliarity of some
of its officers with the agreements that the press believed were already in place from
before the war.
The response of the London newspapers and their correspondents to their neglect
by the War Office (to use no stronger term) has many parallels in the history of war
reporting: they went off to war regardless. Despite the self-censorship of the British
press, the BEF’s crossing to France and deployment had been freely reported in foreign
 29

Strategy and Propaganda 29

newspapers, and its general location on the French–Belgian border was known. Some
British reporters were already in France or in Belgium, others now journeyed to Paris
or attached themselves to the French and Belgian armies; most began to pursue the
BEF and a story, taking the prospect of temporary military arrest as part of the game.
How close most of them came to the fighting in August is hard to determine, including
from their own later accounts. Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle claimed in his
memoirs that with two other reporters he had interviewed British soldiers retreating
from Mons on about the day after the battle; but this account is unsubstantiated and
has some discrepancies, and it is likely that the first British reporters arrived with the
BEF a few days later, just after the Battle of Le Cateau on Wednesday, 26 August.27
The two weeks following the BEF’s concentration at Maubeuge on Thursday, 20
August, and advance into Belgium remained a period of uncertainty for the British
public, but there was by no means a complete press blackout. While information
reaching even Prime Minister Asquith and his colleagues was limited and uncertain,
there were straws in the wind, and astute politicians could see which way that wind was
blowing. On the day after Mons, Monday, 24 August, Asquith wrote to his (probably
platonic) mistress Venetia Stanley, ‘The last thing French said to me when we took
farewell in this room, was that we must be prepared for a reverse or two at first. And
you know how disgusted I have been with the silly optimism of our press.’28 Late on
the same day the Press Bureau released a short communiqué, ‘The British forces were
engaged all day on Sunday and after dark with the enemy at Mons, and held their
ground’; this was picked up next day by most newspapers, together with a second
communiqué to the effect that the British had moved to new positions and were being
opposed by approximately equal numbers of Germans; The Times, although retaining
a positive tone when describing the British withdrawal, assessed that across the front,
‘The battle is joined and so far has gone ill for the Allies.’29 Also on Tuesday, 25 August,
the British government published The Belgian Official Report, giving the first account
by the Belgian government of German war crimes and attacks on civilians during their
invasion of Belgium.30 On the same day, 10,019 men around the country volunteered
for the Army, the first occasion on which the daily number had reached five figures.
Two days later on Thursday, 27 August, a preliminary meeting took place in the House
of Commons, followed by two more meetings over the next three days, that laid the
foundations of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, a cross-party committee to
coordinate the efforts of local recruiting committees and to start to bring order to the
volunteering process.31
As is well known, after fighting the Battle of Mons, the BEF became divided at
the start of its retreat, leading to its II Corps (3rd and 5th Infantry Divisions) having
to stand and fight at the Battle of Le Cateau on Wednesday, 26 August. Most of the
fighting troops of Major General Snow’s 4th Infantry Division arrived at Le Cateau by
train on Monday, 24 August, began advancing towards the rest of the BEF next day and
then fell back again to Le Cateau as part of the general retreat, taking up their position
with II Corps as part of the British defensive line. Snow’s division had suffered from
peacetime inadequacies and from its rushed deployment across the English Channel.
It fought the Battle of Le Cateau without its divisional heavy artillery, its engineers, its
supply train and ammunition column, its field ambulances (medical services), most of
30

30 Propaganda and Conflict

its signallers and its divisional cavalry, who were used for scouting and to give early
warning of danger. The division had even deployed without its field cookers, standard
equipment used to provide hot meals in the field, and the troops were hungry as well
as cold and wet by night, and then hot and thirsty by day from marching under the
August sun.32
The German advance was stopped dead by the British stand at Le Cateau, quite
literally in many cases. Having taken the heaviest casualties – 3,158 men (excluding a
large number of stragglers who later returned to their units) – of any British division
in battle so far, 4th Infantry Division retreated off the battlefield in the late afternoon,
as part of the general British plan to halt the Germans, break contact and resume
the retreat. But the sight of the British soldiers walking away in groups struck some
observers as resembling a disorganized mob. Colonel Victor Huguet, the French
liaison officer with BEF headquarters, reported next day that ‘conditions are such that
for the moment the British army no longer exists’.33 There was virtually no effective
German pursuit, but, retreating in forced marches through the August heat, soldiers
hallucinated from lack of sleep and dehydration, seeing phantom castles and friendly
riders nearby. Commanders feared that if their men were allowed to rest they would
never get them up again. Some formations of the 4th Infantry Division became detached
from the main body for several days. On the day after Le Cateau, BEF headquarters
issued orders for its retreating formations to abandon all unnecessary equipment and
use the transport to carry their exhausted men; this was misinterpreted by 4th Infantry
Division as an order to destroy all equipment as part of a sauve qui peut or general
flight, and much equipment was burned before the order could be countermanded.34
On the same day, two of 4th Infantry Division’s battalion commanders, who were later
court-martialled, attempted to surrender their battalions together with the town of
Saint Quentin and were prevented only by the intervention of British cavalry.35
This was the situation when, on Thursday and Friday, 27 and 28 August, two British
reporters, Hamilton Fyfe of the Daily Mail (who rather than riding a horse drove a
Rolls-Royce) and Arthur Moore of The Times, came across retreating soldiers of 4th
Infantry Division, mostly scattered and trying to find their parent units, but evidently
prepared to talk to reporters. The story of what happened next was set out in some
detail in the official history of The Times in 1952, complete with facsimile reproductions
of the critical documents, and is generally supported by other accounts and sources,
although there are some difficulties with it that may never be resolved.36 Back at their
hotel at Amiens on the morning of Saturday, 29 August, Moore and Fyfe each wrote
out his story, and these were sent back together to their respective newspapers. As was
common among journalists, Moore’s handwritten dispatch was composed as if he had
written it on Saturday afternoon or evening, which is when he knew it would arrive at
The Times’s headquarters at Printing House Square in London. Caught up in the drama
of events, and drawing on what he had heard from lost, exhausted and in some cases
traumatized soldiers, Moore identified the men that he had interviewed as from ‘the
Fourth Division, all that was left of 20,000 fine troops’ and that it had been ‘thrown into
the fight at the end of a long march and had not even the time to dig trenches’. Pleading
at the start of his article to the censor to allow its story to be told, Moore painted a vivid
word picture of ‘straggling units’, of almost continuous ‘desperate fighting’ from Mons
 31

Strategy and Propaganda 31

onwards, and of the Germans daily harassing the retreating British with ‘Aeroplanes,
Zeppelins, armoured motors and cavalry’. In fact, the first Zeppelin airship raid took
place on the night of 5/6 August on Liege, and the Germans did have some armoured
cars, but none were used against the British in the retreat from Mons. ‘I have seen
broken bits of many regiments’, Moore continued, and men ‘worn out with marching’
who were nevertheless ‘steady and cheerful, and wherever they arrive make straight for
the proper authorities and seek news of their regiment’.37
At Printing House Square, after reading through this dramatic document, which
was about two newspaper columns long, The Times’s acting editor George Freeman,
together with foreign editor Henry Wickham Steed, blue-pencilled those parts of
Moore’s account which they believed would not survive censorship and sent the
manuscript to the Press Bureau. Significantly for the importance that German war
crimes and atrocities were soon to have in British propaganda and recruiting, a
paragraph on German atrocities in Belgium was deleted from the version sent to the
censor, for reasons of space. After about two to three hours, shortly before midnight,
the piece was returned with a note from F.  E. Smith himself, actually reinstating
several of the self-censored passages, and adding a concluding paragraph, written
as a continuation of Moore’s account and as if the author had been a witness to the
events, ‘The British Expeditionary Force, which bore the great weight of the [German]
blow, has suffered terrible losses’ but ‘it needs men, men, and yet more men’, and
that ‘we want reinforcements and we want them now’. Even the identification of the
4th Infantry Division was not censored out, a breach of what would later become
established practice. Smith also added a covering note:

I am sorry to have censored this most able and interesting message so freely but
the reasons are obvious. Forgive my clumsy journalistic suggestions but I  beg
you to use the parts of this article which I  have passed to enforce the lesson  –
re-inforcements & reinforcements [sic] at once.38

Interpreting Smith’s ‘suggestions’ as a command, The Times made the unprecedented

decision to run Moore’s piece on the front page of a special edition on Sunday, 30
August, bylined ‘from our special correspondent’ and with the dateline ‘Amiens August
29’  – hence ‘Amiens Dispatch’. Normally, The Times ran only advertisements and
personal messages on its front page and was not published on Sundays (the Sunday
Times appeared in the ordinary way on the same day leading with other stories). The
headlines for Moore’s story ran ‘Mons and Cambrai / Losses of the British Army /
Fight Against Severe Odds / Need for Reinforcements’. The rest of the front page
included more general stories about the war in the west and the east, and the naval
war. Some editions appear also to have included material from Fyfe’s piece, copied
directly from another of Northcliffe’s papers, the Sunday morning Weekly Dispatch,
which was a sister paper to the Daily Mail, with headlines such as ‘German Tidal Wave
/ Our Soldiers Overwhelmed by Numbers / Plain Duty of the Nation’.39 The next day,
Monday, 31 August, over 30,000 men volunteered to join the Army.
What the public, and presumably The Times’s staff, could not know was that the
publication of the Amiens Dispatch coincided with a crisis in Asquith’s government
32

32 Propaganda and Conflict

over communications between Kitchener at the War Office and Sir John French at
BEF headquarters. Over the weekend, Asquith and his wife Margot were away from
London, visiting members of her family at her niece’s home in Lympne, Kent, and
later some wounded soldiers at Folkestone Hospital.40 But on the Monday, Asquith
and his colleagues found themselves puzzling over a long and rambling telegram sent
from Sir John French to the War Office, full of ambiguities, which called for a general
attack while simultaneously appearing to demand that the BEF must be pulled out of
the line. Asquith had already been facing with annoyance the prospect of complaints
in the House of Commons over the decision to suspend the Government of Ireland
Act. Now he also found himself facing criticism and demands for information
following the special edition of The Times with the Amiens Dispatch. He complained
to Venetia Stanley that ‘The Times published a most wicked telegram on Sunday from a
supposed correspondent at Amiens, describing the rout and desperation of our army’,
although the report had denied that there had been any rout; Margot Asquith, wrongly
attributing the decision to publish to Geoffrey Robinson, The Times’s editor, who had
been absent from Printing House Square that night, complained to the leader of the
Opposition, Andrew Bonar Law, of the way that ‘the article about our failures, which he
[...] published in Sunday’s Times ([30] August 1914) was translated into every language
and widely circulated’.41 ‘Taffy’ Gwynne of the Morning Post was furious at what he
saw as a security breach by The Times, writing angry letters to Asquith and to others
(including Charles Masterman, who had just been asked to set up Wellington House),
as well as denouncing The Times in his editorials, to the point at which Robinson asked
for a meeting with Gwynn on ‘neutral ground’.42
The popular response to the Amiens Dispatch reproduced, on a vastly larger
scale, the volunteerism following the defeats of Black Week in the Anglo-Boer War,
in reaction to what was portrayed as a defeat and a national crisis rather than in a
mood of exuberance. Over the following week up to Monday, 7 September, 174,901
volunteers came forward, by far the largest single number for any week of the war,
causing the Army recruiting system to collapse by mid-week, with men’s names being
taken before they were sent home again because the Army could not process them.
This was a formidable piece of recruiting propaganda. But there is good evidence
that in passing the Amiens Dispatch and adding his own call for recruits, F. E. Smith
(who was, after all, an opposition Conservative member of parliament) had acted
without reference to the government, which did not welcome his actions. Following
the publication of the special edition of The Times on the Sunday morning, at 3.40
pm, the War Office issued through the Press Bureau a communiqué (which according
to Asquith was written by Churchill) describing in measured tones the events from
Mons to Le Cateau as a ‘four days battle’ but adding that since Thursday, 26 August,
the BEF had been unmolested except by German cavalry patrols and had received
twice the number of reinforcements as its losses, ending that ‘the army is ready for the
next encounter, undaunted in spirit’.43 This was followed by a statement from the Press
Bureau at 11.10 pm that though it did not forbid publication of reports from the war
zone, such stories ‘should be received with extreme caution. No correspondents are at
the front, and their information, however honestly sent, is therefore derived at second
or third hand from persons who are often in no position to tell coherent stories.’44
 33

Strategy and Propaganda 33

These Press Bureau correctives appeared in London newspapers on Monday,

simultaneously with questions being asked about the Amiens Dispatch in the House
of Commons first to Asquith and then in the evening to F. E. Smith. Asquith began
by describing the publication as a ‘very regrettable exception’ to the patriotic restraint
shown by the press and announced that the government had that very day made new
arrangements for providing the public with information about the BEF; what these
arrangements by Asquith and Kitchener were would become apparent a week later.45 In
response to Asquith’s criticisms, The Times sent a statement to the House of Commons
which was read into the parliamentary record, and next day, Tuesday, 1 September, it
published additional statements on the circumstances, pointing out that ‘we published
it in accordance with the official request’, although certainly neither Smith nor anyone
in government had called for a special Sunday edition to be created for the purpose.46
Smith spoke for about an hour, starting by claiming that ‘I never sought the office that
I  hold’ and embarking on a history of government–press relations up to that date,
starting with the Admiralty, War Office and Press Committee. When he eventually
reached the circumstances of the Amiens Dispatch, he pointed out that ‘no war
correspondents were being allowed at the front, and that there was the greatest anxiety,
and legitimate anxiety, to obtain any information as to the fortunes of the campaign’,
that being passed by the censor did not actually mean government endorsement of
the report and that his addition of a call for reinforcements ‘was in order to carry
out what I knew to be the policy of the War Office’.47 Smith was to resign at his own
request from heading the Press Bureau at the end of September. The entire sequence
of events leading both to and from the Amiens Dispatch arose from confusion within
the government over propaganda, and from the lack of a system that had been agreed
and understood by the press itself of accreditation for reporters, and of press handling
and censorship.
But this is not quite the end of the story. In the heightened atmosphere of Monday,
31 August, a second telegram was received by Kitchener from Sir John French at BEF
headquarters just before midnight, which was interpreted as evidence of panic there,
an assessment which is contradicted by the evidence of junior officers who noted
French’s calmness and confidence that day. Of several possible explanations, the most
plausible is that French, who was a poor prose stylist, had composed the telegrams
himself rather than entrust them to a staff officer. Asquith’s response, as he described
it to Venetia Stanley, was to send Kitchener out to France ‘to unravel the situation and
if necessary put the fear of God in them all’.48 Kitchener and French met on Tuesday, 1
September; exactly what they said to each other is unknown: Kitchener never spoke of
the meeting and French’s memoirs are unreliable. But the result was a formal order (or
‘instruction’, to use the official term) from Kitchener to French that the BEF would cease
its retreat and turn to take part in the Battle of the Marne, the decisive French Army
counterstroke that ended the German threat to win the war quickly. By remaining in
action the BEF also lost in total 31,709 casualties up to 4 October, destroying a large part
of the stock of experienced officers who might have commanded the new armies that
Kitchener was raising. While obviously the Amiens Dispatch was not the chief factor
in this sequence of events, it was an important addition to the general atmosphere of
stress and crisis within which Asquith’s and Kitchener’s decisions were made.
34

34 Propaganda and Conflict

Also on Monday, 31 August, at its third meeting in the House of Commons, the
Parliamentary Recruiting Committee was officially created. Soon famous for its
recruiting posters, the main function of this committee was not at first to promote
recruiting but to seek to bring to it some kind of order by encouraging and supporting
local recruiting committees. While the official and central recruiting system was
temporarily in a state of collapse, local recruiters, who believed that they had been
given a clear lead, and responding to the press’s call for more recruits, temporarily took
over the process. It was late September 1914 that saw the great eruption of local and
regional recruiting which led to the famous Pals Battalions, infantry units recruited
locally, often from friends and workmates. At their high point in October 1914, eighty-
four new battalions were raised locally, compared with nineteen raised through the
official War Office machinery.49
Finally, on Monday, 7 September, which represented the peak of recruiting
stimulated by the Amiens Dispatch, the change to government policy on reporters
with the BEF announced by Asquith a week earlier came into force. While the details
of how the decision was made remain unknown, Kitchener had taken even further
his old idea from the Anglo-Boer War, by appointing a serving officer who was also
an experienced writer, Colonel Ernest Swinton, to BEF headquarters to write under
the byline ‘Eyewitness’, as the sole British official reporter on the Western Front.50 This
arrangement, which pleased no one, lasted until spring 1915, when Swinton was at
first joined and then replaced by newspaper reporters accredited to BEF headquarters.
Although, as has been repeatedly stressed, the Amiens Dispatch was not the sole
cause of any major subsequent event; without its publication, the British news blackout
on the Western Front might have continued for much longer than it did. Also, and
more speculatively, the BEF might not have fought in the Battle of the Marne; and the
Pals Battalions might not have been created in such large numbers.

Notes
1 For the 1878 recommendations, see The National Archives, Kew (TNA), WO 33/32,
‘Newspaper Correspondents with an Army in the Field and Military Attachés of
Foreign Powers at Head-Quarters’, 1878. For a reference to the 1889 regulations, see
TNA, WO 32/7138, ‘Revised Rules for Newspaper Correspondents at the Seat of War’,
1899 – the original War Office file of 1889 does not seem to be extant.
2 See Stephen Badsey, ‘War Correspondents in the Boer War’, in John Gooch (ed.),
The Boer War – Direction, Experience and Image (London, 2000), pp. 187–202; the
quotation from Kitchener is on p. 201.
3 TNA, CAB 17/91, ‘Control of Press’, which includes a draft parliamentary ‘Publication
of Naval and Military Information Act’ of 1905 with the preamble as quoted.
4 TNA, CAB 17/91, ‘Control of Press’, CID memorandum ‘Control of the Press’
summarizing these plans, 13 November 1911; and ‘Report and Proceedings’ of the
standing subcommittee, 1913.
5 TNA, DEFE 53/1, ‘A, WO, AM and PC, Minutes of Meetings 5 November 1912 to July
1939’, including the memorandum on the establishment of the standing committee
 35

Strategy and Propaganda 35

(the abbreviation stands for ‘Admiralty, War Office, Air Ministry [from 1918] and
Press Committee’), 5 November 1912.
6 Charles Edward Callwell, Experiences of a Dug-Out 1914–1918 (London, 1920), pp.
258–9; Simon Batten, ‘ “A School for Leaders”: What Did the British Army Learn
from the 1912 Army Manoeuvres?’ Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research,
93: 373 (2015), pp. 25–47.
7 Lucy Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman: A Biography [1939] (London, 1968), pp. 272–3;
M. L. Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War,
1914–18 (London, 1982), pp. 38–40.
8 TNA, DEFE 53/1, ‘A, WO, AM and PC, Minutes of Meetings 5 November 1912 to July
1939’, minutes of the meeting for Monday, 27 July 1914; George Riddell, Lord Riddell’s
War Diary 1914–1918 (London, 1933), pp. 1–3.
9 TNA, DEFE 53/1, ‘A, WO, AM and PC, Minutes of Meetings 5 November 1912 to July
1939’, minutes of the meeting for Wednesday, 30 July 1914.
10 George H. Cassar, Kitchener’s War: British Strategy from 1914 to 1916 (Washington,
DC, 2004), pp. 19–26; Nicholas A. Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic
Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA, 2012), pp. 201–2.
11 Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly, The Edwardian Army: Recruiting, Training and
Deploying the British Army 1902–1914 (Oxford, 2012); Spencer Jones, From Boer War
to World War: Tactical Reform of the British Army 1902–1914 (Norman, OK, 2012);
Stephen Badsey, ‘Sir John French and Command of the BEF’, in Spencer Jones (ed.),
Stemming the Tide: Officers and Leadership in the British Expeditionary Force 1914
(Solihull, 2013), pp. 27–50.
12 Brian Bond, The Victorian Army and the Staff College 1854–1914 (London, 1972), pp.
295–300; Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace (London, 2013), p. 303.
13 TNA, CAB 22/1, ‘Secretary’s Notes of a War Council Held at 10 Downing Street
August 5, 1914’ and ‘Secretary’s Notes of a War Council Held at 10 Downing Street
August 6, 1914’; Lambert, Planning Armageddon, pp. 201–3.
14 An example of this advertisement may be found as ‘The Army’, The Times, 7 August
1914, p. 5.
15 Lambert, Planning Armageddon, pp. 232–4.
16 Steven M. Miller, Volunteers on the Veld: Britain’s Citizen-Soldiers and the South
African War, 1899–1902 (Norman, OK, 2007), p. 57.
17 C. à Court Repington, The First World War 1914–1918, vol. 1 (London, 1920), p. 21.
18 ‘Lord Kitchener’s Plan by Our Military Correspondent’, The Times, 15 August 1914,
p. 7; Stuart Halifax, ‘ “Over by Christmas”: British Popular Opinion and the Short War
in 1914’, First World War Studies, 1: 2 (2010), pp. 103–22.
19 David Silbey, The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War 1914–1916 (London,
2005), pp. 15–48; Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the
Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2012), pp. 143–62;
Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War
(Cambridge, 2008), pp. 70–111; Laura Ugolini, Civvies: Middle-Class Men on the
English Home Front 1914–18 (Manchester, 2013), pp. 32–60.
20 Repington, The First World War, vol. 1, p. 22.
21 Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), House of Lords, 25 August 1914, vol. 17, cc. 501–4,
statement by Lord Kitchener.
22 Trevor Wilson (ed.), The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott 1911–1928 (London, 1970),
p. 100.
36

36 Propaganda and Conflict

23 Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock (eds), Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914–1916
(Oxford, 2014), p. 6, entry for 29 August 1914; Margot Asquith’s diary was not a day-
by-day record but written up at irregular intervals from notes that she kept.
24 Keith Wilson (ed.), The Rasp of War: The Letters of H. A. Gwynn to the Countess
Bathhurst 1914–1918 (London, 1988), p. 20, Gwynn to Bathhurst, 5 August 1914.
25 Sanders and Taylor, British Propaganda, pp. 19–20.
26 William Beach Thomas, A Traveller in News (London, 1925), p. 56.
27 Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told (London, 1920), pp. 4–6; Philip Gibbs, The Pageant
of the Years (London, 1946), pp. 143–7.
28 Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock (eds), H. H. Asquith Letters to Venetia Stanley
(Oxford, 1982), Asquith to Venetia, 24 August 1914, p. 191.
29 ‘British Army’s Stern Fight’, and ‘Namur Lost’, The Times, 25 August 1914, p. 6; Martin
J. Farrar, News from the Front: War Correspondents on the Western Front 1914–18
(Stroud, 1988), pp. 16–19.
30 Silbey, The British Working Class, p. 23; Pennell, A Kingdom United, p. 145.
31 Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies 1914–16 (Manchester,
1988), pp. 60–3.
32 Sir James E. Edmonds, Military Operations: France and Belgium, 1914, vol. 1 (History
of the Great War based on Official Documents; London, 1922), pp. 121–46.
33 Quoted in Nikolas Gardner, Trial by Fire: Command and the British Expeditionary
Force in 1914 (Westport, CT, 2003), p. 60.
34 Cited in many accounts, e.g., ibid., p. 61.
35 This is a well-known and now well-documented story which for understandable
reasons did not appear in the British official history of the campaign; see the account
by the senior cavalry officer involved, Sir Tom Bridges, Alarms and Excursions
(London, 1938), pp. 85–8; and John Hutton, August 1914: Surrender at St Quentin
(Barnsley, 2010).
36 [Anon.], The History of ‘The Times’: The 150th Anniversary and Beyond, 1912–1948,
part I: 1912–1920 (London, 1952), pp. 222–7; Reginald Pound and Geoffrey
Harmworth, Northcliffe (London, 1959), p. 469; Farrar, News from the Front,
pp. 18–23.
37 All quotations are from ‘Mons and Cambrai’, The Times, 30 August 1914, p. 1.
38 Quotation and facsimile of the letter in [Anon.], The History of ‘The Times’, part I,
pp. 222–3.
39 Ibid., p. 225; the version of the front page of The Times for 30 August 1914 held by the
British Library does not have these particular headlines.
40 Brock and Brock (eds), Asquith Letters to Venetia Stanley, Asquith to Venetia, 30
August 1914, pp. 139–40; Brock and Brock (eds), Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary,
p. 28, entries for 30–31 August 1914.
41 Brock and Brock (eds), Asquith Letters to Venetia Stanley, Asquith to Venetia, 31
August 1914, p. 209; Brock and Brock (eds), Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary, p. 32,
entry for 4 September 1914.
42 Wilson (ed.), The Rasp of War, p. 26, Gwynn to Bathhurst, 1 September 1914; Brock
and Brock (eds), Asquith Letters to Venetia Stanley, Asquith to Venetia, 31 August
1914, p. 209; Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, Papers of
Charles Masterman CFGM 6/5/1/3, Letter H. A. Gwynne to Charles Masterman, 31
August 1914.
43 This Press Bureau communiqué is quoted in full in ‘British Forces Intact’, The Times,
31 August 1914, p. 8; the attribution to Churchill is in Brock and Brock (eds), Asquith
Letters to Venetia Stanley, Asquith to Venetia, 31 August 1914, p. 209.
 37

Strategy and Propaganda 37

44 This communiqué is quoted in full in a later edition of The Times on the same day,
‘Four Days Battle’, The Times, 31 August 1914, p. 8.
45 Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), House of Commons, 31 August 1914, vol. 66, cc.
372–4, statement by the prime minister.
46 ‘The Attacks on The Times’, The Times, 1 September 1914, p. 9.
47 Hansard, HC, 31 August 1914, vol. 66, cc. 454–511, statements by F. E. Smith.
48 Brock and Brock (eds), Asquith Letters to Venetia Stanley, Asquith to Venetia, 1
September 1914, p. 213; for this controversial episode, see Badsey, ‘Sir John French’,
pp. 46–8.
49 Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, pp. 61–2, 79–80.
50 Ernest D. Swinton, Eyewitness: Being Personal Reminiscences of Certain Phases of the
Great War, Including the Genesis of the Tank (London, 1932), pp. 52–4.
38

38
 39

‘Thank God for the French Army’: Churchill on

the French Army between the two world wars
Antoine Capet

Following Hitler’s accession to the German Chancellery on 31 January, Churchill

said in the Commons on 23 March 1933, ‘I dare say that during this anxious month
there are a good many people who have said to themselves, as I have been saying for
several years: “Thank God for the French Army.” ’ What is interesting in his phrasing,
beyond his well-known act of faith in the French Army, is his reminder, ‘as I  have
been saying for several years’. One must note that he does not say ‘since the war’: this
would not be justified, because there was a time after the Great War when he was
distrustful of French intentions, fearing that a France reigning supreme militarily on
the continent would not resist the temptation of seeking hegemony, imposing policies
which adversely affected British interests. Later in his speech, he explained the self-
interested reason for his change of heart:

There is another and more obvious argument against our trying to weaken the
armed power of France at the present juncture. As long as France is strong and
Germany is but inadequately armed, there is no chance of France being attacked
with success, and, therefore, no obligation under Locarno will arise for us to
go to the aid of France. I am sure, on the other hand, that France, which is the
most pacific nation in Europe at the present time, as she is, fortunately, the most
efficiently armed nation in Europe, would never attempt any violation of the
Treaty which exists or commit an overt act against Germany without the sanctions
of the Treaty, without reference to the Treaty, and, least of all, in opposition to the
country with which she is on such amicable relations – Great Britain.1

A few weeks later, on 14 April, he repeated ‘I am glad to say’ in his plea in favour of
the British government doing nothing at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva to
weaken ‘the strongest military power’ in Europe:

One of the things we were told after the Great War would be a security for us was
that Germany would be a democracy with parliamentary institutions. All that has
been swept away. You have dictatorship – most grim dictatorship. . . .
40

40 Propaganda and Conflict

I will leave Germany and turn to France. France is not only the sole great
surviving democracy in Europe; she is also the strongest military power, I am glad
to say, and she is the head of a system of States and nations. France is the guarantor
and protector of all these small States I mentioned a few moments ago; the whole
crescent which runs right round from Belgium to Yugoslavia and Rumania. They
all look to France. When any step is taken, by England or any other Power, to try
to weaken the diplomatic or military security of France, all these small nations
tremble with fear and anger. They fear that the central protective force will be
weakened, and that then they will be at the mercy of the great Teutonic power.2

In The Gathering Storm (1948), his memoir of the inter-war years published fifteen
years later, Churchill reminisced, ‘I remember particularly the look of pain and
aversion which I saw on the faces of Members in all parts of the House when I said
“Thank God for the French Army.” ’3 We now know that this blind trust in the French
Army turned out to have been misplaced, as was demonstrated in May 1940 – but the
point is that a keen professional soldier like Churchill should have been so impressed
by what he had seen in the war that his admiration lingered into the 1930s.
His experience as a poilu4 on the actual front from 18 November 1915 to 6 May
1916  – his ‘hundred days’ in Paul Addison’s apt phrase5  – of course gave him first-
hand knowledge of the appalling conditions which prevailed in the trenches and the
tenacious self-sacrifice required if the men were to hold the lines in spite of everything.
‘I . . . ask you to submit my resignation to the King. I am an officer, and I place myself
unreservedly at the disposal of the military authorities, observing that my regiment
is in France’, he wrote to Asquith, the prime minister, on 11 November 1915,6 after
concluding that his ministerial career would never recover following the Gallipoli
disaster.7 The regiment in question was the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, in which
he had served since 1902, enjoying its summer camps, officially for training, but also
a great annual social occasion. When he disembarked at Boulogne on 18 November
1915, he was greeted by an orderly who took him directly to the commander-in-chief
of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, whose headquarters was in the
Château du Hamel, at Blendecques, near Saint-Omer. ‘I am staying tonight at GHQ in
a fine château, with hot water, beds, champagne & all the conveniences’, he wrote to his
wife, Clementine, after a fine dinner with the general.8 In other words, initially the only
inkling that he was in France came from châteaux and champagne. Sir John French
suggested that Churchill might receive command of a brigade in due course – but some
experience of trench warfare was necessary first. Churchill later wrote, to justify what
could appear as undeserved promotion:

Having been trained professionally for about five years as a soldier, and having
prior to the Great War seen as much actual fighting as almost any of the Colonels
or Generals in the British Army, I had certain credentials which were accepted in
military circles. I was not a Regular, but neither was I a civilian volunteer.9

As the Second Battalion of the Grenadier Guards was to be sent to the line on 20
November, Churchill was immediately attached to it, with the rank of major. The sector
 41

‘Thank God for the French Army’ 41

to be defended lay between Merville and Neuve-Chapelle. Churchill described the

grim landscape to his wife:

It is a wild scene. . . . Filth & rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defences &
scattered about promiscuously, feet & clothing breaking through the soil, water
& muck on all sides; & about this scene in the dazzling moonlight troops of
enormous rats creep & glide, to the unceasing accompaniment of rifle & machine
gun & the venomous whining & whirring of the bullets which pass overhead.10

His chance to see the French lines came very quickly. On 4 December, he wrote again
to his wife, ‘Tomorrow I go to the French 10th army under the chaperonage of Spiers.
It will be v[er]y interesting to see the scene of these terrific Arras battles & I  shall
learn a great deal of their system in the trenches.’11 A  London society acquaintance
of Churchill’s, Captain Spiers, as he then was,12 spoke perfect French and was serving
as liaison officer between the HQ of the British Expeditionary Force and the staff of
the French 10th Army. The visit duly took place the next day, and Churchill sent a
substantial account of his first meeting with French commanders since he had left the
Admiralty in May:

Yesterday I visited the 10th French army. I was received with much attention –
more so in fact than when I went as 1st Lord.13 Spiers showed me round these
terrible battlefields where at least 100,000 men have perished. The Germans
considerably refrained from shelling as usual & I  was able to visit all the
celebrated spots. I lunched with the HQ14 of the 33rd [French Army] Corps and
cheered them all up about the war & the future. The general [General Fayolle15]
insisted on our being photographed together  – me in my French steel helmet
& to make a background German prisoners were lined up under a gendarme
(I will send you a copy). In the evening I called on General D’Urbal16 to thank
him for letting me visit his lines & he made me stay for dinner. He commands 6
army corps.17

Churchill made much of his gift, in French military nomenclature casque Adrian
modèle 1915, light blue (the infantry’s colours). Apparently, he believed it to be more
resistant to penetration than the regulation British Brodie helmet – not yet in regular
service in the British Army anyway  – as he suggested to Clementine, ‘I have been
given a true steel helmet by the French wh[ich] I  am going to wear, as it looks so
nice & will perhaps protect my valuable cranium.’18 A few days later, he alluded to the
casque Adrian again: ‘My steel helmet is the cause of much envy. I look most martial
in it – like a Cromwellian. I always intend to wear it under fire – but chiefly for the
appearance.’19 Indeed, the proud ‘French Cromwellian’ wore it for two pictures which
have become extremely famous: the celebrated photograph with his friend Archibald
Sinclair, the future leader of a Liberal faction and future Minister for Air in 1940, taken
at Armentières on 11 February 1916; and his oil portrait by Sir John Lavery of 1916.20
In his papers, now at the Imperial War Museum, Lieutenant Colonel C.  E. L.  Lyne
recounts a funny incident connected with Churchill’s ‘queer attire’: at one stage, one of
42

42 Propaganda and Conflict

his artillerymen ‘came into Battery Headquarters in a state of some excitement’. He had
an alarming report to make:

I believe we have got a spy in our sector because I have just seen a bloke dressed
in a Frenchman’s steel helmet and queer garments and speaking in a gutteral [sic]
voice, who said ‘This is a good place for an OP.’21 Actually, . . . I thought it was a
bloody awful place, so I’m quite sure he is a spy, so let’s go and arrest him.22

Spiers took Churchill to see General Fayolle again on 29 December at Camblin, where
they had dinner and a ‘very interesting conversation’.23 Churchill confirmed in a letter
to Clementine that

we made an expedition to the French lines. I was able to go to the very farthest
point we hold on the Vimy Ridge, from which a fair view of the plain of Douai was
obtainable. I believe Spiers & I are the only Englishmen who have ever been on
this battle-torn ground.

He continued with an instance of what we would now call ‘fraternisation’:

The [German–French] lines are in places only a few yards apart . . . The sentries
looked at each other over the top of the parapet; & while we were in the trench the
Germans passed the word to the French to take cover as their officer was going to
order stone shelling. This duly arrived; but luckily it was directed upon the boyau24
up wh[ich] we had just come & not on that by wh[ich] we were returning.25

Sir Martin Gilbert reports a conversation with Spears who reminisced about that visit
fifty-five years later:

I tried to show him what would interest him. I took him to look down on the plain
of Douai. The French would be polite – they always were. But they never took him
seriously. He played no part in the military hierarchy, which was the one thing that
mattered in the French army. […]
Mostly, Winston looked. If there was a question to be put, he put it. There was
a place I took him to at Notre-Dame de Lorette. It was a ridge and a declivity. The
French kept attacking it, but nobody had ever been known to come back alive. This
interested Winston considerably. He wanted to know why, why, why. […]
Winston was very curious, very inquisitive to see what the French were doing.
It was a time when they were experimenting with all sorts of devices, like a
moving shield which you pushed along in front of the infantry. But when Winston
mentioned the idea of tanks, the French said:  ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler to flood
Artois and get your fleet here?’26

When Churchill received command of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers on
1 January 1916, he made for a place known as Moolenacker farm, near Méteren (Nord),
where the officers were billeted. Only ‘somewhat decrepit nags and a few mules’ were
 43

‘Thank God for the French Army’ 43

there among dilapidated buildings. The nearest town was Hazebrouck, 10 kilometres
away, where he does not seem to have met any French people, except the waiters of the
Hôtel de la Gare, where he took twenty of his officers to ‘an elaborate feast beginning
with oysters & lots of champagne’27 before they marched to the trench lines, on 23
January. On the front line, over in Belgium, at the ‘unpronounceable’28 Ploegsteert, soon
renamed Plug Street – just as Ypres had become Wipers – Churchill had his lodgings 3
km away at the local hospice, run by Belgian nuns, when not actually on trench duty.
He was to serve there until 6 May 1916, with substantial leaves of absence to attend
sessions at Westminster, since he had not resigned his seat as an MP, but with no more
occasions to meet French generals or see French troops at first hand until later in the
year. This ‘extraordinary episode’ in Churchill’s life was now over.29 Having actually
lived in the trenches, he felt for the rest of his life that this made him an authority on
the subject. Moreover, as a regimental officer, he felt that he knew far more than a staff
officer of the same rank – perhaps even more than generals safe in their châteaux in
the rear. To this, one must add the Francophilia which he had developed before the
war, and which was if anything reinforced by the warm welcome which he received
from General Fayolle and others – whether they thought highly of him or not is beside
the point: what matters is that he kept a fond memory of the VIP treatment which he
received at their hands when serving in the British Expeditionary Force. An army with
generals who seemed to recognize his merits could not be a bad army.
His period of purgatory on the back benches ended when Lloyd George made
him Minister of Munitions on 7 July 1917, his duties including close coordination
of the production of war supplies with his French opposite number, Louis Loucheur.
Fortunately, they got along extremely well. Churchill keenly seized all opportunities
to fly (his preferred mode of transport whenever possible) – to the Ministère in Paris
for talks, but also to the front to ascertain the real needs of the forces on the spot,
British or French. From London he kept up a steady correspondence with the French
civilian and military authorities, notably on the question of heavy artillery supplies.
This made Churchill a natural choice for Lloyd George on 28 March 1918, when – with
the war situation extremely worrying for the Allies following the initial success of the
great German spring offensive – he took the decision to send a personal emissary to
Clemenceau, the French prime minister – the ‘Tiger’, as he was called – and Foch, the
newly created generalissimo.
Churchill never tired of recounting these fateful days, when the outcome of the war
hung in the balance, and he was in France, in Paris or when he accompanied Clemenceau
on his tour of the battlefield, where they were greeted by Foch. The fullest account
appeared in a magazine article of 1926, ‘A Day with Clemenceau’, which he reprinted
in Thoughts and Adventures. Churchill proudly gives the answer which he got from the
Tiger when he asked the head of the British military mission in Paris to tell him that
he had been sent by Lloyd George with full powers to discuss the war situation: ‘Not
only shall Mr. Winston Churchill see everything, but I will myself take him to-morrow
to the battle and we will visit all the Commanders of Corps and Armies engaged.’30
Accordingly, the next morning, 30 March, Churchill duly reported to the Ministère de
la Guerre, from where there set off towards the zone of operations the distinguished
convoy of five cars ‘all decorated with the small satin tricolour of the highest authority’,
44

44 Propaganda and Conflict

with Clemenceau in the lead car and Churchill and Loucheur in the next. The first stop
was at the Beauvais town hall, where Foch was expecting them so that he could explain
his plans to them. Churchill was in thrall at ‘his extraordinary methods of exposition’,
for which ‘he had been long wondered at, laughed at, and admired in all the schools of
war at which he had been Professor or Chief ’.31 The generalissimo had prepared a large
map of the area affected by the German breakthrough. Unfortunately, Churchill tells
us, ‘he spoke so quickly and jumped from point to point by such large and irregular
leaps that I could not make any exact translation of his words.’32 Foch was in fact trying
to get his audience to follow the German advance on the map – at least this was what
Churchill gathered, continuing, ‘But the whole impression was conveyed to the mind
with perfect clearness by his unceasing pantomime33 and by his key phrases.’34 More
precisely, Churchill understood that Foch was narrating the unfolding of the German
offensive over the last five days. On each day, they gained less – until on the fifth, the
day before the scene in Beauvais, they hardly made any progress: ‘his whole attitude
and manner flowed out in pity for the poor, weak and miserable little zone of invasion
which was all that had been achieved by the enemy on the last day.’35 Then at last came
relief, even for those who had been able to catch only a few phrases of his agitated
French:

The worst was over. Such was the irresistible impression made upon every mind
by his astonishing demonstration, during which every muscle and fibre of the
General’s being had seemed to vibrate with the excitement and passion of a great
actor36 on the stage.37

Even better, Foch promised a turning of the tide:  ‘Stabilisation! Sure, certain, soon.
And afterwards. Ah, afterwards. That is my affair.’38 The final scene as described by
Churchill is also worthy of a great drama:

He stopped. Everyone was silent.

Then Clemenceau, advancing, ‘Alors, général, il faut que je vous embrasse.’
They both clasped each other tightly without even their English companions
being conscious of anything in the slightest degree incongruous or inappropriate.39

It is clear that this scene of public reconciliation – because such it was – made a deep
mark on Churchill’s view of France. The full conclusions were drawn only later, in Great
Contemporaries (1937), but the notion that the defence of France – putting Country
before Party – had absolute priority over personal and ideological disputes profoundly
impressed itself on Churchill’s mind – and memory – with disastrous consequences
in May 1940, when he misread the nature of the divisions among French élites, which
would turn out to be the insurmountable.
In Thoughts and Adventures, Churchill insists perhaps more on the military than on
the political dimension when he concludes, in respect of that Beauvais scene,

These two men had had fierce passages in the weeks immediately preceding these
events. They had quarrelled before; they were destined to quarrel again. But, thank
 45

‘Thank God for the French Army’ 45

God, at that moment the two greatest Frenchmen of this awful age were supreme –
and were friends. No more was said.40

One cannot fail to notice there Churchill’s thanks to the deity in a context very similar
to that of his later ‘Thank God for the French Army’. Churchill’s admiration for the
74-year-old Clemenceau appears as boundless when he next describes the dangerous
and exhausting foray which they made in the afternoon, not only within the range of
German guns but also of their rifles, into the Bois de Moreuil, which had just been
retaken by the Canadians. He gave an account of his day in a letter to Clementine
written on the morrow:

Yesterday was v[er]y interesting, for I saw with Clemenceau all the commanders
. . . The old man is v[er]y gracious to me & talks in the most confidential way.
He is younger even than I am!41 and insisted on being taken into the outskirts of
the action wh[ich] was proceeding N of Moreuil. . . . Stragglers, wounded horses,
blood & explosives gave a grim picture of war. I finally persuaded the old tiger to
come away from what he called ‘un moment délicieux’.
We dined with Pétain in his sumptuous train and I was much entertained by
Clemenceau. He is an extraordinary character, every word he says – particularly
general observations on life & morals – is worth listening to. His spirit & energy
indomitable. 15 hours yesterday over rough roads at high speed in motor cars.
I was tired out – & he is 76!42
He makes rather the same impression on me as Fisher:43 but much more
efficient & just as ready to turn round & bite! I shall be v[er]y wary.44

Events proved that Churchill had no reason to be wary, since he was never the object
of anything but benevolence on Clemenceau’s part then or later, notably in June when,
as Churchill recounts in his memoir of the war, The World Crisis: ‘M. Clemenceau had
authorised and even urged me to go everywhere, see everything and “tell Lloyd George
what we [the French] are doing.” ’45 This enabled Churchill to form an opinion of the
preparedness of the French forces facing the German offensive which had reached
Château-Thierry, 100 km from Paris:

I visited the armies of Generals Humbert and Deben[e]‌y, who awaited the expected
shock. I knew both these Generals personally, and was still better acquainted with
General Fayolle who commanded the Army Group. One could reach the front line
from Paris in less than three hours, and I followed with the closest attention the
improved methods of defence which the French were adopting.46

Generals Humbert (1862–1921), Debeney (1864–1943) and Fayolle (1852–1928) were

either dead or far too old to participate in the events of 1940 – but, as in the case of Foch
(1851–1929), these French Army commanders left Churchill with a fond memory and
an evident nostalgia for the days which he spent at their side during the Great War. He
also mentions two generals who were to play a crucial role in the Second World War –
though of course Churchill could not know that when he wrote The World Crisis. He
46

46 Propaganda and Conflict

has only praise for the first, who stood by Foch through thick and thin, ‘a certain young
General Weygand, alert, discreet and silent in manner, afterwards to become better
known’.47 On the other hand, Churchill never took to Pétain, ‘a skilful, frigid, scientific
soldier’ whose ‘views differed on important points from those of Foch’,48 notably on the
necessity of keeping reserves to defend Paris instead of sending troops to relieve the
British Expeditionary Force – a fact which Churchill never forgot.
Churchill was out of office during what he calls ‘General Nivelle’s Experiment’, to
which he devotes a whole chapter in The World Crisis. Here, therefore, we do not have
Churchill as witness, but Churchill as chronicler from secondary sources. Interestingly,
he does not blame Nivelle after the event for the deadly failure of his offensive, in
which ‘the French troops attacked . . . with their customary gallantry’,49 resulting in
a ‘slaughter, woeful to the shrunken manhood of France’,50 but the politicians who
trusted him in the first place:

Studying French war politics, one is struck first of all by their extreme complexity.
The number of persons involved, the intricacy of their relations, the swiftness and
yet the smoothness with which their whole arrangement is continually changed,
all baffle the stranger during the event, and weary him afterwards in the tale. The
prevailing impression is that of a swarm of bees – all buzzing together, and yet each
bee – or nearly every bee – with a perfectly clear idea of what has to be done in the
practical interests of the beehive.51

It now seems evident that he should have borne these words in mind in the 1930s,
since his description shows how easily this elaborate and delicate mechanism can
break down. It did not, of course, as it turned out, in 1918 – but Churchill’s narrative
of the conduct of the war shows how often the Allies were on the brink of disaster,
not least because of the wrong Frenchmen taking the wrong decisions to promote the
wrong French generals, as when the government enthusiastically appointed Nivelle
in December 1916. ‘On December 27, Joffre was promoted Marshal of France and
relieved of his command’52 – Churchill starkly writes of the man who left his HQ ‘which
had nursed so much glory’ – to ‘some comparatively junior officer . . . who had only
commanded a single army for five months’. Hence his ex post facto judgement: ‘The
appointment of General Nivelle was clearly a very questionable proceeding.’53
All these blots on the landscape, however, seemed to be deliberately forgotten and
ignored later in the 1920s, when Churchill wrote his articles in praise of the two great
French leaders of the recent war. Clemenceau’s obvious wish to establish the warmest
relations with Lloyd George, and Churchill, his occasional personal representative,
explain the latter’s extremely positive memory of him. This is reflected in another
article, taken up in Great Contemporaries, in which he was to reiterate his glowing
portrait, now with a more political slant:

The truth is that Clemenceau embodied and expressed France. As much as

any single human being, miraculously magnified, can ever be a nation, he was
France. . . . He represented the French people risen against tyrants – tyrants of the
mind, tyrants of the soul, tyrants of the body; foreign tyrants, domestic tyrants,
 47

‘Thank God for the French Army’ 47

swindlers, humbugs, grafters, traitors, invaders, defeatists  – all lay within the
bound of the Tiger and against them the Tiger waged inexorable war. Anti-clerical,
anti-monarchist, anti-Communist, anti-German  – in all this he represented the
dominant spirit of France.54

In 1929, Churchill had published an equally favourable article about Foch, also
reprinted in Great Contemporaries:

His undaunted and ever-flowing combative energy, as a man in contact with

other personalities and harrying remorseless detail, as a Commander with a front
crumbling under the German flail, was proved inexhaustible even by the Great
War. His power of endurance was the equal of his energy. […]
The magnitude of the events which Marshal Foch directed is of course beyond
compare in the annals of war. . . . In 1914 he had saved the day by refusing to
recognise defeat. . . . But 1918 was created for him. . . . Then it was that the
characteristic genius of Foch attained its full and decisive expression.55

Churchill’s description of the dual face of France and how it was encapsulated in the
contradictory, yet complementary, personality of the two joint saviours of the country
in 1918, as he saw them, has never been bettered. After his portrait of Clemenceau and
his representation of the dominant spirit of France, Churchill continued,

There was another mood and another France. It was the France of Foch – ancient,
aristocratic; the France whose grace and culture, whose etiquette and ceremonial
has bestowed gifts around the world. There was the France of chivalry, the France
of Versailles, and, above all, the France of Joan of Arc. It was this secondary and
submerged national personality that Foch recalled.56

The link is cleverly made with the events which eventually led to victory, ‘In the
combination of these two men during the last year of the war, the French people found
in their service all the glories and the vital essences of Gaul’,57 insisting first on the
elements which should have prevented any idea of reconciliation – ‘These two men
embodied respectively their ancient and their modern history. Between the twain there
flowed the blood-river of the Revolution. Between them towered the barriers which
Christianity raises against Agnosticism’58 – before pointing to the decisive factors of
convergence:

But when they gazed upon the inscription on the golden statue of Joan of Arc: ‘La
pitié qu’elle avait pour le royaume de France’ and saw gleaming the Maid’s uplifted
sword,59 their two hearts beat as one. The French have a dual nature in a degree
not possessed by any other great people. . . . It is an unending struggle which goes
on continually, not only in every successive Parliament, but in every street and
village of France, and in the bosom of almost every Frenchman. Only when France
is in mortal peril does the struggle have a truce. The comradeship of Foch and
Clemenceau illustrates as in a cameo the history of France.60
48

48 Propaganda and Conflict

Anyone not familiar with Churchill’s two articles might easily be excused for thinking
that they are the translation of some writings by General de Gaulle  – such is the
similarity in style and reasoning. Here, Churchill was clearly ‘more French than the
French’. Indeed, his Francophilia made him seize every occasion to go to Paris, to the
French Riviera and to the châteaux of his wealthy British and US friends in France. In
the 1920s, on top of his many private visits, his duties as Chancellor of the Exchequer
(1925–9) demanded sustained contact with Poincaré (Minister of Finance, 1926–8),
since this was the great period of international renegotiation of war debts – and France
had heavy repayments to make to the British Treasury. All this was connected with
the general question of German reparations and also, indirectly, with the proposals for
disarmament, since the money not spent on armaments could be used to accelerate the
repayment of foreign loans. Churchill, in spite of his best efforts to obfuscate the issue in
The Gathering Storm, was closely associated with what was called ‘the Ten-Year Rule’ –
the idea first formulated in 1919 and given a new lease of life by Churchill himself as
chancellor in 1928. It was abandoned only in March 1932: ironically, by the government
led by the former pacifist and arch-appeaser Ramsay MacDonald – for whom Churchill
only had scathing comments in private, in public and in his later writings, one reason
among many others being that MacDonald was extremely wary of the French, whom he
saw as a greater threat to peace than the Germans in the post-war years.
In spite of pushing for the Ten-Year Rule in order to reduce military and therefore
government expenditure, allowing him to contain taxation, Churchill had an innate
sense of Realpolitik which made him continue to court the company of French military
and political leaders. As soon as he became chancellor, he had to go to Paris for a
conference of Allied finance ministers on inter-Allied war debts  – but he took full
advantage of his visit to see important contacts whom he had made in France during
the war, as he explained to Clementine on the evening of his arrival:

Even meal times have been devoted to meeting people of consequence. I had an
interview with Herriot [Prime Minister] . . . We got on well. Tomorrow I  am to
see President Doumergue [President of the Republic] in the morning . . . & visit
Clemenceau in the evening & dine with Loucheur.61

The Churchill Papers contain a ‘Note of a Conversation with the President of the
French Republic’, written on the day of his visit, which shows that there were two
great themes in the interview  – the war debts, which formed the official reason for
the audience, but also, and perhaps above all, the future of relations between Britain,
France and Germany. To Doumergue, who insisted on ‘the vital importance of an
accord between France and England which should convince Germany that she had no
chance of splitting the Allies’,

I replied that the danger of German aggression in the west would not be so
great were it not for the situation in the northern east. Germany would perhaps
rest content with the arrangements of Versailles so far as her western frontiers
were concerned. I  was personally convinced that she would never acquiesce
permanently in the condition of her eastern frontier.62
 49

‘Thank God for the French Army’ 49

Two days later, back in Westminster, he gave a summary of his impressions to the
cabinet, beginning with the favourable financial arrangements obtained for the UK,
and continuing,

Speaking generally, I find the French Ministers and politicians depressed. Having
seen them so often during the last ten years, often in tragic hours, I have never found
them so tame and sad. For the moment there is no resentment towards us. All that
has passed to the United States. . . . In my opinion the new attitude of France, amid
all her difficulties, deserves recognition at the hands of His Majesty’s Government.
The position of France ground between the upper and nether millstones of
American avarice and German revenge affords full justification for her present
sombre mood.63

Again in January 1927, he writes from Dieppe to Clementine about the conversations
which he has just had in Paris: ‘Loucheur’s luncheon in Paris was a considerable affair.
[Aristide] Briand, [Raoul] Peret, Vincent Auriol, about 15 MPs representing leading
elements in all parties – & v[er]y advanced politicians.’64
In another memorandum to the cabinet after a visit to Poincaré, prime minister, in
Paris, again on debts and reparations, he wrote on 19 October 1928,

I think he wants a settlement and is prepared to run risks for it. I do not think there
is any danger of the French trying to manoeuvre us into an awkward corner. . . .
Everything then will rest with the Germans. It is for them to say what price in
prolonged national effort they are prepared to pay for the liberation of their soil
and their finances from foreign control.65

When Churchill left the Exchequer in May 1929, the question of debts and reparations
was still not solved – in fact it never would be. Worse for him, his disagreement over
the future of India made him fall out with the other leaders of the Conservative Party,
and he did not regain office until the outbreak of the Second World War. He no longer
had any opportunity to go to France in an official capacity – but this did not prevent
him maintaining his existing extensive network of friends and connections and making
new acquaintances among the rising men of French politics – Right or Left – while he
continued to cultivate the generals whom he had met as young men, like Gamelin, a
former member of Joffre’s staff who had stood out during the German spring offensive
of 1918.
He continued to be the guest of French leaders even though he could no longer
speak on behalf of the British government, or indeed the Conservative Party. The
occasion of these lunches, dinners and conversations was provided by his frequent
painting trips to France, which inevitably included a day or two in Paris on the way
to the French Riviera, usually at the château de l’Horizon, near Cannes, owned by
a wealthy American, Maxine Elliott, or to the château of Saint-Georges-Motel, near
Dreux (Eure-et-Loir), owned by Consuelo Balsan, née Vanderbilt, who had wed
Churchill’s cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, in 1895 and divorced in 1921 before
marrying the French industrialist Jacques Balsan.
50

50 Propaganda and Conflict

His personal relations with most of his contacts in France followed their own
trajectory regarding Germany, rearmament and appeasement. A  good example of a
deteriorating friendship is that with Pierre-Étienne Flandin, who had been in charge
of aviation from 1917 to 1920, and as such had collaborated with his British opposite
number, Churchill, Secretary of State for Air and War from 1919 to 1921. It all started
well when Flandin became prime minister in November 1934 and Churchill sent him
a telegram of congratulation. In July 1935, a month after Flandin’s fall, Churchill wrote
to invite him, with a reaffirmation of his faith in the Anglo-French entente in the face
of the unnamed German threat:

I rejoice that your calm strength is now in the service of France. I  feel greatly
the dangers which menace both our countries, and indeed what is still called
civilisation. But I cannot shake off that feeling which I have always had for the last
quarter of a century, namely that England and France will somehow or other come
through them together.66

In December, during a visit to Paris with Clementine, the Churchills had lunch with
him. Flandin became foreign minister in January 1936 (until June), and in March,
at the time of the decisive Rhineland Crisis, he went to London, having dinner at
Churchill’s flat on 12 March, as recalled by the latter in The Gathering Storm:

He told me that he proposed to demand from the British Government simultaneous

mobilisation of the land, sea and air forces of both countries, and that he had
received assurances of support from all the nations of the Little Entente and from
other states. He read out an impressive list of the replies received. There was no
doubt that superior strength still lay with the Allies of the former war. They had
only to act to win.67

Churchill was obviously impressed by Flandin’s determination – but because the former
was being ostracized by the British government, his only room for manoeuvre was to
strive to make the French position known to whichever British leaders of opinion he
could invite to listen to it, as he explains,

There was little I  could do in my detached private position, but I  wished our
visitor all success in bringing matters to a head and promised any assistance that
was in my power. I gathered my principal associates at dinner that night to hear
M. Flandin’s exhortations.68

As it turned out, ‘M. Flandin’s exhortations’ fell on deaf ears when they were repeated
to Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, who rejected the idea of any Anglo-
French intervention, knowing that public opinion was strongly against it.
Churchill of course never despaired, and he continued to cultivate Flandin’s good
graces. The culmination of their understanding was reached in May, when Churchill
asked Flandin to give him his estimates of French and German forces as they stood,
and in his detailed reply, Flandin also said, ‘I follow, from afar, your energetic and
 51

‘Thank God for the French Army’ 51

courageous action.’69 Churchill lunched twice with Flandin in the following months
on his way back from the French Riviera, first at Flandin’s home in Domecy-sur-Cure
(Yonne) on 13 September 1936,70 and in Paris on 16 February 1937. The turning point
in their relations came a year later, and their falling out developed gradually in 1938.
Churchill wrote to Clementine from the French Riviera on 8 January 1938 that fences
could still be mended: ‘Tomorrow I dine with Flandin at St Jean Cap-Ferrat. He has
lately been diverging somewhat from the policy in Foreign Affairs wh[ich] I pursue, &
I hope to bring him back to the field.’71 The talks did not go well, as Churchill told her
on 10 January:

The dinner with Flandin was very depressing, the food lamentable. But the account
he gave of France was most pessimistic. […] It looks as if these French Right-Wing
politicians thought that Germany would become undisputed ruler of Europe in
the near future.72

In another letter, on 22 March, he wrote, ‘Flandin has been behaving very badly, and
doing all manner of harm.’73
The final estrangement occurred on 27 March 1938, when, during another lunch
in Paris  – at the British Embassy, with Sir Eric and Lady Phipps  – Flandin argued
that the only possibility of recovery of strength for France was to bring down the
Popular Front and introduce government by decree, with Churchill objecting that
this ‘would alienate all Left sympathies in Great Britain for France’.74 In the autumn,
Flandin was one of the prominent ‘Munichois’75 – and all possibility of reconciliation
with Churchill was obliterated when he sent a telegram of congratulation to Hitler
after Munich. In The Gathering Storm, Churchill offers an explanation for that about-
turn – which, it can be supposed, applies equally well to other future ‘Vichyssois’76 and
collaborationists: at the time of the Rhineland Crisis, when Flandin came to London
in March 1936, Churchill advised him to ask to be received by Baldwin, who did
everything he could to discourage the French government from any military action
against Germany, from which Flandin is reported to have deduced that the only safe
course for France was to come to terms with Hitler. At the same time, with a far-
reaching retrospective argument, Churchill suggests that Baldwin’s weakness was able
to prevail over Flandin’s apparent wish to intervene because France no longer had
leaders of the right mettle: ‘Clemenceau or Poincaré would have left Mr. Baldwin no
option.’77
If relations with Flandin led to disappointment, Churchill had of course many
more positive experiences with the men that he had met during the Great War. During
his visit to France in September 1936, besides Flandin Churchill also saw his old
friend General Georges, who invited him to the military manoeuvres near Aix-en-
Provence on 9 September, followed by a visit to the Maginot Line. He duly followed the
manoeuvres as a guest of General Gamelin, now commander-in-chief of the French
Army. In the evening he wrote to Léon Blum, then prime minister: ‘I have had a most
interesting day with General Gamelin at the manoeuvres. I was very pleased with all
I saw.’78 In case one should think this was base flattery, totally insincere, he wrote to
Clementine a few days later using almost the same terms:
52

52 Propaganda and Conflict

The manoeuvres were v[er]y interesting. I  drove about all day with General
Gamelin the Generalissimo, who was communicative on serious topics. […] To
anyone with military knowledge it was most instructive. The officers of the French
army are impressive by their gravity & competence. One feels the strength of the
nation resides in its army.79

On 12 September, he had lunch with General Gamelin at Brignolles and on the

following day with Flandin at Domecy-sur-Cure, as we saw. From there, he went
back to the embassy in Paris before leaving on the 15th for the Maginot Line with the
British Military Attaché. After a ten days’ interlude in London, he was back in Paris
with Clementine on 24 September, and they had lunch with President Herriot, Flandin
and Paul Reynaud, then a backbench deputy for Paris. In the evening, he delivered a
major speech in English at the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs on the importance of Anglo-
French cooperation in defence of parliamentary democracy and Western civilization,
in contrast with ‘the doctrines of Comrade Trotsky and Dr Goebbels’.80
The next trip of major importance, though much shorter, took place in March 1938,
only a few days after the Anschluss. In The Gathering Storm, Churchill duly mentions
this important visit:

At the end of March, I  went to Paris and had searching conversations with the
French leaders. The Government were agreeable to my going to vivify my French
contacts. I stayed at our Embassy and saw in a continued succession many of the
principal French figures.81

He mentions the friendly atmosphere with Blum and Paul Reynaud. He also confirms
his difficulties with Flandin: ‘We argued for two hours.’ And he suggests that the first
cracks in his absolute confidence in the French Army appeared on hearing Gamelin, in
contrast with his views after the manoeuvres in September 1936:

Gamelin, who also visited me, was rightly confident in the strength of the French
Army at the moment, but none too comfortable when I questioned him upon the
artillery, about which he had precise knowledge.82

This was new, because until then Churchill had really been nervous only about the
French Air Force. He left Paris uneasy about the political developments there too.
Thus it seems clear that by the spring of 1938, behind the façade of absolute faith in
French military invincibility in case of attack – he knew of course that what was later
called the Maginot mentality precluded any French invasion of Germany – his faith
in France’s political will to fight and ability to renew the Union sacrée (the political
truce in the name of the sacred duty towards the nation) of the Great War was no
longer unshakeable. Churchill and Clementine went to Paris again in July 1938, as
official guests during the Royal Visit, and Churchill continued to follow political
developments in France extremely closely. He was once more a guest of honour, on the
official podium, for the 14 July military parade on the Champs-Élysées in 1939, when
General Gamelin invited him to come again to visit another part of the Maginot Line.
 53

‘Thank God for the French Army’ 53

Churchill’s last trip to France before the outbreak of war included his visit to the
Maginot Line from 14 to 17 August with Generals Gamelin and Georges, which
greatly satisfied him, and General Spears, who accompanied him as another old
friend of General Georges, noted, ‘Winston Churchill was pleased with the aspect
of the men, who greatly liked to be inspected by him.’83 Shortening his family
holiday in view of the deteriorating situation – the newspapers were full of rumours
about a spectacular German–Soviet pact – Churchill stopped in Paris on his way
back to England, having lunch once more with General Georges on 23 August. He
later wrote,

He produced all the figures of the French and German Armies and classified
the divisions in quality. The result impressed me so much that for the first time
I said: ‘But you are the masters.’84

Thus he seemed to have forgotten his earlier qualms, and it is of course too facile to
say after the event that Churchill was blinded by his faith in generals like Gamelin or
Georges, and that his nostalgia for the brotherhood in arms which had led to victory
in spite of all the difficulties in the Great War made him lose his otherwise undoubted
profound understanding of military affairs – that in fact he was a victim of his own
wishful thinking. What he did not perceive is that the ‘dual nature’ of France, which
his great heroes Foch and Clemenceau had been able to overcome in good time, would
resurface with a vengeance, with no men of their calibre being able to silence political
divisions in order to encourage the same will to fight in May 1940. It is indeed difficult
to explain why his experience of the ‘extreme complexity of French war politics’ and
how it affected the high command, as expressed in The World Crisis, does not seem
to have made him realize that whatever the prestige of men like Gamelin, Georges or
Weygand due to their glorious war record, this carried little weight in 1939–40 in the
face of the multifarious undercurrents of French political life, which overtly or covertly
promoted defeatism and surrender.

Notes
1 Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), House of Commons (HC), 23 March 1933, vol. 276,
cols 542 and 547.
2 Hansard, HC, 14 April 1933, vol. 276, cols 2792–3.
3 Winston Spencer Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1: The Gathering Storm
(Boston, MA, 1948), p. 77.
4 Poilu was the term used to designate French soldiers of the First World War.
5 Paul Addison, Churchill: The Unexpected Hero (Oxford, 2005), p. 84.
6 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 3: Companion, part 2: Documents, May 1915–
December 1916 (London, 1972), p. 1250.
7 When the Liberal prime minister, Asquith, reorganized his government, in May 1915,
following the repeated failure of the Anglo-French fleet to force the Dardanelles Straits,
he was compelled to remove Churchill from the Admiralty as the price of Conservative
support.
54

54 Propaganda and Conflict

8 Letter to Clementine, 18 November 1915, in Mary Soames (ed.), Speaking for

Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (London, 1998),
p. 113.
9 Winston Spencer Churchill, ‘With the Grenadiers’, in Winston Spencer Churchill
(ed.), Thoughts and Adventures [1932] (London, 1947), p. 68.
10 Letter to Clementine, 23 November 1915, Speaking for Themselves, p. 116.
11 Ibid., 4 December 1915, p. 126.
12 He changed his name to Spears in 1918 and ended his career as General Spears.
13 An interesting, if indirect, reflection on the sense of priorities in the two countries.
In Britain, the Senior Service was of course the navy – in France (or Germany and
Russia) the crucial force was the land army.
14 Located at Camblain L’ Abbé, north-west of Arras (Pas-de-Calais).
15 General Fayolle was then in command of the 33rd Army Corps. He rose to marshal of
France in 1920.
16 Commander-in-chief of the 10th French Army, who had led the troops during the
disastrous Battles of Artois (Arras) in 1915. He fell from favour in April 1916 and
never again received command of an army.
17 Letter to Clementine, 4 December 1915, in Gilbert, Churchill, vol. 3: Companion,
part 2, p. 1314.
18 Letter to Clementine, 8 December 1915, Speaking for Themselves, p. 129.
19 Ibid., 12 December 1915, p. 132.
20 ‘Winston Churchill, Wearing a French Poilu’s Steel Helmet’, now at Chartwell, together
with the famous helmet exhibited below the canvas.
21 A military operation.
22 IWM 80/14/1, quoted in Michael Paterson, Winston Churchill: His Military Life, 1895–
1945 (Newton Abbot, 2005), p. 218.
23 Gilbert, Churchill, vol. 3: Companion, part 2, pp. 1345–6.
24 A narrow passage leading from one trench to another.
25 Gilbert, Churchill, vol. 3: Companion, part 2, p. 1347.
26 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 3: The Challenge of War: 1914–1916
(London, 1971), p. 625.
27 Letter to Clementine, 23 January 1916, Speaking for Themselves, p. 159.
28 Christopher Isherwood, Kathleen and Frank: The Autobiography of a Family
(New York, 2015), p. 486.
29 Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness [2001] (London, 2002), p. 75.
30 Winston Spencer Churchill, ‘A Day with Clemenceau’, in Winston Spencer Churchill
(ed.), Thoughts and Adventures, p. 123.
31 Ibid., p. 124.
32 Ibid., p. 125.
33 A term of praise in Churchill’s view, since he was a keen admirer of pantomime,
as made clear in his essay, ‘Everybody’s Language’, first published in Collier’s (26
October 1935) and reprinted as ‘Charlie Chaplin’ in Winston Spencer Churchill, Great
Contemporaries: Churchill Reflects on FDR, Hitler, Kipling, Chaplin, Balfour, and Other
Giants of his Age, ed. James W. Muller [1937] (Wilmington, DE, 2012), pp. 381–9.
34 Churchill, ‘A Day with Clemenceau’, p. 125.
35 Ibid.
36 Again, words of great praise from a Churchill who was an undoubted connoisseur and
practitioner. See Jonathan Rose, The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (New
 55

‘Thank God for the French Army’ 55

Haven, CT, 2014). Rose quotes an unlikely admirer, Neville Chamberlain: ‘Winston’s

[…] speeches are extraordinarily brilliant and men flock in to hear him as they
would to a first class entertainment at the theatre. The best show in London, they say’
(p. 189).
37 Churchill, ‘A Day with Clemenceau’, p. 126.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Clementine would have known that Clemenceau was in fact thirty-three years older
than Churchill and readily understood his figure of speech.
42 Clemenceau was born on 28 September 1841 – he was therefore in his 75th year.
43 As First Sea Lord, the old Admiral Fisher (born in 1841, like Clemenceau) had had
a tempestuous relationship with his theoretical civilian master, the First Lord of the
Admiralty, Churchill, in 1915, over the Dardanelles.
44 Letter to Clementine, 31 March 1918, Speaking for Themselves, p. 206.
45 Winston Spencer Churchill, The World Crisis [1923] (New York, 1993), vol. 2, p. 1322.
46 Ibid.; see also Robin Prior, Churchill’s ‘World Crisis’ as History (London, 1983).
47 Churchill, The World Crisis, p. 1325.
48 Winston Spencer Churchill, ‘Foch the Indomitable’, Nash’s Magazine (July 1929).
Reprinted as ‘Marshal Foch’ in Great Contemporaries, p. 188.
49 Churchill, The World Crisis, p. 1164.
50 Ibid., p. 1166.
51 Churchill changed the wording in the ‘abridged edition’ in one volume which he
drafted in 1930. See The World Crisis: An Abridgment of the Classic Four-Volume
History of World War I (New York, 1992), p. 708.
52 A clear example of that ‘extreme complexity’ of ‘French war politics’.
53 Churchill, The World Crisis, p. 1150.
54 Winston Spencer Churchill, ‘Tiger of France’, Collier’s (29 November 1930). Reprinted
as ‘Clemenceau’, in Great Contemporaries, p. 290.
55 Churchill, ‘Foch the Indomitable’, reprinted as ‘Marshal Foch’, in Great
Contemporaries, pp. 184, 190.
56 Churchill, ‘Tiger of France’, reprinted as ‘Clemenceau’, in Great Contemporaries,
p. 291.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 As anyone going to see the golden statue on Place des Pyramides (near the Louvre)
today will notice, there is no such inscription and she does not brandish a sword,
simply holding a standard. She does have a drawn sword on the plain bronze statue of
Place Saint-Augustin, however.
60 Churchill, ‘Tiger of France’, reprinted as ‘Clemenceau’, in Great Contemporaries,
p. 291.
61 Letter to Clementine, 10 January 1925, Speaking for Themselves, p. 288.
62 Churchill Papers 18/21, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5: Companion
(London, 1979); repr. The Churchill Documents, vol. 11: The Exchequer Years, 1922–
1929 (Hillsdale, MI, 2009), p. 339.
63 Ibid., p. 341.
64 Letter to Clementine, 28 January 1927, Speaking for Themselves, p. 306.
65 Churchill Papers 18/21, The Exchequer Years, 1922–1929, p. 1363.
56

56 Propaganda and Conflict

66 Letter to Pierre Étienne Flandin, 23 July 1935, Churchill Papers 2/236, in Gilbert,
Churchill, vol. 5: Companion; repr. The Churchill Documents, vol. 12: The Wilderness
Years, 1929–1935 (Hillsdale, MI, 2009), p. 1215.
67 Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p. 195.
68 Ibid., p. 195.
69 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, 1874–1965, vol. 5: 1922–1939 (London, 1976),
p. 738.
70 Letter to Clementine, 13 September 1936, Speaking for Themselves, p. 417.
71 Ibid., 8 January 1938, p. 432.
72 Ibid., 10 January 1938, p. 433.
73 Letter to Ava Wigram, 22 March 1938, Churchill Papers 1/323, in Martin Gilbert,
Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5: Companion (London, 1979); repr. The Churchill
Documents, vol. 13: The Coming of War, 1936–1939 (Hillsdale, MI, 2009), p. 956.
74 Sir Eric Phipps to Lord Halifax, 27 March 1938, Phipps Papers, in ibid., p. 961.
75 The name given in France to the supporters of the Munich Agreements in 1938.
76 The name given in France to the supporters of Pétain’s Vichy régime after June 1940.
77 Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p. 198.
78 Letter to Léon Blum, 8 September 1936, Spencer-Churchill Papers, in The Coming of
War, 1936–1939, p. 340.
79 Letter to Clementine, 13 September 1936, Speaking for Themselves, p. 417.
80 Gilbert, Churchill, 1874–1965, vol. 5: 1922–1939, p. 788.
81 Churchill, The Gathering Storm, pp. 281–2.
82 Ibid., p. 282.
83 Gilbert, Churchill, 1874–1965, vol. 5: 1922–1939, p. 1102.
84 Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p. 400.
 57

Art under dictatorship: Propaganda,

plunder and provenance
Ulf Schmidt and Katja Schmidt-Mai

The Nazi art trove

In September 2010, during a routine border check, an elderly man, dressed in a fur
coat and travelling alone on the train from Zurich to Munich, caught the attention of
German officials. Cornelius Gurlitt, born in 1932 in Hamburg, the son of the Jewish art
dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt – who had amassed one the most extensive art collections
during the Third Reich  – was unable to produce any identity papers; together with
the fact that he was carrying €9,000 in cash, the officials at first suspected a case of
money laundering across the Swiss–German border. Little did they know that the case
would rapidly turn into one of the most profound post-war public relation disasters for
the German authorities in respect of dealing with art that had been confiscated, sold
and traded during the Nazi period and thereafter. Official checks on Gurlitt’s address
during the initial money-laundering inquiry revealed that he lived alone, was not
registered with the local authorities, neither in Munich nor anywhere else, and had no
bank account or social security number, findings which aroused the suspicions of the
District Prosecutor of Augsburg. In February 2012, after obtaining a search warrant
on the grounds of suspected tax evasion and embezzlement, the authorities searched
Gurlitt’s flat in the well-heeled district of Schwabing, Munich. What they discovered –
and subsequently confiscated  – far exceeded their expectations:  a treasure trove of
1,224 unframed paintings and drawings originating mostly from the late nineteenth
century and the first half of the twentieth century.1 For several decades, the apartment
had served as Gurlitt’s headquarters and warehouse, from which he would travel to
Switzerland to sell his treasures to trusted art dealers, and thus fund his reclusive
lifestyle.
The resulting media interest was unprecedented. Under the headline ‘Art Trove in
Germany Abounds in Mysteries’, the International New York Times published a series of
images of the recovered artworks, including paintings by artists such as Marc Chagall,
Henri Matisse, Otto Dix and Max Liebermann, and a landscape painting by Canaletto.2
Whether the confiscation of one of the largest post-war caches of ‘Nazi looted art’,
as some newspapers called it, was lawful or whether it constituted a case of judicial
58

58 Propaganda and Conflict

overreach has been the subject of debate ever since the magazine Focus broke the story
in November 2013. Since then, Gurlitt and looted art have been the subject of countless
publications and documentary films of diverse quality and scholarly integrity – often
by journalists keen to benefit from the publicity they themselves had generated – and
were the ‘inspiration’ for the feature film Am Abend aller Tage (2017).3 Most recently,
his collection has been at the heart of two co-organized exhibitions in Bonn and Bern.4
For the general public, on the other hand, the case apparently offered proof that ‘looted
art existed in German homes by the bucketful and has fed the descendants of the
perpetrators until today’.5
The ‘Taskforce’ set up by the Bavarian and federal authorities under the leadership
of Ingeborg Berggreen-Merkel and her team of experts to investigate the Schwabinger
Kunstfund (Schwabing Art Find) promoted the importance of transparency and art
historical research; yet, like the Augsburg District Prosecutor, who was criticized for
confiscating the Gurlitt collection illegally, it quickly ran into complex legal territory.
Copyright lawyers challenged the Taskforce for publishing online images of those of
Gurlitt’s artworks which were ‘suspected’ of being Nazi-looted art, arguing that not
only Gurlitt was the rightful owner of the art collection but also that its confiscation
had been unlawful. The aim of establishing what constituted looted art and artworks
that had been traded by and during the Third Reich, and returning them to their
rightful owners, found itself on a collision course with strict German data protection
and property laws. When in 2016 the Taskforce reported its findings, the scale of the
embarrassment became clear. Out of a total of almost 1,500 artworks, only five items
were identified as ‘Nazi looted art’. Summing up the ‘Gurlitt case’, Die Welt noted, ‘Once
again this great, powerful, prosperous and proud Germany has been unable to come to
terms with her past – without demonstrable sovereignty, and with even less intellectual
brilliance.’6

Propaganda, plunder and provenance – a

conceptual triangle

The Gurlitt case raises a series of challenging questions about art under the Third
Reich:  given the resources and expertise available, why were the Taskforce officials
able to shed so little light on the world of German art dealers and the art trade
more generally in the first half of the twentieth century? Why did those tasked with
investigating the case take such a legalistic and conceptually narrow approach in
examining Gurlitt’s collection, thereby overlooking important political, economic and
art historical factors? For example, why did the Taskforce use the category of ‘from
the Degenerate Art exhibition’7 to justify the discontinuation of further research
into these artworks? We still know far too little about the art trade under the Nazis,
which makes it all the more puzzling that potential lines of inquiry were cut short.
How did Hildebrand Gurlitt and other Nazi art dealers acquire artworks that had been
confiscated and subsequently exhibited in the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition? How did
they trade in and with looted art? How did the process of ‘swapping’ and ‘exchanging’
looted art for other types of art work in practice? How did Gurlitt senior access and,
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more importantly, bequeath his extensive art collection to his family in the post-war
period, out of the public eye, and without any meaningful level of oversight? How do
we explain that the victims and their descendants were left for decades in a political and
moral vacuum, without recourse to the law or the authorities, and unable to reclaim
their artworks from those who had unlawfully obtained them? These are exceedingly
difficult and complex questions to answer. They require an interdisciplinary approach
combining propaganda studies and the history and politics of cultural plunder by
the Nazi regime  – itself an integral part of the Third Reich’s racial and geopolitical
ambitions during the Second World War – with detailed provenance research about
the artworks acquired.
This chapter addresses the extent to which the Nazi propaganda campaign, including
the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition of 1937, and the administrative machinery which
managed propaganda under Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, was intricately
connected to the Nazi programme of cultural plunder and its associated trade in looted
art. It suggests that the two processes, and the underlying organization, need to be seen
conceptually and historically together, since the former established the conditions for,
and significantly influenced, the latter. The chapter first examines these developments
from a temporal perspective  – through the inter-war period and the Second World
War – before exploring the attempts by the Allied authorities to recover, albeit largely
unsuccessfully, looted art from suspected Nazi art dealers. It then discusses the detailed
provenance of two paintings in order to illustrate the great complexity of the restitution
claims which the rightful owners of the artworks and their heirs had to pursue over
several decades. It concludes – as a result of the two case studies – that we need to
know the provenance of a greater number of individual artworks handled by the Third
Reich if our aim is to understand the trade networks and historical continuities of
the art market more clearly. This chapter argues that historians, whether of politics/
society or of art, need to take account of the three categories – propaganda, plunder
and provenance – as well as historical developments, simultaneously or consecutively,
rather than focus exclusively on any one area, to ensure that the political history
of propaganda and plunder is closely interwoven with the parallel provenance of
individual artworks. Using newly discovered and unusual sources such as invoices,
inventories, sales ledgers and exchange contracts, and combining historical with
art historical methodologies, it aims to make not only a historiographical but also a
conceptual and methodological contribution to the dominant role of propaganda and
the shifting political economy of the art market during the Third Reich.
The subject of ‘looted art’ is rapidly becoming part of, and needs to be integrated in,
a cross-disciplinary and global debate that takes account of the international trade in,
and exchange of, cultural artefacts. This body of literature looks at the intricate networks
linking artists, museums, art collectors, intellectual property, commodity and copyright
issues, international restitution agreements and the role and methods of provenance
research. The Taskforce addressed hardly any of these issues. The recent publication
of a special issue on ‘The Restitution of Looted Art in the Twentieth Century’ in the
Journal of Contemporary History, and of the book Der Gurlitt-Komplex. Bern und die
Raubkunst, shows the growing importance and broadening appeal of the subject among
the scholarly community.8 This chapter suggests that a lack of understanding about the
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way in which the art market and its associated networks functioned before, during
and after the Third Reich is responsible for the inability of the German authorities to
approach the subject of Nazi-looted art in a more contextualized and nuanced fashion.
Despite multiple studies on the subject, including Jonathan Petropoulos’s
authoritative Art as Politics in the Third Reich,9 and his equally important study
about the Nazi art world,10 scholars have not yet examined or fully understood the
interconnectedness between Nazi propaganda and its concerted programme of war-
time plunder.11 David Welch was among the first to draw attention to the propaganda
dimension of the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition; yet, scholars failed to link the study
of propaganda with the trade in art and culture which accelerated on the eve of the
war.12 Goebbels’s well-known diaries, edited by Elke Fröhlich, have likewise not been
studied with the expanding market of modern and ‘looted’ art in mind.13 What is more,
scholars have almost entirely overlooked the collection of the Treuhandverwaltung
von Kulturgut (Trusteeship for the Administration of Cultural Assets), located at
the Federal Archives in Koblenz, which contains information about dozens of Nazi
art traders in occupied Europe and the complex web of financial and non-financial
transactions involving looted art during the war. This is not just a story about the
seemingly ambivalent ‘emotions’ of art plunderers and their ‘Faustian bargain’ with the
Nazi regime – this ‘psychic drama’, as Petropoulos has called it – but also one which
takes a closer look at their profound, and often ruthless, financial interests which
determined much of their decision making.14 The previously unexplored sources
mentioned above (such as invoices, receipts, inventories, bank statements, ledgers
recording acquisitions, sales and exports and exchange agreements) can help us to
illuminate, and better understand, that opaque historical and temporal space within
which state agencies and art dealers not only obtained valuable artworks but also sold,
swapped and traded them across Europe and the world.
The ways in which art dealers acquired artworks in the Third Reich, more often
than not illegally, require particularly close scrutiny. For example, we need to explore –
through detailed provenance research – what a ‘sale for a purpose’ really meant, when
the sale of artwork was linked to the planned emigration of the seller and his or her
family and relatives, or a ‘sale under duress’, when sellers were placed under undue
pressure, threatened or intimidated into selling a particular artwork, often below
market value. Scholars also need to study how owners of artworks tried to protect their
treasured objects, for example through a ‘sale to deny access’, when works of art were
sold or transferred as a loan to museums and institutions to prevent Nazi authorities
from confiscating them. In each of these instances, it is important to understand the
context in which a particular artwork was transferred from one owner to another, and
whether this transfer, and thus ownership, can be classed as legitimate from a legal and,
more importantly, moral perspective.
The main focus of the Taskforce was to determine the extent to which artworks
could be classed as ‘Nazi looted art’ (NS-verfolgungsbedingt entzogen Kulturgut).
A  closer look at the artworks under examination reveals the extent to which the
applied categories raise more questions than answers. Out of a total of 1,497 artworks
examined,15 the Taskforce classed 507 as ‘from the outset untainted’ (vornherein
unbelastet) because they originated from ‘Gurlitt’s family property’ (Gurlittschen
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Familienbesitz), a particularly questionable category in the context of the Nazi art

trade. Of those 507 artworks, 231 items were identified as having been confiscated by
the Nazi regime as part of the 1937 ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition. In other words, the fact
that certain artworks had been forcibly removed was seen as evidence by the Taskforce
that these artworks were not ‘Nazi looted art’, and that no further investigation into
their provenance was warranted. This meant that the Taskforce and others saw the
Nazi campaign against ‘degenerate art’ conceptually and historically separate from the
Nazi programme of cultural plunder in the occupied territories. Art dealers such as
Gurlitt apparently turned into ‘perpetrators’ (Täter) only when they traded in ‘looted
art’ towards the end of the war.16 Their prior involvement in the confiscation, sale
and exchange of ‘degenerate art’, on the other hand, was not just seen as acceptable
and blameless but was also portrayed as an almost heroic act of ‘rescuing’ mostly
expressionist artworks from their otherwise inevitable destruction by the Nazi regime.
This is a position which the present chapter aims to challenge.
The Taskforce classified a total of 500 Gurlitt’s artworks as ‘problem images’
(Problem-Bilder), and, of these, 5 were identified as ‘definitely’ belonging to the
category of ‘Nazi looted art’. Yet in 119 cases, there was either a ‘strong suspicion’
or ‘specific indicators’ which seemed to suggest that the artworks were ‘Nazi looted
art’, and in 344 cases there was only poor or no evidence about the provenance of
the artworks available. Taken together, in 463 cases, the artworks may well have been
stolen, looted, sold under pressure and so forth during the Third Reich. If we add to
this list an estimated total of 489 artworks which the Nazis had impounded for the
‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition,17 and which mysteriously found their way into Hildebrand
Gurlitt’s art collection, then we are dealing with almost 1,000 artworks which have to
be examined and contextualized within the propaganda history of the Third Reich and
the trade in art by Nazi art dealers.

Propaganda: The ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition 1937

Given the Nazi attack on modernity and the modernist movement (e.g. expressionism,
Dadaism, new objectivity, cubism, futurism, etc.), itself associated with left-wing
or liberal politics, it is perhaps not surprising that art and culture were dramatically
affected by the Nazi assumption of power. The creation of the Reich Chamber of Culture,
which was closely affiliated with Goebbels’s Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment
and Propaganda, spearheaded the envisaged ‘reconstruction of German cultural life’.
In practice, this meant the financial support, production and promotion of Aryan art
‘consistent with Nazi ideals’. Artists and art critics were required to apply for membership
of the Reich Chamber. Under Goebbels’s leadership, officials such as the SS officer Heinz
Hinkel also engaged in a concerted campaign to remove Jews from cultural and artistic
life. Divided into seven sub-departments, the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, headed from
1936 by Adolf Ziegler, was instrumental in confiscating the artworks for the ‘Degenerate
Art’ exhibition which opened at the Hofgarten in Munich in July 1937.18
The exhibition coincided with inauguration of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst
(House of German Art) in Munich in order to juxtapose ‘degenerate’ art with
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state-approved German neo-classical art. In his speech at the opening, Adolf Hitler
made it plain that modern art had become ‘racially corrupted’ by depicting ‘misformed
cripples and cretins, women who inspire only disgust, men who are more like wild
beasts’.19 He called upon the cultural elite to resist the reduction of art to the ‘level of
fashions in dress’ and to reject impressionism, futurism, cubism and Dadaism. Art
that was costly and could not be understood by ordinary people was not necessarily
good, he argued. Valuable art had to be eternal rather than transitory, in Hitler’s view.
The Nazis were determined to ‘make a clean sweep’ of modern art, replacing it with
works of art reflecting the ‘experiences of the German people’.20 Modern art would
not be destroyed, though, but exhibited as ‘documents’ depicting cultural and racial
decline. Hitler not only wanted to educate the German people to collectively reject
modern art but also threatened artists with forced sterilization if their ‘defects of vision’
turned out to be hereditary; if, on the other hand, the artists’ ‘impressions’ were a
form of ‘humbug’ that they themselves did not believe in, they would face criminal
prosecution.21 According to Welch, even for the Nazis the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition
and its associated propaganda represented an ‘extraordinary statement . . . of art that
was to be abominated’.22 The exhibition nonetheless offered art dealers with close
connections to the regime an opportunity to acquire some of the most sought-after
pieces of modern art at below market-value prices. Having learned to read between
the lines, experienced art dealers such as Hildebrand Gurlitt knew that the official
rejection of modern art by the regime, and the subsequent dumping of large quantities
of art onto the art market, would result in a drop in value of the artworks and the likely
emigration of the artists.
Goebbels first conceived the idea for a separate ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition
representing the Weimar ‘era of decay’ (Verfallszeit) in June 1937, following Hitler’s
dismissal of the exhibition jury for their selection of artworks for the Große Deutsche
Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) – to be held at the House of German
Art in Munich  – and their replacement by his personal photographer Heinrich
Hoffmann. Although interested in modern art and art history, Goebbels was careful not
to alienate Hitler on issues of culture and taste. On 4 June, after introducing measures
to clear out any Jews from the Reich Chamber of Culture – ‘There are just too many
Jews’ – Goebbels pondered about the prospect of a ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition ‘so the
people can learn to see and understand’.23 The alternative ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition
was initially meant to be staged in Berlin. The next day, Hitler travelled with his
entourage to Munich to inspect the House of German Art and flew into a rage about the
paintings selected for the Great German Art Exhibition, telling Goebbels on their train
journey to Regensburg that he would rather postpone the exhibition for a year than to
‘exhibit such rubbish’ (als so einen Mist aus[zu]stellen).24 Two weeks later, as Goebbels
noted, the Great German Art Exhibition had been reduced to 500 images: ‘everything
else [has been] thrown out’; this gave him a ballpark figure for the number of
artworks to be shown in the alternative exhibition which by now was to be staged
in Munich.25 At around the same time, he received a report from Heinrich Himmler
about concentrations camps and decided to see one of the camps for himself.26 For
the Nazi leadership, measures to ‘rid’ Germany of Jews, the handicapped and political
opponents through discrimination, sterilization, intimidation and imprisonment, and
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to ‘cleanse’ the arts and culture of Bolshevist tendencies (Kulturbolschewismus) were

part and parcel of its concerted policies of exclusion designed to eliminate all that was
deemed to be un-German and unhealthy in society. Initial objections to the exhibition
by Hans Schweitzer (Goebbels’s Reich Commissioner for Artistic Design, in charge of
producing Nazi propaganda posters), Albert Speer (Hitler’s architect) and others were
quickly overcome.27 For Goebbels, the alternative exhibition was an attempt to conceal
profound ideological differences with leading empire builders such as Nazi ideologue
Alfred Rosenberg and gloss over the mediocre quality of the artworks exhibited in the
Great German Art Exhibition.28 Compared to the relatively modest viewing figures
for the Great German Art Exhibition, there is a certain irony in the ‘Degenerate Art’
exhibition’s success: it was seen by more than two million visitors and shown in thirteen
venues in Germany and Austria.29
To spread responsibility across the administration for the cultural ‘cleansing
action’ (Säuberungsaktion)  – that is, the selection of artworks for the ‘Degenerate
Art’ exhibition – while asserting the dominant position of the Propaganda Ministry,
Goebbels instructed Ziegler to appoint a commission of leading Nazi artists, art
historians and cultural experts.30 On 30 June, Hitler authorized Goebbels to stage the
exhibition.31 The next day, Goebbels gave the commission the go-ahead to confiscate
works of art as yet another measure to force Germany’s cultural elite into submission.32
For about two weeks in early July 1937, and under Ziegler’s leadership, the five-man
commission toured thirty-two collections in twenty-eight cities and initially confiscated
5,328 works of art deemed to represent ‘decadence’, ‘weakness of character’, ‘mental
disease’ and ‘racial impurity’. Of these, the Nazis exhibited a total of 650 paintings,
sculptures and drawings of artists such as Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Chagall, Max
Ernst, Dix, Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
Lyonel Feiniger and Franz Marc.33 The artworks were exhibited in the dark and narrow
rooms of the Munich Institute of Archaeology; they were hung close to each other, at
times displayed without frames, and derogatory slogans covered the walls. Misleading
labels indicating how much money museums had spent for the artworks during the
inflationary years of the 1920s portrayed the artists as Jewish–Bolshevist conspirators.
As in the field of racial propaganda films, Goebbels’s ministry had taken the time-
tested – though not particularly subtle – approach of contrasting the alleged aesthetic
ugliness and degeneracy of modern art with the idealized health and beauty of neo-
classical art exhibited in the House of German Art.34
The confiscation of artworks and cultural artefacts was decided at the highest levels
of government. Instructed by Goebbels by telephone to ‘cleanse the museums’ on 25
July, and authorized by Hitler to ‘clear out all museums’ days later, Ziegler and his
commission continued to confiscate modern art until October 1937.35 By then the
commission had confiscated a total of approximately 17,000 artworks from over 100
museums, but had stopped short of plundering private collections. Following a three-
hour inspection tour of the confiscated material in the presence of Speer and Ziegler
in November, Goebbels was pleased to see that it contained few borderline cases; the
rest was ‘such crap’ (derartiger Dreck), he noted, that one could vomit.36 The Nazis
subsequently sold off, often below market value, most of the artworks confiscated
for the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition; at the end of 1938, Goebbels noted, ‘All saleable
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pictures will be sold to foreign countries, the other combined in horror exhibitions
or destroyed.’37 The revenue from auctions and individual sales – about RM 1 million
in total – was deposited in a special account controlled by the Propaganda Ministry,
and used to compensate selected museums.38 Earlier, in May 1938, the regime
retrospectively attempted to place the programme on a legal footing by issuing the ‘Law
for the Removal of Degenerate Art’, the execution of which was overseen by a ‘disposal
commission’, run by the operating officer Franz Hofmann from the Propaganda
Ministry under the chairmanship of Goebbels.39 In March 1939, and in total secret,
the Nazis burned about 5,000 artworks classed as worthless from the collection of
confiscated material and sold about 3,300 paintings and drawings to foreign countries
up until 1942; the remaining pieces, an estimated 8,700 in total, were hidden in storage
facilities until the end of the war.40
Thanks to the work of the Taskforce, we now know that about 500 artworks from
the ‘Degenerate Art’ collection ended up in Hildebrand Gurlitt’s art collection, but how
they got there is shrouded in mystery. In some cases, after the bulk sale of previously
confiscated paintings for profit had turned out to be problematic for the Nazis, he
seems to have taken them on commission or bought them for a fraction of their market
value; in other instances, especially during the war, he seems to have taken works of
art on commission to sell on behalf of Jews being deported to the East but never seems
to have followed through with the sales or passed on any earnings to their rightful
owners, knowing full well that they were unlikely to return. We likewise know little
about how he retrieved his sizeable collection after the war, and how he expanded it
to over 1,500 works of art which, in the end – when investigators discovered them in
his son’s flat in 2012 – constituted an unprecedented assemblage of looted, inherited
and lawfully and unlawfully obtained artworks. It makes it all the more important to
explore Gurlitt’s transactions in more detail.

Plunder: The case of Hildebrand Gurlitt

Born in 1895 into an upper-middle-class family, Gurlitt grew up in Dresden, where

his father Cornelius was a professor of art history.41 It was because of his paternal
grandmother, née Lewald, that the Nazis subsequently targeted him and his family,
including his brother, a musicologist at the University of Freiburg, because of their
‘Jewish descent’. Surrounded by artistic and academic talent from an early age, and
having befriended the painter Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, one of the founders of the
group Die Brücke (The Bridge), Gurlitt studied art history after the First World War.
Through his contact with Schmidt-Rottluff, he is likely to have become interested in
the works of expressionist artists such as Kirchner, Nolde, Max Pechstein, Carl Hofer,
Erich Heckel, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Beckmann, Dix, Käthe Kollwitz and Otto Müller.
Gurlitt’s collection – temporarily confiscated by the Allies after the war – contained
artworks by all of the above-named artists, the only exception being works of art by
Kirchner, which decades later were discovered among his son’s Munich art trove.42
How and when Gurlitt obtained the Kirchner43 artworks is not fully known, or whether
he obtained them lawfully, but his keen interest in creating a private collection of
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Art under Dictatorship 65

expressionist artworks from the 1920s onwards seems to be beyond doubt. They were
the centrepieces of his otherwise eclectic art collection after the Second World War.
In 1925, he was appointed to the directorship of the König Albert Museum in
Zwickau; one of his shows there featured works by the Russian painter and art theorist
Kandinsky. Dismissed in 1930 for his apparently ‘progressive tastes’, he then worked at
the Dresden Academy of Applied Art and published about artists such as Kollwitz and
Nolde.44 According to his own post-war recollections, which are not always truthful,
he initiated ‘public debates against Nazi art’ before moving to Hamburg to take up the
position of director of the Kunstverein (Art Association). Three years later, following
the Nazis’ rise to power, he was again dismissed. At the age of forty, unemployed,
and with his wife Helene having given birth to their first child Cornelius, Gurlitt
found himself in an existential crisis; after the war, he told Allied investigators that
the decision to become an art dealer had been made ‘very much against my purely
scientific intentions’ and that the Nazis had taken away his ‘good future’.45 Attempting
to portray himself as a victim of Nazi persecution, he was adamant that he had never
benefited from the Nazis financially:

I was well off as director of the Kunstverein Hamburg . . . I had an apartment of 12
rooms, a very large library and a nice art collection. I had a good future ahead of
me and would inherit one day the house of my mother in Dresden, with the library
and collections of my father, his personal fortune and the contents of 14 rooms
filled with antique furniture.46

Although these fragments have to be read with caution, given the context in which
they were produced, they nonetheless provide us with insight into his personality, in
which the importance of material wealth and professional advancement went hand in
glove with a sense of entitlement and claim to social status.
Gurlitt’s extensive contacts with the world of avant-garde art helped to establish him
as a successful art dealer who used his Kunstkabinett (art gallery) as a venue for exhibiting
expressionist artworks which the Nazis attacked as ‘decadent’ and ‘degenerate’. We
know relatively little about his business dealings before the opening of the ‘Degenerate
Art’ exhibition, yet his reputation as a trusted art expert and dealer seems to have
extended into the higher echelons of the Nazi regime. As one of only a handful of art
dealers, the others being Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller and Bernhard A. Böhmer,
Goebbels’s ministry appointed Gurlitt to work for the ‘disposal commission’, which was
tasked with selling off on the international art market thousands of confiscated works
of modern art from the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition.47 A  list of firms commissioned
by the Propaganda Ministry to undertake the sale of Verfallskunst (‘degenerate art’)
suggests that art galleries in Stuttgart, Oslo and Paris, as well as the art dealers Karl
Haberstock, Wolfgang Gurlitt and Harold Halvorson, were likewise engaged in the
sale of modern art in exchange for foreign currency and artefacts.48 Gurlitt had applied
for the position, knowing that his work for the commission would offer him a secure
income and close connections to the Nazi regime. He may have taken this step as a
way of protecting himself and his family against potential threats from Nazi hotheads
against Jews and political opponents, as seen during the Kristallnacht in 1938, or he
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66 Propaganda and Conflict

may have seen this as a way to mend his strained relations with the authorities, and
turn his gallery into an ‘isle [sic] of free thought’, as he claimed after the war.49 The
more likely explanation, however, is that Gurlitt saw his appointment as a once-in-a-
lifetime opportunity to gain unrestricted access to an unprecedented cache of modern
art which would not only boost his own short-term wealth but in the long run also
enable him to create one of the most sought-after and valuable private collections of
modern art in the world.
Recent work not only confirms this but also highlights the extent to which art
dealers such as Gurlitt, Möller, Böhmer and Buchholz, as well as the art dealers Sofie
and Emanuel Fohn, used so-called ‘exchange contracts’ (Tauschverträge) to transfer
some of the confiscated modern art into their ownership.50 Rather than selling or
‘disposing’ of the confiscated artworks on the international art market, as intended by
the Propaganda Ministry and the ‘disposal commission’, the dealers offered German
museums artworks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in exchange for
confiscated ‘Degenerate’ art. In addition to receiving financial compensation, we
know of eleven museums which agreed to nineteen ‘exchange contracts’ as a form of
compensation.51 Since all applications for the ‘exchange contracts’ were decided in
close liaison with the ‘disposal commission’, the art dealers had de facto created a self-
serving system by which they could acquire modern artworks not just for a fraction of
their value but also through payments in kind.52 The relevant written ‘agreements’ and
‘exchange contracts’ between the museums and the art dealers gave these transactions
a veneer of legitimacy and protected those involved against future claims by third
parties, evidence which turned out to be useful in post-war restitution cases against
the museums, the dealers and their heirs.
The Schönhausen Palace in the northern district of Berlin Pankow served as the
main storage facility for the disposal of confiscated artworks. Gurlitt and his fellow art
dealers were instructed to remove ‘the white tags with the inventory numbers, as well as
any stamps and inscriptions’ of the artworks to ensure that their provenance, including
any knowledge about the originating museums or their former owners, was erased from
the record.53 They and those involved in the operation knowingly became complicit
in a concerted cover-up by the Nazi regime. Artworks could either be bought in bulk
directly from the Propaganda Ministry or sold on commission. In October 1938, Gurlitt
was given unfettered access to the Schönhausen art depot, which included expressionist
art he had once acquired for his museum in Zwickau, and began to secretly sell the
artworks to trusted colleagues and customers in the basement of his Hamburg gallery.54
A previously unknown inventory of artworks from the Schönhausen art depot reveals
that Gurlitt purchased five paintings by Kandinsky, including Composition, and a
painting by Robert Delaunay called Saint-Séverin for a combined total of CHF 10,000.55
Months later, in early 1939, he sold Kandinsky’s Composition and Delaunay’s Saint-
Séverin for CHF 11,000, a considerable profit given that he still had four paintings by
Kandinsky in his possession.56 A colleague later recalled seeing ‘paintings by Munch,
Corinth and Franz Marc emerging from . . . [Gurlitt’s] car like some colorful ball of yarn,
and it was never quite clear how all of it could have fit into that tiny car’.57 Significantly,
the inventory also reveals the identity of all the 125 paintings which Theodor Fischer,
the ‘Aryan’ art dealer from Switzerland, had selected and valued in preparation for the
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Art under Dictatorship 67

international auction which was held in Lucerne in 1939 to generate additional revenue
for the Nazi regime from confiscated or stolen artworks.58 Although Vincent van Gogh’s
Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin (1888) – which had been confiscated from the
Stuttgart Neue Staatsgalerie as late as March 1938 – and Pablo Picasso’s Two Harlequins
were sold for CHF c.60,000 above their valuation, the total amount generated, CHF
c.570,000, was hardly impressive, suggesting that potential buyers might not have
wanted to be associated publicly with the sale of artworks of dubious provenance or
where the revenue was known to benefit the Third Reich.59
In May 1939, as Europe was preparing for war, Gurlitt took on over 3,700 works
of confiscated art on commission for the Propaganda Ministry and sold the painting
Animal Destinies by Franz Marc to the Kunstmuseum in Basel for CHF 6,000 (RM
3,381). For this transaction, after having paid the Propaganda Ministry as the listed
‘vendor’ of the painting, he received CHF 1,000 (RM 563) in commission.60 Two points
are noteworthy about these transactions. First, they allowed Gurlitt to establish close
relations with the secretive Swiss museum and gallery world which helped him, and
later his family, to sell individual artworks.61 Second, in December 1940, he purchased
another 1,723 works of art ‘on paper’ from the Schönhausen art depot, mostly
watercolours, prints and drawings by expressionist artists such as Nolde, Heckel
and his one-time friend Schmidt-Rottluff. These artworks seem to have formed the
cornerstone of his collection, which the Allies temporarily confiscated after the war,
and which in later years became an even greater, albeit also more opaque, collection
which his family subsequently inherited.62
The process of selling off unwanted ‘degenerate’ art abroad brought Gurlitt and his
fellow art dealers into the murky orbit of Nazi officials, museum directors and private
collectors involved in the looting of art and antiquities on the European continent.
Attempting to justify his role in these operations, he told Allied interrogators after
1945 that he had been forced to ‘decide between the war or work for the museums’, yet
omitted to mention the fact that the power and privileges and the financial resources
available had given him unfettered access to some of the finest pieces available in the
European art market. He likewise did not reveal that he had approached Hans Posse –
Special Commissioner for the Führermuseum in Linz63 – as early as 1940 in the hope
of establishing a close relationship with him. Scholars have previously assumed that
Gurlitt became involved in the trade in looted art only after Posse’s death in 1942,
and after his friend Hermann Voss, director of the Wiesbaden Art Museum, had been
appointed Hitler’s special commissioner. The evidence discovered reveals, however,
that Gurlitt sought to establish contact with influential Nazi art traders years earlier and
made unsolicited offers to sell high-value artworks. In December 1940, for instance, he
used his assignment by a German corporation to find a ‘present’ for Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring, worth up to RM 25,000, as a pretext to approach Posse and his
team.64 Shortly thereafter, Posse’s connections helped Gurlitt to sell a painting by
his grandfather Louis Gurlitt, a nineteenth-century landscape painter, to Albert
Speer; in return, Gurlitt offered for sale to Posse artworks worth tens of thousands of
Reichsmark.65 By the time of Posse’s death, their contact had matured into a mutually
beneficial business relationship which Posse’s successor Voss continued, albeit on a
vastly different scale.
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68 Propaganda and Conflict

In general, Gurlitt showed few moral qualms in touring the occupied countries and
purchasing, often at astronomical prices, artworks for Hitler’s personal art collection
that was to be displayed at the Führermuseum.66 Voss’s appointment had been
engineered by Goebbels to expand his influence over Nazi cultural policy and gain
privileged access to valuable artworks from the occupied territories.67 Remarkably,
during the height of the Nazi trade in looted art, the Propaganda Ministry engaged with
Gurlitt in both the selling and buying of artworks.68 As a special emissary, Gurlitt was
now working indirectly for the office of Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, who, as Hitler’s
personal secretary, was in charge of the Führermuseum. The financial transactions
were made by the Reich Chancellery, headed by Hans Heinrich Lammers, through the
private banking house Delbrück Schickler & Co., which made investments with, and
looked after, Hitler’s personal fortune.69 The Führermuseum project, in other words,
was paid for out of Hitler’s personal account to serve the Nazi propaganda machine
which used art and architecture as expressions of an apparently superior German
culture. This was a world like no other, in which money was no obstacle and in which
Gurlitt could conduct his business affairs free from external control.
From September 1943 to September 1944, he delivered to Voss over 100 artworks
with a market value of c. RM 9.2  million.70 Most of the paintings he purchased for
Hitler’s collection were apparently ‘rare Italian and Dutch masters’ for between RM
25,000 and RM 30,000, but there were also more expensive purchases.71 In May 1944,
he bought several artworks from a Paris broker for over RM 2  million for the Linz
Führermuseum.72 There was no need to coerce owners into selling their artworks; the
war-time economy and insecurity in German-occupied territories had created the
perfect conditions for Gurlitt to pick and choose the best pieces of artworks. ‘If paintings
were pointed out to me as not for sale’, he later told officials, ‘I did not even ask for the
price. I did not need to do so as I had enough offers.’73 He recalled that all transactions
were conducted in a ‘very friendly spirit’ and that he was ‘not feared as other dealers
were’, an assessment which is probably true given that he paid disproportionately high
prices which inflated the market: ‘But as I had a strong desire to acquire many objects
for Linz, I never bargained and paid the prices.’74 The suggestion made by some that
Gurlitt paid ‘junk prices’ for the artworks could not be corroborated; on the contrary,
resulting from the enormous trade in art during the war, the prices for art increased
exponentially from 1943 onwards.75 In that year alone, Gurlitt’s transactions in France
netted him about RM 200,000 in commissions.76 As one of Voss’s agents, Gurlitt also
used various brokers to create additional distance between him and the previous
owners of the artworks. He later told investigators that he had

never spoken to anybody about purchases in Paris as a [sic] whole the art business
is a very secret one. The only Jew I saw in Paris was Mr Engel, but as I, having myself
Jewish blood, was in an exposed position, I could not do anything to help him.77

This was yet another attempt to portray himself as a victim rather than admitting that
he had been an integral part of the regime’s policy of plunder.
Rather than relying on chance encounters with potential sellers, Nazi art traders,
backed up by a network of informants and advisors, identified and purchased art in the
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Art under Dictatorship 69

occupied territories in a systematic and targeted fashion. In July 1943, Erhard Göpel,
the General Commissioner for Special Missions in the Netherlands, provided Voss
and his team with a comprehensive report about the state of the Parisian art market in
which he identified some of the most valuable artworks that were ‘likely to come up
for sale’; these included paintings by Claude Lorrain, Anthony van Dyck, Jean-Honoré
Fragonard, Taddeo Gaddi and Lorenzo Credi, as well as a painting attributed to the
French Renaissance painter Jean Fouquet.78 Six months later, on 17 January 1944,
Gurlitt purchased the Fouquet painting known as Portrait or Head of a Monk for RM
825,000, an exorbitant sum of money at the time, and sold it three days later to Voss.79
Acquired in 1935 by the Demandolx-Dedons family in Marseille, the painting was
sold to Gurlitt through the Dutch broker Théo Hermsen, who had previously sold him
dozens of paintings from German-occupied France.80 Gurlitt received RM 15,000 in
commission for the sale.81
As it turned out, Voss did not want the painting for Hitler’s Linz museum, which
is why Gurlitt offered it to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne at the same
price. On the initiative of its director, Otto Förster, four Cologne-based companies
raised the money as a bridging loan until the city of Cologne was in a position
to purchase the painting on behalf of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in February
1944.82 Meanwhile, other art dealers were lying in waiting in case the deal fell
through  – such as Alois Miedl, one of Göring’s henchmen, who had forced the
Jewish Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker to sell his art collection below market
value before taking over his company in Amsterdam, offered to pay Gurlitt 750,000
Gulden for the painting should the city of Cologne be unable to raise sufficient
capital. This episode illustrates the extent to which art dealers, banks and museums
competed over access to, and ownership of, looted art as it was coming onto the
market. Within this complex web of conflicting but powerful interests, Gurlitt not
only found himself centre stage but also was able to secure maximum profits and
professional prestige.
As the war drew to a close, and with the prospect of further revenue, Gurlitt
purchased ever more artwork for Hitler’s increasingly unachievable Führermuseum.
Copies of invoices and receipts discovered at the Federal Archives in Koblenz reveal
that in 1944 Gurlitt bought artworks with a market value of over RM 10  million.83
Most of the purchases were undertaken in France but he also bought artworks in Italy,
Belgium and even in Hungary. In June 1944, he bought another cache of art from
Hermsen for RM 3,130,000, which included four Gobelins tapestries for RM 2,200,000
alone (see Figure  3.1).84 For this transaction, his commission was a staggering RM
156,000.85 As the Allies started to occupy cities such as Paris and Brussels, the trade
in looted art became increasingly beset by technical problems emanating from large-
scale financial transactions in different currencies and across multiple bank accounts;
this led Gurlitt’s lawyer to claim in early 1945 that Gurlitt had taken ‘considerable
financial risks’ on behalf of Hitler’s Special Commissioner during the war, and that
he should be exempt from future claims for compensation made by banks or clearing
houses.86 While the Nazis systematically persecuted and killed millions of European
Jews and other victim groups, and while ordinary citizens feared for their lives and
livelihoods during relentless bombing raids, Gurlitt used his privileged position to
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70 Propaganda and Conflict

Figure 3.1  Gurlitt’s invoice to Professor Dr Voss, 1944.

Source: BAK, B323/134, vol. 6, 1940–5, Gurlitt to Voss, 28 June 1944.

amass a personal fortune.87 For the one-time art historian, and many others like him,
the Nazi conquest of the European continent had become a profitable business model.

Recovery: The Gurlitt collection

How can we explain the quantitative difference between Gurlitt’s collection confiscated
by the Allies in 1945, which comprised 115 paintings, 19 drawings and 72 various
objects, and which was returned to him in the early 1950s, and the collection inherited
by his son Cornelius, which comprised almost 1,500 works of art, almost 500 of which
originated in all probability from the cache of art confiscated by the Nazis in 1937?88
The answer to this question may lie in the fact that Gurlitt purchased more than
1,700 artworks from the Reich ‘on paper’. This means that most of the objects that he
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Art under Dictatorship 71

bought would have remained at the Schönhausen art depot throughout the war and
quite possibly thereafter. The dozens of artworks retrieved from that cache in his ‘tiny
car’ during the war  – works by Nolde, Müller, Kollwitz, Dix, Beckmann, Pechstein,
Grosz, Hofer, Heckel, Lehmbruck and Schmidt-Rottluff – became part of his personal
collection confiscated by the Allies in 1945, and which also included items which he
had lawfully inherited or bought from members of his family.89 It took six years for this
collection to be returned to Gurlitt.
Without access to the bulk of his ‘personal’ collection, but with access to
considerable cash and knowledge of the whereabouts of modern art collections, there
are several possibilities as to how Gurlitt may have built up his art collection up until
his death in 1956. He neatly documented almost all transactions for the numerous
artworks he acquired during the war in sales and import/export ledgers, and it is clear
from these records, despite the fact that they have been redacted, that only a fraction
of these artworks were confiscated after the war; he may have hidden the items in
storage facilities unknown to the authorities and subsequently retrieved them. He
may also have bought additional pieces from museums, at auctions, and galleries. His
records allowed him detailed insight into the whereabouts and ownership of hundreds
of valuable modern artworks. Finally, he might have retrieved some or all of the
remaining paintings and drawings he had purchased ‘on paper’ from the Schönhausen
art depot, arguing that he was the rightful owner of these artworks. In the post-war
transitional environment, German and Allied officials are unlikely to have questioned
the narrative of a man with Jewish ancestry who could demonstrate that he had been
dismissed by the Nazi government. Taken together, this would explain why in 2012,
almost six decades later, the German authorities discovered approximately 1,000
artworks in the flat of Gurlitt’s son, which originated from the broader context of the
‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition, were looted, or regarding the provenance of which there
was little or no information.
Gurlitt’s post-war interaction with the authorities was hardly forthcoming or
truthful. When asked about the whereabouts of, or trade in, individual paintings and
cultural artefacts his sudden loss of memory was remarkable, as he emphasized that
he had either forgotten any details or lost relevant evidence in the closing months of
the war.90 In addition to constructing a smokescreen about his own victimhood, he
denied ever having traded in, handled or acquired ‘looted’ art from German-occupied
France. He had apparently ‘never seen with [his] eyes’ any of the Jewish art treasures
which had been confiscated by the Nazis, a statement which, while factually perhaps
correct, glossed over the reality that he had bought hundreds of artworks in France
through intermediaries involved in the looted art trade.91 He had apparently never
bought art which had not been offered voluntarily to him.92 Buying art in bulk in
France from established brokers such as Hermsen, Gurlitt believed, and selling it to
established German museums, including the planned Linz museum, freed him from
any professional or moral responsibility as to the origins of the works.93 Although
aware of the storage facilities ‘in which the Jewish art possessions were collected’, he
maintained never having socialized with Nazi officials engaged in the looted art trade.
Rumours about French art dealers or private owners being pressured into selling their
artworks could apparently not be substantiated, he told officials, although there is also
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72 Propaganda and Conflict

no evidence that he ever attempted to verify these rumours or to find out how his
intermediaries had obtained the artworks in the first place.
Records compiled by the US Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section show
that Gurlitt continued to apply to the Allied authorities to have his collection returned
to him.94 In June 1948, he asked officials to waive the requirement for a detailed list
of artworks he owned because all of his ‘business books and correspondence’ had
apparently been destroyed in the Dresden bombings in February 1945, a statement
which was false, given the existence of his recently discovered sales ledgers. When
asked about the whereabouts of individual paintings and cultural artefacts, a sudden
loss of memory became particularly noticeable. Other statements were equally untrue.
A gouache by Chagall was apparently ‘an old possession’ of his sister, he told Allied
officials in 1945, and a painting by Picasso was one he had supposedly ‘bought from
the artist’ in Paris in 1942 for FF 60,000.95 (Gurlitt himself produced evidence to the
contrary in the form of a letter from Swiss painter Karl Ballmer: see below.) Five years
later, on 12 and 13 December 1950, while visiting the Wiesbaden Central Collecting
Point to reclaim his artworks from the Allied authorities, Gurlitt became distinctly
nervous when he was shown the Picasso painting Portrait of a Woman with Two
Noses.96 The notes taken by the Allied official reveal Gurlitt’s attempt to reclaim the
painting without drawing too much attention to it. At first he gave the ‘impression that
he did not expect this picture’ and made ‘some remarks of no importance’, yet he had
recognized the painting as ‘his property’, as the official remarked,

Afterwards, when the inspection was over, he twice went back for a short moment
to the Picasso picture and looked at it. Then I made a remark that it was dated and
back in the office he suddenly said: ‘I could tell you a long and funny story about
this picture.’ I tried to seem unconcerned. First giving us the impression that he
did not know any thing of importance about this picture but after an hour being
able to tell me a long and apparently complicated story about this picture.97

Allied officials had become increasingly suspicious of the veracity of Gurlitt’s statements
and classed him as a man who did ‘not seem very open-hearted’.98 However, less than
three weeks later, Gurlitt produced the previously mentioned letter from Ballmer, who
declared that he had given Gurlitt the Picasso Portrait of a Woman with Two Noses and
Chagall’s gouache Allegorical Scene with Three Moons as a present. As the post-war
restitution process was now winding down, the statement was deemed sufficient for
both artworks to be returned to Gurlitt, adding yet another two very valuable artworks
to an already exceptional  – though largely unlawfully acquired  – art collection.
Gurlitt, along with dozens of art dealers, museum directors, agents, middlemen and
brokers from Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and elsewhere in occupied
Nazi territories, had skilfully exploited the wartime conditions for their own profit,
and had become accomplices and co-conspirators in one of the most unprecedented
orgies of art plunder the world had ever witnessed, a history the extent of which is
just beginning to emerge and be fully understood. The following two case studies aim
to further highlight the complexities which the victims of this history have had to
confront.
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Art under Dictatorship 73

Provenance: Two case studies

Klee’s Sumpflegende
The first case study looks at Klee’s painting Sumpflegende (Legend of the Swamp,
Figure 3.2), which the Nazis confiscated for the 1937 ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition, and
traces the resulting post-war legal battle over ownership. The second case examines
Liebermann’s painting Zwei Reiter am Strand (Two Riders on the Beach, Figure 3.3),
which was identified as looted art after it was discovered in Cornelius Gurlitt’s flat
in 2012.
In 1919, inspired by his travels to North Africa, the Swiss-born Klee completed
the painting Sumpflegende, a small oil painting on cardboard measuring only 47 ×
41 cm, and sold it to Paul Erich Küppers, one of the founders of the Kestnergesellschaft
gallery in Hanover. Klee’s painting was part of a series of compositions that depicted
the formative principle and rules of nature without venturing into a complete abstract
oeuvre. On the back of the painting, Klee had added a handwritten note, ‘1919.163. /
Sumpflegende / Klee / sold / owner / Dr. Küppers’, clearly identifying the owner of the
painting as art historian Dr Paul Erich Küppers.99 In 1922, Sophie Küppers, also an
art historian, inherited the painting on the death of her husband. Five years later, in

Figure  3.2  (left) Paul Klee, Sumpflegende (Legend of the Swamp), shown on (right)  the
so-called ‘Dada Wall’ (not displayed in its entirety).
Sources:  Paul Klee, Sumpflegende (Legend of the Swamp) / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0
and Paul Klee, ‘Sumpflegende an der Dada Wand’, faculty-web.at (Memento vom 26. August 2002 im
Internet Archive).
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74 Propaganda and Conflict

1927, Sophie married the Russian painter and architect El Lissitzky, with whom she
emigrated to Russia in the same year.100 Before leaving Germany, Sophie Lissitzky-
Küppers handed thirteen artworks over to the Hanover Provinzialmuseum as a loan,
documented by the museum’s inventory.101 The Nazis subsequently confiscated all of
these artworks for the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition and displayed Klee’s painting on
the so-called ‘Dada-Wall’, ridiculed by the slogan, ‘Take Dada seriously – it’s worth it!’
(Nehmen Sie Dada Ernst – es lohnt sich!).102
What makes the case particularly relevant for our understanding of the
provenance of artworks unlawfully obtained during the Third Reich is the fact that the
Provinzialmuseum was not the rightful owner of the painting at the time the Nazis
confiscated it; the painting had rather been given to the museum as a loan. In March
1941, Gurlitt bought the painting – which had been unlawfully obtained by the regime –
for CHF 500 from one of the Nazi art depots.103 Meanwhile, the rightful owners of the
painting were leading a life of misery and hardship. In 1944, three years after the death
of her second husband, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers and her son Jen were deported to
Novosibirsk, Siberia, where they lived in miserable circumstances. Despite several
attempts to reclaim her art collection, Sophie died penniless in Novosibirsk in 1978.104
What exactly happened to the painting after Gurlitt purchased it remains strangely
opaque. We know that in 1962 the Lempertz auction house in Cologne sold the
painting for an anonymous vendor for DM 85,000 to the art expert Wilhelm Arntz,
who bought it on behalf of the Basel-based gallery owner Ernst Beyeler.105 Whether
Gurlitt’s son, Cornelius, was the person selling the painting is not known but possible,
given that he had inherited Gurlitt’s art collection. A  year later, the painting was  –
presumably – bought by an unknown private Swiss collector, making it even harder to
trace. A couple of years later, in 1968, Sophie made another attempt to find and reclaim
her art collection by writing to the Niedersächsische Landesmuseum, the successor of
the Provinzialmuseum which, in the late 1920s, had taken her collection on loan. In
response, the museum told her that it had no knowledge of the whereabouts of her
collection, except for a painting by her deceased husband El Lissitzky, but that it had
considered purchasing the Sumpflegende when it was offered for auction by Lempertz.106
In 1973, the Siegfried Rosengart gallery in Lucerne put the Sumpflegende on
show; there it remained for the next nine years. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, though,
never saw or managed to reclaim any of her artworks; all of her seven applications
to leave the Soviet Union between 1973 and her death in 1978 were rejected.107 In
1982, the painting returned from Switzerland to Germany after it had been bought
by the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundations and the City of Munich
on behalf of the Lenbachhaus Museum for DM 800,000.108 Shortly thereafter, in April
1982, Wilhelm Arntz – who had purchased the painting in 1962 – told Armin Zweite,
director of the Lenbachhaus, that the painting had been ‘seized by the Reich without
compensation’ (zugunsten des Reiches entschädigungslos eingezogen) and that it should
be returned to its rightful owners because it had been de facto ‘confiscated’.109 However,
the Lenbachhaus did not seem to have seen any need to respond to, or act on, these
suggestions; meanwhile, Jen Lissitzky, the rightful heir of the painting, who in 1980
had moved to Estonia, was at first unable to reclaim the painting through legal or other
means.110
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Art under Dictatorship 75

Shortly after German reunification, Jen Lissitzky issued court proceedings against
the Lenbachhaus after the latter had rejected an amicable settlement. Ironically,
while proceedings were ongoing, the Lenbachhaus displayed the painting at a Berlin
art exhibition which displayed the biased and derogatory representation of modern
art during the Third Reich through a recreation of the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibit.111 It
allowed Lissitzky’s lawyer to obtain a temporary injunction which raised the possibility
that a court might confiscate the painting, worth over DM 4 million at this point.112
In its ruling, the Berlin court noted that the case would be the litmus test of whether
the ‘Federal Republic of Germany, and Berlin as its legal representative, was willing
to demonstrate to history that lawlessness can become law again’.113 In 1993, Lissitzky
nonetheless lost the court case against the Lenbachhaus. In its judgement, the court
stated that the acquisition of the painting by the Lenbachhaus and others had not been
mala fide (bösgläubig) and that after thirty years the case was now statute-barred.114
Ulrich Drobnig from the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International
Private Law disagreed, arguing that Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers and her son Jen had not
lost their claim to ownership of the painting through the trade and financial transactions
to which it had been subjected. According to Drobnig, there were ‘overriding reasons’
not to have the claim statute barred after thirty years.115 Remarkably, the court also
claimed that the German Reich had ‘purchased’ the painting in 1941. Since the German
state (Fiskus) functioned as the vendor of the artwork, so went the argument of the
court, the buyer had apparently every reason to believe that the vendor was also the
owner of the artwork which was for sale.116 Gurlitt had de facto become an agent for,
and operated on behalf of, the German state and it was this same state which – through
a court ruling decades later – retrospectively legitimized Gurlitt’s wartime acquisitions,
a circular argument par excellence.
Five years later, in 1998, the German government signed an internationally binding
agreement on looted art, known as the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-
Confiscated Art; private museums, private trusts and private collections, however, were
exempt from the agreement.117 In Article 7, the agreement states, ‘Pre-War owners and
their heirs should be encouraged to come forward and make known their claims to art
that was confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted.’118 It could be argued
that the agreement did not exist at the time of the court case between Lissitzky and
the Lenbachhaus; yet, Lissitzky and his family obviously had a strong moral case for
the retrospective application of the principles, given that he and his mother had been
reclaiming the work since the 1960s. What complicated matters further from a legal
perspective was the fact that the painting had been acquired by the Lenbachhaus, a
museum which is not subject to the Washington principles because it is managed by
a private trust. Lissitzky and his family were thus reliant on the good will of a private
trust and its trustees to abide by the Washington agreement voluntarily, and to resolve
the case fairly and amicably, yet for a long time there was no settlement in sight. The
Bavarian regional court in Munich has ‘rejected returning the Klee painting with
constantly changing reasons since 1992’; Christoph von Berg, Klaus Bandekow and
Karsten Zorn, the lawyers representing the Lissitzky heirs, told Bloomberg News, ‘All
attempts by the heirs to reach an agreement have been brusquely brushed aside.’119 In
2012, after negotiations failed, three of Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers’s grandchildren filed
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76 Propaganda and Conflict

a new court case against the Lenbachhaus to have the painting returned to them. The
suit put the value of the painting at €2 million. In July 2017, a settlement between the
parties which allowed the painting to remain at the Lenbachhaus finally brought to an
end twenty-five years of legal dispute.120
Hannes Hartung of THEMIS solicitors, representing the City of Munich, put a
particular gloss on the dispute, arguing that the painting could not be classed under
any circumstances (auf keinen Fall) as looted art which had been confiscated from
Jewish owners during the Holocaust. Instead, according to Hartung, the painting
was an example of ‘degenerate art’ which ‘today is traded everywhere and traded
unchallenged’ (wird heutzutage überall und unbestritten gehandelt).121 Hartung’s failure
to appreciate the prolonged injustice caused to the rightful owners of the painting
was surpassed only by his portrayal of the 1982 purchase by the Lenbachhaus as
‘compensation’ (Wiedergutmachung) for the defamation of the painting by the Nazis.122
In other words, the Lenbachhaus had apparently paid DM 800,000 to a ‘renowned
Swiss gallery’ as a form of ‘compensation’ so that the painting could from now on
reside where it had been created, and be shown to the public from the time of its
acquisition by the Lenbachhaus. Even the most even-handed of scholars find it difficult
not to see statements of this sort for what they are. Their aim is not only to create
retrospective justifications for past misjudgements in dealing with artworks of this
nature but also to construct a veneer of moral legitimacy for an art market which has
become increasingly corroded by dubious business practices.

Liebermann’s Zwei Reiter am Strand (Two Riders on the Beach)

The second case study looks at one of two similar oil paintings by the Jewish artist
Liebermann (Figure 3.3).123 As the influential president of the Prussian Academy of Arts,
he promoted French realism and impressionism in Germany. This movement aimed to
unite impressionism with German objectivity and the forerunners of expressionism.
The Nazis would target this type of ‘art cosmopolitanism’ and confiscate Liebermann’s
works during the ‘Degenerate Art’ campaign. In 1933, Liebermann resigned from the
Prussian Academy following the decision not to exhibit any more works by Jewish
artists.
The painting to be discussed here shows the influence of Liebermann’s
impressionistic and fauvist tendencies and depicts two men riding along the sandy
beaches of Scheveningen in the Netherlands. Discovered in 2012 among Cornelius
Gurlitt’s art collection, the Taskforce identified the painting as Nazi-looted art.
Questions, though, remain as to how Gurlitt obtained it in the first place, whether he
had been ‘tipped off ’ by officials about the painting’s existence in Lower Silesia before
he purchased it and whether he ‘bought’ or ‘traded’ it for other artworks.
The painting stems originally from the art collection of the Jewish factory owner
David Friedmann in Wrocław, then known as Breslau, in Silesia. Friedmann acquired
the painting in 1905 and owned it until at least 1939.124 Other records suggest that
Friedmann owned the painting until August 1941.125 It seems reasonably certain that
Nazi officials had set their sights on the Liebermann painting, as is the case for the
previously mentioned work by Fouquet, and on Friedmann’s art collection generally,
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Art under Dictatorship 77

Figure 3.3  Max Liebermann, Zwei Reiter am Strand (Two Riders on the Beach) (c.1900).
Source: Sotheby’s.

after the outbreak of war. In December 1939, a senior Nazi official from Breslau sent –
or planned to send  – to the authorities in Berlin a letter headed ‘Seizure of Jewish
Art Collections’. In it he wrote that Friedmann, ‘a Jew’, owned a valuable collection
of French impressionists and ‘good German’ landscapes and that ‘the painting by
Liebermann (Riders on the Beach) would likely fetch at least RM 10,000–15,000
abroad’.126 Friedmann, who had previously been forced to sell some of his properties,
was barred from selling his art collection without permission.
Friedmann died in February 1942. A month later, the Nazis deported his daughter first
to Ravensbrück and then to Auschwitz, where she perished. It seems that Friedmann’s
death prompted the authorities to auction off not only his villa – and confiscate the
proceeds on behalf of the Reich – but also sell off parts of his art collection. In July 1942,
the Silesian Museum of Fine Arts, Breslau, which had previously corresponded with
Gurlitt about Friedmann’s collection, bought two of Friedmann’s artworks, including
the Liebermann painting, from the Hermann Petschel auction house in Breslau.127 It is
not known whether the auction house sold the painting on behalf of Friedmann’s estate
or on behalf of the Reich; given what we know about the forced sale of his villa, the
latter seems more likely. A month later, in August 1942, the director of the museum,
Cornelius Müller-Hofstede, ‘traded’ the two artworks to Gurlitt, possibly in exchange
for other paintings in Gurlitt’s possession.128
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Whether Gurlitt earmarked certain paintings – in his own mind or in conversations

and correspondence with others – which he intended to purchase once they became
available because the owners of the artworks had been deported or killed or had
forfeited their collections remains speculative, but it is also not beyond the realms
of possibility. When it came to high-value artworks, art traders such as Gurlitt knew
no moral bounds. In 1947, Gurlitt’s secretary Ingeborg Hertmann noted in a witness
statement made to the criminal police in Hamburg, ‘When the Jews were deported to
the Łodz ghetto, they entrusted Gurlitt with their paintings to be sold. After a while,
these people wrote, please send us the money, we are starving. Gurlitt then instructed
me in a calm and indifferent manner to send RM 10 to the Jew.’129
In 1945, the Liebermann painting was confiscated by the Allies and transferred
to the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point. The inventory lists the painting as ‘WIE
1930’.130 Five years later, in December 1950, it was returned to Gurlitt.131 Over the next
decade, the painting was exhibited at various national and international venues.132
Following Gurlitt’s death, ownership first passed on to his widow, Helene, and then
to his son, Cornelius. It was one of the few paintings which the Taskforce classified ‘as
looted art with the highest degree of probability’ (mit höchster Wahrscheinlichkeit der
NS-Raubkunst zugehörig). In 2015, the lawyers administering Cornelius Gurlitt’s estate
returned the painting to the heirs of David Friedmann.133
These two case studies illustrate the complicated nature of the Nazi art trade and
the long-term legacy of post-war restitution claims against museums and Nazi art
traders and their heirs. They highlight the complexity and effects of an often narrowly
defined legal framework and demonstrate that for some of the artworks under
investigation international agreements are not applicable. The provenance of the first
painting shows why the categories applied by the Taskforce and others in relation
to ‘looted art’ had been too narrow to capture the essence of the art trade during
and after the Third Reich. The second case, a painting obtained by Gurlitt under
questionable circumstances, highlights not only inherent problems of provenance
research but also the importance of a painting’s provenance in determining its value
on the international art market.

Art dealers and the art market: Towards the future

The international art market seems to have profited from the publicity generated
by the worldwide debate about looted art, restitution claims and drawn-out court
cases, as well as from the sale of artworks associated with Nazi-looted art, in the
case of sales that were not challenged in court.134 The Liebermann painting is a
case in point: in 2009, prior to the discovery of the Munich art trove, Liebermann’s
painting Zwei Reiter am Strand, the one not discussed here, was sold for over
£289,000 to a private collector.135 Six years later, in 2015, after several years of media
attention about Gurlitt and the subject of looted art, Sotheby’s sold the restituted
Liebermann painting Zwei Reiter am Strand, discussed here, to an unknown bidder
for £1,865,000, an increase of over 500 per cent for an almost identical painting.136 In
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Art under Dictatorship 79

June 2017, Sotheby’s also sold a draft study for either or both of the paintings for over
£284,000.137 Whether ‘the murkier the better’ turns out to be true for the art market
remains to be seen. Judging by the number of exhibitions,138 restoration programmes,
guided tours, conferences, workshops, research projects,139 auctions, publications,
TV and radio broadcasts and the ever-growing social media presence on the subject,
one might be forgiven for concluding that the art world has been stimulated by
the debate about Nazi-looted art.140 While some of this activity is welcome, it also
raises questions, for example, why the art market and its transactions continue to be
largely unregulated, poorly documented and highly secretive, lacking transparency
and accountability at many levels. Whether we look at art dealers and collectors,
museums and educational trusts, government-funded programmes or the judiciary,
when it comes to the art trade the largely accepted rules of professional and business
ethics do not seem to apply.
The material presented here has shown, first and foremost, that the term ‘looted
art’ requires conceptual reframing and also broadening in order to capture the great
range of, and linkages between, different types of injustices committed by the Nazi
regime in the field of art and culture. The term should, for instance, encompass the
Nazi policy of confiscating, and subsequently trading in, thousands of artworks as
part of the ‘degenerate art’ exhibition, a policy which was unlawful then and needs
to be classed as unlawful now, given that it was carried out by a criminal regime en
route to waging one of the most brutal wars in modern history. This chapter has not
only demonstrated the value of integrating the subject of looted art within the broader
conceptual triangle of propaganda studies, the history of plunder and art historical
provenance research but has also shown that the historically fashioned networks of
art traders, art experts, museums and collectors require scholarly and public attention;
they epitomise important continuities and disciplinary legacies which extend into the
present day. These networks established and maintained trading routes through which
cultural artefacts moved largely unchecked from one place to another in return for
financial capital throughout the twentieth century; they provided access to expertise
and logistical support and created a secretive environment – an economic and legal
grey zone – within which the trade with art proceeded outside international regulatory
frameworks. Instead of embracing a robust and transparent self-regulatory system, art
traders and auction houses have operated in ‘overlapping networks’ in which regulatory
loopholes in the trade in cultural artefacts can be exploited for illegal activities such as
tax evasion, price-fixing, fraud, embezzlement and money-laundering.141 In the case
of Switzerland, powerful interest groups linked to the Swiss art trade have recently
prevented a reform of the so-called Zollfreilager (customs-free zone) in which the
storage and sale of goods can take place anonymously, as if they were islands ‘cut off
from ordinary jurisdictions’.142 Calls to place such tax havens under the jurisdiction of
the relevant money-laundering laws have so far gone unheeded.143 Some experts have
even claimed that the entire sector has deteriorated into a ‘criminal organisation’.144
It is incumbent on scholars and investigative agencies such as the Federal Criminal
Police Office of Germany (Bundeskriminalamt) to shine a bright light on the dubious
business practices of the global art trade, which feeds on secrecy and discretion as
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does fire on oxygen.145 In the case of Nazi-looted art, there is compelling evidence that
post-war auction houses, museums and art experts, especially in Southern Germany,
Switzerland and Austria, had detailed knowledge of the whereabouts and provenance
of the Gurlitt collection for many years.146 But instead of working towards the return
or restitution of looted art, they profited from its sale.147 A professional duty of care
towards the artworks and their rightful owners is often non-existent in these enigmatic,
well-endowed circles. To this day, as Stefan Koldehoff has argued, the art market lacks
a sense of guilt (Unrechtsbewußtsein) for its involvement with the Nazi regime and is
unwilling to come to terms with the past.148
Despite steps in the right direction, for example through Web-based portals and
databases such as lootedart.com and lostart.de, and the creation of the International
Research Portal for Records Related to Nazi-Era Cultural Property,149 experts are
only just beginning to recognize the international dimension of the subject. Often
the political and legal complexities turn restitution claims into drawn-out processes
without the prospect of mediation or compromise. National laws, as they stand,
are rarely appropriate instruments for dealing with lost or looted art. In the Third
Reich, as we have seen, retrospective laws and decrees became cynical instruments
for constructing a veneer of legitimacy for state-sanctioned policies of expropriation,
expulsion and mass murder. Lawyers who today argue that the confiscation and
expropriation of artworks was lawful because it was based on existing legislation, and
that their sale was therefore legal, are not only retrospectively sanctioning the activities
of one of the most criminal regimes in modern history but are also denying victims
and their descendants their right to justice. In light of the German government’s
recent experience of establishing compensation schemes for the victims of companies
accused of using forced and slave labourers during the Nazi period,150 the German
authorities would be well advised to take a more proactive approach in the field of art
and culture, for example by setting up a state-funded office of international experts,
backed by statute, for the investigation of art under the Third Reich.
Where does all this leave Cornelius Gurlitt, the ‘Nazi treasure hoarder’, who lived
his entire adult life as the custodian of his father’s art collection? Art must have been for
Gurlitt both a substitute for human relations and a dreadful curse. Hildebrand Gurlitt’s
art collection remained with him, even during the last days of his life. In a suitcase
underneath his hospital bed, his court-appointed carer found a painting by Claude
Monet worth millions of pounds, a sad end to an unimaginably lonely life.151 Despite
being vilified in the media and online, the image of Gurlitt as a frail, old man who was
unable to defend himself publicly not only reveals the moral ambiguity of the case but
also serves as a canvas on to which to project the cultural–political shortcomings and
legal barriers which make the process of coming to terms with the history of Nazi-
looted art so problematic. This chapter, by throwing these failings into stark relief,
makes clear that the legacy of the ‘Gurlitt case’ extends well beyond being a ‘lesson in
dealing with the Nazi period’ in today’s unified Germany, as Thomas Schmidt recently
argued in Zeit Online;152 instead, it needs to be seen as a watershed moment in how
society and the general public – and not just art experts – view, and deal with, artworks
and their provenance as a reflection of Europe’s fractured history.
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Notes
1 Taskforce Schwabinger Kunstfund, Fact Sheet: http://www.taskforce-kunstfund.de/
fileadmin/_downloads/factsheet_de.pdf. The German authorities confiscated a total
of 1,224 artworks in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Munich apartment, seized 239 artworks at his
house in Salzburg and examined 34 artworks as part of his estate following his death
in May 2014.
2 Melissa Eddy and Alison Smale, ‘Art Trove in Germany Abounds in Mysteries’,
International New York Times, 6 November 2013.
3 See, e.g., Stefan Koldehoff, Die Bilder sind unter uns: Das Geschäft mit der
NS-Raubkunst und der Fall Gurlitt (Berlin, 2014); Johannes Heil and Annette Weber
(eds), Ersessene Kunst – Der Fall Gurlitt (Berlin, 2014); Anders Rydell, Hitlers
Bilder: Kunstraub der Nazis – Raubkunst in der Gegenwart, transl. A. Brunstermann
(Frankfurt, 2014); Birgit Schwarz, Auf Befehl des Führers: Hitler und der NS-Kunstraub
(Stuttgart, 2014); Susan Ronald, Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and
the Looting of Europe’s Treasures (New York, 2015); Catherine Hickley, The Munich
Art Hoard: Hitler’s Dealer and His Secret Legacy (London, 2015); Meike Hoffmann
and Nicola Kuhn, Hitlers Kunsthändler: Hildebrand Gurlitt 1895–1956 (Munich,
2016); Oliver Meier, Michael Feller and Stefanie Christ, Der Gurlitt-Komplex. Bern
und die Raubkunst (Zurich, 2017); Maurice Philip Remy, Der Fall Gurlitt: Die wahre
Geschichte über Deutschlands größten Kunstskandal (Munich, 2017); see also the
documentaries Maurice Philip Remy, Der seltsame Herr Gurlitt (Arte, 2013); Katja
Lüber and Jörg Jung, Gurlitt: Der Skandal um die NS-Kunst und seine Folgen (WDR,
2017) and Dominik Graf ’s feature film Am Abend aller Tage (Leitwolf, 2017).
4 See the co-organized exhibitions in Bonn (Dossier Gurlitt: Nazi Art Theft and
Its Consequences) and Bern (Dossier Gurlitt: ‘Degenerate Art’ – Confiscated and
Sold): Kunstmuseum Bern and Kunst- und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland (eds), Bestandsaufnahme Gurlitt (Munich, 2017); also Melissa Eddy,
‘First Public Showing of Monet, Rodin and Maillols from Gurlitt Trove’, New York
Times, 27 June 2017.
5 Thomas E. Schmidt, ‘Schuld und Sühne’, Zeit Online, 30 September 2017.
6 Hans-Joachim Müller, ‘Der Fall Gurlitt – ein deutsches Trauerspiel’, Die Welt, 17
January 2016; also Schmidt, ‘Schuld und Sühne’.
7 Die Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’ (The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition), 19 July to 30
November 1937, was organized by artist and politician Adolf Ziegler. It showed 650
works of art confiscated from German museums.
8 Meier, Feller and Christ, Der Gurlitt-Komplex. See also in particular Bianca Gaudenzi
and Astrid Swenson, ‘Looted Art and Restitution in the Twentieth Century – Towards
a Global Perspective’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52: 3 (2017), pp. 491–518; Jason
Lustig, ‘Who Are to Be the Successors of European Jewry? The Restitution of German
Jewish Communal and Cultural Property’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52: 3
(2017), pp. 519–45; Jonathan Petropoulos, ‘Art Dealer Networks in the Third Reich
and in the Postwar Period’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52: 3 (2017), pp. 546–65;
Inês Fialho Brandão, ‘ “What’s in Lisbon?” Portuguese Sources in Nazi-Era Provenance
Research’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52: 3 (2017), pp. 566–87; Sophie Cœuré,
‘Cultural Looting and Restitution at the Dawn of the Cold War: The French Recovery
Missions in Eastern Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52: 3 (2017), pp.
588–606; Christine Kim, ‘Colonial Plunder and the Failure of Restitution in Postwar
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Korea’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52: 3 (2017), pp. 607–24; Andrew Bellisari,
‘The Art of Decolonization: The Battle for Algeria’s French Art, 1962–70’, Journal of
Contemporary History, 52: 3 (2017), pp. 625–45; Cynthia Scott, ‘Renewing the “Special
Relationship” and Rethinking the Return of Cultural Property: The Netherlands and
Indonesia, 1949–79’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52: 3 (2017), pp. 646–68; Laetitia
La Follette, ‘Looted Antiquities, Art Museums and Restitution in the United States
since 1970’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52: 3 (2017), pp. 669–87. See also Richard
Evans’s lecture ‘Looted Art and Its Restitution’, Third Lee Seng Tee Distinguished
Lecture, Wolfson College, Cambridge, 7 June 2010: http://www.richardjevans.com/
lectures/looted-art-restitution/; and his lecture ‘Corruption and Plunder in the Third
Reich’ (n.d.): http://www.richardjevans.com/lectures/corruption-plunder-third-reich/.
9 Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996).
10 Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany
(London, 2000).
11 In addition to the two works by Petropoulos cited above, see Götz Aly, Hitler’s
Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, transl. Jefferson Chase
(New York, 2007); Nancy H. Yeide, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann
Goering Collection (Dallas, TX, 2009); Ronald, Hitler’s Art Thief.
12 David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (London, 1993).
13 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente,
part 1: Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, vols 1–4 (Munich, 1987), hereafter TJG: SF, part 1;
part 2: Diktate 1941–1945, vols 1–15 (Munich, 1993–6).
14 Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain, pp. 2ff.
15 See note 1.
16 See also Schmidt, ‘Schuld und Sühne’, where he claims that Gurlitt became a
‘perpetrator’ only as late as 1943, with his active involvement in looting art.
17 Taskforce Schwabinger Kunstfund, Fact Sheet. The Taskforce identified 231 artworks
as belonging to the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition and classified 252 artworks as
‘belonging mostly to the ‘Degenerate Art’ confiscation process.
18 See note 7. The Reichskammer der bildenden Künste (Reich Chamber of Fine Arts)
was headed by Eugen Hönig between 1933 and 1936, by Adolf Ziegler between 1936
and 1943, and by Wilhelm Kreis from 1943 until 1945.
19 Welch, The Third Reich, p. 207; see also Fröhlich (ed.), TJG: SF, part 1, vol. 3, 19
July 1937.
20 Welch, The Third Reich, p. 206.
21 Ibid., p. 207.
22 Ibid., p. 203.
23 Fröhlich (ed.), TJG: SF, part 1, vol. 3, 5 June 1937; also Peter Longerich,
Goebbels: Biographie (Munich, 2010), pp. 346ff.; Ralph Georg Reuth, Goebbels: The Life
of Joseph Goebbels, the Mephistophelean Genius of Nazi Propaganda, transl. Krishna
Winston (New York, 1993), pp. 226ff.
24 Fröhlich (ed.), TJG: SF, part 1, vol. 3, 6 and 7 June 1937.
25 Ibid., 19 June 1937.
26 Ibid., 22 June 1937.
27 Ibid., 12 June 1937; Reuth, Goebbels, p. 227.
28 Longerich, Goebbels, pp. 347–8.
29 Ibid.; also Welch, The Third Reich, p. 203.
30 The commission consisted of Wolfgang Willrich, a Nazi artist whose paintings
of heroic ‘Nordic’ men and women were later exhibited at the Great German Art
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Art under Dictatorship 83

Exhibition; Hans Schweitzer; Klaus Graf von Baudissin, an art historian and SS officer
who had replaced Ernst Gosebruch as director of the Folkwang Museum in Essen;
Otto Kummer, a representative from Bernhard Rust’s Ministry of Science, Education
and National Culture; and Robert Scholz, Alfred Rosenberg’s leading art expert.
31 Fröhlich (ed.), TJG: SF, part 1, vol. 3, 30 June 1937; Longerich, Goebbels, p. 347; Reuth,
Goebbels, p. 227.
32 Fröhlich (ed.), TJG: SF, part 1, vol. 3, 1 July 1937.
33 Longerich, Goebbels, p. 348.
34 See also Ulf Schmidt, Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia in Nazi Germany: The
History of Medical Research and Teaching Films of the Reich Office for Educational
Films/Reich Institute for Films in Science and Education, 1933–1945 (Husum, 2002).
35 Fröhlich (ed.), TJG: SF, part 1, vol. 3, 25 and 28 July 1937; 1 August 1937; Longerich,
Goebbels, p. 349.
36 Fröhlich (ed.), TJG: SF, part 1, vol. 3, 5 November 1937; see also Longerich, Goebbels,
p. 349, who erroneously claims that the confiscated artworks were shown to Goebbels
in November 1938.
37 Fröhlich (ed.), TJG: SF, part 1, vol. 3, 13 November 1938; Frederic Spotts, Hitler and
the Power of Aesthetics (London, 2002), pp. 151–68.
38 For example, in 1942, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne received RM 31,370
and a series of paintings from Hildebrandt Gurlitt as a form of compensation
for the confiscated artworks: correspondence of Dr Marcus Leifeld, Cologne,
with the authors, 4 July 2017; see also Petropoulos, Art as Politics, pp. 102–6;
for recent work on the history of compensating museums affected by the
‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition, see Johanna Poltermann, ‘Die Entschädigung der
Museen nach der Beschlagnahme entarteter Kunst 1937’ (Master’s dissertation,
Freie Universität Berlin, 2013); Johanna Poltermann, ‘“Wiedergutmachung” für
deutsche Museen? Die Beschlagnahmen “entarteter” Kunst in den Bayerischen
Staatsgemäldesammlungen 1937/38 und deren Entschädigung’, in Bernhard Maaz
(ed.), Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Jahresbericht 2016 (Munich, 2017), pp.
136–52.
39 Gesetz über Einziehung von Erzeugnissen entarteter Kunst, 31 May 1938, Deutsches
Reichsgesetzblatt 1938, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1938), p. 612; Fröhlich (ed.), TJG: SF, part 1,
vol. 3, 13–15 January 1938; Longerich, Goebbels, p. 349. For the make-up of the
‘disposal commission’, see Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain, p. 83; Poltermann, ‘Die
Entschädigung der Museen’, note 41, p. 150.
40 Petropoulos, Art as Politics, p. 108.
41 Hildebrand Gurlitt has become the focus of considerable attention among art
experts and the public; for some of the recent literature, see Ronald, Hitler’s
Art Thief; Meier, Feller and Christ, Der Gurlitt-Komplex; Kunstmuseum Bern
and Kunst- und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (eds),
Bestandsaufnahme Gurlitt; see also the databases lootedart.com and lostart.
de, which contain dozens of newspaper articles, blog posts and bibliographical
references about the ‘Gurlitt case’.
42 Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933–45 (hereafter
lootedart.com), Gurlitt Case: Hildebrand Gurlitt: Allied Documents, Interrogation
and Collection List 1945–50, at www.lootedart.com/QDES4V964951; also
Monuments Men Foundation, ‘Update on the Cornelius Gurlitt Collection’,
2 December 2013: https://www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/news/
update-on-the-cornelius-gurlitt-collection.
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43 For the provenance of the drawing Two Nudes on a Bed by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
which Hildebrand Gurlitt ‘purchased’ in 1940, see Michael Kimmelman, ‘The Void at
the Heart of “Gurlitt: Status Report” ’, New York Times, 19 November 2017.
44 Hildebrand Gurlitt, Aus dem Käthe Kollwitz-Werk (Dresden, 1930); Hildebrand
Gurlitt, ‘Zu Emil Noldes Aquarellen’, Die Kunst für alle, 44 (1928–9), pp. 41–4.
45 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement Written by Dr
Hildebrand Gurlitt, 8–10 June 1945.
46 Ibid.
47 Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain, p. 83.
48 Ibid., pp. 67–8.
49 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement.
50 Poltermann, ‘Die Entschädigung der Museen’; Poltermann, ‘ “Wiedergutmachung”
für deutsche Museen?’; see also Andrea Bambi, ‘ “Nicht pinakothekswürdig”: Ernst
Buchners Museumspolitik und ihre Folgen: Tauschgeschäfte und Ausstellungen
in den Pinakotheken 1933–1945’, in Bernhard Maaz (ed.), Bayerische
Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Jahresbericht 2016 (Munich, 2017), pp. 126–35; for
Buchholz, see also Ingeborg Prior, Sophies Vermächtnis: Von Hannover nach Sibirien.
Die tragische Geschichte der Kunstsammlerin Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers und ihrer
geraubten Bilder (Springe, 2015), pp. 321–2.
51 Poltermann, ‘ “Wiedergutmachung” für deutsche Museen?’, p. 136; Poltermann, ‘Die
Entschädigung der Museen’; see also Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate
of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York, 1994),
pp. 24–5.
52 See also Petropoulos, Art as Politics, pp. 108–9.
53 Spiegel Staff, ‘Phantom Collector: The Mystery of the Munich Nazi Art Trove’, Spiegel
Online, 11 November 2013.
54 Ibid.; also Bundesarchiv Berlin (hereafter BAB), R55/21015, Galerien Gurlitt in Berlin
und Hamburg. Schriftwechsel, 1938–42. Liste Bestand Niederschönhausen, pp. 26–50.
55 BAB, R55/21015, Galerien Gurlitt in Berlin und Hamburg. Schriftwechsel, 1938–42.
Liste Bestand Niederschönhausen, pp. 26–50. Gurlitt purchased the following
paintings by Kandinsky: Wunder der Tiefsee (Inv. No. 1344); Gebirgslandschaft (Inv.
No. 6998); 3 Klänge (Inv. No. 10928); Composition (Inv. No. 11252); and Blauer Berg
Dresden (Inv. No. 13679). He also bought the painting by Robert Delaunay: Saint-
Séverin (Inv. No. 6077).
56 See Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste (hereafter DZK), Kunstfund Gurlitt,
Einkaufsbuch Verkaufsbuch (Sales Ledgers) 1937–41 (http://www.lostart.
de/Content/041_KunstfundMuenchen/_Buecher/Buch1_download.pdf?__
blob=publicationFile&v=9), Book 2, 1939, p. 6; Book 3, 1939, p. 2.
57 Spiegel Staff, ‘Phantom Collector’.
58 BAB, R55/21015, Galerien Gurlitt in Berlin und Hamburg. Schriftwechsel, 1938–42.
Liste Bestand Niederschönhausen, pp. 26–50; for Fischer’s role in trading in ‘looted
art’, see Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain, pp. 30, 70, 91.
59 Petropoulos, Art as Politics, pp. 106ff.
60 See DZK, Kunstfund Gurlitt, Sales Ledgers, Book 2, 1939, pp. 30–1; Book 3, 1939, p. 2;
for Gurlitt’s relationship with the Propaganda Ministry, see Ronald, Hitler’s Art Thief,
p. 209.
61 See Meier, Feller and Christ, Der Gurlitt-Komplex.
62 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement.
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Art under Dictatorship 85

63 Hitler’s plans for a Führermuseum – part of a cultural complex in Linz – were never
realized.
64 Bundesarchiv Koblenz (hereafter BAK), B13323/134, vol. 6, 1940–5, Gurlitt to Posse,
10 December 1940; Wiedemann (on behalf of Posse) to Gurlitt, 12 December 1940;
Gurlitt to Posse, 14 and 19 December 1940.
65 BAK, B323/134, vol. 6, 1940–5, Gurlitt to Posse, 15 January 1941; Gurlitt to Posse, 19
March 1941; Posse to Gurlitt, 21 March 1941; Gurlitt to Posse, 10 September 1941;
Gurlitt to Posse, 25 September 1942; also Ronald, Hitler’s Art Thief, p. 209. For the
post-war sale of items from Speer’s art collection, see Koldehoff, Die Bilder sind unter
uns, pp. 14ff.
66 BAK, B323/134, vol. 6, 1940–5; B323/147; B323/98 and B323/99; also Spiegel Staff,
‘Phantom Collector’.
67 Fröhlich (ed.), TJG: SF, part 1, vol. 3, 3 and 8 February 1943.
68 See, e.g., DZK, Kunstfund Gurlitt, Sales Ledgers, Book 2, pp. 26–8, and Book 3, p. 2.
69 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement; also BAK, B323/134, vol.
6, 1940–5, B323/173, B323/153 and B323/154.
70 Spiegel Staff, ‘Phantom Collector’.
71 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement.
72 See DZK, Kunstfund Gurlitt, Sales Ledgers, Book 3, 1944, p. 72.
73 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement.
74 Ibid.
75 See Spiegel Staff, ‘Phantom Collector’; see also Petropoulos, Art as Politics, pp. 235–6.
76 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement.
77 Ibid.
78 BAK, B323/147, Göpel to Voss, 1 July 1943, ‘Die Lage des Pariser Kunstmarktes’, 5 July
1943; Göpel to Voss, 7 July 1943.
79 See DZK, Kunstfund Gurlitt, Sales Ledgers, Book 3, 1944, p. 70; Site Rose-Valland –
Musées Nationaux Récupération, MNR 599: http://www2.culture.gouv.fr/public/
mistral/mnrbis_fr; lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement.
80 See DZK, Kunstfund Gurlitt, Sales Ledgers, Book 3, 1944, p. 70; see also Gurlitt, Sales
Ledgers, Book 2, 1942, pp. 74–9. Gurlitt’s import/export ledger for the year 1944
suggests that he paid Hermsen RM 825,000; Hermsen, in turn, seems to have paid
FF 800,000 to the Demandolx-Dedons family. Alternatively, the French authorities
may have erroneously recorded French francs instead of Reichsmark; see Site Rose-
Valland – Musées Nationaux Récupération, MNR 599.
81 See DZK, Kunstfund Gurlitt, Sales Ledgers, Book 3, 1944, p. 74.
82 BAK, B323/134, Reimer to Gurlitt, 14 April 1944; see also Site Rose-Valland –
Musées Nationaux Récupération, MNR 599; also Roland Krischel (Head of Medieval
Department, Wallraf-Richartz Museum) to authors, 30 June 2017. Following the
purchase of Fouquet’s painting by the city of Cologne, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum
listed the painting under inventory number 2707. On 7 October 1949, the painting
was returned to France as part of the restitution process.
83 Statistical data about Gurlitt’s purchases compiled from invoices, receipts and
correspondence; see BAK, B323/134, vol. 6, 1940–5, Beauftragung von Dr. Hildebrand
Gurlitt im Rahmen des Sonderauftrags, 1944 (u.a. Paris und Brüssel).
84 Ibid.; see also DZK, Kunstfund Gurlitt, Sales Ledgers, Book 3, 1944, p. 74. After the
war, Gurlitt erroneously claimed that these had been Beauvais tapestries. lootedart.
com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement.
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85 BAK, B323/134, vol. 6, 1940–5, Gurlitt to Voss, 28 June 1944; also DZK, Kunstfund
Gurlitt, Sales Ledgers, Book 3, 1944, p. 70.
86 BAK, B323/134, vol. 6, 1940–5, Bericht über die finanzielle Abwicklung von
Bilderkäufen für den Sonderauftrag Kunstmuseum Linz durch Herrn Dr. H. Gurlitt,
22 January 1945.
87 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement.
88 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Supporting Documentation Provided by Gurlitt
and Related Documentation from the Allies Regarding the Collection (Gurlitt
Coll[ection]), 1950–1.
89 Gurlitt’s sales ledgers contain numerous entries of purchases of art from his family
for himself: DZK, Kunstfund Gurlitt, Sales Ledgers, Books 1–3.
90 BAK, B323/331, Aussagen und Erklärungen von Händlern und Verkäufern (A–J)
1947–54, Gurlitt to Edgar Breitenbach, 28 February 1949; Gurlitt to Gerda Koester, 5
August 1951.
91 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement.
92 Ibid.
93 BAK, B323/331, Aussagen und Erklärungen von Händlern und Verkäufern (A–J)
(1938–42) 1947–54, Information by Dr Gurlitt, pp. 254–7.
94 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Gurlitt Coll[ection]; also Nick Enoch, ‘How U.S. Military
Quizzed German Dealer of £1bn Nazi Art Loot Just after the War . . . but then Let Him
Go (along with the Odd Chagall and Matisse)’, Mail Online, 9 November 2013.
95 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Translation of Sworn Statement.
96 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Gurlitt Coll[ection].
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 The Lenbachhaus has confirmed (e-mail, Dr Hoberg to authors, 7 May 2018) that
the handwritten note by Paul Klee states the following: ‘1919.163. / Sumpflegende
/ Klee / verkauft / Besitzer / Dr. Küppers’. See also Datenbank national wertvolles
Kulturgut: Paul Klee, Sumpflegende (1919): http://www.kulturgutschutz-
deutschland.de/DE/3_Datenbank/Kulturgut/Bayern/02805_117.html. The
information listed in the database (‘1919.163 Sumpflegende Klee; 1919/163 gespalten
1_lv’) is incorrect. Also see Melissa Müller and Monika Tatzkow, Verlorene Bilder.
Verlorene Leben – Jüdische Sammler und was aus ihren Kunstwerken wurde (Munich,
2009), pp. 98–114; Prior, Sophies Vermächtnis, p. 324.
100 Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Maler, Architekt, Typograf, Fotograf
(Dresden, 1967).
101 Ulrich Krempel, El Lissitzky, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers: Von Hannover nach Moskau
(Göttingen, 2015), pp. 8–9, 120–1; Prior, Sophies Vermächtnis, pp. 311–12, 321.
102 Beschlagnahmeinventar-Datenbank der ‘Forschungsstelle Entartete Kunst’: http://
www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/khi/ressourcen/diathek/beschlagnahmeinventar/
index.html. In total, the Nazi regime confiscated an estimated 141 artworks by Klee.
Of these, fifteen artworks are known to have been destroyed, and another fifty-nine
artworks have vanished without a trace; for Klee’s persecution by the Nazi regime,
see Meier, Feller and Christ, Der Gurlitt-Komplex, pp. 221–30. The slogan has been
cut off in Figure 3.2.
103 Prior, Sophies Vermächtnis, pp. 324–5.
104 Prior, Sophies Vermächtnis, pp. 258ff.; Krempel, El Lissitzky, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers,
pp. 174–9.
105 Prior, Sophies Vermächtnis, p. 325.
 87

Art under Dictatorship 87

106 Ibid., pp. 325–6.

107 Krempel, El Lissitzky, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, pp. 178–9; Prior, Sophies Vermächtnis,
pp. 263–4.
108 Ibid., p. 326; see also THEMIS Partners, ‘Sumpflegende’: www.themis.partners/
highlights/sumpflegende/.
109 Wolfgang Kohrt, ‘Ein Gemälde von Paul Klee in München, die Geschichte des
Verbannten Jen Lissitzky und die Debatte um geraubte Kunstwerke. Schatten über
einem Bild’, Berliner Zeitung, 20 January 1999.
110 Prior, Sophies Vermächtnis, p. 326.
111 Kohrt, ‘Ein Gemälde von Paul Klee’.
112 Prior, Sophies Vermächtnis, p. 329.
113 Kohrt, ‘Ein Gemälde von Paul Klee’.
114 Prior, Sophies Vermächtnis, pp. 330–1; see also THEMIS Partners, ‘Sumpflegende’.
115 Ibid., pp. 330–1.
116 Ibid., p. 331.
117 Gunnar Schnabel and Monika Tatzkow, Nazi Looted Art: Handbuch Kunstrestitution
weltweit (Berlin, 2007), p. 289; Commission for Looted Art in Europe (CLAE),
Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art: http://www.
lootedartcommission.com/Washington-principles; also Evans, ‘Looted Art and Its
Restitution’.
118 CLAE, Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art.
119 Catherine Hickley, ‘Nazi-Seized Klee Goes to Court after Munich Rejects Talks’,
Bloomberg Business Week, 27 March 2012: https://plone.unige.ch/art-adr/
news-actualite/nazi-seized-klee-goes-to-court-after-munich-rejects-talks.
120 Rose-Maria Gropp, ‘Restitutionsstreit: Klees “Sumpflegende”. Schritte in die richtige
Richtung’, FAZ.net, 6 May 2013; Spiegel Staff, ‘Streit um Klee-Bild beendet’, Spiegel
Online, 26 July 2017.
121 THEMIS Partners, ‘Sumpflegende’.
122 Ibid.
123 The two oils are Zwei Reiter am Strand (c.1900; erroneously dated 1901 by the
Taskforce, Lost Art ID 477892: http://www.lostart.de/DE/Fund/477892) and Zwei
Reiter am Strand (1901). The painting discussed here is the former. One way of
distinguishing them is by the forelegs of the second horse: both can be seen in the
former painting. For ease of reference and to avoid confusion, we have consistently
referred to both paintings as Zwei Reiter am Strand, although other authorities refer
to the painting discussed here as Zwei Reiter am Strand nach links. See Sotheby’s,
‘Property from a German Private Collection, Max Liebermann, Zwei Reiter am
Strand nach links – Studie (Two Riders on the Beach Turned to the Left – Study)’, 22
June 2017: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2017/impressionist-
modern-art-day-sale-l17008/lot.369.html. We are grateful to Sotheby’s for granting
us permission to use their high-resolution image of the paintings for this publication.
124 Sotheby’s, ‘Property Restituted to the Heirs of David Friedmann, Max Liebermann,
Zwei Reiter am Strand nach links (Two Riders on the Beach to the Left)’, 24 June
2015: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2015/impressionist-
modern-art-evening-sale-l15006/lot.27.html; Lost Art ID 477892: http://www.
lostart.de/DE/Fund/477892.
125 DZK, Kunstfund Gurlitt, Schlussbericht Max Liebermann ‘Reiter am Strand’, ‘Zwei
Reiter am Strand’: http://www.taskforce-kunstfund.de/fileadmin/_downloads/
TFK_2014-07-25_Schlussbericht_Liebermann_Reiter_am_Stand.pdf, pp. 5–10;
88

88 Propaganda and Conflict

see also Schlesische Kunstsammlungen, ‘David Friedmann’: http://www.

schlesischesammlungen.eu/Kolekcje/Friedmann-David-1857-1942-Breslau; draft
(?) letter ‘Betrifft: Sicherstellung Jüdischen Kunstbesitzes’ from Oberregierungsrat
Dr Westram to Reichswirtschaftsminister, Breslau, 5 December 1939, in Archiwum
Państwowe we Wrocławiu (Wroclaw National Archives), Nr. I/9971: https://www.
welt.de/kultur/gallery121776044/Auf-den-Spuren-der-Nazi-Raubkunst.html#cs-
zgbdc5-6cnpnfiu0pfsv48x675-original-jpg.jpg.
126 Spiegel Staff, ‘Phantom Collector’. See also draft (?) letter ‘Betrifft: Sicherstellung
Jüdischen Kunstbesitzes’.
127 Sotheby’s, ‘Property Restituted to the Heirs of David Friedmann’.
128 Ibid.; see also Lost Art ID 448871 (http://www.lostart.de/DE/Fund/448871),
Kunstkabinett Dr H. Gurlitt [sic], Hamburg, to Provinz Museum, Breslau, 9 June
1941, in Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu (Wrocław National Museum), Gabinet
Dokumentów, Schlesisches Museum für bildende Künste Breslau, Veräusserung
und Umtausch von Kunstwerken, 1920–44, II/145, p. 154; Johanna Klapproth,
‘Tauschbilder. Zur Entschädigung der Museen nach der Beschlagnahme 1937’
(Master’s dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin, 2013).
129 Staatsarchiv Bamberg, Spruchkammer Bamberg Land G 251, Polizei – Kriminalamt,
Witness Statement Ingeborg Hertmann, 27 November 1947; also Spiegel Staff,
‘Phantom Collector’; Ronald, Hitler’s Art Thief, p. 210, provides a poor and
misleading translation of Hertmann’s witness statement to the criminal police in
Hamburg in 1947.
130 lootedart.com, Gurlitt Case: Gurlitt Coll[ection], Collecting Point Wiesbaden,
Collection Gurlitt: Hamburg, Inventory Number WIE 1930.
131 DZK, Kunstfund Gurlitt, Schlussbericht Max Liebermann, p. 15.
132 Boris Pofalla, ‘Der Schatz und seine Hüter’, Frankfurter Allgemeine, 9 November
2013: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kunst/der-fall-gurlitt/fund-von-
muenchen-der-schatz-und-sein-hueter-12656198.html; Taskforce, Lost Art ID
477892.
133 Berner Zeitung Staff, ‘Rückgabe von Bild aus Gurlitt-Sammlung steht offenbar
bevor’, Berner Zeitung, 20 March 2015: https://www.bernerzeitung.ch/kultur/kunst/
Rueckgabe-von-Bild-aus-GurlittSammlung-steht-offenbar-bevor/story/23683127;
copied in http://www.lootedart.com/R5TNSK806211; Doreen Carvajal, ‘Painting
Recovered from Gurlitt Trove to Be Auctioned in London’, New York Times, 22 May
2015; Spiegel Staff, ‘Phantom Collector’.
134 Meier, Feller and Christ, Der Gurlitt-Komplex.
135 Sotheby’s, ‘Property from a Private Collection, Max Liebermann, German, Zwei
Reiter am Strand nach links (Two Riders on a Beach)’, 3 June 2009: http://www.
sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2009/19th-century-european-paintings-
including-german-austrian-central-european-paintings-the-orientalist-sale-spanish-
painting-and-the-scandinavian-sale-l09661/lot.14.html.
136 Sotheby’s, ‘Property Restituted to the Heirs of David Friedmann’; Stephanie Pieper,
‘Millionenerlös für Bild aus Gurlitt-Schatz’, Tagesschau, 25 June 2015.
137 Sotheby’s, ‘Property from a German Private Collection’.
138 Eddy, ‘First Public Showing’.
139 See, for instance, Getty Research Institute, German Sales Catalogs, 1930–1945: Art
Works, Art Markets, and Cultural Policy: German Sales Phase II: 1901–1929: http://
www.getty.edu/research/scholars/research_projects/index.html#germansales.
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Art under Dictatorship 89

140 Ibid.; Kate Connolly, ‘German and Swiss Galleries to Display Gurlitt’s Nazi-Era
Treasure Trove’, Guardian, 5 April 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/
apr/05/german-and-swiss-art-galleries-display-cornelius-gurlitt-nazi-art.
141 See also Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain, p. 9, who refers to a ‘clandestine postwar
network of former Nazi art experts’; and Petropoulos, ‘Art Dealer Networks in the
Third Reich and in the Postwar Period’, in which he refers to a series of ‘overlapping
networks’.
142 Thomas Buomberger, ‘Ein Risiko für den Ruf der Schweiz’, Beobachter, 30
March 2015.
143 Ibid.
144 Hans-Peter Riegel, ‘Kunstmarkt ist ein Tummelplatz für Geldwäscher’, Die Welt, 29
October 2014: https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article133765120/Kunstmarkt-ist-
ein-Tummelplatz-fuer-Geldwaescher.html; Buomberger, ‘Ein Risiko für den Ruf der
Schweiz’.
145 For the role of secrecy within the art world, see Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain,
pp. 63ff.
146 Meier, Feller and Christ, Der Gurlitt-Komplex; Schmidt, ‘Schuld und Sühne’;
Georg Leyrer, ‘Kunstfund: Alliierte hatten nach Krieg Werke beschlagnahmt’, Der
Kurier, 6 November 2013. Also in November 2013, the Austrian art expert and
Deputy Director of the Belvedere in Vienna, Alfred Weidinger, commented that
the ‘Gurlitt case’ was hardly surprising and that whole affair had been blown out
of proportion: ‘That this [Gurlitt] collection existed was no secret. In fact, every
significant art dealer in Southern Germany was aware of its existence – and even
of its scale’: Nikolai B. Forstbauer, ‘Sammlung Gurlitt in Bern und Bonn: Spektakel
war gestern’, Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 1 November 2017: https://www.stuttgarter-
nachrichten.de/inhalt.sammlung-gurlitt-in-bern-und-bonn-spektakel-war-
gestern.93f6e7da-853a-488a-a90c-2d2f145f9802.html.
147 Meier, Feller and Christ, Der Gurlitt-Komplex; Schmidt, ‘Schuld und Sühne’.
148 Koldehoff, Die Bilder sind unter uns, p. 18.
149 lootedart.com, ‘International Research Portal for Records Related to Nazi-Era
Cultural Property’, 9 May 2013: www.lootedart.com/OTR6DU975691.
150 See, e.g., Gregor Neil, ‘Daimler-Benz, Forced Labor and Compensation’, Dimensions,
13: 2 (1999), pp. 25–30; Wilfried Reininghaus and Norbert Reimann (eds),
Zwangsarbeit in Deutschland 1939–1945: Archiv- und Sammlungsgut, Topographie
und Erschliessungsstrategien (Bielefeld, 2001); Andreas Frewer and Günther
Siedbürger (eds), Medizin und Zwangsarbeit im Nationalsozialismus. Einsatz und
Behandlung von ‘Ausländern’ im Gesundheitswesen (Frankfurt and New York, 2004);
Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under
the Third Reich (Cambridge and New York, 2006).
151 Matt Schudel, ‘Cornelius Gurlitt, Hoarder of Valuable Art Collection, Dies’,
Washington Post, 6 May 2014; Spiegel Staff, ‘Monet-Gemälde in Gurlitts Koffer
entdeckt’, Spiegel Online, 5 September 2014.
152 Schmidt, ‘Schuld und Sühne’.
90

90
 91

Part Two

The Second World War

92

92
 93

Introduction
Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt

The bibliography relating to propaganda and the Second World War is immense and
has a long history. Almost as soon as the war ended, journalists and academics began
discussion on the nature of the propaganda output of the combatant states, its diversity,
quality and impact. One of the first into print was Admiral Sir George Pirie Thomson
in 1947 with his Blue Pencil Admiral: The Inside Story of the Press Censorship.1 A year
later appeared the first English-language editions of Goebbels’s diaries translated by
Louis P. Lochner, a US journalist.2 As a selection from the diaries, the publication was
by no means aimed at understanding Goebbels’s role solely as propaganda minister,
but it nonetheless provided insights into his thinking and sentiments. Journalists
proved particularly keen to move from news disseminators to historians in the years
immediately after the war, as many military correspondents reflected on their war
experiences. However, these works tended to be general overviews of particular battles
or campaigns rather than analyses of the way they gathered and submitted their copy
and the process behind its subsequent appearance in print.3
With most of the state archives closed until the 1970s, the interpretation provided
by personal accounts dominated the field. Thus, by the late 1970s, the groundwork on
mechanisms had been laid, reflected in such works as Ian McLaine’s Ministry of Morale
(1979), a book which is fascinating for having been written as the relevant archives
were being opened up to the wider public.4 For current readers, its lack of footnotes,
and yet clear knowledge of the official sources, makes it seem like a hybrid form of
official and academic history. Occasionally, this took the form of seemingly overarching
accounts written from a position of perspective and distance when they were, in fact,
driven by personal experience. For example, Michael Balfour’s Propaganda in War
1939–1945: Organisations, Policies and Publics in Britain and Germany is a fascinating
comparative study of British and German approaches which was informed throughout
by his own direct experience in the General Division of the Ministry of Information
(MOI) during the conflict.5 Published in 1979, the same year as McLaine’s work,
Balfour’s dense, highly structured account systematically explored a huge range of
propaganda campaigns and responses to specific themes such as British bombing and
reactions to the capitulation of Nazi forces at Stalingrad. Although somewhat uneven
in nature due to the profusion of vignettes, Balfour’s work nonetheless made a hugely
94

94 Propaganda and Conflict

important contribution to overall understandings of the workings of propaganda in

the Second World War.
As can be readily understood, these early histories also tended to be macro-scale
overviews of the governmental propaganda machines and were often far more about
policy, mechanisms and personnel than analyses of the actual output. These pioneering
studies therefore provided the essential skeleton for later more detailed work on
particular aspects of propaganda. They also ensured that for a very long time, and
arguably this is still the case, Second World War propaganda has been conceived of as
a state-driven exercise through formal state agencies and structures.
However, nuance has been brought to the field by studies not solely focussed on
propaganda but engaging with it as part of a wider argument. Ian Kershaw’s work
on Nazi Germany has stressed the idea that Hitler’s officials sought to interpret his
sometimes vague ideas and at the same time curry favour by being seen as ideologically
sound Nazis. This created internal competition between officials and ministries leading
to more and more radical plans in a process labelled ‘working towards the Fuhrer’.6
Similarly, Richard Overy’s work on the bombing of Germany has shown that external
pressure from Allied military action may have made people more likely to accept or
conform to the propaganda ideals disseminated by the government.7 In many ways,
these interpretations build upon Angus Calder’s pioneering work, The Myth of the
Blitz, in which he blurred deliberately the idea that the state instructed people what
to do and think. Instead, Calder argued that the relationship between individual and
state was a much more fluid and elastic one and had far more to do with individual
agency accepting and complying, or possibly rejecting, and yet still engaging with the
message.8
With the maturing of Second World War propaganda studies, the way was opened
for more detailed studies of particular media forms and outputs. By contrast, as
these studies have evolved, explorations of Second World War propaganda in which
the newspaper forms the main focus of attention have declined, which makes it very
different from explorations of Great War propaganda and public discourse. Instead,
cinema has become an extremely important topic. David Welch pioneered close analysis
of Nazi cinematic propaganda in his 1985 work, Propaganda and the German Cinema,
1933–1945.9 Analysing both production organizations and the films themselves, this
represented a major step forward in foregrounding the propaganda output itself. In
1998, James Chapman took a similar approach in his The British at War: Cinema, State
and Propaganda, 1939–1945.10 As the title makes clear, Chapman wanted to explore
the relationship between the state and the cinema industry in its attempt to respond to
a national demand. Films are analysed for their content and style and therefore open
up the question of impact and audience response. In between Welch and Chapman,
Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards built upon their pioneering histories of British
cinema with their Britain Can Take It: Cinema and Society in the Second World War
(1986).11 Aldgate and Richards were concerned to answer questions about what the
films said about the British people’s experience of the ‘People’s War’ set within the
wider framework of the concerns of the MOI.
Hollywood’s contribution to the United States’ war effort was also opened up in
the 1980s. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black produced a detailed insight into
 95

The Second World War 95

the film policy of the Office of War Information and explored many films along the
way in their Hollywood Goes to War (1987).12 Like those of Aldgate and Richards
and of Chapman, their study explored the macro-workings of the state propaganda
mechanisms, the interactions with the commercial cinema industry and the nature of
the cinematic output. With studies of cinematic propaganda bursting into vigorous
life, the radio, arguably the key communications media of the Second World War, has
not gained similar attention. However, there are notable exceptions. Sian Nicholas’s
thorough study of the BBC’s wartime operation, The Echo of War:  Home Front
Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–45 (1996), revealed much about its delicate
relationship with the government, being nominally independent but deeply related
to the state.13 The inability to block radio waves made it a valuable way to influence
the enemy, as Martin Doherty explored in his Nazi Wireless Propaganda:  Lord
Haw-Haw and British Public Opinion in the Second World War (2000).14 Another
theme of Nazi broadcasting to Britain, and to occupied nations, was explored in
Horst Bergmeier’s 1997 monograph Hitler’s Airwaves:  Jazz, Swing, and Nazi Radio
Propaganda.15 Most recently, Will J. Studdert has added to our knowledge of the use
of music as propaganda in his comparative study The Jazz War: Radio, Nazism and
the Struggle for the Airwaves in World War II (2017).16 It complements Frank Rybicki’s
exploration of the way the Nazis attempted to utilize radio for both domestic and
foreign consumption in his Rhetorical Dimensions of Radio Propaganda in Nazi
Germany 1939–1945 (2014).17 For Rybicki, the removal of the visual forced the
imagination to the fore and created a more dynamic relationship between audience
and producer.
Words and images come together in the propaganda posters of the conflict. Given
the ubiquity of posters as a medium of information during the Second World War, it
took a remarkably long time for them to become the focus of critical attention. Indeed,
it can be argued that in Britain it took until Joseph Darracott and Belinda Loftus of
the Imperial War Museum produced their booklet, Second World War Posters (1972),
that they were finally given a status in their own right.18 Rebecca (Bex) Lewis’s 2004
PhD thesis, ‘The Planning, Design and Reception of British Home Front Propaganda
Posters of the Second World War’, explored a series of themes and campaigns in detail
but has not yet been published.19 Serious study of posters took an equally long time to
appear in the United States and continental Europe. The delay was probably driven by
the gradual development of research methodologies and approaches. As with cinema,
many historians, and others interested in Second World War propaganda, needed time
to engage with the techniques of art history and film studies and adapt and deploy
them to their own work.
By the same token, it took art historians some time to turn to the official war
art programmes of the Second World War. Until relatively recently, the war art of
the First World War has dominated interest largely because its quantity, quality and
diversity monopolized attention. Similarly to the development of studies on cinematic
propaganda, those behind the studies of war art tend to be driven either by the
aesthetics and the place the output has within the media or genre, with the wider
contexts given second place, or vice versa, depending upon the precise background of
the author. However, unlike in studies of cinema, the vast majority of the literature is
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96 Propaganda and Conflict

produced by art historians who specialize in this area, rather than historians interested
in propaganda and persuasion.20 This is an issue addressed in Part One of this
particular volume in the contribution of Schmidt and Schmidt-Mai, where a historian
of propaganda and an art historian have collaborated in a piece of research likely to
stimulate new engagement and fruitful debate in this field.
The chapters which make up this part reveal a range of preoccupations, leading
themes and questions, reflecting the maturing of Second World War propaganda
studies. Richard Taylor and James Chapman’s chapters reveal something of the auteur
approach, exploring as they do how two great artists and technicians – the poet Dylan
Thomas and the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock – had to balance their individual interests
and desire for artistic freedom within the structures of government propaganda
agencies and policies. A different approach is taken by Jeffrey Richards, who reveals the
truth of Siegfried Sassoon’s claim that ‘in remembering we forget much’ through his
analysis of films that dealt with darker or controversial issues during the war but have
failed to make it through to the accepted canon of wartime ‘greats’. Marina Petrakis
picks up on a theme of great interest during the Cold War, which has been revitalized in
our age of Putin and post-truth, namely, the covert propaganda campaign designed to
encourage some, while misleading and demoralizing others. This element also infuses
Gaynor Johnson’s contribution. Her study of the British Foreign Office’s reaction to
the Katyn massacre explores the impact of competing pressures and agendas, and the
extent to which expediency demands a highly controlled interpretation of a particular
event. All of these contributions reveal the intensity of the challenges thrown down by
the second, great total war of the twentieth century and at the same time reveal much
about the maturing field of propaganda history and studies.

Notes
1 George P. Thomson, Blue Pencil Admiral: The Inside Story of the Press Censorship
(London, 1946).
2 Louis P. Lochner (transl. and ed.), The Goebbels Diaries (London, 1948).
3 For examples see Fred Majdalany, The Monastery (London, 1946); Chester Wilmot,
The Struggle for Europe (London, 1952).
4 Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information
in World War II (London, 1979).
5 Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War, 1939–1945: Organisations, Policies and Publics in
Britain and Germany (London, 1979).
6 See Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London, 1998); Hitler, 1936–1945:
Nemesis (London, 2000).
7 Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe, 1939–1945 (London, 2013).
8 Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London, 1991).
9 David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1985).
10 James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945
(London, 1998).
11 Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: Cinema and Society in the
Second World War (Oxford, 1986).
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The Second World War 97

12 Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits
and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (London, 1987).
13 Sian Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–
45 (Manchester, 1996).
14 M. A. Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda: Lord Haw-Haw and British Public Opinion
in the Second World War (Edinburgh, 2000).
15 Horst Bergmeier, Hitler’s Airwaves: Jazz, Swing, and Nazi Radio Propaganda (New
Haven, CT, and London, 1997).
16 Will J. Studdert, The Jazz War: Radio, Nazism and the Struggle for the Airwaves in
World War II (London, 2017).
17 Frank Rybicki, Rhetorical Dimensions of Radio Propaganda in Nazi Germany 1939–
1945 (Saarbrücken, 2014); Will J. Studdert, ‘ “We’ve Got a Gig in Poland!”: Britain and
Jazz in World War II’, Jazz Research Journal, 7 (2013), pp. 79–111.
18 Joseph Darracott and Belinda Loftus, Second World War Posters (London, 1972).
19 Rebecca Lewis, ‘The Planning, Design and Reception of British Home Front
Propaganda Posters of the Second World War’ (PhD thesis, University of
Southampton, 2004).
20 For examples see Monica Bohm-Duchen, Art and the Second World War (London,
2013); Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, London’s Burning: Life, Death and Art
in the Second World War (London, 1994); Laura Brandon, Art or Memorial? The
Forgotten Story of Canada’s War Art (Calgary, 2006).
98

98
 99

‘False hopes and airy visions’? Dylan Thomas and

British film propaganda in the Second World War
Richard Taylor

Swansea’s ‘golden boy’, Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), is best known for his poetry, his
short stories, his radio play Under Milk Wood and his overgenerous, and eventually
fatal, consumption of alcohol, but his contribution as a scriptwriter for British
propaganda films in the Second World War has been generally overlooked and largely
undervalued. It is the purpose of this chapter to rescue this part of his career from its
undeserved relative obscurity (and it seems appropriate to dedicate the essay to the one
former student who has made a successful academic career in the study of propaganda,
Emeritus Professor David Welch).
Dylan Thomas was not far short of his 25th birthday when war broke out in
September 1939. In the course of that quarter-century, he had left his home town in
1934 to develop his bohemian lifestyle in London, met (1936) and married (1937)
Caitlin Macnamara, fathered a son (1939) and moved, at least temporarily, to the
Carmarthenshire town of Laugharne (1938). As far as the wider world was concerned,
he was known for his first collections of poetry (18 Poems, 1934; Twenty-Five Poems,
1936; and The Map of Love, 1939, which also included some short stories) and his first
radio broadcast (Life and the Modern Poet, 1937).
His only published writing on film by this time was a very short article for his
school magazine in 1930:

When English producers turned back to their trade in 1919 they found that
America had got complete hold over the world and dominated every market. It
was not until two or three years ago that England woke up to the fact that English
producers were bringing forth many fine films. Up to then the public had been
so used to seeing thousands of American pictures and occasional and almost
invariably bad English ones that they did not get to know that there were some
really intelligent producers at work in England.1

He began his concluding paragraph with a sentiment that the Soviet avant-garde, and
particularly Sergei Eisenstein, would have agreed with:
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100 Propaganda and Conflict

Synchronised films up to 1930 have been distinctly disappointing. Crudity was

expected, but both American and English producers have taken sound for granted,
and have been over-confident of themselves. The older and established producers,
especially, have merely added it to their screen-properties, without realising that it
is something new which cannot be tackled by any old methods but which requires
a special method of approach. Even film-pioneers must start at the beginning of
sound-film production, and learn what there is to be learnt.2

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Thomas was as avid a filmgoer as any
teenager at the time, but the kind of films he would have been exposed to in the local
cinemas in Swansea would have been very much those described in his schoolboy
piece. In his quasi-autobiographical radio feature Return Journey, broadcast in June
1947 and presaging the style of Under Milk Wood, the First Voice remarks of Swansea’s
Uplands district, where Thomas grew up:  ‘Here was once the flea-pit picture-house
where he whooped for the scalping Indians . . . and banged for the rustlers’ guns.’3 But
there is also some evidence to suggest that the range of foreign programming for local
audiences might well have been rather broader than later generations have come to
expect.4 In a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, written in the form of a comic playlet
Spasma and Salnady (a title derived from loose anagrams of the two correspondents’
names), Salnady (i.e. Dylan) remarked,

Among the few films I  have enjoyed are:  The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Atlantic/
Atlantik, Student of Prague, Edge of the World, Vaudeville, Waxworks, The Street,
M and The Blue Angel (all German); Sous les toits de Paris; Potemkin (Russian).5

This certainly displayed a working knowledge of European films of the period, which
told their story primarily through images rather than words. Such, as so many film
historians have noted, were the advantages of silent cinema.
Thomas’s interest in film continued while he lived in London. Indeed his first
biographer Constantine Fitzgibbon remarked,

All his life Dylan was a passionate film fan. He would give himself up completely
to whatever film he was seeing, would not only laugh aloud at the funny ones but
would cry without shame when the actors demanded this of him. He had a fan’s
hero-worship for the stars, which persisted even when he was famous himself, and
his pride and delight at being invited to Charles Chaplin’s home was enormous and
genuine. . . . I think that he derived more sheer pleasure from being treated as an
equal by Charlie Chaplin than he would have done had he been so treated by T. S.
Eliot or W. B. Yeats. The world of poets was the world he knew: that other world
was the infinitely more attractive world of dreams.6

That ‘infinitely more attractive world of dreams’ was to appear even more infinitely
attractive when war broke out in Europe in September 1939. Dylan Thomas was by no
means alone among intellectuals in preferring the world of dreams to the real world
of war. He wrote in a letter to his friend, the critic and screenwriter John Davenport,
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‘False Hopes and Airy Visions’? 101

on 14 September 1939, ‘I am trying to get a job before conscription, because my one-

and-only body I will not give . . . all I want to do is write poems . . . Soon there will
not be a serious paper paying inadequately for serious stories and poems.’7 Augustus
John, a fellow Welshman, suggested writing to Sir Kenneth Clark, Director of the
National Gallery, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and, somewhat improbably perhaps,
also Director of the Film Division at the Ministry of Information (MOI), to ask if
there were any possibility of a ‘reserved job’ at the ministry, particularly in the Film
Division.8 This direct approach failed, so the launch of Thomas’s scriptwriting career
depended on a more indirect series of encounters that led him to Donald Taylor,
whose company, Strand Films, was, like the Crown Film Unit, centrally involved in the
making of documentary films for the MOI and for that matter also employed Graham
Greene as a scriptwriter.9
Writing film scripts also suited Thomas because, although his employer and
therefore his source of a reasonably regular income were in London, he could spend
much of his time doing the actual writing with his young family in Wales. Thomas
made very clear in his correspondence that he did not like London at all. In a letter to
the actress Ruth Wynn Owen provisionally dated May 1942 he wrote, ‘I wish you were
in London, where even the sun’s grey and God how I hate it.’10 In a letter to his wife
Caitlin the following year, he was even more explicit about his disaffections:

And I  cannot come down this weekend. I  have to work all day Sunday. I  am
working, for the first time since I sold my immortal soul, very very hard, doing
three months’ work in a week. I hate film studios. I hate film workers. I hate films.
There is nothing but glibly naive insincerity in this huge tinroofed box of tricks.
I do not care a bugger about the Problems of Wartime Transport.11

Taylor’s scriptwriters sometimes worked individually but more often as a team, as did
the company as a whole. Many of the films had the same director (John Eldridge or Alan
Osbiston), cameraman (Jo Jago), composer (William Alwyn) and conductor (Muir
Mathieson). Unfortunately, the files of Strand Films have been destroyed, making it
difficult to ascertain precisely what Thomas’s contribution to team-scripted projects
was. In this essay, I shall therefore focus primarily on films that are clearly written by
Thomas: the eight which are publicly available on DVD from the official collection of
the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London,12 and three others.13 Although these
films vary in length, it is worth pointing out that the average lasted 12.75 minutes,
so we are examining here short documentaries rather than feature-length films. In
January 1942, Thomas wrote to John Summerfield, novelist and fellow documentary
scriptwriter, ‘I’m still helping to produce . . . the series of priggish, facetious shorts
extolling the virtues of sad girls in unfitting uniforms and the vices of happy thinking,
moving and x-ing – the word I must use.’14 (One instance of the ‘sad girls in unfitting
uniforms’ may well have been Balloon Site 568, discussed later.)
These documentary films played a specific part in wartime propaganda under
Kenneth Clark and his successor Jack Beddington:15 for them, documentary film
helped to boost and maintain morale through a focus on various aspects of the realities
of the war effort and the post-war settlement that justified and motivated that effort,
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102 Propaganda and Conflict

while feature films provided much-needed escapism from those realities.16 This suited
Thomas, as it suited those who had previously been active in the British documentary
film movement.
Some scripts were never completed, some scripts were completed but the films
never made, some scripts were completed but the films based on them were not and
Fitzgibbon recalls one film that was completed but never released because the MOI
was ‘scandalised by its eccentricity’.17 This was Is Your Ernie Really Necessary? (1943),
a parody of the wartime slogan ‘Is your journey really necessary?’, in which all the
parts were played by a single actor. The first successful film listed by Fitzgibbon was
The Conquest of a Germ, released in February 1942. However, the most authoritative
and detailed study of Thomas’s scripts by John Ackerman lists this as his ninth work,
released in 1943.18 I shall take his list as definitive, or as near definitive as we have.
Ackerman lists twenty-three scripts, from This Is Colour, made for Imperial Chemical
Industries (ICI) in 1942, to Rebecca’s Daughters, written in 1948 but not actually made
until 1992. Only fourteen of those scripts were written during wartime and not all of
those could necessarily be considered ‘war films’, This Is Colour being one. So we are
left with about a dozen ‘war films’: eight of those are on the IWM DVD; the following
four are not:  Young Farmers (1942), The Unconquerable People (1944), Our Country
(1944) and Fuel for Battle (1944).
The first of these ‘war films’, as far as we can see, was New Towns for Old, six minutes
long and directed by John Eldridge in 1942 for Strand Films from a script by Thomas.
It was set in Sheffield, thinly disguised as Smokedale; a local councillor (trilby, tweed
jacket, pipe and Yorkshire accent) is proudly showing a visitor, effectively the ‘man from
the ministry’ (bowler, greatcoat and received pronunciation), what the city council
has achieved in the twenty years since the Great War to clear slums and implicitly to
build the ‘homes fit for heroes’ that were promised during that war to the returning
soldiers and their families. The new housing, emancipated from the shadow of the steel
plants and factories, is light, airy, spacious, surrounded by a green belt and provides a
better environment for the younger generation to grow up in. It is the creation of ‘the
new council’, presumably Labour, elected by a small majority after the Great War, and
this particular ‘new town for old’ clearly also provides the inspiration for the post-war
settlement to come. At the end of the film, in response to the visitor’s question ‘Who’s
going to make these plans come true?’, the councillor turns to the audience and points
at them with his pipe, rather as Kitchener pointed from the Great War recruitment
poster:  ‘They are! You are! You’re t’only folk that can make these plans come true.
Not only plans for this town. But for every town. For your town. Remember! It’s your
town!’19
Thus an essential element of post-war welfare provision for the masses was already
being promoted on film in 1942, the year the Beveridge Report was published, although
Winston Churchill remained opposed to any promise of post-war improvements. As
late as 12 January 1943, he argued,

Ministers should, in my view, be careful not to raise false hopes as was done last
time by speeches about ‘Homes for heroes, etc.’. The broad masses of the people
face the hardships of life undaunted but they are liable to get very angry if they
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‘False Hopes and Airy Visions’? 103

feel they have been gulled or cheated . . . It is for this reason of not wishing to
deceive the people by false hopes and airy visions of Utopia and Eldorado that
I have refrained so far from making promises about the future.20

However, a rising feeling of suspicion and disquiet had been identified in a Home
Intelligence report of May 1942:

There is growing evidence of a feeling among certain sections of the public

that ‘everything is not fair and equal and that therefore our sacrifices are not
worthwhile’. In particular there is some belief that the rich are less hit by rationing
than ‘ordinary people’.21

The matter was resolved at a meeting of Home Front Ministers in March 1943, who
felt ‘that on various post-war topics extreme views seem to be catching the public
imagination; and it was thought to be high time that the balance should be redressed
by gaining a hearing for more moderate and realist views’.22
So, the efforts of the MOI, Strand Films and Dylan Thomas were already somewhat
ahead of their time and raised for a number of diehards the spectre of some kind of
endorsement of socialism. This spectre had, after all, haunted the British establishment
throughout the inter-war period. The Tory MP Bob Boothby famously remarked, ‘The
MOI did not win the war, but it certainly won the election for Labour.’23
The Documentary News Letter, which provides us with a consistent contemporary
view of these films, praised the propaganda value of New Towns for Old as ‘very good
for the Home Front, particularly since the film makes it clear that plans for the future
are bound up with the war effort which we are all engaged in here and now’.24
The next film was Balloon Site 568, slightly longer at just over eight minutes, directed
by Ivan Moffat and co-scripted by Moffat and Thomas. It was a straightforward, and
perhaps rather predictable, recruitment film for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
(WAAF), depicting four women from different walks of life, and with somewhat
unreliable accents, during their training and integration as balloon operators so that
men could be released for other, implicitly more masculine, duties. This represents
the social cohesion of the prospective post-war settlement. The film relies on staged
interviews in the style of Humphrey Jennings’s documentaries to explain the context
and it is in these that the unreliability of the accents becomes obvious. The film was seen
as moving on from Squadron 992, made during the ‘phoney war’ and now considered
dated. The Documentary News Letter observed,

A job, which the film admits must at times be hard, even depressing, is shown to
be an inviting one. Burdensome military discipline is not to be seen – but the girls
drop their sing-song in the recreation hut quickly enough when an operational order
comes through. The films should bring recruits to the Service . . . We have moved a
little since Squadron 992 so pleasantly mirrored our then conception of total war.25

The following film, CEMA, also released in 1942 and, at seventeen minutes, just over
twice as long, was devoted to the activities of CEMA, the Council for the Encouragement
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104 Propaganda and Conflict

of Music and the Arts, chaired at the time by the economist John Maynard Keynes, and
the forerunner of the Arts Council. To emphasize its educational purpose, the film was
introduced by R. A. Butler, the then president of the Board of Education, who expresses
CEMA’s remit as ‘to bring the best to as many people as possible to cheer them on to
better times’. It was, rather extraordinarily for such a short film, co-directed by five
men, including Dylan Thomas and Alan Osbiston. Examples of ‘the best’ include a
performance by a harp trio of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s arrangement of ‘Greensleeves’
in an idyllic English parish church, surrounded by blossoming fruit trees in spring, the
time of renewal and hope. This is followed by rehearsals for a performance by the Old
Vic Company of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor in a provincial industrial
town. The one member of the rehearsal audience, the theatre cleaner, is riveted by the
story that unfolds on stage, and the full house for the performance proper is completely
engrossed.
The film cuts to an exhibition, in what appears to be a factory, of work by living
artists ‘just to let you and me have a chance of seeing what kind of pictures are being
painted in England [sic] today at war!’. The dialogue between a man named in the
script as Newton and a worker (3rd Man) is significant:

Newton: What do you think of this one?

3rd Man: ‘S’ not too bad, but what’s the point of it all these ‘ere art? Pretty pictures
don’t win anything. Not now anyway.
Newton: We all know what we’re fighting against, but don’t you think we sometimes
forget what we’re fighting for?
3rd Man: Not pretty pictures!
Newton: Yes, but they’re part of it. We’ve got to fight because, if we didn’t, we
wouldn’t be free. Free to work, to play, to listen, to look at what we want to.26

The climax of CEMA is a performance in an armaments factory canteen of the rousing

first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1, which captivates the workforce
and, of course, represents Britain’s then wartime ally, the Soviet Union. As the
music concludes, we see tanks rolling off the production line, emphasizing the close
connection between the arts, civilian morale and the war effort on the Home Front.
Young Farmers (twelve minutes, 1942), which I have not seen, showed, according to
the synopsis, the efforts of a school in County Durham to help children to appreciate
the importance of the land and of work on it.27 The film concludes with this clear
propaganda message:

We believe that everyone, wherever they are, whatever they are, should learn to
love the land. The children, boys and girls of today, [are] our future citizens and
farmers. We can help them realise, as this war has already shown, what a great and
worthy future lies in the land. We must help them to learn to care for, value, and
respect it. The land must never become spoiled, neglected, or forgotten again.28

It is, of course, significant that the MOI tried to cover all parts of the UK in its
documentary films and to reflect regional and national difference through variations
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‘False Hopes and Airy Visions’? 105

in both language  – accent, intonation and usage  – and landscape and architecture.
So, Young Farmers was set in the north-east of England while the film that followed it
focussed on Dylan Thomas’s homeland, Wales.
Wales – Green Mountain, Black Mountain, twelve minutes long and again directed
by John Eldridge in 1942, is important not only because it depicted recent and
contemporary life in Wales as part of the MOI’s ‘Pattern of Britain’ series but also
because it marked a significant step in the development of Thomas’s own scriptwriting
style. Those who are familiar with what was later to become the radio play Under
Milk Wood will recognize elements of the commentary in the Wales film.29 The film,
unusually, has two narrators, William Griffiths and David Raymond, and, even more
unusually, was also made in a Welsh-language version (which I  have not seen, if
indeed it still exists). The commentary opens with what by today’s standards would be
regarded as an exaggerated, almost ‘cod’ Welsh accent, relishing the rolled consonants
like ‘r’ and ‘ll’.30 (But then the accepted ‘received pronunciation’ of English on stage,
radio and screen was equally exaggerated and ‘cod’ by today’s standards!)
The synopsis underlines the film’s commitment to what Churchill, as cited above,
was to call ‘false hopes and airy visions of Utopia and Eldorado’:

Wales is a country of great contrast. On the green hills are the farms; in the valleys
the black mining villages. Before the war, in many parts of Wales, young men
waited in vain for work; now all who can are working hard digging coal out of
the rich mountains, rearing sheep on mountain slopes which new-sown grasses
have made good pasture again. In town and village, in the mines, foundries and
shipyards and on the farms, life throbs with work for all. Never again must there
be young men with no work in derelict towns.31

The film’s title and the opening words of the commentary spell out the structure of the
content focussed on oppositions that underlie the notion that ‘Wales is a mountain
of strength.’32 Morning mist over Snowdonia recalls past struggles between Wales
and England and contrasts with the ‘yellower and greyer’ mist over the industrialized
valleys characterizing ‘the terrible near war of England and Wales and her brothers
and sisters all over the earth, against the men who would murder man’.33 The people
are driven forward by their memories of the sufferings of the recent past and by their
hopes for a better future:

Remember the procession of the old-young men.

It shall not happen again.
It must not happen again . . .
Britain at war has asked these once-denied, helpless and hopeless men for all
their strength and skill at the coal seam and the dockside, the foundry and the
factory. The world shall know their answer, and the world shall never deny them
again.34

Thomas’s script combines the realist tradition of the British documentary film
movement with the romanticism of much of his poetry.
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106 Propaganda and Conflict

Just as the films discussed so far showed different social classes within the UK
pulling together as part of the war effort, so the next film The Battle for Freedom (fifteen
minutes, 1942, directed by Alan Osbiston) depicted the nations of the British Empire
and Commonwealth pulling together with the UK and its allies (Russia, the United
States and China) in the common struggle against Germany and Japan. Thomas’s script
for this film was read by Kent Stevenson, a BBC war correspondent, in the declamatory
style so typical of newsreels of the time.35 The film contrasts the brutal slavery of the
enemy with the enlightened trusteeship of the British and their allies. It steers a careful
line between the old idea of Empire and the emerging concept of the Commonwealth,
where the old ‘white’ Dominions (Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand)
were benevolently preparing the more ‘backward’ parts of Empire (Africa, Malaya and
the Indian subcontinent) so that ‘they [might] achieve full independence and self-
government’.36 The barbarism and greed of the Axis powers  – Germany and Japan,
and here Italy is mentioned too – are contrasted with the civilizing mission of the self-
styled United Nations. Canada receives special mention as a place where refugees from
occupied Europe have found particular refuge and been welcomed and integrated into
the social fabric and where airmen from all over the Commonwealth are trained to
fight in the war in Europe and the Far East. ‘All the free peoples of the world hear
Canada’s fighting voice!’37 The commentary ends with a rousing call to arms:

Liberty against butchery, against the German locust and the mechanised plague of
Japanese annihilation.
In England now, the free men of the Empire are preparing to attack; preparing
with all their will and skill and strength for the attack which must come.38

The prospect was now being dangled before the audience of a better post-war world on
a global, as well as a national, level.
The Battle for Freedom was followed by what is probably the best-known war film
associated with Dylan Thomas, These Are the Men (fifteen minutes, 1943), devised
and compiled by Osbiston and Thomas and using excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl’s
‘documentary’ of the 1934 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg, Triumph of the Will
(Triumph des Willens, 1935), to parody the Nazi leadership. A similar technique had
been used in Germany Calling, a two-minute film released through the newsreels in
1941 in which newsreel footage of the Nazi leaders was altered to match the music
of the ‘Lambeth Walk’ to rather greater comic effect than in These Are the Men.39 The
opening titles of this latter film are played out against external shots of the Zeppelinfeld
to the accompaniment of the SA marching song. The film proper begins with footage
of ordinary people, universalized images of labour. The poetic commentary opens,

Who are we? We are the makers, the workers, the bakers,
Making and baking bread all over the earth in every town and village.

Shots of the bakers give way to those of workers and then to scenes of war:

We are the makers, the workers, the wounded, the dying, the dead,
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‘False Hopes and Airy Visions’? 107

The blind, the frostbitten, the burned, the legless, the mad . . .
Who sent us to kill, to be killed, to lose what we love?
Widowed our women, unfathered our sons, broke the hearts of our homes?
Who dragged us out, out of our beds and houses and workshops
Into a battle-yard of spilt blood and split bones?
Who set us at the throats of our comrades?
Who is to blame?
What men set man against man?
Shout, shout, shout out their name!

This is precisely what the rest of the film does in a commentary that bears the
unmistakeable stylistic imprint of Dylan Thomas.
The remainder, and bulk, of the film uses footage from the Riefenstahl film with
a new soundtrack that lampoons the grandiose claims of Hitler, Goebbels, Göring,
Streicher and Hess by imposing a would-be English translation that substitutes
negative assertions for the bombast of the Nazis. So, when the crowd screams ‘Heil!’,
it appears to be endorsing the British propaganda assertions, rather than the Nazi
claims, and this underlines the notion that the common people have been led astray by
their leaders: ‘These are the men – these are to blame.’40 After Rudolf Hess has finished
speaking, the camera shows the young men who have been led astray: ‘You obeyed
your leader’s word. You must suffer his reward. And the betrayers are betrayed, and
the promises of victory turn stale and sour under African sun and Russian snow.’41
We see frozen corpses in the snow and then the mass graves of German soldiers. The
commentary tells us that some young Germans will escape from their horrific past and
‘May yet be our comrades and brothers, workers and makers, after the agony of the
world at war is over’.42 These Are the Men ends with a warning to the enemy:

But for those who taught them the business of death,

Who crippled their hearts with cruelty, never, never, never
Shall there be pardon or pity: no hope of a new birth.
They shall be put down. Forever.43

The last shots are of Hitler screaming ‘We are the men’ as the image fades to a phrase
from the Horst Wessel song, the anthem of the Hitler Youth. The Documentary News
Letter remarked that ‘Dylan Thomas’s verse frequently cuts like a knife into the
pompously bestial affectations of this race of supermen’.44
After These Are the Men, Thomas wrote two scripts for films that are not included
on the IWM DVD. One of them, The Unconquerable People (1944), was a celebration
of the people’s victory, working through the Resistance, using four different numbered
voices (the first time Thomas had used this device so central to his later script-based
work) to indicate the different contributions made and the social cohesion brought
about by the war in the occupied countries across Europe:

We were an Army who were once a rabble

Of fighters who had only faith,
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108 Propaganda and Conflict

Faith in the masterless will of the people

To drive our enemy off the earth –
Out of the light of the sun.
We were the People’s Army: and we won!45

This script does not appear to have been made into a film and Thomas told Taylor in
September 1944 that writing The Unconquerable People ‘was made more difficult by
my not knowing for what countries the film is intended, nor whether it will be shown
before the war is over or after’.46
Our Country, at forty-five minutes a much longer film, was actually made for
distribution in the United States47 and directed by John Eldridge with a score by
William Alwyn. As a prestige product, it was premiered at the Empire Cinema,
Leicester Square.48 This film is not on the IWM disc but it is available elsewhere49 and it
is such an important film that I have decided to include it in my discussion.
According to Ackerman, the original commentary by Stanley Holloway was rejected
and Thomas was commissioned to write the replacement, which he did predominantly
in verse.50 The film is set within a frame, with an introduction by serving USAF
lieutenant Burgess Meredith,51 who was already an established Hollywood actor, and
a concluding reference to the D-Day landings, and within this frame there are further
framing shots of the sea. Starting and finishing in Aberdeen, Our Country covers the
whole of Great Britain – England, Wales and Scotland – pulling all the various parts
into a single narrative through the journey of a merchant seaman on leave, played
by David Sime. In each place, he fleetingly shares the everyday lives of the people he
meets.52 These snippets illustrate the variety of life in wartime Britain and include one
of the first portrayals of black musicians, although these may well be part of the US
fighting forces involved in D-Day. Nonetheless, they are part of the perceived realism
of the film.
There is also a clear influence of Soviet cinema, especially documentary, in the
way the film is made. There is no dialogue, even though we see the characters on
screen speaking to one another; the film is driven forward by the commentary and
the imagery. The scenes of tanks moving forward above the White Cliffs of Dover and
of the celebrations after the apple harvest in Kent, and the use of panning shots, are
all redolent of Soviet cinema, in particular Ivan Pyriev’s Tractor Drivers (Traktoristy,
1939), although this was a collective-farm (kolkhoz) musical and far from being a
documentary. In fact, The Times criticized Our Country for its lack of realism and
remarked rather sniffily that ‘the commentary consists of free verse written by Mr
Dylan Thomas, which may be good – a few lines suggest it is – but which is recited with
such a monotonous emphasis that it soon . . . becomes a barrier between spectator and
screen’.53 On the other hand, Edgar Anstey, himself a leading documentary film-maker
who had worked under none other than John Grierson, commented in his Spectator
review, ‘All that has been said and written about the deadening effect which official
sponsorship might have upon the arts is challenged by Our Country’ and concluded
by remarking that it ‘represents the most exciting and provocative film . . . for many a
long day’.54
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‘False Hopes and Airy Visions’? 109

After Our Country, Thomas returned to scripts for home consumption. By this time,
Strand Films had become Gryphon Films but it still consisted of the same team working
together. The last two strictly war films on the IWM DVD both date from 1945, the last
year of the Second World War, and both deal with the consequences of that war. A City
Reborn (originally entitled Building the Future)55 was in some ways a companion piece,
almost a coda, to New Towns for Old: whereas Smokedale (Sheffield) needed planned
reconstruction after the ravages of the industrialization that had actually created the
city, Coventry, the subject of A City Reborn, needed planned reconstruction after the
ravages of the wartime bombing that had interrupted the long and continuous history
that the film traces back to medieval times. A City Reborn, twenty-three minutes long
and again directed by John Eldridge, opens on the train taking a soldier on leave
and two ‘directed workers’, one male, one female, to Coventry.56 Released in the final
months of the war in 1945, the film uses these characters, and the soldier’s girlfriend,
to show how the city has been physically devastated by the German bombing raid in
November 1940, but also how its population has coped psychologically and practically
with the destruction and dislocation and is preparing for a better peace. In particular,
the soldier and his girlfriend walk round the city looking for possible places to live
after hostilities have ceased and this leads to a humorous discussion (is the garage
or the nursery more important?) of the ‘prefabs’ that are already being built in the
city’s own factories. The amicable discussion between the engineers about the future
development of the city allows the first engineer to propagate quasi-socialist views of
the advantages of public urban planning. The self-sufficiency of the city’s inhabitants
is also a response to the reminder from the councillor at the end of New Towns for
Old: ‘Remember, it’s your town!’
The last of the wartime films was A Soldier Comes Home, five minutes long and also
directed by John Eldridge. It dealt with what was then (November 1945) a significant
social problem: the psychological readjustment needed for wives and husbands who had
been separated from one another during the war. In this case, the soldier in question,
Jack, has returned after four years’ service in Burma, a place of which his worshipping
son Jim has only highly romanticized notions: ‘Is the Irrawaddy as big as the Thames?
I bet there are no barges on it. I wish there were crocodiles in the Thames.’57
The wife, who, significantly, is the only one of the three central characters to have
no name, is more resentful: of the fact that Jack has to return to army service, although
the war is now over; of the fact that he talks all the time about his ‘pals out there
and what is happening to them’; and of the fact that other soldiers have already been
demobbed. ‘I shall be alone. Charlie in the pub talking about going back to his job, and
Harry demobbed. Why can’t you go back to your job?’ To which Jack responds simply,
‘That is my job.’58 The film concludes with the wife apologizing for her selfishness.
The situation remains as unresolved in the film as it was in real life at the end of that
momentous year. A Soldier Comes Home was not well received. The characters were not
fully developed, which is scarcely surprising in such a short film, and the psychological
dilemma at the heart of the film was not adequately situated in its historical context.
As usual, the Documentary News Letter put it succinctly: ‘the film turns out to be an
emotionally muddled rough sketch of a film yet to be made.’59
110

110 Propaganda and Conflict

By this time the wartime leader Winston Churchill had been unceremoniously
discarded by the electorate and Clement Attlee’s Labour government had been elected
by a landslide to enact the promises that had been made to that electorate, at least in
part through the documentary films made for the MOI.
Where did the contribution of Swansea’s ‘golden boy’ fit into British documentary
films during the Second World War and, more specifically, into the wartime propaganda
process? If we define propaganda as an intentional process of persuasion,60 it is clear
that the documentary film-makers knew very well what they were doing, despite, and
perhaps partly because of, Churchill’s efforts to discourage them, and whatever their
personal motives for engaging in this kind of work. Paul Jackson has described Dylan
Thomas as ‘the Anti-Fascist Propagandist’,61 but that epithet can be applied not only to
almost everybody, if not all those, working in British wartime propaganda but also to
those who had worked in the pre-war British documentary film movement, such as
John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings and Edgar Anstey.
Dylan Thomas would have been familiar with their work and the assumptions
that underlay it. In fact, he used the techniques employed in both streams of the
documentary movement:  sometimes the straightforward reportage of facts with a
commentary, sometimes the poetic recreation of apparent reality, often including staged
reconstructions of dialogue and the events themselves.62 The interest Thomas showed
in film in his earlier contribution to his school magazine continued throughout his life
until his last public appearance eleven days before his untimely death in New York, at
a symposium in that city on ‘Poetry and Film’, also attended by Maya Deren, Arthur
Miller and Parker Tyler.63 Of the scriptwriter’s contribution as poet, he remarked that
‘the right words might be only a grunt’:

I’m not at all sure that I want such a thing . . . as a poetic film . . . Just as a poem
comes out . . . one image makes another in the ordinary dialectic process . . . in a
film, it’s really the visual image that breeds another – breeds and breathes it.64

Donald Taylor described the war films produced by Strand as helping people ‘to see on
the screen the fine part that their native land is playing in helping to win the war’ and
added that they ‘will make people all over the world, as well as the inhabitants of this
country, appreciate for what we are fighting’.65 ‘For what we are fighting’ was precisely
what Dylan Thomas’s scripts were intended to illuminate, whether for Britain as a
whole or Wales in particular. Thomas and the people he worked with did not regard
their work as promoting ‘false hopes and airy visions’ and nor did the British electorate
in the 1945 General Election.

Notes
I should like to thank Professor Jeffrey Richards, Lancaster University, and Gary
Gregor and Gareth Evans of Swansea for their assistance and advice in the preparation
of this essay.
 111

‘False Hopes and Airy Visions’? 111

1 Dylan Thomas, ‘The Films’, Swansea Grammar School Magazine, 27: 2 (1930), pp. 54–
6, reproduced in Walford Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings (London,
1971), pp. 87–9; punctuation as in the original.
2 Ibid.; compare Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov,
‘Statement on Sound’ (1928), in Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 1: Writings,
1922–34, transl. and ed. Richard Taylor (London and Bloomington, IN, 1988; rev.
edn, London and New York, 2010), pp. 113–15. The first English translation of this
declaration appeared as ‘The Sound Film. A Statement from USSR’ in the London-
based Close Up, October 1928, pp. 10–13. It is just about possible, although highly
unlikely, that Thomas might have been aware of it.
3 Reprinted in Dylan Thomas, The Dylan Thomas Omnibus (London, 2014), p. 322;
broadcast dated from Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas: The Biography (Harmondsworth,
1978), p. 223; rev. edn (Talybont, 2006), p. 237; Fitzgibbon dates the broadcast on
the BBC Welsh service as 9 May 1947: Constantine Fitzgibbon, The Life of Dylan
Thomas (London, 1965), p. 397. A close friend of Dylan Thomas, Swansea’s ‘other
poet’, Vernon Watkins (1906–1967), also recalled the influence of the Uplands cinema,
especially the Saturday afternoon serials, and dedicated a poem to the memory of
Pearl White, who starred in many of them: Jeff Towns (ed.), Vernon Watkins’ Swansea.
‘Salzburg-on-the-Tawe’ (Swansea, 2006), pp. 10–12, 20–2.
4 Richard Taylor, ‘The Social History of a Postcard’, Swansea History Journal – Minerva,
17 (2009–10), pp. 10–21, esp. pp. 17–18.
5 Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings, p. 142. The films mentioned are
Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920, starring Conrad Veidt); Atlantic/
Atlantik (E. A. Dupont, 1929, a British-German co-production filmed in England);
Der Student von Prag (Henrik Galeen, 1926, also starring Conrad Veidt); Am Rande
der Welt (Karl Grune, 1927); Varieté (E. A. Dupont, 1925, starring Emil Jannings);
Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Paul Leni, 1924, starring Emil Jannings and Conrad Veidt);
Die Straße (Karl Grune, 1923); M (Fritz Lang, 1931, starring Peter Lorre) and Der
blaue Engel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930, starring Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich);
Sous les toits de Paris (René Clair, France, 1930) and Bronenosets Potemkin (Sergei
Eisenstein, USSR, 1926).
6 Fitzgibbon, Life of Dylan Thomas, p. 64.
7 P. Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters (new edn, London, 1987), p. 410.
8 Fitzgibbon, Life of Dylan Thomas, p. 270. Thomas also approached Stephen Spender to
intercede on his behalf, see Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, p. 444.
9 Fitzgibbon, Life of Dylan Thomas, pp. 277–8.
10 Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, p. 496.
11 Ibid., p. 504; the reference is almost certainly to the filmed but unreleased project Is
Your Ernie Really Necessary? (1943), on which more later.
12 Dylan Thomas: The War Films Anthology (2007).
13 Young Farmers (1942); The Unconquerable People (1944); Our Country (1944).
14 Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, p. 495.
15 Jack Beddington (1893–1959) had previously been publicity director for Shell and, as
director of the MOI Films Division from April 1940 until 1946, was more responsible
for wartime output than Clark.
16 Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the
Second World War (Oxford, 1986), ch. 1.
17 Fitzgibbon, Life of Dylan Thomas, pp. 281–2.
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112 Propaganda and Conflict

18 John Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Complete Screenplays (New York, 1995), pp.
v, 45–52.
19 Ibid., p. 12.
20 Cited in Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of
Information in World War II (London, 1979), p. 183.
21 Cited in ibid., p. 177.
22 Cited in ibid., p. 181.
23 Cited in Nicholas Pronay, ‘ “The Land of Promise”: The Projection of Peace Aims in
Britain’, in K. R. M. Short (ed.), Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II (London,
1983), p. 72.
24 Documentary News Letter, 3: 6 (1942), p. 94. The publication, edited by John Grierson,
ran from January 1940 until 1949 and promoted the ideas and practices of the British
Documentary Film Movement, who effectively constituted its editorial board.
25 Documentary News Letter, 3: 7 (1942), p. 100.
26 Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Screenplays, p. 20.
27 Frances Thorpe, Nicholas Pronay and Clive Coultass (eds), British Official Films in the
Second World War. A Descriptive Catalogue (Oxford and Santa Barbara, CA, 1980),
pp. 107–8.
28 Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Screenplays, p. 25.
29 In fact the original version of Under Milk Wood was being read by Thomas to his
friends as early as 1933: David N. Thomas (ed.), Dylan Remembered, vol. 1: 1914–1934
(Bridgend, 2003), p. 165.
30 Giles Goodland identifies this as ‘a distinctively South Welsh accent’; see Giles
Goodland, ‘Dylan Thomas and Film’, New Welsh Review, 9 (1990), p. 18. In more than
forty years in South Wales, I have never heard anything remotely like it.
31 Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Screenplays, p. 26.
32 Ibid., pp. 28–9.
33 Ibid., p. 28.
34 Ibid., p. 31.
35 Stevenson had also read the commentary to Common Heritage (1940) with Leslie
Howard. He had joined the BBC in 1941 and was shot down while on a raid over
Germany in 1944: http://www.bbc.co.uk/corporate2/broadcastinghouse/memorial.
html#heading-kent-stevenson (last access 7 May 2018).
36 Documentary News Letter, 2: 12 (1941), p. 223; Ackerman (ed.), Dylan
Thomas: Screenplays, p. 33.
37 Ibid., p. 34.
38 Ibid., p. 37.
39 Details of Germany Calling are based on Thorpe, Pronay and Coultass (eds), British
Official Films, p. 81.
40 Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Screenplays, p. 41.
41 Ibid., p. 43.
42 Ibid., p. 44.
43 Ibid.
44 Documentary News Letter, 4: 3 (1943), pp. 145–6.
45 Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Screenplays, p. 62.
46 Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, p. 521.
47 Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Screenplays, pp. 62–3, mistakenly claims that the film
was made for distribution in the USSR. The ‘Introduction’ makes it obvious that the
 113

‘False Hopes and Airy Visions’? 113

film was intended for the United States. Ackerman makes several uncharacteristic
errors in his coverage of this particular film.
48 Goodland, ‘Dylan Thomas and Film’, p. 18.
49 Panamint Cinema PDC 2027.
50 Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Screenplays, p. 64.
51 Burgess Meredith (1907–1997) was married at this time to Paulette Goddard,
following her divorce from Charlie Chaplin and was later also placed on the
Hollywood blacklist. He would have been a familiar figure to US movie audiences
at this time and, as a serving US officer in the UK, a highly suitable actor to put Our
Country in its wartime propaganda context.
52 The episode called ‘The Girl’s Story’ by Ackerman and ‘Clocking Off ’ on the DVD
was once more set in Sheffield, where the girl in question had been spotted by
Eldridge purely by chance, talking in the street to a friend; see Ackerman (ed.), Dylan
Thomas: Screenplays, p. 64.
53 The Times, 27 June 1945, p. 6.
54 The Spectator, 19 June 1945, p. 594.
55 Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, p. 514, n. 1.
56 The soldier was played by Bill Rowbotham (1914–1999), better known to later
generations as Bill Owen, the actor who played Compo in the long-running British
television sitcom, The Last of the Summer Wine.
57 Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Screenplays, p. 100.
58 Ibid., p. 101.
59 Documentary News Letter, 51 (1945), p. 8.
60 Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London, 1979),
p. 28; David Welch, ‘Powers of Persuasion’, History Today, 49: 8 (1999), pp. 24–6.
61 Paul Jackson, ‘Dylan Thomas: The Anti-Fascist Propagandist’, in Hannah Ellis (ed.),
Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration (London, 2014), pp. 87–101.
62 Julian Maclaren-Ross recalled the further influence of the scripts printed in Sergei
Eisenstein’s The Film Sense, ed. Jay Leyda (New York, 1942); Julian Maclaren-Ross,
Memoirs of the Forties (London, 1965), pp. 129–30.
63 Maya Deren (1917–1961), US experimental film-maker; Arthur Miller (1915–2005),
US playwright; Parker Tyler (1904–1974), US author, poet and film critic.
64 ‘Poetry and the Film: A Symposium’, Film Culture (Summer 1963), cited in Goodland,
‘Dylan Thomas and Film’, p. 17.
65 Kine Week, 25 July 1940, p. 21, cited in Goodland, ‘Dylan Thomas and Film’,
pp. 17–18.
114

114
 115

Hitchcock as propagandist
James Chapman

Alfred Hitchcock is cinema’s pre-eminent auteur:  a master craftsman whose films

exhibited an extraordinary degree of thematic and formal consistency across a long
career that spanned half a century (Hitchcock directed his first film, The Pleasure
Garden, in 1926, and his last, Family Plot, in 1976)  and three national cinemas
(Germany, Britain and the United States).1 Hitchcock is admired for his mastery of film-
making technique and for his ability to generate suspense: Andrew Sarris called him
‘the supreme technician of the American cinema’.2 And he has also been claimed as one
of cinema’s great moralists, whose films explore profound existential and psychological
questions. Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, whose original auteurist study remains
one of the milestones of Hitchcock scholarship, saw Hitchcock as a Catholic artist who
used cinematic form to construct a ‘moral universe’ that is ‘a thousand times more
perilous, if not more fatal, than that of ancient tragedy’.3
Yet the focus on Hitchcock as auteur has tended to overshadow other contexts for
his films: and one of these was his work as a propagandist during the Second World
War. Like many of his contemporaries in the film industry, including Alexander Korda,
Noël Coward and Leslie Howard, Hitchcock was actively involved in propaganda
work both in the United States and in Britain. This work involved the production of
three US feature films – Foreign Correspondent (1940), Saboteur (1942) and Lifeboat
(1944) – and two short films made in Britain on behalf of the Ministry of Information
(MOI):  Bon Voyage (1944) and Aventure Malgache (1944). As Alain Kerzoncuf and
Charles Barr have established, Hitchcock was also involved in re-editing two British
documentary films for their release in the United States, Men of the Lightship (1940) and
Target for Tonight (1941), in the initial preparation of the ‘Hollywood British’ feature
film Forever and a Day (1943), and directed a US public service film promoting War
Bonds, The Fighting Generation (1944).4 His wartime propaganda work culminated in
his role in the making of an unreleased documentary about the German concentration
camps in 1945. While the three feature films all fit, more or less comfortably, into the
conventional critical construction of Hitchcock as auteur, however, the other projects
remain for the most part unknown and neglected, largely because they are not typically
‘Hitchcockian’.
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116 Propaganda and Conflict

The contexts for Hitchcock’s role as a wartime propagandist were a combination

of personal and professional circumstances. By the late 1930s, Hitchcock was firmly
established as Britain’s foremost motion picture director. His international reputation
was built on the critical and commercial success of the cycle of polished thrillers he
directed for the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation between 1934 and 1938:  The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage
(1936), Young and Innocent (1937) and The Lady Vanishes (1938).5 These films brought
Hitchcock to the attention of Hollywood as they were seen as matching the narrative
pace and production values of US films: the US trade paper Motion Picture Daily, for
example, recognized Hitchcock as ‘a director with an American sense of box-office
values’.6 Hitchcock, for his part, was attracted by the prospect of working with the
bigger budgets and technical resources of the US film industry. In July 1938, following
lengthy negotiations, Hitchcock signed a contract with Selznick International Pictures,
and after one last British film, the costume drama Jamaica Inn (1939), moved with his
family permanently to Hollywood in March 1939.7
The timing of Hitchcock’s departure for the United States six months prior to the
outbreak of the Second World War later brought accusations from some quarters of the
British film industry that he had deserted his native country in its hour of need: that
he was one of those who – as it was put at the time – had ‘Gone with the Wind Up’.8
It was not that Hitchcock or other members of the British colony in Hollywood  –
including actors Charles Laughton and Laurence Olivier  – were being accused of
cowardice but rather that they should have been working in Britain making films to
support the British war effort. In the event several of the ‘Hollywood British’ did return
home: David Niven rejoined his army regiment and starred in The Way Ahead (1944),
Laurence Olivier joined the Fleet Air Arm and made the patriotic epic Henry V (1944)
and Leslie Howard directed and starred in Pimpernel Smith (1941) and The First of the
Few (1942). Hitchcock’s decision to remain in California prompted an angry response
from his old friend and mentor Michael Balcon, who had given the director his first
break at Gainsborough Pictures in the 1920s. Balcon fired a broadside at his former
protégé in a Sunday newspaper article entitled ‘Deserters!’, in which he referred to ‘a
plump young junior technician . . . whom I promoted from department to department.
Today, one of our most famous directors, he is in Hollywood, while we who are left
behind are trying to harness films to the great national effort.’9
However, Balcon’s attack on Hitchcock as a ‘deserter’ was unfair in several respects.
For one thing Hitchcock’s decision to relocate to Hollywood was something he had
planned since the mid-1930s rather than a panicked response to the worsening
international situation in 1939.10 And for another thing the British government had
stated publicly that British actors and film-makers working in Hollywood could
best serve their country by making films promoting the British cause in the United
States – especially given that the United States remained neutral until December 1941.
The British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, more or less told the British
Hollywood community to stay put

because they are consciously championing the British cause in a very volatile
community which would otherwise be left to the mercies of German propagandists,
 117

Hitchcock as Propagandist 117

and because the continuing production of films with a strong British tone is one of
the best and subtlest forms of British propaganda.11

This was a time when ‘Hollywood British’ films  – US films with a strong British
flavour  – were popular:  these ranged from literary adaptations such as Wuthering
Heights (1939) and Pride and Prejudice (1940) to swashbuckling adventure films such
as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940).12
Hitchcock’s first US films can be located within the ‘Hollywood British’ cycle.
Rebecca (1940), the first film under his contract with Selznick, was an adaptation of
a novel by a British author (Daphne du Maurier) with English locations (albeit shot
entirely in the studio) and a predominantly British cast.13 For his second picture,
Selznick loaned Hitchcock to independent producer Walter Wanger to direct Foreign
Correspondent, an international espionage thriller in the mould of his Gaumont-British
films. Wanger was one of Hollywood’s more liberal and internationalist producers – his
films included You Only Live Once (1937), Blockade (1938) and Stagecoach (1939) –
and Foreign Correspondent, which was very loosely based on Vincent Sheean’s memoir
Personal History, was something of a pet project for him.14 Wanger had already
commissioned scripts from writers John Howard Lawson and John Lee Mahin before
Hitchcock became attached to the project after he finished shooting Rebecca. Hitchcock
threw out the existing scripts and worked on his own treatment with his assistant Joan
Harrison. They recast Sheean’s rambling memoir into a fast-paced thriller based on the
adventures of an opinionated US reporter. Their first treatment begins:

This is the story of a young American newspaperman who goes to Europe with
certain fixed ideas of what is right and what is wrong. In his opinion Europe in
the year 1939 has only itself to blame for its political troubles and the rapidly
approaching war crisis. He learns, however, through bitter experience that
European life is more complex than he had imagined and that methods and ideas
which may be perfectly right for a new nation and continent cannot always be
applied in a more sophisticated civilization.15

Hitchcock therefore fashioned the story into a narrative of ideological conversion

that would contrast US and European values before the protagonist learns to curb his
chauvinism. This is achieved through his romance with a young Englishwoman – whose
father, ostensibly the idealistic leader of a peace party, turns out to be the instigator of
a plot to kidnap a Dutch statesman – and his developing friendship with an apparently
effete English journalist, whom he initially dislikes. Hitchcock and Harrison had
a real-life model for the latter character:  ‘The American meets several of the other
foreign correspondents, among them one on the English “Times”, Ian Fleming, whom
he rather despises, for his apparent effeminacy, suede shoes and affected drawl.’16 ‘Ian
Fleming’ became Scott ffolliott in the film.
The script of Foreign Correspondent went through many revisions:  among the
writers who contributed to the screenplay were Charles Bennett (author of the play
Blackmail – the source of Hitchcock’s, and Britain’s, first talking picture in 1929 – and
collaborator on five of Hitchcock’s Gaumont-British thrillers), the British author James
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118 Propaganda and Conflict

Hilton (whose novels Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr Chips had recently been made
into films) and US humorist Robert Benchley (who would have a cameo role in the
film as an amiably drunken reporter). The most significant change during the scripting
process was the rewriting of the protagonist. The character of Johnny Jones – surely a
reference to George M. Cohen’s musical Little Johnny Jones – was transformed over the
course of various drafts from a knowledgeable if opinionated political commentator
to a naïve American abroad. Thus in the first ‘White Script’ he is described as ‘a very
smart political observer, with a couple of books to his credit, and the ability to set
down his ideas in honest, straightforward language’. The ‘Yellow Script’ (26 March
1940) includes the following exchange between Johnny and his editor:

Powers: You give quite a lot of thought to European politics, don’t you?

Johnny: If you can call that shilly-shallying they’re doing over there ‘politics’.

At this point, however, it was evidently decided that Jones should not be so politically
aware, as in the ‘Pink Script’ (23 April 1940) the scene has changed entirely:

Powers: What do you think of the present European crisis, Mr Jones?

Johnny: What crisis?
Powers: I’m referring to the impending war, Mr Jones.
Johnny: Oh that. (He smiles). To be very frank, sir, I haven’t given it much thought.17

This is the scene as it appears in the finished film. The production records do not
indicate the reason for the change but it is reasonable to speculate that the decision
to make Johnny Jones unaware of events in Europe was in order to turn him into
more of a US everyman type. All the evidence suggests that at this time the majority
of Americans outside the large metropolitan centres of the East and West coasts were
not well informed about the European situation. This persisted even after the United
States’ entry into the war. In 1943, the British Consul-General in Chicago reported:
‘The majority of people in the Middle West are ill-informed and ignorant . . . they have
little interest in anything outside America.’18
The propaganda theme of Foreign Correspondent, then, was to challenge Americans’
perceived ignorance about world affairs. To this extent, it was ideologically at odds
with the prevailing mood: in 1940, political and public opinion in the United States
was very strongly isolationist. There was support for Britain and the Allied cause at
the top of government – President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a noted Anglophile –
though this support fell a long way short of intervention in the war. US isolationism
had historical and ideological roots:  the experience of the First World War had left
many Americans embittered – there was a widely held view that the United States had
been tricked into the war through Allied (and specifically British) propaganda – while
the economic and social problems of the Great Depression had turned the United
States into a more inward-looking nation. In this climate, Hitchcock and Wanger had
to tread carefully. Hence the publicity materials for Foreign Correspondent set out to
downplay its political elements. According to a report in the New York Times, ‘Foreign
Correspondent will have as little political significance as it has to the Vincent Sheean
 119

Hitchcock as Propagandist 119

book, which is none at all [sic]. The title was changed from Personal History because
of Wanger’s refusal to compromise the Sheean yarn or profit from the mislabeling.’19
To a large extent the reception of Foreign Correspondent in the United States, where
it was released in August 1940, suggests that it was seen as an entertainment rather
than as a propaganda film. The US exhibitors’ journal Harrison’s Reports, for example,
called it ‘a thriller of the first order . . . The story has a significant political angle; but it is
of secondary importance to the melodramatic action, which is absorbing.’20 However,
it was a different matter when the film was released in London two months later. Its
British release coincided with the height of the Blitz: the concentrated air raids carried
out by the Luftwaffe against British cities. In this context, the ending of the film had
acquired a particularly topical angle. After the completion of principal photography,
Hitchcock had added a short coda to the film  – scripted by Ben Hecht  – in which
Johnny (played by Joel McCrae), now a fully fledged war correspondent, broadcasts to
the United States from London during an air raid. When the lights go out in the studio,
Johnny stays by the microphone and appeals directly to his listeners:

It’s as if the lights are out everywhere. Except in America. Keep those lights burning.
Cover them with steel. Ring them with guns. Build a canopy of battleships and
bombing planes around them. Hello America, hang on to your lights – they’re the
only lights left in the world!

This was clearly intended as a message for the United States to prepare itself for
war:  it stops short of calling for US intervention in Europe and therefore is finely
calculated not to offend isolationists. In Britain, it was understood in a different way.
The documentary film-maker Paul Rotha took exception to the speech which he felt
revealed ‘a grave lack of knowledge of public opinion here in Britain’ and ‘implies that
the British people no longer have faith in democracy in their own country’. In a letter
to the journal Documentary News Letter, he protested:

I can assure these leaders of the British documentary film that the people who are
really suffering as well as fighting this war do not share this view that the lights are
even dimmed in Britain. If they did, the Fascist propagandists might well claim to
have already won the war . . . In their editorial the Editors of DNL rightly divide
the British nation into two camps of US and THEM; I invite these leaders of the
documentary group to remember that democracy in practice needs only one
camp – WE.21

Rotha’s letter  – which was counter-signed by other film-makers including Michael

Balcon and documentarist Alberto Cavalcanti, critics Ritchie Calder and Dilys Powell
and Labour MP Michael Foot  – was prompted by the journal’s positive review of
Foreign Correspondent in its previous issue: Documentary News Letter – a small but
critically influential publication that represented the progressive voice within British
film culture – was not habitually given to praising Hollywood films.22 His objection to
Foreign Correspondent should be understood in the context of the journal’s left-leaning
politics and its advocacy of the idea of the ‘people’s war’: Rotha evidently felt that the
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120 Propaganda and Conflict

ending of Foreign Correspondent went against the spirit of documentary films such as
Britain Can Take It! (1940) – released at the same time as Foreign Correspondent – with
its emphasis on stoical British resistance to German air raids.
In the event, however, this was little more than a storm in a teacup. Documentary
News Letter was a small-circulation magazine that was probably not widely read
outside the film industry and was certainly not reflective of popular film taste. British
audiences do not seem to have been put off by the falseness that Rotha detected in
Foreign Correspondent: according to the trade press, it was the second most popular
general release in Britain in 1940 (the first was Rebecca).23 Wanger and Hitchcock both
had good reason to be satisfied with the film, which was nominated for the Academy
Award for Best Picture  – losing out to Rebecca, for which David O.  Selznick, as
producer, accepted the Oscar – and was a popular success on both sides of the Atlantic.
It also received an endorsement from a most unlikely quarter. Joseph Goebbels, the
Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda in Hitler’s Germany and an avid
cinephile himself, saw Foreign Correspondent (probably, as Hitchcock speculated,
acquiring a print through neutral Switzerland) and evidently liked it, describing it as
‘[a]‌masterpiece of propaganda, a first-class production which will no doubt make a
certain impression upon the broad masses of the people in enemy countries’.24
Saboteur (1942) was another loan-out from Selznick – this time for producer Jack
Skirball at Universal Pictures – and in certain respects can be seen as a companion
piece to Foreign Correspondent. The film’s production history spanned the United
States’ entry into the war, and the development of the script reflected the changing
ideological context. Hitchcock began working on the script in the summer of 1941,
again with Joan Harrison, sketching out an original story about a young munitions
worker who is innocently implicated in arson and finds himself on the run from the
authorities while seeking to expose a ring of saboteurs in the United States.25 This was
a formula Hitchcock had used before, notably in The 39 Steps, though to see Saboteur
as essentially a remake of The 39 Steps is to ignore the very different contexts of the
two films. Hitchcock and Harrison’s treatment was fleshed out into a full screenplay by
Peter Viertel, a young writer on Selznick’s payroll who was son of the Austrian émigré
director Berthold Viertel – the elder Viertel had made several films for Gaumont-British
in the 1930s – with an uncredited contribution from John Houseman, co-producer of
Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater on the Air. It is entirely a matter of speculation that
the protagonist’s name (Barry Kane) was Houseman’s reference to Welles: Houseman
had been involved in the early development of Citizen Kane (1941).26 The humorist
and short-story writer Dorothy Parker was then drafted in to add scenes and polish
the dialogue. The untitled ‘White Script’ of 12 December 1941 is credited to Parker,
Harrison and Viertel. At this point, there was no indication of the nationality of
the saboteurs though there was a suggestion that their motivation might have been
mercenary rather than ideological: Barry remarks that the character called Fry ‘is a
saboteur – a man that doesn’t mind killing Americans for money’.27
The script was barely completed, however, before it was overtaken by events. On
the morning of 7 December 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise aerial attack on
the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The attack – without a formal declaration
of war – precipitated the United States’ entry into the Second World War: the United
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Hitchcock as Propagandist 121

States’ subsequent declaration of war on Japan (8 December) was followed by Japan’s

allies Germany and Italy declaring war on the United States (11 December). It was on
12 December 1941 – only five days after Pearl Harbor and one day after Germany’s
declaration of war  – that the script of Saboteur was submitted for approval to the
Production Code Administration (PCA). At this point, official policy regarding the
role of the film industry in supporting the war effort had yet to be determined: it was
not until June 1942 that an Office of War Information (OWI) was established.28 In
the absence of any official guidelines for film propaganda, the PCA took it upon itself
to ensure that movies supported a patriotic outlook and did not contain anything
that might be deemed defeatist or subversive. And in this context Saboteur presented
certain problems. The PCA told Universal that ‘the basic story seems acceptable under
the provisions of the Production Code’. ‘However’, it added, ‘there is one disturbing
element which appears, from time to time, throughout this script and that is the great
number of seemingly anti-social speeches and references. It is essential that such
statements be rewritten to avoid giving this flavour.’ Among the lines it singled out
were one that cast aspersions on the wealthy (‘Just because he’s got a big ranch and a
fancy house and a million-dollar swimming pool – that doesn’t say he’s a good guy’)
and another that suggested defiance of the law (‘I have my own ideas about my duties as
an American citizen. They sometimes involve disregarding the law’).29 With the United
States now a nation at war, it seems that the PCA was not willing to countenance any
suggestion that all Americans were anything but law-abiding patriots.
Hitchcock and Universal realized that the United States’ entry into the war made
Saboteur a timely and topical picture: the imperative now was to press ahead as quickly
as possible. The script was hurriedly revised in the early weeks of 1942. The ‘anti-social
speeches’ noted by the PCA remained, but they were now counterbalanced by the
addition of several set-piece speeches asserting the virtues of the United States and its
democracy. In the ‘Blue Script’ of 8 January 1942, the scene where Barry encounters a
circus troupe who hold a vote on whether to hand the fugitive over to the police was
revised to include a reference to the wartime context:

Bones: In this situation I find a parallel for the present world predicament – we
stand defeated at the outset – you, Esmeralda, have sympathy, yet you are willing
to remain passive and let the inevitable happen. I have a belief, yet, I am tempted
to let myself be over-ridden by force. The rest of you, with the exception of this
malignant jerk here, are ignorant of the facts, and therefore confused.30

Given the historical context, it is difficult to read this as anything other than a
commentary on the United States’ entry into the war: many Americans were indeed
confused and knew little of the international situation. The ‘malignant jerk’ is an
antagonistic midget – known in the film as ‘The Major’ – who rejects the democratic
process (‘No vote:  I’m against voting!’) and is subsequently denounced as a ‘fascist’.
Another addition was a speech by Barry in which he responds to the villain-in-chief
Tobin’s declaration of support for totalitarianism (‘When you think about it, Mr Kane,
the competence of totalitarian nations is much higher than ours’) with a rousing
defence of democratic values:
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122 Propaganda and Conflict

Barry: Let me tell you something. The last four or five days I’ve learned an awful
lot . . . I’ve met ruthless guys like you . . . and I’ve met a whole lot of others . . .
people that are warm and helpful and eager to do the right thing – people that
are alive – people that get a kick out of helping each other. They feel proud to be
fighting the bad guys. Love and hate – the world is choosing up sides. I know
who I’m with, and I know there are a lot of people on my side – millions of us
in every country, and we’re plenty strong. We’ll fight standing up on our feet,
and we’ll win. Remember that Mr Tobin. We’ll win no matter what you guys do.
We’ll win if it takes us from now until the cows come home.31

This speech would be slightly shortened and modified in the finished film, but it is
entirely characteristic of the propaganda strategies of US cinema of the Second World
War: it would become common practice to insert into films of all genres a set-piece
speech affirming faith in the United States and its democratic values. In any event,
these amendments satisfied the PCA:  its comments on the revised script no longer
focussed on the ‘anti-social speeches’ but rather that some of the dialogue between
Barry and heroine Patricia was ‘overly sex suggestive and must be rewritten to avoid
this flavour’.32 When the completed film was reviewed by the PCA on 25 March 1942,
it was awarded a seal of approval without any cuts.
Hitchcock was later dismissive of Saboteur, telling François Truffaut that ‘it was
cluttered with too many ideas . . . Looking back at Saboteur, I  would say that the
script lacks discipline. I don’t think I exercised a clear, sharp approach to the original
construction of the screenplay.’33 He was also dissatisfied with the casting of Robert
Cummings as Barry Kane (‘a competent performer, but he belongs in the light-comedy
class of actors’) and Patricia Lane as the heroine (‘She simply wasn’t the right type for
a Hitchcock picture’).34 From an ideological point of view, however, Saboteur is not
without its points of interest. Unlike other films dealing with German espionage in the
United States, such as Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and The House on 92nd Street
(1945), the conspiracy threat is not from an external source but originates within the
United States itself. Saboteur posits the existence of a group of fifth columnists within
the upper echelons of US society: Tobin (Otto Kruger) is a wealthy rancher and his
co-conspirator Mrs Sutton (Alma Kruger) an esteemed society hostess. A  recurring
theme of Saboteur is the refusal to accept that people like Tobin or Mrs Sutton can
possibly be traitors: Patricia is sceptical (‘It’s hard to believe that about any American’)
and Barry’s attempts to warn Mrs Sutton’s guests that they are in the middle of ‘a hot
bed of spies and saboteurs’ are met with disbelief as he is assumed to be drunk or
playing a practical joke. Hitchcock averred that Tobin and his supporters were based
on the so-called ‘America First’ factions: ‘We were in 1941 and there were pro-German
elements who called themselves America Firsters and who were, in fact, American
Fascists. This was the group I had in mind while writing the scenario.’35
Although there is no hard evidence, it is possible that Saboteur may have been made
in response to an official mandate. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, J. Edgar Hoover,
the powerful Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), campaigned
energetically to persuade the US public in general and policymakers in particular of
the danger of a ‘fifth column’ in the United States. Francis MacDonnell attests that
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Hitchcock as Propagandist 123

Hoover ‘repeatedly characterized America’s “Trojan Horse” as a serious threat to

national security’.36 In hindsight, it is apparent that Hoover significantly exaggerated
the threat of an Axis fifth column in the United States: the real aim of his campaign
had been to whip up hysteria in order to build up the FBI – which expanded from 898
agents in 1938 to 4,886 by 1945 – and to consolidate his own power base. In fact the
only significant German spy ring in the United States, the Duquesne ring, was rounded
up within a month of Pearl Harbor.37 Nevertheless, Saboteur is so insistent on the threat
of the enemy within – and the complacency of the US public – that it seems reasonable
to speculate that it might have been influenced by Hoover’s rhetoric.
If Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur have generally been regarded as relatively
minor Hitchcock films – entertaining but essentially unimportant pictures – the same
cannot be said of Lifeboat (1944), which Hitchcock directed on loan to Twentieth
Century-Fox. Lifeboat has often been analysed from the standpoint of a technical
exercise:  the challenge of shooting a film entirely in close-ups. As Hitchcock told
Truffaut:

I wanted to prove a theory I had then. Analyzing the psychological pictures that
were being turned out, it seemed to me that, visually, eighty per cent of the footage
was shot in close-ups or semiclose shots. Most likely it wasn’t a conscious thing
with most of the directors, but rather an instinctive need to come closer to the
action. In a sense this treatment was an anticipation of what was to become the
television technique.38

Hitchcock often liked to set himself technical challenges: later he would shoot Rope
(1948) in continuous long takes in order to replicate ‘real time’, while Rear Window
(1954) was for the most part confined to the point of view of a protagonist confined
to one room. Yet to see Lifeboat solely as a technical exercise misses the point that it
was also conceived, quite explicitly, as a propaganda film. Hitchcock consciously set
out to use the story of a group of survivors cast adrift in a lifeboat as an allegory of the
war between fascism and democracy: while the democracies would be represented by
a diverse group of passengers and crewmen, fascism would take the character of the
cunning and resourceful German U-boat captain who is picked up and who nearly
succeeds in overcoming the others. It is important to recognize that the reading of
Lifeboat as a wartime allegory was intended from the outset and is not a case of an
interpretation subsequently overlaid onto the film by critics or historians. To quote
Hitchcock again, ‘We wanted to show that at that moment there were two world forces
confronting each other, the democracies and the Nazis, and while the democracies
were completely disorganized, all of the Germans were clearly headed in the same
direction.’39
Hitchcock spent most of 1943 preparing and shooting Lifeboat. He first approached
Ernest Hemingway to write the script:  when Hemingway was unavailable, John
Steinbeck, whose novel The Grapes of Wrath had been turned into an Academy Award-
winning picture by John Ford for Twentieth Century Fox in 1940, came on board to
write the first draft, which he did in the form of a novelette which was to have been
published to coincide with the film. Steinbeck was no stranger to propaganda work: in
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124 Propaganda and Conflict

1942, he had published an account of the training of a bomber crew (Bombs Away: The
Story of a Bomber Team) and the novel The Moon Is Down, a tale of the Norwegian
Resistance, which was made into a film, also by Fox, in 1943.40 Steinbeck felt that
Hitchcock’s and Jo Swerling’s revisions changed his original story so completely that
he later publicly distanced himself from the project. He particularly objected to what
he considered was Hitchcock’s demeaning characterization of the crewmen:  in one
letter, he labelled Hitchcock ‘one of those incredible English middle class snobs who
really and truly despise working people’.41 The writing credits for Lifeboat were also
the subject of a lawsuit alleging plagiarism of a newspaper story: the case was rejected
as it was clear that the finished film equally reflected the contributions of Hitchcock,
Steinbeck and Swerling.42
Lifeboat would prove to be one of Hitchcock’s most controversial films. The OWI
took objection to the script on the grounds that it highlighted social and class differences
between Americans (reflected in the tension between the proletarian ‘oiler’ Kovac and
the millionaire industrialist Rittenhouse) and because the US and British characters
were represented as weak and disunited. It particularly disliked the character of news
correspondent Connie Porter – a role written specifically for Tallulah Bankhead – as ‘a
selfish, predatory, amoral, international adventuress’. But most of all the OWI objected
to the characterization of Willy, the German U-boat captain, who is shown to be more
resourceful and cool-headed than the other survivors. The OWI felt that Lifeboat was
better propaganda for the Nazis than for the Allies because its theme seemed to have
become ‘the triumph of Nazism over democracy’.43 Hitchcock made some changes to
pacify the OWI, but the charge that Lifeboat was to all intents and purposes a piece of
pro-Nazi propaganda persisted when it was released in January 1944. Bosley Crowther,
the senior film critic of the New  York Times, called Lifeboat an ‘appalling folly’ and
felt that it was ill-judged as propaganda: ‘Unless we had seen it with our own eyes, we
would never have believed that a film could have been made in this country in the year
1943 which sold out the democratic ideal and elevated the Nazi “superman.” ’ Crowther
was particularly critical of the fact that ‘none of the democratic folks possess resource
or ability, or the confidence of all the rest’ and asked rhetorically, ‘Is this the conception
of ourselves we want to show abroad? Is this a picture of civilians which we want our
soldiers on the front to see?’44 Crowther’s review prompted a response from producer
Kenneth MacGowan which, somewhat disingenuously it has to be said, claimed that
the film had not been intended as a war allegory:

Lifeboat began simply as Hitchcock’s suggestion that we should lay an entire

picture in a lifeboat and thus turn out the first one-set feature film ever made
. . . Up to that point – indeed, far beyond it – we had not the slightest notion of
building a theme. We built it, however, quite unconsciously, and suddenly awoke
to that fact. Unwittingly we had set images of the ‘soft democracies’ into a little
world dominated in will and purpose by an aggressor. We found them steering
themselves past a sort of Munich only to run smack against a Warsaw.45

The controversy over Lifeboat  – which also attracted criticism from the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People due to its characterization of the
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Hitchcock as Propagandist 125

black seaman Joe – might explain why Lifeboat did not win any of the Academy Awards
it was nominated for, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography,
though Tallulah Bankhead was voted best actress by the New York Critics’ Circle.
For contemporaries, then, Lifeboat failed as propaganda:  its allegory was too
muddled and it was too insistent upon the social and political divisions between
the ‘good’ characters. There are certainly elements in the film that run against the
ideological grain of officially mandated film-making during the Second World War.
It is one of the few wartime films, for example, to address the disenfranchisement of
African Americans: ‘Do I get a vote too?’ asks the stoker Joe (Canada Lee) as the others
forget to ask his opinion when debating what to do with the German. Another reason
for its negative contemporary reception was the film’s ambivalent ending: characteristic
for Hitchcock but unusual for wartime US cinema. The survivors have more or less
allowed the German Willy (Walter Slezak) to take control of the lifeboat: he is better
able to navigate (unbeknown to the others he has a compass) and seems stronger
(again, unbeknown to the others, he has a hidden water flask and energy pills) and
is rowing them in the direction of a German supply ship. It is only when they learn
that Willy has pushed the delirious Gus (William Bendix) overboard during the night
that they turn upon him and as a group beat him to death. It is a moment of frenzied
violence than in its suddenness and brutality anticipates scenes in later Hitchcock films
such as the murder of Marion Crane in Psycho (1960) and the killing of security agent
Gromek in the Cold War spy thriller Torn Curtain (1966). On one level, the killing of
Willy might be read as the other characters overcoming their differences and uniting to
defeat the enemy: the democracies – when roused to anger – are stronger than Nazism
after all. But on another level, the killing of Willy, without recourse to due legal or
judicial process, is tantamount to murder:  the sort of atrocity usually attributed to
the Nazis. Robin Wood’s analysis of the ending of Lifeboat highlights its moral and
ideological contradictions:

At the end, the camera pulls back to reveal Joe standing apart, the only non-
participant: as an American black he knows all about lynch mobs. Which of course
brings home to the audience precisely what is going on here: one form of Fascism
is being answered by another of its manifestations.46

The controversy over Lifeboat has strong parallels with another wartime feature film
that also drew criticism for its ideologically problematic content. Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) is notorious as the film
that Winston Churchill wanted to supress.47 Like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,
which is insistent that in order to defeat Nazism it is necessary to cease playing by ‘the
National Sporting Club rules’ and adopt the ruthless tactics of the enemy, Lifeboat
demonstrates that in the last resort the democracies are capable of such behaviour.
‘What are you so squeamish about? We’re at war!’ declares Kovac (John Hodiak) as
he argues in favour of throwing the German overboard. It is perhaps no coincidence
that both films were by auteur directors who both distanced themselves to an extent
from the prevailing ideological orthodoxy of wartime film-making in Hollywood
and Britain. It is also significant that in hindsight both films seem more mature and
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considered than many of the more didactic wartime films that insist upon ideological
conformity and consensus.
Immediately following Lifeboat, Hitchcock returned briefly to Britain where early in
1944 he made two short propaganda subjects for the MOI at the invitation of its films
advisor Sidney Bernstein.48 Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache were French-language
films intended for screening in Francophone territories: Bernstein, a cinema exhibitor
who had overseen the release of MOI films in the United States during the early years
of the war, held a new brief to supervise a film programme in preparation for the Allied
liberation of Europe. Hitchcock said that he undertook the assignment because

I felt the need to make a little contribution to the war effort . . . I knew that if I did
nothing I’d regret it for the rest of my life; it was important for me to do something
and also to get right into the atmosphere of war.49

There were possibly other factors at play. Hitchcock was keen to free himself from his
Selznick contract: he and Bernstein had discussed for some time going into partnership
as independent producers after the war and the twelve-week visit to London over the
winter of 1943–4 was a good opportunity to move this plan forward now that an Allied
victory seemed rather more than a distant hope. The trip also meant that Hitchcock
was able to stall the preparation of his next film Spellbound as part of his negotiations
with Selznick.50
The conditions under which Hitchcock made the two MOI shorts could not have
been more different from those he enjoyed in Hollywood. Bon Voyage and Aventure
Malgache were shot quickly and cheaply at Welwyn Studios in Hertfordshire using
non-professional actors (a French theatre troupe known as the Molière Players)
and a small crew. Bon Voyage, written by Angus MacPhail (Hitchcock’s friend and
collaborator from his Gaumont-British days) and J. O. C. Orton from an earlier draft
by V.  S. Pritchett, dramatizes the escape of an RAF airman from a prisoner-of-war
camp spirited home by the French Resistance: a twist reveals that his fellow escapee,
a Pole, is actually a Gestapo agent who has set up the escape in order to uncover the
Resistance group. Hitchcock and cinematographer Günther Krampf  – a German
émigré who had photographed Pandora’s Box (1928) for G. W. Pabst – made a virtue
of the minimal sets by shooting the film in an expressionist style replete with tight
angles and menacing shadows. Bon Voyage was listed as one of seven ‘Ministry
Special Productions’ included in the MOI’s Catalogue of Films for Liberated Territories
published in September 1945: it is specified as being ‘for France and Belgium only’.51
Evidence regarding the extent of its distribution at the time is patchy in the extreme.
Truffaut recalled seeing it ‘in Paris toward the end of 1944’:52 this might have been at
the Radio Cité Bastille cinema, where a preview was held in October 1944 and the
manager reported that his audience ‘who had no advance notice of the film, gave it a
very good reception’.53
Aventure Malgache – the second of the two films in conception though it may have
been shot first  – proved to be much more problematic. It grew out of Hitchcock’s
experience of making Bon Voyage. As Hitchcock told it:
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Hitchcock as Propagandist 127

It [Bon Voyage] was a four-reel picture and the Free French forces provided me with
technical advisers . . . We used to work on the screenplay in my room at Claridge’s,
and there was a whole group of French officers, including a certain Commander or
Colonel Forestier who never agreed to anything the others suggested. We realized
that the Free French were very divided against one another, and these inner
conflicts became the subject of the next film, Aventure Malgache.
One of the men there was an actor and a lawyer whose Resistance name was
Clarousse. He was in his late sixties, but he had lots of energy and he was always at
odds with his Free French companions who finally threw him in jail, in Tannarive
[sic]. It was a true story and Clarousse told it himself. But when it was finished,
there was some disagreement about it and I believe they decided not to show it.54

In a perverse sort of way, it is the emphasis on disagreement and dissent with the
Resistance that now makes Aventure Malgache seem a more significant film:  even
though it was never seen publicly at the time, it now has historical interest as a record
of internal divisions within the Free French that would not be acknowledged in a
standard propaganda film.
It has always been assumed that the reason not to release Aventure Malgache was
a political one: that it simply would not have been in anyone’s interest to show a film
focusing on internal divisions. The ‘myth’ of the Resistance that quickly emerged in
post-war France would also have militated against a reissue. The National Archives in
London reveal that the controversy surrounding Aventure Malgache persisted for half
a century and that the film was actively suppressed by the British Foreign Office. The
official reason seems to have been the potential threat of libel as the film was based on
the experiences of a real individual: a French lawyer practising in Madagascar called
Jules François Clermont. In a note of October 1963 in response to a request to allow it
to be shown as part of a Hitchcock season at the Belgian Film Archive, an official within
the MOI’s successor organization, the Central Office of Information, recorded that ‘I
viewed the film with Miss Cargill of the Foreign Office and we were both doubtful of
the wisdom of releasing it because of the potentially libellous material it contains.’55
In this regard, the official view remained consistent. As late as 1979, a request from
the National Film Theatre to screen Aventure Malgache as part of its season to mark
Hitchcock’s 80th birthday was declined on the grounds of

the sensitivity [which] arises because the film’s subject is the take-over by the Free
French forces of Madagascar from the Vichy French. Real people are depicted –
and not in the most polite terms! Some still live – or at least – their relatives do and
hence the possibility of libel!56

It was not until 1993 that Aventure Malgache was exhibited in public when it was
shown on a double bill with Bon Voyage at selected cinemas prior to its release on
video cassette.
The ‘discovery’ of the two ‘lost’ Hitchcock films inevitably attracted much
interest:  Hitchcock scholars have sought to locate them in Hitchcock’s œuvre by
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128 Propaganda and Conflict

finding thematic or formal links to other films.57 The scene of Jeanne’s murder
in Bon Voyage, for example, shot in close-up while she was making a telephone
call, has some parallel with the attempted murder of Margot Wendice in Dial M
for Murder (1954), while the ‘old Gestapo trick: shoot one of your own people to
prove that you’re not one of them’ is referred to in North by Northwest (1959). The
long camera takes (up to two and a half minutes) and tracking shots Hitchcock
employs in Aventure Malgache in preference to his usual montage-based technique
might be seen as anticipating the formal experimentation of Rope. At the same
time as highlighting their ‘Hitchcockian’ characteristics, however, it should not be
forgotten that Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache were foremost propaganda films
rather than Hitchcock films. In this context, the use of non-professional actors was
consistent with other wartime British films, especially the story-documentaries of
the Crown Film Unit, including Men of the Lightship, Target for Tonight, Coastal
Command (1942), Fires Were Started (1943) and Western Approaches (1944), while
the two films may also be seen as more realistic variations of the Resistance stories
turned out during the war by British studios such as Secret Mission (1942) and The
Flemish Farm (1943). Bon Voyage has some more specific parallels with Powell
and Pressburger’s similarly themed escape narrative One of Our Aircraft Is Missing
(1942).
Sidney Bernstein was also the prime mover in the project that marked Hitchcock’s
last contribution to Anglo-US film propaganda during the Second World War. Early
in 1945, Bernstein, in his new role as Films Officer of the Psychological Warfare
Division (PWD) of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), hit
upon the idea of making a film about the Nazi atrocities that had come to light as a
consequence of the liberation of Europe. Bernstein tasked Sergei Nolbandov, a White
Russian émigré who had directed Ships with Wings (1941) and Undercover (1943) for
Ealing Studios before joining the MOI, with sorting through the actuality footage of
the liberation of German concentration camps taken by British and US service and
newsreel cameramen. The first indication that a compilation film was to be made
comes in a memorandum from Nolbandov on 22 February 1945 requesting approval
of funds to make prints of the raw footage:

I have discussed the question of the German atrocities material with Mr Bernstein
and I am instructed by him to say that this material is being collected with a view
to preparing a film which will show the German atrocities committed in many
parts of the world. The basic idea of the film is to present an objective report,
almost like a criminal investigation report, which would demonstrate the terror
methods used by the Germans in Occupied Europe, Russia etc.58

The MOI authorized the film though with caveats. A  note from the Director of the
Finance Division states:

I approve the project but the film will only proceed if the available material proves
to be adequate. At that stage it should be looked upon as being for Non. T. [i.e. non-
theatrical] distribution in Liberated Territories but it may well have a wider use.59
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Hitchcock as Propagandist 129

The scope and nature of the ‘German Atrocity Film’ was transformed following the
liberation of the Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. Nolbandov informed the
War Office on 20 April that ‘we have been instructed by the Allied Command to prepare
a film immediately on this subject’: his request for the dope sheets of the cameramen
of the Army Film and Photographic Unit was tagged as ‘urgent’.60 Bernstein, who
visited Belsen on 22 April, immediately tasked Paul Wyand of British Movietone to
record ‘sound interviews of the British officials and German SS men etc at the Belsen
concentration camp’.61 This was followed by a ‘Special Coverage Motion Picture Team’
from the US Army being dispatched to film at the Dachau concentration camp.62 The
plan that was now emerging was that the MOI would produce the film in collaboration
with the OWI on behalf of SHAEF. To this extent the ‘German Atrocity Film’ would be
a combined Anglo-US initiative on a similar basis to The True Glory (1945), the official
film of the liberation of Europe compiled by Britain’s Carol Reed and the United States’
Garson Kanin. The MOI declared that ‘[this] work should be given top priority’.63
However, Bernstein sounded a note of caution about the time needed to prepare the
film in a ‘secret – priority’ telegram: ‘We are undertaking to produce a film on German
atrocities in camps and after having seen film already taken on this subject realise that
first grade job cannot be put together in hurry.’64 Bernstein was particularly concerned
that the visual material for the film must be thoroughly and meticulously documented
in order to prevent the possibility of any later accusations that it had been faked: hence,
he issued detailed instructions for cameramen regarding the filming of material and
the imperative of ascertaining its authenticity.65
It is unclear when Hitchcock first became attached to the film. Patrick McGilligan’s
biography of the director places it as early as February 1945 and suggests that Hitchcock
‘had committed himself to the project early enough to give Hitchcockian instructions
to some of the first cameramen entering the concentration camps’.66 However, this is not
corroborated by other sources: in any event, the official directives to cameramen came
from Bernstein. The most fully documented account of the history of the ‘German
Atrocity Film’, that by Kay Gladstone of the Imperial War Museum, suggests that it was
in May 1945 that ‘Hitchcock’s name is first mentioned’.67 As Hitchcock – then involved
in the preparation of Notorious  – could not travel to Britain until June, Bernstein
sounded out another British director, Sidney Gilliat, to oversee the compilation of
the film: Gilliat, however, was committed to a feature film at the time (probably The
Rake’s Progress) and had to decline.68 The first confirmation of Hitchcock’s involvement
comes in a memorandum from Bernstein to the MOI’s Finance Division on 23 July:

Mr Alfred Hitchcock has been appointed to direct the film, and he has been
working on it since he arrived. He will not take a fee for his work. We find that
commissioning of one writer to help Mr Hitchcock in this work would not answer
our purpose, and we propose to use more than one writer and/or expert in the
preparation of the treatment and commentary. This will also speed up the work.
The film is 5/6 reels in length, and the work involved is very considerable.69

The two writers recruited to the project were Colin Wills, a war correspondent for
the News Chronicle who had been present at the liberation of Belsen (‘His first-hand
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130 Propaganda and Conflict

knowledge of the situation is extremely valuable’), and Richard Crossman, deputy

editor of the New Statesman and a member of the PWD of SHAEF who had also visited
the camps (‘In addition to having been an eye-witness, his knowledge of German
propaganda, German mentality and German language would be invaluable for us’).
A third expert was the scientist Professor Solly Zuckerman as ‘scientific (and medical)
adviser’.70
The extent of Hitchcock’s role in the preparation of the ‘German Atrocity Film’ has
also been questioned. In his study of the film editor Stewart McAllister, for example,
Dai Vaughan avers that he did little more than ‘cast his professional eye over the thing
and ensure that it would turn out a real film and not a jumble of sequences’.71 There is
evidence, furthermore, that the film was to be cut in order to fit the script rather than
the commentary added after compilation of a rough cut. On 16 July 1945, Colin Wills
delivered his

treatment and commentary for the Concentration Camp film. In order to place it
in your hands before I depart for Paris to-morrow, and so that Mr Hitchcock can
get to work at once, seeing his time is so limited, I have been working on it without
cease since my last conference with him.72

Nevertheless, it seems that Hitchcock did have a significant input into the film.
According to editor Peter Tanner, who worked alongside Hitchcock and Stewart
McAllister, when he was interviewed for the British television documentary A Painful
Reminder (1985),

Hitchcock’s main contribution to the film was to try to make it as authentic

as possible. It was most important that everybody, particularly the Germans
themselves, should believe that this was true, that this horror had happened, that
people had suffered to that extent. And I  can remember him strolling up and
down in the suite at Claridge’s and saying, ‘How can we make that convincing?’
We tried to make shots as long as possible, used panning shots so that there was no
possibility of trickery – and going from respected dignitaries or high churchmen
straight to the bodies, corpses, so it couldn’t be suggested that we were faking the
film.73

The use of long takes to preserve spatial integrity was a feature of the realist film theory
that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s through the work of the influential French critic
André Bazin, as well as a device that Hitchcock would employ, extensively, in Rope and,
to a lesser extent, in Under Capricorn (1949), the two features he made for Transatlantic
Pictures, his post-war venture into independent production with Sidney Bernstein.
Hitchcock worked on the ‘German Atrocity Film’ for around one month (July
1945): by this stage, there were already indications that the production was running
into problems. Indeed, Bernstein had complained to his US colleague Davidson Taylor
at the end of May that ‘[the] present production position is most unsatisfactory’. Not
only had there been delays in obtaining actuality footage shot by the US Army Pictorial
Service but also the footage itself was deemed unsatisfactory:  ‘The material so far
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Hitchcock as Propagandist 131

received is not in line with the directive; it completely lacks the factual, corroborative
material which is so necessary.’74 There is some suggestion that by the summer of
1945 the Americans were less than fully committed to the joint Anglo-US film and
may have deliberately held back the best footage to include in their own film about
the concentration camps. The first indication of this is a cable from Davidson Taylor
to Bernstein on 18 June, when he suggested that Billy Wilder might be available to
make the ‘atrocity film’ in Munich.75 This did not meet with the approval of Sergei
Nolbandov, who was adamant that the MOI should retain control of the film: ‘If I may
express an opinion, after my various conversations with Mr Wilder, it would, I think,
be preferable from the point of view of the film, if this were to be made here under our
supervision.’76 Three weeks later William Patterson, head of the OWI’s Films Division,
told Bernstein that due to ‘prior commitments, including joint activities’  – this was
probably a reference to The True Glory, which was then at the editing stage – ‘OWI
is unable to provide either personnel or facilities for the full length atrocity film . . .
We have prepared, as you know, a newsreel type compilation on the atrocity material
which is being screened in Germany.’77 In a follow-up letter, Patterson amplified:

The response to the two reel atrocity film we made for the American zone in
Germany has been so satisfying that the informational authorities there have
requested us to expand it immediately to three reels . . . I feel that this work which
we plan to turn out quickly does not conflict with the detailed feature-length
documentary you have in hand but will, in fact, complement it by bridging the
time gap for you with a newsreel type treatment which will also help prepare the
German mind to receive the probing editorial treatment you plan for this all-
important subject.78

The US film, entitled Death Mills (Die Todesmühlen), evidently took priority for the
OWI, and without its involvement in facilitating the release of US-shot actuality footage
the planned joint film was always going to be difficult to complete. To this extent the
‘German Atrocity Film’ became the victim of inter-Allied institutional rivalries and
tensions. Although the MOI intended to continue with the film, which was included
in its Catalogue of Films for Liberated Territories under the title German Concentration
Camps Factual Survey (‘This will be a full length, historically documented and definitive
account of the German concentration camps as they were uncovered by the British,
US and Russian armies of liberation’), in the event the film was not completed and
remained in the film archive of the Imperial War Museum until it was broadcast on the
Public Broadcasting System in the United States under the title Memory of the Camps
in May 1985 to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.79
Hitchcock’s career as a wartime propagandist therefore ended with a whimper
rather than a bang: from a purely historical perspective, the ‘German Atrocity Film’
may have been the most important project he had ever undertaken but its effective
suppression meant that its significance as the first major film record of the Holocaust
was not recognized until much later. Yet in certain respects it provided a fitting
conclusion to Hitchcock’s wartime work that had sometimes proved controversial,
as in the cases of Lifeboat and Aventure Malgache, and at other times, as in Foreign
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132 Propaganda and Conflict

Correspondent and Saboteur, had been ideologically against the grain. Hitchcock’s
greatest critical and commercial successes were still ahead of him, but his important,
if at times problematic, contributions to wartime propaganda cinema in Britain and
the United States show that there is rather more to Hitchcock’s achievements than his
popular reputation as ‘the master of suspense’ would suggest.

Notes
1 The critical literature on Hitchcock is vast; see Jane A. Sloan, Alfred Hitchcock: A
Guide to References and Resources (Berkeley, CA, 1993), for a bibliography of books
and journal articles that at the time of publication included over 850 items. The classic
auteur studies are Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four
Films, transl. Stanley Hochman [1957] (New York, 1988) and Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s
Films (London, 1965). See also Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York,
1989). Raymond Durgnat’s The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock: Or, The Plain Man’s
Hitchcock (London, 1974) offers a characteristically idiosyncratic alternative to the
critical orthodoxy, while Robert E. Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation
(Chicago, 1992) is a valuable historical study of the critical reception of Hitchcock’s
films and how he promoted his own biographical legend as ‘the master of suspense’.
2 Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 [1968]
(New York, 1996), p. 57.
3 Rohmer and Chabrol, The First Forty-Four Films, p. 114.
4 Alain Kerzoncuf and Charles Barr, Hitchcock Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films
(Lexington, KY, 2015), pp. 123–4.
5 For discussion see Tom Ryall, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (London,
1986), pp. 115–40, and Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (Moffat, 1999), pp. 132–202.
6 Motion Picture Daily, 24 June 1935, p. 22.
7 See Leonard J. Leff, Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration of
Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick in Hollywood (London, 1988), pp. 20–35.
8 The phrase ‘Gone with the Wind Up’ – a reference, of course, to David O. Selznick’s
production of Gone with the Wind (1939) – is generally attributed to the veteran actor
Sir Seymour Hicks, though I have been unable to identify the original source.
9 Quoted in Charles Barr, ‘Deserter or Honored Exile? Views of Hitchcock from
Wartime Britain’, Hitchcock Annual, 13 (2004–5), p. 5.
10 Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (Chichester, 2003),
p. 198.
11 Quoted in Nicholas John Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against
American ‘Neutrality’ in World War II (Oxford and New York, 1995), p. 50.
12 H. Mark Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood ‘British’ Film, 1939–
45 (Manchester, 1999).
13 Laurence Olivier, George Sanders, Nigel Bruce and C. Aubrey Smith were all British,
while Joan Fontaine had British parents but had lived in the United States from
childhood.
14 Matthew Bernstein, Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent (Berkeley, CA, 1994), pp.
157–62.
15 Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los
Angeles, Alfred Hitchcock Collection (hereafter AMPAS Hitchcock) f. 238, ‘Personal
 133

Hitchcock as Propagandist 133

History: Original Story by Alfred Hitchcock and Joan Harrison Suggested by Vincent

Sheean’s book of the same name’, 1st complete line, 20 November 1939, p. 1.
16 Ibid. Ian Fleming, the future creator of James Bond, had been a foreign correspondent
for the Reuters news agency during the early 1930s – he covered the Moscow show
trial of six British engineers from the Metropolitan-Vickers Company accused of
espionage in 1933 – and was known for his somewhat affected manner.
17 AMPAS Hitchcock f. 239, Personal History. Shooting script, undated but including
revision pages dated 3 March, 18 March, 26 March, 30 March, 23 April and 24
May 1940.
18 Quoted in Susan A. Brewer, Selling War: British Propaganda in the United States
during World War II (Ithaca, NY, 1997), p. 80.
19 New York Times, 14 April 1940, p. 129.
20 Harrison’s Reports, 24 August 1940, p. 134.
21 Documentary News Letter, 1: 12 (1940), p. 6.
22 Reading between the lines of the letter, Rotha also seems to have believed,
erroneously, that John Grierson had a hand in writing the speech at the end of Foreign
Correspondent. Grierson, who had established the Empire Marketing Board (later
General Post Office) Film Unit in the 1930s, had taken up a new post as head of the
National Film Board of Canada shortly after the outbreak of war. Rotha had never
been one of Grierson’s inner circle: they were not antagonistic but held very different
views on the role and nature of documentary.
23 Kinematograph Weekly, 10 January 1940, p. 34.
24 Quoted in Colin Shindler, Hollywood Goes to War: Films and American Society 1939–
52 (London, 1979), p. 14.
25 AMPAS Hitchcock f. 631, ‘Untitled Original Treatment by Alfred Hitchcock and Joan
Harrison’, 20 August 1941 (including later pages dated 22 September 1941).
26 McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, p. 295.
27 AMPAS Hitchcock f. 633, ‘Untitled Hitchcock Original. Screen Play by Dorothy
Parker, Joan Harrison & Peter Viertel’, 12 December 1941.
28 Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits
and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (London, 1987), pp. 56–60.
29 AMPAS MPPA, PCA, Saboteur: PCA to Jack H. Skirball, 16 December 1941.
30 AMPAS Hitchcock f. 633, ‘Untitled Hitchcock Original’: ‘Blue – Changes’, 8
January 1942.
31 Ibid.
32 AMPAS MPPA, PCA, Saboteur: PCA to Maurice Pivar, 26 January 1942.
33 François Truffaut, with Helen G. Scott, Hitchcock [1968] (London, rev. edn 1986), pp.
212–14.
34 Ibid., p. 205.
35 Ibid., pp. 205–6.
36 Francis MacDonnell, Insidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Home
Front (New York, 1995), p. 159.
37 Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage
(London, 1997), pp. 179–80.
38 Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 221.
39 Ibid., p. 222.
40 Maria A. Judnick, ‘ “The Name of Hitchcock! The Fame of Steinbeck!”: The Legacy
of Lifeboat’, in Mark Osteen (ed.), Hitchcock and Adaptation: On the Page and Screen
(Lanham, MD, 2014), pp. 193–4.
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134 Propaganda and Conflict

41 Quoted in Jackson Benson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (New York,
1984), p. 542.
42 McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, pp. 335–6.
43 Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, pp. 312–13.
44 New York Times, 23 January 1944, p. X3.
45 Ibid.
46 Robin Wood, ‘Hitchcock and Fascism’, Hitchcock Annual, 13 (2004–5), p. 59.
47 James Chapman, ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) Reconsidered’, Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 15: 1 (1995), pp. 19–54.
48 McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, p. 346.
49 Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 228.
50 Leff, Hitchcock and Selznick, pp. 122–3.
51 The National Archives, Kew, London (hereafter TNA), INF 1/636, Catalogue of Films
for Liberated Territories (MOI, September 1945).
52 Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 228.
53 Kerzoncuf and Barr, Hitchcock Lost and Found, p. 157.
54 Truffaut, Hitchcock, pp. 228–30. In fact, Bon Voyage was a three-reeler (2,415 feet).
55 TNA, INF 6/2470, F. W. Coldham to Mr Wheeler, 7 October 1963.
56 Ibid., Mr White to Mr Kelly, 14 August 1979.
57 See Brett Wood, ‘Foreign Correspondence: The Rediscovered War Films of Alfred
Hitchcock’, Film Comment, 29: 4 (1993), pp. 54–8; Sidney Gottlieb, ‘Hitchcock’s
Wartime Work: Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache’, Hitchcock Annual, 3 (1994), pp.
158–67; and Justin Gustainis and Deborah Jay DeSilva, ‘Archetypes as Propaganda
in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lost” World War II Films’, Film and History, 27: 1 (1997),
pp. 80–7.
58 TNA, INF 1/636, Sergei Nolbandov to George Archibald, 22 February 1945.
59 Ibid., Archibald to Welch (MOI), 23 February 1945.
60 Ibid., Nolbandov to Ronald Tritton (War Office), 20 April 1945.
61 Ibid., Sidney Bernstein to Paul Wyand, 22 April 1945.
62 Ibid., PWD SHAEF MAIN to 21 Army Group, 27 April 1945.
63 Ibid., Handwritten note by Archibald headed ‘Approved’ on memo from Nolbandov,
21 April 1945.
64 Ibid., PWD SHAEF MAIN to PWD SHAEF REAR, 27 April 1945.
65 Ibid., Bernstein to Lt Col J. R. Foss (US Army Film, Music and Theatre General
Section), no date.
66 McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock, p. 373.
67 Kay Gladstone, ‘Separate Intentions: The Allied Screening of Concentration Camp
Documentaries in Defeated Germany in 1945–46: Death Mills and Memories of
the Camps’, in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (eds), Holocaust and the Moving
Image: Representations in Film and Television since 1933 (London, 2005), p. 54.
68 TNA, INF 1/636, Sidney Gilliat to Bernstein, 25 May 1945.
69 Ibid., Bernstein to O’Connell (MOI), 23 July 1945.
70 Ibid.
71 Dai Vaughan, Portrait of an Invisible Man: The Working Life of Stewart McAllister, Film
Editor (London, 1983), p. 155.
72 TNA, INF 1/636, Colin Wills to Nolbandov, 16 July 1945.
73 Quoted in Kerzoncuf and Barr, Hitchcock Lost and Found, p. 186.
74 TNA, INF 1/636, Bernstein to Davidson Taylor, 30 May 1945.
75 Ibid., Taylor to Bernstein, 18 June 1945.
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Hitchcock as Propagandist 135

76 Ibid., Nolbandov to Bernstein, 20 June 1945.

77 Ibid., William D. Patterson to Bernstein, 9 July 1945.
78 Ibid., Patterson to Bernstein, 16 July 1945. Patterson’s letter concludes, ‘Monty advises
that because of our production program for Germany, he has no-one to spare to assist
you on this full-length film.’ It is unclear whether the ‘Monty’ referred to is Field
Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, the field commander of SHAEF, though if it
was indeed Montgomery then it is ironic in the extreme that he should have driven
the final nail into the coffin of the ‘German Atrocity Film’.
79 Kerzoncuf and Barr, Hitchcock Lost and Found, p. 184.
136

136
 137

The films we forgot to remember: The other

side of Second World War propaganda
Jeffrey Richards

The received view of British wartime cinema was established as early as 1947 when
Roger Manvell wrote that ‘the war film discovered the common denominator of the
British people’. He pointed to 1942 as the turning point in the emergence of a new
populist documentary-style British cinema to replace the outdated and class-bound
melodramas of the early war years. The keynote of the films from 1942 to 1945 was
seen to be strict accuracy in the depiction of warfare; the highlighting of personal
issues of ‘comradeship, bravery, fear, tension, endurance, skill, boredom and hard
work’; the absence of blatant heroics and jingoistic self-display; and a projection of a
national image of reticence, wry humour and stolid determination.1
Manvell proposed a canon of quality British films which in pursuit of this ideal
had succeeded in creating a peculiarly British cinematic poetry. Among war films, he
singled out In Which We Serve (1943), The First of the Few (1942), The Gentle Sex (1943),
Millions Like Us (1943), San Demetrio–London (1944), The Way Ahead (1944) and The
Way to the Stars (1945) and, among non-war films, The Stars Look Down (1939), The
Proud Valley (1940), Love on the Dole (1941), This Happy Breed (1944), I Know Where
I’m Going (1945) and Brief Encounter (1945). The common features of these films were
realistic contemporary settings, ordinary people and emotional restraint.
Manvell’s pantheon constituted just the sort of film productions that the Ministry
of Information (MOI), overseer of British wartime cinema, required for propaganda
purposes both at home and abroad. It was the ministry which formulated and promoted
the concept of ‘The People’s War’ and encouraged the production of films dramatizing
the themes of how we fight, why we fight and the need for sacrifice if the war is to
be won.2 These are the films that are regularly revived and are part of the collective
memory of wartime cinema. But there was another side to wartime cinema, produced
by the commercial film industry in Britain and the United States, a vast hinterland of
films that remain unknown, unseen and are never revived. They are the films we forgot
to remember.
Many of them are B pictures because they could respond quickly and on short
shooting schedules to current events and they aimed to take their stories directly from
the headlines. However, this topicality and the changing fortunes of the war sometimes
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138 Propaganda and Conflict

caught the film-makers out. 49th Parallel (1941) was made with the explicit intention
of bringing the United States into the war. By the time the film was completed and
released, the United States was already in the war. Let George Do It (1940) was set in
unoccupied Norway; by the time the film came out, Norway had been occupied. Then
there is Chetniks!, produced by the 20th Century Fox B unit in 1943. The foreword sets
out the film’s political position:

This picture is respectfully dedicated to Draja Mihailovich and his fighting

Chetniks  – those fearless guerrillas who have dedicated their lives with a grim
determination that no rest shall prevail until the final Allied victory, and the
liberation after resurrection of their beloved fatherland – Yugoslavia – has been
achieved.

The real-life figure of General Mihailovich, the leader of the Chetniks – the royalist
guerrillas opposing the German occupation of Yugoslavia – was played by the Dutch
actor Philip Dorn. He is shown in the film nobly and heroically resisting the Germans
under Gestapo Colonel Bockner (played by Martin Kosleck, Hollywood’s perennial
Goebbels lookalike). He rescues prisoners being transported to a concentration
camp, supplies food to the starving local population and relieves his home town
from German occupation. The film ends with Mihailovich, flanked by two Orthodox
priests, announcing that he will fight on until Yugoslavia is liberated. Unfortunately for
the film, in 1943 the Allies shifted their support from the royalist Chetniks, accused
of collaborating with the Nazis, to the Communist partisans under Marshal Tito.
Mihailovich was eventually captured and executed by the partisans, as a collaborator
and a traitor. This seriously limited the film’s reissue value.
British relations with France have been problematic since at least the Hundred
Years War. The situation was exacerbated by the French Revolution. Before Hitler,
Napoleon was Britain’s biggest bogeyman. In the nineteenth century, war with France
was far more likely than war with Germany. But it was in the interests of Britain and
the Free French to boost the idea of French resistance to the Nazis. The authorities
were sufficiently aware of French sensitivities to veto the proposed film version of
Shaw’s Saint Joan, deeming it impolitic to remind the French that the English had
burned their national saint alive, albeit in the Middle Ages.3
After the fall of France, the tendency both in US and British films was to focus
on the heroic resistance to the Nazi occupiers, in films such as Paris Calling (1941),
Paris after Dark (1943) and Paris Underground (1945). But one film took a different
and decidedly downbeat view of the French and that is another never revived film.
This Was Paris (1942), made in Britain by Warner Bros, is devoted totally to showing
how a fifth column infiltrated and demoralized France, softening her up for conquest.
The focus is on a British intelligence agent Captain Bill Hamilton (Griffith Jones),
investigating a Paris fashion house, suspected of fifth-column activities. The house is
run by a German, Madame Florian, and backed by a Dutch businessman (who is in fact
a German agent) and a French aristocrat (Count de la Vague) who at one stage explains
that he believes in Franco-German cooperation to oppose the spread of communism.
Hamilton joins forces with US dress designer Anne Morgan (Ann Dvorak) to thwart
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The Films We Forgot to Remember 139

the fifth columnists. But they fail. The Germans invade, the disillusioned Count shoots
himself and Anne and Bill join refugees fleeing from Paris. The film ends with the title
‘France will rise again’. But the picture it paints of France is almost wholly negative.
Then there is The Man from Morocco (1944). Directed by German Jewish émigré
Max Greene (real name Mutz Greenbaum), written by Austrian Jewish émigré
Rudolph Cartier (real name Rudolf Kacser) and starring Austrian Jewish émigré Anton
Walbrook (real name Adolf Wohlbrück), The Man from Morocco (1944) is a hard-
hitting anti-Fascist thriller featuring members of the International Brigade (described
as ‘the vanguard of the United Nations’), led by Czech sculptor Karel Langer (Anton
Walbrook) and including a Scot, a Canadian, a Dutchman, an Austrian, a Russian and
a black American. The film begins in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and moves on to
an internment camp run by a sadistic French fascist in 1939, thence to forced labour
on the railway in French Morocco from where Langer escapes to London with a list
of loyal Frenchmen for the Free French and finally to North Africa after the Allied
landings in 1942 for a final reckoning with the French fascist villain. It is a rarely seen
example of a film utilizing the Spanish Civil War as a background, and highlighting
French fascism. There are a couple of sympathetic French characters (the doctor who
dies helping Langer escape from Morocco, the camp guard who won’t use his Christian
name Pierre because he shares it with the Vichy prime minister, Laval). But the
principal French character is the ruthless fascist camp commandant, Captain Ricardi.
Both Britain and Hollywood had largely steered clear of the Spanish Civil War
when it was actually being fought. The only serious film on the subject, Blockade
(1938), scripted by an avowed communist, John Howard Lawson, was so completely
emasculated that it is never made clear which side is which.
Another controversial aspect of Britain’s relationship with France was the
bombardment and effective destruction by the Royal Navy of the French fleet at Mers-
el-Kebir on 3 July 1940, which followed France’s surrender to Germany on 22 June and
was intended to deny a military asset to the enemy. In this operation, 1,297 French
naval personnel were killed and it created great hostility towards the British.
This formed the background to a pacy B picture made in Hollywood by 20th
Century Fox – Tonight We Raid Calais (1943). British commando Geoffrey Carter (John
Sutton) is landed on the French coast with the mission to identify a Germany factory
producing anti-tank shells and to signal its presence to a Royal Air Force (RAF) raid.
He seeks refuge with a French peasant family the Bonnards but encounters hostility
from the daughter of the family Odette (Annabella) because her brother Pierre, serving
with the French Navy, was killed in the naval bombardment. Pierre’s wife then died
in childbirth and the Bonnards are now raising his baby. She continually wants to
give Carter up to the Germans but her father insists that he pose as Pierre in order to
complete his mission. When the Germans arrest her parents, the Germans promise
her their lives if she gives up the Briton. She does but then the commandant forces
her to watch her parents – along with other neighbours – being shot by firing squad.
She now turns to vengeance against the Germans, and together with a widow and her
three daughters, helps Carter escape. They set fire to the fields to signal the location
of the factory, which is duly bombed by the RAF; Carter returns to England with the
baby, and the women remain to fight. The moral is that whatever the British did, the
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140 Propaganda and Conflict

Germans are much worse. It presses all the right emotional buttons. Germans shoot
the local village priest and later torture prisoners and execute old men and women.
One of the Germans seeks sex from Odette in return for privileges. At the start when
Carter is asked where his home is, he replies ‘Coventry’. Nothing more needs to be said.
The audience know what Coventry means.
Republic Pictures, who were best known for B westerns, made a contribution to the
war effort with a trio of films set in Britain, tackling subjects no one else did. The most
remarkable of the three is Secrets of Scotland Yard (1944). At the time when codebreaking
was a closely guarded secret, Republic made a film about British codebreakers, based
in Room 40 of the Admiralty. It opens in Berlin in 1918 with the German High
Command declaring that they have been beaten by the British codebreakers and when
the next war comes, they must have an agent in Room 40. Cut to 1939, war is declared
and the codebreakers are at work in Room 40. They listen to the King’s speech on the
radio  – an authentic recording  – and stand for the national anthem before getting
to work, with blackboards and chalk deciphering the German messages. With the
exception of one newly recruited woman, not very graciously received, they are tweedy,
pipe-smoking, tea-drinking middle-class Englishmen. The code-deciphering scenes
punctuate the film. The somewhat fanciful plot has codebreaker John Usher (Edgar
Barrier) murdered and his place taken by his identical twin brother, a Scotland Yard
inspector, who eventually solves the murder of his brother and later of Sir Christopher
Pelt (C. Aubrey Smith), head of Room 40, and unmasks the traitor, Waterlow (Lionel
Atwill), the man who had taken over from Pelt and is half-German. The film is given
a topical edge by references to the sinking of the Athenia and the pursuit of the Graf
Spee and culminates in the saving from sabotage of a plane-load of top brass flying to
Warsaw for a high-level meeting. Room 40 of the Admiralty became celebrated as the
centre of government codebreaking during the First World War. But in fact in 1919 it
was merged with the War Office cryptographic branch and renamed the Government
Code and Cypher School and by 1939 was located in Bletchley Park, whose activities
remained secret not only during the war but also for decades after it. Denison Clift,
the scriptwriter of Secrets of Scotland Yard, has merely projected forward to 1939 the
codebreaking situation from 1918. The US Office of War Information (OWI) submitted
the project to the British MOI that apparently raised no objection to it, as it hardly
reflected current codebreaking practices.
During the war, the National Gallery evacuated its art treasures to a salt mine in
North Wales and Republic’s Scotland Yard Investigator (1945) has a wealthy, deranged
art collector Carl Hoffmeyer (Erich von Stroheim) steal the Mona Lisa from the mine.
Sir James Collinson, Director of the National Gallery, played by the recently knighted
Sir C. Aubrey Smith, retrieves it and returns it to the director of the Louvre. The Mona
Lisa was hidden from the Nazis during the occupation but not in Wales. It was moved
from place to place within France.
In February 1942, the British newspapers were full of the story of a serial killer,
dubbed ‘The Blackout Ripper’, who murdered four prostitutes in the space of a few
weeks. He was caught, turned out to be RAF officer cadet Gordon Frederick Cummins
and was hanged.4 Republic rushed out a lively B picture, The London Blackout Murders
(1942), but with a twist. The victims of the man dubbed ‘The Blackout Jack the Ripper’
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The Films We Forgot to Remember 141

are all traitors or subversives working for the Germans and seeking to influence the
British government to go for a negotiated peace. The culprit turns out to be a doctor –
Jack Rawlings  – who after a trial in a basement courtroom during an air raid (an
authentic touch) is condemned to death and told by the judge that the law is the basis of
the civilization they are fighting for. He embraces his fate willingly. The film confronts
the ethics of killing your enemies by extrajudicial means. It attracted the attention of
Ulric Bell of the OWI, who was particularly concerned by the implication that the
British government might consider a negotiated peace. He recommended denying the
film an export licence, to prevent it being shown in Britain. But Republic had cannily
acquired an export licence before the OWI saw it and the Office of Censorship was
unwilling to withdraw it.5
Rumour was one of the problems that the government in wartime faced because
of its effect on morale. In the early years of the war, several powerful rumours gained
currency: that Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose and elements of the government
had fled to Canada, that General Gamelin, the French commander, had committed
suicide and that the Germans were preparing to install the Duke of Windsor as a
puppet ruler. The Home Intelligence unit reported,

The rumour situation is becoming so serious that it becomes imperative for the
whole matter to be discussed in detail. It is useless to warn people against repeating
rumours; most people only repeat what they believe to be true and they repeat it
because they have nothing more positive to talk about.

So an Anti-Lies Bureau was set up to counter false rumours. Prime Minister Winston
Churchill on 5 July 1940 ordered the MOI that ‘a wide campaign should be immediately
put in hand against the dangers of rumour’. This led to a poster campaign urging people
to ‘join Britain’s Silent Column’ and to ‘keep it under your hat’.6
But some rumours proved fruitful plot devices for films. One was the persistent
rumour that German agents were transmitting information through musical codes
over the radio. This provided the central plot point to such espionage films as Let
George Do It (1940), International Lady (1941) and They Met in the Dark (1943). But
one figure who gained a reputation for omniscience and whose reports were initially
much discussed was ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, William Joyce, an Irish-American Mosleyite
fascist who went to Germany and became a major propaganda broadcaster from
1939 to 1945, delivering news in English in a drawling upper-class voice. At one time,
an estimated 50 per cent of radio listeners tuned in to his broadcasts. He became a
character in films in his own right. In Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942),
the great detective seeks to solve the question of Lord Haw-Haw-type broadcasts by the
‘Voice of Terror’ predicting acts of sabotage, bombing raids and so forth with uncanny
accuracy. Holmes (Basil Rathbone) proves the broadcasts are coming from England
and the ‘Voice of Terror’ is Sir Evan Barham (Reginald Denny), a member of the Inner
Intelligence Council, who is really Heinrich Von Bork, German master spy.
Columbia Pictures’ Appointment in Berlin (1943) worked a twist on this by making
the broadcaster a double agent. Wing Commander Keith Wilson (George Sanders) is
first seen in 1938 denouncing Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and because of
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142 Propaganda and Conflict

this is recruited into counter-espionage. He is disgraced and sent to prison for trying
to obtain secret military information, a situation contrived by the authorities to endear
him to the Germans. He defects to Germany and starts broadcasting anti-British
propaganda as ‘The Voice of Truth’. But in fact he is sending secret information in
code to British intelligence in the broadcasts. He is about to be exposed when he learns
the starting point for the planned invasion of Britain, so he flees to Holland, hijacks a
plane, flies towards England, broadcasting the location – the Frisian Islands – before
he is shot down. The RAF destroy the invasion force and he gets a posthumous medal.
But William Joyce himself is a character in Passport to Destiny (1944), an endearing
curiosity in which a cockney charwoman Ella Muggins (Elsa Lanchester) travels to
Germany with the intention of killing Hitler. She gets a job as a cleaner in the Reich
Chancellery and there encounters Lord Haw-Haw himself (Gavin Muir). He is told by
his German superior that he is to be taken off the air as the British people no longer
believe his broadcasts. He begs Ella to help him escape from Germany but is arrested
before he can get away. Ella teams up with two anti-Nazi Germans; they are arrested
but escape when the prison where they are being held is bombed by the RAF. They
hijack a plane and fly to England.
Radio messages also figure in Berlin Correspondent (1942), a fast-moving, far-
fetched, comparatively light-hearted B picture from 20th Century Fox, which
nevertheless includes some grim realities (concentration camp, torture, euthanasia).
A US news correspondent Bill Roberts (Dana Andrews) is broadcasting from Berlin
to the United States in November 1941, just before the United States enters the war.
He paints an upbeat picture of conditions in Germany. He declares that there are
no air raids on Berlin, only for his broadcast to be interrupted by one. But he is also
broadcasting accurate information by code to his newspaper which then publishes
the truth. Colonel von Rau of the Gestapo (Martin Kosleck) seeks the source of the
information the newspaper is printing. He traces the source to an anti-Nazi German
called Rudolf Hauen who is arrested and tortured but will not speak. So he is sent
to an insane asylum where ‘mercy killings’ eliminate the unfit and the subversive.
Bill rescues Hauen from the asylum but is then himself arrested and imprisoned in a
concentration camp. The Nazis are planning to use an actor to impersonate Bill’s voice
on the radio and make him into ‘an American Lord Haw-Haw’. But Bill escapes from
the concentration camp, drives to Berlin in a breakneck car chase and, together with
Hauen’s daughter Karen, with whom he is now in love, he hijacks a German plane and
flies to freedom, having heard the news of Pearl Harbor.
The contribution of the film-making team of Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle
to the war effort was a series of escapist musicals (Irene, Sunny and No, No, Nanette)
and a brace of uplifting dramas about female heroines with Anna in the leading roles.
She played the title role in Nurse Edith Cavell (1939), the story of the woman shot by
the Germans in the First World War for helping Allied prisoners to escape, and she
played pioneer aviatrix Amy Johnson in They Flew Alone (United States: Wings and
the Woman) (1941). There was one oddity among these offerings and that is the little
remembered but ingenious thriller The Yellow Canary (1943). Deftly scripted by Miles
Malleson and DeWitt Bodeen, it was given a breathless topicality by the incorporation
of contemporary events such as the bombing of Buckingham Palace by a lone German
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The Films We Forgot to Remember 143

raider in September 1940 and the evacuation of women and children to Canada. Set in
1940, the film had Anna Neagle cast against type as Sally Maitland, an apparent Nazi
sympathizer, recruited by a German spy ring in Canada. The character of Sally was
evidently inspired by the upper-class English fascist sympathizer Unity Mitford. Sally
is the socialite daughter of an admiral, had spent the late 1930s in Germany and had
returned to England to voice opposition to the war and admiration for Hitler. She is
dubbed ‘Ribbentrop’s Girlfriend’ and ‘Sally from Unter Den Linden’ and is shunned by
the public. She is deported to Canada. There she is courted by a charming Polish officer
Jan Orlok (Albert Lieven) who turns out to be a leading figure in a German spy ring,
planning to blow up Britain’s Atlantic convoy in the harbour of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Once she is made aware of the plan, Sally is revealed as a British agent and she succeeds
in foiling the plot, with the aid of British intelligence agent Lieutenant Commander Jim
Garrick, played by Richard Greene, who was released by the Army specially to play the
part in what was evidently regarded as a film with particular propaganda value.
The film contains several messages for audiences. It stresses the role of the
Commonwealth, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canadian naval
intelligence cooperating with British intelligence to thwart the German plot. It warns
against the danger of fifth columnists with Canadian hotel workers, customs officers
and Polish refugees revealed to be working for the Germans. It demonstrates the
calmness of the British under fire, with an opening scene in which two members of the
Observer Corps discuss whether or not Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare while
they watch for German bombers approaching London and Cyril Fletcher performs
comic monologues in a night club while an air raid is in progress.
The extent to which Anna Neagle’s role wrong-footed audiences is revealed by a
story she tells in her autobiography:

I was so busy that I did not see the finished film for nearly a year. Then I caught up
with a matinée performance in Newcastle. Sitting in front of me were two ladies,
one very elderly and rather deaf, so that her companion was constantly explaining
what the film was about, to the accompaniment of low moans from her elderly
friend. ‘Oh no. Tch-tch’, she muttered, ‘Oh dear me no, Anna Neagle would never
do that.’ When I finally appeared in my WRNS uniform, and all was made clear,
she gave a very relieved sigh. ‘There’, she said, turning in triumph to her patient
neighbour, ‘I told you Anna Neagle wouldn’t do things like that.’7

What of the topics that did not appear? The greatest dearth of film subjects is the
extermination of the Jews. The question of how much was known about the Holocaust,
when it was known and how far it was believed is still a matter of heated debate. From
an exhaustive investigation of the evidence, Richard Breitman has argued,

The press published considerable information about Nazi mass killings and
government insiders had access to additional reports and conversations. But many
people could not ‘know’ something that tested the limits of their comprehension.
For some it did not register until the end of the war, when photographs and
newsreels provided gripping images of the horror.8
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Almost from the start of the war, there were mass shootings of Jews by Einsatzgruppen
(operational groups) and Ordnungspolizei (order-keeping police) in occupied Poland,
Bohemia, Ukraine and Russia, although the Nazis sought to keep the extent of the
atrocities a secret. Allied access to intercepted German radio intelligence exchanges
and detailed reports from Polish and Czech underground sources confirmed the
reality of these mass shootings. There were regular reports particularly in the US
newspapers detailing what was going on. In November 1941, the New  York Journal
American reported on the murder of 52,000 people in Kiev and in March 1942 the
New York Times reported that the Gestapo had murdered 240,000 Jews deported from
Germany and the Eastern Ukraine.9
Soon after the decision by the Nazis to implement systematically the ‘final
solution’, generally believed to date from the Wannsee Conference in 1942, the Allies
were receiving evidence of the construction of extermination camps at Auschwitz
and Treblinka. On 15 November 1942, the Polish underground reported that tens
of thousands of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war had arrived at Auschwitz ‘for the
sole purpose of their immediate extermination in gas chambers’.10 This report went
initially to the Polish government in exile in London and was passed on to the Allied
governments. It was evidence like this that convinced the Allies to issue in December
1942 the first official declaration accepting the reality of the ‘final solution’. Britain,
the United States and the Soviet Union confirmed that the Germans were carrying
out Hitler’s intention to exterminate the Jews of Europe, condemned their actions and
pledged themselves to punish those responsible. The declaration did not, however,
mention the gas chambers. Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden read out this statement
in the House of Commons on 17 December 1942, denouncing the ‘barbarous and
inhuman treatment of the Jews’, and the MPs stood for two minutes’ silence. Leading
British newspapers reported that over a million Jews had been murdered since the start
of the war. The ‘final solution’ was thereafter regularly reported. In 1944, for instance,
President Roosevelt called the ‘wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe . . .
one of the blackest crimes of all history’.11
So why did the cinema not make more of this? First, there was still anti-Semitism
in British and US society. George Orwell reported, ‘It is generally admitted that anti-
Semitism is on the increase, that it has been greatly exacerbated by the war, and that
humane and enlightened people are not immune from it.’12 In the United States, an
opinion poll in 1942 showed that 40 per cent of Americans believed that the Jews had
too much power and 18 per cent supported Hitler’s measures against them. US anti-
Semitism grew worse during the war.13 Senior officials, perhaps influenced by anti-
Semitism, in Britain and the United States persisted in thinking the atrocity reports
exaggerated and for a long time doubted the existence of the ‘final solution’. Second,
after the exposure of some First World War atrocity stories as myths, people were
inclined to regard such claims with scepticism. Third, traditionally Hollywood had
sought to avoid depictions of the Jews. The movie moguls, most of them Jewish, did not
want to draw attention to their Jewishness fearing that to highlight Jewish life or Jewish
heroes might provoke an anti-Semitic backlash. Famously the 1937 Warner Bros. film
The Life of Emile Zola, which dealt with the Dreyfus affair, made no mention of the
anti-Semitism that lay behind it and had no character utter the word ‘Jew’. The only
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The Films We Forgot to Remember 145

mogul to make films that were wholeheartedly and unapologetically pro-Semitic was
Darryl F. Zanuck and he was the only studio boss who was not Jewish. His productions
Disraeli (1929), The House of Rothschild (1934) and much later Gentleman’s Agreement
(1947) stand out by virtue of their rarity. The timidity of the film industry seems to have
continued into the war, despite the compelling evidence of anti-Jewish persecution.
Lester Friedman emphasized the economic motivation of the moguls in his book
Hollywood’s Image of the Jew:

Since they knew films with Jewish characters would prove difficult to market
overseas, even if these characters lived in fictive locales and existed centuries
ago, the Hollywood chieftains hedged their bets by creating as many nationless,
raceless and religionless characters as possible. Like the hard-headed businessmen
they were, studio heads usually placed their pocket books above their principles
or even their personal convictions. This fact, at least in part, accounts for the lack
of screen Jews in the thirties, since the inclusion of even minor Jewish characters
might well eliminate a film from distribution in the lucrative markets abroad.14

During the 1930s, 40 per cent of Hollywood companies’ revenues came from overseas
distribution and every country had its censorship code. Once the Nazis came to power
in Germany, all films featuring Jewish themes and Jewish actors were routinely banned.

The uncertainty of markets abroad contributed to the evaporation of Jews from

American movie screens, but it was not the only cause. At home, the market for
films about Jews seemed equally small. Thirties studio heads believed films with
Jewish characters in central roles were too specialized, too exotic, for their now
largely Gentile audiences.15

Concentration camps featured in films such as Escape (1940), Pastor Hall (1940),
Pimpernel Smith (1941), Berlin Correspondent (1942), The Seventh Cross (1944) and The
Mortal Storm (1940), but not extermination camps. On the whole, wartime propaganda
depicted the Japanese as infinitely more bestial and sadistic than the Germans. It was
not until after the war that cinema in Britain and the United States acknowledged the
extermination camps in Frieda (1947) and in Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946). Only
one full-length British feature film dealt with the persecution of the Jews in Germany
and it has been completely forgotten and never revived. Directed by Harold French and
based on a novel by the Jewish writer Louis Golding, Mr. Emmanuel (1944) is set in
1936 and features the journey of elderly Jew Isaac Emmanuel (played by Felix Aylmer
with great dignity and sensitivity) from the north of England to Germany to discover
the fate of the mother of a German boy refugee, suicidal because of the lack of news
about his mother. His father had been killed by the Nazis because of his ‘political views’
(presumably left-wing). When Emmanuel traces the mother, she is now married to a
high Nazi official and rejects her son; so Emmanuel tells the boy she too is dead. There
are some implausibilities in the film. Emmanuel, after several beatings by the Gestapo,
looks unmarked and a subplot features a Jewish singer, mistress of a Nazi minister,
who helps Emmanuel to get out of Germany. The minister in an authentic echo of
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146 Propaganda and Conflict

Goebbels actually says when challenged about the mistress: ‘I am the one who decides
who is a Jew and who is not.’ But the film paints a grimly realistic picture of the state of
fear, terror and suspicion existing in German society in the years before the war with
the torture and execution of Jewish prisoners by the Gestapo dramatized. By contrast,
Emmanuel is fully accepted in British society.
The nearest US equivalent of Mr. Emmanuel is Address Unknown (1944), based
on a bestselling book by Kressman Taylor. Directed by the celebrated art director
William Cameron Menzies, it is very much a designer’s film. Shot entirely in the
studio and utilizing highly stylized sets and settings, expressionist lighting and intense
brooding close-ups, it provides an appropriately stark and alienating context for Paul
Lukas’s outstanding psychological study of a decent man, corrupted by ambition and
opportunism and eventually destroyed by his terror of the regime he has supported.
Set like Mr. Emmanuel in the 1930s, it opens in San Francisco, where German Martin
Schultz (Paul Lukas) and his Jewish partner Max Eisenstein (Morris Carnovsky) run
an art gallery. They are hoping that their respective children will marry. But Max’s
daughter Griselle (K. T. Stevens) wants first to establish herself as an actress on the
German stage. Martin also returns to Germany to purchase paintings and there falls
under the influence of the suavely sinister Baron von Freische (Carl Esmond) who
draws him into the Nazi regime by explaining Hitler’s mission to spearhead national
regeneration. Martin gets a job at the Ministry of Culture and writes to Max explaining
that Hitler is good for Germany and the Jew-baiting of the regime is a minor aberration.
As we hear his words spoken, we see Jews cowering in the ruins of their shop wrecked
by Brownshirts. Eventually, Martin writes to terminate their communication on the
grounds that Max is a Jew.
The most powerful sequence in the film follows. Griselle is rehearsing in a play,
which resembles Max Reinhardt’s celebrated production The Miracle. In a cathedral
set, surrounded by nuns, Griselle recites the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the
Mount (‘Blessed are the meek’, etc.). She is interrupted by an officious Nazi censor who
demands that the lines be cut. But during the actual performance, she restores them.
The censor stands up in the audience, denouncing her as a Jew, and the audience storm
the stage, clawing at the safety curtain which has been lowered to get at the hated Jew.
She flees and is later seen staggering across a muddy field, pursued by Stormtroopers
with dogs. She reaches Martin’s villa and seeks sanctuary but he turns her away and
locks the door. There is a burst of gunfire, signalling her death, and just a bloody palm
print on the wall to proclaim her fate. Martin writes Max a curt one-line note to tell
him his daughter is dead. But his life begins to unravel as he receives a series of letters,
apparently in code, implicating him in Resistance activities. He swears that he is not
involved but is dismissed from his job and placed under surveillance. His wife leaves
him and takes the children to Switzerland. He writes to Max, whom he suspects of
sending the letters, begging him to stop writing. But still they come. He contemplates
suicide but then hears the Gestapo arriving to arrest him. A final letter from the United
States is returned marked ‘Address Unknown’. Max, it turns out, has not sent them. They
were sent by Martin’s son Heinrich to avenge the death of Griselle, whom he loved.
Then there is desertion, a subject rarely treated in wartime films – and if so, as in
Waterloo Road (1945) or The Way Ahead (1944), explained on compassionate grounds.
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The Films We Forgot to Remember 147

By October 1944, 80,000 men from the Army alone had gone absent without leave. The
peak year 1941 saw one in ten of the entire armed forces deserting.16 The most hard-
hitting film to tackle the subject was 20th Century Fox’s adaptation of Eric Knight’s
novel This Above All (1942), the title a quotation from Hamlet: ‘This above all, to thine
own self be true.’ The film focuses on working-class Clive Briggs (Tyrone Power), who
joined up on the first day of the war and served in France but has now deserted. He
reasons that what England means to him is poverty, hunger, men begging for work,
his experience in the 1930s. He believes this is what it will be like after the war too.
He meets an upper-class girl, Prudence Cathaway (Joan Fontaine), who has joined the
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and who tries to explain what England really means and
how Germany cannot be allowed to win. He goes on the run but an encounter with a
one-armed rector and a discussion on faith clears his mind. He determines to rejoin
the Army, fight for victory over Germany and then fight for a better England after the
war. The film articulates, tackles and resolves the question of a class-divided society
and the need for all classes to unite to defeat the enemy.
Another Hollywood film on a subject not tackled in British cinemas is The Hour
before the Dawn (1944). This completely forgotten and never revived film, based on
a novel by Somerset Maugham, explores the even thornier question of conscientious
objection. In the Second World War, 59,192 people in the UK claimed to be
conscientious objectors:  only 3,577 were given unconditional exemption. Half were
registered on condition they took up approved work, generally in agriculture. A fifth,
12,204, were turned down altogether and were liable for call-up.17 In The Hour before
the Dawn deputy headmaster Jim Hetherton (Franchot Tone) becomes a pacifist, for
reasons of boyhood psychological trauma rather than principle. He goes before a
tribunal and then seeks work in agriculture. He endures insults, white feathers and
rejection by society. He marries an Austrian refugee Dora (a miscast Veronica Lake)
but she is in fact a Nazi agent, and when one of her friends gets Jim to contact pre-war
appeaser Sir Leslie Buchanan about the possibility of arranging a negotiated armistice
with Germany, Buchanan declares they are all behind Churchill now and appeasement
is dead. Jim becomes suspicious and eventually finds his wife signalling Nazi bombers
on their way to destroy the aerodrome where his brother serves as a wing commander.
In the book, he strangles her and then shoots himself. The film required a more upbeat
ending so after he kills her, Jim overcomes his pacifist scruples, enlists in the RAF and
is last seen flying on a bombing raid to the strains of ‘There’ll Always Be an England’.
The film carefully details the plight of the conscientious objector but, as with that of the
deserter, resolves it in favour of commitment to the war effort.
These are just some of the films we forgot to remember; they give a much more
complex and varied picture of wartime cinema than the one to which we have become
accustomed.

Notes
1 Roger Manvell in Michael Balcon et al., Twenty Years of British Film 1925–1945
(London, 1947), pp. 84–5.
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148 Propaganda and Conflict

2 Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the
Second World War (Oxford, 1986); James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State
and Propaganda 1939–1945 (London, 1998).
3 Donald P. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye: Shaw and the Cinema (Notre Dame, IN, 1965),
p. 112.
4 Donald Thomas, An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers & Civilians in the
Second World War (London, 2003).
5 H. Mark Glancy, When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood ‘British’ Film, 1939–
45 (Manchester, 1999), p. 194.
6 Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information
in World War II (London, 1979), pp. 80–1.
7 Anna Neagle, There’s Always Tomorrow: An Autobiography (London, 1974), pp. 143–4.
8 Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and
Americans Knew (New York, 1998), p. 8.
9 Ibid., p. 127.
10 Ibid., p. 116.
11 Ibid., p. 203.
12 Cited in Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (London, 1969), pp. 574–7.
13 Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits
and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (London, 1987), p. 283.
14 Lester Friedman, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew (New York, 1982), p. 84.
15 Ibid.
16 Calder, The People’s War, pp. 388–9.
17 Ibid., p. 571.
 149

The Special Operations Executive and covert

propaganda during the Greco-Italian War, 1940–1
Marina Petraki

On 26 May 1940, Major Ian Pirie arrived in Athens from Egypt, ostensibly as head of
Air Raid Precautions (ARP), but in fact as second-in-command of Section D, which
would carry out propaganda, sabotage and other such irregular warfare activities. Pirie’s
post-war account of these activities provides much of the material for this chapter.1
In July 1940, following the German occupation of France and the Dunkirk
evacuation, a new secret organization – the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – was
officially formed from the amalgamation of existing espionage and sabotage groups
such as Section D of MI6 and MI(R). The purpose of the new organization, which
was headed by Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton, was to ‘co-ordinate all
action by way of subversion, sabotage and underground propaganda against the
enemy overseas’.2 It was divided into Section SO1, responsible for the coordination of
subversion and black propaganda, and Section SO2, responsible for sabotage and, at
the same time, for providing the means for carrying it out.3 The secret organization,
which was ordered by Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’, aimed to prepare, support and
encourage the people of occupied Europe to resist. This necessitated great caution
because of the difficulty in recruiting suitable agents and acquiring materials like radio
transmitters, explosives and small arms.
Greece had several advantages over the rest of the Balkans in respect of the
recruitment of agents. In July 1940, it was still a free country professing neutrality
and so preparations could be made relatively easily for post-occupation resistance in
advance of a German attack; and it held a somewhat romantic appeal to young British
candidates seeking ‘an ideal escape from peacetime routine or frustrations’.4 According
to Antony Beevor, ‘the diversity of their characters should be a warning against too
simple an analysis. They ranged from Philhellenic dons to well-connected thugs, with
many variations in between including a handful of good regular soldiers, romantics,
writers, scholar gypsies and the odd louche adventurer.’5 Patrick Leigh Fermor, an SOE
agent, wrote of himself and other SOE ‘improvised cave-dwellers’ that

it was the obsolete choice of Greek at school which had really deposited us on the
limestone. With an insight once thought rare, the army had realised that the Ancient
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150 Propaganda and Conflict

tongue, however imperfectly mastered, was a short-cut to the modern: hence the

sudden sprinkling of many strange figures among the mainland and island crags.6

Thus, the recruitment of agents in Greece (for both military and secret missions)
employed a somewhat eccentric approach. Operatives were ‘almost literally recruited
on an “old school tie” basis, the main centre of recruitment popularly believed to be
the bar of White’s Club’.7 The Balkans and Middle East Section headquarters of the SOE
was based in Cairo, with a branch in Istanbul, and its chief became Arthur Goodwill,
already working for Section D in the London Office.8
Section D had begun to operate in Greece in May 1940 when Goodwill, who was
touring the Balkans, arrived in Athens. He approached the British minister Sir Michael
Palairet and asked for his cooperation in recruiting personnel from the British Legation
and the Consulates in Athens and Salonika in order to make serious preparations
for post-occupation resistance and sabotage. Palairet declined any involvement
and participation by the Legation or Consulates with Section D or any other secret
activities that would jeopardize the existing good relations between the British and
the Greek governments. Instead, he suggested that Goodwill turn to successful
British businessmen residing in Athens. It should be stressed at this point that official
propaganda activities in Greece, which emanated from the Greek Section of the British
Ministry of Information (MOI)9 and the Foreign Office, were at this stage and, until
the Greco-Italian war broke out, very discreet. Its main task was to promote the values
of the British Empire and to justify the British cause. Propaganda material like posters,
photographs and articles from British newspapers as well as newsreels, which were
sent on a regular basis to the British Legation in Athens and directed towards the Greek
public, were considered quite satisfactory by Palairet, who was trying to maintain this
level of propaganda without getting involved in secret operations.
So Goodwill began to seek suitable operatives among prominent English
businessmen established in Athens who would be willing to offer their services. After
numerous attempts at contact, Goodwill succeeded in setting up a secret organization
of five ‘exceptionally able and entirely trustworthy Englishmen of the commercial
world’10 known as the ‘Apostles’.11 The head of the Apostles was the Secretary of the
British Legation in Athens H. J. Sinclair, who was also the Chief Engineer of the Athens
and Piraeus Tramways Trust and head of the Power and Traction Company. Goodwill
was convinced that ‘the qualities of this man were so exceptional that, in the initial stage
at any rate, it would be a pity to use him as anything but No. 1’.12 The other members
were R. M. Meikle and L. C. Kemp, a Mr Saunders, who was an agent for Lloyd’s,13 and
Stanley Bailey, who was the head of the Lake Copais Reclamation Company. Bailey
was described as ‘a very stout fellow, who has a number of English engineers working
under him and because of his work at reclaiming land, he had at his disposal many
workers and explosives’.14
In Salonika, Goodwill recruited Major Menzies, a Canadian, who was a
representative of the Imperial War Graves Commission.15 Other members of the
Organisation in Salonika were a Mr Donaldson, who worked at the British consulate
and was responsible for matters concerning the area from the town of Volos to the
Albanian border, and a Mr Wilkinson, who was in charge of a considerable land
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The SOE and Covert Propaganda 151

reclamation contract in Ioannina and would thus have easy access to Italian-occupied
Albania.
Although the British Legation was aware of all these developments, when Goodwill
tried again to obtain its open support Minister Michael Palairet again refused to
countenance any involvement with the Apostles, maintaining that this could jeopardize
the Legation’s good relations with the regime of Ioannis Metaxas, who at the time
professed neutrality.
Apart from securing new operatives for Section D, Goodwill managed to secure
a cover position for an agent who would act as Sinclair’s second-in-command and
liaison between the Apostles and Section D. With the help of the British Legation, a
position of full-time secretary to the British ARP voluntary organization – under the
supervision of Harold Caccia, the First Secretary of the British Legation – was made
available. In this way, Section D’s no. 2 would arrive in Athens as an ARP executive.16
At the end of May, after Goodwill left for Cairo, Ian Blacklaws Mason Pirie, ‘a former
Oxford history scholar and bantamweight boxing blue’,17 under the cover of adviser to
the British community as head of ARP, arrived in Athens and became Sinclair’s secret
assistant. The original choice for second-in-command was A. W. Lawrence, a younger
brother of T. E. Lawrence ‘of Arabia’, who had left London for Alexandria by special
plane on 26 May 1940. However, Goodwill was not convinced that he was the suitable
person for the job.18 Pirie’s official duties included lectures to the Athens Fire Brigade
and the installation of air-raid shelters at various neutral legations.
At the same time, the War Office was working on the formation of a ‘Shadow
Mission’ to travel to Greece with the aim of preparing the ground for future military
operations if and when Greece were occupied by the Axis powers. It was suggested
that four radio transmitters should be dispatched to fulfil the needs of the mission;
furthermore, three members of MI(R) who had good knowledge of Greek affairs
were, after a ‘rushed course in explosives’,19 sent to Greece to form the aforementioned
Shadow Mission. These were the Greek-speaking Cambridge don Nicholas Hammond,
the archaeologists John Pendlebury and David Hunt and a businessman from Zagreb,20
as the team would act as liaison between Greece and Yugoslavia. In spite of Palairet’s
objections to the War Office, as he considered ‘the value of such activities under the
present circumstances highly problematic’,21 the Shadow Mission arrived in Greece.22
Given the Greek government’s refusal to allow any British action which might
jeopardize its neutrality, they were refused entry: their cover of ‘businessmen’ and ‘civil
servants’ was not convincing. Pendlebury, a former curator of Knossos, was allowed to
cross to Crete, his cover being that of additional Vice-Consul at Heraklion; the others
carried on to Egypt and were attached to the 1st Battalion of the Welch Regiment in
Alexandria.23
In August 1940, a meeting of all Section D representatives took place in Istanbul
to coordinate the activities of the organization in the Balkans for the coming winter.
Among the participants were Sinclair and Pirie. Pirie was put in charge of the Greek
operations, a decision which was not disclosed to the other members ‘in order not to
ruffle the feelings of the Apostles’.24
As the threat of an Italian attack on Greece, especially after the sinking of the Elli
on 15 August, became apparent, Pirie began to build up his connections in order to
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organize an effective network for a subversive propaganda campaign in Greece and

suspended all sabotage activities that were due to take place; for had any such come to
light, they would have given the Italians a pretext for invasion.
Because of strict Greek censorship regulations, underground propaganda, which
could not be handled by the MOI as this would expose the British government and
cause tension in Anglo-Greek relations, had to be dealt with in utmost secrecy. Thus,
securing operatives who would be involved in setting up a satisfactory propaganda
network had to be dealt with especially cautiously. A new recruiting effort for ‘suitable’
personnel began in Athens, which proved very successful. Pirie’s first and most
significant connections were with the Athens Consulate. First to be approached were
Consul-General Graham Sebastian, ‘a man of great character who knew the Balkans
well’,25 and his Honorary Vice-Consul Thomas Bowman, a successful businessman,
who owned the concession of the marble quarries at Dionyssos and had lived in
Athens for thirty years. He spoke excellent Greek and had connections in high places
such as Constantinos Maniadakis, Metaxas’ notorious Minister of Public Order.26 The
propaganda ‘team’ included Harold Caccia, the First Secretary of the British Legation,
Gerard Young, the Director of Publicity and pre-war head of the British Archaeological
School in Athens, and the Press Attaché, David Wallace. Among the most effective
recruits were a Monsieur Routier, a French Levantine who had been involved in French
underground propaganda, but had lost his position after the armistice, and ran a small
office from which he conducted an indeterminate business, and a Herr Altmayer, the
former editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung who had escaped the Nazi regime and become
a German refugee in Yugoslavia. He was an expert in subversive propaganda and now
lived in Athens.
All of the Apostles’ activities before the Italian attack were planned under the
assumption that Metaxas’ government would most probably make concessions with
the Axis, as had the government of Romania. The mission’s work was thus to establish
channels whereby propaganda could be circulated in occupied Greece after the forced
withdrawal of the British Legation. In view of this possibility, the SOE operatives were
determined not to disclose any of their activities to the Greek government or to any
other authority, thereby jeopardizing the operation and exposing the agents to the
enemy, as had happened in Romania. According to Pirie, secret activities in Romania
and plans to destroy the country’s oil fields ‘came to nothing’ as government policy
changed following the invasion by Germany and agents were exposed, arrested and
‘ill treated’. It should be stressed, however, that, following Greece’s entry in the war,
SOE agents in charge of organizing post-occupation and resistance trained a large
number of Greek saboteurs (around 400, many of them communists) and succeeded
in ‘smuggling’ into Greece five tonnes of explosives and other ammunitions before
Germany’s invasion.27
The first propaganda attempt was made just before the Italian attack with the
distribution of 30,000 copies of an anti-Italian poem To the Heroes of Corfu (1869)
by the Greek poet Achileas Parashos, which was distributed all over Greece and had
an immediate success. The poem, which was quickly translated into English and
distributed among the British residing in Greece, was received with great enthusiasm
by the Greek people.28 Its success troubled the Italian Ambassador, who protested to
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The SOE and Covert Propaganda 153

Metaxas, only to receive the reply ‘it is very difficult to suppress a Greek classic’.29 This
first propaganda coup, however small, boosted the organization’s morale, which was
low after a number of unsuccessful attempts at sabotage in Albania, and encouraged
the agents to proceed with further plans for producing and distributing propaganda
material. In this respect, Routier’s participation proved very useful. With his help Pirie
and Wallace gained access to newspaper and news cuttings and telegrams that had
been rejected by the censors, making at the same time good use of his connections
for the dissemination of subversive propaganda. Sinclair’s services would also prove
very successful on the distribution side, as he was able to collect and disseminate
information around the bus and tram depots and into small cafés frequented by tram
and bus drivers.30
At the same time, emphasis was given to avoid any propaganda that would
undermine the ‘Fourth of August Regime’,31 as long as this served British interests,
underlining instead the regime’s democratic elements and stressing the importance
of a British victory against the Axis. At the same time, due to Greece’s economic
dependence on Germany, which imported most of the country’s agricultural products
within its clearing system, Metaxas was obliged to follow a balanced policy towards
both Britain and Germany and professed neutrality until the Italian attack of 28
October 1940.32
The Italian attack on Greece and the unexpected Greek victories put a new
perspective on the Apostles’ propaganda activities, which intensified. The new
objectives were twofold:  to keep up Greek resistance by bolstering their fighting
spirit and undermining the Italians, and to produce an effective pro-British counter
propaganda against Germany, whose black propaganda and whispering campaign
consisted of rumours which ‘exposed’ the British, their lies and fake solidarity with
the Greeks.33 The main difficulty Pirie encountered as the war progressed and the
Greeks were winning, was that, while the British were trying to fight fascism, Metaxas’
regime was stressing that they were fighting the Italians and not fascism. To this end,
instructions were given by the Greek censors that the word ‘Italian’ always preface the
word ‘fascism’.
During this period, Greek control of printing material directed against Germany
was very strict as the government tried to avoid any action that would openly provoke
the Germans. Thus, many propaganda projects were halted; the Greek police exposed
others. Just before Christmas, an attempt was made to forward 50,000 copies of
an anti-Hitler postcard to Belgrade. This was a coloured cartoon with a caption in
Serbo-Croat, for distribution through the Serbian Peasant Party. The postcards, which
depicted Yugoslavia as Little Red Riding Hood and Hitler as the Big Bad Wolf, were
discovered by Greek police; after an inspection of several printing houses in Athens
both the printer and Routier, who had placed the order, were arrested. Bowman’s
intervention with Maniadakis secured their release.
The ‘Big Bad Wolf ’ incident enabled Bowman to discuss propaganda activities
with Maniadakis, including the production of postcards that would undermine the
enemy’s spirit and bolster the Greeks. Maniadakis was enthusiastic about the idea and
the SOE immediately arranged for six designs of Christmas cards to be printed with
captions in Greek, emphasizing Anglo-Hellenic cooperation and solidarity.34 In no
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154 Propaganda and Conflict

time, 230,000 of these cards were ready. The intention was to distribute them free to the
Greek troops, who could post them home for Christmas. In that way, Pirie argued, ‘we
should be using the Greek Post Office to distribute pro-British propaganda into every
village and home in Greece’.35 When the postcards were shown to Maniadakis, he was
so pleased with the result that he commandeered an army lorry to take them straight to
the front for distribution, while asking Bowman to place an order for a million more.36
The idea of producing pro-British postcards with the consent of the regime was taken
up commercially by Greek firms, and several dozen designs which emphasized Anglo-
Greek friendship and solidarity, at the same time ridiculing the enemy, were soon on
sale in shops in Athens. In fact, Pirie wrote, ‘I think we might claim to have put the
comic postcards industry on its feet in this country.’37
At the end of January, Metaxas died and SOE propaganda was stepped up. Printed
material like posters and cartoons that ridiculed Mussolini and leaflets against fascism
began to circulate more freely. Sinclair and other SOE members were furnished with
large numbers of cards and photographs with captions in Greek stressing Britain’s
support for the Greek cause. These were placed on notice boards and on the walls
of cafés and factory canteens, and in public places. Many of those photographs were
forwarded by Routier to journalist friends and found their way into the press from
time to time. He also managed to get photographs displayed in the lobbies of the three
new cinemas in Athens and furnished various clubs with photograph albums, to which
a regular supply of photographs was sent.
Propaganda activities included the financing of a weekly newspaper for the Greek
troops, entitled ‘Thunder’, in Argyrokastro in Albania. The paper was edited by the
Archbishop of Argyrokastro, a rabid Greek patriot and an anglophile, who had acquired
a printing press captured from the Italians. Pirie’s team made sure that a regular flow of
pro-British and anti-German articles was sent to the bishop. ‘In that way’, Pirie wrote,
‘we shall have control of a pro-British newspaper circulating throughout the Greek
troops, . . . and no doubt we can disseminate a reasonable amount of anti-German
propaganda also.’38 Two more papers were financed by the organization; one was the
weekly Dodekanisiaki, the organ of the Youth Organisation of the Dodekanese, and the
other the Ethniki Amyna (National Defence), a paper with strong army connections
circulating widely among the troops. It was edited by a General Angeliotis, who had
strong connections with the Greek royal family and was ‘extremely pro-British’.39
As German propaganda was intensified and became more effective, an important
issue which rose high on the SOE propaganda agenda was the scheme of dropping
anti-German pamphlets directed at the morale of the Italian troops at the front. After
discussion with the MOI, the SOE put forward a plan for the production and dropping
of pamphlets which stressed the difference between the Italian Army and Mussolini
and asked questions like ‘How many letters have you had from your wife since the
Germans occupied Italy?’ This question was based on plausible reports that German
troops had been seen in many places in Italy; these were most probably members
of the Afrika Korps moving south.40 Others stressed German arrogance, depicting
starving Italians next to the healthy-looking Germans who had deprived them of their
food. These pamphlets would, according to the instructions of the MOI, ‘contrast the
bright picture of well-fed Germany with the sombre Italian picture as result of the
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The SOE and Covert Propaganda 155

official rationing due to the fact that Germany has taken a good proportion of her food
stocks’.41 However, this proposal met with the constant refusal of the Royal Air Force
(RAF). It was not until the end of February 1941, when the German invasion of Greece
was imminent and the British Expeditionary Force to Greece was on its way, that
the RAF was persuaded to undertake this operation.42 All squadrons received orders
which ‘reminded them of the importance that the War Office attached to pamphlet
dropping’.43 Ironically, by that time the Greek sky was ‘raining’ anti-British German and
Italian propaganda pamphlets with exactly the same depiction and messages stressing
British arrogance as the reason behind the starving of Greek children and the deaths of
soldiers who were fighting not for the Greek flag but for the British Empire’s interests.
Together with the dropping of pamphlets at the front, distribution of pro-
British and anti-German pamphlets to Italian prisoners of war in Greece began to
take place with the hope that the message would be communicated back home. In
addition, loudspeakers were set up in the prison camps, with members of the Apostles
broadcasting news bulletins from Athens, Cairo and London in Italian.44
Although the subversive propaganda activities concerned mainly the Balkans, the
SOE also undertook the anti-Italian propaganda aimed at Italians living in Egypt.
Because of the military operations, it was very difficult to ensure that anti-German
propaganda material sent by the MOI to Cairo arrived in time. This vacuum was
filled by SOE agents from Greece, Cairo and Malta: they undertook the production
and distribution of pamphlets stressing the friendship between the Italian and the
British peoples which had been destroyed by the Duce’s arrogance. When war broke
out between Greece and Italy, the British propaganda effort towards Italians in Egypt
changed; it now stressed the Germans’ exploitation of Italy, appealing at the same time
to the Italians’ democratic feelings and asking them to revolt against fascism.45
One of the most important struggles of SOE propaganda operatives in Greece was
against fifth columnists and the German whispering campaign targeted against the
British. Reports from Greece and several other sources that reached the War Office
underlined the danger of German covert propaganda stressing at the same time the
insufficiency of British propaganda to counteract the very strong German whispering
campaign. These reports put the British authorities on high alert. Orders were issued
which ‘urged strongly the need for vigorous pro-Ally and anti-German campaign by
every method possible. . . . Unless something is done immediately there is danger that
every growing fear of Germany may be seriously exploited to our disadvantage.’46
By the end of 1940, a certain ‘KRUGER’, described by Pirie as ‘chief of the German
Fifth Column’,47 had returned to Greece from Berlin as Secretary to the German Consul
in Salonika. Immediately, a large-scale German propaganda and whispering campaign
was launched in Macedonia. The German Consulate employed more than 200 people
and ‘invested’ large sums of money in the whispering campaign, which described as
false promises made to the Greeks by the British, and encouraged them, with German
intervention, to agree terms with the Italians.48 To emphasize the destructiveness of this
‘unnecessary war’, the whisperers often made mention of the disabled and wounded
soldiers who were arriving from the front.
The rumours disseminated by enemy-paid municipal employees and civil servants
spoke of Germany’s decision to extend bombing to all points where the British were
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located. One of the most effective and threatening rumours circulating in Salonika
and the northern towns was that of an imminent Bulgarian attack on Greece; this
brought back bitter memories of past Bulgarian aggression, which was supposedly
being restrained at the time by Hitler, ‘who loved Greece’.49 However, the whisperers
warned, ‘If the British continued to use Greece for the realization of their plans, then
the Germans would help the Bulgarians to get access to the Aegean.’50
In addition to German whispers, defeatist letters – penned by Kruger’s propaganda
office, forwarded by Greek agents and transported by lorry drivers, to avoid
censorship – circulated in northern towns.
All of this put Pirie’s agents on alert. The key role in handling the organization’s
covert propaganda in Macedonia was of his agent Menzies, who proved to be very
successful. Menzies’ first act was to increase the number of his operatives. Apart
from the full-time agents that he employed, there were 300–400 part-time employees
working for him for expenses only; this ensured that there were about 70–80 men at
work at any given time. Then he tracked down and exposed the enemy’s subversive
propaganda machine in Thrace and Macedonia. As he discovered, it was composed of
four branches.51
Military Branch:  The aim of this branch was to promote and underline the
supremacy and power of Germany with the help of printed material and statistics,
providing information on any military questions that the Greek people might have.
This branch was run by ex-military personnel with an ex-colonel, Georgios Poulos, as
its head.
Intelligence Branch:  This branch was very effective in conveying the enemy’s
propaganda as it employed influential professors, teachers and prominent members of
the municipalities. Merchants were especially vulnerable as very effective propaganda
was directed towards them, particularly in respect of their trade. They were encouraged
to consider such important issues as ‘Who buys your tobacco? Who imports your
expensive goods? We do, not the British.’52
Third Branch: Its propaganda was aimed especially at those who lived in villages
and small communities. Among their employees were school teachers, ex-officers and
policemen. They conveyed their propaganda skilfully by exploiting ‘all the unsettled
questions of each village, attacking the government, wealthy classes and finally
England’.53 Head of this branch was a very capable lawyer, a certain Lefakis.
Fourth Branch:  This branch was of great importance as it dealt with monitoring
the lives and actions of persons of special significance. Its agents were intellectuals,
members of the Greek police, teachers and labourers. Head of this branch was the
German Consul himself.
The structure of the German propaganda machine was attacked by Menzies in
the following way. After ascertaining the names of the members of these branches,
Menzies’ agents circulated true and false reports that incriminated the enemy
whisperers, accusing them at the same time of being in the pay of the Germans. These
allegations were aimed especially towards the lower class and the peasants, who were
the most vulnerable targets of the propaganda.
The SOE whisperers constantly toured all the northern towns where German
propaganda was thriving and stressed the fact that the British would never be defeated,
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The SOE and Covert Propaganda 157

often bringing up their heroic resistance during the Blitz, and likening it to the situation
in Greece. At the same time, they underlined British (moral and material) support for
Greece, strengthening their arguments with the circulation of the appropriate printed
material.
In the Athens area, Sinclair employed over thirty part-time agents to work for
expenses only. When the enemy whisperers were located, Sinclair put his own agents
on their tail and applied the following technique:

When one of those German agents starts putting out German propaganda in a
café, or another place, our agent accuses him of having an Italian wife. This simple
accusation seems always to discredit the German agent and several cases have
been reported in which these men have been set upon by their audience.54

In addition to all the above, the SOE financed, at the low cost of 5,000 drachmas per
month, a ‘certain amount of entertainment’ of Greek intellectuals, particularly from
the universities, who were doing ‘excellent work’ in circles often thought to be pro-
German.55 At the same time, Bowman used his influence over Maniadakis to press
for the withdrawal of allegedly pro-German elements from the government and other
administrative bodies.56
In Piraeus, German subversive propaganda attacked the British by exploiting the
bad behaviour of the British armed forces emphasizing through their whisperers the
arrogant and autocratic British attitude. These British forces, which included RAF
personnel who had arrived in Greece in November 1940 and sailors from naval vessels
that carried aid to assist Greece’s war effort, were often drunk and abusive towards the
local population.57
According to Pirie, his operatives attempted to combat this enemy ‘technique’ by
‘removing the handles the enemy used’.58 Working closely with the Consulate, both
in Athens and in Piraeus, these incidents  – ‘which undermined British prestige’  –
were dealt with straight away by representations to the British authorities and,
most importantly, by cash payments through the Consulates for damage caused to
premises by British servicemen. Such an incident concerned the killing of a Greek
citizen in a café brawl. The serviceman was duly convicted by the British authorities
of manslaughter. A heavy claim was put forward, and, following a personal request
by Maniadakis to Bowman, the RAF paid 50,000 drachmas in compensation to
the dependants of the deceased; a further 50,000 drachmas was made available to
Bowman ‘to enable British prestige to come slightly better out of a most unfortunate
incident’.59
In southern Greece, German whispering was not so apparent although there were
some Greek agents working for the Germans and known to be in their pay. Covert
propaganda work in this area was handled by two distinct organizations, one run by
Sinclair, who employed a number of whisperers, and the other by Routier. Routier had
a vast number of contacts to whom he passed on the whispers which were put out by
Pirie. As the organization often faced a shortage of agents – many of them had been
called up – steps were taken to replace them by part-time employees who worked for
a nominal fee.60
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An effective propaganda medium which was introduced by Pirie’s team at the

end of 1940 was the establishment of a pan-Balkan radio broadcasting service
from Greece,61 which would manipulate public opinion on the British side. ‘Special
attention’, according to Pirie, should be given to broadcasts aimed at the Yugoslavian
people who – because of the war in Albania – had ‘common frontiers with . . . the hated
Italians’; such broadcasts should emphasize all the time the Italians’ failure to win ‘and
the good example of the Greek officers and soldiers in defending their motherland’.62
After some difficulty, Pirie’s team managed to get permission from the Greek Minister
of Propaganda to use Athens Radio to broadcast to the Balkan countries in their own
languages. With the help of Greek journalists Haniotis and Selenos (the latter being
the Greek Chief Censor, brought into SOE pay at 4,000 drachmas per month), the
broadcasts were successfully put into operation; all the broadcasters were Pirie’s agents.
These Balkan broadcasts, which stressed the miserable conditions in the occupied
countries and the need to resist aggression, were very well received in neutral countries
like Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Turkey.63 Altmayer was put in charge of broadcasts in
German from Athens Radio. These broadcasts appealed to ‘the German world of
culture and science to understand the cause of Greece, cradle of Western (including
Nordic) civilisation’.64 However, strong German influence in the Greek Ministry of
Propaganda succeeded in getting Altmayer replaced by another German, a Herr von
Steiner. Pirie’s team managed to persuade the Greek authorities that he was a German
agent and he was therefore dismissed.65 All this time the German propaganda machine
was very active. On 2 March, the German Legation showed ‘to a hand-picked Greek
and diplomatic audience’ the film about ‘the conquest of France (Victory in the West)’
which had, according to Pirie, ‘a great effect’.66
At the end of March, as the German invasion was imminent, Pirie’s team received
instructions from the MOI to establish an independent radio service in Greece,
controlled entirely by the British, which would broadcast ‘the Voice of Britain speaking
from Greece to all countries in Southeastern Europe’.67 After much effort the first
broadcast in the ‘Yugoslav language [sic]’ took place on 7 April, by which time the
German invasion of Greece had already begun.68
A few days before the invasion, the Apostles started to prepare material which
would be left behind and distributed to the Greeks upon the evacuation of the British
Expeditionary Force. This material (mainly posters) stressed the following points: first,
that no trust could be placed in any offer by Hitler; second, that the interests of Hitler
and Mussolini were identical; third, that the Germans’ occupation would be sorely felt.
By 5 April, as Pirie’s team was preparing for evacuation, the anti-German posters
were ready. Pirie’s agents managed to place 120,000 in the centre of Athens, while
60,000 were sent to the countryside. According to Pirie, these posters, ‘which depicted
HITLER and MUSSOLINI as partners in butchery and crime’,69 were of high quality, with
images that ridiculed the enemy and underlined the brutality of the ‘partners’:

They had been designed by the two best political cartoonists in Greece in three
colours. The order was put with the ELKA-ASPIOTIS Works which printed the Greek
Bank notes. So good were they that the American Minister applied to the Greek
Ministry of Propaganda for some copies. The Minister repudiated all connection
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The SOE and Covert Propaganda 159

with them and referred them to the British Legation Publicity Department, who of
course equally repudiated them.70

When these posters were displayed, Theologos Nicoloudis  – the Minister of

Propaganda – protested strongly to Maniadakis and sent round his own men to paste
over these posters with others that had been prepared to advertise Easter activities and
religious services. The following night members of the Apostles covered Nicoloudis’s
posters with the remaining 80,000 posters. The minister now had no posters left
and sent his men out to scrape off the offending ones, ‘a lengthier and more tedious
process’.71 The Greek population thus had access to posters which ridiculed both
Mussolini and Hitler and whose captions warned the Greeks not to trust Hitler, and
that the German occupation would prove very hard to bear. A  few days later, after
the SOE and the British Expeditionary Force were evacuated, these warnings would
become a terrifying reality, lasting four years.

The SOE’s activities in Greece differed from those in other countries because of Greece’s
professed neutrality and Britain’s strategic need for the country to remain under
British influence, and because there was room for serious preparation for subversive
activity in advance of a German attack. The first attempt towards not only establishing
a resistance network but also preparing an effective propaganda machine that would
underline the Anglo-Greek alliance and undermine the Axis powers was made in May
1940 by Section D and MI(R), two of the most important constituent organizations of
the SOE. The activities of the SOE in Greece from the beginning of 1940 to November
1942, chronicled by Major Ian Pirie, were mostly known to the British Legation as well
as to Greek officials. Pirie’s work, described as a ‘first class history’,72 sheds light on the
role of the SOE in Greece and the effect these activities had on the local population
and the war effort. After the German occupation of Greece, SOE agents continued to
operate from Cairo and played an important role in organizing Greek resistance and
subversive activities.

Notes
1 The National Archives (TNA), HS 7/150–1, Major Ian Pirie, ‘SEO Activities in Greece
1940–1942’ (hereafter Pirie).
2 Richard Clogg, Anglo-Greek Attitudes: Studies in History (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 63.
3 The SOE was controlled by the Minister of Economic Warfare, the Minister of
Information and the Foreign Secretary. On the SOE, see M. R. D. Foot, SOE: An
Outline History of the Special Operations Executive, 1940–46 (London, 1999). On
MI6, see Keith Jeffrey, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949
(London, 2011).
4 Antony Beevor, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (London, 1991), p. 23.
5 Ibid. Many university dons and archaeologists with a knowledge of Greek had been
suitable candidates for recruitment to MI(R).
6 Quoted in ibid.
7 Clogg, Anglo-Greek Attitudes, p. 65.
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8 The SOE in Cairo covered the Balkans, as well as the Middle East: Syria, Egypt, Iraq,
Iran, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Libya and Malta.
9 The head of the Greek Section was John Stavridis. For a full account of the activities
of this section, see Marina Petraki, Bretaniki politiki kai propaganda sto ellinoitaliko
polemo [British Politics and Propaganda in the Greco-Italian War] (Athens, 2011).
10 Pirie, p. 1.
11 Named after the ‘Cambridge Apostles’, a secret association established in the
nineteenth century.
12 Pirie, p. 2.
13 According to Pirie, Saunders had ‘agents in every port and [was] a veritable fund of
information on shipping problems’, p. 2.
14 Ibid.
15 The Commission was set up in May 1917 to maintain the graves of all Commonwealth
soldiers who had lost their lives in the First World War.
16 An office was put aside for him in the building of the Athens and Piraeus Electricity
Company. Theodoros Sabatakakis, Taftotites praktoron kai kodika onomata [Identity
and Code Names of Secret Agents] (Athens, 2006), p. 111.
17 Clogg, Anglo-Greek Attitudes, p. 68. A ‘blue’ is someone who has represented Oxford
or Cambridge University in a match against the other university. Pirie was once
described as ‘not unlike a grown-up Cupid in well-cut clothes’: Beevor, Crete, p. 27.
18 Pirie, p. 15.
19 Beevor, Crete, p. 4.
20 Ibid.
21 TNA, FO 371/24922/R6544, ‘Shadow Missions – Greece and Yugoslavia’, July 1940.
22 They left England by flying boat from Poole Harbour on 4 June and reached Athens
after a difficult journey.
23 Beevor, Crete, pp. 4–5. See also all relevant telegrams exchanged between the
Foreign Office and Palairet, who categorically denied any involvement with these
activities: TNA, FO 371/24922/R6584, June 1940.
24 Pirie, p. 21 and Clogg, Anglo-Greek Attitudes, p. 69.
25 Pirie, p. 21.
26 Ibid., p. 30.
27 Ibid., p. 28; and Clogg, Anglo-Greek Attitudes, p. 70.
28 Pirie, p. 28.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., p. 27.
31 The ‘Fourth of August Regime’ pursued a policy of close relations with Britain,
resulting in British guarantees to Greece in April 1939 against growing Italian
aggression.
32 On Metaxas and his regime, see Marina Petrakis, The Metaxas Myth: Dictatorship and
Propaganda in Greece (London, 2005).
33 These rumours aimed at spreading widespread defeatism among the Greek population
and emphasising the need to come to terms with the Italians and renounce British
help: TNA, FO 371/24867/R351 and TNA, FO 371/24867/R1206, ‘Propaganda in
Greece’, November 1940 and February 1941.
34 Christmas cards as well as other postcards and specially designed leaflets were sent to
the front to encourage soldiers to keep fighting and keep their spirits high.
35 Pirie, p. 62.
36 Due to the shortage of time, only 100,000 of those were produced before Christmas
and sent to the front: Pirie, p. 62.
 161

The SOE and Covert Propaganda 161

37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., pp. 69, 78.
39 Ibid., p. 78.
40 Ibid., p. 66.
41 TNA, FO 371/24921/R8549, ‘Propaganda for Italy’, December 1940.
42 Pirie, p. 78.
43 Ibid., p. 79.
44 Ibid., p. 61.
45 David Garnett, The Secret History of PWE: The Political Warfare Executive 1939–1945
(London, 2002), p. 65.
46 TNA, FO 371/24925/R1631, ‘Propaganda in Greece’, February 1941.
47 Pirie, p. 67.
48 Before Greece entered the war, a considerable proportion of the expenditure of
German propaganda was borne by Greek tobacco merchants (Germany imported
most of Greece’s tobacco). After Italy’s attack, all expenditure was undertaken by the
German Consulate in Salonika.
49 Pirie, p. 68.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., pp. 67–78.
52 Ibid., p. 71. As noted above, Germany imported most of Greece’s luxury agricultural
products, especially tobacco. Despite Metaxas’ efforts to persuade the British to
import more tobacco so that Greece’s economy became less dependent on Germany,
this was not achieved. BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC War Files,
News Overseas, E920 (formerly OS148), 14 November 1940.
53 Pirie, p. 72.
54 Ibid., p. 73.
55 Ibid., p. 76.
56 After Metaxas’ death, the SOE and Palairet believed that this was an opportunity to
broaden the Greek government with more democratic elements, but the Greek king
refused.
57 Pirie, p. 73.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., p. 75.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., p. 61.
62 Ibid., p. 84.
63 Ibid., p. 63.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., p. 82. The film was Sieg im Westen (1941).
67 Pirie, p. 86.
68 Ibid., p. 85.
69 An article in The Times of 8 May 1940 referred to these posters and the effort of the
Minister of Propaganda to destroy them. Pirie, p. 89.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., pp. 89–90.
72 Comments by a Colonel Taylor of the Foreign Office dated 17 November 1945, in the
preface to Pirie’s ‘History’.
162

162
 163

The interplay between diplomacy and

propaganda: The Foreign Office and the
discovery of the Katyn massacre, 1943
Gaynor Johnson

With the exception of the Holocaust, the Katyn massacre is the most widely analysed
war crime committed in Europe during the Second World War. It has been the subject
of numerous books, journal articles, documentaries, even movies and novels. The
timeline is relatively straightforward. It is known that the Soviet Security Service, the
People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), was responsible for massacring
approximately 14,700 Polish officers and policemen taken from the three prisoner-
of-war camps in Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov during April and May 1940 (the
Soviet Union had invaded and occupied Poland in September–October 1939). Of
this number, it was the prisoners transported from the first of these camps, around
4,400 in number, whose remains were disposed of in the Katyn forest near Smolensk.
The whereabouts of the bodies of the remainder of the officers and policemen are
not known. The decision to murder a large number of senior members of the Polish
Army and policemen was taken on 5 March 1940 by the politburo of the All-Union
Communist Party (the Bolshevik party) by direct instruction of Stalin. However, news
about the massacre reached Western Europe only when, in the spring of 1943, the
remains of some of the Polish officers were discovered by German forces during their
continuing invasion of the Soviet Union. The find prompted calls for an international
commission of enquiry to be established under the auspices of the International Red
Cross (IRC) to identify the victims. Stalin’s response was to announce the immediate
suspension of Soviet diplomatic relations with Poland (after the fall of France in 1940,
the Polish government had been in exile in London). Considerable mileage out of the
discovery was made by Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry for Propaganda as proof of the
barbarity of the Slavonic Untermensch against which the Nazi regime was fighting,
as a means of diverting attention away from rumours about German atrocities in the
same region. The news of the find also had long-term implications for the relationship
between the British, Polish and Soviet governments for the remainder of the war and
in the years that followed.
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164 Propaganda and Conflict

One focus of existing studies has been the deafening silence of the British
government concerning well-substantiated information in its possession about Soviet
culpability. In many respects, this remains a current issue. The Foreign Office has
adopted a variety of tactics over the years, including placing the evidence in the public
domain, without formally commenting on its significance. It has been argued that this
tactic stems from an unwillingness not to confront a state that, since 1943, has moved
from being an uneasy ally to a Cold War adversary and then a semi-rogue state with
a complex and tense relationship with Western Europe. The long passage of time and
the thorny nature of the foreign policy of the Putin regime suggest that the matter will
not be raised by the British Foreign Office any time soon. This is much to the chagrin
of the vocal body of scholars and war memorialists who believe that the Polish people
have been ill served by the failure of both the British and US governments to bring the
Russians to book. An argument often made is that the British consciously sacrificed
Polish interests for the sake of cohesion of the alliance against the Axis powers. This
analysis will argue that, while there is some truth in this, it does not paint the whole
picture. Foreign policy formation does not operate in a world of black and white
certainties, especially during a long and complex war. British policy towards the Katyn
question was no exception to this. By examining the evidence from the Foreign Office
files and others relating to them that date from the spring of 1943, it is clear that some
officials favoured backing the Polish position against that of the Soviet. This was not
always a consistent line of argument, but it was, nonetheless, visible and important and
made by senior specialists in Soviet and Polish affairs.
The historical literature on the Katyn massacre has largely been the preserve of
Polish and Russian scholarship and has primarily focussed on issues of motive and
planning. A number of important gaps remain; for example, whether the Polish officers
were murdered where they were buried or killed elsewhere. However, the question of
Soviet responsibility, suspected since 1943 but lacking verification in Russian archive
evidence, became clear through documents released by the Gorbachev and Yeltsin
governments in the late 1980s and the 1990s.1 That said, the public record is not as
full as it could be. The opening of the archive revealed that many files relating to
prisoner-of-war testimony contemporaneous to the massacre were destroyed by the
Khrushchev regime in the 1950s. There are few English-language studies, although
the most important recent scholarly account is by the Anglo-Polish scholar George
Sanford.2 Written in English, his work demonstrates Soviet culpability. But his main
aim is to argue that Poland has been let down by the unwillingness of the international
community to hold the Russians accountable. Consequently, his analysis is tempered
with an emotive hue that assumes that the Western democracies cared little for the
plight of Poland both during the Second World War and after it.
This chapter attempts to move away from this quasi-subjectivity and to examine
what the British government knew in 1943 and how it processed this information.
What emerges is that the diplomatic options open to the British were far from
straightforward. In reality, British diplomatic reaction to the discovery of the massacre
operated on two levels; the first was the political, in the persons of the prime minister,
Winston Churchill, and the foreign secretary, Antony Eden. To them in 1943, the
coherence and survival of the wartime alliance, which included the Soviet Union,
 165

The Interplay between Diplomacy and Propaganda 165

was vital to the successful prosecution of the war. Consequently, all other diplomatic
considerations had to be subordinate to that, regardless of their nature. A  British
confrontation with the Russians over Katyn could have only negative consequences
for the war effort. Sanford and others view that argument as an indication of British
diplomatic spinelessness and as a betrayal of the Polish government-in-exile in
London. But what has hitherto been overlooked is a second strand, the reaction of the
officials within the Foreign Office, which offers a more complex and varied picture. In
the spring of 1943, the permanent officials within the Central Department, the Foreign
Office desk that dealt with Eastern European relations, adopted a variety of tactics to
try to make Stalin take a more lenient approach to Polish requests for information
about Soviet involvement in the massacre.
The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it will attempt to examine the massacre
against this international framework. Second, it will be used as a template the reaction
of the British Foreign Office to the discovery of the massacre in 1943 and the various
strategies it adopted to bury some of the information that came across its desks. As
such, it provides an interesting and important insight into how the British Foreign
Office viewed the use of propaganda as a tool both for its own use and for its use by
other agencies. The reaction of the democratic powers to Soviet responsibility for the
Katyn massacre poses a number of key questions, only two of which can be tackled
in this chapter. The first of these is, to what extent should wartime allies suppress
knowledge of their partners’ breaches of international laws on human rights and
genocide in times of war? Second, how much of this information should be kept from
the electorate in a democratic state? These are large questions, and their importance
is furthermore enhanced by their relevance to how we continue to judge the ethical
conduct of regimes around the world.
During the first eighteen months of the Second World War, the Foreign Office
expanded the number of its departments. This involved an alteration in the remit
of established units and the addition of extra ones whose brief specifically related to
the operation of the war, for example, the Prisoner of War Department. The initial
purpose of what had been named the Central European Department had been to
handle correspondence relating to Germany and Austria, although some aspects
of the enforcement of First World War peace settlements were dealt with by other
departments. By 1943, the department’s remit had long since expanded to include
Poland, the Low Countries, League of Nations affairs and, less logically, Spain and
Portugal. Its superintendent was William Strang, although the running of day-to-day
business fell to the acting head, Frank Roberts. Their four permanent subordinates were
Geoffrey Harrison, Denis Allen, Patrick Hancock and Michael Williams, their number
mirroring the size of the department when it was created in 1919. Then League affairs
had been the province of the Western Department with the Southern Department
managing Britain’s Iberian diplomacy. The increase in workload brought about a need
to specialize; it is notable that only the views of Roberts and occasionally Harrison
appear in the records with any degree of regularity. The majority of the documents
were shared, inevitably, with the Northern Department, which was responsible for
Soviet affairs. The high profile of the views of Christopher Warner and Orme Sargent,
the Northern Department’s head and superintendent, respectively, in the Foreign
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166 Propaganda and Conflict

Office documentation illustrates not only that the diplomatic fallout from the Katyn
massacre was seen as belonging equally within the province of both departments but
also that such a joint arrangement of responsibility and discussion was bureaucratically
possible.
At the heart of the Foreign Office’s response was the thinking of Frank Roberts.
Born in 1907, and educated at Rugby School and at Trinity College Cambridge,
Roberts entered the Foreign Office in 1930. By 1943, he had risen to the rank of first
secretary and was later to become a noted specialist on Eastern European diplomacy,
his career culminating in a stint as British ambassador to Moscow, between 1960
and 1962. However, in 1943, he was a much more accomplished commentator on
Britain’s relations with the Arabic-speaking Middle East than on European diplomacy.
This appears to have encouraged in him an open-mindedness that might not have
been so apparent if he had had more experience of Central and Eastern European
diplomacy. He was less persuaded by the Great Power diplomatic arguments that
dominated the thinking of Churchill and Eden. To him, it was incumbent on Britain
to adopt a moderate approach in dealings with the members of the grand wartime
alliance; the same was also true of relations with the Polish government now in exile
in London. Poland ‘look[ed] to us for a sensible middle course and it seems important
that we should not discourage them from looking to us by running too obviously
after the Russians and Americans and possibly eventually falling between all possible
stools’.3 He thought that the smaller powers had yet to be convinced that the British
government would adopt this role, but that it was vital that such assurances should be
forthcoming. Roberts’s view was not without its critics. Gladwyn Jebb, a senior figure
in the Department of Economic Warfare, believed that Polish fears that the interests
of the small powers would be subsumed by Great Power politics were exaggerated. He
urged the Foreign Office not to be ‘moved by such clamour’.4 Reflecting on the likely
composition of the post-war Security Council of the United Nations, Jebb cautioned
against offering small countries permanent seats because of their concerns about
diplomatic marginalization.5 Those responsible for making peace after the Second
World War should learn the lesson of the interwar period, during which many of the
smaller powers proved to be poor allies to Britain and France.6 Thus, Roberts and Jebb
formed the two opposing camps within the Foreign Office on how to handle relations
with Poland over discovery of the massacre.
The views of Roberts, Jebb and their colleagues, however, need to be understood
against the wider context of Anglo-Soviet-Polish relations, specifically the kinds of
psychological techniques each country used to convince the others of its diplomatic
and political position. The two principal methods – commenting on propaganda and
appeals for humanitarian aid  – had strong emotive dimensions and were therefore
susceptible to the personal dynamics of individual politicians, diplomats and officials.
Neither of these factors appealed to the British government’s preferred method of
a slow, dispassionate consideration of the impact of a course of action on Britain’s
strategic interests and priorities. Nor was the Foreign Office comfortable with or
experienced in dealing with the full force of the Soviet propaganda machine, whose
prime rationale was to wage ideological war. Yet it was through the medium of
propaganda that the British government was forced to view Russian relations with the
 167

The Interplay between Diplomacy and Propaganda 167

Poles in the spring of 1943. The British embassy in Moscow sent weekly syntheses of the
Soviet press to the Foreign Office, offering enthusiastic and lengthy comment on their
credibility. In March 1943, a counsellor at the embassy, the splendidly named Lacy
Baggallay, despatched two stories from the Moscow News that caused consternation
in London because they implied that the Russians were encouraging Poles to rebel
against the Germans so that they could ‘find immediate relief for the eastern front’.7
More important was the long-held Soviet belief that the Polish government-in-exile
was exercising ‘malign influences’ in Whitehall and thus delaying the opening of a
second European front. Central to this conspiracy theory was the leader of the Free
Poland government-in-exile, General Sikorski. Baggallay was convinced that most
of these rumours were unfounded but nonetheless recommended that the Polish
embassy in London be checked for leaks. Soviet sources believed that the presence
of the Polish government in the British capital compromised its independence and
‘greatly complicated’ Soviet relations with Britain and the United States.8 Baggallay
advised that the Russians were unlikely to allow Sikorski to return to Poland after
the war because he would not ‘suit the Soviet government’; that instead a series of
provisional local councils would be set up to govern the country. It was ‘easy to
imagine’ how these would be ‘transformed into a Soviet-controlled government’,
although he doubted whether Stalin had planned that far ahead.9 This paints a more
nuanced picture than Sanford’s claim that, by this juncture, Stalin had ‘imposed his
control over the Poles’ and was searching for a ‘pretext’ for breaking off diplomatic
relations with Poland.10
The principal issue that concerned Foreign Office’s relations with the Polish
government-in-exile in the spring of 1943 was the provision of relief for a quarter
of a million displaced people in Poland. These requests were made not via Roberts’s
department but to Eden in a series of meetings with his Polish opposite number, Count
Edward Raczyński. They knew each other well; Raczyński had been ambassador to
London, from 1932 to 1939. The Pole painted a picture of a country on the brink
of economic and political collapse, stating that Polish relief organizations had been
broken up by the Russians. He appealed to the British government to intervene but
urged that too much credence should not be attached to press reports concerning
disputes between the Polish and Soviet governments.11 Raczyński wanted the British
and US governments to put pressure on the Russians to allow humanitarian agencies to
administer aid to a further 200,000 Poles living in the Soviet Union.12 Eden undertook
to examine these proposals ‘urgently and sympathetically’ but held out little hope of
the Soviets agreeing to allow such organizations to operate in territory they controlled.
His cautious mood increased when Raczyński asked whether the Allies would agree
to accommodate 50,000 Polish refugees who were fleeing the Russian advance. Eden
anticipated that such a step would likely ‘raise very considerable difficulties’.13 In
pushing for ‘an early decision’ on these issues, Raczyński then raised the question of
Soviet propaganda regarding Polish affairs. He asked Eden to do what he could to rein
in the publication of Soviet War News, compiled by the Soviet embassy in London,
because it was consistently hostile to Polish issues. Similarly, the British press should
be encouraged to be more ‘sympathetic to the plight of Poland’.14 Eden stated that
he had already taken up the matter with the Russian ambassador to London, Ivan
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168 Propaganda and Conflict

Mikhailovich Maisky, and was confident that the matter could be resolved, although
the ‘difficulties in the press had by no means been all on one side’.15
Roberts thought that it would be difficult for the Russians to attack Sikorski’s
government openly but warned that it would be ‘hard to avoid serious trouble if
the present tension in Polish-Soviet relations continues’.16 He also predicted that
the discovery of the remains in the Katyn forest would ‘bring matters to a head one
way or the other’. At the same time, the Russians were ‘deceiving themselves’ if they
believed that the people of Poland would tolerate being governed by a regime imposed
on them from Moscow.17 Roberts’s colleague, Roderick Dew, agreed, noting that ‘the
Russians might be tempted to set up a rival Polish government if the [existing] Polish
government were to break off diplomatic relations . . . but not I think short of that’. At
present, he believed that the Russians were too overstretched by the war to take pre-
emptive action against the Poles.18
This was the situation when, on 13 April 1943, Radio Berlin announced that the
local population had indicated to the German occupying authorities the location of a
Soviet execution site in the Katyn forest, west of Smolensk. The corpses were stacked
in twelve layers in a large pit 28 metre long and 16 metre wide. The men, still wearing
their military uniform, had been executed by a single shot to the back of the head.
Initial reports suggested that all of the missing 10,000 or so Polish officers had been
murdered there, a figure enhanced, either through error or by design by the Germans,
to between 11,000 and 12,000. But closer examination demonstrated that the figure
was much smaller. Roberts felt that the Poles had missed a major opportunity to score
political points over the Russians by allowing the Germans to break the news of the
discovery. As he later told Eden, ‘The Polish case has tended to go by default owing to
the circumstances in which the Katyn question first became public knowledge.’19
So, what did the Foreign Office know about the status of Polish prisoners of war
in the Soviet Union at the time of the discovery of the remains in the Katyn forest?
Summary documents prepared for meetings between Churchill and Sikorski reveal
that the Foreign Office had fairly full information at its disposal as early as April 1940.
Then, the Soviet newspaper Pravda had published a report that there were 189,000
Polish prisoners of war in Russia. Of these, the officers were mostly held in camps in
Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov. In early spring 1940, they had been moved to an
unknown destination. After the Russo-Polish Agreement of 30 July 1941, the Russians
had released significant numbers of junior ranks but very few officers. The Polish
military authorities subsequently claimed that the whereabouts of between 7,000 and
9,000 were unknown; the matter was then raised by the Polish embassy in Russia with
the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. In December 1941, Sikorski had handed Stalin a
list of names of 4,664 missing officers. However, his only response was that all Polish
officers had been released, but their whereabouts were unknown.20
This remained the state of Foreign Office intelligence until the news of the discovery
of the remains in the Katyn forest was first made known through a press summary
made by a Mr Lancaster on 12 April 1943.21 Roberts was initially struck by rumours
that the Poles were planning to hold a state funeral in Warsaw; his first act, however,
was to prepare a brief on the discovery for Eden, who was due to meet the Allied foreign
ministers on 15 April, at which meeting the matter would inevitably be raised. Roberts
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The Interplay between Diplomacy and Propaganda 169

also arranged to receive an advance copy of a statement on the story that was being
prepared by the Polish Minister of Information for despatch to Eden. It is interesting
that informing the British ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, of the
news was not foremost in Roberts’s mind; Clark Kerr just needed to be given ‘briefly
the facts’.22 That said, Roberts believed that it was now ‘more than ever essential for the
Russians to make some gesture to the Poles’ and that the British government should do
everything possible to facilitate this.23 Consequently, he made the extraordinary request
that the Polish press be asked not to publish any inflammatory articles relating to the
discovery of the remains. However, the best that the Foreign Office’s News Department
was able to secure was a twenty-four-hour delay on the release of the story.24 Mr
Balinski, a counsellor at the Polish embassy in London, suggested a compromise which
Roberts thought ‘very reasonable’.25 This involved Polish newspapers being asked to
avoid anti-Soviet bias when breaking the Katyn story and to use an anti-German
spin. If, as it was rumoured, the Germans had actually known the whereabouts of the
remains for more than two years, why had they chosen the present time to make the
information public? Equally, Roberts’s conversation with Balinski made it clear that
knowledge of the massacre was actually widely known within the Polish community
in London. Therefore, any prolongation in the release of the story would probably be
interpreted negatively by the Poles. Although still uneasy, Roberts felt reassured that
the situation was under control and that ‘we should now let matters take their course’.26
What Roberts and the Foreign Office underestimated was the vehemence with
which the Polish government-in-exile would reject Russian claims that the Germans
were responsible for the massacre.27 On 15 April 1943, the Polish Cabinet decided to
set out its version of the facts based on its own intelligence sources with the Soviet
Union.28 This coincided with a short article in the newspaper Dziennik Polski that
claimed that the discovery was ‘another lie put out by German propaganda in order
to spoil Polish-Soviet relations’.29 On the same day, Clifford Norton, the British consul
in Berne, informed the Central Department of rumours that the IRC had received a
request from the Poles to investigate the discovery of the Katyn remains.30 Roberts’s
view here is not consistent. On 20 April, he minuted that the Polish press statement
was ‘precipitate and somewhat ill-considered’ and that little could be gained by
counselling against making recourse to the IRC.31 The following day, his attitude had
mellowed:

Since the Germans are speaking to the world, we cannot expect the Russians and
the Poles to keep quiet . . . I am not sure that a policy of complete censorship, which
would leave only the Germans free to speak to the world, might not do more harm
than good.32

The Polish decision to involve the IRC does not appear to have formed a major
talking point between Churchill and Polish political and diplomatic representatives in
London. Concurrent with Roberts’s reflections on the most recent strategies adopted
by the Poles, Sikorski handed Churchill a paper detailing current intelligence about
the massacre and pressed for British support in bringing the perpetrators to justice.33
Meanwhile, the news from Geneva was not good; the IRC declined the Polish request
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170 Propaganda and Conflict

for an investigation ‘in conformity with general policy of declining all unilateral
requests of this kind’.34
In the light of this news, the Central Department underwent a strategic shift in
its thinking to deflect attention away from what it saw as precipitate Polish action.
Once again, there is a curious ambiguity in Foreign Office policy that makes it unclear
where official British loyalties actually lay. This change of approach had within it a
number of dangers, the greatest of which was that it risked directly antagonizing the
Russians. Nevertheless, in a lengthy memorandum, Roberts concluded, ‘The only
way to combat the German story about the discovery of bodies of Polish Officers and
intelligentsia is for the Soviet authorities to produce the live bodies.’35 Significantly,
this was a train of thought that he was also prepared to share with the US government,
forming as it did guidance to Viscount Halifax, the British ambassador to Washington,
on 16 April.36 Yet this willingness to confront the Russians was markedly absent from
a round-robin telegram the Central Department sent to all major British embassies
and legations the following day. This outlined two points of instruction. First, to ‘avoid
commenting but if pressed [to] point out . . . the matter is . . . one between the Polish
and Russian governments exclusively’. In outlining the second point, the focus shifted
towards German motives for spreading the Katyn story, not to Russian responsibility.
Diplomats needed to be aware that the Germans had begun to spread the Katyn story
‘as part of Goebbels’ whitewashing campaign’ to deflect international attention away
from the Germans’ own atrocities in Eastern Europe; as ‘a last resort’ attempt ‘to split
the United Nations’ because the Germans knew that hopes of a victory were futile; and
finally, to detract attention from Germany’s military reverses.37
The ability of the Foreign Office to steer between two controversial positions was
made more difficult when reports that the US president, Franklin Roosevelt, and Eden
had reached an agreement to restore the Polish–Soviet border after the war appeared
in the Egyptian press, much to the dismay of the Polish government.38 Initially, the leak
was thought to have come from the United Press’ London censor. Roberts’s reaction
was characteristically phlegmatic: ‘The harm has been done, those responsible seem
suitably repentant.’39 His colleague, in the Foreign Office, Mr Harrison, however, was
angrier: ‘Everything conspires to make the prospect of our being able to do any good
with the Russians more remote. I  should have thought someone at the Censorship
should be sacked for this.’40 Roberts’s more measured reaction stemmed from his
knowledge that the leak had actually come from the US embassy in London. It would
have been counter to his strategy of persuading the US government to take a more
favourable view of the Polish plight to have revealed the real source of the leak. As an
extension of this thinking, he was also keen to ensure that the Foreign Office did not
associate the Polish government with the disclosure.41
At the same time, Roberts continued his strategy of limiting the fallout from
the Polish press statement about the massacre:  a pronouncement that resulted in a
‘sweeping denial’ of the ‘German lie’ from the Soviets.42 On 16 April, Roberts claimed
that Foreign Office analysts of the Polish statement now viewed the Polish broadcast
as ‘bad propaganda’. The British government should do all that it could to prevent the
broadcast of further similar statements by the Poles. However, the Foreign Office News
Department doubted that such a strategy would work.43 A compromise solution was
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The Interplay between Diplomacy and Propaganda 171

proposed by the Political Warfare Executive, that the statement be broadcast only on
Polish radio stations.44 Roberts noted with satisfaction that this solution was accepted
‘very willingly’. It is significant that the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office,
Sir Alexander Cadogan, advised ‘against our saying anything to the Russians’. Roberts
made it clear that Cadogan had taken this decision purely to enable the continuation
of the negotiations concerning the plight of Poles still in the Soviet Union. ‘I could
not conceal . . . that the line taken in the communiqué and particularly the appeal to
the IRC might seriously embarrass us in approaching the Russians.’ Roberts advised
the Poles against making further public statements, a request that met with a mixed
response.45 Stalin’s reaction, in contrast, was ‘predictable, rapid and ruthless’.46 To him
the Poles and the Germans were in league to discredit the Soviet Union.47 On 19 April,
Pravda attacked what it termed ‘Hitler’s Polish collaborators’.48
The same day, Roberts drafted a telegram to Clark Kerr warning him of a likely Soviet
backlash. It was important to realize that German claims regarding the identity of the
perpetrators of the massacre were simply part of a new propaganda line ‘that Germany
is defending European interests and civilisation from external, and particularly from
Russian, dangers’.49 The telegram went on to update Clark Kerr on the events of the
preceding four days. The fact that Roberts adopted this approach suggests that the use
of traditional British diplomatic channels in Moscow was not at the forefront of his
strategic thinking. Otherwise expressed, if the preservation of good British relations
with the Russians had been Roberts’s priority, he would have communicated with
Clark Kerr more frequently during this period of tortuous relations with the Poles.
But Clark Kerr had other channels of communication open to him. A close confidant
of Eden, the ambassador told the foreign secretary that Russian protestations of
innocence were so frequent and so vehement as to convey the opposite view:50 that
Katyn was ‘disturbing for it is uncomfortable to reflect upon the consequences of an
enquiry which might show that guilt was there’.51 Clark Kerr was to be criticized by a
later generation of Foreign Office commentators for not playing a more active role in
conveying British disquiet to the Soviets.52 The evidence appears to suggest, however,
that, rather than being passive, Clark Kerr’s understanding of the British government’s
dilemma was well articulated.53 Others at the Foreign Office, such as Roberts, were
content to use Clark Kerr to keep their options open in negotiating with the Soviets.54
On 19 April, the British War Cabinet met to discuss the Polish-Russian question.
Eden believed that the Poles should be encouraged to take a broad view, not to allow an
emotional response to the massacre to stand in the way of the longer-term objective of
securing the evacuation of the remaining Polish troops and their families from Russia.55
However, Roberts thought that the Poles were unlikely to view the situation in those
terms: ‘The trouble is that the Poles are not sufficiently hopeful of any improvement
inside Russia to prevent them saying something about their officers.’56 That said, the
news from Moscow was heartening. Clark Kerr reported Soviet and Polish intelligence
that suggested that ‘the Poles would go to almost any lengths in order to avoid an open
clash . . . [and] it is not at this that [the] Russians are aiming’.57 He recommended that
any further suggestion about making recourse to the IRC should be firmly resisted by
the British government, ‘for it is uncomfortable to reflect upon the consequences of an
enquiry which might show that guilt was there’.58 An international investigation of this
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172 Propaganda and Conflict

nature might ‘court something little short of a disaster’.59 Clark Kerr also advocated
a measured British approach in dealing with the Soviets and the Poles, advice which
Harrison thought dangerous: ‘The danger of waiting is that one side or the other may
in the meantime take some irreparable step.’60 However, Roberts appreciated that the
adoption of a more unhurried approach would give Churchill the opportunity to
make the intervention to Stalin that he had recently promised on behalf of Sikorski.61
Churchill had also wanted to know the views of Roosevelt before speaking to Stalin.62
Roberts was concerned that this extra step would cause a dangerous delay.63 Mr Warner,
his colleague in the Central Department, however, had other concerns. By inviting
the IRC to investigate the contents of the Katyn graves, the Poles would unwittingly
be giving credence to the German propaganda. In other words, the credibility of the
German propaganda would have been more effectively undermined if the Poles had
remained silent. If relations with the Soviet Union were to be improved, the Poles must
be prepared not to comment if accused of being part of an anti-Soviet conspiracy with
the Germans. In future, ‘we must extract an undertaking from Gen[eral] Sikorski
. . . to be guided by our advice’.64 William Strang, the Superintendent of the Central
Department, had some sympathy for this line of argument but believed that the Foreign
Office’s focus should be not so much on reining in the Poles but on making sure that
Churchill’s wishes about greater consultation with the Americans came to pass. But
once again, the focus within the Foreign Office was how difficult the Poles had made
British relations with the Soviets. There is something more than condescending about
Strang’s comment: ‘I see no harm in telling the Polish government that the episode of
the murdered officers, and their reaction to it, and the Russian counter-reaction, make
our proposed approach to the Russians infinitely more difficult.’65
Roderick Dew saw other dangers. Referring to an editorial in Pravda on 19 April,
Dew stated that he believed that the Soviets were using the discovery of the remains
‘to distinguish between the Polish government and the Polish people’ and that Stalin
‘cherish[ed] hopes of the establishment of a new Polish government close to the Soviet
form’.66 Dew’s pessimism also stemmed from press reports received from Baggallay in
mid-April 1943 that implied that the current poor relations between the Soviet Union
and Poland stemmed from a ‘pre-arranged agreement between the German invaders
and the pro-Hitlerite elements in Sikorski’s ministerial circles’.67 The same report
criticized the Poles for appealing to the IRC to investigate ‘what never occurred, or
rather what was committed by the Berlin masters of foul deeds and then cunningly
put at the door of the Soviet organisations’. The Polish government was ‘inexcusably
entrapped in the net of the Goebbelses and provocateurs’; consequently, the Polish
appeal to the IRC amounted to ‘direct and open support of the Hitlerite provocateurs
in the fabrication of their foul invention’.68
Securing the support of the US government did not prove difficult, much to
Roberts’s relief as he busied himself with preparing instructions for Halifax.69 His work
was, however, partly comprised by the publication of a note by Stalin claiming that the
Soviet Union was the aggrieved party in all of the accusations that were flying between
his government, the Poles and the Germans.70 On 21 April, he announced the severing
of diplomatic relations with Poland because of the ‘vile fascist calumny against the
USSR’.71 Churchill was willing to support Stalin in opposing further IRC involvement
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The Interplay between Diplomacy and Propaganda 173

in the investigation of the Katyn massacre.72 On 25 April, Clark Kerr explained Stalin’s
intervention in terms of a desire to apply pressure on Churchill and Roosevelt to
reach agreement on the position of the Polish frontier with the Soviet Union after the
war.73 The ambassador recommended that the Foreign Office give serious thought to
accommodating Stalin on this matter in return for buying time to reconcile the current
difficulties between Poland and the Soviet Union, to ‘dispose of this matter once and
for all’.74 Orme Sargent, the Superintendent of the Northern Department, which dealt
with, inter alia, Anglo-Soviet relations, agreed with Clark Kerr’s analysis but felt that a
stumbling block was Stalin’s decision to sever diplomatic relations with Poland.75 Stalin
would probably agree to reinstate relations with Poland only if the frontier question
were resolved to his satisfaction and if the British and US governments provided an
undertaking to abide by it when the war was over.76 In a rare minute intervention, Eden
noted his agreement with Sargent’s analysis: ‘Yes; this is possible, even probable.’77
But all of this was to no avail, and on 25 April 1943 the Russian Minister for Foreign
Affairs, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, issued the formal statement breaking off
Soviet diplomatic relations with Poland. Cadogan believed that the British government
should give serious consideration to Stalin’s likely terms for reinstating relations.
He told Eden, ‘We should not get Soviet-Polish agreement during the war save by a
settlement of this problematic [border] problem.’78 After all, ‘it might be a good thing to
get from the Russians an admission that they would be satisfied with something’. It was
‘still a long way . . . before they are actually overrunning that region, and perhaps more
besides’. But he thought that Roosevelt was unlikely to agree.79 The background to this
discussion was a long memorandum by Sargent on when and how post-war territorial
agreements should be discussed between the British, US and Soviet governments.
In a conversation between Roosevelt and Eden on 16 March 1943, the president had
suggested that, through a post-war border settlement, Poland should acquire East
Prussia and some parts of Silesia. Sargent’s observation was part of a much longer
analysis of the consequences for the British government of making ad hoc concessions
to the Soviets to smooth wartime relations concerning issues relating to the post-war
peace-making process. The Foreign Office should reflect on three questions:

How would we reconcile an attempt to settle one of the frontier questions created
by the war with the principle which we have laid down and which I think the US
government have endorsed, that we are not willing to discuss frontier questions
during the war and that they must be reserved for the general peace settlement?
If we are ready in this instance to make an exception, is the present moment
opportune for starting negotiations with the Soviet government? And lastly, if we
do negotiate how far are we prepared to go and what are we prepared to concede?80

In answering these questions, Sargent believed that it was important to remember that
neither Britain nor the United States had territorial claims in Europe, while the Soviets
had ‘made it abundantly clear that they intend as a result of this war to advance their
European frontiers westwards’. An ability to reach an agreement with Stalin about
his likely post-war territorial objectives at the present time ‘should go a long way to
reassure the Poles’. If such an agreement was not forthcoming, the pressure placed
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174 Propaganda and Conflict

on Russo-Polish relations ‘may well hamper the general war effort at a moment when
united action in Europe may be of the utmost importance’. In the climate immediately
before the discovery of the Katyn remains, there had been, in Sargent’s view, every
reason to ‘assume that Stalin [was] ready to negotiate with HMG in this subject’,81
although post hoc there was little reason to believe that it would place a major barrier
to long-term diplomatic negotiations between the Russian and US governments.
In Moscow, on 26 April 1943, Clark Kerr had a meeting with Molotov, who refused
to delay the public announcement of the rift between the Russians and the Poles.82
Clark Kerr used ‘every argument’ to persuade Molotov to delay publication ‘in order
to give HMG time to seek a solution and so to avert a disaster’. But Molotov remained
implacable, arguing that ‘no self-respecting government could act otherwise than the
Soviet government were doing’. Clark Kerr reported that Eden and Churchill had been
‘greatly surprised and distressed’ by the news and that ‘only Hitler would be pleased’
by it.83 The ambassador then offered his own analysis of the Russian government’s
strategy. Stalin ‘did not understand how seriously HMG took this matter’, but that
severing of diplomatic relations with Poland was ‘part of a preconceived plan’ towards
the creation of ‘a Polish government in Russia with which they [the Soviets] would
establish diplomatic relations’. Clark Kerr recommended that Churchill and Roosevelt
send a sternly worded personal message expressing their dismay at Stalin’s actions.84
Roberts was happy to approve Clark Kerr’s ‘language to Molotov’.85
The above analysis gives a flavour of the mindset of the British Foreign Office at
the time of the discovery of the Katyn massacre and the immediate diplomatic fallout
from it. This chapter has highlighted the role played by the Central Department in
analysing the evidence surrounding the discovery. However, there is one further strand
that needs to be explored that demonstrates that ambiguity of the Foreign Office’s
position. It is not Roberts whose name is most associated with the official Foreign
Office response to the Katyn massacre. That accolade fell to Owen O’Malley, who
produced two influential reports on the evidence, in May 1943 and in February 1944. It
is perhaps tempting to assume that Roberts was not selected to write the Katyn reports
because he felt too strongly about the matter. That is to forget that O’Malley was hardly
an objective commentator. While he was undoubtedly a ‘Foreign Office man’, he was
also British ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile and an expert on Eastern
European affairs, having also been attached to the British embassy in Moscow in the
1920s and in charge of the British Legation in Budapest until the outbreak of war in
1939. Thus, the Foreign Office deliberately put itself in a position where the adoption
of an anti-Soviet stance was impossible to avoid, even if that was only to be conveyed
implicitly.
O’Malley’s first memorandum was produced less than a month after the discovery
of the remains.86 Historians place a great deal of emphasis on it; for example, Sanford
has described it as ‘the single most important document in the Katyn controversy’.87
It was released into the public domain only in 1972, under the terms of the British
Thirty-Year Rule. O’Malley made it clear that he was convinced of Soviet guilt, a
conviction of which he was still more persuaded by the time of the publication of his
second report, in February 1944. Soviet evasiveness in responding to Polish questions
about the whereabouts of the missing officers pointed, in his view, to evidence of guilt.
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The Interplay between Diplomacy and Propaganda 175

O’Malley devoted thirteen paragraphs to analysing the evidence and concluded that
the remains discovered in April 1943 were indeed those of some of the missing Polish
officers. This evidence included a forensic discussion of clothing found on the corpses
and the fact that none of the families of those missing had heard from their relatives
since the spring of 1940. Denis Allen described O’Malley’s analysis as ‘brilliant’,
‘unorthodox’ and ‘disquieting’.88 Roberts was less willing to gush, describing O’Malley’s
conclusions as ‘very odd and disingenuous’.89 O’Malley recommended that the British
government should revisit its assessment of the morality of Soviet diplomacy but not
in a way that would lead to a change in British policy; that a moral shift should take
place, not a diplomatic one.90 Roberts wondered where this left the future of Anglo-
Soviet relations, given the Allied governments’ intention to prosecute war crimes after
the war.91 Because of the many bones of contention he thought the report threw up,
he recommended that only the narrative sections be circulated to the War Cabinet.
However, he was overruled by Strang, who oversaw the circulation of the whole report
to the King and to the War Cabinet. The effect of the debate on O’Malley’s findings in
May 1943 resulted in what Cadogan later described as a Foreign Office ‘presumption
of Soviet guilt’.92
This belief that the Soviets were responsible for the Katyn massacre has remained
the unspoken consensus of opinion in the British government. In February 1944,
O’Malley produced a second lengthy analysis of the evidence, which was widely
circulated within the Foreign Office.93 This was largely in response to the Germans’
decision to invite an international panel of pathologists and criminologists to examine
the evidence, the results of which were released to the Polish government.
The announcement by the Soviets of the creation of a commission to evaluate
the Katyn evidence provided part of the context to O’Malley’s second report. The
Burdenko Commission consisted of eight officials aided by five medics. The Foreign
Office produced a document evaluating the evidence presented to the commission in
a memorandum on 17 February 1944. It was written by Professor B.  H. Sumner, a
distinguished scholar of Russian history and culture.94 It concluded that the Russian
investigation added nothing new to what was already known, especially on the failure
of the Soviets to produce evidence that the Polish officers were alive. Significantly,
however, Sumner was partly persuaded by the Burdenko Commission’s conclusion that
the Katyn massacre had been perpetrated by the Germans; that there was insufficient
evidence of German innocence. His conclusions caused a furore within the Foreign
Office. Cadogan and Allen thought that both the Burdenko investigation and Sumner’s
assessment of it were robust and sound. Roberts’s view was characteristically more
nuanced. He was concerned that ‘this useful paper fastens on the weaknesses in the
German case, which indeed have always been apparent, but it does not to my mind
dispose of the weaknesses in the Russian case’. Oliver Harvey, an official at the Foreign
Office, thought Sumner’s paper provided a useful balance to O’Malley’s open hostility
to the Russians. Yet it was Sir William Malkin, the Foreign Office’s legal adviser, who
made sure that his colleagues did not allow the Sumner report to bring about a shift in
overall British position.
O’Malley devoted much attention to comparing the methodologies of the German
and Soviet panels of experts. However, despite the wealth of new evidence at his
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176 Propaganda and Conflict

disposal, he decided that ‘no definite conclusion’ could be drawn from it. That said,
he continued to believe that the Soviets were probably responsible for the massacre
primarily because of their unwillingness to share the findings of the Burdenko
Commission outside the portals of the Kremlin.95 He found a number of important
discrepancies between the German and Soviet forensic evidence and consequently
dismissed ‘as more or less unreliable the verbal accounts of supposed witnesses and
the findings of the scientific commissions on both sides’.96 He was particularly struck
by the Burdenko Commission claim that, far from being dead, the Polish officers in
question were all working in the Smolensk region, although, strangely, ‘not a single
one . . . was ever seen or heard of alive again’.97 ‘The defective nature’ of the Burdenko
Report made O’Malley’s ‘doubts even stronger than before’.98
The official political and diplomatic reaction of the Foreign Office to O’Malley’s
two reports was one of studied neutrality. Both Churchill and Eden were keen to keep
the Katyn question off the agenda in their dealings with the Soviets. As the Western
Allies prepared to open the long awaited second front in northern France, both men
were anxious not to antagonize Stalin, who believed that the start of this offensive
was long overdue. Churchill took a practical view; to him, the evidence was genuinely
inconclusive. The Katyn massacre was ‘not one of those matters where absolute
certainty is either urgent or indispensable’.99 Eden was more convinced of Soviet
culpability but nevertheless believed that in the face of such conflicting evidence ‘we
shall probably never know’.100 Churchill did not raise the matter with Stalin at their
subsequent meeting at Yalta, primarily because he feared the consequences both for
the wartime alliance and for Soviet relations with Poland. ‘This is the only line of safety
for the Poles and indeed for us . . . there is no use prowling morbidly round the three
year old graves of Smolensk.’101 This desire to bury the issue was at the heart of his
reactions to O’Malley’s two reports, especially the second, circulation of which he
was keen to restrict only to the Foreign Office and to himself. As the prime minister
prepared to meet Stalin at Tehran in December 1943 to agree, inter alia, the post-
war position of the Polish frontier, it was important that O’Malley should be allowed
to express his views only ‘very secretly’.102 He made it clear that O’Malley’s findings
would never form the basis of British criticism of the Soviets:  ‘All this is merely to
ascertain the facts, because we should none of us ever speak a word about it.’103 Eden
was less comfortable with this course of action. While he believed O’Malley’s second
report to be ‘prejudiced’, it was also ‘pretty explosive’.104 It therefore deserved a wider
audience than Churchill was prepared to countenance, a view, not surprisingly, shared
by O’Malley himself.105
When the British government was confronted with how to prosecute war crimes at
Nuremberg in 1946, the O’Malley reports produced a lively debate within the Foreign
Office. There were those, such as Denis Allen, who took the view that ‘the Russians have
produced prima facie evidence in support of their case’.106 While Patrick Dean, a future
ambassador to Washington, recommended that the Nuremberg lawyers should do all
that they could to avoid raising the Katyn question in any of their official discussions
with the Germans, Dean’s colleague, Thomas Brimelow, indicated a reason why the
Foreign Office thought the matter best avoided:
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The Interplay between Diplomacy and Propaganda 177

The Soviet investigations inculpate the Germans without entirely exculpating the
Soviet authorities . . . we cannot do more than say that there is a prima facie case
against the Germans. We may feel that there is also a prima facie case against the
Russians, but we cannot say so.107

This line continued in March 1948 when, as part of the Nuremburg trials investigations,
the Polish government handed the Foreign Office copies of documents relating to
missing prisoners of war.108 Robin Hankey, attached to the British embassy in Warsaw,
was disconcerted when the gesture resurrected Soviet interest in the Katyn question. He
advised, ‘The whole thing stinks. But we can’t butt in.’109 The situation was made worse
because, as the trials continued, the patterns of evidence appeared to make Russian
responsibility for the massacre less clear. As Hankey told Raczyński, the British lawyers
had ‘been impressed by the weight of evidence produced by the Russians to show that
it had in fact been done by the Germans and that the Russians had very much the best
part of the argument’.110 This development in the Foreign Office’s view of the evidence
remains an anomalous part of the picture that emerges from the archives.111
Space does not permit a full discussion of how the Foreign Office treated the Katyn
question after the Second World War, although it is an interesting and revealing story.
It was the US government, not the British, that took the first post-war initiative to keep
the matter alive in the minds of the international community. In 1951, the US House
of Representatives voted to create a select committee to conduct a reappraisal of all the
evidence.112 Conducting its investigation at the height of the Korean War, the Foreign
Office had little confidence in the committee’s ability to deliver an objective report.113
Thus, when the interim report pointed to NKVD responsibility for the massacre, the
Northern Department was encouraged by the British embassy in Washington to view
it as having ‘an obvious political [that is anti-Soviet] bias’.114 Five years later, the Katyn
question re-emerged on to the Foreign Office agenda briefly, when an official visit to
London from the Russian president, Nikolai Khrushchev, produced an instruction to
all officials not to raise the matter with the Soviet delegation.115 In the two decades that
followed, at the height of Cold War politics, there was little appetite within the Foreign
Office to help the Soviets conceal their war crimes. But rather than taking the form
of open criticism of the Soviets, the Foreign Office expressed this shift through direct
sympathy for the Polish position. This was largely the purpose behind the memorandum
produced by the Foreign Office’s historical advisor, Rohan D’Olier Butler, in 1972,
which reviewed all of the evidence in the light of the Thirty-Year Rule release of the
Foreign Office General Correspondence files.116 This assessment, although not without
its critics, has formed the mainstay of subsequent British government reviews of the
Katyn evidence until the 1990s, when the fall of the Soviet regime briefly yielded new
opportunities for scholars to examine official archives from the communist period.
The principal aim of this chapter has been to revisit the response of the British
Foreign Office to the discovery, in 1943, of the remains of the Katyn massacre some
three years earlier. The picture is complex, with the majority of officials favouring
suppressing the growing body of evidence of Soviet guilt. This has been explained
and was seen at the time as necessary to the successful prosecution of the war and
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178 Propaganda and Conflict

the maintenance of the alliance between Britain, the United States and the Soviet
Union. However, this chapter has also presented evidence to suggest that some key
figures, such as Frank Roberts, whose views have not been examined in detail before,
were sympathetic to offering open support for Polish claims that the Russians were
guilty of a war crime. This analysis has also provided a useful case study of the way
in which a British government department handled foreign propaganda during the
Second World War. Furthermore, the Katyn example demonstrates the willingness
of the Foreign Office to pursue a unique diplomatic strategy, that of non-recognition.
But the advisability of adopting such a strategy must be questioned and can be
seen as somewhat self-defeating. The failure of the British government to make a
statement about how it viewed the events of 1940 and then 1943 has kept the Katyn
issue in the historical spotlight rather than the opposite. The Foreign Office (now the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO) has not been shy about publishing and
commenting on the key documentation in its collection but has done so only from a
strictly narrative-based, historical perspective: stating the facts rather than analysing
their significance. It seems that it is for historians to make up their own minds about
the value of this information. This is rightly the case, of course, but it still allows
the FCO to cling to its own strategy of deafening silence. The evidence surrounding
the Katyn massacre has now been extensively picked over and one wonders what
further there is to say except about the wider diplomatic and political fallout from
the attitudes of the international community to it: how, for example, did the Foreign
Office’s – and then the FCO’s – studied unwillingness to discuss the massacre openly
after 1946 impact on Britain’s relations with Poland during the Cold War era and
beyond?

Notes
1 George Sanford, Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940 (London, 2005), pp. 1–2.
2 Ibid. Other useful English-language sources include P. M. H. Bell, John Bull and the
Bear (London, 1990), pp. 109–27, and Gabriel Gorodetsky, The Maisky Diaries: Red
Ambassador to the Court of St James’s (New Haven, CT, 2015), pp. 505–10.
3 The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), FO 371/34568/C4263/258/55, Minute by
Roberts, 13 May 1943, on Minute by Roberts, 14 April 1943. Cf. Bell, John Bull, p. 116.
4 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4263/258/55, Minute by Jebb, 10 May 1943, on Minute by
Roberts, 14 April 1943.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4130/258/55, Baggallay to Foreign Office, 13 March 1943.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Sanford, Katyn, p. 127.
11 TNA, FO 371/C4020/258/G55, Eden to O’Malley, 9 April 1943.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
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The Interplay between Diplomacy and Propaganda 179

15 Ibid. See also TNA, FO 371/34568/C4048/258/55, Baggallay to Foreign Office, 30

March 1943.
16 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4130/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 17 April 1943, on Baggallay
to Foreign Office, 13 March 1943.
17 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4130/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 24 April 1943, on Baggallay
to Foreign Office, 13 March 1943.
18 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4130/258/55, Minute by Dew, 18 April 1943, on Baggallay to
Foreign Office, 13 March 1943.
19 TNA, PREM 3/353, Minute by Roberts, 7 June 1943 on O’Malley to Eden, 24
May 1943.
20 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4230/358/55, Annex, 15 April 1943, on Note to Churchill by
General Sikorski, 15 April 1943. See also TNA, FO 371/34568/C4230/358/55, Foreign
Office to Clark Kerr (British ambassador in Moscow), 20 April 1943.
21 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4478/258/55, Foreign Office Minute by Lancaster, 13
April 1943.
22 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4478/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 15 April 1943, on Foreign
Office Minute by Lancaster, 13 April 1943.
23 Ibid.
24 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4478/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 14 April 1943.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Sikorski Institute, London, Documents on Polish-Soviet Relations (hereafter DPSR),
1, no. 307, Soviet Information Bureau communique.
28 DPSR, no. 307, Minister of National Defence Communiqué. TNA, FO 371/34568/
C4278/258/55, Communicated to the British government in Minute by Polish
ambassador, 15 April 1943.
29 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4331/258/55, Minute by Polish ambassador, 15 April 1943,
ibid. The text was communicated in O’Malley to the Foreign Office, 17 April 1943.
30 TNA, FO 37134569/C4364/258/18, Norton to the Foreign Office, 15 April 1943.
Norton’s views carried weight because he had spent much of the late 1930s attached
to the British Legation in Warsaw and was thus viewed as an expert on Polish affairs,
although here his involvement stemmed from the fact that the IRC was headquartered
in Switzerland.
31 TNA, FO 37134569/C4364/258/18, Minute by Roberts, 20 April 1943, on Norton to
the Foreign Office, 15 April 1943.
32 TNA, FO 371/34570/C4664/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 21 April 1943, on Minute by
Ridsdale, 21 April 1943. Cf. Sanford, Katyn, p. 129.
33 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4230/358/55, Note to Churchill by General Sikorski, 15
April 1943.
34 TNA, FO 371/C4316/258/55, Norton to the Foreign Office, 18 April 1943.
35 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4234/258/55, Foreign Office Minute, 16 April 1943.
36 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4234/258/55, Foreign Office to Halifax, 16 April 1943. The
following day, the Foreign Office gave Halifax the impression that there was also
doubt about the scale of the atrocity. ‘It is probable that the Germans have discovered
bodies of individual Poles, some of them identifiable.’ TNA, FO 371/34569/
C4479/258/55, Foreign Office to Halifax, 17 April 1943, in Minute by Roberts, 16
April 1943.
37 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4234/258/55, Circular Foreign Office telegram, 17 April 1943.
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180 Propaganda and Conflict

38 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4244/258/55, British Minister in Cairo to Foreign Office, 17

April 1943.
39 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4244/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 19 April 1943, on British
Minister in Cairo to Foreign Office, 17 April 1943.
40 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4244/258/55, Minute by Harrison, 17 April 1943, on British
minister in Cairo to Foreign Office, 17 April 1943.
41 Minute by Roberts, ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4479/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 16 April 1943.
44 Some authors blame the Daily Telegraph for breaking the news of the Polish request
to the Red Cross on 16 April 1943 ahead of the planned Polish timetable for releasing
the news. Alexandra Kwiatkowska-Viatteau, 1940–1943, Katyn: L’armée polonaise
assassinée (Brussels, 1982), pp. 22–3.
45 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4479/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 17 April 1943 on Minute by
Roberts, 16 April 1943.
46 Sanford, Katyn, p. 129.
47 Inter alia, DPSR, no. 309, Raczyński to Bogomolov, 20 April 1943.
48 Sanford, Katyn, p. 129.
49 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4230/358/55, Foreign Office to Clark Kerr, 19 April 1943.
50 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4396/258/55, Clark Kerr to Eden, 21 April 1943.
51 Ibid.
52 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, History Notes, Katyn: British Reactions to
the Katyn Massacre, 1943–2003 (London, 2003), p. 9. My thanks to Professor Erik
Goldstein for sending me a copy.
53 See also TNA, FO 371/34568/4057/258/55, Extract from War Cabinet Conclusions 52
(43), 12 April 1943.
54 TNA, FO 371/34568/4057/258/55, Minute by Harrison, 13 April 1943, on Extract
from War Cabinet Conclusions 52 (43), 12 April 1943.
55 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4454/258/55, Extract from War Cabinet Minutes, 19
April 1943.
56 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4454/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 22 April 1943 on extract from
War Cabinet Minutes, 19 April 1943.
57 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4396/258/55, Clark Kerr to the Foreign Office, 21 April 1943.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4396/258/55, Minute by to Harrison, 21 April 1943, on Clark
Kerr to the Foreign Office, 21 April 1943.
61 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4396/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 21 April 1943, on Clark Kerr
to the Foreign Office, 21 April 1943.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4396/258/55, Minute by Warner, 22 April 1943, on Clark Kerr
to the Foreign Office, 21 April 1943.
65 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4396/258/55, Minute by Strang, 22 April 1943, on Clark Kerr
to the Foreign Office, 21 April 1943.
66 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4130/258/55, Minute by Dew, 21 April 1943, on Baggallay to
Foreign Office, 13 March 1943.
67 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4130/258/55, Soviet Monitor: Radio Bulletins from the USSR, 20
April 1943, on Baggallay to Foreign Office, 13 March 1943.
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The Interplay between Diplomacy and Propaganda 181

68 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4130/258/55, Soviet Monitor: Radio Bulletins from the USSR,

Pravda editorial, 19 April 1943, on Baggallay to Foreign Office, 13 March 1943.
69 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4550/258/55, Halifax to Foreign Office, 21 April 1943; Minute
by Roberts, 24 April 1943, on same.
70 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4550/258/55, Minute by Sargent, 24 April 1943, on Halifax to
Foreign Office, 21 April 1943.
71 TNA, FO 371/34569/C484569258/55, Stalin to Churchill, 21 April 1943.
72 DPSR, no. 312, Churchill to Stalin, 24 April 1943.
73 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4644/258/55, Clark Kerr to Foreign Office, 25 April 1943.
74 Ibid.
75 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4644/258/55, Minute by Sargent, 27 April 1943, on Clark Kerr
to Foreign Office, 25 April 1943.
76 Ibid.
77 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4644/258/55, Minute by Eden, 27 April 1943, on Clark Kerr to
Foreign Office, 25 April 1943.
78 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4133/258/55, Minute by Cadogan to Eden, 20 April 1943, on
Foreign Office Minute by Sargent, 15 April 1943.
79 Ibid.
80 TNA, FO 371/34568/C4133/258/55, Minute by Sargent, 15 April 1943.
81 Ibid.
82 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4646/258/55, Clark Kerr to Foreign Office, 26 April 1943.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
85 TNA, FO 371/34569/C4648/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 27 April 1943, on Clark Kerr
to Foreign Office, 26 April 1943.
86 TNA, PREM 3/353/C6160/258/55, O’Malley to Eden, 24 May 1943.
87 Sanford, Katyn, p. 170.
88 TNA, PREM 3/353/C6160/258/55, Minute by Allen, 25 May 1943, on O’Malley to
Eden, 24 May 1943.
89 TNA, PREM 3/353/C6160/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 25 May 1943, on O’Malley to
Eden, 24 May 1943.
90 TNA, PREM 3/353/C6160/258/55, O’Malley to Eden, 24 May 1943.
91 TNA, PREM 3/353/C6160/258/55, Minute by Roberts, 25 May 1943, on O’Malley to
Eden, 24 May 1943.
92 See ‘The Katyn Massacre and Reactions in the Foreign Office: Memorandum by the
Historical Adviser’, printed for internal circulation in the Departmental Series of the
Eastern European and Soviet Department as DS 2/73, dated 10 April 1973 (‘Butler
Memorandum’), p. 12. The Butler Memorandum is available at http://webarchive.
nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110413142005/http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/about-us/our-
history/historical-publications/research-projects/katyn/the-butler-memorandum/;
last access 16 August 2018.
93 TNA, FO 371/39390/C2099/8/55, O’Malley to Eden, 11 February 1944.
94 TNA, FO 371/39393/C2957G/8/55, 4 March 1944. This is reproduced as Annex B of
the Butler Memorandum, pp. 1–8.
95 See also Sanford, Katyn, p. 145.
96 TNA, FO 371/39390/C2099/8/55, O’Malley to Eden, 11 February 1944.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 TNA, PREM 3/353. M1777.4, Churchill to Eden, 25 February 1944.
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182 Propaganda and Conflict

100 TNA, PREM 3/353 PM/44/100, Eden to Churchill, 26 February 1944.

101 TNA, FO 371/34571/C4798/258/G55, Churchill minute of 28 April 1943 to Eden.
102 Churchill had inquired of Eden on 15 July 1943 whether the first O’Malley report
had been sent to Roosevelt. Eden replied the following day that he was against
sending it officially through the Washington embassy – ‘if it were to find its way
into unauthorised hands, the reactions on our relationship with Russia would
be serious’: Record of Churchill–Roosevelt–Stalin conversation, Soviet embassy,
Tehran, 1 December 1943, Foreign Office, Historical Papers, no. 48, ‘Churchill and
Stalin: Documents from the British Archives 1943’.
103 Ibid.
104 TNA, FO 371/34580, Eden, 16 July 1943.
105 TNA, FO 371/47734/N16482/664/55, O’Malley to Cadogan, 13 April 1944.
106 TNA, FO 371/2309/N16482/664/55, Memorandum by Allen, 25 October 1945.
107 Annotation to ibid.
108 TNA, FO 371/71610/N2599/108/55.
109 TNA, FO 371/564/N4406G/108/55, Annotation of 10 April 1946.
110 TNA, FO 371/71610/C2599/2599/55, Hankey to Raczyński, 5 March 1948.
111 K. Duke (Eastern European Research Department) later recalled that what the
British legal team had thought of the Soviet evidence at Nuremberg was now ‘rather
different’. TNA, FCO 28/1946, Bullard to Brimelow, paper on Butler Memorandum,
16 October 1972.
112 The Katyn Forest Massacre: Interim Report of the Select Committee to Conduct an
Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest
Massacre Pursuant of H. Res. 390 and H. Res. 539, House of Representatives report
no. 2430, 82nd Congress, 2nd session, Washington DC, US Government Printing
Office, 2 July 1952, p. 3.
113 Louis FitzGibbon, Unpitied and Unknown: Katyn – Bologoye – Dergachi (London,
1975), pp. 206–393; TNA, PRO371/86679, Minute by Maddocks, 20 May 1950.
114 TNA, FCO 28/100719/1662/17/52, Littlejohn-Cook to Northern Department, 30
July 1952.
115 TNA, FO 371/122671/NP1661/3, Minute by Haigh, 23 April 1956.
116 Butler Memorandum.
 183

Part Three

Postwar and Cold War

184

184
 185

Introduction
Mark Connelly, Jo Fox, Stefan Goebel and Ulf Schmidt

We are living in a society which is profoundly wrong, Tony Judt, the author of
Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005), has poignantly pointed out, with its
relentless consumerism and material interests.1 Ideas and ideologies do not seem to
matter any longer. In our world today, people no longer ask whether a thing is good, fair
or just; or whether it improves the lives of the many, not the few; or whether it is true
or untrue. Our relativist, post-modern, post-Cold War world has not only left behind
ideologies and theories but also has become ‘post-ethical’, Judt argues. Compared to
the Cold War, a term first popularized by the journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1947
book Cold War, ideas and ideologies may no longer arouse the same level of passion
among large swathes of an internet-addicted populace interested in ‘infotainment’ by
means of (anti)social media.2 Yet, in the 1950s and 1960s, widely held beliefs in the
superiority of the capitalist or communist models of society constituted the raison
d’être for why entire nations threatened each other with Mutually Assured Destruction
(MAD). The spectre of total nuclear annihilation within a matter of minutes led not
only to a ‘battle of nerves’, and a concomitant acceleration in civil defence spending and
military preparedness, but also to the exploitation of the ‘communications revolution’ –
especially of radio, film, TV and the emerging ‘new media’ – for propaganda purposes.
Responding to the lessons learned from the Second World War, all major powers
invested heavily in propaganda infrastructure to sell their way of life domestically and
discredit the enemy at home and abroad.
Much of the field’s early literature focussed on American and Soviet diplomacy
and propaganda, including Donald Dunham’s Kremlin Target:  USA  – Conquest by
Propaganda (1961) or Frederick Barghoorn’s book on Soviet Foreign Propaganda
(1964), in which he argued that the Soviet Union had attempted, but failed, to ‘sap
the faith of Americans in their leaders and their institutions’.3 In 1968, in response
to complaints about an assumed ‘propaganda gap’ which apparently existed alongside
a ‘missile gap’, Thomas Sorenson, the former deputy director of the US Information
Agency (USIA), published The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda, detailing
the work of the agency from its inception in 1953 until the Cuban Missile Crisis in
1962.4 The Cold War and its perceived threat of total destruction not only provided
Western and communist governments with a strategic and moral justification for the
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186 Propaganda and Conflict

development of weapons of mass destruction but it also created, above all, a climate
of fear and paranoia in which governments attempted to win over hearts and minds.
As early as 1950, President Harry S. Truman had described the ideological contest as a
‘struggle above all else, for the minds of men’.5 Studies such as John Clews’ Communist
Propaganda Techniques (1964) and Luca Scott’s Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against
the Soviet Union, 1945–56 (1999) reflected this sentiment by analysing the different
techniques and media forms employed since the end of war.6 Nicholas Cull’s work on
US public diplomacy (2014) and on US ‘counter-propaganda’ in this volume shows the
extent to which scholars continue to explore the subject from this perspective.7
During the Korean War (1950–3), propaganda came to play an instrumental role in
the ideological struggle between the United States, the Soviet Union and communist
China for domination of the Korean peninsula. This was an international war by proxy,
as William Stueck’s The Korean War:  An International History (1995) makes plain.8
North Korean and Chinese allegations about ‘germ warfare’ and other ‘atrocities’ were
met by the US ‘Campaign of Truth’ and the revival of the Voice of America (VOA)
which broadcast to over a hundred countries in dozens of languages. The Soviet Union
responded by broadcasting thousands of hours a week on enhanced short-wave radio
programmes. Significantly, the US military used the ‘germ warfare controversy’  –
which happened against a backdrop of greater state surveillance of scientists and civil
servants suspected of communist sympathies, particularly in the United States and
Canada – as a pretext to increase preparations for nonconventional warfare, arguing
that the Western Allies needed to develop an extended weapons programme so that
they could retaliate if necessary.
Given the political climate at the time, it is hardly surprising that experts engaged
in studying the methods and means employed in propaganda campaigns. At one end
of the spectrum, journalistic, sociological and anthropological studies explored the
relationship between individuals and the modern state to gain a better understanding
of how best to manage and manipulate public opinion through the use of mass media.
The idea of propaganda as the ‘magic bullet’ and a ‘hypodermic needle’ for the control
of public opinion was increasingly challenged by accounts which stressed the limited
effects of propaganda, building on the work of authors such as Walter Lippmann,
author of The Phantom Public (1925), who saw propaganda more as a ‘mechanism
for engineering public opinion and consent’.9 Highlighting the complex interactions
between opinion leaders and people in ‘need for propaganda’, and by departing from
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s idea of ‘manufacturing consent’, the French
sociologist Jacques Ellul argued convincingly in Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s
Attitudes (1965) that propaganda is ‘most effective when it reinforces previously held
opinions and beliefs’.10
Whereas most commentators agreed that propaganda ‘confirms rather than
converts’, experts in the behavioural and psy-sciences (psychology, psychoanalysis,
psychiatry, etc.) developed rather crude, albeit long-lasting, models about the nature
of man by alleging the communist ‘brainwashing’ of American POWs. Coined by the
journalist Edward Hunter in 1950, and then used in his book Brainwashing in Red
China (1951), the term initially referred to the idea that the communist bloc possessed
some sort of technique to ‘erase and repattern human thought processes’.11 It not only
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Postwar and Cold War 187

found traction in popular culture and feature films such as The Manchurian Candidate
(1962), and was later appropriated within the post-1989 discourse about consumerism,
but it also accelerated civilian and military studies in the behavioural sciences.12 In
addition, Western governments funded and utilized the writings of dissidents such as
the Czechoslovak émigré Edward Táborský, who applied the concept in his pamphlet
Conformity under Communism: A Study of Indoctrination Techniques (1958) to warn
against the ‘engineering of consent’ in communist Europe.13 As the Cold War heated up,
and unpersuaded by the negative findings of social science studies about the conceptual
utility of ‘brainwashing’, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in close collaboration
with the US military intelligence community, established a far-reaching experimental
programme to test mind-altering drugs on non-consenting participants.14
Post-war debates about communist ‘brainwashing’, irrespective of their limited
currency within the academic community, gave additional impetus to theories of
totalitarianism, as advocated by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism
(1951) to describe both Nazism and Stalinism as totalitarian movements.15 In response,
political scientists and authors such as Robert J. Lifton, known for his work on ‘thought
reform’ in communist China (1961), examined the psychological causes and effects
of modern conflicts.16 His book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology
of Genocide (1986) paved the way for greater engagement with the history of Nazi
medicine, which included the study of film as vehicles of propaganda and persuasion,
and with the psychology of Nazi perpetrators, for example in Christopher Browning’s
Ordinary Men (1992).17 At the same time, scholarly interest in understanding the
nature of the Nazi regime was reflected in the Historikerstreit (‘historians’ dispute’) in
the years 1986–9 and saw intellectuals from both ends of the political spectrum clash
over different interpretative models, most notably in the debate over ‘intentionalism’
versus ‘structuralism’. The concept of ‘Working towards the Führer’, first developed
in Ian Kershaw’s book on Hitler: 1889–1936. Hubris (1998) to find a middle ground
between the opposing positions, also enriched the field of propaganda studies.18 The
release of new source collections such as Goebbels’s diaries (Die Tagebücher von Joseph
Goebbels), edited by Elke Fröhlich in the years 1987–96, enabled experts to highlight
the central role of Nazi propaganda and mass media within the mainstream debate
about the Third Reich.19 It is within this broader context that David Welch’s seminal
study on The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (1993) established essential ground
work for propaganda studies, resulting in a new body of work which moved beyond
the realm of politics, for example by examining the role and image of women in the
entertainment and film industry, as in Jo Fox’s study on Filming Women in the Third
Reich (2000).20
During the Cold War, cultural propaganda, frequently referred to as cultural
or public diplomacy, took centre stage in promoting ideas and values across the
ideological divide. Cultural propaganda was seen as an effective tool to complement
psychological warfare, for example through the dissemination of cultural products
such as films, TV and radio programmes, music, theatre and language teaching, as
well as through the proliferation and distribution of a certain type of memorial and
heritage culture that was reflected in museum exhibitions, artefacts and public events.
Whereas Britain engaged in a concerted post-war ‘re-education programme’ to ‘sell
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188 Propaganda and Conflict

democracy’ to the German people, as Philip Taylor has argued in British Propaganda
in the Twentieth Century (1999), the United States broadcast American jazz and rock
music across the ‘Iron Curtain’, or what some see more as the ‘Nylon Curtain’, to sway
public opinion towards the American ‘way of life’, discussed in Walter Hixson’s Parting
the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (1997).21 Studies such
as Reinhold Wagnleitner’s Coca-Colonization and the Cold War (1994), on the other
hand, looked at the extent to which cultural products and brands such as Coca-Cola,
Levi’s and McDonald’s served broader cultural propaganda aims to ‘homogenize
the world into a global village dominated by American values’.22 Within the field of
propaganda studies, cultural activities and their products are all nowadays subjected
to critical analysis, from comic strips, fast cars, design and architecture to photography
and video recordings.
More recently, international trade fairs and exhibitions have been examined not
just from the perspective of Cold War competitors showing off material progress and
technological innovation, as in the case of the notorious ‘Kitchen Debate’ between
the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the US Vice President Richard Nixon at the
American National Exhibition in Moscow (ANEM) in 1959, but also in an attempt to
assess audience responses and their impact on popular opinion. In staging the Cold
War Modern: Design 1945–1970 (2008) exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
David Crowley and Jane Pavitt explored architecture, film, literature, computer, art,
design and technology as vehicles of Cold War cultural propaganda.23 Significantly,
their work’s concluding chapter, ‘Cold War Landscapes’, discusses the extent to which
American counterculture and the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s
employed posters, film, architecture and ‘design vehicles’ for raising environmental
awareness, as in the case of the celebration of ‘Earth Day’ in 1970 or ‘Drop City’ in
Colorado.24 Susan Reid, in ‘Our Kitchen is Just as Good’ (2008), looked at Soviet
responses to ‘representations of modern American domesticity’.25 Documenting and
assessing the landscapes on which the Cold War ‘propaganda war’ took place is also the
focus of Dara McGrath’ prize-winning Project Cleansweep (2019).26
The chapters in this section look at the issues raised through the use of
interdisciplinary methodological and historiographical perspectives, encompassing
the role of photography, film, education, diplomacy and print media as vehicles of
propaganda and persuasion. In their chapter about a US wartime medical experiment
as propaganda, Katja Schmidt-Mai and Jonathan Moreno combine their historical
analysis with a detailed art historical description of photographs of a LIFE Magazine
article which was submitted as exonerating evidence in the Nuremberg Doctors’
Trial of 1946–7. Julie Anderson, meanwhile, takes the British documentary film The
Undefeated (1950),27 which informed viewers about the support available for disabled
ex-servicemen, as her starting point to examine the relationship between the emerging
post-war welfare state, information agencies and the general public. Having examined
the effectiveness of the British Council’s cultural propaganda campaign during the
Second World War in his book A Battle for Neutral Europe (2012),28 Edward Corse
looks in more detail at the extent to which the conceptual distinction between the
terms ‘cultural propaganda’ and ‘propaganda’, and the use of the former, helped the
British Council to promote British life and culture in Poland during the early Cold
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Postwar and Cold War 189

War period. James Farley’s chapter, on the other hand, explores the representation
of the communist ‘model worker’ in Chinese propaganda films, and how his or her
depiction in the style of socialist realism compared to Soviet propaganda promoting
the ‘New Soviet Man’. While drawing attention to certain similarities, Farley also
highlights distinct differences in ‘revolutionary experience’ which shaped the approach
to, and content of, Chinese film propaganda. In his study of US public diplomacy
during the Cold War, Nicholas J. Cull argues that all propaganda attempts to portray
itself at some point as ‘counter-propaganda’ – much in the same way that increased
military preparedness is described as a ‘defensive’ response to the threat of an external
aggressor – and explores the evolution and nature of US counter-propaganda. Peter
Johnston examines different print media used during the Cold War to recruit members
to the British armed forces as a way of conceptualizing the blurred boundaries between
propaganda and advertising. Finally, reflecting on the making of the documentary
series Love, Hate and Propaganda, Fabrice d’Almeida provides us with a witness
account of his collaboration with David Welch:  the two were senior consultants for
the Canadian TV series broadcast in both the English and French languages. His
chapter offers insights into debates about the role of academia and public history in
historiology and thus serves as a conceptual bridge to the epilogue.

Notes
1 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2005).
2 Walter Lippmann, Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy since 1945 (London, 1947);
for an excellent synthesis of how propaganda was disseminated during the Cold War,
see Daniel Leab, ‘Cold War (1945–1989)’, in Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert and David
Welch (eds), Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the
Present (Santa Barbara, CA, 2003), pp. 92–4; and David Welch, Propaganda: Power
and Persuasion (London, 2013), pp. 104–12.
3 Donald Dunham, Kremlin Target: USA – Conquest by Propaganda (New York, 1961);
Frederick Barghoorn, Soviet Foreign Propaganda (Princeton, NJ, 1964).
4 Thomas Sorenson, The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda (New York,
1968).
5 David Welch, ‘Opening Pandora’s Box: Propaganda, Power and Persuasion’, in David
Welch (ed.), Propaganda, Power and Persuasion: From World War I to Wikileaks
(London, 2014), p. 9.
6 John C. Clews, Communist Propaganda Techniques (London, 1964); Luca Scott,
Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945–56 (Manchester, 1999).
7 Nicholas J. Cull, ‘The Tragedy of American Public Diplomacy, 1989–1999: The Last
Decade of the United States Information Agency Reconsidered’, in David Welch
(ed.), Propaganda, Power and Persuasion, pp. 113–26; see also his essay, ‘Counter-
Propaganda: Cases from US Public Diplomacy and beyond’, in this volume.
8 William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ, 1995).
9 Welch, ‘Opening Pandora’s Box’, p. 9; Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public
(New York, 1925).
10 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, transl. Konrad Kellen
and Jean Lerner (New York, 1965); Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky,
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190 Propaganda and Conflict

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, 1988);

Welch, ‘Opening Pandora’s Box’, p. 3.
11 Edward Hunter, Brainwashing in Red China (New York, 1951); Edward Hunter,
Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It (New York, 1956); Susan Carruthers,
‘Brainwashing’, in Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert and David Welch (eds), Propaganda
and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encylopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara,
CA, 2003), p. 47.
12 The Manchurian Candidate, dir. John Frankenheimer (USA, 1962).
13 Edward Táborský, Conformity under Communism: A Study of Indoctrination
Techniques (Washington, DC, 1958).
14 Ulf Schmidt, Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments
(Oxford, 2015).
15 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951).
16 Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of
‘Brainwashing’ in China (London, 1961).
17 Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
(London, 1986); Ulf Schmidt, Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia in Nazi
Germany: The History of Medical Research and Teaching Films of the Reich Office
for Educational Films/Reich Institute for Films in Science and Education, 1933–1945
(Husum, 2002); Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the
Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992).
18 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London, 1998).
19 Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, part
I: Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, vols 1–4 (Munich, 1987); part II: Diktate 1941–1945,
vols 1–15 (Munich, 1993–6).
20 David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda [1993] (2nd edn, London,
2002); Jo Fox, Filming Women in the Third Reich (Oxford and New York, 2000).
21 Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: Selling Democracy
(Edinburgh, 1999); Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the
Cold War, 1945–1961 (Basingstoke, 1997).
22 Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission
of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, transl. Diana M. Wolf
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1994); David Welch, ‘Cultural Propaganda’, in Nicholas J. Cull,
David Culbert and David Welch (eds), Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical
Encylopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara, CA, 2003), p. 101.
23 David Crowley and Jane Pavitt (eds), Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970 (London,
2008).
24 David Crowley, ‘Looking Down on Spaceship Earth: Cold War Landscapes’, in ibid.,
pp. 249–67.
25 Susan Reid, ‘Our Kitchen Is Just as Good: Soviet Responses to the American National
Exhibition in Moscow, 1959’, in ibid., pp. 154–62.
26 Dara McGrath, Project Cleansweep: Beyond the Post-Military Landscape of the United
Kingdom (Berlin, 2019).
2 7 The Undefeated, dir. Paul Dickson (UK, 1950).
28 Edward Corse, A Battle for Neutral Europe: British Cultural Propaganda during the
Second World War (London and New York, 2013).
 191

A wartime medical experiment as

propaganda: The malaria case
Katja Schmidt-Mai and Jonathan D. Moreno

A medical experiment involving the deliberate exposure of vulnerable people to a

dangerous parasite sounds like a recipe for the kinds of horrific practices associated
with Nazi concentration camps. It would be natural to suppose that the subjects of
these experiments must have either been physically coerced or threatened in a manner
that made refusal to participate even more unappealing than the experiment itself.
Moreover, such an experiment would surely be one that authorities would prefer to
have suppressed, or at least not to have widely publicized, if only so as not to stimulate
lingering public sympathy for the experiment’s victims, an outcast population of
convicts.
Yet these intuitions turn out to be both anachronistic, reflecting a twenty-first-
century perspective, and to have been decisively refuted in at least one remarkable
case. In that instance, the experiment was sponsored at the highest levels of the US
government during the Second World War, involved prisoners who were not in any
obvious way coerced or threatened and was made the object of a vigorous publicity
campaign in the pages of one of the most widely circulated magazines in the country.
This magazine article was also unique in its graphic portrayal of the experiment,
including several iconic images that were sure to appeal to a readership that, while
patriotic, was growing tired of war and its price in blood and treasure. Indeed, the
spare text of fewer than 200 words was more than matched in its propaganda value
by the power of the images themselves. In yet another odd twist, the article and its
photographs nearly upended what many scholars regard as the most important
international legal case in history, and certainly a landmark in the history of medical
ethics: the trial of Nazi doctors who had participated in what were judged to have been
crimes against humanity.

A White House experiment

Anticipating an invasion of the home islands of Japan in late 1945 or early 1946, the
US military faced a medical crisis. Tens of thousands of soldiers and marines were at
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192 Propaganda and Conflict

risk of malaria during deployments in Asia but the Japanese had made it impossible
to obtain the standard treatment, quinine. Operating under the highest auspices of
the US government, the Committee on Medical Research (CMR) was charged with
developing cutting-edge treatments against the diseases that most threatened the
American fighting forces. Malaria was at the top of the CMR’s list, comprising 22 per
cent of its $25 million wartime budget; other projects involved sexually transmissible
diseases like gonorrhoea (a significant cause of absence from duty, especially in the US
Navy). In this research, which involved the use of prisoners as experimental subjects,
the investigators considered both safety and consent issues. For malaria, the CMR set
up the Malaria Research Program in 1944. Run in the main by the Army, research took
place at several sites: the Penitentiary in Atlanta, the New Jersey State Reformatory in
Rahway and the US Army disciplinary barracks in Green Haven, New York.1 The CMR
also contracted with the University of Chicago, where the malariologist Alfred Alving
was on the staff. As his research site, Alving chose the nearby federal penitentiary at
Stateville, Illinois. The Stateville research unit was staffed by Army medical officers.
Over the next two years, 500 white, male prisoners volunteered for experiments
that involved the induction of Plasmodium vivax and various prophylactic and
treatment measures.2 Though P.  vivax is not the most dangerous form of malaria
and is not generally fatal, it can lead to an enlarged spleen. The prisoner volunteers
were exposed to the bite of mosquitoes that had fed on the blood of mental hospital
patients who had been treated with malaria, apparently as a now-obsolete (but often
temporarily effective) therapy for the psychotic symptoms associated with tertiary
syphilis. Among the several experiments conducted were a study to assess chemical
analogues of pamaquine to prevent relapses and one to challenge the prophylactic
effects of pentaquine at high doses, which resulted in unanticipated adverse reactions.
Scholars have in the past debated the ethics of the Stateville malaria experiments.3
Key issues include whether the consent was truly voluntary, whether dose levels were
known to be safe and whether scientists were prepared to terminate an experiment if
it turned out to be more dangerous than anticipated. These were among the standards
established later by the Nuremberg Code written by the judges at the trials of Nazi
doctors and other officials implicated in the concentration camp experiments. One
of these was a malaria experiment at Dachau. Though the conditions of the Dachau
experiment were vastly different from those at Stateville, the publicity surrounding
the US studies, as we shall see, created a rhetorical opening for the legal defence of the
Nazis. In both cases, an important background condition for the experiments and the
attendant propaganda (on the US side) was the exigencies of wartime.
Our focus in this chapter is neither on resolving the ethical issues of the malaria
experiments nor on analysing the way that perceived military considerations affect
ethical standards, but rather on the role of the US experiment as a unique case of wartime
propaganda. In order to reconstruct, in detail, the propaganda value and content of the
photographic images of a magazine article in which the Stateville experiments were
made public, we will offer, for the first time, a historical analysis combined with a
detailed art historical description and investigation of the photographic images. While
photographs undoubtedly can reflect what is in front of the camera, viewers also need
to be aware that photographs possess the ability to interpret and manipulate reality. This
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A Wartime Medical Experiment as Propaganda 193

approach will allow us to showcase how the use of photographs as potential historical
sources was exploited for an article with considerable wartime propaganda value.
Paul Fussell has described the Second World War as the most carefully managed
war in human history.4 It was a time of widely circulated magazines and newspapers
capable of carrying impressive images as well as of unprecedented newsreel film
depictions of actual combat. These media were complemented by radio broadcasts.
The contrast between this well-organized reporting and the utter chaos and barbarism
of the war itself presented an interesting dilemma and opportunity for those who
were in a position to determine how the war should be depicted both on the home
front with such campaigns as ‘war bonds’ and ‘victory gardens’, and to the fighters
themselves with carefully calibrated dispatches about the progress of the struggle. At
mid-century, control of these media was still possible partly because they had not yet
achieved a level of technology and portability that would allow them to be deployed
by just anyone who wished to record events. Journalists and their employers were far
more willing to subject themselves to management by authorities during the Second
World War than was the case even a few years later during the Korean War.5 Moreover,
command systems were in place to ensure that only desirable and morale-boosting
information was made generally available. It was during the Second World War, for
example, that every American general officer was assigned a public relations specialist.
The arrangements at Stateville and the attendant publicity must be seen in this light.

Stateville

By the time war broke out in 1939, malaria was a century-old obsession in both
Europe and the Americas. For armies, the parasite was a greater threat than the enemy
and frustratingly resistant to any medical treatment, excepting only regions where
the mosquito population itself could somehow be abated. And there was another
complication:  although there were thousands of compounds with the potential for
treating the disease, they required testing in human subjects, a scarce resource. In the
United States as elsewhere, the mentally ill were an attractive research population not
only because they were captive and subject to the authority of hospital superintendents
but also because experiments on them could be justified on the basis that the high
temperature induced by malaria had proven to ameliorate the symptoms of tertiary
syphilis, which resembled the behaviours of the severely mentally ill. This rationalization
only went so far, however, until it stimulated too many ethical reservations. In any
case, still more human material was required than were available in insane asylums.
Prisoners were the obvious alternative.
Though Stateville housed the most violent offenders in one of the most secure,
forbidding and militarized prisons in the United States, the University of Chicago’s Alf
Alving was fortunate in one respect. The prison had entered a period of reform with
the appointment of Joseph Ragen as warden. When Ragen arrived, the prison yard
was a chaotic array of crude shacks ‘ruled by gangs who pimped out young offenders
as prostitutes, grew marijuana, gambled, and made alcohol in stills using potatoes and
sugar stolen from the kitchen’.6 Ragen imposed discipline, enhanced security, rewarded
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loyal employees and made the parole process more humane. Morale at Stateville was
fairly high as a result.
Stateville’s most famous prisoners were Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, bright
and affluent University of Chicago graduate students who were less than 20 years old
when, in 1924, they committed what newspapers called ‘the crime of the century’.7
For the thrill of it, the two lovers kidnapped, tortured and killed Loeb’s 14-year-old
cousin and then demanded a ransom from his father. The police easily solved the case,
ending the young men’s ambition to commit the ‘perfect crime’.8 Although the public
cried out for revenge, the judge gave them a life sentence. A few years into his sentence
at Stateville, Loeb was killed by another inmate whom he had tried to force into sex.
Leopold survived to become a key member of Alving’s experimental team. Warden
Ragen arranged for Alving to meet with Leopold and several other influential prisoners
to explain that the malaria experiment was important to the war effort. Alving said he
needed 200 prisoner volunteers; Leopold accurately predicted that he would get two or
three times as many. In the end, 487 convicts volunteered.
Leopold was one of about two dozen inmates who were trained as technicians in
the experiment. On ‘biting days’, they pressed jars of female anopheline mosquitoes
onto the volunteers’ skin. The malaria symptoms were too much for one man, who
died early in the project due to an undiagnosed heart condition. News of the death
travelled quickly in the prison and thousands of the convicts demanded answers.
Rather than rebel openly, after the circumstances were explained to them and the
national importance of the research re-emphasized, not only did the prisoners cease
their protests but the number of volunteers actually increased.
Proud of his men, Warden Ragen encouraged the visit by the LIFE Magazine crew.
It was a win-win for both the prison and the US government, as LIFE was at that time
a prominent national publication. Virtually every American would read it and see its
photographs, whether in their homes or in their doctors’ surgeries or hair dressers’
shops. Journalist David Plotz has observed,

[t]‌he most popular magazine in America, LIFE circulated 4 million copies a week,
and was read by 13.5 million people – 10 percent of the population. The largest
weekly magazine now, People, has a smaller circulation than LIFE even though the
US population is 2.5 times as large as it was then. And in an age before TV, LIFE’s
photographs were a dominant way that Americans saw the world.9

LIFE Magazine promised that it would enable its readership

to see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the
poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things  – machines, armies,
multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work  – his
paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things
hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women
that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and
be amazed; to see and be instructed.10
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A Wartime Medical Experiment as Propaganda 195

In 1936, LIFE Magazine was bought by Henry Robinson Luce and relaunched as a
weekly news magazine with a strong emphasis on photo reportage. As a publisher of
magazines such as Time, LIFE and Fortune, and an important Republican figure and
philanthropist, Luce has been described as one of the most influential private citizens
in the America of his day who ‘relentlessly lobbied for greater American involvement
in the affairs of China and its neighbours’.11 He also seems to have had access to
classified information which he used to good effect in some of his publications, and
presided over an influential network including members of the American Congress,
philanthropists and business leaders as well as people in Hollywood and the arts more
widely.12 Luce was born in China in 1898 to missionary parents. His father, Henry
Winters Luce, was a Presbyterian missionary who was keen ‘to save China through a
combination of Christianity, modern science, democracy, and the sorts of freedoms
enshrined in the US Constitution’.13 Luce wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps to
continue his mission. Influenced by his upbringing in China as well as by Roosevelt
and Wilson’s internationalism, he ‘argued that the United States had both the right and
the moral obligation to use its military and economic might in the service of promoting
higher ideals of freedom and democracy around the world’.14 Luce therefore used his
publishing empire to promote US politics and overseas involvements.
LIFE Magazine became the most read of any of Luce’s publications. Its development
as a photo magazine was a great success with readers:  a photographed scene or an
event could be viewed as the equivalent to actually being there, ‘allowing’ readers to see
otherwise inaccessible locations and events. Over time, photographs and illustrations
became even more important than text that was condensed into small sections, with
almost fifty pages per issue dedicated to photographs printed on nicely coated paper.
This concept proved to be an instant hit, with the magazine selling almost 1 million
copies within four months of its relaunch. LIFE’s motto ‘To see life; to see the world’
attracted some of the best photographers and photojournalists to work for it, from
Edward Steichen to Lee Miller, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstadt
and Margaret Bourke-White, whose photographs have also been highly influential in the
world of fine art photography. LIFE Magazine not only dominated the way Americans saw
the world but also offered a far-reaching and controllable way of publicizing the malaria
experiments. LIFE’s 4 June issue was the only one in 1945 that was published without a
cover photograph. Instead the cover page displayed an appeal to the American people
to invest in War Bonds and help the war effort. The content of this issue mirrored the
cover appeal. Readers would find articles like ‘Battered Face of Germany’, ‘Nazi Poison
Vials’ and ‘US Bases in the Post-War Pacific’15 nicely combined with more entertaining
subjects like ‘Bulb Sized Sun’ and ‘Fashion on Dolls’.16 On page 43, a photo essay entitled
‘Prison Malaria. Convicts Expose Themselves to Disease So Doctors Can Study It’,
which consisted of five photographs, fused propaganda elements with entertainment
and introduced readers to the malaria experiments in Stateville Penitentiary.
The photographs were taken by the then 26-year-old Myron Davis, who had
dropped out of his last year at the University of Chicago in 1940 and became, when
hired a year later by LIFE, the youngest photographer to work for the magazine. In
1943, Davis worked as a war correspondent photographer assigned to General Douglas
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MacArthur’s command in the southwest Pacific, where at one point he got infected
with malaria and had to resign. Two years later, in 1945, he was commissioned by
LIFE’s editorial board to cover the malaria experiments in Stateville Penitentiary.17
In general, the selection of images for publication in a magazine like LIFE was
influenced by several criteria:  the entertainment value of the images, their political
and propaganda value, their documentary value and the formal and technical quality
of the photographs. Photographers would receive precise instructions about the
desired layout of the article and, consequently, the number and size of publishable
photographs. The report about the experiments consisted of only 169 words next to
the heading and was neatly placed below one of Davis’s 9 × 7 inch photographs. The
photograph (Figure 9.1) depicts the inmate Richard Knickerbocker, who was serving a

Figure  9.1  LIFE Magazine’s original caption:  ‘Army doctor watches malaria-carrying
mosquitos bite stomach of Richard Knickerbocker, serving 10 to 14 years at Illinois State
Prison’.
Source: LIFE Magazine, 4 June 1945, p. 43.
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A Wartime Medical Experiment as Propaganda 197

Figure 9.2  Postcard of Panoptic guard tower and interior view of cell house, new Illinois
State Penitentiary at Stateville, IL (probably 1940s).
Source:  Scanned from the postcard collection of Alex Wellerstein (copyright expired). Available at
https://prisonphotography.org/2010/08/21/stateville-prison-joliet-il-art-object/ (last access 27 June
2018).

lengthy prison sentence, on ‘biting day’. He is apparently lying in a bed in the hospital
ward of Illinois State Prison.
Because the experiments were conducted in the prison hospital, participating
inmates could escape the so-called ‘roundhouse’ of Stateville (Figure 9.2). Through its
design as a panopticon, a circular structure containing several tiers of cells that were
monitored by a watch tower in the centre, prisoners were isolated in their cells under
constant surveillance with no privacy at all. Participation in the malaria experiments
would not only offer the possibility of a reduced sentence by a more sympathetic parole
board, it also offered the chance to escape the isolation and surveillance which some
of the inmates had endured for years. Being transferred to the hospital ward improved
their living conditions at least for a short while and made their life more humane and
decent.
The photograph of Knickerbocker (Figure 9.1) shows him lying in a clean hospital
bed with a woollen blanket tucked around his lower body. Only the barred windows
and mesh wire behind his head provide an indication that we are not looking at a
normal hospital ward. On the left side, his head close to Knickerbocker’s stomach with
two jars containing the mosquitoes, sits an army doctor monitoring the experiment. On
Knickerbocker’s forehead a sticker displays the following letters and numbers: ‘M31-
35 First. M36-40 Second’, referring to ‘the mosquito lot’ the prisoner was exposed to.
Every ‘patient’ received ten infected mosquito bites with a P. vivax malaria strain.18
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The photographs

Davis carefully composed his photograph as a two-point perspective containing

two vanishing points, one behind the head of the army doctor and the other behind
Knickerbocker’s head. Consequently, the eye of the viewer is immediately led to the focal
point of the image: the two glass containers on Knickerbocker’s stomach. Davis achieved
this composition by directing his ‘sitters’ into particular positions:  Knickerbocker’s
right arm and hand are bent back to hold onto the metal bedframe, thus allowing the
army doctor sufficient space to lean over with his arms crossed on the mattress close
to the mosquito jars. Second, and significantly, it is clear that the photograph that was
printed in the article had its edges cropped by Davis to ensure that the viewer was not
distracted by the excess of detail the image might otherwise reveal. Furthermore, both
men appear to be looking intently and calmly at the mosquitoes at work, underlining
the desired message to the effect that both researcher and research subject are helping
the war effort in a serene and controlled way. At the same time, by virtue of his
participation in the experiment, the image seems to suggest that the subject does not
have to endure unreasonable suffering.
Reducing the space devoted to text, Davis’s photograph became the main reference
source for the malaria experiment and the image therefore obtained a position of
supremacy over the written word. With its emphasis on photographs, LIFE Magazine’s
editorial policy relied strongly on the photographers to produce the most powerful and
eloquent images for the article. For the following pages in this 4 June 1945 issue, the
editorial board would choose four more images by Davis to illustrate the experiment.
It is reasonable to assume that all of these photographs had been substantially cropped,
not only to create compositions with a strong focal point but also to allow sufficient
space for the advertisements next to the images.
On examining the photographs selected for publication in the article, one notices
that the images document the different stages of the experiment. The reader becomes
a witness to how the experiment is monitored by army doctors and how prisoners are
examined for ‘ill effects’ (Figure 9.3). Readers are able to look inside the hospital ward
where prisoners accompanied by a doctor are exposed to mosquitoes (Figure 9.1) and
they are shown the photographs of two inmates infected with malaria who suffer from
‘a violent chill’ and ‘high fever’ (fourth and fifth photographs, page 46 of the article,
not reproduced in this chapter). The malaria sufferers are depicted sleeping peacefully
in their hospital beds, well cared for with hot water bottles or cushions filled with ice
cubes; in both cases, the images – representing just the upper body – focus on their
calm faces, their eyes closed.
The viewer gains the impression through Davis’s photographs that the different
stages of the malaria experiment at Stateville are being carefully monitored and
documented. Yet the caption of the fourth photograph, page 46 of the article, reveals
that this is a depiction of an inmate of Atlanta Penitentiary, where malaria experiments
were also carried out by the CMR. With regard to the malaria sufferer in the fifth
photograph, page  46 of the article, we have no information about the place of his
imprisonment.
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A Wartime Medical Experiment as Propaganda 199

Figure 9.3  LIFE Magazine’s original caption: ‘Testing new drugs, prisoners are examined
for ill effects. Convict assistant second from left is Nathan Leopold, still imprisoned for
his part in the Leopold–Loeb case’. Astonishingly, the Getty archive was able to provide
Davis’s original, that is pre-cropped, version of this image. The vertical lines represent the
cropping lines: within these lines is the image that was published in LIFE Magazine, 4 June
1945, p. 44.
Source: Photo by Myron Davis/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

However, it is important to remember that these images cannot be seen as neutral

documentary photographs. Instead, they are designed and constructed for maximum
effect. When we ‘read’ a photograph, we must first be aware that the photographer
imposes his or her compositional order on the image by choosing a vantage point, a frame
and a moment of exposure as well as his or her selection of the plane of focus. Second,
while it might be thought that only digital photos can be altered, analogue photographs
too offer considerable possibilities for manipulation, for example by retouching the
print, cropping the image and changing tones and contrast in the darkroom. Third,
in order to allow for a well-informed ‘reading’ of the photographs, the viewer needs
some essential background information about the photographer, the date, location
and circumstances of the images, information that we now provide in this chapter.
Fourth, it also matters whether the photographs are commissioned and intended
for publication or just snapshots for private use. Finally, the relationship between
the photographer/camera and the subject before them needs to be considered: is the
subject aware or unaware of the camera? Is the subject cooperating willingly or is s/he
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under duress? Is the depicted scene candid or staged? Given that most people have a
natural tendency ‘to trust their eyes’, and therefore accept photographic depictions as
factual and truthful, photography is the perfect objective foundation for documentary
images used in a propaganda context.19
On analysis of Davis’s photographs, it becomes evident that they had become
inaccurate representations because of the manipulative processes that are assumed to
have taken place, such as cropping, and changing the contrast and light of the negative
through masking and dodging.20 Furthermore, Davis’s photographs need to be seen and
analysed in conjunction with historical circumstances and the technical development
of cameras and, in this particular case, in light of the history of medical ethics: in 1947,
the LIFE Magazine article about the malaria experiments was submitted as evidence in
the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial (officially United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al.)
by the German defence attorney Robert Servatius.

Photojournalism

When Henry Luce relaunched LIFE in 1936, he was convinced that not only could
photographs ‘describe’ stories better than words but that they would also sell more
copies. Luce was proven right; LIFE’s success story convinced other magazines such
as LOOK Magazine, founded in 1937, to apply a similar concept. Consequently,
illustrated magazines and photojournalism expanded rapidly in the 1930s and early
1940s and it soon became clear that a code of conduct was needed for this new form
of ‘visual journalism’.
The debate surrounding such a code of conduct had started far earlier and has to be
seen in connection with the development of the handheld camera, so much more portable
and concealable than its predecessor, which was mounted on a tripod. Already in 1890,
Henry Harrison Suplee had written in his article ‘The Ethics of the Hand Cameras’
about the increasing numbers of photographers who would be tempted ‘to photograph
anything and everything, regardless of the approval or the wish of the subject, and
in many cases without informing him of the fact that he has been photographed at
all’.21 With the rise of more and more illustrated magazines, photographers came under
pressure to produce the right images and so more guidance was needed in how to
create photographic works that aspired to be honest, accurate and truthful. In 1939,
Laura Vitray, a script editor for the US Office of Education; John Mills Jr, an employee
of the Eastman Kodak Company and former staff photographer for the Washington
Post; and Roscoe Ellard, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri, published
‘Pictorial Journalism’, outlining the ethical dimension of photojournalism and the
legal implications of unethical photographic representations.22 In 1946, the National
Press Photographers Association (NPPA) was founded, articulating the values,
ethics, responsibilities and the legal and moral obligations of photojournalism.23 This
development needs also to be seen in conjunction with the return to civilian life of war
photographers; these were in need of guidance on ethical and legal issues surrounding
photographs. However, a proper and binding code of conduct for photojournalism did
not come into being at this stage.
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Today, many would argue that the aim of documentary photographs used in
photojournalism is ‘to inform’ readers in an unbiased and objective fashion. The
chosen photographs should try to illustrate the story in all its facets and avoid under all
circumstances turning the matter into something banal or entertaining. In this case, the
editorial board of LIFE Magazine chose photographs that underlined the fact that no
one was harmed and everyone, even a convicted murderer like Nathan Leopold, would
be able to do his bit to help the war effort. But what was required of a photojournalist
like Davis in 1945 in terms of ‘photographic illustration’? John G. Morris, the photo
editor of LIFE Magazine from 1938 to 1946, explained, ‘We always looked for the best
photographers and the quality and impact of the pictures were the core of the success.’24
There were no guidelines about ethics, accuracy and manipulation in documentary
photographs at the time. However, the technical equipment photographers used
not only determined the appearance of the photographic composition but also the
photographer’s conduct. In this case, Davis worked with a large-format 4 × 5 camera
with a tripod, mainly the Speed Graphic camera, and a battery-powered flashgun fitted
with a reflector. This meant that the inmates and doctors in the ward were certainly
aware of the equipment and the photographer. These were no snapshots. People needed
direction and would know that they had been photographed when the flashlight went
off. In today’s terms, we would refer to the depicted images as staged photographs with
a documentary purpose.
This becomes particularly clear when we take a closer look at the photograph
with Nathan Leopold (see Figure 9.3). We are fortunate to have access, via Getty’s
archive, of Davis’s original photograph, which is reproduced here with lines added
to show where the photograph was cropped when it was printed in LIFE Magazine.
The image can be divided more or less diagonally into two zones: foreground and
background. The main focus in the foreground is a triangle of three figures. On the
far left, we see a man dressed in a dark army shirt holding a pen and a clipboard.
Next to him, to his right, stands Nathan Leopold; he is wearing a white shirt with
a dark handkerchief in his shirt pocket and beige trousers. (LIFE Magazine was
printed in full colour; our reproduction is in grey scale.) He seems to be engaging
with the officer, looking down at the sheet of clipboard. On the right side, we have a
man sitting on what appears in the uncropped image to be the end of a bench; he is
dressed in a white T-shirt and beige trousers. He is holding a white plastic cup in his
left hand and seems to be chewing on a small wooden stick. Behind him sits another
man dressed in institutional clothes, like the rest of the group in the background
(who are standing).
The background of the cropped photograph depicts a group of four men of
seemingly white American origin and ten men of seemingly African-American origin;
the uncropped photograph depicts a total of twenty-six prisoners, comprising twelve
white Americans and fourteen African-Americans (there are also a female nurse
and another army officer on the right, who is taking notes). So while Davis and/or
the LIFE Magazine editor might not have intended to portray a higher proportion
of African-American prisoners, the cropping process has resulted in this impression.
The photographer has furthermore chosen a section of the image in which the barred
windows of the room are invisible.
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The photograph was cropped in such a way that the viewer has to focus on
Nathan Leopold. This effect was enhanced by the white and beige clothes that
Leopold is wearing, given that our eyes generally focus on the lightest spot in a visual
representation. Leopold is the only person in the photograph who is depicted full-
length dressed in what appear to be civilian clothes. His posture, standing and looking
down at the clipboard, and his lighter-coloured clothes compared to those of the other
prisoners, give reason to suggest that he is in charge in some way. As a result of the
cropping process, viewers can hardly see that the person to the left of Leopold is an
army officer; rather, they see somebody who is taking down dictated notes. Leopold
has certainly dressed up for the occasion, a fact that is underlined by his white shirt
with a pocket handkerchief, folded carefully with the point showing. He confidently
displays an accessory of the bourgeois elite, referencing his descent from a very wealthy,
well-educated immigrant German family. By the time Leopold committed the murder,
he had completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, gaining the
highest honour, ‘Phi Beta Kappa’, from the Greek initials of the motto ‘Love of learning
be the guide of life’. This honour is awarded to the most outstanding and exceptionally
talented students of arts and sciences at American colleges and universities.
A further element underlining the fact that the photograph was staged is that all
the prisoners in the background can be clearly seen. This was achieved by directing
the prisoners in the back row to stand on a bench. The viewer also focuses on Leopold,
because five prisoners in the background and the two in the foreground are looking
in his direction while he is engaged with the paperwork and the spectator of such a
photograph will naturally follow the motion of the gaze of these prisoners.
We do not know for sure whether Davis gave the prisoners, doctors or officers
any directions while taking these photographs. One might speculate that he asked
them to take up a particular posture, directed people to a certain point and told
them not to look directly into the camera. What we can say is that Davis probably
interfered in the darkroom, highlighting some parts and darkening others; and
he certainly applied cropping in at least one case; his interventions thus produced
strong compositions with explicit focal points. The question remains, though, what
one can expect in this case from a photographer commissioned to document such
an experiment accurately and ‘truthfully’. The photographic medium has many
contradictions. The camera allows an almost instantaneous and easy record to be
made of what is before it. However, the photographer imposes his set of choices for
the composition of an image, negating its apparent objectivity. The first step is choice
of vantage point, frame, moment of exposure and plane of focus. The second step
would be to undertake manipulations in the darkroom, for example by dodging,
burning or masking.25 By making parts of the photograph lighter, darker, sharper or
adding more contrast, the photographic composition can substantially change. Such
darkroom manipulations allow the photographer to accentuate some compositional
elements while, at the same time, making others almost disappear. It is therefore
important to bear in mind that the photographic medium offers the photographer
endless possibilities for manipulating what has been ‘documented’ by the camera
after the shutter has been released. Finally, one has to take into account the editors
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A Wartime Medical Experiment as Propaganda 203

of LIFE Magazine, who chose photographs without commenting on any suffering or

the death of one inmate.

The malaria experiment in the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial

No one associated with the Stateville experiments could have been expected to
anticipate the role the LIFE Magazine article would play in the trial of twenty-three
doctors and functionaries accused of war crimes in connection with concentration
camp experiments. The trial at Nuremberg, known informally as ‘the medical case’,
began in December 1946. The US Army lawyers prosecuting the case had every reason
to think that many of the defendants would ultimately be found guilty; the trial itself
would not be a lengthy affair. Many documents about the experiments intended for
destruction had instead been recovered by the Allied armies. Meticulous analysis by
a court-appointed expert, the German-Jewish neurologist Leo Alexander, seemed to
make it clear that horrible crimes had been committed on innocent men, women and
children.26 The fact that so many medical doctors were involved only added to the
sense that moral culpability needed to be assigned. As the prosecution maintained,
this was a murder trial.
However, the defendants were able to call upon able legal counsel who managed to
shift the burden of prosecution, at least for a time. Besides asserting that their clients
were obliged to act according to the orders of their superiors – a common line of defence
in the various war crimes trials – the defence lawyers also argued that the experiments
themselves were not out of line with medical experiments conducted by the Allies
themselves during, for decades before, and even after the war. For this purpose, it was
possible to refer to human experiments in the published medical literature and, in at
least one famous instance, in the popular press. For this argument, the LIFE Magazine
article provided a key example.
Defence lawyer Robert Servatius made it a point to question a prosecution witness
closely about the Stateville experiment. The Allied prosecution team had chosen
German psychiatrist and medical historian Werner Leibbrand, from the University
of Erlangen, as a medical expert to give evidence during the Doctors’ Trial in order
to establish the unethical nature of the Nazi experiments. It was the first of twelve
trials for war crimes committed by German doctors that the US authorities held before
US military courts in their occupation zone in Nuremberg following the Second
World War.
Allied legal advisers hoped that a German medical expert ‘might not only
strengthen the case of the prosecution, but facilitate the process of denazification’.27
But Servatius turned the tables in his cross-examination of Leibbrand by reading out
the text of the LIFE Magazine article before the court and then inducing him to label
the Stateville malaria experiments as a violation of medical ethics. On 27 January 1947,
Servatius asked Leibbrand during cross examining, ‘Witness, are you of the opinion
that a prisoner who had over ten years’ sentence to serve will give his approval to an
experiment if he receives no advantages there from? Do you consider such approval
voluntary?’28 Leibbrand confirmed that experiments on prisoners could not be
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204 Propaganda and Conflict

voluntary given that owing to the circumstances of their imprisonment, they were in ‘a
forcible situation’ and unable to take an informed decision based on free will.29 He went
on to point out that prisoners had no medical knowledge and therefore ‘no possibility
at all to weigh the consequences of such interference’.30 As the cross-examination of
Leibbrand went on Servatius, who had prepared his argument carefully, introduced the
LIFE Magazine article about the malaria experiments to the witness. Servatius began
by reading out the entire article in court and described each photograph in detail, also
reading out all the captions. He then turned to Leibbrand: ‘Now, will you please express
your opinion on the admissibility of these experiments?’31 Leibbrand explained the
consequences of a malaria infection which ‘always have the therapeutic possibility of
death’.32 Leibbrand therefore concluded, ‘In consequence, such experiments should be
carried out on guinea pigs and not on human beings.’33 By now it was clear to everyone
in the courtroom that the Allied prosecution team had underestimated the evidence
that could come to light through a cross-examination of Leibbrand. Leibbrand’s
testimony had in essence put American medical science in the same moral category as
German medical science before American judges.
Also present in the courtroom that day in January 1947 was a key prosecution
expert on medical ethics, Dr Andrew Ivy. Ivy was the vice president for medical affairs
at the University of Illinois, the same state in which the federal prison was located. As
the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) handpicked representative at the trial, Ivy
seems to have immediately appreciated not only that the Nazis’ lawyers had identified
a weakness in the prosecution’s line of argument but also that the medical profession
more generally  – and the American profession in particular  – might be called to
account for longstanding transgressions of the very ethics that had been violated by
the Nazis. It fell to him to protect the good name of American medicine.34
Several months before Leibbrand’s damaging testimony, Ivy had sent the AMA a
list of principles of ethics for human experiments which were immediately published
in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).35 Publication of these
principles allowed Ivy to assert in his testimony a few months later in June 1947 that
there were established rules for conducting human experiments in the US medical
profession. In his testimony, however, Ivy came perilously close to perjury when he
made that assertion, in which he also claimed that those rules had been well known
on an informal basis. Before giving his testimony, Ivy made another key move. He
approached the governor of Illinois to request that a committee be created to sanction
the ethics of the Stateville experiments. That committee did so in short order, though
with Ivy himself as the chair it seems to have existed mainly on paper and never to
have actually met.
Thus was US medical ethics protected from an unwelcome association with Nazi
crimes, despite doubts that might have been harboured about the Stateville experiments.
Perhaps the most important moral distinctions were not fully captured in the formal
context of the trial, namely that, unlike the concentration camp inmates the Stateville
prisoners were truly criminals; that unlike in the Nazi experiments death was not an
acceptable endpoint for any of the US experiments; and that Dachau and other Nazi
experiment sites were death camps while Stateville was part of a normal prison system.
More importantly, though, from the standpoint of the significance of this episode to
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A Wartime Medical Experiment as Propaganda 205

posterity, Ivy’s JAMA principles were incorporated by the three American judges into
the ten-point medical research ethics document known as the Nuremberg Code.36

Conclusion

It is remarkable enough that a potentially dangerous medical experiment became

a significant public relations tool for a national government that was prosecuting a
desperate war. There are few other cases, if any, in which an experiment was cited in
an affirmative context to stimulate patriotic sentiment rather than as an example of
an enemy’s inhumanity. Still more exceptional is the fact that this event was embodied
in an exercise of sophisticated photojournalism featured in one of the most popular
magazines in the world which was later admitted as court evidence in the trial of Nazi
medical doctors and officials. Servatius, the defence lawyer, tried to use the malaria
article and its photographs to substantiate the impression that German and American
scientists were working to similar ethical standards. We could argue that a complete
analysis of the photographs and their genesis would have caused even more problems
for the Allied prosecution team, given that the manipulative nature and staged
character of these images would have come to the forefront. Typically, the court
would consider witness testimony as more important than photographic evidence.
Photographs could be of relevance in a courtroom if they might make any fact at issue
in the court case more or less credible. Today, with the greater awareness of analogue
and digital manipulation of photographs, a court would review any potentially
misleading photographic qualities before allowing them as evidence. In that sense,
the published staged photographs could have helped the Allied prosecution team to
reference ‘the human conditions’ for the prisoners who took part in the experiment.
However, this certainly did not happen; instead, the prosecution was keen to prevent
this becoming a trial against American medical research practices and therefore
realized that they needed a substantial medical ethics code in order to show up the
significant differences between German and American research practice. Therefore,
perhaps the most astonishing twist is that the LIFE Magazine article became such a
controversial item in the trial of Nazi medical doctors and officials that it might have
influenced, albeit indirectly, the crafting of the most important medical ethics code
in history.

Notes
1 Nathaniel Comfort, ‘The Prisoner as Model Organism: Malaria Research at Stateville
Penitentiary’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences,
40: 3 (2009), pp. 190–203.
2 Karen Masterson, The Malaria Project: The U.S. Government’s Secret Mission to Find a
Miracle Cure (New York, 2014).
3 See Jonathan D. Moreno, Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans (New York,
2001), pp. 32–4.
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206 Propaganda and Conflict

4 Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War

(New York, 1989).
5 Ibid., pp. 143 and passim.
6 Masterson, The Malaria Project, p. 273.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 David Plotz, ‘The Greatest Magazine Ever Published’, Slate, 27 December 2013.
10 P. B. Kunhardt Jr (ed.), Life: The First 50 Years (1936–86) (Boston, MA, 1986), p. 5.
11 Robert E. Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, Time and the American Crusade in Asia
(Cambridge, 2005), p. 1; see also Office of the Historian, ‘Henry Luce and 20th
Century US Internationalism’, Bureau of Public Affairs, United States Department of
State, available at https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937–1945/internationalism
(last access 27 June 2018).
12 Herzstein, Luce, Time and the American Crusade in Asia, p. 1.
13 Office of the Historian, ‘Henry Luce and 20th Century US Internationalism’.
14 Ibid.
15 LIFE Magazine, 4 June 1945, pp. 21–8, 32, 81–7.
16 Ibid., pp. 51–5, 77–81.
17 Jennifer Delgado, ‘Myron Davis, 1919–2010: Life Magazine Photographer’, Chicago
Tribune, 21 April 2010, available at http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-04-21/
features/ct-met-0422-davis-obit-20100421_1_mr-davis-life-magazine-photographer-
chicago-sun-times (last access 27 June 2018).
18 Alf S. Alving et al., ‘Procedures Used at Stateville Penitentiary for Testing of Potential
Antimalarial Agents’, Journal of Clinical Investigation, 27 (May 1948), p. 3.
19 Anthony R. Fellow, ‘History of Journalism: 1861–1930’, in Christopher H. Sterling
(ed.), Encyclopedia of Journalism, vol. 2 (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2009), pp. 701–7; David
Culbert, ‘Photography’, in Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert and David Welch (eds),
Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa
Barbara, CA, 2003), pp. 297–9.
20 ‘Masking’ gives texture so that blacks and shadows look completely dark or sharpens
the image so that the contrast of the image changes when the image is printed;
‘dodging’ decreases the exposure of areas of the print, making them lighter.
21 Henry Harrison Suplee, ‘The Ethics of the Hand Cameras’, Photographic Times, 19: 429
(6 December 1889), p. 608.
22 Laura Vitray, John Mills Jr and Roscoe Ellard, Pictorial Journalism (New York and
London, 1939).
23 National Press Photographers Association: https://nppa.org/about; https://nppa.org/
code_of_ethics; of particular interest is a circular letter from Burt Williams on behalf
of the organizing committee of the fledgling association to all working photographers
in the United States: https://nppa.org/sites/default/files/NPPA_Organizing_
Committee_Letter.pdf.
24 José Manuel Serrano Esparza, ‘John G. Morris: An Interview with the Most Influential
and Experienced Photo Editor in History’, 28 November 2009, available at http://
elrectanguloenlamano.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/john-g-morris-interview-with-most.
html (last access 28 June 2018).
25 ‘Burning’ increases the exposure of areas of the print, i.e. making them darker.
26 For Leo Alexander’s role at Nuremberg see Ulf Schmidt, Justice at Nuremberg: Leo
Alexander and the Nazi Doctors’ Trial (Basingstoke and New York, 2004).
27 Ibid., p. 205.
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A Wartime Medical Experiment as Propaganda 207

28 Klaus Dörner and Angelika Ebbinghaus (eds), The Nuremberg Medical Trial 1946/47.
Transcripts, Material of the Prosecution and Defense, Related Documents (Munich,
1999), Documents and Material, Document Karl Brandt No. 1, fiche 146, frames
02067f.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., frame 02070.
32 Ibid., frame 02071.
33 Ibid.
34 Jon M. Harkness, ‘Nuremberg and the Issue of Wartime Experiments on US
Prisoners’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 276: 20 (1996), pp. 1672–5.
35 ‘Supplementary Report of the Judicial Council’, Proceedings of the AMA’s House of
Delegates Annual Meeting, 9–11 December 1946, Journal of the American Medial
Association, 132 (1946), p. 1090. See Advisory Committee on Human Radiation
Experiments, Final Report (New York, 1996), ch. 2.
36 Ibid.
208

208
 209

10

The Undefeated: Propaganda, rehabilitation

and post-war Britain
Julie Anderson

In 1950, newspapers announced the release of the film The Undefeated, a documentary
which focussed on the state’s support for disabled ex-servicemen. Commissioned by
the Ministry of Pensions and produced by the Central Office of Information (COI),
the film centred on a pilot who became disabled as a result of injuries sustained in a
wartime glider accident. The film follows ‘Joe Anderson’s’ journey from hospital to
workplace through the rehabilitation process, highlighting the Ministry of Pensions’
work and the state’s responsibility to its war wounded.
This chapter explores post-war British propaganda in film and focusses on The
Undefeated to examine the series of relationships between the state, the public and
information programmes. Starting with the seminal work of David Welch, historians
have explored war and film propaganda during the Second World War, demonstrating
that the relationship between propaganda and the state was often highly complex.1
Welch observes in his most recent book on British propaganda that, at the beginning
of the war, the Ministry of Information (MOI) was often the subject of ridicule and
goes on to note that some politicians saw the MOI, and those that ran it, as agents
with dangerous leftist views.2 James Chapman argues that the concerns over one-party
states and their use of propaganda meant that the British government was unwilling
to employ the same coercive powers as dictatorships.3 This tension between political
ideology and film propaganda in the national contexts of Britain and Nazi Germany is
explored in Jo Fox’s masterful study. She states,

In understanding the inherent tensions within films, even the tensions perhaps
between ideological and propagandistic intent and contradictory and sometimes
incoherent meanings and messages, combined with an appreciation of the
cultural, social, economic and political space in which these films were conceived,
produced, filmed, edited and received, the film historian comes not only closer to
understanding the films themselves, but their role within society.4

It is from this standpoint that this chapter explores the complex construction of
propaganda in 1950s Britain. It focusses on post-war propaganda, noting the way
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210 Propaganda and Conflict

aspects of wartime propaganda were repurposed to fit a peacetime narrative, and uses
The Undefeated to explore the tension surrounding post-war propaganda, its continued
employment after the war and the impact of the film. It supports arguments that the
Attlee government found propaganda an expedient way to inform the public and
promote the state’s post-war work. Rather than using propaganda to maintain morale
during conflict, the state recruited similar propaganda tools to support newly emerging
welfare reforms. Films such as The Undefeated informed and persuaded people of the
government’s willingness to assist individuals and highlighted the systems established
to aid them to train for work and re-establish themselves in economic and social life.
However, in an ironic twist, The Undefeated’s message of medical, social and financial
support for disabled veterans by a caring ministry which put their welfare foremost
threatened recruitment numbers to the Forces in a new Cold War conflict.

Post-war propaganda

In 1945, the Labour Party under Clement Attlee was elected on a manifesto of social
transformation. The welfare state was a central platform for change, yet its smooth
establishment was hampered by a combination of opposition to reform and the
perilous state of Britain’s finances.5 Propaganda, which was employed so effectively
during the war to maintain the population’s support in a long and protracted conflict,
became central to the new government’s message. William Crofts argues that the ‘Attlee
government’s propaganda campaigns remain a unique attempt in a parliamentary
democracy to mould public opinion in peacetime’.6 In contrast to propaganda which
stressed Britain’s wartime strength in the face of the enemy, welfare state propaganda
focussed on post-war rebuilding and plans designed to inform the public on health
matters, assistance programmes and legislation. Books, magazines and other popular
media informed the public about William Beveridge’s vision, published in 1942,7 and
the function of the welfare state. The post-war implementation of these programmes
was treated with suspicion by the press and the Conservative opposition, who argued
that public funds earmarked for rebuilding the nation should not be spent by the state
to highlight its efforts. However suitable – within reason – a wartime environment was
to a propaganda programme, there was greater opposition to and suspicion of these
techniques to influence public opinion after the war.
The production and distribution of post-war propaganda required administrative
support. In 1946, the COI replaced the wartime MOI. There was little difference
between the two administrative departments. Mariel Grant notes, ‘The wartime
coalition and post-war Labour governments, far from regarding the MOI as a failure or
propaganda as a necessary evil, drew upon the experience of the MOI in determining
how best to administer official information with the return to peacetime conditions.’8
The dissemination of ‘information’ was a preferred British term, and the renaming of
the administrative structure, in taking away its ministerial title and replacing it with
a central office, served to downplay fears surrounding the importance of propaganda
messages after the war.
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Propaganda, Rehabilitation and Post-war Britain 211

The locus of propaganda dissemination centred around the cinema. In 1950, the
English (i.e. not including the Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish) public averaged
twenty-eight cinema visits per year, so film remained a crucial means to communicate
the state’s message.9 Furthermore, the cinema industry’s enthusiastic support for
government programmes was longstanding; Robert James notes that throughout
the 1930s the editorial board of Kinematograph Weekly believed in the cinema’s
importance in propaganda and education.10 With this broad-based support, the COI
commissioned a number of films immediately following its establishment. Under John
Grierson’s directorship, the COI maintained its commitment to documentary film,
commissioning a number of feature-length pictures, three of which were released
in 1950  – Life in Her Hands, Out of True and Four Men in Prison  – and produced
under Crown.11 It also released a number of second features and featurettes, which
included The Undefeated. The film industry continued to accept the COI’s influential
role, reporting in November 1950 that 60 per cent of the 28  million individuals
who attended the cinema each week saw a COI film and that ‘the kinema industry
responded well to the government’s request that one COI film each month is given a
commercial distribution’.12
While the cinema industry responded favourably to the COI’s propaganda films,
discussions in the House of Commons concerning propaganda were generally critical
of departments that supported the government’s scheme. Similar to the reaction to the
MOI during the war, criticism of the COI and its potentially threatening propaganda
message galvanized the government to establish a Committee of Enquiry into the
home information services. The French Committee reported to the government in
1949.13 Its report supported the continued operation of the COI but made suggestions
about more effective and appropriate types of propaganda; it found that ‘specific action’
types of propaganda were preferable to ‘general exhortation’ or the transmission of
information.14 Moreover, the committee recommended that reductions be made to the
home services, particularly films.15 The Undefeated was already in production when
this new directive was announced, so it escaped the financial cuts to film production.
Propaganda remained a contentious issue throughout the life of the Attlee
government. In December 1950, a heated debate in the House of Commons over a
film about nationalization by the Ministry of Transport caused one member to ask
if it was not ‘very improper for public funds to be used for the production of a film
which at least half the Members of the House of Commons would regard as intensely
controversial political propaganda’.16 Debates surrounding the appropriateness of
propaganda continued even after the Labour government was voted out of power. In
December 1951, in a parliamentary debate about Information Services, member for
Renfrew Major Guy Lloyd asked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury John Boyd
Carpenter about the costs associated with government information services. Lloyd
then declared,

The truth is that we get far too much propaganda, far too much propagandists
[sic], and far too many apologists. Most of these Departments, organisations, and
individuals, costing in total many million pounds, are apologists in some shape
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212 Propaganda and Conflict

or form for the Government who employ them. But they do not apologise to the
taxpayer who pays for them.17

However, unpopular propaganda remained in post-war Britain; it was used to inform

the public about the government’s efforts on their behalf. The Undefeated embodied
this transmission of information specifically in relation to disabled veterans.

The Undefeated

On 25 June 1949, C. L. Paine from the Film Division of the COI wrote to the independent
production company run by James Carr, World Wide Pictures, asking them if they
were interested in compiling a report and investigation to produce three reels of film
on ‘pensions’.18 Much of World Wide Pictures’ early work had been undertaken on
behalf of the Armed Services and the COI, and the company agreed to the £100 sum
offered.19 Funding was still available to make films supporting the government aims,
and the commissioning of the proposed film came prior to the reductions in services
recommended by the French Committee. World Wide Pictures was familiar with the
terms that ‘it shall be a Condition of Contract that copyright in the work shall rest in
the Controller, HM Stationery Office, and that no communication regarding it shall be
made to any person with a view to publication’.20
Initially, the proposal of a film whose subject was the Ministry of Pensions’ work was
met with criticism in the press. In particular, films perceived as propaganda depicting
the work of specific ministries were viewed with suspicion, as they fell into the French
Committee’s dispreferred categories of ‘general exhortation’ or ‘transmission of
information’, and not the preferred type of ‘specific action’ propaganda.21 Newspapers
continued to voice opposition to the Attlee government’s actions, and a proposal for a
film was no exception. In 1949, when news of a potential film about pensions emerged,
the Evening Post reported that questions had been raised in parliament regarding
the costs of the film. The film’s purpose also came under criticism; the Evening Post
reported that there were concerns that the film would be ‘Party political propaganda’.22
The Undefeated was the first documentary at World Wide Pictures for director
Paul Dickson. Dickson had learned his craft at Paul Rotha’s company Films of Fact,
before moving to World Wide Pictures in 1948. Straddling the genres of a feature
film and a documentary, The Undefeated employed a fictional narrative which follows
the experience of Joe Anderson, a glider pilot, who loses both his legs in a crash at a
Rhine crossing in March 1945. The film follows Joe Anderson through his Ministry
of Pensions journey and documents his progress through his physical and emotional
rehabilitative process.
The Undefeated employed groups of non-professional actors, whose presence lent
authenticity to the film. The lead character of the story, Joe Anderson, was played by
Gerald Pearson, a Board of Trade official. Newspapers reported that Pearson modestly
declared he was selected because ‘my name was first to come out of the Ministry files
with the necessary qualifications’.23 Pearson was born in India but had lived with his
grandmother in England and postponed his degree course at the University of Cambridge
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Propaganda, Rehabilitation and Post-war Britain 213

to serve with the South Wales Borderers. Like his character Joe Anderson, Pearson lost
both his legs during the war. His limb loss lent validity to his role in the film, and to the
part of Joe Anderson. The non-professional ex-servicemen actors in The Undefeated
provided interesting asides and a wide range of stories with which the ministry was able
to detail its work and provide information to the public. The film employed humour and
showed off individual skills; in one of the scenes when Joe Anderson goes into a lift, a
man demonstrates his ability to light a cigarette with one hand.
The question of the central character’s service role was not raised in the communication
between World Wide Pictures and the Ministry of Pensions in 1950. However, the
choice of a pilot as the main character in The Undefeated by Paul Dickson resonated
with the public in a number of ways. The majority of civilians who had witnessed and
experienced combat during the war had done so through aerial attacks, so aircraft
were a potent reminder of the war.24 The representation of pilots who had publicly
fought skirmishes above Britain’s skies in the summer of 1940 became very powerful,
particularly after awareness was increased by the Air Ministry’s publication of a thirty-
two-page booklet, Battle of Britain, in 1941. Its publication was followed by a longer book
The Battle of Britain, 1940, which provided a more detailed version of events.25 Indeed,
Richard Overy argues that the Battle of Britain was one of the key ‘moral moments’
of the war, during which uncertainties ‘gave way to a greater sense of purpose and a
more united people’.26 The Undefeated employed a wartime narrative that many of the
watching public understood, and for some awoke feelings of wartime patriotism, which
informed many individuals’ feelings after the war. Patriotism, argues Geoff Eley, was not
‘straightforwardly conservative’ but had strong leanings to the left, which included

the egalitarianism of the World War II, the achievement of the welfare state,
and a complex of democratic traditions stressing decency, liberalism, and the
importance of everyone pulling together, in a way that honoured the value and
values of ordinary working people.27

The Royal Air Force (RAF), more specifically Fighter Command, was foremost in the
public’s memory, as it – or rather its pilots – had taken centre stage during the war.
They were a minority in the RAF, yet it was the pilots who represented the RAF in the
minds of the public and influenced the culture of the service.28 Pilots were particularly
revered for their bravery in the skies during the Battle of Britain. Individual pilots were
not identified during the battle; however, it was difficult not to associate the image
of the lone fighter pilot, and the one-on-one nature of skirmishes between fighter
aircraft, with anything other than individual bravery and endeavour. Their efforts and
skill were the subject of newspaper articles which detailed successful nightly bombing
raids on German targets. Consequently, the pilots’ exploits were an important tool
for the maintenance of morale; reports detailing the bravery, loyalty and selfless
duty of RAF pilots were used endlessly, and ‘the cult of the warrior hero became an
important element of the propaganda war’.29 As Martin Francis notes, ‘The general
public remained wedded to an affecting image of fresh-faced young men living life to
the full in the precious intermissions between active duty, reckless sensualists under
constant sentence of death.’30
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214 Propaganda and Conflict

The RAF was vital as a propaganda vehicle during the war. Arguably, the RAF – and
especially the pilot – reflected the propaganda message that all citizens were fighting
the war together on an equal footing, regardless of limiting factors such as class. Jeremy
Crang argues that the comradeship in the RAF partly transcended social origins.31 The
emphasis on comradeship and the lack of emphasis on hierarchy reinforced the RAF’s
popularity, which made it the perfect vehicle for propaganda. As the war progressed,
Bomber Command and the Air Ministry collaborated to produce propaganda messages
through films and newspaper reports demonstrating the RAF’s powerful public role in
disseminating propaganda.32 Jo Fox recognizes that ‘not only did air power pervade the
everyday space but it also came increasingly to dominate the cinematic space’.33 Feature
films and documentaries provided the vehicle for this message. Mark Connelly notes
that the film Target for Tonight (1941) reinforced the message that the Air Ministry
wished to portray to the public. The reaction to the film was unanimous praise.34
Other feature films that celebrated the Battle of Britain were produced during the war,
including The First of the Few (1942), which starred the highly popular British actor
Leslie Howard, and cemented the heroic efforts of the RAF in the public’s mind. It was
the most successful film screened in Britain in 1942.35
Pilots and the RAF maintained their cultural relevance after the war. Owing to the
prominence of the pilots during the conflict, and their central role in the propaganda
war, the audiences of The Undefeated were able to conceptualize an airman’s story as
it was easy to separate the pilot from the many thousands of individuals in the RAF.
A number of feature films made in Britain featured RAF pilots in a heroic role. Indeed,
it has been argued that the 1950s were the ‘heyday of the British war picture’.36 An
exception to the pilot as hero was the film Cage of Gold (1950), which featured an
ex-wing commander as a blackmailer. Other films such as Landfall (1949) dealt with
a pilot wrongly accused of sinking a British submarine. Later films such as The Dam
Busters (1955) and The Sound Barrier (1952) were about technology; The Sound
Barrier was about the scientific achievements made in flying after the Second World
War, and The Dam Busters celebrated aircraft technology, flying skills and heroism. It
related the story of a wartime success: the breaking down of dams in order to sabotage
Germany’s wartime production. In particular, The Dam Busters focussed heavily on
individual bravery, the relationship between the pilots and crew and their strength of
character when faced with the ultimate sacrifice. The theme of stoic, silent acceptance
in the face of danger and death was prevalent in many war films, and the Dam Busters’
pilots epitomized these quintessentially British heroic traits. These films combined the
scientific knowledge of the backroom boys with the bravery and ‘derring-do’ of pilots.
Christine Geraghty notes that ‘the fifties war film tends to place an emphasis on a small
male group, largely made up of officers and boffins’.37 The Undefeated exploited this
interest in war and the public’s memory of civilian bombing in the Second World War.

The Undefeated and the Ministry of Pensions

The Ministry of Pensions’ film output was relatively small compared to other
ministries that engaged public interest, such as the Ministry of Health. When a film
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Propaganda, Rehabilitation and Post-war Britain 215

about ‘pensions’ was commissioned, the Ministry of Pensions stipulated that one of
the objectives of The Undefeated was to demystify the process of seeking support for
disabilities caused by war.38 The ministry was established during the First World War
and had a poor reputation during the war and in the inter-war period for its miserly
award of pensions to the war disabled. Support for the war disabled was garnered from
charitable donations and the efforts of pressure groups such as the British Legion.39
Much of the public remembered the difficulties encountered by veterans in gaining
support owing to administrative complexities and harsh medical committees, so the
Ministry of Pensions endeavoured to transform its reputation for unfairness. Indeed,
in 1946, Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour and National Service, noted that after
the First World War voluntary associations had been responsible for the welfare for
disabled people, and that after the Second World War the government wanted to make
disabled people’s support a ‘state responsibility’.40 The Undefeated reminded viewers
that the sacrifices of those who had fought in the First World War were not forgotten,
and that support was available for them. In particular, the state no longer wanted
to ignore the needs of those who had fought and given their bodies and minds in
its service. In one scene, a veteran from the First World War attends a Ministry of
Pensions office, where he is informed that he will be able to make a retrospective claim
as a result of his war service. This scene specifically addressed the commonly held and
often truthful perception that First World War veterans were treated poorly by the
state. The Undefeated demonstrated the post-Second World War Ministry of Pensions’
positive response to the war disabled, partly to erase the memory of an unfair and
miserly ministry, and demonstrated the caring face of the modern post-war state for
all veterans (see Figure 10.1).
Support for veterans was reinforced by acts of parliament. The Disabled Persons
(Employment) Act of 1944 was a landmark piece of legislation, which assisted disabled
people to find work, as employment was considered fundamental to disabled people’s
self-esteem and value to his/her fellow citizens and the state. The National Advisory
Council on the Employment of the Disabled, which was established in 1945, the same
year the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act was enacted, supported legislation through
exhibitions and films in various locations around the country. In 1945, 230,000 people
in six cities saw the Back to Work exhibition.41 The Act encouraged all disabled people to
register; however, disabled veterans were given preferential treatment through reserved
occupations, loans and support for personal aids and home adaptations. Despite the
protected occupations of car park attendant and lift operator not being considered
very challenging jobs, disabled veterans were entitled to more assistance under this
legislation than their civilian counterparts.42 The Undefeated underpinned this message
of special support for veterans. The state demonstrated its commitment to disabled
veterans through the establishment of specific systems of infrastructure and benefits,
which The Undefeated illustrated as Joe Anderson progressed through it. Employment
was seen as the final successful outcome of rehabilitation, and The Undefeated reflected
this concentration on useful work as the culmination of the rehabilitative process
(see Figure  10.2). In the film, it is finally revealed that Joe Anderson is a Disabled
Resettlement Officer at the Ministry of Pensions, which supported the success of the
regime and demonstrated the efficacy of the rehabilitative process.
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216 Propaganda and Conflict

Figure 10.1  First World War veteran: A First World War veteran with worsening bronchitis
attends a Ministry of Pensions local office to gain assistance with his pension.
Source: The Undefeated, World Wide Pictures, Central Office of Information and Ministry of Pensions,
Director: Paul Dickson, 1950.

However positively the state wanted to make the application for fiscal support
for disabled veterans, it proved challenging to produce a compelling film which
focussed on form filling and the eligibility criteria that governed the application and
administration of pensions. In one scene, the director Paul Dickson circumvented
this by using comedy, as an administrator in a Ministry of Pensions Office looked for
the details of a client named ‘J. Smith’. Despite World Wide Pictures’ initial brief of
‘pensions’, it was to the process of rehabilitation which The Undefeated devoted itself.
During the war, rehabilitative regimes were systematized in order to achieve the
highest levels of functionality after wounding.43 Indeed, this organized, modern state
apparatus, underpinned by caring attitudes and appreciation for those disabled in war,
was what the government wished the public to see and appreciate through films like
The Undefeated.
The film focussed in detail on the therapeutic practices that disabled servicemen
experienced while in hospitals and rehabilitation units. Much of the filming was
done on location at three of the largest and most important rehabilitation centres,
Roehampton Hospital outside London, Rookwood in Cardiff and Stoke Mandeville
in Buckinghamshire. After wounding, Joe Anderson goes to Roehampton, which had
been established in 1915 as a limb-fitting hospital for amputees from the First World
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Propaganda, Rehabilitation and Post-war Britain 217

Figure 10.2  The end: Joe Anderson at work as a Disablement Resettlement Officer with a

client.
Source: The Undefeated, World Wide Pictures, Central Office of Information and Ministry of Pensions,
Director: Paul Dickson, 1950.

War.44 The camera takes the audience into a gymnasium where men were exercising
their stumps. The regimented way that the patients, who were all male, raised their
stumps up and down in unison to build up muscle maintained the connection between
rehabilitation and military service. Rehabilitative treatment remained closely allied to
exercise regimes in the Forces, and that connection between discipline and military
service demonstrated that rehabilitation had purpose and meaning in a way that those
who had been in the Forces related to. Although the scene was central in demonstrating
the physical regime of rehabilitation reminiscent of the Forces, a small percentage of
cinema goers interviewed as part of the survey said they found the scenes of men
exercising their stumps in a gymnasium upsetting (see Figure 10.3).45
During the war, Britain established itself as leading the medical field in rehabilitation.
There were a number of conferences hosted in Britain during and after the war, and
representatives of different nations came to Britain to see rehabilitation in practice. In
1945, the British Council for Rehabilitation was established to coordinate rehabilitative
therapies.46 After the war, rehabilitation centres remained a central core of the physical
and emotional regimes which encouraged the reintegration of disabled people into
work and social life. The Undefeated delivers a nationalistic propaganda message as it
depicts Britain’s status as a leader in rehabilitation; in the film, a group of international
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218 Propaganda and Conflict

Figure 10.3  Gymnasium: The gymnasium where men exercise their stumps.

Source: The Undefeated, World Wide Pictures, Central Office of Information and Ministry of Pensions,
Director: Paul Dickson, 1950.

visitors watch the therapeutic process to learn from the British method. Yet as the
public saw when they watched Joe Anderson’s endeavours, rehabilitation was more
often the story of individual and personal success. The individual nature of experience
in the system of rehabilitation reminded the public of private struggle, which brought
a humanizing aspect to the story. This was reflected in reports on The Undefeated. In
a piece on a screening of The Undefeated to a War Pensions Committee, the Yorkshire
Post highlighted the experience of a local man who was infected with polio while
serving. He was reported as being a ‘typical Ministry of Pensions case’, as he had taken
up a post as a lecturer at a university, yet still underwent rehabilitative treatment at a
Ministry of Pensions hospital.47 The message of The Undefeated was Britain’s leadership
in an international field of therapy as reflected in the success of rehabilitation, and the
way that disabled British veterans, with their unique set of characteristics, negotiated
their way through the regime and emerged triumphant.
Probably one of the most surprising aspects of The Undefeated was its focus on
mental trauma. War trauma, known as battle fatigue in the Second World War,
remained an issue for the Forces and resulted in significant numbers of discharges. In
the Second World War, one of the purposes of the systemized rehabilitative process was
the regaining of mental health through physical activity.48 The Ministry of Pensions had
come under criticism regarding its treatment of those who suffered shellshock in the
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Propaganda, Rehabilitation and Post-war Britain 219

First World War, so The Undefeated was the perfect propaganda vehicle for improving
its reputation in relation to mental trauma in war.
In The Undefeated, Joe Anderson’s mental trauma is demonstrated through his
inability to speak as he believes that his co-pilot Lofty had been killed in the crash in
which Anderson lost his legs. Anderson’s particular manifestation of mental trauma,
the loss of his voice, as opposed to some other type of behaviour, demonstrated British
resilience in the face of a highly traumatizing experience, maintaining the wartime
notion of keeping a stiff upper lip, even when faced with the loss of a comrade. This
stoic attitude, it was believed, had served Britain very well during the war, and its
persistence provided continuity to British self-identity. Andy Medhurst notes that
stoic silence in the face of war trauma was a common trope in cinematic films after
the war. He argues that British actors such as John Mills, John Gregson and Kenneth
More rehearsed their ‘tropes of masculine emotionlessness’ in films such as Scott of the
Antarctic.49 It was more British to lose one’s voice and be inarticulate about feelings than
it was to be overly emotional. When Joe Anderson is confronted towards the end of the
film with his friend Lofty, very much alive, he regains his voice immediately. This part
of the film provided a sense of drama which humanized Joe Anderson and reminded
audiences that war remained a highly traumatizing experience, yet it could also be
overcome. Moreover, as Pearson – a civil servant – was not a professional actor, his
silence for much of the film made his job easier and ensured that the film maintained a
professional veneer. Instead, the film was voiced by Leo Genn. The sense of drama was
maintained through technical means; Dickson employed what he termed ‘the Lady
in the Lake technique early on with point-of-view shots’, which hid the identity of
narrator until the final reveal, when the audience realizes that it was Joe Anderson who
is actually narrating the story.50
The Undefeated mirrored the experience of many servicemen who had returned
from the conflict. It focussed not only on the nature of physical trauma but also on the
emotional trauma that many suffered as a result of war. Those fighting men who had
experienced it, and the families of those who returned traumatized by war, understood
the connection between physical and emotional trauma. Therefore, Joe Anderson’s
physical wounding and associated mental trauma resonated with audiences. His
overcoming of physical disability by learning to walk on his artificial limbs, and the
regaining of his voice once he realized that his friend Lofty had not actually died in
the glider crash, demonstrated the power of this combination of practices to assist in
the rehabilitation and creation of another useful citizen for the nation. This made the
film resonate with the public, as many of them related to this wartime experience of
overcoming the trauma of war on a personal and individual level.

Another war

In June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea and, in its support of the United
States, Britain found itself embroiled in a conflict less than five years after the end
of the Second World War. Although Britain’s contribution of men and weapons in
Korea remained relatively small, the nation’s economy  – already saddled with war
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220 Propaganda and Conflict

debts incurred during the Second Word War  – was strained by the significant cost
of its support for NATO Cold War defences in Europe.51 Yet Britain owed a fiscal and
military debt to the United States. Hasty arrangements were made to support the
conflict; a British brigade was created from troops stationed in Hong Kong and sent
to Korea.52
The government was aware of the influence of films on public consciousness and
their potential to affect opinion. The conflict in Korea had unforeseen implications
for The Undefeated, a film produced to elicit positive attitudes about the Ministry of
Pensions and its support of disabled servicemen. After production was completed,
The Undefeated was shown privately on a number of occasions, including to Members
of Parliament in March. It was screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival in August
1950, when an initial survey was taken to assess its suitability for general audiences.
Reception to these early screenings was generally positive, but The Undefeated was
not placed on general release. In an article in the News Chronicle in October 1950,
film critic Richard Winnington reported that following The Undefeated’s screening
before ‘an appreciative audience of MPs in the House of Commons’ in March, there
had been a ‘blackout’ on putting it on general release, despite Associated British-Pathé’s
acquisition of screening rights for the film as a supporting picture.53 He called on the
COI and Associated British-Pathé to give ‘a clear statement when or if it will be shown
to the public who paid for it’.54 Winnington reinforces the sense of public ownership
of the information produced for its consumption which mirrored Sir Henry French’s
view: ‘The citizen has a right to be told, and the Government has a clear duty to tell
him, what it is doing in his name, and with his money and why.’55 The cinema industry
appeared oblivious to issues surrounding the film’s release; the Kinematograph Weekly
announced in November 1950 that the film was to be released as one of four films
produced by the COI, without making any reference to its controversial nature.
Winnington repeated his accusations regarding the state’s concern about the film’s
impact on willing recruitment to the Armed Services more forcefully in another film
review in December’s Sight and Sound, where he stated, ‘Films now must not only fight
their way through the industry and through the intransigence of distributors:  they
must also face vague but powerful political pressures.’56 He argued strongly that the
reason for the few screenings of The Undefeated was because depictions of disabled
soldiers damaged the recruitment drive for the Korean War.
The question of whether The Undefeated, with its ‘first class object lesson in the
comparative values of courage’,57 affected recruitment for the conflict in Korea
concerned the government, which worried about the resilience of the public, although
there was no official statement in this regard from any minister or from the government.
In October 1950, a survey of public reactions was taken in order to ascertain whether
or not the film should be made widely available to commercial cinema, in view of
its potential appeal to the public. The role of surveys was central in ascertaining the
public’s opinion and had been used extensively during the war. By 1950, the Social
Survey was well established in British social life. The reason for a survey to gauge the
public’s reaction to The Undefeated was to find out if viewing the war disabled was
upsetting, or indeed, as Winnington had pointed out, if the film produced a negative
response to National Service, which was extended from eighteen months to 2 years in
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Propaganda, Rehabilitation and Post-war Britain 221

1950 as a consequence of British involvement in the Korean War. In order to assess

The Undefeated’s suitability for full release, the film was shown in thirteen locations
between 16 and 18 October 1950, and surveys were taken following the screenings in
Wigan, Huddersfield, Ipswich and Plymouth.58 The reason for the choice of locations
for the surveys was not explained.59 In total, 161 interviews of people who had seen the
film were completed, and these were compared with a control group of 160 who knew
nothing about the film and had not seen it.60
In part, Winnington’s accusation of state concerns surrounding the potential impact
of The Undefeated on recruitment for the Forces was correct. The final report published
from the survey taken in October stated, ‘It might cause discomfort . . . and the sight
of disablement might lead to some adverse effect upon the recruiting drive, or cause
worry among parents and relatives undergoing their period of National Service.’61
Richard Vinen notes that newspapers including the Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, Daily
Express and Daily Mail attacked conscription, and from that he concludes that ‘readers
of newspaper articles might well have got the impression that peacetime conscription
was almost universally unpopular’.62 Yet, Gallup polls taken in the first six months of
the war reported broad-based support for the conflict in Korea.63
The response to The Undefeated was generally positive among the two groups, those
who had seen the film and those who had not (to whom the outline of the plot and the
story was explained). Although some members of the public found the film upsetting,
many of those surveyed felt that it was a lesson for them to be reminded about the
plight of those disabled as a result of war. The Social Survey report noted,

It seems true to say, for many who found the film at all disturbing or moving, the
experience of seeing it was felt to be salutary  – a reminder of things too easily
forgotten, perhaps an assuagement of an unconscious sense of guilt arising from
the disturbing subject of war disablement.64

From the responses, it is apparent that many individuals related to the characters and
the situations in The Undefeated. A  significant number of adults had served in the
Forces or as part of the war effort, or had been affected by bombing, disruption and
privations, so the impact of the war resonated with them. Furthermore, in the case
of men who were surveyed, the locations, experiences and characters were familiar,
reminding them of their wartime service. As Raymond Durgnat points out, two world
wars and post-war conscription framed many of the social experiences of men,65 and
this was evident in some of the responses. One 55-year-old shift foreman who served
in the Second World War said the film ‘made me feel a bit shaky; and I think it brought
a lot of memories back’. A  retired Army captain said, ‘You couldn’t help crying, it
touched you so bad.’66
Responses from the survey reinforced the Ministry of Pension’s successful
transmission of its message. One respondent to the survey, a housewife of age fifty-
seven, said, ‘Should be shown to help other Service men and women, and give the
general public a good idea of what is done for ex-Service people who are disabled.’67
Another said, ‘Well I reckon it was marvellous work to see how the men persevere. In
fact, I saw a lot of it again. They did an excellent job. I can’t put it into words really.
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222 Propaganda and Conflict

The money wasn’t wasted.’68 The state’s message through films such as The Undefeated
ensured that the public remained positive about levels of support for disabled
servicemen, which may have inspired confidence if a soldier was wounded and
disabled in the Korean conflict.
The state’s concerns that the depiction of disabled war veterans might affect the
numbers of recruits for the Korean War were evident in the questions asked in the
survey. Three of the eleven questions were framed around the impact of the film on
recruitment. However, a significant percentage of the survey’s respondents answered
that the film would have little impact on the numbers of volunteers to the Services.
Indeed, 68 per cent of those who saw the film said it would have no impact on
recruitment, and 60 per cent of those who had not seen the film agreed with them. The
report concluded that screening The Undefeated would have ‘no important influence
upon recruitment to the Services, although there is a possibility that it might have
some effect upon a few, marginal, potential volunteers’.69
The positive response to the film from the surveys undertaken in the four locations
ensured a full Associated British Cinema release. The Undefeated was screened
throughout the country in 1951 and early 1952. After its general release, reviews of the
film were good, and there was no further mention in the press that the film might have
an adverse impact on the numbers of men volunteering for the Services. The Undefeated
was compared favourably to contemporary Hollywood films such as The Men and
Bright Victory, which appeared in 1950 and 1951, respectively. Moreover, the British
press considered The Undefeated more authentic than the two Hollywood productions.
The Times reported that the two American films did not have ‘the courage to go through
to the end . . . without the help of a fictional story, a romantic interest’.70 Instead of a
passionate love interest and the added thrill that provided to audiences, Joe Anderson
is married and his wife attends medical appointments with him (see Figure 10.4); she
speaks to doctors regarding her concerns about Joe’s emotional trauma, manifested in
his voice loss. In The Undefeated, there were few roles for women: they played wives and
helpers and were not portrayed as romantic love interests or central characters. It was
noted in one newspaper that, unlike The Men, The Undefeated ‘deals with the technical
and surface sides of the subject, rather than the inner conflict of the disabled’.71 Other
reviews, while praising the film, also pointed out the limits of its documentary style.
One review noted, ‘It does not quite succeed in achieving the very difficult transition –
the problem of all documentary – between the impersonal, authoritative explanation of
the Ministry’s work, and the personal study of individuals.’72 Leo Enticknap notes,

The ‘documentary realist’ tradition had been heavily promoted by commentators

and press critics as an expression of indigenous cultural values in a propaganda
context, both in the promotion of non-fiction films themselves, and the
incorporation of themes and styles deemed to be more ‘real’ than the alternative
of Hollywood escapism.73

This concentration on the detail of disabled veterans’ physical rehabilitation meant

that some reviewers described The Undefeated as ‘grim’. However, The Times defended
the film’s approach, reporting in 1951,
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Propaganda, Rehabilitation and Post-war Britain 223

Figure 10.4  Couple: Joe Anderson and his wife leaving Roehampton Hospital.

Source: The Undefeated, World Wide Pictures, Central Office of Information and Ministry of Pensions,
Director: Paul Dickson, 1950.

The Men was a full-scale fictional film, while The Undefeated runs for half an hour
or so and could be regarded simply as an advertisement for the work done by
the Ministry of Pensions. Indeed, if it were a bad, an insensitive, a sentimental
film, that is precisely what it would be, but while the Ministry of Pensions plays a
considerable part in it, it is a great deal more than that.74

While recognizing the propaganda message of the film represented by the central
role of the Ministry of Pensions, the journalist in The Times acknowledged the skill
in making a propaganda film that was acceptable for the public. Indeed, the powerful
message of The Undefeated was so realistic that the authorities were concerned about
its upsetting subject matter, its impact on National Service and public attitudes to the
Korean War.

Conclusion

Despite the delays in its release, its documentary style and the grim nature of its subject,
The Undefeated was critically acclaimed and won the BAFTA for Best Documentary in
1951. Government propaganda was vital to the delivery of information in post-war
224

224 Propaganda and Conflict

Britain, and the established channels opened during the war continued to serve the
needs of the post-war Attlee government after 1945. In order to appeal to audiences,
director Paul Dickson employed a wartime narrative familiar to an audience whose
experience of the conflict was at the forefront of recent memory. The Undefeated
detailed Joe Anderson’s rehabilitation, which reflected the experience of significant
numbers of individuals after the conflict. Although The Undefeated was a relatively short
documentary film, it was found to be superior when compared to feature films from
Hollywood, with their concentration on internal emotional struggles and romantic
relationships. The irony of The Undefeated, which was produced as a propaganda
documentary drama whose purpose was to inform the public about the work of the
Ministry of Pensions, and its ongoing support for the disabled veterans from the First
and Second World Wars, was its potential to be a propaganda film affecting the
number of recruits for the war in Korea. Without the Social Survey – which reassured
the authorities that The Undefeated would not impact on support for the conflict in
Korea – the film would not have achieved commercial release. The tension between
public ‘ownership’ of government productions, a powerful propaganda message and
the potential impact of that message on another conflict was played out through The
Undefeated.

Notes
1 See David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1985);
James Chapman, The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945
(London, 1998); Jo Fox, Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War
II Cinema (Oxford, 2007); Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take
It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford, 1986); P. M. Taylor (ed.),
Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War (New York, 1988).
2 David Welch, Persuading the People: British Propaganda in World War II (London,
2016), p. 16.
3 Chapman, The British at War, p. 4.
4 Fox, Film Propaganda in Britain, p. 4.
5 See Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–1951 (London, 1993), pp. 87–118.
6 William Crofts, Coercion or Persuasion? Propaganda in Britain after 1945 (London,
1989), p. 12.
7 William Beveridge, ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’, Cmd. 6404 (London, 1942)
(the ‘Beveridge Report’).
8 Mariel Grant, ‘Towards a Central Office of Information: Continuity and Change in
British Government Information Policy, 1939–51’, Journal of Contemporary History,
34: 1 (1999), p. 50.
9 Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London and
New York, 1994), p. 83.
10 Robert James, Popular Culture and Working-Class Taste in Britain, 1930–39: A Round
of Cheap Diversions? (Manchester, 2010), pp. 57–60.
11 Jack Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale, IL, 2000), p. 258.
12 Kinematograph Weekly, 9 November 1950, p. 12.
 225

Propaganda, Rehabilitation and Post-war Britain 225

13 The French Committee, ‘Cost of Home Information Services’, Cmnd. 7836

(London, 1949).
14 Crofts, Coercion or Persuasion?, p. 231.
15 Thomas Fife Clark, The Central Office of Information (London, 1970), p. 39.
16 Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), House of Commons, 4 December 1950, vol. 482,
cc. 13–16.
17 Ibid., 7 December 1951, vol. 494, cc. 2789–97.
18 The National Archives, Kew (TNA), INF 6/553, ‘The Undefeated (Overcoming
Physical Disability) 1950’, Letter from C. L. Paine to the Secretary, World Wide
Pictures Limited, 25 June 1949.
19 Patrick Russell and James Piers Taylor (eds), Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film
in Post-War Britain (London, 2010), p. 39.
20 TNA, INF 6/553, Letter from C. L. Paine to the Secretary, World Wide Pictures
Limited, 8 July 1949.
21 Crofts, Coercion or Persuasion?, p. 231.
22 ‘MP to Question Cost of Proposed Ministry of Pensions Film’, Evening Post, 2
November 1949, p. 7.
23 ‘Legless Man to Star in Film’, Press and Journal, 29 August 1950, p. 6.
24 Richard Overy, The Air War 1939–1945 (London, 1980), p. 207.
25 Hilary Aidan St George Saunders, The Battle of Britain, August–October 1940: An Air
Ministry Record of the Great Days from 8th August–31st October 1940 (London, 1941);
J. M. Spaight, The Battle of Britain, 1940, with a foreword by Marshal of the Royal Air
Force Viscount Trenchard (London, 1941); see S. P. MacKenzie, The Battle of Britain
on Screen (Edinburgh, 2007), p. 25.
26 Richard Overy, The Battle of Britain: Myth and Reality (London, 2010), p. 120.
27 Geoff Eley, ‘Funding the People’s War: Film, British Collective Memory, and World
War II’, American Historical Review, 106: 3 (2001), pp. 818–38.
28 Richard Vinen, National Service: Conscription in Britain 1945–1963 (London,
2014), p. 57.
29 Garry Campion, The Good Fight: Battle of Britain Propaganda and the Few
(Basingstoke, 2009), p. 312.
30 Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force (Oxford,
2008), p. 22.
31 Jeremy Crang, The British Army and the People’s War, 1939–1945 (Manchester, 2000),
pp. 59–61.
32 See Richard Overy, ‘Making and Breaking Morale: British Political Warfare and
Bomber Command in the Second World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 26: 3
(2015), pp. 370–99.
33 Fox, Film Propaganda in Britain, p. 93.
34 Mark Connelly, Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World
War II (London, 2001), p. 5.
35 Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 2000), p. 441.
36 MacKenzie, The Battle of Britain, p. 47.
37 Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’
(London, 2000), p. 181.
38 Leo Enticknap, ‘ “I Don’t Think He Did Anything After That”: Paul Dickson’, in Patrick
Russell and James Piers Taylor (eds), Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-
War Britain (London, 2010), p. 158.
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226 Propaganda and Conflict

39 See Graham Wootton, The Politics of Influence: British Ex-Servicemen, Cabinet

Decisions and Cultural Change 1917–1957 (London, 1963).
40 Manchester Guardian, 6 January 1946.
41 TNA, LAB 18/148, Minutes of the Meeting of the National Council for the
Employment of the Disabled, 10 March 1946, ‘Disabled Persons (Employment)
Act, 1944: Minutes and Agenda of National Advisory Council; Establishment of
Committee on Training and Rehabilitation’.
42 Julie Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation in Britain: Soul of a Nation
(Manchester, 2011), p. 10.
43 Ibid.
44 See Helen Alper (ed.), A History of Queen Mary’s University Hospital Roehampton
(Roehampton, 1997).
45 TNA, RG 23/165, Bertram Hutchinson, ‘The Social Survey: Audience Reaction to the
Film The Undefeated’, Central Office of Information, No. 164, 1950, p. 3.
46 The Lancet, 3 March 1943, p. 285.
47 ‘Heroes of Everyday Life’, Yorkshire Post, 20 December 1950, p. 1.
48 See Julie Anderson, ‘ “Turned into Taxpayers”: Paraplegia, Rehabilitation and Sport
at Stoke Mandeville 1944–1956’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38: 3 (2003), pp.
461–76.
49 Andy Medhurst, ‘Myths of Consensus and Fables of Escape: British Cinema 1940–
1951’, in Jim Furth (ed.), Labour’s Promised Land? Culture and Society in Labour
Britain 1945–51 (London, 1995), p. 298.
50 Interview with Paul Dickson (National Film School, Beaconsfield, 1987) in David
Berry, Wales in the Cinema: The First Hundred Years (Cardiff, 1996), p. 249.
51 Hennessy, Never Again, p. 409.
52 Callum MacDonald, Britain and the Korean War (Oxford, 1990), p. 22.
53 Richard Winnington, ‘A Film All Britain Should See – Now!’, News Chronicle, 13
October 1950, p. 2.
54 Ibid.
55 The French Committee, ‘Cost of Home Information Services’.
56 Richard Winnington, ‘The Men and the Undefeated’, Sight and Sound, 19: 8
(December 1950), p. 329.
57 ‘Film Reviews: The Undefeated’, Cinema News and Property Gazette, 75: 6120
(8 November 1950), p. 13.
58 TNA, RG 23/165, Hutchinson, ‘The Social Survey’, p. 1.
59 The population of the north went to the cinema more regularly than those from other
areas of the country, which may have been the reason for the selection of two cinemas
in the north of England. See Hideo Ichihashi, ‘Working-Class Leisure in English
Towns 1945–1960: With Special Reference to Coventry and Bolton’ (PhD thesis,
University of Warwick, 1994), p. 325.
60 TNA, RG 23/165, Hutchinson, ‘The Social Survey’, p. 1.
61 Ibid.
62 Vinen, National Service, p. 52.
63 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–1951 (London, 2008), p. 458.
64 TNA, RG 23/165, Hutchinson, ‘The Social Survey’, p. 2.
65 Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England (London, 1970), p. 89.
66 TNA, RG 23/165, Hutchinson, ‘The Social Survey’, p. 4.
67 Ibid., p. 5.
68 Ibid., p. 2.
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Propaganda, Rehabilitation and Post-war Britain 227

69 Ibid., p. 7.
70 ‘New Films in London’, The Times, 26 March 1951, p. 8.
71 ‘Popularity of British Films’, Yorkshire Post and Leeds Mercury, 29 December
1950, p. 2.
72 ‘The Undefeated’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 17: 199 (August 1950), p. 123.
73 Enticknap, ‘Paul Dickson’, p. 157.
74 ‘Leicester Square Cinema’, The Times, 29 December 1950, p. 4.
228

228
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11

The British Council behind the Iron

Curtain: Cultural propaganda in
early Cold War Poland
Edward Corse

Introduction

The British Council had been formed by the British government in 1934 to ‘promote
British life and thought’ abroad. As I set out in my A Battle for Neutral Europe, which
examined the work of the British Council during the Second World War in Europe,
the Council often shied away from using the term ‘propaganda’. It proactively made
a distinction between its work and propaganda in the ‘generally accepted derogatory
sense of that word’. However, many, including Lord Lloyd of Dolobran (British Council
chairman from 1937 to 1941), accepted that, despite disliking the word itself, the
Council’s purpose in promoting British life and thought was propaganda of a sort,
and that applying the term ‘cultural propaganda’ to the Council’s work was a helpful
distinction from the more bombastic political kind.1
In my analysis of the term ‘cultural propaganda’, I identified a number of existing
definitions. For example, Philip M. Taylor had defined propaganda as ‘the promotion
and dissemination of national aims and achievements in a general rather than
specifically economic or political form, although it is ultimately designed to promote
economic and political interests’.2 Other historians, notably David Welch, Nick Cull
and David Culbert, recognized cultural propaganda as a ‘long-term process intended
to promote a better understanding of the nation . . . with a view to creating goodwill’.3
I concluded that through its work the British Council, at least during the Second
World War in Europe, fitted within these definitions of cultural propaganda. Other
terms may be preferred such as ‘cultural diplomacy’ or ‘soft power’, but these terms
are essentially interchangeable or have similar purposes.4 I also developed a model of
cultural propaganda based on three pillars – ‘perception’, ‘substance’ and ‘organisation’ –
all of which I suggested are required for cultural propaganda to function effectively.5
Just prior to the Second World War, the British Council had put in place the
organizational framework for promoting cultural propaganda through opening a
number of offices and institutes across Europe such as in Portugal, Poland, Romania
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230 Propaganda and Conflict

and Yugoslavia in order to disseminate cultural propaganda. However, many of these

offices and institutes, particularly those in Central and Eastern Europe, had to be
closed rapidly again as war raged across the continent from 1939 onwards, limiting
its ability to carry out cultural propaganda to the neutral countries of Spain, Portugal,
Turkey and Sweden.
While the Council had its critics, particularly in the form of Lord Beaverbrook
(who held four ministerial roles during the Second World War and was a major
newspaper proprietor owning, among other titles, the Daily Express), many did see
some value during the war of creating sympathy for Britain in neutral countries.
However, the immediate peacetime prospects for the Council did not look promising.
The prime minister, Winston Churchill, stated to the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden,
in November 1944, that the British Council ‘are certainly one of the objects ripe for
retrenchment when the war comes to an end’.6 A fuller review of the Council’s work
was conducted in early 1945 by Findlater Stewart and although his report was neither
accepted by the Foreign Office nor seen by the British Council, it was clear that the
future of the Council and the role of British cultural propaganda were uncertain in the
post-war world.7
However, following the conclusion of the war the Foreign Office, at least, was keen
for the Council to regain the ground that it had lost and even looked for it to expand
into countries it had had little or no opportunity to influence previously. Sir Alexander
Cadogan, permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, stated in early 1945, just
over a month after Churchill’s dismissive statement,

Our [the Foreign Office’s] opportunities for exercising direct political influence in
most of the countries of Eastern Europe are likely to be limited. Indirect means
of influence such as the long-term work of the British Council, will, therefore be
very valuable.8

Poland was one country where the Council had opened one of its very first institutes
prior to the war, and where both the Foreign Office and the Council wished to reopen
activities. Poland had been devastated by the Second World War and there remained
significant social dislocation and lack of basic needs throughout the country, not least
in the capital itself, which had been the subject of a suppressed uprising, shelling
and general bombardment.9 Poland had also moved westwards, not only taking its
border with Germany up to the rivers Oder and Neisse but also losing a vast swathe of
territory in the East to its so-called liberator, the Soviet Union. In short, it was a very
uncertain post-war situation for both the Council and for Poland in new territory and
new circumstances, with both taking a leap into the unknown.
Already by the summer of 1945, the British ambassador to Poland, Victor
Cavendish Bentinck, had made a plea to the Council for them to send a representative
to the country, stating that the representative ‘will find himself almost embarrassingly
popular . . . all sorts have expressed to us their desire for a speedy resumption of cultural
relations with the West’.10 In October 1945, David Shillan, who had been posted to the
Council’s offices in Lisbon during the Second World War, made an exploratory visit
to Poland ‘to examine the possibilities of Council work and to advise as to what was
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The British Council behind the Iron Curtain 231

needed to carry it out’. Building on the initial work of Bentinck, Shillan spent a month
in Warsaw and Krakow building up relationships, which could then be developed
further by a more permanent representative in the country.11

Early years
The British Council identified George Chandos Bidwell as the right man to lead its
team in this new Poland as the British Council’s representative. Bidwell was born
in Reading in 1905 and during his early career had written articles for papers and
magazines such as the Reading Standard and Good Housekeeping. Once war had
broken out in December 1939, he joined the army and took part in the North African
campaign before joining the British Council in the Middle East.12
In Cairo, Bidwell had gained a reputation as an effective manager, and his
reputation was furthered by his role as acting British Council representative in Persia
for four months in the summer of 1945. In October 1945, he was promoted to assistant
representative in Warsaw and travelled to Poland on 8 January 1946, then appointed
representative later that year.13
In Bidwell’s first report back from Poland in February 1946, he gave a description
of the conditions in Warsaw:

The three London Appointed members of the Council’s staff in Warsaw are housed
in three small bedrooms in the partly restored Hotel Bristol. The hotel has no
water, primitive sanitation and indifferent cleaning service. In the passages are
gaping holes and heaps of rubble . . . Warsaw is, literally, a ruin.14

Despite the conditions, the British Council was most definitely in demand, as
Bentinck had predicted. Bidwell noted that already 750 copies of Britain To-day (the
British Council’s newsletter), 100 copies of Monthly Science News and fifty copies
of the British Medical Bulletin had been ordered. He stated that during the recent
war the Germans had deliberately destroyed Polish libraries and were determined
to particularly eradicate British books, which meant that ‘the calls for presentations
[was] exceptionally heavy . . . [and that it was] hard to refuse so many deserving
appeals’. Bidwell had to necessarily prioritize his efforts and concentrated on
building up the universities of Warsaw and other major cities, as well as schools and
societies.15
It was not just the practical issues of building up libraries and coping with Warsaw’s
devastation that was a problem, however. Clearly there was a broader political issue,
not only with Poland but also with all of Eastern Europe, in that the Soviet Union
and not Britain was the ‘liberator’ of these countries. Churchill and Eden had agreed
with Josef Stalin at the Fourth Moscow Conference in October 1944 that Poland
would move westwards as described above, and that the rest of Eastern Europe
(except Czechoslovakia) would be carved up along the lines of the ‘percentages
agreement’ nominally recognizing de facto Soviet control over most of the land
that it had ‘liberated’.16 Attempts were made in 1944 to draw together the Polish
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government-in-exile based in London and the Soviet-backed government17 but these

attempts could only go so far when Soviet dominance over Eastern Europe was near
absolute.
Bidwell noted that, in recognition of this situation, the Council’s work ‘must be
done quietly and cautiously. Friends – both English and Polish – frequently emphasize
that point. There are powers and influences to which our work, if not unwelcome, is at
least a cause of suspicion.’18 On 11 July 1946, he reported that there was a new ruling in
Poland, which meant that all matters to do with foreign organizations of any kind had
to be approved by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. ‘Political trends’, he noted,
‘have tended to make results more difficult to achieve.’19 The immediate ‘political trend’
that Bidwell was referring to was the People’s Referendum (also known as the ‘Three
Times Yes’ referendum, as three constitutional questions were asked) which took place
on 30 June 1946, in which the results are widely regarded to have been falsified.20
The nationalization decree (adopted January 1946)  and Three-Year Plan (adopted
September 1946) also led to ever-increasing control by the Soviet-backed authorities.21
In his first annual report in early 1947, Bidwell gave a description of the conditions
under which the Council was working in Poland:

The problems are . . . constant anti-British press campaigns, the ill-disguised watch
kept on us by the Secret Police, the fear of our contacts that too open association
with us will have serious consequences for them (one at least now languishes in
gaol), and the certainty that any tactical error we may make will be pounced upon
and used against us – these factors do not make for any easy atmosphere in which
to carry out cultural work . . . It is hoped that a cultural convention may remove
the official barriers. If that should fail, only a policy of seeking and exploiting the
gaps in the fences remains.22

But the political winds were not necessarily all driving in the same direction. In
November 1946, Bidwell reported that there was a split in opinion about the British
Council in Polish ministerial circles, with the Polish prime minister Edward Osóbka-
Morawski (who was at this time a socialist rather than a communist) opening the Tate
Gallery Exhibition organized by the Council, but the Minister of Culture refusing to
attend. Bidwell was frustrated by the Polish government generally dragging its feet
on all important decisions, owing to struggles between the various factions alive in
Poland. In particular, it took many months to get a final decision on whether the
Council could occupy certain premises or not.23 He stated,

We are conscious that we can only put out our maximum effort and achieve an
optimum result when we are welcomed and assisted as much by the Government
as by the people.24

In Bidwell’s January 1947 report, it was clear that things had changed rather
dramatically. There had been increasing anti-British sentiments emanating from the
Polish government in the run-up to the elections due on 17 January. On 14 January,
the Starosta (mayor) and Militia turned up at the British Council offices with a
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The British Council behind the Iron Curtain 233

presidential eviction order which demanded that the ground floor of their offices
should be evacuated immediately. As a result of government in-fighting, the order
was then postponed after an appeal, with the Polish Ministries of Education, Culture
and the Socialist Party supporting the Council’s position. The order came into force,
eventually, on 31 January.
There were clearly tensions within the Polish government and its policy was not
uniform. Remarkably, the Council was up and running again by 9 February, and
Bidwell was able to predict that the election and the appointment of the Polish Cabinet
showed indications that there were elements of the Polish government who wanted a
closer and more friendly collaboration with the Council.25 Indeed, in his March 1947
report, Bidwell noted that actually the events of January 1947 appeared to be rather
transient. He noted ‘the difficult conditions experienced during and immediately after
the election period are steadily receding . . . the whole atmosphere is easier and more
favourable to our progress’.26 A year later Bidwell was reporting that, while the situation
of the Council’s premises remained unresolved, there had been significant growth in
the Council’s activities.27 A few months after that the Council successfully negotiated
the reconstruction and lease of a new property at 59 Aleje Jerozolimskie, where the
Council was until 2015.28 It appeared that the events of January 1947 were firmly in the
past, at least for now.

Bidwell’s defection

The next crisis the Council faced in Warsaw was caused not by the Polish authorities
but by their own representative. Bidwell announced in letters to the chairman of the
British Council, Sir Ronald Adam, on 2 June and to the new British ambassador to
Poland, Sir Donald St. Clair Gainer, on 4 June 1949 that he had become a Polish citizen
and resigned.29 With his letter to Adam he enclosed his statement to the press that was
to be issued on 5 June and then asked for reimbursement of untaken leave of at least
ninety days – a number so large that it can surely only be regarded as provocative.30
Bidwell’s resignation itself, the manner in which it occurred and the fact that
Bidwell made a statement to the press which received wide publicity in Poland and the
Soviet Union clearly created a deep suspicion that his move was politically motivated.
Gainer’s initial analysis was that the statement

purports to justify his action in terms of Communist claptrap of the vulgarest

[sic] and most blatant kind  – including not only the usual vituperation of the
United States but equally grotesque and slanderous attacks on H[is] M[ajesty’s]
G[overnment], the Foreign Service and the British Council itself, whose work here
may of course be very seriously, and perhaps irretrievably damaged by Bidwell’s
performance.31

Gainer was clearly, and understandably, angry. But he was also confused and shocked.
He wrote to the Foreign Office stating ‘[t]‌he shock . . . to me of Bidwell’s totally
unexpected action was very severe’. He judged that Bidwell’s action was something that
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234 Propaganda and Conflict

‘none of us could have foretold’ and wanted to believe it was caused by a personal issue
rather than a political one.32 Confusion and shock were shared by the Foreign Office in
London. J. P. G. Finch wrote to Gainer on 16 June declaring that Bidwell’s actions had
‘naturally caused us considerable disquiet. This is the most deplorable affair.’33 There
was clearly a lot of head-scratching around Bidwell’s motives. G. A. Carey-Foster, head
of the Security Department at the Foreign Office, noted in a letter to the embassy in
Vienna that Bidwell was regarded by the Council as one of its ‘best men in the field’
and despite being known to have some ‘rather leftish sympathies’ and his suspicious
marriage to a Polish woman, ‘his work did not suffer and he was on good terms with
the Ambassador and his various other British colleagues’.34
Adam also wanted to believe that Bidwell, whom he regarded as a personal friend
(having visited Bidwell in Warsaw himself in April 1948),35 would not have resigned
if it were not for ‘matrimonial entanglements’, and that he had not made a political
defection. He had to be persuaded by the Foreign Office that sending a reply to the
letter he had received from Bidwell, let alone one which wished that he be ‘happy and
successful in his new life’, was inadvisable.36
So what had been going on? The excuse both Adam and Gainer, as well as many
officials at the Foreign Office, wanted to believe was that the defection had something
to do with Bidwell’s marriage arrangements. It is true that a complicated situation had
arisen when he had divorced his first British wife in Poland (which was recognized
in Polish but not British law) before marrying his second, Polish, wife. Bidwell had
then tried to make his second wife a British subject, but she had been refused by the
British authorities on the grounds that under British law she could not be his wife. The
only way he could regularize his marriage and legitimize any children was through
becoming a Polish citizen. Indeed, some months later, both MI5 and the Foreign Office
appeared to be working on the assumption that his defection was caused by personal
circumstances and was not political.37
But was there more to it than that? Gainer had clearly forgotten that he had himself
noted his concern about Bidwell some seventeen months previously in January
1948. While not predicting a defection, Gainer had demonstrated that Bidwell was
struggling to maintain a pro-British message while maintaining popularity with the
Polish authorities, and that Bidwell considered the latter to be more important.38
Indeed, in his letter to Adam, Bidwell actually denied it had anything to do with
his marriage and its complications, pointing to his press statement as explaining his
motives. It is worth, therefore, taking a moment to consider Bidwell’s statement. On
closer inspection, it could appear to be more anti-British  – or at least anti-British
establishment – than anti-British Council, which is an important distinction. On the
British Council, Bidwell stated,

[A]‌ny work which the Council can attempt [is made] farcical . . . I have come to
the conclusion that the British Council, even though it is by intention a non-
political body, may at any moment find itself working against the interests of the
government of any country whose ideology is different from that of the United
Kingdom . . . [T]he British Council cannot escape confusion with the British
Government [and therefore] my work here is no longer possible.39
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The British Council behind the Iron Curtain 235

It would seem that he was still a supporter of the British Council’s stated purpose of
extending cultural ties in a non-political context but believed it was being used as an
anti-communist tool of the British government, a move that he did not support.
Having said that, the Foreign Office noted that, following his defection, Bidwell had
taken up a new translation job and had written articles for the Polish press. Officials
were relieved to report that, despite what appeared in his press statement, ‘none of
these [new articles] so far has been particularly anti-British in tone or content’.40 In
fact, according to intelligence received from observers of Bidwell in his new job, it
was reported that he was advising Polish radio not to ridicule the Royal Navy in one
broadcast because it would go down badly in Britain. He was overruled by his Polish
bosses, but, still, he had made the stand.41
So although he claimed he had defected because the British Council was being too
political and perhaps too British, his initial actions – at least following his defection –
suggested he was not being active against Britain. It could appear from this that Bidwell
had made his move due to his marriage situation and that his press statement, far from
being a statement to be taken at face value, was designed to make himself attractive to
the Polish authorities. He was, after all, deciding to spend the rest of his life as a Polish
citizen. It could seem through his actions that he was not necessarily turning his back
on the purpose of the British Council, or indeed on Britain, and wholly defecting to
Poland in a political sense.
The Foreign Office certainly wanted to believe that that was the case, but it became
more and more difficult for that view to remain plausible. In 1950, Bidwell published
a book in Polish  – Wybrałem Polskę  – which translated as ‘I chose Poland’.42 The
impression the book gives was that, despite his previous protestations and the analysis
by the Foreign Office and MI5, it was not just personal difficulties Bidwell was trying
to resolve by becoming a Polish citizen but that the move also had political reasoning
behind it. Again, it could be that he recognized that he needed to do something
quite radical, such as publishing this book, to ensure he was accepted by his adopted
homeland, rather than being genuinely political: it is difficult to be sure. But through
publishing his book, and the detail into which it went, it was becoming more and more
difficult to accept that his was not a political move.
The Foreign Office carefully analysed the book and its reviews. It was reported that
Bidwell believed that behind the noble slogans of the British Council

there [was] nothing except the cruel interests of the British bourgeoisie, that
anybody who tried to implement the official slogans of that cultural outpost would
soon be disarmed by representatives of the British regime. But his acquaintance
with Poland, with her new life, created by the hands of the working class, enables
him this time to draw different conclusions from a better society.43

The claim in Bidwell’s book – that the British Embassy in Warsaw wanted him only to
cultivate relationships with those who were deemed to be favourable to Britain and
to understand the subjects occupying the attention of Polish scientists which were
needed for intelligence purposes – was not denied by the embassy. The Foreign Office
acknowledged that there was a difference of opinion between himself and the embassy
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236 Propaganda and Conflict

about the object of the British Council’s work.44 The focus of Bidwell’s claim was the
recollection of a conversation at his flat in February 1947 between himself, Frank
Ashton Gwatkin (a Foreign Office inspector) and Kenneth Johnstone (director of the
European Department of the British Council) during which it was made clear that the
Council was to aim to influence as many people as possible in favour of the UK, so as to
have supporters in Poland in time of war. The embassy in Warsaw now admitted ‘[a]‌s
you will see Mr Bidwell’s book is not based entirely on fiction’.45 Perhaps his defection
should not have come as such a surprise at all.
Whether Bidwell’s actions were a surprise or not, and whether his was a political
move or not, the Foreign Office considered a range of options to try to ensure that this
was an isolated incident. In response to suggestions that the Council should be closed
down entirely in Eastern Europe for fear of similar incidents elsewhere, Gainer noted
that he did ‘not regard the folly and treachery of an individual as any reason for not
doing our utmost to keep going the very useful work which the Council, in spite of
everything, has done in this country’.46 Carey-Foster agreed, noting,

I do not think there is any question of [the Council being closed down]. The British
Council has on the whole done useful work in [Soviet] orbit countries where it is
the main, or only, agency for attempting to publicize the British as opposed to the
Eastern way of life.47

Interestingly, however, Carey-Foster suggested that

these recent events [will mean that] it is no longer very probable that the British
Council will for much longer enjoy the reputation in Satellite countries of being
the spearhead of the British Intelligence Service. This is unfortunate but there does
not seem to be any way of keeping up the pretence.48

It would be clear enough, he thought, that, if questioned by the Poles, Bidwell knew
very little about British activities in Poland outside of the work of the Council.
Efforts to contain Bidwell’s defection were largely but not entirely effective. For
example, one British Council-sponsored lecturer and his wife in Finland were quickly
found to be Communist Party members.49 The Foreign Office also decided to keep
an eye on Rhys Ellias in Budapest; he had been a close associate of Bidwell while in
Poland.50 But the Foreign Office’s efforts could not prevent a second defection just
eight months later, on 4 February 1950, by a British Council doctor in Prague, Dr
Arna Rides. Rides defected to the Czechoslovak Communist Party and attacked the
Council for conducting an anti-Czech policy backed by the Foreign Office. She stated
that she

was worried by the not sincere [sic] policy of the British Council. Employees of
the British Council maintained contact exclusively with enemies of the people’s
state. [The British Government maintains] activities directed against USSR and
against other peace-loving countries. The British Council is the instrument of such
a policy.51
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The British Council behind the Iron Curtain 237

It was a view not dissimilar to that stated by Bidwell the previous year, and indeed
Rides referenced Bidwell in her press conference. Any further defections were,
however, prevented. This was partly due to the efforts of the Foreign Office and the
British Council but also, as we shall see, because in most parts of Eastern Europe the
Council was soon to be expelled entirely.

Activities of the British Council

So what were the activities of the British Council that were under so much debate? During
the immediate post-war years, the British Council’s activities in Poland concentrated
on science, music and art, the teaching of English as well as other subjects at Polish
universities, building up its own library, distributing books and providing film showings.
In the monthly reports, science featured particularly prominently with statistics
provided of the number of journals received and distributed, contacts made and
so forth.52 The Council reported in its first annual report from Poland that it was
cooperating closely with the Polish scientific and technical press, with British technical
articles being accepted by 60 per cent of Polish scientific journals. Radio Polski
accepted the Council’s proposals for a series of popular broadcasts on British science.
Nearly 1,000 copies of Medical Science News and 6,500 copies of Britain To-day had
been distributed in the first twelve months.53 In 1947 and 1948, Dr Robert Cruikshank,
of the National Health Laboratory; Dorothy Keeling, formerly of the National Council
of Social Service; and Dr E. A. Carmichael, director of the Neurological Research Unit,
all visited Warsaw and other cities. Sir Harold Spencer Jones, the Astronomer Royal,
visited Warsaw, Wrocław, Kraków, Poznań and Toruń in 1948, where he gave lectures
and held discussions on a range of astronomical topics.54
For the promotion of music and theatrical productions, piano recitals of English
music were given by Noel Mewton-Wood and Angus Morrison; and the Sadlers Wells
Ballet Company toured Europe including Poland in September and October 1948.55
James Whitehead performed the Elgar Cello Concerto in a range of Polish cities and
attendance at the concerts he gave was reported to be good.56 A Shakespeare Festival
was held among Polish theatrical groups, which competed for the prize of best
production at the Teatr Polski in Warsaw.57
For promoting art, Sir Eric Maclagan, the former director of the Victoria and Albert
Museum, gave lectures on Fine Art in Warsaw and Kraków in September and October
1946. John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery, visited Warsaw, Kraków and
Katowice twice in the autumn of 1946 to organize a Tate Exhibition on modern British
painting that was visited by 42,000 people in under a month.58
At the universities, British Council lecturers Edgar McGahan and Ian Jago were
attached to the University of Warsaw and the Catholic University at Lublin, respectively,
to teach English. During the 1947/8 academic year at the University of Warsaw,
McGahan devoted seven hours a week to public lectures, four hours to seminars
on both linguistic and literary subjects and two hours to his English-speaking and
play-reading circles.59 Nevertheless, eventually there was a Polish government decree
that removed the right of Polish universities to autonomously choose their staff, and
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238 Propaganda and Conflict

Figure 11.1  Number of books, British Council library in Poland, 1947–50.

Source:  Figures taken from various British Council monthly reports between February 1947 and
October 1950 in TNA, BW 51/9.

control shifted to the Polish Ministry of Education. McGahan was told that in early
1949 his contract with the University of Warsaw would be allowed to lapse. McGahan
was transferred from the university to the Council’s Warsaw staff and continued to
lecture at the English College, to the Warsaw English Teachers’ Circle and in the British
Council Institute but clearly no longer being posted in the university itself was a huge
blow. Jago’s post was also later withdrawn from the Catholic University at Lublin on the
grounds that the English Department was too small to justify his presence.60
The British Council’s library, however, steadily increased both in number of
books available and number of members over the early part of the Cold War, with no
appreciable lack of interest in the use of the library as a result of any interference from
the government or from Bidwell’s defection (see Figures 11.1 and 11.2).
The Council distributed books, periodicals and other publications – some presented,
some sold – to a wide variety of institutions. Given the state of Polish libraries in the
immediate post-war period, many of the books were provided as much-needed gifts
to make up for losses during the war.61 The Council noted, however, in 1949 that the
distribution of free material had fallen in the 1948/49 reporting year (see Figure 11.3,
to the end of 1948) – and that this was ‘a healthy sign indicating the gradual passing
of the rehabilitation period’,62 with more institutions being able to pay for material and
the immediate need to stock libraries having reduced. Indeed, the Council was slowly
changing its role into being a facilitator rather than a provider of materials. Declines in
the numbers of books and periodicals being distributed therefore should not be taken
at face value as a reduction in success, but as a result of changing needs.
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The British Council behind the Iron Curtain 239

Figure 11.2  Number of library members, British Council library in Poland, 1948–50.

Source: Figures taken from various British Council monthly reports between March 1948 and October
1950 in TNA, BW 51/9.

Figure  11.3  Total books and periodicals presented by the British Council to Polish
institutions, 1946–8.
Source: Figures taken from various monthly reports between June 1946 and December 1948 in TNA,
BW 51/9.
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240 Propaganda and Conflict

Figure 11.4  Viewers at British Council film showings in Poland, 1947–8.

Source: Figures taken from various monthly reports between February 1947 and December 1948 in
TNA, BW 51/9.

Films were considered by Bidwell to be ‘by far the most popular of functional
wares’,63 and in the early years the Council was able to loan out equipment and films
to institutions, which proved very popular in the long, dark and cold winter evenings.
In a similar way to book and periodical presentations, the numbers of viewers of
the British Council films decreased over time (see Figure  11.4). This was no doubt
partly due to governmental pressure, but it was also because films were becoming
more readily available and the demand for the British Council as one of the few film
providers immediately after the war had declined.
None of these activities were particularly different from the types of activities the
British Council had carried out in other countries such as Spain, Portugal, Sweden
and Turkey during the Second World War. As elsewhere, the Council was in Poland
looking for pro-British friends to influence in the first instance. These pro-British Poles
would have greater influence on their more sceptical compatriots than the Council
would have done if it had tried to influence Poles directly.64 Bidwell’s claim that the
Council was there for a broader purpose and not just cultural exchange was of course
true, but it was open in carrying out this broader purpose and it was aligned with the
types of activities it did elsewhere.

Comparisons to other countries behind the Iron Curtain

In March 1950, the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, approached the British Cabinet
with a paper entitled ‘The British Council in Russian Satellite Countries’.65 In essence,
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The British Council behind the Iron Curtain 241

it outlined that the situation in Eastern Europe was becoming ever more desperate for
the Council. The Council had already left Romania and in Hungary the government
had requested that the British Council withdraw. It was becoming clear too that the
Czechoslovakian authorities were becoming increasingly hostile. Arna Rides’ defection
the previous month had also focussed minds.
Bevin put two options to the cabinet: first to be proactive and withdraw the British
Council from all the remaining Iron Curtain countries  – that is, Czechoslovakia,
Bulgaria and Poland; or, second, to wait until withdrawal were demanded by the
governments concerned. He recommended the second option. He noted that ‘it
is fairly clear that the Czechoslovak Government intend, if possible, to stultify the
Council’s work and would like to drive it out altogether, and for this purpose may
be expected to resort more and more to police methods with consequent danger to
the Council’s personnel’. It was agreed a note should be sent to the Czechoslovak
government expressing the concerns of the Council although recognizing that this
might precipitate a request for withdrawal.66
Bevin recognized that the situation more generally across the Iron Curtain countries
could in time mean that if the Czechoslovakian government sought the British Council’s
withdrawal (as indeed happened very shortly afterwards),67 the governments in Poland
and Bulgaria could also request that the activities of the British Council be reduced
or ceased altogether. However, he was more hopeful about reports from Warsaw and
Sofia, in respect of which he stated ‘the Council’s prospects in those countries have not
yet deteriorated sufficiently to justify a voluntary withdrawal’.68 Bevin was keen not to
be seen to be doing the Kremlin’s work for them and withdraw prematurely.
Bevin’s paper built on the work carried out the previous year, during which the
Council had concluded that, while the situation was becoming more difficult, there
were three reasons for maintaining the presence of the Council in Eastern Europe: first,
that the Council’s presence was ‘a sign to the Western-minded that they are not
abandoned’; second, the Council acted as ‘a means of displaying the advantages of
Western life’; and last the Council’s presence was ‘a card of re-entry in case things get
better at some future time’.69 The three reasons remained valid even after Bidwell’s and
Rides’ defections.
Bevin stated that there was no reason to believe the Polish police were likely to act
against the Council ‘without having some grain of fact as their starting point’. He noted
that ‘[t]‌here have been indications of the possibility of “incriminating” documents
being planted on the Council’s premises’, but he believed that attacks were not likely
without prior attacks on British consulates, which currently were being left alone.70
A letter sent by Bidwell’s successor, John B. S. Jardine, gave a run-down of activity by
the secret police and their attempts to bribe various members of the locally employed
Council staff and their associates in an attempt to plant documents in the Council’s
safe. It appears that through maintaining a high degree of vigilance all the secret
police’s attempts were thwarted.71
Soon after the Council was requested to withdraw from Prague in May 1950, the
Bulgarian government followed suit in June, asking the British Council to withdraw
from Sofia. Ignoring Yugoslavia, as it was not under Soviet control, this left only the
British Council’s work in Poland intact behind the Iron Curtain beyond June 1950.72
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242 Propaganda and Conflict

So why was Poland different? Interestingly, Poland was not the country that had
captured the largest share of the Council’s budget in Eastern Europe in the 1949/50
financial year, and there were fewer visitors from Poland to Britain under Council
auspices than from Czechoslovakia.73 Indeed, the British Council representative’s
annual report for 1950/1 suggested that Jardine was as surprised as anyone that the
British Council had not been expelled from Warsaw, as it had from other Eastern
European capitals. Jardine wondered whether this was because either that the Polish
Institute in London perhaps held some significance for the Polish government (and did
not want it closed in a tit-for-tat action) or that the Polish government just had not got
round to expelling the British Council.74 It had already been noted by a Council report
on the activities of the Cominform (the Soviet-dominated organization of Communist
parties in the Eastern Bloc) that Poland had been slower than other countries in
Eastern Europe to clamp down on Western influence. The non-renewal of McGahan’s
post at the University of Warsaw was seen as one of the starting points for a general
move to follow the lead of other Eastern European countries, but there was perhaps a
general reluctance to move too quickly.75
To an extent many parallels can be drawn with the events of 1956 that followed
Nikita Khrushchev’s speech denouncing the policies of Josef Stalin. Poland was able to
achieve a degree of autonomy from Moscow under Władysław Gomułka, whereas in
Imre Nagy’s Hungary similar attempts to gain a degree of self-determination attracted
a Soviet invasion. Johanna Granville states that Poland had ‘developed a strong sense of
unity and grim determination to survive at any cost’, which helped the British Council’s
case. However, she goes on to say that ‘had the Soviet leaders not decided to intervene
in Hungary, they [might] well have intervened in Poland instead’.76 So, perhaps Poland
was not that different but just ‘lucky’ to have the Soviet focus on Hungary.
Nevertheless, Poland never looked in danger of leaving the Soviet’s Eastern Bloc,
despite taking a noticeably different line to the rest of the Communist countries,
and had continued to stress the need for the Red Army to be based on Polish soil in
case of a new German threat. Both East and West Germany refused to recognize the
Oder–Neisse line as the (East) German–Polish border until 1950 in the case of the
East (under the Treaty of Görlitz) and for many decades in the case of the West, and
there continued to be an underlying fear of Germany in Poland.77 In contrast to Nagy’s
demands in 1956, Poland was not asking for radical change by seeking to leave the
Warsaw Pact and becoming a neutral country.
That being said, the Soviets probably also recognized privately that the history
of Russian–Polish relations and the events of 1939, in particular, caused all Soviet
influence to be treated with an even greater degree of suspicion in Poland than in other
countries. Although a lot of things had happened since 1939, it was still only a decade
or so ago. It was also partly a question of demographics. Poland had a population of
c.25 million in 1950; Czechoslovakia’s was c.12 million; Hungary’s c.9 million; Bulgaria’s
c.7 million; even geographically large Romania had a population of only c.16 million.78
Taking on Poland would always have been a different task for Moscow from that of
taking on any of the other countries in the Eastern Bloc, and the Soviets did not want
to antagonize the Poles if they did not need to do so.
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The British Council behind the Iron Curtain 243

Poland on its own

The Council’s work in Poland was far from easy despite being allowed to continue.
Norman Tett, who had recently taken over from Jardine as representative, noted in his
1951/2 annual report that

no one in public life [in Poland] dare associate himself with Council activities.
All that extension of the Council officer’s work through local nationals, which is
probably our most effective technique in many countries, is impossible, and the
only lectures we can sponsor are those by our own officers, in English.79

Much of the work that the Council had managed to do in the late 1940s had dwindled,
particularly with regard to scientific exchanges and the provision of periodicals.
Contact with universities had practically ceased to exist.80 McGahan, following his
departure, even began to be described by his former colleagues at the University of
Warsaw as a lecturer who ‘poisoned’ the minds of Polish students.81
The Council really did stand pretty much alone in the early 1950s. The Institut
Français closed in 1949, BBC broadcasts in Polish had been jammed, the British
correspondent of the Associated Press had left, Vincent Buist of Reuters had been
expelled and the US Information Centre and Reading Rooms had closed. The only
other major non-Communist institution that survived throughout this period was the
Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, Tett noted, ‘It is surprising that the British Institute
is still permitted to work here.’82
Now practically alone, and rather astonished that the British Council had not yet
been asked to leave, Tett noted that no one had been persecuted for visiting the British
Council’s premises – despite the Polish government’s negative attitude. The situation
was different for visitors to the US Reading Room, who were frequently followed by the
police, arrested and interrogated. The fear of persecution had, though, kept many away
from the British Council, at least initially after it had been forced out of other countries
in the Eastern Bloc.83
Nevertheless, the apparent removal of all other Western influence appeared to
actually increase the importance of the British Council’s work. The library was well
used and the cinema was always full, despite having few exciting documentaries. Tett
considered ‘[t]‌here is the duty to help keep alive the flame of independent thought’.84
Interestingly, it appears that Bidwell and Rides in Czechoslovakia were actually right
in the sense that the Council was no longer just promoting British culture but also
proudly standing as a non-Communist outpost looking for ways to resist the desires of
the Polish government where it could without being expelled.
Over time, the work of the Council began to recover. In 1953, the Council noted that
many of those who had been scared off visiting the institute, and who now realized that
it was still open for business, gained enough courage to visit it again. Poles considered
that if the Council had survived through these dark years, unlike the French and US
institutes, then they could have faith that it would keep going. Borrowings from the
library increased; film viewer numbers climbed to 14,000 in 1953 compared with 9,000
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244 Propaganda and Conflict

and 5,000 for the previous two years.85 In 1954, Tett reported that ‘[a]‌lmost every week
someone not having used the Institute since 1950 begins to do so again and a few
more youngsters take a chance, come to a film, find they can get away unmolested, and
continue as regular visitors’.86
Having survived, the Council was in a good position in 1956 – with Khrushchev’s
destalinization speech and the rise of Gomułka – to increase its activities in Poland.87
The Polish people were keen to engage effectively with the Council. The numbers
of visitors and book borrowers increased and meetings took place with the Polish
authorities, who actively encouraged the British Council to operate to the full, to the
extent that the staff  – whose numbers remained constant  – could not initially cope
with the interest.88 By May 1958, the Council was able to organize a visit by Sir John
Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra to Poland with the blessing of the Polish Ministry
of Culture and the Polish State Artistic Agency; this was combined with a visit by the
Hallé to the Prague Festival. The report of the visit noted that it ‘has exceeded our
fondest hopes in the goodwill won for Britain (and the British Council)’, although the
‘work involved in getting the Hallé to and from Poland’ was ‘fairly considerable’. Not
only were there concerts (two in Warsaw and one in Łódź) but also social engagements
and a press conference – unthinkable only a few years beforehand.89
Visits and the work of the Council in the 1960s continued to flourish. Professor
Colin Cherry of Imperial College travelled to Warsaw, Gdańsk and Kraków in 1962
to give a number of lectures on telephone usage modelling and information theory.
His report of his visit and correspondence demonstrate that he was well received at
his lectures and maintained direct contact with Polish scientists following his visit.90
Similarly, Luton’s Borough Librarian, Frank M. Gardner, provided a glowing report
of the Council’s library activities in Warsaw following his visit in 1966. He reported
that it was ‘one of the best [he had] ever seen, with a good, attractive and representative
stock . . . and [it] was very busy whenever [he] went in’.91
Prior to the Soviet invasion, Nagy’s Hungary had appeared to show signs of wanting
to restore relations with the British Council. For example, there were a few exchanges
of books with Hungary between 1953 and 1955, and the Deputy Minister of Culture
(and later prime minister), Gyula Kállai, made an unofficial visit to the Foreign Office
in London in June 1956 to make it clear that he wished to increase Hungarian–British
cultural relations.92 W. R. L. Wickham at the British Council considered that he was
‘satisfied’, in the aftermath of Kállai’s visit,

that the old charges of espionage were no longer believed in, though not formally
retracted [by the Hungarian government], and that, if reasonable freedom of
access and movement by Council staff in Hungary were to be made a prerequisite
of the resumption of normal cultural relations, that freedom would be granted.93

There were signs too that the Romanians were also interested in expanding cultural
relations following the invitation of Muir Mathieson, the Scottish conductor, to
Bucharest in 1956.94
Although there were signs of improvement, Council activities outside of Poland
remained scanty throughout the 1950s. Conditions had improved enough in the 1960s
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The British Council behind the Iron Curtain 245

for the British Council to start stationing officers at the embassies in Prague, Budapest
and Bucharest, though not to open Council offices. Things were still difficult and contact
was limited. For example, in Romania one of the Council’s local staff was ‘assumed to
be still in gaol’ and therefore the Council suspended operations in Bucharest, despite a
formal invitation to resume contacts. In Budapest, it was decided that a limited annual
British Council ‘work-plan’ should be initiated by the Hungarian government, with
the Council having the ability to unilaterally withdraw if conditions were not right.95
Often choices were made between one book exhibition or one theatrical visit a year
for each country owing to budget restrictions.96 Nevertheless, visits that had worked
well in Warsaw – such as that of Sir John Barbirolli – were tried in other cities such as
Prague, which, at least in the case of Barbirolli, were a great success, with further trips
considered.97
Although this may look like a large expansion in activities, the scale of the work being
proposed should be compared with that at the time of Bidwell’s defection. In 1960/1, the
Council’s budget for the ‘satellite countries’ (which included Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Bulgaria and Romania but excluded Poland) was £15,000. In 1949/50, the budget
had been around £96,000 for just three of the same four countries (Czechoslovakia,
Hungary and Bulgaria  – with operations in Romania already suspended).98 When
inflation is taken into account, the decrease in expenditure was starker than these
figures suggest. The programmes of work were significantly more limited than they
had been previously and it is unclear how much of an impact such a small operation
could have achieved.
However, it was a start; and the Council recognized in a meeting in 1959 that it
should keep ‘in view that the ultimate aim, at some future date (not necessarily near),
would be the return of the Council to these countries’.99 The key point was that this
was going to be a long-haul re-establishment and that the Council was not expecting
a miraculous change in circumstances to increase relations with these countries
immediately. It chose to strike a balance between being ‘aggressive’ and ‘furtive’
and, given the previous expulsions from Budapest, Prague and Sofia in 1950, ‘the
Council’s name would be used sparingly’, and not in a way that might attract unwanted
attention.100 Following a reconnaissance trip to Prague and Budapest by the director
of the Council’s East European Department, Brenda Tripp, it was concluded that
‘there is not likely to be any prospect of the return of the British Council as a separate
representation [to Prague] in the immediate future’, and no ‘large scale opening up’ of
contacts. It was a similar picture in Budapest, despite the fact that the Italians and the
French were pressing ahead with establishing cultural institutions of their own in the
city.101

Conclusion

Despite being expelled from most of the Eastern Bloc in the early 1950s, the British
Council was able to continue its cultural propaganda activities in Poland. The
Council in Poland not only survived during the 1950s, following the defection of its
representative, George Bidwell, but did so with a separate office and library, which
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246 Propaganda and Conflict

attracted visitors throughout the period. Unlike in surrounding countries, the Council
managed to maintain an open window onto the British way of life for a society that
restricted the freedoms of its citizens.
In terms of the model of cultural propaganda that I  developed in A Battle for
Neutral Europe,102 it was only in Poland that all three pillars – Perception, Substance
and Organization – existed.
The Perception Pillar (i.e. the way in which cultural propaganda needs to be
presented) was fulfilled by the Council in a number of ways. For example, it
demonstrated the Handicap Principle in that, despite the difficulties it faced, the
Council remained in place, keeping the flame of British thought alive in Communist
Poland. It was also a benign and subtle organization, which was attractive to those who
used its library services, and it worked incrementally to build up relationships one at a
time over a relatively long period, with increasing numbers of visitors using its services
even during the most difficult years. Despite the defection of Bidwell, the Council also
generally had the right personalities with the stamina necessary to keep the Council
going in such circumstances.
The Substance Pillar (i.e. the actual content of the cultural propaganda) was also
fulfilled. For example, as in the neutral countries during the Second World War,
the Council focussed on facts of conservative substance, where British personalities
could show that they were experts in their field with whom the Polish people would
want to engage. In the early years, there are many examples of this, from the visits of
Carmichael, Spencer Jones, Maclagan and Rothenstein to the lecturing by McGahan
and Jago in the universities. As the atmosphere became more difficult, the Council
relied on its mainstay of libraries and film shows, which the people of Poland could
elect to visit if they wanted to, and thereby fulfil their intellectual needs  – but the
Council’s propaganda was far from being imposed in a proactive way.
Most important, however, was the fulfilment of the Organization Pillar (i.e. the
need for a vehicle to encourage and direct propaganda). The fact that the British
Council could continue to exist and operate in Poland, albeit for a period in a severely
limited way, was clearly absolutely essential; this was not possible in other Eastern Bloc
countries.
As to why the Council was able to maintain activities in Poland, when it could not
do so elsewhere, three reasons present themselves. First, the Soviet–Polish relationship
was different to other Soviet relationships in the Eastern Bloc. Poland still felt it
needed protection from all quarters against any new German threat. It was not going
to antagonize its Soviet ‘liberator’ to the extent of trying to exit the Eastern Bloc; the
Soviets knew this and therefore could provide Poland with more leeway in its internal
affairs than they could to others of their satellites. Second, the Soviets knew that Poland
was larger demographically than other countries and so could not be intimidated as
easily as the other satellites – and even perhaps recognized that Poland had not been
treated fairly by themselves in 1939. In short, for these two reasons, Poland could get
away with a bit more than the Soviets would allow elsewhere. The third reason was
more about the attitude of the Poles themselves. It certainly seemed a surprise to the
British Council that it was able to operate in Poland and not elsewhere. It could have
been that the Polish Institute in London was important to the Poles for various reasons;
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The British Council behind the Iron Curtain 247

or that the Poles just had not got round to closing the Council. Perhaps there was
a genuine belief on the part of enough Poles that maintaining links with Britain, as
long as these did not undermine their security for some reason, was something worth
doing. After all, Britain was not a real threat to Poland: Britain had entered the Second
World War as Poland’s ally on the occasion of the German invasion in 1939, and many
Poles had fought alongside Britain against Germany between 1939 and 1945. If there
was no real reason to sever relations with its recent ally, then it may have been that the
Poles felt minded not to do so, regardless of any pressure put on them by the Soviets.
Whatever the reasons, and although its work in the early 1950s was extremely
limited, the Council was in a good position in 1956 to take advantage quickly of the
new political circumstances presented by the rise of Gomułka, to the extent that its
staff were initially overwhelmed by the interest the Poles showed in what the Council
had to offer. Even in the face of the tensions and difficulties to follow the Council was
able to stay in Poland, and indeed in the same building that it occupied until 2015, for
the whole of the Cold War.

Notes
1 Edward Corse, A Battle for Neutral Europe: British Cultural Propaganda during the
Second World War (London and New York, 2013), pp. 5–6, 8.
2 Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda
1919–1939 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 125–6; also see Corse, Battle for Neutral
Europe, p. 8.
3 Nicholas Cull, David Culbert and David Welch (eds), Propaganda and Mass
Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara, CA, 2003),
p. 101; also see Corse, Battle for Neutral Europe, p. 8.
4 Ibid., p. 9.
5 Ibid., pp. 183–94.
6 The National Archives, Kew (TNA), FO 924/17, Winston Churchill to Anthony Eden,
26 November 1944.
7 Frances Donaldson, The British Council: The First Fifty Years (London, 1984), pp. 132,
140. Findlater Stewart (formerly permanent undersecretary of state for India 1932–
45) was appointed by Eden to the task of reviewing the council’s work.
8 TNA, BW 69/10, Finance and Agenda Committee (109th meeting), paper A,
2 January 1945.
9 See the first report of George Chandos Bidwell, British Council representative to
Poland, TNA, BW 51/9, Bidwell, ‘Report on British Council Work in Poland, January
and February 1946’, 28 February 1946.
10 TNA, FO 924/210, Cavendish Bentinck to Foreign Office (FO), 28 August 1945.
11 TNA, BW 51/17, Bidwell, ‘The British Council, Warsaw: Report for Year ended 31st
December, 1946’, undated but presumably early 1947.
12 See ‘Bidwell Chandos George’, available at http://jbc.jelenia-gora.pl/Content/211/
Bidwell.html (last access 18 July 2018; in Polish); George Bidwell, Ani Chwili
Nudy: Autobiografia (Katowice, 1976), pp. 67, 144.
13 TNA, FO 924/761, G. P. Wethered, FO, letter to H. Christopher Beaumont, British
Embassy, Vienna, 27 October 1949.
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248 Propaganda and Conflict

14 Bidwell, ‘Report on British Council Work in Poland, January and February 1946’.

15 Ibid.
16 Richard Taylor, Secrets of the National Archives: The Stories Behind the Letters and
Documents of Our Past (London, 2014), pp. 274–6. The ‘percentages agreement’ is
available at TNA, PREM 3/66/7.
17 See David Welch, Modern European History 1871–2000: A Documentary Reader
(London, 2003), pp. 123–4; R. F. Leslie (ed.), The History of Poland since 1863
(Cambridge, 1980), pp. 282–3; and Mark Kramer, ‘Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the
Consolidation of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1944–1953’, in Vladimir
Tismaneanu (ed.), Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in
East-Central Europe (Budapest and New York, 2010), pp. 65, 73.
18 Bidwell, ‘Report on British Council Work in Poland, January and February 1946’.
19 TNA, BW 51/9, Bidwell, ‘British Council, Warsaw, Monthly Report, June 1946’, 11
July 1946.
20 Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–56
(Harmondsworth, 2012), pp. 206–7. The three questions were around (a) abolishing
the Polish Senate, (b) nationalization of basic industries and (c) recognition of the
western Polish border on the Oder–Neisse line.
21 R. J. Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century – and After (London, 2002),
p. 218.
22 TNA, BW 51/17, Bidwell, ‘The British Council, Warsaw: Report for Year ended 31st
December, 1946’.
23 TNA, BW 51/9, Bidwell, ‘Monthly Report of the British Council, Warsaw,
November 1946’.
24 Ibid.
25 TNA, BW 51/9, Bidwell, ‘Monthly Report of the British Council, Warsaw, January
1947’; TNA, BW 51/9, Bidwell, ‘Monthly Report of the British Council, Warsaw,
February 1947’.
26 TNA, BW 51/9, Bidwell, ‘Monthly Report of the British Council, Warsaw,
March 1947’.
27 TNA, BW 51/9, Bidwell, ‘Monthly Report of the British Council, Warsaw,
January 1948’.
28 TNA, BW 51/9, Bidwell, ‘Monthly Report of the British Council, Warsaw,
March 1948’.
29 TNA, FO 688/78, Bidwell to Adam, 2 June 1949; Bidwell to Gainer, 4 June 1949.
30 TNA, FO 688/78, George Bidwell to Sir Ronald Adam, 2 June 1949.
31 TNA, FO 688/78, Telegram from Gainer to FO, 5 June 1949.
32 TNA, FO 688/78, Gainer, Letter to C. F. A. Warner (assistant undersecretary, FO), 10
June 1949.
33 TNA, FO 688/78, J. P. G. Finch (FO) to Gainer, 16 June 1949.
34 TNA, FO 924/761, Carey-Foster, Letter to Beaumont, British Embassy, Vienna, 21
July 1949.
35 TNA, BW 51/9, Bidwell, ‘Monthly Report of the British Council, Warsaw, April 1948’.
36 TNA, FO 371/77388, Minutes by FO officials C. P. Mayhew, 13 June 1949, P. S. Falla,
17 June 1949 and Finch, 25 June 1949.
37 TNA, FO 924/761, Wethered, FO, letter to Major S. Strong, MI5, 5 October 1949;
Wethered, FO, letter to Beaumont, 27 October 1949.
38 Reference to Gainer’s letter in TNA, FO 371/77388, Minute by Mayhew (FO), 13
June 1949.
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The British Council behind the Iron Curtain 249

39 TNA, FO 688/78, Bidwell’s statement to the press as reported in translation by Gainer

to FO by telegram, 5 June 1949.
40 Ibid.; also see TNA, FO 688/78, Cultural Relations Department, FO, to Chancery at
British Embassy, Warsaw, 12 July 1949.
41 TNA, FO 688/78, M. B. Winch (FO), memorandum dated 13 July 1949.
42 George Bidwell, Wybrałem polskę (Warsaw, 1950).
43 TNA, FO 688/78, FO translation of book review in Nowa Kultura (dated 10
September 1950) of Bidwell, ‘I chose Poland’, with covering note dated 21
September 1950.
44 TNA, FO 688/78, R. H. S. Allen, British Embassy, Warsaw, to K. G. Younger MP, 20
June 1950.
45 Ibid.
46 TNA, FO 688/78, Gainer, Telegram to Warner, 8 June 1949.
47 TNA, FO 924/761, Carey-Foster, Letter to Beaumont, 21 July 1949.
48 Ibid.
49 TNA, FO 371/77388, Minute by Falla, 17 June 1949.
50 TNA, FO 371/77388, Minutes of a meeting entitled ‘Mr. Bidwell’s Defection. Record of
a Meeting Held at the Foreign Office on the 10th June 1949’.
51 TNA, BW 51/10, ‘British Council in Czechoslovakia was hiding spies and patronised
reactionary persons who fled abroad: Declaration of Dr. Arna Rides’, 7 February 1950.
52 See e.g. TNA, BW 51/9, Bidwell, ‘British Council, Warsaw, Monthly Report,
June 1946’.
53 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Warsaw: Report for Year Ended 31st
December, 1946’.
54 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘British Council Poland: Annual Report 1947/1948’; ‘British Council
Poland: Annual Report 1948/1949’.
55 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘British Council Poland: Annual Report 1947/1948’.
56 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘British Council Poland: Annual Report 1948/1949’.
57 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘British Council Poland: Annual Report 1947/1948’.
58 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Warsaw: Report for Year Ended 31st
December, 1946’.
59 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘British Council Poland: Annual Report 1947/1948’.
60 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘British Council Poland: Annual Report 1948/1949’.
61 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘British Council Poland: Annual Report 1947/1948’.
62 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘British Council Poland: Annual Report 1948/1949’.
63 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘British Council Poland: Annual Report 1947/1948’, p. 5.
64 This model of influence is explored in Corse, Battle for Neutral Europe, p. 7.
65 TNA, CAB 129/39, Cabinet Paper entitled ‘The British Council in Russian Satellite
Countries: Memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs’, 20 March 1950.
66 Ibid.
67 Donaldson, British Council, p. 152.
68 TNA, CAB 129/39, ‘The British Council in Russian Satellite Countries’.
69 TNA, FO 924/773, ‘British Council Activities in Iron Curtain Countries’, undated but
references in document suggest early 1949.
70 TNA, CAB 129/39, ‘The British Council in Russian Satellite Countries’.
71 TNA, BW 51/10, Jardine, Confidential letter to Division C at British Council, dated 10
March 1950.
72 Donaldson, British Council, p. 152.
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73 TNA, FO 924/773, ‘British Council Activities in Iron Curtain Countries’. Budget

estimates below are extracted from same document, with population figures taken
from United Nations, World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision. vol. 3: Analytical
Report (New York, 2004), available at http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/
wpp2002/WPP2002_VOL_3.pdf (last access 19 July 2018), Table I.2: Population of the
World by Country, Estimates and Projections According to Variants: 1950, 1975, 2000,
2025 and 2050. These data show that, in real and in proportional terms, spending on
Czechoslovakia was higher than for Poland.

Country Budget Population Budget per

estimate (million) person
1949/50
Poland £38,000 c.25 c.£0.00152
Czechoslovakia £53,000 c.12 c.£0.00442
Hungary £30,978 c.9 c.£0.00344
Bulgaria £12,019 c.7 c.£0.00172

Also see TNA, FO 924/773, ‘Note on Visitors from East Europe in 1947/48 and
1948/49’.
74 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Poland: Representative’s Annual Report,
1950–1’.
75 TNA, FO 924/773, ‘The Cominform and Education in East Europe’, 14 December
1948, pp. 5–6.
76 Johanna Granville, The First Domino: International Decision Making during the
Hungarian Crisis of 1956 (College Station, TX, 2004), pp. 38–9.
77 Gerald H. Hughes, ‘Unfinished Business from Potsdam: Britain, West Germany, and
the Oder–Neisse Line, 1945–1962’, International History Review, 27: 2 (2005), pp.
259, 268.
78 United Nations, World Population Prospects, Table I.2; Czechoslovakia total arrived at
by adding Czech Republic and Slovakia estimates.
79 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Poland: Representative’s Annual Report,
1951–2’.
80 Ibid.
81 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Poland: Representative’s Annual Report,
1950–1’.
82 Ibid.; TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Poland: Representative’s Annual Report,
1951–2’; also see TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Poland: Representative’s
Annual Report, 1954–5’; also see ‘Poland Expels Newman’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8
April 1950.
83 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Poland: Representative’s Annual Report,
1950–1’.
84 Ibid.
85 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Poland: Representative’s Annual Report,
1952–3’.
86 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Poland: Representative’s Annual Report,
1953–4’.
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The British Council behind the Iron Curtain 251

87 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Poland: Representative’s Annual Report,

1955/6’.
88 TNA, BW 51/17, ‘The British Council, Poland: Representative’s Annual Report,
1956/7’.
89 TNA, BW 51/15, C. Robinson (British Embassy, Warsaw), ‘Report on the Visit of the
Hallé Orchestra to Poland, May 27th–30th 1958’, 3 June 1958.
90 Imperial College Archives, BI CHERRY, 10/B/19/1, ‘British Council: Correspondence
1961–70’; in particular Colin Cherry to Professor Smolenski, 29 September 1961;
and Colin Cherry to Professor Rajski, 13 March 1962.
91 Bedfordshire and Luton Archives, X812/13/8, ‘Visit to Czechoslovakia and Poland,
September 26th–October 17th 1966 by Frank M. Gardner, O.St.J., F.L.A. on behalf of
the British Council’, p. 15.
92 TNA, BW 1/328, Draft Note entitled ‘Work in Iron Curtain Countries’, undated, but
among papers dating from June and July 1955; also see TNA, BW 1/328, ‘Visit of the
Hungarian Deputy Minister of Culture, 15th June 1956: Record of Conversation’.
93 TNA, BW 1/328, Letter from W. R. L. Wickham (British Council) to A. A. F. Haigh
(Cultural Relations Department, Foreign Office), 28 June 1956.
94 TNA, BW 1/328, ‘Mr. Muir Mathieson: Visit to Rumania 1956: Record of
Conversation at British Council on 19 June’.
95 TNA, BW 1/328, ‘Note of a Meeting Held at 11 a.m. on Friday, October 28th [1960]
to Discuss Council Work in the Satellites’.
96 TNA, BW 1/328, ‘Note of a Meeting Held at 3 p.m. on Thursday, July 14th [1960] to
Discuss Council Work in the satellites’.
97 TNA, BW 1/328, ‘Note on Meeting Held of 10th June [1960] to Consider
Manifestations for USSR and Satellites in 1961–2’.
98 TNA, BW 1/328, ‘Summary of Proposed Expenditure on the Satellites 1960/61’.
99 TNA, BW 1/328, ‘Notes of a Meeting to Discuss Council Work in the Satellites’, 26
August 1959.
100 Ibid.
101 TNA, BW 1/328, Brenda Tripp, ‘Report on Visit to Prague by Director, East Europe
19th–23rd October, 1959’; Tripp, ‘Report on Visit to Hungary by Director, East
Europe 9th–19th October, 1959’.
102 Corse, Battle for Neutral Europe, p. 184.
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252
 253

12

From Civil War to Cold War: The Model

Worker in Chinese film propaganda
James Farley

On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong stood in Tiananmen Square with his fellow citizens
and proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This was to
be the start of a new era of peace, a ‘New China’, dedicated to rebuilding the country
following the previous decades of foreign occupation, war and Civil War. Conflict
had defined China at the start of the twentieth century. The new era, ushered in by
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), promised a new beginning for the people, a
new society guided by the ideology of Marxist–Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.
This new society, as it eventually transitioned to communism, would bring the ‘era
of perpetual peace for mankind’.1 However, as Mao argued in Problems of Strategy
in China’s Revolutionary War, in 1965, this would be possible only when ‘classes and
states [were] eliminated’.2 Both classes and states existed at the time of the founding
of the People’s Republic and, consequently, the new state was born into a world of
conflict, defined by the close of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War.
As a proto-socialist state, China was unlikely to remain neutral during this period of
conflict. Although the country’s relationship with the Soviet Union was, from the start,
complex, Mao argued that China would ‘lean to one side’ as it allied itself with the
Soviet Union.3
Through ‘leaning to one side’, the new Chinese government could take advantage
of and emulate parts of the Soviet propaganda system. Chinese artists were educated
in the style of socialist realism and film-makers were urged to study from renowned
Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet film director and theorist who
had produced world-famous films such as Battleship Potemkin (1925). One of the
key tools utilized by the CCP during this period for the purposes of propaganda was
the ‘Model Worker’, the subject of this chapter. In order that a new society be built,
new citizens were needed. Heroic, fighting individuals from China’s recent past were
selected to represent the aspirations of the new society, presented to the population
as ‘Model Workers’. Although this propaganda shares some similarities with the ‘New
Soviet Man’, there are also significant differences caused by variations in revolutionary
experience: primarily the effect of imperialist occupation and a belief that reform of
behaviour in society was crucial in building a successful ‘New China’. In addition, an
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254 Propaganda and Conflict

examination of the structure of the new society, built upon the values of nationalism,
social reform and the development of socialism, provides further insight into the
fundamental differences between the methods of Soviet propaganda and its goals and
those of the CCP.
It was not simply the threat of external conflict that defined propaganda through
the post-Civil War period. By 1949, the Communist Party had pushed its Civil War
rivals, the nationalist ‘Guomindang’, out of mainland China, but the battle for the
hearts and minds of the people was only just beginning. Film propaganda played a key
role in the mission to redefine what it would mean to be a Chinese citizen. Indeed, the
purpose was to create a new citizen, who would counter specific problems that were
believed to have been contributing factors to China’s subjugation by foreign powers.
Prior to gaining power in 1949, the CCP, through the theoretical work of Mao Zedong,
had already developed a blueprint for national reconstruction following a successful
revolution. The first of these documents, ‘In Memory of Norman Bethune’, was written
in 1939; the second, ‘Serve the People’, in 1944, the third, ‘The Foolish Old Man Who
Removed the Mountains’, in 1945; and the fourth, ‘Talks at the Yan’an Conference on
Literature and Art’, in 1945.4 The political ideology developed by Mao was intended to
address three key problems that faced China: national unity, social development and
the implementation of a new economic system. The purpose of post-Civil War film
propaganda was consequently not only to capture the hearts and minds of the public
but also to create a new citizen, a ‘warrior’, able to construct a new society and defend
it from attack.
The founding father of the Chinese Republic, Sun Yatsen, argued that a commitment
to the ideology of nationalism was essential for the people of China to be emancipated.
However, the CCP’s commitment to the use of nationalism for nation-building goes
rather deeper than emancipation of the people from foreign rule. John Hutchinson
and Anthony Smith, in their work Nationalism, offer insight into the highly complex
and subjective nature of its study. They agree with Sun Yatsen that ‘freedom and
sovereignty’ are the key aspects of any nationalist cause but add that this doctrine
is underpinned by three elements, ‘autonomy’, ‘unity’ and ‘identity’.5 The nationalist
aspect of film propaganda contains these three elements. The ability for the nation to act
autonomously, without the assistance or control of others is a major theme. The unity
of the people when facing either foreign or class enemies is a significant component.
And the third element, ‘identity’, is addressed in film propaganda in a number of ways,
particularly by the use of historical figures to promote a collective history.
The cause of social and cultural reform in China had been a preoccupation of
intellectuals and governments throughout the early twentieth century. Successor to
Sun Yatsen and leader of the ‘Nationalist Party’ (Guomindang), Jiang Jieshi (Chiang
Kaishek) was also keen to enact policies that would address social and cultural issues
that the country was facing. His ‘New Life Movement’, established in the 1930s, was
intended to provide solutions to the perceived problems within society but had largely
failed.6 CCP propaganda that dealt with social and cultural reform took a different
approach and focussed mainly on instruction by example and encouragement. Film
propaganda was crucial here as the people were presented not simply with mythical
heroes but also as contemporaries, individuals who had engaged in battle, with the
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From Civil War to Cold War 255

reactionary forces either of the Guomindang or of imperial Japan. The CCP’s social
reform agenda focussed on the promotion of six specific behaviours:  empathy,
community spirit, selflessness, hard work, self-criticism and the desire to fight.
Subsequent to the revolution, the development of socialism and eventual transition
to communism was a core aim of the new Chinese state. Film propaganda featuring
Model Workers was employed in support of this effort. Models were selected from
the social classes established by the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, which was
introduced in the precursor to the first constitution of the PRC, ‘The Common
Programme’, adopted in 1949.7 Article 1 stated that China was a ‘People’s Democratic
state’, led by the working class, based on an alliance of workers and peasants united with
all democratic classes and nationalities in China. This alliance included the national
bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie; indeed, they are represented in the flag of the
PRC, itself a symbol of the People’s Democratic Dictatorship. Propaganda related to
models from these social classes served two functions. First, it provided citizens of
‘New China’ with role models for the social class to which they now belonged. Second,
the system, supported by Model Worker propaganda, demonstrated to citizens what
was expected of them, by countering perceived existing social problems.
The CCP was not slow to utilize film for propaganda purposes. As Paul Clark
states in his work on Chinese cinema and politics, ‘From February 1953 onward, all
production of “the most important art” was in party hands. A process which had taken
over 10  years to complete in the Soviet Union in China took a mere three.’8 Model
Worker films of the post-Civil War period focussed to a great extent on conflict, both
historical and contemporary. The core values of nationalism, social reform and the
development of socialism were embedded in each film.
In this chapter, three films are analysed to demonstrate the extent to which film
propaganda was guided by these principles. The first film features the peasant Model
Worker Liu Hulan. It was produced at the start of the post-Civil War period and
focusses on the conflict of the previous decade as well as on the war with Japan. The
second also focusses on the same period but from the perspective of a soldier of the
People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Dong Cunrui. Shan Gan Ling, the third film, was
produced slightly later, in 1956, and follows the story of a fictional Model Worker, a
commander in the army during the Korean War.

Liu Hulan (1950)

We have won the war, now we have more confidence in ourselves.9

Liu Hulan was produced by the Changchun Film Studio and released in 1950. It
focusses on the heroic actions of Model Worker Liu Hulan. Her story was used to
demonstrate how conflict had produced a new type of citizen-soldier in China, loyal to
the Communist Party and inspired by the words of Mao Zedong. The film emphasizes
how the conflict in which Liu was involved helped to shape her into a new type of
individual, one who was not only dedicated to the resurgence of the Chinese state but
who also represented the new cultural norms the party was intent on establishing.
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256 Propaganda and Conflict

The Changchun Film Studio had experience working with Model Workers prior
to making Liu Hulan. In 1950, the film Zhao Yiman was released.10 It focussed on a
member of the national bourgeoisie, one of the social groups of the newly created
People’s Democratic Dictatorship. By contrast, Liu Hulan focussed on the adventures
of a member of the peasant class. Conflict, in Liu Hulan’s case both external and
internal, and the importance of establishing new cultural norms provided the vehicle
by which the three key values of nationalism, social reform and the development of
socialism were meant to be promoted.
Liu Hulan was a fourteen-year-old girl from Shanxi province who had worked as a
spy for the Communist Party during the Civil War. She was eventually captured by the
Guomindang, tortured and executed, but not before, according to legend, stating that
victory would shortly belong to the Communist Party. From the beginning, even as a
child, Liu is defiant. She confronts the exploitative landlord and his wife and celebrates
the eventual arrival of the People’s Army. She works to undermine the Japanese
occupation and later the Guomindang forces before being captured and executed.
The way in which the film addresses conflict is worthy of further attention. Liu had
fought primarily against the Guomindang, her fellow citizens. This clearly presented
problems, as depicting those loyal to the Guomindang was obviously a sensitive issue.
Consequently, as with other films of this era, considerably more screen time is dedicated
to the war against Japan than to that against the Guomindang. Indeed, the film changes
focus to the Civil War only in the final twenty minutes. Thematically, Liu Hulan is
complex as it deals with the benefits of socialism and the creation of a new kind of
Chinese culture. In order to win over the soul of the people, the CCP continuously
used depictions of the pre-revolutionary system of exploited and exploiters, thereby
demonstrating the extent to which society had changed since liberation.11
Nationalism in Liu Hulan is based primarily on the concept of national unity.
However, this unity was also exclusionary, as those who were not part of the People’s
Democratic Dictatorship, for example the ‘landlord’ class, were singled out as betrayers
of the nation, in league with imperialist powers. Indeed, throughout the film it is made
exceptionally clear who is responsible for the problems that China was facing. The
poor are oppressed and the rich are cruel collaborators who share little in common
with their countryside kin. The director portrays those who worked with the Japanese,
in this case a landlord, as being not only beyond redemption but also as appearing
to be distinctly ‘foreign’. Early in the film a thunderstorm erupts upon the arrival of
the Japanese forces. This is repeated when the landlord returns to oppress the people
after their temporary liberation by the PLA. Consequently, a clear connection is
made between the collaborator and the imperialist oppressors; they are one and the
same. Indeed, the link between the ‘class enemy’, the Guomindang and Jiang Jieshi
in particular, is made explicit early in the film. When the People’s Army arrives, its
commander proclaims, ‘We are the Red Army, we journey to eastern China to resist
the Japanese invaders, we aim to annihilate Japanese imperialism and overthrow the
quisling Jiang Jieshi and help you to defeat the rich.’12
Major events, such as the defeat of the Japanese, are credited solely to the actions
of the Communist Party. Indeed, two-thirds of the way through the film, word comes
that the Japanese have been defeated with the assistance of Soviet forces in the north.
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From Civil War to Cold War 257

The soldier bearing the news then states that Mao has demanded that they seize the
guns abandoned by the Japanese enemy and use them to take control of the country’s
major cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing.13 It is implicitly indicated that
the Japanese have surrendered to the People’s Army, but there is no mention of the
role that the United States or the Guomindang forces had in the defeat of Japan. The
propaganda message is clear; only those aligned with the Communist Party were true
patriots. The film closes with a song, ‘we will surge forward for our national liberation,
we must defeat the aggression of Jiang Jieshi and America’.14
Liu Hulan tackles several social and cultural issues that were thought to be
problematic, particularly in the countryside, and especially on issues of perceived
female inferiority. Prior to liberation, Liu can be seen undertaking heavy manual labour.
Liu’s grandfather engages in conversation with a neighbour and laments his ‘bad luck’
at having a granddaughter. Although the neighbour argues that this ‘deficiency’ could
be remedied by Liu marrying a wealthy man, it is not enough for her grandfather who
states, ‘when she grows up, she becomes another family’s; a daughter is always a loss’.15
It is through this dialogue that the director drives the social reform agenda. By the end
of the film, Liu is a confident, successful young woman, depicted in the film as being
rather older than she was in reality. She succeeds in her mission independent of any
male assistance. As the anti-Japanese war rages, Liu can be seen dutifully taking care of
her family and of the needs of other villagers. She displays empathy for their suffering
and donates food from her own family to those with starving children. She is selfless
and unafraid of hard work. Moreover, in what was to become a common theme in
later films, Liu works so hard that she collapses. When offered additional food to aid
in her recovery, she refuses it and states that it would harm the socialist spirit of the
community.
Conflict plays a central role in Liu’s story as the social reform agenda is driven
by her struggle against oppression. At a preparatory session of the Chinese Political
Consultative Congress in September 1949, Mao had stated that the Chinese people
had ‘stood up’. Liu Hulan personifies this concept.16 This point is made explicit when
Liu states, ‘We have won the war, now we have more confidence in ourselves.’17 This
new-found confidence, inspired by the party, is then demonstrated in the subsequent
Civil War. Liu helps wounded (PLA) soldiers while evading enemy sentries. During
engagements with enemy forces, she is confident and highly proficient in the use of
grenades and rifles, despite appearing to have had no prior experience; she is the ideal
peasant-soldier.
Liu has clearly ‘stood up’ and, despite being captured and executed, her spirit is
unbroken. Chinese film historian Yingjin Zhang argues that execution scenes in
Chinese films during this period served to fulfil two functions: first, to incriminate the
class enemy and second to strengthen the resolve of the revolutionaries to overthrow
their oppressors.18 While these two points are certainly valid, I would argue that these
scenes also serve a third function: to reverse the idea that China was the ‘sick man of
Asia’ by demonstrating that its people had value, a fighting spirit and a social and moral
conscience. Liu Hulan’s resolute actions were the ideal antidote to the humiliation of
the past century; these were warrior-citizens whose actions would capture the hearts
and minds of the masses and prepare them for the Cold War struggle ahead.
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258 Propaganda and Conflict

The promotion of socialism focusses largely on land ownership and the eventual
benefits of socialist liberation. The release date of the film and its relationship to the
start of the ‘Land Reform’ campaign (1947–52) is no coincidence. Liu Hulan served to
reinforce the need for this campaign by depicting the horrors of class conflict within
the ‘old society’. The film begins with the miserable exploitation of the peasants and
their slavish existence. Following liberation, the same fields are worked by happy,
motivated peasants. The heavy work is performed by animals while the peasants each
gain an equal share from their labour and boast to each other about how much land
they now have. Liu herself states that it was because of the liberation by the People’s
Army that the villagers could have hope again and that the ideal of socialist equality
could be realized.19
On the surface, it would appear that Liu Hulan should have fulfilled the criteria
for creating a successful film based on the concept of the Model Worker. However,
responses recorded in the cinema magazine Dazhong Dianying were rather negative.
The film appeared on the cover of the October 1951 issue. It was subject to criticism in
several articles. One such criticism by a worker was that the depictions were not vivid
or passionate enough. Another worker stated that ‘this film hasn’t shown us the passion
and love between Liu and the people from her social class’.20 The depiction of Liu was
clearly not heroic enough and had failed to successfully communicate the values of the
peasant-soldier.

Dong Cunrui (1955)

Forward for the New China.21

The ‘Model Worker’ theme was developed further in Dong Cunrui, directed by Guo Wei
and released in 1955 by the Changchun Film Studio. The film was successful and won
the Ministry of Culture Award for best film in 1957.22 Film historian Jay Leyda notes
that by 1955 films produced by the major studios in China had become more warlike.23
The Korean War was not long concluded and these films reflected an environment in
which there was a genuine fear of further conflict. Model Worker films such as Dong
Cunrui and the later Shang Gan Ling were clearly designed not only to continue the
nation-building efforts of earlier films like Liu Hulan but also to create confidence
in the people that they would be protected. Indeed, when interviewed, Zhang Liang,
the actor who portrayed Dong, claimed that the director Guo Wei had told the film
crew that the aim of the film was to inspire those ‘fighting to liberate Taiwan’, that
they would ‘gain some strength after watching this film’.24 Yingjin Zhang argues that
Chinese cinema became increasingly nationalistic during the 1960s.25 While this may
be true, earlier films also contained extremely strong elements of nationalism and used
recent conflicts to illustrate the need not only for nationalism but also for social reform
and the development of socialism.
Dong Cunrui was born in Hebei province in 1929. During his adolescence, he
experienced the effects of the Japanese occupation of China and resolved to join the
resistance. Dong Cunrui features something that many other Model Worker films of
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From Civil War to Cold War 259

this era lacked: significant and meaningful character development. Ban Wang argues
that films of this era focussed on ‘development from a private “self ” into a collective
“self ” engaged in the movement of national liberation’.26 While this is an attractive idea,
this development is rather muted in many Model Worker films. Dong Cunrui is the
exception as there is clear evidence of his development from ‘private self ’ to ‘collective
self ’. The plot of Dong Cunrui services this development as the audience experiences
Dong’s growth from glory-seeking nationalist to self-sacrificing hero of the revolution.
By comparison, Liu Hulan is essentially a paragon throughout her experiences. In Dong
Cunrui, the audience witnesses the tempering of the protagonist’s spirit as he joins the
army and learns that the revolution is meant to serve the people and not an individual’s
ego. His journey from ‘private self ’ to ‘collective self ’ is completed by self-sacrifice
when he detonates handheld explosives to prevent the Guomindang’s advance. Dong
Cunrui’s development epitomizes how a warrior-Model expresses the core principles
of the party. Dong served to inspire the individual by demonstrating that any person
could become a hero of the nation if they followed the directives of the party in order
to improve themselves.
Conflict and the glorification of war are central to the plot of Dong Cunrui. The
way in which this is presented differs considerably to earlier films as the focus, at
least initially, is not on the brutality of occupation but on the heroic and noble nature
of those who have joined the PLA. The film opens with happy villagers celebrating
liberation by the PLA and with flower-bearing girls surrounding the soldiers as they
depart. Dong makes a personal choice to join the fight. His village has been liberated,
but, fuelled by nationalist, anti-Japanese rhetoric, he joins the army.
Depictions of the enemy remain consistent with earlier portrayals. As in Liu Hulan,
most of the fighting is between the PLA and Japanese soldiers. Only at the end is a
brief reference made to the Civil War. As before, this is significant as Dong sacrifices
himself in the Civil War of liberation. However, the main focus is once again on the
anti-Japanese war and therefore an external enemy which, in contrast to that in Liu
Hulan, is faceless and anonymous. Each scene featuring the Japanese is dark in colour
tone and often includes foreboding storm clouds overhead. The director uses shifting
colour tone to achieve this. The Japanese and the US enemy appear inhuman, attacking
and killing civilians with no respect for the conventions of war. In one sequence, the
PLA fight the Japanese with the Great Wall in the background; the message is clear: the
enemy are the same as the barbarians of history. Only the People’s Army stand as
protectors of the nation against the inhuman monsters that threaten it.
As in earlier films, there is a very clear distinction made between the loyal soldiers
of the People’s Army and the traitors of the Guomindang. Dong Cunrui aligns Jiang
Jieshi, and by extension the Guomindang, explicitly with foreign aggressors. When
the film turns to the Civil War, the Guomindang attack the villages from the air. Dong
notices the US insignia on the planes, and then in the next shot a different plane bears
the emblem of the Guomindang. After the attack, the commander tells the survivors
that the bombardment is caused by Jiang Jieshi and the United States and makes a
speech wherein he explains to the survivors of the bombardment, ‘The hatchet man of
the USA, Jiang Jieshi, is throwing bombs towards our heads!’27 In order to sidestep the
awkward problem of disunity caused by the Civil War, the solution is simple: those who
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260 Propaganda and Conflict

fight the People’s Army are not loyal citizens; they are being controlled by foreigners.
The mission of Dong and his comrades is clear: they are the unifying fighting force of
a new China, dedicated to sweeping away the humiliation of the past and establishing
a new order.
One of the propaganda strengths of Dong Cunrui was the amount of time dedicated
to character development. Although the nationalist theme is exceptionally strong, it
never overshadows the importance of social reform and the development of the self
in service to the nation. In Dong Cunrui, there is a particular focus on the concept of
self-criticism and selflessness. As the film begins, Dong wants to join the fight to fulfil
his own desire to be a hero. He is instructed repeatedly by older soldiers who question
his mentality and ask him to consider why he wants to fight. His desire to be a hero
results in some incidents where his actions damage the rest of the group. Commander
Zhao, played by Zhang Song Yang, represents the party and acts as a father to Dong,
offering gentle criticism, encouragement and wisdom. He states, ‘To win the battle
we must correct our thoughts.’28 Dong’s ‘conversion’ to the ‘correct’ mode of thinking
occurs when he eventually joins the party. His ‘conversion’ is quasi-religious as he
states, ‘I know joining the Party is just the beginning, there will be more tests during
our struggle.’29
Dong achieves his goals through hard work and the education provided by the
party. However, it is made clear that slavishly following orders will not achieve success.
At one point, Dong argues with a senior officer and disobeys orders. His actions
result in success and he is awarded a medal, while the more timid senior officer is
excluded from the celebration. Clearly, education can take an adherent only so far;
passion, a fighting spirit and decisive action are also the hallmarks of a Model Worker.
In addition, and in contrast to the cruel enemy that they were facing, the soldiers are
exceptionally empathetic to those around them. Soldiers build relationships with the
peasants, and orphaned children are cared for by the community. The unified humanity
of the soldiers is particularly apparent whenever a comrade falls in battle. Following
the instruction of Mao in ‘Serve the People’, whenever a soldier falls, his compatriots
take time to remove their caps and mourn his passing.30 This instructional technique is
used extensively in later films, such as Shang Gan Ling.
In contrast to the themes identified above, there is limited promotion of the benefits
of socialism. In marked contrast, the film focusses on the concept of serving the people
and the benefits of land reform for the peasants. Soldiers speak frequently of the need
for revolution but never discuss the justification for it beyond the message of anti-
imperialism and national self-determination. The importance of socialist development
is linked, as in Liu Hulan, with the benefits of the Land Reform and Collectivisation
Campaign. This campaign began in 1947 and was the process by which land was forcibly
redistributed to peasants from the landlords who had previously owned it. Because
of the complex social stratification of the countryside, the campaign was particularly
difficult to implement, as classifying individuals was far from straightforward. These
difficulties were naturally not detailed in propaganda and instead only the perceived
benefits of the campaign were highlighted. In Dong Cunrui the campaign is only
hinted at, with subtle references to the benefits for the peasant soldiers that were to
be achieved from the establishment of a socialist society. Issues of social stratification
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From Civil War to Cold War 261

are dealt with more clearly, as the film often dwells on elements of social levelling.
Commanders and regular soldiers talk with each on the same level, share jokes and use
nicknames, thus demonstrating the way in which the party was attempting to establish
a classless society.
Dong Cunrui was clearly an important film for the CCP’s Central Propaganda
Department. It featured on the cover of Dazhong Dianying in 1956. It was frequently
advertised inside the magazine with both colour shots from the film and artistic
portrayals of Dong. In addition, Zhang Liang detailed his experiences playing the
role and how Dong’s actions had strongly affected him. This is an interesting piece of
supplementary propaganda, as Zhang spends a great deal of time detailing the reasons
for Dong’s actions, reinforcing the desired message, that when he sacrificed himself he
was thinking of ‘the country, people, life and victory’.31 Articles like these were clearly
intended to remove any ambiguity from the minds of readers about the meaning of
what they had witnessed on screen.
As an instrument of supplementary propaganda, Dazhong Dianying evolved
considerably over the first decade of CCP rule. Earlier articles reviewed films more
critically and allowed readers to make their own judgements about the films. Later
pieces became progressively more didactic.

Shang Gan Ling (1956)

Our soldiers, the privates under the leadership of the CCP, everyone one of them may
fight tens of, or hundreds of enemies.32

Following the success of Dong Cunrui, Changchun Film Studios developed the military
Model Worker theme further in a new film by utilizing the more recent external conflict
in Korea. The film was entitled Shang Gan Ling and it was directed by Sha Meng. It
starred Gao Bao Cheng in the central role of Model Worker Zhang Zhongfa. Zhang
was a fictional character; thus, his portrayal represents a propaganda composite of the
ideal leader. Another Model Worker, Huang Jiguang, was present at the eponymous
battle. He sacrificed himself by blocking a machine gun nest with his body. Although
this is referenced in the film, his actions are instead undertaken by another fictional
character, Yang De Cai who is inspired by the leadership of Zhang Zhongfa to sacrifice
himself.
Dong Cunrui was, in part, a reaction to the Korean War. Shang Gan Ling was based
on a real incident, known to the United Nations forces as the Battle for Pork Chop
Hill.33 The nationalist theme was developed considerably in this film with a particular
focus on the unity of the people, the evil nature of the foreign threat and the superiority
of Chinese military professionalism and technology. In addition, Shang Gan Ling
develops a nationalist theme introduced in Dong Cunrui: the beauty of the Chinese
countryside and its status as Motherland of the people. The film demonstrates the
extent to which the idea of a unified China, not just of the people but also of territory,
combined with correct leadership, was central to the implementation of the Model
Worker movement.
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262 Propaganda and Conflict

The Battle of Shang Gan Ling took place between 14 October and 28 November
1952. The film opens with an explanation of the situation, in which the blame for the
conflict is firmly placed on the United States. Zhang Zhongfa leads a small team of
soldiers on a relief mission to assist the Chinese forces at Shang Gan Ling hill. When
they arrive, the commander, soon to be relieved, refuses to withdraw, stating, ‘I can
never leave here, as long as I  am alive, I’ll never leave this position.’34 However, he
is eventually forced to abandon the position after being shot and blinded by enemy
gunfire. This is followed by scenes in which the PLA heroically attempts to hold its
position. Inevitably, the PLA soldiers are forced to retreat because of the overwhelming
numbers of enemy soldiers who storm their position. The remaining soldiers retreat to
a cave where they learn from their leader the importance of unity and positive attitudes
in battle. Led by their heroic leader Zhang Zhongfa, they successfully reclaim the hill.
While all three themes – nationalism, socialism and social reform – permeate Shang
Gan Ling, nationalism is the primary driving force of the film.
The promotion of the nationalist theme in Shang Gan Ling can broadly be
divided into four categories: anti-Americanism, unity of the people, the beauty of the
Motherland and the superiority of Chinese weaponry and technology. Although the
first three aspects were also common in the earlier films, the addition of numerous
scenes detailing the performance of Chinese weaponry would appear to indicate a new
level of confidence in this aspect of the nation’s ability to defend itself, or at least a
desire to project an air of confidence. The audience is exposed to the cruel nature of
the foreign enemy from the outset. For example, US soldiers are shot at by their officers
to make them advance, when they had been forced to retreat. To further underline the
propaganda message, US soldiers can be seen laughing as they use flame throwers to
attack Chinese soldiers. The depiction of US soldiers in other parts of the film was clearly
intended to demonstrate the ways in which Chinese society was morally superior. The
US soldiers are easily defeated; they advance in enormous numbers, seemingly without
any leadership or instinct for self-preservation. When they eventually manage to
overrun the Chinese position, they spend their time smoking and looking at pictures
of semi-clad women. They are thus portrayed as being more than simply barbaric; they
are degenerate, decadent and so  – by extension  – is the culture they represent. The
Chinese soldiers are not only presented as being physically and mentally superior, they
are also shown to be morally more advanced than their American adversaries.
The plot of Shang Gan Ling is unmistakably designed to assist in promoting another
important aspect of nationalism, the unity of the people. As Paul G. Pickowicz notes,
there are no examples of any kind of ethnic divisions in the Chinese Army, and the
enemy is commonly referred to as being ‘di ren’ (the enemy) rather than of a specific
nationality.35 Consequently, this creates a clear ‘us versus them’ dialectic, the type that
propagandists had been attempting to emphasize since the beginning of the Model
Worker project. The soldiers are forced together by circumstances into an unpleasant
location, but they work selflessly together to turn probable defeat into victory. Zhang
Zhongfa helps to foster this spirit of unity. Resources are diverted to help the wounded,
and traditional Chinese stories are told to encourage the soldiers. This is an interesting
aspect as in later films the words of Mao would no doubt have been invoked to inspire,
but in Shang Gan Ling the soldiers look to their nation’s history for inspiration.
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From Civil War to Cold War 263

In Dong Cunrui, it is possible to see the way in which scriptwriters had decided
to incorporate the geographical and natural environment of the countryside into the
nationalist message. In Shang Gan Ling, this is taken a step further as soldiers frequently
mention their homeland. This culminates with a montage scene in which the soldiers
sing the song ‘My Motherland’ while a succession of pictures of China come into
view.36 This song is sung prior to the soldiers returning to battle. Thus, it would appear
that they draw strength from the concept of nationhood rather than from a specific
ideology or leadership principle. However, this is not to dismiss the importance of the
party. While the promotion of the country as being the ‘Motherland’ is obvious, it is
the father, in this case the party, that gives the soldiers further inspiration and guidance
by which they can achieve success. This success is also achieved by another aspect
absent from earlier films. In Shang Gan Ling, a great deal of emphasis is placed on the
military firepower in the hands of the People’s Army. Artillery strikes are frequently
mentioned and, in an interesting juxtaposition, it is the Americans who use human
wave tactics while the Chinese use superior weaponry and technology to overcome
their opponents.
In summary, the nationalist message that the propagandists of the Changchun Film
Studio were attempting to communicate to the audience was multifaceted, but hardly
complex. By viewing Shang Gan Ling, the audience were intended to feel confident
that China was more than capable of waging war. The Korean conflict provided
propagandists with the opportunity to demonstrate the values of ‘New China’ by
highlighting in their portrayal of the enemy everything that the new state was not.
The US enemy was degenerate and dishonourable. By contrast, the PLA was noble,
united, morally superior and gained strength from their Motherland. The soldiers of
the PLA used this strength, combined with the latest technology, to fight the despicable
barbarian horde intent upon destroying the newly formed nation.
Although Shang Gan Ling lacks the character development of Dong Cunrui, the
core elements of social reform are still relevant. Zhang Zhongfa was a composite film
‘character’ and this initially makes his imperfect portrayal a little confusing. His only
real character ‘flaws’ are his extreme enthusiasm for combat and his slightly outdated
thinking regarding the inclusion of women on the frontline. He displays a great deal
of empathy for the commander he replaces and is sensitive to the needs of the less
experienced soldiers in his unit. In addition, he is personally responsible for inventing
a new battle strategy but refuses to take the credit for it, instead choosing to share the
honour with his unit. Comradeship and community spirit seamlessly run through the
film. Following the conclusion of a successful battle, Zhang Zhongfa is presented with
some apples as a gift from the leadership. He immediately offers them to the wounded
soldiers. However, they also reject the fruit and state that they would rather it went to
those who were still fighting to secure everyone’s freedom.
Zhang Zhongfa’s background story is also used to present the ideal career trajectory
of a Model Worker. This is seen when a soldier explains to a female nurse the details
of Zhang’s journey from new recruit to veteran soldier. This journey culminates in an
audience with Chairman Mao. The message is made very clear to the audience: live
the ideal life and you will be rewarded. Pickowicz argues that Zhang Zhongfa is not
a perfect hero because of the tensions that exist within his character.37 These tensions
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exist, so he argues, because although he is supposed to be a dedicated Leninist he still

questions authority. While Zhang is most certainly not ‘perfect’, the ‘tensions’ that exist
are superficial. Dong Cunrui went through a journey that fundamentally changed his
character; in contrast, Zhang Zhongfa has already achieved heroic status from the
beginning of the film. He may question orders and is critical of the leadership, but in a
manner similar to that of Dong. Indeed, like Dong, he is awarded a medal for his bold
actions. Zhang was clearly completely loyal to the central leadership of the party, but in
Maoist fashion this did not mean his immediate superiors were beyond criticism. He
is devoted to the central authority but critical of local leadership.
References to the benefits of the socialist system are limited in Shang Gan Ling.
What little evidence exists is confined to the promotion of comradeship and equality
of the sexes. One of the most prominent characters in the film is a nurse named Wang
Lan, played by Liu Yu Ru. Zhang is initially unhappy about allowing her to join the
war effort; he states, ‘[a]‌woman comrade is still a woman.’38 He is admonished for this
comment and eventually places her in command of the medical unit inside the cave.
By contrast to both Zhao Yiman and Liu Hulan, the amount of coverage given to
Shang Gan Ling in the film magazine Dazhong Dianying is rather limited. The film is
featured on a 1956 cover and in several colour advertisements inside the publication.39
Shang Gan Ling demonstrates the fundamental change in the way in which a military
Model Worker and Chinese society were to be portrayed during a contemporary rather
than historical conflict. The battle gave Sha Meng the opportunity to create a ‘palate
cleanser’, designed to wash away the bitter taste of the previous century.

Conclusion

The development of post-Civil War film propaganda was clearly intended to answer the
question of how China could once again be ‘great’. Chinese cinema was influenced by a
desire not just to re-model existing Chinese society but also to provide a re-evaluation of
the historic past. This re-evaluation was designed to counter the perceived continuous
‘humiliation’ by foreign powers since the late nineteenth century and was achieved by
depicting Model Workers as soldiers engaged in heroic military acts during historical
conflicts. However, this was not the sole function of the Model Worker in cinematic
propaganda. To confront the challenges of the Cold War and create a ‘new China’ based
on the ideology of Marxist–Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, a new type of citizen
was required. Consequently, Chinese propaganda not only focused on exhortations
to increase productivity and build a new socialist economy but was also primarily
intended to change the way in which citizens perceived the world around them. The
new citizen would arrest the perceived decline of the nation through enthusiasm for
change based on the core values of nationalism, social reform and the development of
socialism.
In addition to demonstrating to citizens what was expected of them, propaganda
films of this era used depictions of the enemy not only to further the cause of
national unity but also to define what the new Chinese state was not. In each of the
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From Civil War to Cold War 265

films studied, there is a very clear line that exists between the oppressed and their
oppressors. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of the featured enemies is the
way in which they were portrayed as being particularly inhuman. This conceivably
fulfilled two functions, first to thoroughly demonize those who opposed the People’s
Republic and second to help further define the humanity of the Model Worker and
the way in which the new nation was morally superior. Indeed, in films presenting the
Civil War, Chinese nationals who served with the Guomindang are either never seen
or are closely associated with the hated Japanese, thus making it clear that they are not
genuine members of the nation.
Mao’s insistence  – that the message of socialism presented through propaganda
must be simple and easy to understand for the masses – clearly influenced the films
of this era, particularly those featured in this chapter. Indeed, socialism as a concept
is rarely, if ever, explored or explained. References are made to land reform and the
equality of the people in earlier films, but they are largely ignored in later ones. The
focus shifts to what was to be expected of an ideal socialist citizen. The use of Model
Workers to promote certain ideas or cultural norms was hardly a new concept, but why
did Chinese propagandists embrace it to such a great extent? The politics of Chinese
nationalism are complex, but with regard to Model Workers they featured three
interesting concepts:  iconoclasm, rebounding from humiliation and the unification
of the people. In consideration of these themes, the Model Worker was the ideal agent
of change. The concept provided a canvas upon which the propaganda departments of
the CCP were able to paint its vision of what a perfect ‘new citizen’ should be. Film,
in particular, gave the propaganda department the opportunity to depict historical
events as they arguably would have liked them to have been, and to remove elements
of Chinese culture (iconoclasm) that were believed to be unsuitable. In addition, the
actions of the Model Workers presented in these films were ‘enhanced’ (rebounding
from humiliation). This was so that they might better serve to counter not just the
social problems that were believed to exist in society but also to demonstrate the
inherent worth of the people.
The importance given to cinematic propaganda is evident in the ways in which
it developed and in which any deviations from the promotion of nationalism, social
reform and the development of socialism were met with severe criticism. As Mao’s
vision of how to create a perfect China evolved, so did portrayals of the perfect Model
Worker. Heroes such as Liu Hulan demonstrated optimism for a more socially equal
future while Dong Cunrui represented the uncertainty – and optimism – of the post-
Civil War period. The fictional Zhang Zhongfa of Shan Gan Ling served to display
the extent to which propagandists wished their audience to know that ‘new China’
was willing and able to engage in external conflicts. The propaganda message was
clear:  with the guidance of the CCP provided through the emulation device of the
Model Worker, and by adherence to the core values of nationalism, social reform and
the development of socialism, Chinese society had progressed significantly. The nation
was now technically, spiritually and morally superior to any imperialist enemy. By
emulating the heroes of the recent past, the people would be guaranteed a secure and
prosperous future ready and able to face the challenges of the Cold War.
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Notes
1 Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 1: Problems of Strategy in China’s
Revolutionary War (Peking, 1965), p. 183.
2 Ibid.
3 Mao Zedong, Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-Tung: ‘On the People’s
Democratic Dictatorship’ (Peking, 1967), p. 306.
4 Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 2: ‘In Memory of Norman Bethune’
(Peking, 1965), p. 337; Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 3: ‘Serve
the People’ (Peking, 1965), p. 227; Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol.
3: ‘The Foolish Old Man Who Removed The Mountains’ (Peking, 1965), p. 321; Mao
Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 3: ‘Talks at the Yan’an Conference on
Literature and Art (Peking, 1965), p. 69.
5 John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (eds), Nationalism (Oxford, 1994), p. 5.
6 Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford,
2005), p. 111.
7 Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York, 1990), p. 515.
8 Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 38.
9 Liu Hulan (1950), Directed by Sun Yu, Changchun Film Studio, 1:00:57.
10 Zhao Yiman (1950), Directed by Sha Meng, Changchun Film Studio.
11 For the CCP, ‘liberation’ meant the overthrow of imperialism (in the Sino-Japanese
war), and of feudalism and capitalism (in the Civil War against the Guomindang).
CCP Model Worker propaganda often blurred the line between Guomindang and
Japanese forces.
12 Liu Hulan, 10:03.
13 Ibid., 59:40.
14 Ibid., 1:24:50.
15 Ibid., 15:40.
16 Timothy Cheek, ‘ “The Chinese People Have Stood Up”, September 1949’, in Timothy
Cheek (ed.), Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions: A Brief History with Documents
(New York, 2002), p. 125.
17 Liu Hulan, 1:00:57.
18 Yinjin Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and
the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002),
p. 177.
19 Liu Hulan, 51:00.
20 ‘Criticism from the Workers about the Film Liu Hulan’, Dazhong Dianying, 28
(1951), n.p.
21 Dong Cunrui (1955), Directed by Guo Wei, Changchun Film Studio, 1:39:01.
22 Yingjin Zhang and Zhiwei Xiao, Encyclopaedia of Chinese Film (London, 2014),
p. 146.
23 Jay Leyda, Dianying/Electric Shadows – Account of Films and the Film Audience in
China (Cambridge, MA, 1972), pp. 213–15.
24 Zhang Liang, ‘My Experience Playing the Role of Dong Cunrui’, Dazhong Dianying, 5
(1956), n.p.
25 Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (London, 2004), pp. 57–8.
26 Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century
China (Redwood City, CA, 1997), p. 140.
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From Civil War to Cold War 267

27 Dong Cunrui, 59:00.
28 Ibid., 36:18.
29 Ibid., 1:02:20.
30 Zedong, Selected Works, vol. 3: ‘Serve the People’, p. 227.
31 Zhang, ‘Role of Dong Cunrui’.
32 Shang Gan Ling (1956), Directed by Sha Meng, Changchun Film Studio, 45:00.
33 An American film was also made detailing the events of the battle: Pork Chop Hill
(1959), Directed by Lewis Milestone, United Artists.
34 Shang Gan Ling, 16:53.
35 Paul G. Pickowicz, ‘Revisiting Cold War Propaganda: Close Readings of Chinese and
American Film Representations of the Korean War’, Journal of American–East Asian
Relations, 17: 4 (2010), p. 357.
36 Created in 1956, the song was written by Qiao Yu and speaks of the beauty of the
Chinese nation, the people, the country and its strength.
37 Pickowicz, ‘Revisiting Cold War Propaganda’, p. 356.
38 Shang Gan Ling, 40:00.
39 James Farley, ‘Constructing a New Citizen – The Use of Model Workers in “New
China” 1949–1965’ (PhD thesis, University of Kent, 2016).
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13

Counter-propaganda: Cases from US
public diplomacy and beyond
Nicholas J. Cull

In some circumstances god respects an appropriate time for falsehood.

—Aeschylus (525–456 BC)1

One of the oddities of mass political persuasion – propaganda – is that the single most
powerful driver of its evolution has been the desire to combat the advance of the ideas
of others, which is to say that much of what we consider to be propaganda can also be
understood as counter-propaganda. The word ‘propaganda’ originated in the middle of
the sixteenth century in the vocabulary of the Jesuit order as a way of speaking of their
organized attempts to ‘propagate’ the Catholic faith in response to the encroachment
of Protestantism:  the so-called ‘Counter-Reformation’. The massive US information
campaign of the Cold War was called into being as a response to the perceived
threat of communist propaganda from the Soviet Union, and in our own time the
contemporary large-scale expenditure of China in the realm of cultural outreach and
international broadcasting is conceptualized by Beijing as a corrective to the Western
bias of the standard global media outlets. It would seem that all propaganda at some
point characterizes itself as counter-propaganda in much the same way as militaries are
justified as defensive. This chapter will examine the evolution and nature of counter-
propaganda, drawing particularly on the history of the phenomenon in the United
States.
Counter-propaganda can be segmented into two core approaches: tactical counter-
propaganda and strategic counter-propaganda. Tactical counter-propaganda is a
message or set of messages or activities deployed to push back against a specific
message from an adversary, as when the United States Information Agency (USIA)
sought to expose specific Soviet disinformation rumours in the 1980s. This tactical-
level counter-propaganda is so dominant in some connections of the topic as to
exclude any wider concept.2 Strategic counter-propaganda is an entire communication
policy devised as a response to an adversary’s propaganda activity, as when during the
1930s the British government launched the British Council and BBC foreign language
broadcasts as a riposte to the perceived encroachment of totalitarian propaganda of
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right and left in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere.3 Claiming a campaign
as counter-propaganda has moral implications. Some political cultures which are
uncomfortable with state-sponsored propaganda are nevertheless willing to launch
counter-propaganda and may even demand it, as in the United States during the run-up
to the passage of the Smith–Mundt Act of 1948, the act which remains the legislative
authority for most US exchange and information work.4
Counter-propaganda has historically included a spectrum of methods. The most
basic is the negative act of censorship:  forcibly preventing the adversary’s ideas
from circulating within one’s own society though press restrictions, radio jamming,
laws, internet walls or similar activity.5 An extension of this has been the dramatic
expedient of reaching into the adversary’s society to forcibly silence the source of
the propaganda. Extreme examples of this include the murder of the BBC Bulgarian
service broadcaster Georgi Markov by the Bulgarian secret service in September 1978
or the Romanian secret service’s bombing of the headquarters of Radio Free Europe
(RFE)/Radio Liberty’s headquarters in February 1981. One might also see the US
government’s decision to target the Al-Qaeda propagandist Adam Gadahn in January
2015 or NATO’s bombing of Serbian state television’s headquarters in April 1999 as
a form of counter-propaganda. If such direct actions are impossible, ineffective or
considered morally unacceptable, the spectrum extends to active interventions in the
information space.
While most counter-propaganda initiatives take the form of messaging of some
kind, there is also a category of broader responses which seek to alter the environment
in which the messages circulate. These environmental interventions may include
attempts to distract from the adversary’s message or to dilute the message by ramping
up the availability of entertainment (as seems to be the case in contemporary China).
One of the most common counter-propaganda strategies is to generate messaging at
a broader environmental level. A state may add a wide range of alternate messages to
muddy the waters (which, as Peter Pomerantsev has demonstrated, seems to be the
favoured tactic of contemporary Russian international media)6 or launch a general
campaign to demonize, ridicule or stigmatize information from a particular source
without specifying a particular piece of propaganda or story they wish to rebut.
A good case of a counter-propagandist taking on a whole category of information
rather than a single story may be found in mid-eighteenth-century England when,
in 1758, the great wit and polemicist Samuel Johnson decided to respond to the
outrageous patriotic propaganda generated by his own country’s press in its coverage
of the French–Indian Wars then raging in North America. Rather than naming names
or publications or taking on specific stories of distortion such as atrocity reporting
relating to the capture of the French fort of Louisbourg by the British in July 1758, he
observed,

Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love
of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.
A peace will equally leave the warrior and relater of wars destitute of employment;
and I  know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers
accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie.7
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Counter-Propaganda 271

The lack of specificity gave the observation a much longer shelf life than a specific
rebuttal of a biased account. In a similar vein, a century later the great British advocate
of trade as a path to peace, John Bright, observed, ‘You will find wars are supported
by a class of argument which, after the war is over, the people find were arguments
they should never have listened to.’8 Dr Johnson’s observation found its echo in the
well-worn meme that ‘in war truth is the first casualty’. This quote was in circulation
among anti-war (and anti-propaganda) activists as far back as 1916. It was widely used
in the 1920s during the period of reflection on why the world fought the Great War,
and was revived in the Vietnam era.9 It has now attained the status of an aphorism,
circulating as a kind of folk remedy to propaganda.10 Other linguistic cultures had
reached similar conclusions. German folk culture has: ‘Kommt der Krieg ins Land /
Gibt’s Lügen wie Sand.’ (When war comes to the land, the lies [pile up] like sand.)11
Spain has ‘En tiempo de guerra, mentiras por mar y por tierra.’ (In wartime, lies [come]
by sea and by land.)12 The Chinese sage Han Feizi observed some 2,300 years ago that
‘nothing is too deceitful in war’, a phrase which may have begun as extending licence
for a ruler but which lives on as a warning to the public.13
There are other examples of aphorisms serving as a counter to media bias of various
kinds. These include the British saying born of the advent of the popular press – ‘You
can’t believe everything [that] you read in the papers’  – or the African-American
‘dozen’ (a street quip) common in the mid-twentieth century:  ‘You talk more shit
than the radio.’14 The internet age has thrown up a fascinating meme which makes
the same point with a quote in large font – ‘Don’t believe everything you read on the
internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it’ – alongside a photograph
of and attribution to Abraham Lincoln.15 The existence of this kind of folk wisdom is
an asset which cannot be underestimated. Political communication works best when
connecting to ideas and feelings which people already have and recognize as true. The
reminder of a folk aphorism against propaganda may blunt the force of an otherwise
powerful piece of propaganda seeking to connect to such reliable pre-existing ideas as
mistrust of foreigners or love of home.
While logic suggests that counter-propaganda requires an enemy campaign to
react against, that campaign does not have to be contemporaneous. Strategic counter-
propaganda campaigns frequently react against the memory of past campaigns
considered especially damaging. The Nazi propaganda strategy in Germany during
Hitler’s rise to power was counter-propaganda devised in response to the memory of
the Allied psychological assault on the Central Powers during the Great War. The most
significant American reaction was, however, the massive intellectual mobilization
against propaganda launched by American intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s in
response the perceived role of British propaganda and vested domestic US interests
in drawing the United States into the Great War. That effort bears close examination.

Counter-propaganda in the inter-war United States

The earliest exponents of the US counter-propaganda effort of the inter-war years were
the public intellectual Walter Lippmann, whose book Public Opinion in 1922 coined
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the term ‘stereotype’, and Harold Lasswell at the University of Chicago, who in 1927
published Propaganda Technique in the World War.16 Books which rang the alarm bell
on foreign propaganda specifically included H. C. Peterson’s Propaganda for War: The
Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (1939).17 Influential books from
the UK finding a US audience included Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time. The
collective intellectual effort in the field of propaganda studies developed into a full-
blown exercise in pre-emptive counter-propaganda with scholars working to protect
the United States from future war propaganda in exactly the way an epidemiologist
seeks to inoculate a population against a future plague. The effort is now recognized
as a major moment in the evolution of the discipline of communication studies in
the United States. By the mid-1930s, the work was a favourite for funding from the
Rockefeller Foundation. Projects supported included the path-breaking media effects
work of the Radio Research Project directed by Austrian émigré Paul Lazarsfeld, first
at Princeton and later at Columbia. Other milestones included the foundation of the
journal Public Opinion Quarterly by US covert intelligence pioneer (and veteran of
early anti-Bolshevik propaganda work) DeWitt Clinton Poole Jr in 1937 and creation of
an Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) in New York City that same year under the
leadership of an education professor from Columbia University named Clyde R. Miller
and a Harvard geologist and activist for academic freedom, Kirtley F. Mather.18
The IPA set about circulating a regular Propaganda Analysis bulletin to opinion
formers within the United States, including editors and college presidents, to ensure
that they were on the lookout for propaganda. Its first edition included what would
be one of its most famous formulations, seven basic propaganda devices which recur
in the literature of propaganda like the seven deadly sins:  Name-Calling (tarring an
adversary with a word calculated to lower their prestige or credibility like ‘Fascist’ or
‘Warmonger’); Glittering Generality (presenting one’s agenda in a vague but enticing
form as when promising ‘a shining city on a hill’); Transfer (unjustifiably associating
an argument with an admired category of thought such as religion or patriotism);
Testimonial (enrolling or citing an intermediary with some special credibility to the
audience); Plain Folks (identifying the speaker or position being promoted with folk
wisdom and familiar home values); Card Stacking (creating a false comparison to
give an illusion of a balanced argument and introducing a disproportionate quantity
of information on your side); and Band Wagon (engineering the appearance of a
large number of people already conforming to the view you wish to promote to take
advantage of the well-known social pressures to conform). The institute’s output
deepened to include a number of books and school texts including The Group Leader’s
Guide to Propaganda Analysis (1938), Propaganda: How to Recognize and Deal with It
(an experimental unit of study materials in propaganda analysis for use in junior and
senior high schools) (1938), The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin’s
Speeches (1939), and Harold Lavine and James Wechsler’s War Propaganda and the
United States (1940).19
The ‘discovery’ of the susceptibility of populations to propaganda and readiness of
governments to engage in it was widely covered in the US media. The Saturday Evening
Post ran a three-part story on the dangers of propaganda in the summer of 1929
and the whole of the 1930s was characterized by a widespread ‘propaganda phobia’
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Counter-Propaganda 273

and propaganda panic.20 One offshoot of this fear was the creation of committees
of the House of Representatives to root out foreign influence starting with the
McCormack-Dickstein Committee of 1934–7 (more properly the ‘Special Committee
on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain
Other Propaganda Activities’) and then the ultimately notorious House Committee on
Un-American Activities (HUAC), established in 1938 to root out foreign fascist and
communist propaganda under the chairmanship of Martin Dies. The investigations led
to a legal intervention in the communication environment in the form of the Foreign
Agents Registration Act (FARA), which required all foreign publicists operating in
the United States to be documented and their publications labelled and shared with
the Department of Justice. US anxiety reached such levels that the British government
decided that any attempt to directly influence American public opinion would be
counterproductive. The British Council did not operate in the United States until
the 1970s. The British approach to US opinion focussed on answering questions and
cultivating American journalists in the United States and the United Kingdom.21

Against rumours in wartime

The outbreak of the Second World War in Europe prompted a redoubling of research
into both propaganda and counter-propaganda. The Rockefeller Foundation launched
foreign radio monitoring and analysis projects at Princeton and Stanford (for the
Pacific Theatre) and a project to study ‘Totalitarian Communication in Wartime’ at
The New School in New York overseen by Ernst Kris and Hans Speier (in cooperation
with Britain’s BBC). In time, the US government subsumed this work into a formal
Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). A particular area of concern was how
best to respond to the circulation of rumours, both spontaneous and deliberately
engineered as a viral form of propaganda. The US government was convinced that the
promulgation of Nazi rumours had played a key role in the fall of France in 1940 and
the German success in the Balkans. The US Office of War Information (OWI) drew up
a typology of the six kinds of Nazi rumour:

(1) Mousetrap – raise false hope – damage morale when proves false (i.e. Hitler
nervous breakdown).
(2) Defeatist – used in France.
(3) Slanderous – undermine faith in institutions.
(4) Strategic – rumour of attack in wrong location, that is, rumour = Balkans,
reality = Scandinavia.
(5) Confused – two or more stories on the same general subject, in contradiction
with each other. Designed primarily to create confusion of mind; and if possible
to destroy the faith of a people in the reliability of its own news services.
Effectively used in conjunction with the mousetrap rumour to cause a people to
believe that its own government is intentionally misleading it.
(6) The recurrent rumour – repetition of the above, that is, peace offensive, Hitler/
army split.22
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The propaganda scholars swiftly noted that propaganda rumours work even when
presented in a negative frame: repeat a rumour even as you deny it and you run the
risk of further advancing the rumour. More than this, a denial can be understood by
an audience as strong evidence that the rumour is true, hence the aphorism ‘there is
no smoke without fire’. With this in mind, the Morale Division of the US government’s
OWI wisely decided not to go forward with a national radio programme exposing
German propaganda rumours, on the grounds that the rumours were more colourful,
memorable and impactful than a boring old fact could ever be. They did however track
rumours carefully, collecting them systematically from a national network of teachers,
barbers, beauty shop workers and others exposed to public discussion. The OWI
used the information collected to help shape its priorities and approaches in public
information.23
The operation proved to be a learning process, more especially as it enlisted some
of the stars of American psychology, including Harvard’s Gordon W. Allport. The OWI
began with the assumption that people spread rumours for a range of reasons. The
initial list of motives was as follows: ‘exhibitionism, reassurance and emotional support,
projection (wish fulfillment or rationalization), aggression (malicious gossip), [or to]
bestow a favor’.24 As the operation progressed, the OWI gained further insight into the
psychology of the rumour-monger. An OWI bureau of intelligence survey conducted
between 3 and 15 August 1942 established a correlation of rumour-mongering with
people who were intelligent and generally well informed, sociable, employed, but
experiencing emotional tension. It was also obvious that people spread rumours
that fitted their pre-war prejudices and that most rumours were not designed or
promulgated by Nazi agents but were the product of local imaginings concocted to fill
a gap in the news.25 Surveys consistently found that rumours in the United States – like
the US culture which gave birth to them – had a peculiar obsession with speculation
on internal racial and ethnic politics. Early examples included widespread stories
that African Americans were organizing to press for racial reform and that Jewish
Americans were excused military service.26 The emphasis on national coherence and
domestic diversity within US wartime propaganda was a response to this. There was
also a general attempt to alert citizens to the dangers of rumour-mongering. The OWI
persuaded Walt Disney to make the short film Chicken Little (1943) with this in mind.27
The OWI resolved that the best place to engage a rumour was locally, within the
community in which it was already endemic. The agency established (or in some cases
established authority over) a network of rumour clinics which identified rumours and
placed counter-material in the local newspaper.28 The director of the Boston office –
psychology scholar Robert Knapp – published his findings in 1944, including a list of
six succinct directives for effective rumour control:

( 1) Assure good faith in the regular media of communication.

(2) Develop maximum confidence in leaders.
(3) Issue as much news as possible, as quickly as possible.
(4) Make information as accessible as possible.
(5) Prevent idleness, monotony, and personal disorganization.
(6) Campaign deliberately against rumour-mongering.29
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The directives still make a lot of sense for those seeking to rein in rumour in the
internet era.
At the end of the Second World War, the United States undertook an unusual
programme of mass counter-propaganda in the ‘re-education’ of Germany and Japan.
While both campaigns began on the basis that the two societies which had played host
to totalitarian propaganda were inherently sick, approaches diverged. In Germany, the
approach retained an inherently democratic model focussing on the nurturing of a
free press, liberal education and civil society. In Japan, the perception of an imminent
regional threat from the USSR foreshortened the activity and it was characterized
rather by simply running new fluid through the old pipes and redirecting the imperial
propaganda machine to new democratic purposes. There were attempts in both
societies to develop free media. One of the most fascinating side notes in Japan was the
US occupation’s decision to launch the radio game show as a genre to promote the idea
of the individual and competition as an antidote to a past diet of centralized imperial
propaganda.30

The Cold War and the backfire effect

The Cold War  – as already noted  – drew forth a massive ideological mobilization
on the part of the United States in the name of counter-propaganda. One major
insight was the understanding that the credibility of a message often hinged not on
its inherent content but on the nature of the messenger, with a messenger bearing
the most similarity to the audience enjoying considerably enhanced credibility. This
underpinned a number of counter-propaganda initiatives, including the sponsorship
of a range of radio stations under the brand of RFE in which émigrés were employed to
provide an open media source in the local language for major nations behind the ‘Iron
Curtain’. Two particular challenges for the United States in its counter-propaganda were
to contest the association of the USSR with peace and with the intellectual community.
One of the effective mechanisms for combating the latter idea was the publication in
1949 of a book of autobiographical essays entitled The God That Failed, written by
intellectuals who had once identified themselves as communists but had later rejected
the philosophy.31 The collection was the brainchild of the British MP and veteran of
Second World War propaganda, Richard Crossman, who served as editor. Crossman
brought together six writers  – Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio
Silone, Stephen Spender and Richard Wright  – spanned a number of nationalities
and ethnicities (if not gender), and had unquestioned credibility with audiences. The
major contribution of the US (and UK) government was to ensure that the book was
translated and available as widely as possible around the world.32
Counter-propaganda capability was one of the rationales used to bolster the
argument that the mainstream international broadcasters operated by the US and
UK governments  – Voice of America and the BBC  – should be allowed to develop
credibility through balanced news coverage. This credibility was however sensitive to
attempts to cash in on a reputation for objectivity and sell a lie. The US government
was caught out in 1960 when President Eisenhower insisted that an American aerial
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reconnaissance aircraft lost over the USSR was a civilian weather plane, only of course
to have Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev expose the lie by producing the pilot of the
plane in question, Gary Powers. It is hard to do counter-propaganda, but doing it with
a lie makes one hostage to the fortunes of future evidence.
The domestic Cold War generated some spectacular examples of propaganda and
counter-propaganda. Some of the pre-war propaganda analysts were still on the scene.
In 1947, Walter Lippmann actually coined the term ‘Cold War’. Clyde Miller reworked
his old propaganda analysis recommendations to create the pamphlet What Everybody
Should Know about Propaganda; How and Why It Works in 1948.33 His partner, Kirtley
Mather, campaigned against McCarthyism in academia. McCarthyism – a spectacular
example of propaganda in the name of counter-propaganda  – demonstrated the
astonishing ability of a meme – in this case that of a vast anti-communist conspiracy –
once launched to gain currency through a mixture of conformity with pre-existing
fears and prejudices and intimidation against breaking ranks. However, as in the Hans
Christian Andersen story of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, the case of McCarthyite
propaganda showed the disproportionate power that a single credible voice could have
in disrupting a collective attitude of acceptance. The equivalent to the little boy calling
out that the emperor was naked was CBS broadcaster Edward R.  Murrow’s exposé
of McCarthy’s bullying techniques on his See It Now TV show in March 1954. The
disproportionate impact of a single dissenting counter-propagandist voice in breaking
the spell of acquiescence in a group was demonstrated convincingly in social science
by Solomon Asch as early as 1951.34
While it is tempting to think that Asch or the Murrow case demonstrate that
the right piece of counter-propaganda can be a magic bullet against propaganda,
subsequent experiences have found this not to be so. It is clear that most audiences
do not appreciate having their errors flagged, and that a powerful argument against
a political point can actually be counter-productive. This is more that the simple
recirculation of a problematic claim. Social psychologists have identified what is
commonly known as the backfire effect, a marked response of holding more firmly
to one’s initial position (i.e. the position of the original propaganda) and rejecting
the new position (that of the counter-propaganda) with considerable vehemence.35
One explanation for this phenomenon is what is termed the ‘confirmation bias’ – the
tendency of individuals to prefer information which confirms the first thing they are
told on any subject; but the deeper currents suggest that this is not merely about timing
but also about emotional attachment to the original explanation, most especially when
it becomes a component of the individual’s self-perceived identity. In terms of the Hans
Andersen story, the fact that people were getting a pay-off from pretending to see the
emperor’s invisible clothes – being able to include themselves among the intelligent
people of the kingdom  – makes the child’s observation less likely to break the spell
in reality than in the fairy story. As the social psychologist Kelton Rhoads has noted,

I submit that in a real Emperor’s New Clothes situation, with the population
being fully invested in the emperor’s clothes, . . . the little kid would have been
shushed up; an IRS [Internal Revenue Service] audit brought down on his parents;
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Counter-Propaganda 277

and somewhere, an apologist would be making the case that ‘At this point, what
difference does it make whether the emperor has clothes or not?’36

The backfire effect suggests that a sustained and explicit counter-propaganda campaign
may be a counterproductive path to take.37
In the middle years of the Cold War, the concept of counter-propaganda remained
current. It was part of the annual budget justification of the USIA and inspired some
particular campaigns. From 1954, the agency circulated a bulletin three times a week
tracking Soviet bloc propaganda under the title Soviet Orbit Propaganda, which
must have seemed ironic when the Soviets achieved their greatest propaganda coup
by actually putting something in orbit. The bulletin ended the decade as Propaganda
Intelligence Review.38
The USIA’s famous worldwide publicity theme of ‘People’s Capitalism’, as launched
in 1956, was explicitly designed to rebut Soviet claims that the US system benefitted
only a few. Similarly, the great USIA photo exhibition ‘The Family of Man’ countered
the Soviet claim to have a monopoly on the ‘brotherhood of humanity’ concept. There
was more to come.

US counter-propaganda in the 1960s and 1970s

The Kennedy administration imagined itself as coming from behind in a war for men’s
minds. Kennedy alluded to this in his inaugural address. His administration devoted
much attention to rebutting the idea that the Soviet Union was the wave of the future
and the best model for third-world development. Besides the communication initiatives
undertaken by the USIA, it is possible to see key policies of the 1960s as partially driven
by the need to provide counter-propaganda by deed. The space programme, the Peace
Corps, the military commitment to Vietnam and aspects of the federal response to the
Civil Rights issue were strongly driven by counter-propaganda concerns. Without a
background of Soviet propaganda and a contrasting Soviet example, US policy would
have unfolded very differently.39
The Vietnam War brought obvious challenges for US counter-propaganda. The Cold
War research-driven methods developed to that point were ill-suited to the realities of
war in the developing world. In the spring of 1964, the CIA helpfully suggested that
the US embassy in Vietnam begin analysing ‘local Viet Cong’ propaganda themes so
that effective counter-themes could be devised. With some irritation the ambassador,
Henry Cabot Lodge, reminded Washington that when a guerrilla enemy is conducting
propaganda through face-to-face conversation, the process left few documents
to study.40 The US government also was soon aware that the best voices to counter
domestic and foreign scepticism about the war (including those from the pioneer
of propaganda study Walter Lippmann) would have been to find a way to empower
the South Vietnamese to explain the war themselves. Despite the appeals from the
bureaucracy of US public diplomacy, the eventual leadership of South Vietnam
remained largely silent on the international stage.41 The North Vietnamese were more
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forthcoming and much more credible than the US government in talking about a war
in their own country.
In tactical counter-propaganda, the defender is forced to fight on terrain picked
by his adversary, but sometimes the adversary chooses badly. This proved to be the
case in the early Nixon period when the Soviet media began drawing attention to the
continued problems of Civil Rights in the United States. In 1970, Soviet outlets around
the world – and especially in Africa – directed particular attention to the pursuit, arrest
and trial of Angela Davis, a young African-American academic, Civil Rights activist
and Communist Party member. She was accused of supplying a handgun to militants
who later used the weapon in a deadly courtroom shooting. The Soviet propagandists
predicted what amounted to a legalized lynching. The USIA flagged the case for its
Public Affairs Officers (PAOs), noting, ‘While on the surface the Davis case seems
made to order for hostile propaganda, the facts are pretty disarming and offer plenty
of ammunition to counter Communist propaganda.’42 The USIA used the Davis case
to demonstrate the virtue of the US open legal system, contrasting the rights extended
to Angela Davis with those denied to defendants in the USSR.43 The USIA sent legal
experts to the field to speak directly to African audiences about the case and arranged
for a party of African jurists to monitor the trial for themselves. The clincher of the
counter-propaganda value of the case came when the all-white jury acquitted Davis.
Similar decisions in parallel cases, such as the trial of the so-called Soledad Brothers
and several Black Panther trials, put the lie to Soviet predictions.44
The process of détente in the mid-1970s brought an interlude in which the architects
of US public diplomacy considered developing an entirely new model of outreach;
however, the coincidence of a lack of bureaucratic imagination, a desire to protect the
bureaucratic status quo and – ultimately – a resurgence of Soviet adventurism brought
a return to counter-propaganda as the raison d’être of US foreign public engagement.
But the threat was shifting. As the Soviet Union moved into economic stagnation in
the later 1970s, it became harder to sell its system in terms of positive benefits or virtue,
and the Kremlin’s propagandists increasingly trusted to the circulation of fabricated
rumours or ‘disinformation’. When the Soviet campaign ramped up in the early 1980s,
the USIA coordinated an inter-agency response which is now considered a classic
counter-propaganda campaign. Key elements included systematically tracking and
exposing Soviet rumours and faked evidence as they appeared – this was done in a
newsletter circulated within the US government called Soviet Propaganda Alert – and
collating the material in the full-scale reports of the inter-agency (USIA/Department
of State) Active Measures Working Group. As the campaign progressed, it became
obvious that there was particular value in sharing an example of propaganda with
an audience other than the intended one, as the approach would seem awkward,
obvious and even humorous and would serve to undermine the overall credibility of
its originator. The USIA’s master of counter-propaganda – Herbert Romerstein – had
great fun showing European audiences examples of the Soviet ‘ethnic bomb’ rumour
crafted for the developing world. The idea of a bomb which killed black people but
left white people unharmed was terrifyingly plausible in the global South but absurd
to Europeans, more especially in its Middle Eastern incarnation, in which the bomb
killed Arabs but spared Jews.45
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There are other examples of counter-propaganda by selective republication.

Sometimes, creative reframing or recontextualization can help. Hence, in 1917,
British propagandists made much capital in the United States by mass-producing and
recirculating a German medallion related to the sinking of the Cunard ocean liner RMS
Lusitania. The medal had originally been struck as one of a private series of artistic
pieces. In the British reframing it became a crass official stand-alone souvenir created
by the German government to celebrate the death of hundreds of innocents.46 Similarly,
in the Second World War, the US government routinely used Nazi propaganda against
purpose, peppering its ‘recruit orientation’ Why We Fight films with clips from films
like Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935), though always taking care to use
only brief clips lest the film somehow regain its original purpose and inflate the image
of the German military. Finally, in our own time, those sympathetic to Israel have
understood the value of taking anti-Israeli or pro-Jihadi propaganda produced for a
local audience and recirculating it outside the Middle East region. The most successful
agency doing this work is the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), founded
in Washington, DC, in 1998 by a veteran of Israeli military intelligence named Yigal
Carmon. MEMRI translates and circulates online examples of propaganda from the
region. A piece which achieved particular prominence was a clip from a Palestinian
children’s television programme, Pioneers of Tomorrow, from 2007 in which Farfour, a
character who strongly resembled Mickey Mouse, was punched to death by an Israeli
government official.47

The post-Cold War period and the war on terror

Like the entire apparatus of US foreign public engagement, the counter-propaganda/

counter-disinformation element of US public diplomacy did not prosper in the years
following the Cold War. Despite valuable work tracking and heading off enemy
distortion during the first Iraq War and the distortions from the former Soviet Union
in the early 1990s, the USIA dwindled. Its staff eventually retired or were transferred
to unrelated duties. A  capability developed ad hoc during the NATO campaign
in Serbia/Kosovo, and the Clinton administration attempted to promulgate a
comprehensive reform of strategic information, including a counter-propaganda
capacity, under Presidential Decision Directive 68 of December 1999.48 The new
structure  – known as the International Public Information (IPI) structure  – was
designed to address what the ‘National Security Strategy for a New Century’ called
an ‘obligation’ to ‘counter misinformation and incitement, mitigate inter-ethnic
conflict, promote independent media organisations and the free flow of information,
and support democratic participation helps advance U.S. interests abroad’. Despite
the gravity of this task, it became mired in turf wars. Budgets and infrastructure
continued to decline. The terrorist attacks on America of 11 September 2001 (‘9/11’)
found the country essentially unprepared to combat disinformation or any other
form of propaganda, foreign or domestic, and at the very moment when the internet
gave rumour-mongers their biggest boost since the invention of the telephone a
century before.49
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The years following 9/11 have seen the slow process of rebuilding the US
government’s international communication capacity. Counter-propaganda has not
been a particular strength. The careful counter-rumour strategy of the OWI’s Robert
Knapp contrasted starkly with the response of the US undersecretary of state for public
diplomacy, Karen Hughes, during the middle years of the George W. Bush presidency.
She forbade her staff from engaging rumours – such as those alleging US complicity
in 9/11  – lest the rumour merely gain greater currency, but without the important
follow-up of local pushback. The US government failed to attempt even the broadest
descriptions of the true motives behind such core policies as its support for Israel.
Counter-propaganda remains a major driver of US public diplomacy. During
the early Obama years, public diplomacy was framed as a necessary response to
the Chinese charm offensive of Confucius Institutes, mega events and expanded
broadcasting. Responding to issues of counter-radicalization became a particular
priority. Instruments included a cross-agency Center for Strategic Counterterrorism
Communications  – established in 2011  – with the State Department as the lead
agency.50 2016 saw the creation of a Global Engagement Center, also under the State
Department.51 The later Obama years and Trump presidency were dominated by the
need to respond (or to be seen to be responding) to both the so-called Islamic State
and to Russia and by controversy over the shortcomings of that response. Are there
any policy recommendations which can be extracted from this century of experience?

(1) The systematic study and discussion of media bias and propaganda is an
important part of any counter-propaganda strategy and may be seen as equipping
a population with an important tool of citizenship.
(2) Rumours/fabrications need careful handling to avoid their simple perpetuation.
A multi-tiered approach is necessary, and explicit counter-messaging should
be restricted only to communities/networks in which the rumour is already
endemic.
(3) More can be achieved by communicating a greater positive than by grappling
explicitly with the negative and sparking a ‘backfire effect’.
(4) Well-chosen deeds can be more eloquent in rebutting propaganda and negative
images than well-chosen words.
(5) Sustained listening is an essential foundation to all public diplomacy, including
counter-propaganda.

Finally, it is worth noting that not all propaganda is best countered in the communication
sphere. Like pain in the body, hostile propaganda is not necessarily best understood
as a phenomenon in its own right but rather as a symptom of an underlying issue.
Just as treating the whole body can remove local pain, so addressing the source of
the propaganda can prove an effective strategy for counter-propaganda. In the late
1980s, the US government was able to end the widespread Soviet dissemination of
the claim that AIDS was created in a US biological warfare laboratory by threatening
to end scientific cooperation with Soviet researchers in the field of AIDS research.
Diplomats noted that the story disappeared from the media as effectively as if someone
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had turned off a tap.52 It may thus be that the ultimate answer to propaganda is to work
with the propagandists to give them a greater stake in the truth than in continued
deception and deceit.

Notes
This is an expanded version of an essay originally commissioned by the Legatum
Institute, London, in 2015 as part of its Transitions Forum and is reused here by kind
permission.
1 This quote (from Fragments, ed. and transl. Alan H. Sommerstein (Loeb Classical
Library, 505; Cambridge, MA, 2008), Fragment 302, p. 295) is included as a corrective
to the misattribution to Aeschylus of the famous saying that in wartime truth is the
first casualty. It is as close as Aeschylus comes to expressing that thought.
2 A readily available example of this limited conception is the current Wikipedia page
for ‘Counterpropaganda’.
3 The standard source on this initiative is Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of
Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda 1919–1939 (Cambridge, 1981).
4 This entire campaign is the subject of Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United
States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989
(New York, 2008); discussion of the Smith–Mundt debate is on pp. 36–7.
5 The most thoroughly documented example of this kind of counter-propaganda
is Paweł Machcewicz, Poland’s War on Radio Free Europe, 1950–1989 (Palo Alto,
CA, 2014).
6 For a sustained discussion of this, see Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and
Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York, 2014).
7 The Idler, no. 30, 11 November 1758.
8 The Bright quote is cited as an epigram by Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in
Wartime: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated throughout the Nations during
the Great War (London, 1928).
9 The quote is used by Philip Snowden, in his preface to the counter-propaganda
treatise by his fellow MP and Quaker anti-colonial activist E. D. Morel, Truth and
the War (London, 1916), p. vii, available at http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.
ark:/13960/t5x649v02;view=1up;seq=14 (last access 24 July 2018). For verifiable
examples of early usage of the quote, see http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/
new_york_city/entry/the_first_casualty_of_war_is_truth/ (last access 24 July 2018).
10 British politician Arthur Ponsonby was one of the popularizers of the ‘Truth is first
casualty’ quote – its repetition was part of press coverage of his anti-war campaign.
‘Ponsonby Sees War Based In Falsehood: “Truth Is First Casualty” In Any Conflict,
Says British Labor Party Leader’, New York Times, 7 February 1927, p. 18.
11 This aphorism is recorded by the Belgian author Fernand van Langenhove at the
opening of his study of German rumours of atrocities committed by Belgians at
the beginning of the First World War: Comment naît un cycle de légendes (Paris,
1916), p. 1.
12 I owe this saying to Catalan scholar of propaganda, Marc Argemí Ballbè.
13 The Chinese original is ‘兵不厌诈’. I owe the quote to the Chinese scholar of public
diplomacy, Zhou Xinyu.
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282 Propaganda and Conflict

14 ‘More shit than the radio’ is noted in Roger D. Abrahams, ‘Playing the Dozens’,
in Alan Dundes (ed.), Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the
Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore (Oxford, MS, 1973), pp. 295–310.
15 http://weknowmemes.com/2012/07/dont-believe-everything-you-read-on-the-
internet/ (last access 24 July 2018).
16 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (London, 1922); Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda
Technique in World War I [1927] (Cambridge, MA, 1971).
17 H. C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality,
1914–1917 (Norman, OK, 1939).
18 The archives of the IPA are at the New York Public Library, available at http://archives.
nypl.org/mss/1513.
19 IPA and Violet Edwards, The Group Leader’s Guide to Propaganda Analysis
(New York, 1938); IPA, Propaganda: How to Recognize and Deal with It (New York,
1938); Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda: A
Study of Father Coughlin’s Speeches (New York, 1939) (Charles Edward Coughlin,
1891–1979, was a controversial Roman Catholic priest who used radio broadcasts
to support anti-Semitism and the fascist policies of Hitler and Mussolini);
Harold Lavine and James Wechsler, War Propaganda and the United States
(New York, 1940).
20 For an intellectual history of the propaganda phobia, see Gary Brett, The Nervous
Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New York, 1999).
21 This background and the British response are dealt with at length in Nicholas John
Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American ‘Neutrality’ in
World War II (Oxford and New York, 1995).
22 Library of Congress, Archive of Folk Culture, AFC 1945/001, World War II Rumor
Collection (hereafter LoC, WWII RC), box 1, folder 2, ‘A Project for the Analysis of
Rumors’, 17 January 1942, available at http://www.loc.gov/folklife/guides/rumors.html
(last access 25 July 2018).
23 Ibid. A draft OWI memorandum on ‘Rumor Control Groups’ of 29 December
1942 summarized the dangers of anti-rumour activity as follows: ‘Programs which
are conducted without an awareness of the inherent and potential dangers of anti-
rumour activity may tend to: a) Circulate the very rumours which are being denied,
b) Circulate more rumours than are effectively denied, c) Make the community too
“rumour conscious,” d) Create widespread uneasiness, which is fertile soil for more
rumours, e) Exaggerate the danger of enemy propaganda – creating unnecessary fears
about the enemy’s cleverness or propaganda success in the United States, f) Deny
only certain kinds of rumours, allowing other rumours to circulate more freely, h)
Monopolise rumour-fighting by a given group so that the rumours denied are simply
those which offend the particular sensibilities or interests of the group – ignoring
those rumours which the group does not recognize as rumors or as dangerous.’ See
LoC, WWII RC, box 2, folder 9.
24 LoC, WWII RC, box 1, folder 2, ‘A Project for the Analysis of Rumors’, 17
January 1942.
25 LoC, WWII RC, box 1, folder 1, undated memo, ‘Rumor Combating Projects’.
26 LoC, WWII RC, box 1, folder 4, includes a compilation of rumours from the South
concerning fears over the status of African Americans, including rumours that
they had organized into secret Eleanor Clubs (named for the First Lady), and from
Alabama that ‘the federal government is going to try to use Negroes in the army to
subdue the south and impose a second reconstruction on us’. See Eugene Katz (Chief,
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OWI Special Services Div.) to Will Alexander (War Manpower Commission), 28

August 1942.
27 Disney’s cooperation is noted in LoC, WWII RC, box 1, folder 5, Katz to Keith Kane
(Asst. Dir., OWI), 5 October 1942.
28 Procedures are set out in LoC, WWII RC, box 2, folder 9, ‘Memorandum on Rumor
Control Groups’, 29 December 1942. The OWI learned that printed denials had to be
handled carefully, even down to the use of type face, noting, ‘Research shows that it
is best to use the same face-type of the same size for both the rumor and the denial of
the rumor. Tests show that where rumor (or rumor denials) are printed in bold-face,
italics, or special face-type, readers fall into the habit of reading all the rumors and
few (or none) of the denials.’
29 Robert H. Knapp, ‘A Psychology of Rumor’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 8: 1 (1944), pp.
22–37. The quotes are from pp. 35–7.
30 On the game show story, see Ji Hee Jung, ‘Playing with New Rules: Radio Quiz
Shows and the Reorientation of the Japanese under the US Occupation, 1945–1952’,
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 34: 4 (2014), pp. 568–85.
31 R. H. S. Crossman (ed.), The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism (New York,
1949; London, 1950).
32 For an overview of the literary element in early Cold War propaganda, see Andrew
Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, 1945–1953 (London, 2004).
33 Clyde R. Miller, What Everybody Should Know about Propaganda: How and Why It
Works (New York, 1948). The pamphlet was produced for and by the Commission for
Propaganda Analysis and Methodist Federation for Social Action.
34 Solomon Asch, ‘Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of
Judgments’, in H. Guetzkow (ed.), Groups, Leadership and Men (Pittsburgh, PA, 1951),
pp. 77–190.
35 On the backfire effect, see Craig Silverman, ‘The Backfire Effect: More on the Press’s
Inability to Debunk Bad Information’, Columbia Journalism Review, 17 June 2011,
available at http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_backfire_effect.php?page=all
(last access 25 July 2018).
36 Rhoads to author, March 2015.
37 Medical communicators have found it best not to reiterate the MMR vaccination/
autism controversy when trying to persuade parents to vaccinate their kids, but rather
to speak only about the benefits of vaccination and majority compliance with the
procedure, plays which build on the readiness of people to go along with the group in
their beliefs or behaviours: the bandwagon effect.
38 On the disposition of the records of these bulletins at the US National Archives
(USNA), see http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/rcs/schedules/departments/
department-of-state/rg-0306/n1-306-96-003_sf115.pdf (last access 25 July 2018).
39 A major review of US propaganda in 1960 noted that only a really dramatic
achievement, like manned flights to the Moon or Mars, could counter Soviet
propaganda, given their image of technological superiority. See Eisenhower
Presidential Library, Papers as President of the United States, 1953–61 (Ann Whitman
file), Administration Series, box 33, Sprague Committee file 1, ‘Conclusions and
Recommendations of the President’s Committee on Information Activities Abroad’,
December 1960, section IV.
40 USNA, Department of State Central Files (RG59), CPF 1964–66, box 417, INF 8
Viet S, Saigon 1637, Rusk to Saigon; INF 6 Viet S, Saigon 2052, Lodge to State, 24
April 1964.
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41 A lament along these lines may be found in LBJ Presidential Library, WHCF CF, box
135, CF USIA 1967, Leonard Marks (USIA Director) to President, via [Staff Assistant
Charles] Maguire, 14 February 1968.
42 Cited in Cull, The Cold War, p. 318.
43 The USIA’s acting director Henry Loomis authorized the agency to ‘discreetly note
President Nixon’s acknowledgement that his early comments on the charges against
Davis should not have been made’. In the United States, despite Nixon’s comments,
the accused was innocent until proved guilty. USNA, Records of the USIA (RG 306),
87.0018, Director’s Subject Files, box 24, 3 REA – Foreign Audience Characteristics,
Jenkins to all USIA PAOs, 4 February 1971; Loomis, ‘Infoguide No. 71–3: The Angela
Davis Trial’, 21 January 1971 with attachment by Ruddy, 13 January 1971. Cited in
Cull, The Cold War, p. 318.
44 Ibid.
45 Accounts of this campaign can be found in Cull, The Cold War, pp. 407–9, 425,
432–4, 444–6, 457–60; also in Alvin A. Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation: American
Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War: An Insider’s Account
(New York, 1995), pp. 93–125. Romerstein’s papers have been archived at the Hoover
Institution Archives at Stanford University and include both publications and internal
USIA documentation dealing with the struggle against disinformation.
46 The story of the medal is told in ­chapter 21 of Ponsonby’s Falsehood in Wartime.
Today, it is not uncommon for an independently produced piece of propaganda to
be mischievously linked to an official source. The government of Iran spoke of the
commercially produced motion picture 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006) in these terms, and
the same could be said of the pernicious YouTube video The Innocence of Muslims
(Nakoula Basseley Nakoula as ‘Sam Bacile’, writer, producer, director, 2012).
47 http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1497.htm (last access 25 July 2018).
48 Federation of American Scientists, International Public Information (IPI),
Presidential Decision Directive PDD 68, 30 April 1999, available at http://fas.org/irp/
offdocs/pdd/pdd-68.htm (last access 25 July 2018).
49 For a sustained discussion of this period – including the PDD 68 structure –
see Nicholas J. Cull, The Decline and Fall of the United States Information
Agency: American Public Diplomacy, 1989–2001 (New York, 2012).
50 For discussion, see Eric Schmitt, ‘U.S. Intensifies Effort to Blunt ISIS’ Message’,
New York Times, 16 February 2015, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/
world/middleeast/us-intensifies-effort-to-blunt-isis-message.html?_r=0 (last access 25
July 2018).
51 See Craig Timberg, ‘Effort to Combat Foreign Propaganda Advances in Congress’,
Washington Post, 30 November 2016, available at https://www.washingtonpost.
com/business/economy/effort-to-combat-foreign-propaganda-advances-in-
congress/2016/11/30/9147e1ac-e221-47be-ab92-9f2f7e69d452_story.html?utm_
term=.2f8fbb8172a1 (last access 26 July 2018).
52 Cull, The Cold War, pp. 474–5.
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14

‘Men of Action’: Printed propaganda

in the recruitment of the regular British
armed forces, 1960–85
Peter Johnston

The Second World War, the experience of a second global conflict within a generation,
followed by the imminent ideological confrontation with the Soviet bloc, convinced
the British establishment that they needed to maintain a substantial standing military.
Indian independence in 1947 and the retreat from Empire also deprived Britain of
manpower resources that had proven so significant in both world wars. In order to
plug the gap, and guarantee that Britain could field a force large enough to defend
it across multiple fronts and in every theatre, National Service, Britain’s first form of
peacetime conscription, was introduced in 1948. However, as Britain’s position in the
world changed in the wake of the Second World War, the need for substantial armed
forces was considerably reduced, and National Service was ended gradually from 1957.
Call-ups formally ended on 31 December 1960, and the last National Servicemen left
the armed forces in May 1963. At a strategic and operational level it was decided that,
rather than rely on often unwilling conscripts, British military capability would be
better served by an all-volunteer, fully professional force.
Prior to National Service, and especially after its abolition, the British military
became much like any other major employer. It too needed to attract enough employees
to fill the gaps that threatened its operations. But instead of being provided with bodies
to fill uniforms and the ranks, the military would have to compete in the labour market
with other civilian employers for men  – and women  – to join the ranks and serve
Britain’s operational military need. In order to avoid a manpower shortage, it began
an active campaign in collaboration with the Central Office of Information (COI, the
UK government’s marketing and communications agency) to ensure it still fulfilled its
obligations from before the end of National Service, and to recruit the best possible
candidates to fill the ranks.
In this, propaganda and advertising were fused together in order to present the
British military in the best possible light to prospective recruits. A note on terms is
important. Advertising is most commonly defined as activities surrounding drawing
attention to a particular product or service; propaganda was best described by Philip
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Taylor when he wrote that it was ‘the deliberate attempt to persuade people to think and
behave in a desired way’.1 While propaganda is a loaded term based on the experience
of the twentieth century and its role in dictatorships and global conflict, it is in fact a
neutral process that can be harnessed for positive or negative outcomes. Propaganda
and advertising are, in fact, in the modern era, practically indivisible. Indeed, Taylor
even refers to advertising as ‘economic propaganda’.2 Thus, it is clear that, while the
British COI and Ministry of Defence (MoD) utilized all the techniques and hallmarks
of an advertising campaign, because the end goal was to boost recruitment they were
in fact simultaneously engaged in creating and disseminating propaganda.
All branches of the armed forces engaged heavily in these campaigns, and the
output was impressive. Between 1960 and 1985, the most common form of propaganda
being disseminated was printed – posters and pamphlets in particular, but also more
ephemeral items such as wall calendars. Posters were designed to grab the attention
and punch home the information quickly. However, pamphlets – designed to be taken
away and consumed slowly and more thoroughly – contained far more information,
which is why both sources are explored here. All this material – designed to present
a career in the armed forces in the best possible light – was produced and supplied to
recruiters, and refreshed and updated on an annual basis. The scale of publication was
huge, encompassing all branches, all trades and all recruitment pathways.
Yet this activity was essential. As Hugh McManners has written, ‘Joining the armed
forces in peacetime, with no immediate prospect of having to go to war, is presented by
recruiters as a career like any other.’3 Significantly, the majority of the roles that needed
to be filled could, at that time, be carried out only by men, and so they dominate the
imagery and were clearly the main target audience. But the women-only branches of
the service also had their own recruitment targets and produced their own material,
though in smaller quantities. There was no single factor motivating enlistment for
either men or women. People joined the different branches of the British armed forces
for a variety of reasons; but most recruits wanted to travel or improve themselves by
gaining useful qualifications. That this could be attained within a salaried position,
along with the sense of adventure that came with being in the military, and with a
pension at the end of service, made the armed forces look like a very promising career
to young people leaving school, either with or without qualifications. In order to fully
inform prospective recruits of these opportunities, advertising was essential, and the
production of propaganda therefore a necessity.
With a myriad of roles to fill, there is little surprise that there were extensive
differences across the armed forces as to what benefits and aspects of the services
were stressed and marketed, which will be detailed below. However, there were
several salient themes that appeared regardless of branch. These included the ideas of
adventure, professionalism and foreign travel, the possibility of active service and the
opportunity to utilize the cutting edge of modern technology. Remarkably, patriotism,
driven by a desire to defend Queen and Country, was rarely featured.
This chapter will explore the different methods, themes and imagery used by the
British armed forces to recruit a professional military and investigate how the British
military sold itself to prospective recruits. It is concerned with the regular forces only;
the Territorial and Reserve forces have their own imagery and traditions that merit
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‘Men of Action’ 287

specific study outside the scope of this work. The slogans, the tag lines, the half-truths
that were used to encourage and motivate British civilians to join the full-time armed
forces are analysed and compared, and the perceptions of the services that these
created are highlighted through oral history testimony from those who consumed this
media and chose a military career in preference to any other. Analysing and exploring
this output tells historians as much about how the British military – and contemporary
society – was changing and evolving as it does about what the military was attempting
to achieve.

Sport and physical training

The most consistent and heavily used theme employed in recruitment literature was
sport, and it remained a dominant and recurring topic throughout the 1960s, 1970s
and 1980s. This was a continuation of a trend that had begun in the late nineteenth
century, when sport as recreation became a key part of British popular culture, with the
result that working-class men were just as interested in exercising their athletic prowess
as were the middle and upper classes. The access to facilities and equipment provided
by the Army, in particular, alongside the amount of time actually given over to sport
as part of conscious attempts to improve the conditions of service, was appealing to
soldiers from all classes.
The First World War had taught the Army that, at a time when it was the largest
it had ever been, sport was a great way to occupy those citizen-soldiers who would
otherwise become quickly bored. The language of sport had been heavily used
to recruit men into uniform and motivate them throughout the conflict.4 In the
aftermath of that war, it was clear that, in times of peace and without a specific enemy,
it was difficult to recruit men on ideological grounds to fill the ranks of a far smaller
army. Those motivated purely by patriotism, without the existential threat of invasion
or war, were also proving to be rare. Therefore, sport was increasingly used as an
incentive to attract recruits. A 1920s-era poster for the Royal Munster Fusiliers, for
example, promised potential recruits, ‘A good clean sporting life is offered with an
assured future.’5
After the Second World War, and with the end of National Service, sport was once
again heavily used by all three branches of the armed forces in recruitment literature
as a major incentive for enlisting. Indeed, a 1972 recruitment pamphlet for the Army
boasted that ‘you would have to be a very rich civilian indeed to take part in all the
sports available to the average Infantryman’.6 In some cases, the topic of sport even
merited its own specific sections in the recruitment material. Yet rather than just a
hobby or recreational activity, sport was also stressed as a vital and important part
of being in the professional military. The ‘Commission in the Household Division’
pamphlet, issued in 1975, stated,

As a civilian you have to struggle to come by your games and your sport, apart
from Saturday afternoons. In the Army, as it is part of your job to keep yourself fit,
so it is part of your duty to play games in working hours.7
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To add an extra point of difference with the civilian world, exotic sports not widely
available in the UK were also promoted, such as big-game fishing, sky diving and
waterskiing, as well as the more common ones such as rugby, football, boxing, cricket
and hockey. Significantly, it is clear that this was a theme that prospective recruits were
extremely receptive to, thus it was very valuable to promote. As Steve Newland, who
served in 42 Royal Marines Commando, said,

The only thing I was really good at at school was sport . . . so for me to get a job if
you like, if you want to call it that, where it involved lots of sport, well the service,
or the Forces, was a good option.8

The theme of sport was also married to that of foreign travel, and the idea of doing
both familiar and unfamiliar sports abroad was also promoted in order to appeal to
the prospective recruit. The concept of ‘adventure training’, whereby soldiers could
participate in physical activity in extreme environments, was, and remains, a major
recruitment tool.
On occasion, the types of sport depicted in these pamphlets revealed a strong class
bias in the organizations that were recruiting. Typically, the main sports advertised
in the recruitment pamphlets of units such as the Parachute Regiment or the Royal
Marines included the usual rugby, football and boxing. Being an amphibious force, the
Royal Marines also often used sports such as waterskiing. However, a 1975 recruitment
pamphlet for the Guards actively invoked the sense that the contemporary Guards
officers, in particular, were of a different social class. In this pamphlet, for example, the
image used to illustrate the ‘Recreation’ section was that of Household Division officers
playing polo at Windsor.9
Yet sport was much more than just a hook on which to catch interested applicants.
The idea of sport and a physical challenge was used by the more elite units of the
British military, the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines, in their recruitment
as an introduction to their highly selective units. For example, the Royal Marines
argued that ‘physical education is an essential part of Royal Marines training’.10 It was
not just about sport; it was about learning new skills and transforming oneself into a
Royal Marine. The Royal Marines specifically recruited men who wanted the physical
challenge of a difficult training regime, and the status of elite troops that came with it.
The provision of competitive sport was the perfect introduction to this and the best way
to ensure they attracted men of suitable character. This in particular attracted men who
had been good at sport at school and wanted to utilize those feelings of success earned
through hard work. For Andy Stone, for example, the additional duration and physical
and mental difficulty of the training required to become a Paratrooper – the infamous
P-Company testing process – that gave the Parachute Regiment its elite status made it
a particularly attractive choice for him: ‘You don’t just walk into the careers office and
join the Parachute Regiment. You have to go through a selection process and that’s
what appealed to me.’11
Similarly, the renowned physical difficulty of the Royal Marines’ training course
at Lympstone served to inspire many recruits to join. Indeed, the Royal Marines
Commando training course was designed to build professional, dedicated men who
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‘Men of Action’ 289

were both physically and mentally suitable for service with the corps, and it was no
secret how difficult and challenging this course was, culminating later in the famous
‘99% need not apply’ adverts of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The dominance of physical activity, and the concept of a test and a challenge, created
demand, attracting the right type of applicant. Commando training was a fundamental
aspect of the unit’s culture, and Lympstone was very much a foundation stone in
building that. A recruitment pamphlet of 1973 stated,

The ‘instant’ Marine does not exist. He is built in body, mind and character. As a
Commando he has to be strong; he has to think for himself, work alone or with a
companion, or maybe in charge of others with no one around to ‘hold his hand’.
Training provides this kind of man. A man of action and skill, who can be relied
upon in all situations to be a professional at his job. It is a job for men who like
challenge, change and the promise of adventure.12

This created a mythology around the Royal Marines that served to act as a further
recruitment incentive. For example, being told that it was too tough for them by friends,
family and civilian work colleagues provided a major incentive for Royal Marines
Danny Marshall, Ray Mead and Dave Barrett to apply and complete the demanding
course in the 1960s and 1970s. The propaganda was also true: the course was extremely
tough and to pass and to become a Royal Marine was a source of enormous pride;
Marshall, for example, still ranks becoming a Royal Marine as one of the greatest and
proudest achievements of his life.13 Lympstone also left a lasting impression on Dave
Barrett: ‘How do I look back on Lympstone? I think it’s an amazing place, and it does a
wonderful job, but it still scares me.’14

Foreign travel

There can be no doubt that the incentive of foreign travel was another major attraction
for prospective recruits to join the British armed forces, and it was a major feature of
the recruitment literature produced by the MoD throughout the post-war period.
The Royal Navy in particular benefitted from this and used the incentive of foreign
travel extensively. While the British Empire was in decline, the Royal Navy would
still visit exotic places around the world, including those – such as the Far East – that
remained beyond the reach of ordinary people even with the advent of mass tourism.
As a recruiting tool, this held a major resonance with prospective recruits. Chris Howe,
for example, believed the travel potential offered by the Navy was among the deciding
factors in convincing him and a friend to sign up: ‘We didn’t know what we were going
to do. We liked the sound of travel, we didn’t fancy staying in our home towns so we
just joined the Navy.’15 Phil Russo similarly recalled that the idea of travel offered by the
Royal Navy certainly appealed to him and specifically remembered the images used in
the recruitment office: the sailor in a foreign country wearing a smart uniform, drink
in hand.16 In the age before mass commercial travel, and with the ongoing economic
and social depression of the 1960s and 1970s, it is no surprise that such an advertising
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policy was a great success. Significantly, the Royal Navy was able to promote this aspect
of the service as it was true – it was not a distortion or a falsehood created purely for
propaganda purposes. For example, Kevin Smith, similarly unsure about his future,
likewise found the travel aspect as being among the most appealing positives about life
in the Navy. Smith believed that ‘there was a certain amount of romance involved in it
all, and all the fantastic places you were going to go and visit . . . that had a major part
of the attraction for joining’.17 Shortly after finishing training, Smith ‘lived the dream’,18
sailing to Portugal, Majorca and Gibraltar, places he could not have gone to without
being in the Royal Navy.
The other branches of the military also made use of the idea of foreign travel. The
Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC), in one piece of their literature, stated, ‘[T]‌ravel
opportunities are almost unlimited in the RAOC!’19 However, from the literature it is clear
that the places that the Army was travelling to did not share the variety of those enjoyed
by the Royal Navy. To compensate, the Army used the idea of foreign travel and physical
activity to challenge perceptions of what service in the Army actually entailed. In a 1968
poster, for example, images of the Army in action in various locales were used with the
tag line ‘Infantry: We drive, ski, float, fly, jump. And sometimes we even march!’20

Technology, trades and embracing modernity

As technology advanced in the later twentieth century, so too did the armed forces
become more technical in outlook and approach. Nowhere was this more apparent
than in the Royal Navy and aviation sides of the British defensive forces.
As the Royal Navy became an increasingly technological force in the post-war era,
there was a concerted drive from recruiters for engineers to oversee the use of and
maintain this equipment in a way unmatched in the less technologically demanding
Army or Royal Marines. This was reflected in the extensive propaganda produced to
further these aims, and there was a real explosion in material of this type. The benefits
of having skills and qualifications in engineering in a civilian world – when the sailor’s
period of service was over – were also stressed and used as an incentive: completing
the training ‘can be considered as good as serving a full trade apprenticeship’.21 This
was something the Royal Navy had always used in order to appeal to recruits; as a 1960
pamphlet stated,

Clearly the young man who has the desire to acquire a skill or a trade – who wants
to excel in something  – is excellent material for a Service that, in its growing
technical complexity, is making increasing demands on brains rather than brawn.22

Artificers were highly sought after in the recruitment literature circulated by the Royal
Navy, even before the end of National Service. In 1958, one pamphlet stated,

In return for their skill and knowledge, Artificers receive higher pay than other
naval ratings and quicker advancement . . . To boys of the necessary quality, the
Artificer Apprentice entry into the Royal Navy offers a career of outstanding
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‘Men of Action’ 291

opportunity, with the age-old attractions of Naval life, such as travel, plenty of
sport and occasional excitement, providing a welcome bonus.23

The same pamphlet was reprinted and reissued five years later, with almost exactly the
same text, the only change being the drawing of attention to Britain’s growing fleet of
nuclear submarines, armed with Polaris missiles.
The growing influence of technology found its way into the recruitment literature
of other branches, including that of the Seaman Branch. In 1964, one pamphlet
pointed out,

Unlike the Jack Tar of earlier years the Seaman today has a specialist job – typical
of the age in which we live. He has, in fact, a dual role in the Fleet. He is both a
man of technical skill and a man of the sea . . . His is an increasingly technical job,
calling for intelligence and a high degree of technical skill. And it is a tough job;
a man’s job.24

Indeed, the title of this pamphlet was ‘It’s a Man’s Job . . . In the Seaman Branch of
the Royal Navy’. Thus, there was also an undeniable link made between service in the
Royal Navy and masculinity. It wasn’t until 1990 that women could serve at sea, and so
men were the exclusive target of this material.
Keeping up with technological change proved a challenge for the Royal Navy, as
can be seen in the enormous turnover in material that was produced. Indeed, this need
was adopted in the recruitment literature itself, with the Royal Navy identifying that, in
order to cope with the increasing pace of technological change, it should

seek men with the salt of the sea in their veins who can cope with the quickening
pace of technological developments . . . They must feel as much at home in an
instrument-packed Operations Room as their forebears did on the gun deck of an
old ‘man o’ war’.25

Yet despite this growing technological trend, the Navy was also keen to point out that
old incentives for joining up still remained as relevant as ever, claiming that ‘some
elements of naval life remain timeless: the travel and adventure associated with life at
sea; the companionship of a happy ship’s company’.26
This idea of embracing modernity is an important feature of the recruitment
literature and is best embodied by the role of the growing submarine fleet in
recruitment propaganda. In contrast to the surface fleet, the submarine division of the
Royal Navy was on the front line in the Cold War against the Soviet Union as the main
responsibility for Britain’s nuclear deterrent was moved from aircraft to Polaris boats
from 1968. Submarines became an increasingly dominant aspect of naval recruitment
literature, as the MoD prioritized this aspect of operations.
The introduction of nuclear submarines resulted in a very different tactical and
operational role in contrast to that of the surface fleet. The appeal of the new gave the
submarine fleet an almost glamorous aspect, as well as appearing to herald the future.
Colin Way, who joined the Navy surface fleet as a clerk (‘writer’ in Navy parlance) in
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292 Propaganda and Conflict

1965, transferred to submarines in 1967 and spent a further thirty-four years in the
service. Way recalls thinking that ‘it was the new thing, really. It seemed to be the way
the Navy was going. It was the future of the Navy and the in thing.’27 Similarly, Jonathan
Powis had always wanted to join submarines, initially as a doctor, but then he decided
that he wanted to command ships:

I did join the Navy expressly to join nuclear submarines . . . I think if you’d joined
the Army in 1943 you would have wanted to join the tank corps because it was the
latest and greatest thing. I felt exactly like that, and I certainly never regretted it.28

Such attitudes were very much fostered by, and reflected in, the recruitment literature
produced by the MoD. For example, in the 1956 pamphlet, ‘The Royal Navy as a
Career:  An Admiralty Booklet about the Life and Opportunities of Ratings in the
Royal Navy’, the main images were an idealized artwork of a sailor in front of a British
ensign on the front cover and the cruiser HMS Belfast in the rear. The sailor wore a
hat marked ‘HMS Eagle’, which was an aircraft carrier in service with the fleet at the
time.29 The text of this booklet was the same as its 1950 equivalent.30 However, in the
1962 version, the cover image was not of a battleship or aircraft carrier, but instead the
focus was very much on submarines, reflecting the changing nature of British naval
defence policy:  HMS Dreadnought, Britain’s first nuclear-powered submarine, was
due to be launched in 1962. The cultural memory of the Second World War, and the
perception of the Royal Navy, had been superseded. By 1976, the Submarine Service
was specifically recruiting and producing its own pamphlets.31 Submarines represented
the cutting edge of technology, and this held considerable appeal for some men. Peter
Harris, for example, grew up in rural Devon, and when he joined the navy he made the
transition ‘from turnips to turbines’.32
Technology and modernity were obviously dominant features when it came to
military aviation. Since the 1920s, aviation had been used across European and
Western culture to herald the future: a service in which man and machine could defy
limitations like never before, and whose pilots embodied traits that ordinary people
longed to possess.33 In the military, potential recruits could participate in aviation
across the armed services, in the RAF, the Army or the Royal Navy. However, in order
to attract men to military aviation, similar tactics were used across the services, and
the same key areas were targeted for the aviation branch as for the regular form of
that service, such as sport and travel, that could be enjoyed as part of the work. In its
1976 recruitment pamphlet, for example, the Army Air Corps wrote that ‘life is not all
work and duties. There is another side to it as well. Nowhere are the opportunities for
sport and games better than they are in today’s Army.’34 However, the Fleet Air Arm,
RAF and Army Air Corps also had the added advantage of being able to offer the
exciting prospect of flight on top of these incentives, and the ability to work with highly
complex machinery that required specialist skills and provided rare social distinction.
As the 1971 ‘Flying for Real’ RAF pamphlet stated, ‘The Aircrew officer is someone
special in our society. Not a superman, but a man who has been trained to the highest
standards of professionalism.’35 With the advances in jet fighter technology, an aircrew
officer would be one of ‘The New Men – the Aerocrats’.36 The cultural memory of the
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‘Men of Action’ 293

Second World War was pervasive. The celebrated heroism of ‘the Few’, the pilots of
RAF Fighter Command from the 1940 Battle of Britain, continued to imbue military
aviators with the same sense of glamour.
There was an acknowledgement within the armed forces that life as an aviator was
more exciting than that of the normal serviceman.37 The Army Air Corps, for example,
extolled the virtues of working with the advanced technology used by the Corps as
part of the attraction for a ‘young progressive corps with a great future’, as well as
stressing the variety of flying roles that were available within the Corps, such as pilot,
observer and airgunner.38 The recruitment literature also described how those from
ground employments could go on to be accepted for aircrew training, moving from
being an observer to airgunner, and also to pilot, and thereby laying out a clear path
of career progression for those who aspired to be a pilot but did not have the right
qualifications to join pilot training immediately. Thus, the Corps laid out a path of
advancement that would ensure manpower retention and prevent the costly turnover
of having experienced men leave after only a few years to be replaced by inexperienced
new recruits. Indeed, it is noticeable that the pamphlets that dealt with flight in the
Army, the Royal Navy and the RAF all laid out the career paths far more than did most
non-flying Army pamphlets – which barely mentioned them.
The wider Army also stressed elements of modernity and dynamism in its
recruitment literature. Likewise, as technology advanced, more skilled recruits were
needed to fill roles such as those of signallers  – something which was promoted in
the specific recruitment propaganda that related to them, along with images such as
of satellite dishes.39 In a 1983 poster, for example, the Royal Signals were advertised
as ‘Today’s communicators equipped for tomorrow’s world’ (Figure 14.1). The poster
combined a futuristic font with three photographic vignettes, demonstrating the
work of the Corps: a sergeant with telecommunications equipment, a soldier erecting
signal equipment in the field and others repairing equipment on a Royal Air Force
(RAF) base.40 Indeed, a 1969 poster described the Royal Signals as ‘space age’, stressing
the modern technology that they used, which had only become more important by
1983.41 Fortunately, as technology advanced, this theme never became outdated and, if
anything, was self-validating.
It was not only the technical trades of the Army that embraced this idea. A 1965
poster for the Parachute Regiment described them as ‘soldiers of the future’ and was
illustrated by troops advancing into battle after a mass parachute drop.42 The designers
can hardly be blamed for glossing over the facts that mass parachute drops were already
an obsolete form of tactical movement, or that the Parachute Regiment has to date
not jumped into battle since Suez in 1956. They were, however, correct in predicting
the regiment’s durability while many other, more long-standing, regiments were being
amalgamated or falling entirely beneath the axe of successive spending cuts.

Variety of roles

As the armed forces were diverse organizations, there were an enormous variety of
roles to be filled. Not all roles would appeal to all prospective recruits, and in some
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Figure 14.1  ‘Royal Signals: Today’s communicators equipped for tomorrow’s world’, 1983.

Source: National Army Museum, London.
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‘Men of Action’ 295

cases particular skills were required. Propaganda would be needed to advertise all of
these roles as well as to break the idea that military service was homogenous.
The military used pamphlets to introduce recruits to the diversity of roles that they
could fill, in order to appeal to the widest possible pool of applicants. The Army, for
example, regularly profiled different regiments and corps, such as the Parachute Regiment,
the Guards, the Army Air Corps or the Royal Armoured Corps; these were all highlighted
individually, as were specific branches such as the Infantry.43 However, as the military was
a closed institution, it needed all the apparatus of civilian society as well as its war-fighting
functions. This was particularly true in the Royal Navy, as warships were portable, mobile,
self-contained communities. Thus, as in the other branches of the armed forces, there was
a call in the Navy for ordinary peacetime roles, such as cooks, stewards and dentists.44
The major difference that was stressed between fulfilling these roles in the civilian sphere
and the military was that these roles could all be carried out while enjoying the wider
benefits of military life, such as foreign travel. In fact, one RAF pamphlet described the
RAF dental officer as ‘a man to be envied. Unlike his civilian colleague he is the dentist
with the time needed for each patient, with time to study and with time to specialize. He
enjoys complete clinical freedom – his standards are never lowered.’45
Part of this was also about advertising the diverse roles available within the military and
restating its professionalism to include all of the different roles and specialisms. For example,
medical officers, veterinarians, fitters, bakers, drivers, divers, bandsmen, were all catered
for by the military recruitment propaganda. Similarly, those with different aspirations or
educational attainment were approached, with separate pamphlets outlining the different
entry routes that were available to them. Lack of education and grades did not need to be
a barrier to entry into the military, and entry at the bottom of the rank structure could be
achieved without much in the way of grades, but those with the necessary qualifications
could enjoy an improved experience on joining the armed forces as an officer.46
Stressing the variety of roles available also ensured the military could provide
realistic aspirations. Successful propaganda must be truthful, and it would have
been detrimental for the British military to claim that all who joined had unlimited
opportunities. Thus, highlighting and extolling the variety of roles available, and
all the attendant benefits of service, still made joining the armed forces seem like a
sensible option. One particular place where this was necessary was in military aviation.
Flying aircraft was enormously difficult and necessitated a certain level of education
attainment before training could even begin. However, while undoubtedly one of the
most glamorous aspects of military service, only a small proportion of those in the
military actually flew. In order to fill the vital roles necessary to sustain the aviators, the
propaganda needed to similarly stress their importance at a strategic and functional
level, much as the RAF attempted to do. A typical quotation from an RAF propaganda
pamphlet stated that ‘for every man who flies in the Royal Air Force, between 30 and
40 men and women are needed on the ground to keep him flying’.47 The RAF presented
these myriad of support roles as exciting, vital to the strategic objectives, and an
opportunity to prevent people becoming bored in their job – something that would
never happen in a military environment but was a constant risk in the civilian world.
Yet the propaganda was not always honest. There was little or no mention of just
how dangerous it was learning to fly fighter aircraft, and the possibility of death was,
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unsurprisingly, not included in any recruitment literature. This was something that those
who were training to become pilots became aware of, as David Morgan, who trained with
the RAF and flew with the Fleet Air Arm in the Falklands War, stated in his memoir,

There is probably only one constant when you fly fighter aircraft: Pilots die. They
die at the most unlikely times, in the most benign of circumstances. It doesn’t
matter what aircraft you fly, whether you are young or old, experienced or a rookie,
whether it is peacetime or war. It is the constant that everyone is aware of and no
one dares contemplate.48

Active service

The British armed forces were actively engaged in different operations across the world
between 1960 and 1985, and the possibility of active service played an interesting role
in recruitment literature. Deployments were used as an attractor, and some recruits
were enthused by the possibility. But some branches of the military placed much
less emphasis on active operations. The likelihood of operations, and the form that
active service would take, had an important impact on the ways in which the different
branches of the British military recruited.
British servicemen have taken part in operations every year since the end of the
Second World War. Thus they, and any prospective recruits, must have ‘always had the
thought and likelihood of combat in the forefront of their minds’.49 The possibility of
active service, of actually doing something, was a theme that the Army and the Royal
Marines actually seized upon as a positive in their recruitment propaganda, with the
Royal Marines calling themselves the ‘Men of Action’ for several consecutive years.50 It
was these branches of the British armed forces that used this theme and factor most in
their recruiting propaganda.
As the Army’s commitment to Northern Ireland increased from 1969, so was this
commitment recognized in propaganda recruitment literature. The COI even went so
far as to produce a pamphlet for the MoD in 1975 entitled ‘Northern Ireland: What Is
It Like for Soldiers?’51 While not every recruit would have seen pamphlets like this, the
fact that the MoD was producing them demonstrates that they were trying to educate
recruits as to the likelihood of active service. Those that did see the pamphlet could
have no doubt that they would be expected to serve in the province. One pertinent
question regarding soldiers and Northern Ireland covered in the pamphlet was, ‘Are
they allowed to refuse to serve there?’, to which the answer was, ‘No. Soldiers know
they have to go where they are needed.’52
This pamphlet aimed to explain how and why the soldier would operate in Northern
Ireland. However, it also exploited the opportunity to extol some of the benefits of
taking part in active service. It took the potential negative of active service – risk of
injury or even death – and put a positive spin on it, presenting it as an opportunity to
utilize all the skills learned during training in order to challenge oneself and act as a
force for good by peacekeeping. This had a major impact on recruits to the Army at this
time. In the infantry, without a conventional war until the Falklands conflict in 1982,
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‘Men of Action’ 297

service in Northern Ireland was seen as ‘the proving ground, if not the culmination’ of
military training, and as a test to be passed.53 The propaganda took this cultural value
from the Army and pushed it out to attract new recruits to the organization.
However, it is remarkable that the concept of active service, of engaging in conflict,
was virtually invisible in the recruitment propaganda produced for the Royal Navy’s
surface fleet in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, which undoubtedly created an
impression that the possibility of seeing any action at all was extremely unlikely. Kevin
Smith, for example, said that, when considering whether to join the Royal Navy, the
idea that he would ever be involved in a war never crossed his mind, whereas he knew
that if he joined ‘the Army or the Marines then it would be a definite’.54 Similarly, as
John Wingate said, ‘I had no sort of feelings when I was joining the Navy that it might
be because I would have to go to war or get in any conflict. It didn’t cross my mind.’55
While this may seem bizarre for a military force, Alistair Finlan has argued that even
though men and women ‘joined a profession in which the fundamental purpose is to
apply violence (often lethal) to achieve political ends’, they rarely practised the skills
that they had learned, and this is particularly true of the Royal Navy in the period
1960–82.56 As the surface fleet was not extensively engaged in active operations, in
contrast to the Army, they did not feature in its recruitment propaganda.
The Cold War is also seemingly a startling omission from the recruitment literature.
Despite being the focus of British defensive operational strategy between 1945 and
1990, there is little direct reference to aspects of the Cold War in military recruitment
literature. Yet this can be explained through a variety of factors. First, the recruitment
campaigns were primarily advertising. They therefore stressed the positive aspects of
military service. It was widely acknowledged by the British Army in Germany that,
should the Soviet Union launch an attack on Western Europe, they would be able to do
little to stop them, and probably be overrun in a short space of time. Putting this in a
recruitment pamphlet, however, would not inspire confidence or encourage any new
members to join. Instead, the positive aspects of service – the training, the travel, the
sport – were all used as incentives. Second, in order to produce successful and effective
propaganda, there was a need to present imagery that resonated with what recruits
already wanted and expected. It is clear from the testimony of service personnel
who joined the armed forces in this period that the idea of fighting in armed conflict
barely registered in the minds of any of them; rather, they were interested in foreign
travel, sport and the opportunity to learn a trade.57 Thus, these aspects were stressed,
rather than the negative hypothetical of war with the Soviet Union. In contrast, when
Northern Ireland – something very real – became an increasingly significant part of
the British Army’s deployment, the recruitment literature began to confront this issue
head on, in order to brief recruits before they joined up.

Gender

One group that merits particular attention in the military recruitment propaganda
produced in this period is that of military women. While women were a formal part
of the British military throughout this period, they were segregated into different
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organizations by gender. Therefore, women were the recipients of specific propaganda

geared exclusively at them. Very rarely did men and women share the same spaces in
the propaganda produced.
Significantly, the volume of propaganda for women was also far lower, and men
remained the dominant gender in terms of target audiences, which reflected the
demographics of the armed forces throughout the period. In 1980, for example,
there were 14,500 women in the British armed forces – just 5.1 per cent of the total
strength.58 As such, it was logical that they featured less in the propaganda produced.
However, gender discrimination regarding roles and opportunities available to women
also certainly played a role, and sometimes women were notable for their absence. As
the Army looked to recruit graduates, for example, in the 1970s, it is remarkable that
in the ‘Graduates in Arms’ pamphlet not one of the profiled officers was a woman,
despite a section on the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) in the same publication
describing it as an ‘integral part of the Army’.59
The WRAC did feature in the Army’s official calendar for 1975. However, whereas the
infantry regiments are mostly shown carrying out exciting duties in foreign countries,
the WRAC representative is a demure driver. There is even an explanation of the cap
badge, and that it features a lioness, ‘the female counterpart of the lion which appears
in many Regimental badges’.60 The message is clear. The WRAC is part of the Army, but
women are apart from the more recognizable aspects of soldiering. Despite claims to
the contrary, the women’s military units were separate organizations. For example, the
Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) stated with much pride that it was to be integrated
as fully as possible with the RAF, with all new entrants being commissioned or enlisted
in the RAF, taking the same oath as the men and subject to the same conditions of
service and disciplinary code. Indeed, the RAF’s officer graduate pamphlet of 1975 has
a section entitled ‘What does the RAF offer to women?’ The answer: ‘[T]‌he main thing
is – equality with men. “Women’s Lib” has been a fact of life for a long time.’61 However,
women were excluded from combatant duties, and so certain roles were not available
to them, and it was only in 1968, for example, that female officers in the WRAF were
authorized to even use the same rank titles as their RAF counterparts.
The strict limitations  – imposed by the military authorities  – on what women
could do in the British armed forces and on the roles that they could fulfil had a major
impact on what could be used to advertise the careers of the military. Even when
women appeared on the same posters and in the same advertising space as their male
counterparts, their inclusion was minimal. In a 1974 poster, ‘Train for a trade in the
RAF’, men and women of the RAF and WRAF are shown together. However, the trades
shown as examples are exclusively those available to men, such as weapons technician,
pilot or engineer. Quite what trade any prospective WRAF recruit could become
involved in was not specified.62 Where women did appear, this was sometimes only for
the benefit of men: they were used as an attractor. For example, an RAOC pamphlet
stated that ‘in the RAOC you will serve not only with soldiers of other regiments of the
Army but also with the girls of the Women’s Royal Army Corps’.63
Despite these differences, however, several of the same themes that were used in
the recruitment of men were also used in the recruitment of women. For example, the
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‘Men of Action’ 299

ability to learn a trade and gain qualifications while working and earning was stressed,
in particular when it came to nursing. Similarly, foreign travel and the ability to staff
the military hospitals in Germany, Cyprus and Hong Kong are used as an attractor: ‘if
you’d like to travel, there’s no more secure, more rewarding way of doing it than by
being a member of the QAs.’64 In addition, the chance for women to join the military
and, in particular, to do something different was heavily promoted and presented as
being the ‘smart’ choice when deciding on what career to pursue.65 As in the male
recruitment propaganda, the options available to military women as opposed to those
in the civilian world – learning new skills, such as Morse code, or the opportunity to
travel – were used as incentives to join. The impression created was that these skills
would mark a woman out from her civilian counterpart, and as the decades passed
and women became more recognized in terms of equality, joining the military was
marketed as a more intelligent choice for those looking to make their own way in the
world.66 The Women’s Royal Naval Service, or WRNS, in particular pushed this idea,
with a 1969 poster proclaiming, ‘WRNS: Be a Wren – be someone special.’67 Similarly,
the Army highlighted how women in the WRAC were different from their civilian
counterparts, in terms of both job prospects and opportunities.68
The posters produced relating to women’s service show their place in the military
hierarchy. One 1963 poster for the WRAC tells women that ‘you’ll be happy in the
WRAC’ as it is a place where ‘a girl can be independent and not be alone’ (emphasis in
original).69 Just to reinforce that message, the poster depicts a WRAC soldier operating
some technical equipment – but under the watchful eye of a supportive male officer
with a clipboard.
While some of the themes and imagery used in the propaganda aimed at women
were frequently similar to those aimed at men, those that were different are remarkable.
For example, sport was never used, and there are virtually no images of women
participating in sporting activity. However, showing a consciousness towards fashion
did appear, with one 1970 poster for the WRAC confidently stating, ‘and NOW  –
attractive new uniforms’.70 It is interesting to note that the previous incarnation of
the WRAC, the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), had also initially struggled in
the Second World War to recruit women due to a perception that the uniforms were
unflattering.
Overall it is clear that, before the late 1980s, service in the Army did not radically
challenge wider British society’s views of established gender roles. In the preceding
decades, the roles played by women were fixed, and no illusions were given that the
military would be a gender-equal society. But by 1990, the Army was able to play on
the idea of what a woman’s role could be and challenge the perception and stereotype
of what serving in the Army was like for a woman. A poster that year, for example,
stated, ‘As a woman in the Army, you’ll be expected to cook, clean and do the dishes’,
and showed a female soldier cooking field rations for herself on exercise, cleaning an
SA80 rifle and repairing a satellite dish.71 Yet even this was only a nod to increased
opportunity. It was only in the mid-1990s that gender segregation ended in the British
armed forces and that female military units were fully integrated with their male
counterparts – even if some roles were still closed to them.
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Conclusions

Despite the enormous annual turnover of pamphlets and posters produced by

the British armed forces in the period 1960–85, there was a remarkable and strong
consistency in the themes, and accompanying images, that were used. Foreign travel,
sport, the learning of a trade and variety of roles appeared in virtually every publication.
From the reactions of service personnel recruited during this time, it is clear that these
messages had an impact and were something that potential recruits would respond to,
hence their continued inclusion in recruitment propaganda.
However, there were some variations in the applications of themes, and the emphases
given to them, across the armed forces in this period. The Army and Royal Marines
were eager to stress the importance of sport and physical activity, and the possibility
of active service, as reasons for joining up. In contrast, the Royal Navy stressed the
technical aspects of service, and the benefits of foreign travel, without any real reference
to the possibility of active service. The recruitment propaganda aimed at women, who
were excluded from many activities that the military participated in on the grounds of
gender, likewise stressed different themes, but, as the decades progressed, it is possible
to chart the changing social attitudes towards women, demonstrating how responsive
to its audience the military were.
Underlining all of these, and perhaps the most dominant theme, was the
professionalism that came with being part of the regular British armed forces. After
the break from National Service and a military composed predominantly of conscripts,
the British armed forces were attempting to remake themselves as dedicated, highly
skilled professionals. This underpinned every variation in theme, image and type-font,
and was a vital message conveyed by the British armed forces as they competed to
attract the best possible applicants to fill their regular ranks and help them fulfil their
strategic obligations.

Notes
1 Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient
World to the Present Era (Manchester, 1995), p. 6; original emphasis.
2 Ibid.
3 Hugh McManners, The Scars of War (London, 1994), p. 72.
4 See Jay Winter, ‘Popular Culture in Wartime Britain’, in Aviel Roshwald and Richard
Stites (eds), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and
Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 330–48.
5 National Army Museum (NAM), 1983-05-29-1, ‘Royal Munster Fusiliers, the Cork,
Kerry, Limerick and Clare Regiment’ recruitment poster (Aldershot, c.1920).
6 The National Archives (TNA), INF 13/87/2, ‘This Is the Infantry’ recruitment
pamphlet (London, 1972).
7 TNA, INF 13/93/11, ‘A Commission in the Household Division’ recruitment pamphlet
(London, 1975).
8 Steve Newland, interview with author, 3 August 2009.
9 ‘A Commission in the Household Division’ recruitment pamphlet.
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‘Men of Action’ 301

10 TNA, INF 13/270/7, ‘Men of Action: The Royal Marines’ recruitment pamphlet

(Southampton, 1964).
11 Interview with Andy Stone, quoted in P. A. Johnston, ‘Culture, Combat and
Killing: The British Armed Forces at War in the Falklands’ (PhD thesis, University of
Kent, 2013), p. 24.
12 TNA, INF 13/37/4, ‘What It Takes to be a Royal Marine’ recruitment pamphlet
(Westerham, 1973), p. 6.
13 Interview with Danny Marshall, quoted in ibid., p. 23.
14 Dave Barrett, interview with author, 15 September 2009.
15 Interview with Chris Howe, quoted in Johnston, ‘Culture, Combat and Killing’, p. 39.
16 Interview with Phil Russo, quoted in ibid., p. 40.
17 Interview with Kevin Smith, quoted ibid., p. 39.
18 Ibid.
19 TNA, INF 13/93/9, ‘Royal Army Ordnance Corps’ recruitment pamphlet
(London, 1975).
20 TNA, INF 13/79/1, ‘Infantry: We Drive, Ski, Float, Fly, Jump. And Sometimes We
Even March!’ recruitment poster (COI, 1968).
21 TNA, INF 13/14/2, ‘Go Far in the Royal Navy’ recruitment pamphlet (London,
1958), p. 3.
22 TNA, INF 13/18/3, ‘They’re Training for a Technical Career in the Royal Navy’
recruitment pamphlet (London, 1960).
23 TNA, INF, 13/14/1, ‘A Leaflet about Artificer Apprenticeships in the Royal Navy’
recruitment pamphlet (London, 1958).
24 TNA, INF 13/23/11, ‘It’s a Man’s Job . . . In the Seaman Branch of the Royal Navy. Age
of Entry, 15–28’ recruitment pamphlet (London, 1964), pp. 1, 5.
25 TNA, INF 13/25/3, ‘Shaping Up to the ‘70s’ information booklet
(Southampton, 1965).
26 Ibid.
27 Interview with Colin Way, quoted in Johnston, ‘Culture, Combat and Killing’, p. 46.
28 Interview with Jonathan Powis, quoted in ibid., p. 46.
29 TNA, INF 13/10/2, ‘The Royal Navy as a Career: An Admiralty Booklet about
the Life and Opportunities of Ratings in the Royal Navy’ recruitment pamphlet
(London, 1956).
30 TNA, INF 13/4/3, ‘Here Is the Navy’ recruitment pamphlet (London, 1950).
31 TNA, INF 13/41/1, ‘Deep Navy’ recruitment pamphlet (Huntingdon, 1976).
32 Peter Harris, interview with author, 25 September 2009.
33 Robert Wohl, The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–
1950 (New Haven, CT, and London, 2005), pp. 2–3.
34 TNA, INF 13/95/9, ‘Army Air Corps’ recruitment pamphlet (London, 1976).
35 TNA, INF 13/112/5, ‘Flying for Real’ recruitment pamphlet (London, 1971).
36 TNA, INF 13/112/14, ‘The New Men – the Aerocrats’ recruitment pamphlet
(London, 1971).
37 Interview with Robin Kent, quoted in Johnston, ‘Culture, Combat and Killing’, p. 51.
38 ‘Army Air Corps’ recruitment pamphlet.
39 TNA, INF 13/84/10, ‘Royal Signals’ recruiting pamphlet (London, 1970).
40 NAM, 1984-04-158-1, ‘Royal Signals: Today’s Communicators Equipped for
Tomorrow’s World’ recruitment poster (HMSO, 1983).
41 NAM, 1985-11-60-37, ‘Space Age Signaller’ recruitment poster (HMSO, 1969).
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42 NAM, 1985-11-60-31, ‘Parachute Regiment: Soldiers of the Future’ recruitment poster

(HMSO, 1965).
43 For example, TNA, INF 13/93/4, ‘The Parachute Regiment’ recruitment pamphlet
(June 1975); TNA, INF 13/84/5, ‘The Guards’ recruitment pamphlet (London, 1970);
‘Army Air Corps’ recruitment pamphlet; TNA, INF 13/86/4, ‘Men – Armour –
Action: Royal Armoured Corps’ recruitment pamphlet (Ipswich, 1971); and ‘This Is
the Infantry’ recruitment pamphlet.
44 For example, TNA, INF 13/23/1, ‘Serve as a Steward in the Royal Navy’ recruitment
pamphlet (London, 1964); TNA, INF 13/36/7, ‘A Cook in the Royal Navy’
recruitment pamphlet (London, 1971); and TNA, INF 13/18/8, ‘The Royal Navy as a
Profession: The Naval Dental Officer’ recruitment pamphlet (London, 1960).
45 TNA, INF 13/110/5, ‘Portrait of a Royal Air Force Dental Officer’ recruitment
pamphlet (London, 1960).
46 ‘A Commission in the Household Division’ recruitment pamphlet.
47 TNA, INF 13/112/12, ‘Smart Girl: She’s Joined the WRAF’ recruitment pamphlet
(Nottingham, 1971).
48 David Morgan, Hostile Skies: The Falklands Conflict through the Eyes of a Sea Harrier
Pilot (London, 2006), p. 97.
49 McManners, The Scars of War, p. 100.
50 ‘Men of Action: The Royal Marines’ recruitment pamphlet.
51 TNA, INF 13/91/1, ‘Northern Ireland. What Is It Like for Soldiers?’ information
pamphlet (London, 1975).
52 Ibid.
53 Antony Beevor, Inside the British Army (London, 1991), p. 33.
54 Interview with Kevin Smith, quoted in Johnston, ‘Culture, Combat and Killing’, p. 39.
55 Interview with John Wingate, quoted in ibid., p. 45.
56 Alastair Finlan, The Royal Navy in the Falklands Conflict and the Gulf War: Culture
and Strategy (London, 2004), p. 1.
57 Johnston, ‘Culture, Combat and Killing’.
58 Government Statistical Service, Defence Statistics 1992 (London, 1992), p. 29.
59 TNA, INF 13/93/6, ‘Graduates in the Army’ recruitment pamphlet (London, 1975).
60 TNA, INF 13/93/15, The Army Calendar, 1975.
61 TNA, INF 13/112/20, ‘RAF Officer Graduate: 20 Questions for the Graduate, the
Professional Man and the Student’ recruitment pamphlet (London, 1975).
62 TNA, INF 13/112/37, ‘Train for a Trade in the RAF’ recruitment poster (COI, 1974).
63 ‘Royal Army Ordnance Corps’ recruitment pamphlet.
64 TNA, INF 13/93/7, ‘Thank You, Nurse’ recruitment pamphlet (Birmingham, 1975).
The ‘QAs’ were members of Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps.
65 ‘Smart Girl: She’s Joined the WRAF’ recruitment pamphlet.
66 NAM, 1984-01-74-17, ‘Smart . . . Smarter’ recruitment poster, 1978.
67 TNA, INF 13/31/3, ‘WRNS: Be a Wren – Be Someone Special’ recruitment
poster, 1969.
68 For just two examples, see NAM, 1993-11-1-58, ‘Nine Good Jobs Your Agency
Couldn’t Offer You’ recruitment poster (1980) and NAM, 1983-11-65-1, ‘The Girls in
Lovat Green Enjoy a Colourful Life’ recruitment poster (1968).
69 NAM, 1993-11-1-133, ‘You’ll Be Happy in the WRAC’ recruitment poster
(COI, 1963).
70 NAM, 2011-11-16-1, ‘She Chose the WRAC’ recruitment poster (1970).
71 NAM, 1994-11-26-1, ‘As a Woman in the Army, You’ll Be Expected to Cook, Clean
and Do the Dishes’ recruitment poster (1990).
 303

15

Love, Hate and Propaganda: Reflections on

the making of a documentary series
Fabrice d’Almeida

Decision making and the transmitting of information lie at the heart of politics. Letting
people know what you are doing is as important as the actual deeds themselves. This
simple reality was the starting point for David Welch’s work on the Third Reich. The
Nazis’ obsession with propaganda took many forms – pictorial, architectural, musical
and of course cinematic. All of these dimensions worked together to form consensus
and create the illusion of a ‘national community’. What was true for the Nazis applies
to other totalitarian regimes, and, let us admit, to democracies, too. Propaganda and
techniques of mass communication are, therefore, at the heart of political identities in
the twentieth century. Looked at together, they allow us to sketch out a different history
of the contemporary world, in which appearances are discussed, and dismantled, so
that the strategies employed by states and political forces are laid bare. And, at the
heart of this history, are to be found feelings.
Thus, David Welch and I, among others, were asked to work as consultants for a
major television series – Love, Hate and Propaganda – for the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation (Société Radio-Canada in Montreal and CBC in Toronto), to be
broadcast in French and English. (The two versions, while being very similar, differed
in some aspects.) This experience is the subject of this c­ hapter – a testimony rather
than an analysis – and it shows both a common vision of the twentieth century and
our insistence that history should not be confined to the academic elite, but that the
wider public should also feel part of it. Therefore, we would be analysing both how to
produce a discussion of the past – what I call a historiology – and some elements of the
history of propaganda needed to explain our choices.

The project: Re-reading the Second World War

David Welch and I were very aware of the importance of documentary films in history
writing, but when we were contacted by Radio-Canada/CBC we did not realize quite
how great was the organization’s wish to produce a serious work of reference, nor how
extensive were its means. (I had been put in touch with the team thanks to the film
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304 Propaganda and Conflict

director Léon Laflamme. He passed on my name to Peter Ingles, the producer and
head of the project. Shortly thereafter, I  receive an unexpected telephone call.) For
me, my first discussion with the producer was a delight. I had been working on visual
images, media and propaganda for 15 years,1 and suddenly a producer called me to ask
if a film on this subject would be likely to show the Second World War in a different
light. The idea was to show the full breadth of the conflict and its violence through the
interpretative screen of the tragic methods used to convince the people. I was not only
convinced but enthusiastic.
And so in spring 2008 work began with this strange transcultural Radio-Canada/
CBC team. First of all, we had to provide the journalists and producers with some ideas
to help them construct their series. They needed guidance in three areas: dates and
turning points that we considered essential, small individual stories and depictions
of ordinary people which would enable viewers to identify with past events and the
names of colleagues who could contribute to this documentary. So, that was the simple,
modest task they set us!
It was a very ambitious undertaking, and this informed all of our decisions. To
understand how ambitious a project it was we need to go back to its genesis, when
Marc Starowicz, the person in charge of documentaries at CBC, started discussions
at the beginning of 2008 with Jean Pelletier about how to kick off commemorations
in 2009 for the 70th anniversary of the Second World War.2 They wanted something
to make a strong impact on the public spirit at a time when the last witnesses to and
survivors of the conflict were disappearing. It seemed to them all the more important
since each new generation, in Canada as elsewhere, is less directly concerned by the
dramas experienced by their ancestors. So, the two people in charge of intercultural
programmes, Sue Dando at CBC and Peter Ingles at Radio-Canada, were asked to find
an angle on the Second World War that would appeal as much to children as to their
parents and indeed grandparents. We found this out when we had already become part
of the team. They had discussed several ideas: young people in the war, asking celebrities
or using the cinema to relate the war . . . Each idea had its drawbacks: too one-sided for
some, too narrowly focussed for others . . . What should be the main subject?
The second ambition helped decide the main subject: those in charge, like the team
of journalists which was being lined up, wanted a critical dimension to the project.
Through the series, the viewer had to be given the opportunity to discuss the choices
made by those in charge of politics and by partisan organizations. It was not enough
just to broadcast an educational programme; what was required was to expose the
institutional and social mechanisms which had been capable of producing effects
as serious as those experienced in the Second World War. Thus emerged the idea of
criticizing the manipulation of information, leadership cults and the role of visual
images in the moulding of public opinion. Naturally, the concept of propaganda came
out of these exchanges. People associate the term ‘propaganda’ with ideology and the
blinding of a population by a totalitarian regime. At the same time, they see the logic of
censorship, of control and mobilization of the masses as a consequence of war.
The two pillars of the nascent documentary series were, then, the ability to speak
to a young audience and to sharpen their critical faculties. The idea was not to
commemorate the path to freedom in hallowed terms but to show the history of the war
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through propaganda. There was to be no hagiography; we would also have to evaluate

the sometimes doubtful practices of the Allied forces during the conflict. Finally, a
consensus emerged that we had to present incontestable facts as well as choosing
others, less well known, but which showed the involvement of ordinary, anonymous
people. So there could be a sequence on Leni Riefenstahl, and another on an ordinary
nurse during the Blitz, or perhaps a passage featuring the life of a Canadian worker
obliged to work on a mass production line.
So the English- and French-language teams set to work on the first six films of
Love, Hate and Propaganda, dealing with the Second World War.3 David Welch’s and
my roles were parallel. We began to reread the synopses, and we indicated the points
that we thought should be re-examined, suggesting solutions. Then we passed on
the names of colleagues who could help, often confirming choices already made by
the journalists and producers, who had by now practically become experts through
devoting so much time to the project. We had formed friendly relations with these
people and met with them if they came to London or Paris for business regarding
the series. I particularly remember a lively discussion with Claude Berardelli in the
Café Select in Montparnasse and a session in the hotel-room-cum-film-studio where
the French contributors were filmed. Aurélie Luneau, a historian who has become
a leading light on the France Culture radio station, was one of the discoveries of
the series. Another was the young author of an excellent book on war propaganda,
Aristotle Kallis.4 Then we met the whole team  – in Toronto for David Welch and
Montreal for me. Often we had to make adjustments to our contributions, to fill in
missing information or to liven up the tone. Then we checked the films during editing
for possible problems.
The presenters were chosen by the TV channels only later, with the aim of creating
a tone that would appeal to and retain young viewers. The two rising stars chosen were
Catherine Mercier for French-speaking Canada and George Stroumboulopoulos for
the English speakers. The series was finally broadcast between March and April 2010,
so meticulous was the verification of all the work.
It was a success with viewers, and this success was repeated in festivals. It was praised
in the TV journals and was well received in the area of historic documentaries, in
particular at the New York professional festival. We were proud of this success because
our aesthetic choices were bold and the tone finally adopted was lighter and livelier
than that in classic works. Subsequently, the series was shown in other countries, such
as in France on Télé Monte Carlo (TMC, a subsidiary of the TF1 group), where it was
very well received. However, legal constraints limited broadcasting, since rights to use
archival footage for worldwide distribution had not been acquired.

Ready for the follow-up: The Cold War

Thanks to this success, the two Canadian channels decided to make a sequel to this
project. We chose to deal with a period nearer the present day, rather than going back
to the Great War. The reason was simple: commemorations for the First World War
would not begin until 2014, leaving us time to examine other periods. We decided
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as a team on the Cold War. No fewer than four films would cover this period, and we
prepared papers showing the purpose and main elements of these films. We met with
the producers in Montreal before launching the operation, and it was decided to follow
similar work processes to those in the first series.
For The Cold War, the crucial thing was to present events often considered as of
minor importance, having less impact on collective memory than a traditional ‘open’
war with clearly defined enemies. For the distinctive feature of the Cold War was that
it exported conflict from the West and maintained a strange peace between the main
protagonists, the USSR and the United States. We took into account famous people
as well as the lives of exemplary figures, such as Artur London, whose experience of
captivity and torture in the USSR enabled insight into Soviet manipulation of justice
in show trials. As an example of American manipulation of justice, we used the case
of President Arbenz of Guatemala. The Space Race also had an important place, but
for me the sequence most emblematic for the angle we had chosen was the Kitchen
Debate of 1959 (a series of impromptu exchanges, through interpreters, between
then US vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at the
opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow). This
involved archive images, a reference to youth movements, analysis of national leaders’
actions and commentary from the historians, all shedding light on how political ideas
interfered with daily life. We were mindful throughout to avoid bias, and that we had
to allow every actor the opportunity that he had enjoyed, in real life, of convincing
his listeners.
The Cold War series took shape, with its visible stand-offs and its secret antagonisms
underpinning the protagonists’ strategies for global influence. Basically, this long stretch
of time, 1945–90, gives us a remarkable insight into the propagandists’ behind-the-
scenes activity. The series yet again was very favourably received and had international
success. This time CBC and Radio-Canada had anticipated success and had sold the
rights in many countries, so it was broadcast and retransmitted several times.

Terrorism in images

The adventure continued with The War on Terror. This time the two consultants, David
Welch and I, had a hand in the editing and in deciding the approach we would take,
working alongside those in charge, the journalists and producers. At the meeting in
Montreal, the stakes were high as no history of the recent terror attacks had as yet been
undertaken. It was 2011 and the wave of ISIS attacks in Europe was yet to take place.
The interest in the subject was mainly prompted by the 11 September 2001 attack in
New York, whose tenth anniversary was about to be commemorated. The key issue was
to remain committed to a history that dared to show the links between causality and
consequence, at the risk of appearing positivist. Our journalist colleagues were also
aware of the political risks of the programme at a time when populist movements were
rearing their heads.
For David Welch, the essential thing was to reveal the lies and strategies of all those
involved, and this determination followed on from the unmasking of the lies of the
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Bush and Blair administrations. A  classic historical question had to be addressed.

When to start the analysis of the series of events which culminated in 9/11? An
initial hypothesis was to start with the event itself, then to look at its effects on the
Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. A  second possibility was to start the action earlier,
with the development of international terrorism – especially the PLO and Carlos ‘The
Jackal’ – at the end of the 1960s. The disadvantage of this more Eurocentric vision was
that Islamist terrorism became somewhat diluted, mixed in with other movements,
most notably the far-left proletarian ones of Italy and Germany, whose kidnappings,
executions and random attacks constituted a sort of propaganda.
At last a third way emerged, which we kept to: to take as a starting point the changed
situation which gave rise to jihadist Islamic movements and their entry into conflict
with the west. Al-Qaeda was to be a point of reference for the editing. So we moved
the discussion to the trigger point. Should we talk about how it was formed to oppose
the Soviet Union in Afghanistan? Would a sentence be enough or was a long sequence
needed? The threat posed by Al-Qaeda to the West began when America stationed
extra troops in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. Who was responsible? There
again, the subject itself imposed a logic:  terrorism should be explained as a means
of propaganda and a subject of interest to the media. The triggering of this conflict
gave rise to a powerful campaign in America to influence opinion, and it did succeed
among a public initially hostile to a new conflict. Thus, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of
Kuwait and the American reaction became our point of departure. We then moved
forward to those strange individual attacks known in the Anglo-Saxon world as ‘lone-
wolf ’ attacks, a concept that has since been discredited by short-sighted journalists
who refuse to accept the local origin of the aggressors.
Watching The Cold War again today what is apparent is its historical balance, and
the neutral stance of the makers, when there could have been a distinct pro-Western
bias, if not in fact an attempt to downplay the responsibilities of one side or the other
for acts of violence. Once again, the series was very successful and was broadcast
internationally.

The First World War

Only the First World War remained to wrap up this series, which closely examined
the twentieth century through its dramas and its most manipulative activities. The
script was written. Peter Ingles had asked me for a synopsis in order to justify the
development phase. We knew that the approaching centenary would ensure that the
programme would feed off the passion for this collective memory, which nourishes so
many associations, and the channel directors and unit heads agreed to proceed. But
then the Canadian government launched drastic budget cuts, and CBC and Radio-
Canada had to make their sacrifices on the broadcasters’ altar of the balanced budget.
The intercultural service was the first victim of this pressure, which led to a reduction
in high-quality operations even when audience figures were good. Sue Dando and
Peter Ingles announced this premature ending to us with frank kindness. They shared
our grief.
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Three contributions to the knowledge of propaganda

In all, no fewer than twelve films were made for Love, Hate and Propaganda: six for
World War II for a New Generation, four for The Cold War and two for The War on Terror.
Like David Welch, I’m very proud of this work. It allowed us to share an interpretation
of propaganda and to give a platform to young (sometimes less so) historians. But
the contribution of this series goes beyond that. I have watched the episodes again,
and looked again at the critiques, and it seems to me that in historiological terms it is
particularly valuable, and to conclude I’d like to stress this contribution.
The first contribution of the series is that it helped rehabilitate the concept of
propaganda. Let us not fool ourselves. In the Anglo-Saxon world from the 1960s,
and with a slight delay in the French-speaking world, the concept of propaganda was
considered outmoded with regard to describing the practices of governments and
advertising, or indeed of militant journalists. It was filed on the shelf of intellectual
obsolescence, and those who studied institutions and political actors who in their own
age had used such vocabulary, such as Nazis, fascists or communists, were seen solely
as historians, incapable of contributing to an understanding of the present, or of the
structures which shape the future.5 This movement to discredit the study of propaganda
was particularly strong in the 1990s, when all the parties and trade unions were winding
up their propaganda structures and replacing them with communications or public
relations departments. So, propaganda disappeared and was relegated to the past.
David Welch and I were not, in fact, that obsessed by the concept of propaganda,
but retaining the study of it was a way of showing how underlying the democratic
world there are strategic tensions which can pervert behaviour. Our belief in the power
of analysis through propaganda was strengthened when we witnessed, from 1989,
during the Romanian revolution, the flourishing of the old methods of censorship and
consensus building based on false news.
The series, by taking up again the word ‘propaganda’ after the lies of the Iraq
invasion of 1990 and more importantly of 2003, renewed links with an intellectual
tradition that naïve exponents of ‘communications’ thought they could get rid of by
sheer force of will.6 For David Welch and myself, we saw what we had been advocating
in the academic world confirmed on the television scene.7 It’s not hard to imagine our
satisfaction.
Second, the series put the accent on political feelings, and emotions. There again, we
were delighted that it fully complied with our historiographical approach.8 The series
used the concepts of hatred and love as a filter through which to interpret the history
of the twentieth century. In this way, it went beyond physical conflicts and ideological
differences. Propaganda transcends national, religious and sentimental differences and
it has to be weighed up against the need for the freedom of the individual. In ethical
terms, our series quite simply defended the right to fair and correct information.
Finally, the series was richly illustrated with archival images and on-the-spot
filming of events. It might seem like a truism, but for researchers like us whose work
has been devoted to the history of the fixed and moving image, this approach had
to be fundamental to the series, since our films were analysing propaganda acts and
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their effects on the mindset of the public. So it was taken as given that graphic and
cinematographic representations were key factors in the creation of mental images.
The critical part of the series consisted in using the history of these representations
as the main conduit for critical analysis. Hence, expert commentary on the filmed
documents, while imparting knowledge and historical elements, was at the same time
able to make the viewer beware of taking what the images depicted as gospel truth. In
short, there was an educational purpose underlying the documentary series.
What can I say about this experience, other than that it provided the opportunity
for visual images to show ideas and facts crucial to our history, ideas and facts not
always seen as an integral part of political history? Undoubtedly, to be perfectly
truthful, I must add that this was also the opportunity for me to meet David Welch, the
man hidden behind the historian.

Notes
1 My first book on the topic was Images et propagande (Paris, 1995).
2 Statement by Peter Ingles, 15 May 2017.
3 As this was the first of the sub-series within Love, Hate and Propaganda, it did not have
a subtitle at this stage. It was later known as World War II for a New Generation.
4 Aristotle A. Kallis, Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War (Basingstoke, 2005).
5 See Fabrice d’Almeida, ‘Propagande – Histoire d’un mot disgracié’, Mots, 69 (July 2002),
pp. 137–48.
6 See David Welch and Jo Fox (eds), Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the
Modern Age (Basingstoke, 2012); and David Welch, Propaganda: Power and Persuasion
(London, 2013).
7 For my part, Fabrice d’Almeida, Propagande, une histoire mondiale (Paris, 2015).
8 Since then Anthony Rowley and Fabrice d’Almeida, Quand l’histoire nous prend par les
sentiments (Paris, 2013), has appeared.
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 311

Epilogue
‘We are all propagandists now’: Propaganda in
the twenty-first century
David Welch

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies . . .
May I, . . .
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
—W. H. Auden, 1 September 1939

A new century has brought with it new questions, propelled not least by astonishing
technological developments, and these have reshaped the relationship between
politics, propaganda and public opinion. Enormous social and technological changes
have profoundly changed our lives over the past 150 years. The essays in this volume
reflect both the subtlety and complexity of the term ‘propaganda’ and demonstrate
the impact that changing technology has had on its dissemination. I have spent my
academic life attempting to show how the dissemination of propaganda has changed
(or not, as the case may be) as a result of these developments – in times of both war and
peace. Focussing largely on the twentieth century, I have identified four key themes: the
importance of nationhood and leadership, how states have attempted to promote
and maintain a healthy population, how wars have been justified and how perceived
enemies have been targeted in order to mobilize mass support in times of war.1 In
this epilogue, however, I would like to reflect on changes that have taken place in the
twenty-first century, on the manner in which such changes produce new phenomena,
and on the challenges that we currently face and are likely to experience in the future.
Measuring the impact of propaganda is problematic and it is not my intention
to analyse it here, nor to scrutinize the historiographical debates that have ensued
about the success or otherwise of specific propaganda campaigns. Instead, I want to
address how technological developments in the twenty-first century have changed the
relationship between politics, propaganda and public opinion and to reflect briefly on
a new phenomenon known as ‘fake news’ – or ‘post-truth’.
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A recurring theme in my work has been the role played by propaganda in times
of war. In the twenty-first century, especially since 9/11, there has arisen a new form
of conflict known as ‘asymmetrical warfare’, a term which has become part of our
vocabulary. The advent of Total War in the First World War changed forever the
relationship between the media and old-style diplomacy and need for secrecy, since
the ‘new’ media had the power to shape public opinion, which politicians most fear.
The Second World War reinforced these trends. The changing nature of international
crises from the Cold War to a post-Cold War context, together with rapidly changing
technology, has transformed both the nature of warfare and its reportage. The Vietnam
War was arguably a watershed, particularly the way it was covered by television.2 At
the end of the 1980s, as the Cold War was coming to an end, the term ‘information
warfare’ started to gain currency. In subsequent ‘limited’ and ‘asymmetric’ wars,
and in the ‘war on terror’, discussion has shifted to the importance of ‘soft power’
(information operations), ‘psyops’ (psychological operations), public diplomacy and
the appropriation by the military of public-relations and strategic communications
approaches.
Partly as a result of America’s defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s, military psychological
warfare had entered a period of decline and discredit. President Reagan was
responsible for revitalizing US psychological operations in the 1980s. At a strategic
level, this involved flooding the Soviet bloc with Western propaganda  – especially
after the arrival of satellite TV and new communication technologies such as video
cassette, fax and mobile phones. Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990,
President George H. W. Bush was persuaded to incorporate psyops as an integral part
of Operation Desert Storm. As a result, psyops came of age. Operation Desert Storm
is commonly associated with modern media technology (‘media war’); however, one
of the oldest forms of propaganda devices  – the leaflet  – was extensively employed
by psyops. More than 29 million leaflets (approximately 29 tons) were disseminated
between 30 December 1990 and 28 February 1991. Sixty-nine thousand Iraqis
surrendered or deserted (invariably carrying ‘safe conduct’ passes which were part of
the dropped leaflets) – many more than were actually killed. The leaflets were crude
and no more sophisticated than those employed in the First World War.
Revealingly, the Second Gulf War in 2003 continued where Operation Desert Storm
left off. US and British ‘Coalition’ forces intensified the use of psychological operations.
The United States has a long tradition of radio psyops that can be traced back to the
Vietnam War. Similar broadcasts were used in campaigns in Afghanistan to persuade
citizens to reveal Taliban and Al-Qaeda factions. In the Second Gulf War, the United
States engaged in a comprehensive airwaves campaign to soften its enemy and soothe
its population at home. Spearheading the electronic propaganda campaign were
converted C-130 cargo planes from the US Air Force Special Operations Command
fleet, transmitting a mixture of Arabic and Western music and spoken announcements
to the troops and citizens of Iraq, urging them not to fight and telling them how to
surrender. The planes were the Coalition’s weapons of mass persuasion. The radio
transmissions were backed up once again by an intense leaflet-dropping campaign.
Over 17 million leaflets were dispersed in the first week of the war, offering detailed
information on how to signal surrender to advancing Coalition troops. Warnings on
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‘We Are All Propagandists Now’ 313

the leaflets included the following: ‘Attacking Coalition aircraft invites your destruction.
Do not risk your life and the lives of your comrades. Leave now and go home. Watch
your children learn, grow and prosper.’ Thus, persuasion was employed in association
with force.
If the war in Kosovo (1998–9) marked the decline of the ‘old news’ (network
television, broadsheet newspapers and current affairs journals) in favour of ‘new
news’ (satellite and cable television, tabloid newspapers and television and radio chat
shows), the military itself became increasingly concerned about image management
and with ‘information control’. Professional military communicators have recognized
that technology has not only freed the media from the physical constraints under
which war correspondents used to labour but also that, with twenty-four-hour rolling
news and the proliferation of international news agencies such as Al Jazeera, the world
media is going to be present at sites of conflict in large numbers and must therefore be
factored into their own strategic thinking. Moreover, globalization has thrown up new
challenges to the West’s previous domination. Al Jazeera is an example of this impact
on the Arab world. What we are now witnessing is a more volatile news environment
and this will profoundly affect foreign affairs as well as journalism – and propaganda.
The Second Gulf War, for example, produced a number of technological shifts
in the reporting of war, particularly the decision to ‘embed’ reporters and television
journalists as actual members of the invasion forces, allowing on the one hand a direct
immediacy never before possible, and on the other hand introducing a new intensity
of information overload. The multitude of news channels beaming constant images
attracted two different types of criticism. Some critics suggested the twenty-four-
hours news channels were little more than purveyors of ‘war porn’ for the manner in
which they broadcast relentless images without context or explanation. Other critics
feared that too much reality could have serious effects on morale. To put such fears in
historical context: how long could the governments of Asquith and Lloyd George have
maintained the war effort had the public been able to see live coverage from the First
World War? Imagine the carnage of the Somme on Sky and BBC News 24; and would
it have been possible to evacuate 300,000 troops from Dunkirk under the scrutiny of
twenty-four-hour rolling news?
In contemporary warfare, governments have attempted to influence the media
through what the military termed ‘perception management’  – a euphemism for
propaganda. In terms of military–media relations, one of the consequences of the
increasing sophistication of the military’s media operations that we have witnessed
since the lessons learnt in the aftermath of the Vietnam War is the accusation of ‘spin’
or manipulation. The rise of professional military communicators since 2001 (and
the shift to what the Pentagon termed ‘perception management’) created a situation
whereby the media became part of the problem and not the solution. At the time of
the First Gulf War in 1991, the military was firmly in control of the media; but by 2003
and the invasion of Iraq, power had shifted to politicians who were now in control of
state–media relations and the information environment. The years of fruitless war in
Afghanistan, together with the contested history of the Iraq War (the Second Gulf War),
have resulted in an unprecedented concentration of ‘communication power’ within a
political elite. Furthermore, the current ‘war on terror’ continues to shape domestic
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public and political perceptions toward a chronic sense of insecurity. Following the
terrorist attacks in Manchester and London, the question of ‘security’ largely shaped
the political debate in the latter half of the June 2017 British general election campaign.
But what do we mean when we speak of a ‘war on terror’ – which has now lasted
for over eighteen years? Following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration justified
its response by announcing the ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT), arguing that it had
the right and ability to pursue Al-Qaeda and any other state or group which harboured
them and their leader, Osama bin Laden. By declaring a global war on terror, the West
invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter, that is the right to self-defence, and in the process
empowered the terrorists with the status of ‘warriors’ – something that groups such as
Al-Qaeda shrewdly exploited in their own counter-propaganda against the West.
The long information war is a war of ideas, a global struggle for hearts and minds.
The GWOT is a battle of indefinite duration – although it has taken the West a long
time to recognize this. For the West (led by the United States), it was conceived against
the backdrop of 9/11 (which represented an extraordinary David versus Goliath
propaganda coup for Al-Qaeda) and terms such as ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ and
‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ framed the immediate response in Afghanistan and
Iraq. ‘Islamofascism’ was defined in the United States as a dangerous, militant ideology
on the march worldwide – preying on the disadvantaged and deluded – not dissimilar
to communism in the Cold War.
The decision to extend the war from Afghanistan to Iraq represented a major
propaganda error (leaving aside the moral arguments) on the part of the Bush
administration. Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States had an opportunity to
tap into the groundswell of positive world opinion that was exemplified by Le Monde’s
famous front page:  ‘We are all Americans now.’ By claiming that Saddam Hussein
possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links with Jihadist groups, the
American-led invasion confirmed all that Osama bin Laden had said since his Jihad
against the United States in 1998. The United States talked about ‘infinite justice’ and
‘enduring freedom’ (liberal, Western values) but Al-Qaeda presented the Americans
not as liberators intent on bringing democracy but as invaders intent on occupying
and destroying the Muslim world. The invasion therefore represented a wonderful
opportunity for Al-Qaeda propaganda. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 (‘Operation Iraqi
Freedom’) allowed bin Laden to declare Baghdad as the centre for the new Caliphate,
and foreign Muslim fighters responded. The GWOT now had a new battlefront and at
the same time it emboldened the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Did news media instigate a debate to justify the war in Iraq? Essentially no – such
questions were viewed by the Bush administration as unpatriotic (underpinned by
the shock and magnitude of 9/11). The cudgel of patriotism prevented the healthy
dynamism needed between political leaders and public atrophies. Following 9/11, the
larger public was generally under-informed about the nature of the war in Iraq. The
great failing of US media coverage was its complicity – the circumstances that led to
9/11 and justification for war merited critical, detached, scrutiny.
The toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad was intended to be a
symbolic act that represented the swift conclusion to a campaign of ‘shock and awe’
(which hardly squared with slogans such as ‘enduring freedom’). It mimicked events in
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‘We Are All Propagandists Now’ 315

the Second World War when US marines planted the stars and stripes on Iwo Jima, or
when Soviet troops unfolded their flag from the smouldering Reichstag in Berlin. The
event was depicted in the Western media as widely celebrated by frenzied Iraqis, yet in
retrospect we know that it was largely constructed and editorialized by the US military.
The images and the accompanying rhetoric suggested that a short war was over rather
than the truer picture that a long war was only just beginning.
Technology may have changed the way in which wars are now reported, but it has
also introduced new tyrannies:  the need to service twenty-four-hour rolling news
channels (‘the tyranny of time’), editorial interference from a distance, greater visual
gimmickry and less interest in the wider context. The coverage of the toppling of the
statue of Saddam Hussein is a case in point. This has led to charges that current war
journalism (often referred to as ‘infotainment’) produces less detailed and analytical
information than in the past.
It is also true that fundamental changes in the nature of warfare have affected both
the ability to cover wars and the style of reporting. Asymmetric warfare is going to
be the dominant form of conflict in the modern age, simply because of the lack of
enemies capable of contemplating a conventional war against the major industrial
powers. So, in the face of conventional firepower, the weaker state or organization
uses different weaponry. Al-Qaeda is the first guerrilla movement to migrate from
physical space to cyberspace. We are now entering a new phase in which small groups,
operating without overt state sponsorship, are able to exploit the vulnerability of ‘open’
societies. Terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and more recently ISIS (Islamic State
of Iraq and Syria, also known by its Arabic-language acronym DAESH) represent a
new and profoundly dangerous type of organization, ‘virtual states’, borderless but
global in scope. Al-Qaeda and ISIS now have access to the means of communications
through the internet (and other social networks), and this changes the dynamics of the
propaganda war. The internet has provided terrorists with a vast cyber-recruitment
arena. Internet chat rooms are supplementing and replacing mosques, community
centres and coffee shops. Al-Qaeda’s main propaganda outlet is its media production
house As-Sahab (‘The Clouds’), whose overriding aim is that of promoting global
Jihad. Distributed through Arab TV networks (Al Jazeera, Al-Arabia, local Pakistani
television stations), As-Sahab uploads its propaganda, known as the ‘martyrdom
videos’, on to YouTube  – a format favoured by younger audiences. The numbers
and quality of these videos have increased and improved incrementally since 2005
and have been widened to include documentary-quality films, iPod files and mobile
phone videos.
More recently, ISIS has gained prominence and started to employ propaganda even
more widely than Al-Qaeda. ISIS’s Amaq news agency is notorious for its execution
videos. However, together with the hard-core battle footage, Amaq also attempts to
depict what everyday life is like in the so-called Islamic State in idyllic terms. The
Islamic State has long issued a steady torrent of sophisticated propaganda to demonize
its enemies, inspire its followers and advance its cause in general. To this end, Amaq
is just one element in ISIS’s propaganda machine that includes a sophisticated glossy-
style magazine, Dabiq, which is published online and in multiple languages and
replaced by Rumiyah in 2016. ISIS propaganda portrays the Islamic State as they see
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themselves: boasting of their victories and painting a romantic image of the restoration

of an Islamic golden age and the heralding of a new caliphate based on holy war. In 2016,
a pocket-sized fifty-five-page guide for information warfare entitled Media Operative,
You Are a Mujahid provided advice as to how Islamic State media operations should
be constructed, claiming, ‘Media weapons [can] actually be more potent than atomic
bombs.’ Underpinning Islamic State’s impressive outreach success in attracting recruits
and inspiring terror attacks, it now recruits Jihadi ‘media operatives’ to disseminate its
message: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the media operative [can] actually be more
potent than atomic bombs’ and has ‘far-reaching potential to change the balance in
respect to the war between the Muslims and their enemies’. The booklet continued,
‘Media operatives are at the forefront of the conflict, in the heart of the war, within
the furnace of its battles. They participate alongside their brothers, fighting against the
enemies of Allah on the Earth and raising aloft the flag of Jihad.’3 In short, for terrorist
and aggrieved groups who want to destroy the status quo, cyberspace is now a major
battlefield, and the ‘war’ is one of ideas.
Since early 2009, the ‘War on Terror’ has been downplayed in official documents
both in the United States and the UK, as it was recognized that, through the
amplification provided by global media channels, it was fuelling the terrorists’ rhetoric
of a Western ‘crusade’ against Islam. In March 2009, the US Defense Department
officially changed the name of operations from ‘Global War on Terror’ to ‘Overseas
Contingency Operation’, and President Barack Obama stopped referring to a ‘war on
terror’ in his speeches. The killing of bin Laden in May 2011 by US Special Forces
represented a major propaganda coup for the president. This was timely, as for some
time the West had been losing the propaganda war against Al-Qaeda and, more
recently, ISIS. The death of bin Laden, together with events following the Arab Spring,
weakened (at least in the short term) Al-Qaeda’s fundamentalist propaganda appeal to
sections of the Muslim world. The subsequent military incursions of ISIS in Iraq and
its aggressive recruitment programme, together with its sustained terrorist activities in
the Middle East and Europe, have challenged once again the way in which, in the past,
governments could largely control the coverage and shape the narrative. (Revealingly,
both Russia and China appear to be bucking this trend by continuing to shape the
wider media narrative through their insidious anti-Western propaganda and their
censorship of social media and the conventional media.)4 For this reason, we cannot
understand terrorism in the twenty-first century  – let  alone counter it effectively  –
unless we understand the rapidly changing process of communication and the nature
of the propaganda that underpins it.

‘There are no longer readers, only writers’: Is everyone a

propagandist now?

And what of the role of citizens in all this? Have the ‘new media’ freed them from the
tyranny of oppressive government? How is propaganda changing with the internet,
social media, mobile technology, advertising and the press? Can propaganda still be
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‘We Are All Propagandists Now’ 317

identified, given the prevalence of communication methods and the sophistication of

the originators? In the age of Facebook, Twitter and internet bots (applications that
perform automated tasks – also known as Web robots), is everyone a propagandist?
What is the role of state propaganda in the twenty-first century and where does it go
next? Is our democracy moving into cyberspace and will the values of the internet
prevail? We have seen in recent times that virtual campaigns on Facebook and Twitter
have resulted in a number of witch-hunts which at times appear to be above the law
(veritable global megaphones for gossip). Bots have been used to launch malicious and
inflammatory attacks on individuals, groups and government and to spread so-called
‘fake news’ (more of this later).5 Edges are dangerously blurred between what happens
online (the lawless place we call the internet) and mainstream media. The Labour
Party’s 2017 election campaign successfully mobilized large numbers of young voters
through its extensive and coordinated use of social media and mobile technology
demonstrating not only a growing age divide when it comes to accessing ‘information’
but also the ineffectiveness of mainstream media (certainly as far as the young are
concerned) in a digital age.6
In governmental departments all over the globe, teams are now assembled whose
sole responsibility is to monitor the world according to social media. Thus, the
traditional flow of information from news providers to the reading/listening public has
been inverted. So is real power shifting from a judicious mainstream to the texting and
Twitter mob? In some ways, there is purity in ‘virtual democracy’: it reflects the public
mood in real time – it is difficult to rig and sometimes ‘truth’ is flushed out. However,
politics by Facebook and Twitter rarely adds up to considered, rational debate. It is a
visceral, communal response, and governments are becoming extremely scared by it.
Old-fashioned focus groups in a room appear irrelevant against thousands of tweeters
suddenly getting angry about something. With politics conducted on social media
sites and with no judicious rules applying, it is almost inevitable that standards and
values that underpin civilized behaviour in the real world do not always apply. It is
now possible to ‘google’ any accusations made against individuals, governments and
companies without the need to verify the facts.
We have, on the other hand, witnessed the positive aspects of the new media. The
Arab Spring which started in Tunisia in December 2010 resulted in a wave of uprisings
and regime takeovers in the Middle East. The new media (particularly the mobile
phone) is credited with facilitating growing citizen discontent in the region. Former
dictators were simply unable to control the speed and flow of information. Similarly
in the fields of health or the provision of aid to counter natural disasters, non-state
players and individuals may contest government decisions, or criticize the lack of
resolve at state level. Social media can therefore generate a spontaneity that may lead
to direct action. Equally, the internet and social networks have allowed individuals
and groups to challenge medical orthodoxy and provide ‘alternative’ advice and
treatments. Generally speaking, these can only be positive developments, in that they
provide different layers of information. The problem arises from the sheer plurality of
sources and the volume of information in cyberspace. How can one navigate such a
vast reservoir of information and verify its authenticity?
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318 Propaganda and Conflict

‘Fake news’ and ‘post-truth’

The internet and social media have transformed communication, giving disinformation
and deception in markets and politics added potency. Deep professional and ethical
concerns deter mainstream media from resorting to such practice and adopting the
values of the internet, although there are troubling signs that the mainstream media is
edging in that direction. If democracy completes its journey into cyberspace, there will
remain huge questions about what the nature of this democracy will be.
Such questions and concerns have recently been given added urgency by the rise
of a new phenomenon variously referred to as ‘fake news’ and/or ‘post-truth’ that has
arisen on social media. Indeed, the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2016
was ‘post-truth’, which it defines as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which
objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion
and personal belief ’. ‘Fake news’ is related, though not identical, to the concept of
‘post-truth’ and has been defined as ‘news articles that are intentionally and verifiably
false – particularly with political implications, and especially those that gain enormous
traction in the popular imagination’.7 Concerns about ‘fake news’ or ‘post-truth’
persuaded the House of Common’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee in January
2017 to launch an inquiry into the issue.8
The current resurgence of the term began soon after the US presidential election
on 8 November 2016, with speculation that false news stories concerning the two
main candidates could have had an impact on the outcome of the election. The stories
in question included  – among many others  – claims that Pope Francis endorsed
Donald Trump for the presidency, that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton had
sold weapons to ISIS, that Trump supporters were engaging in racist chants at an
election victory party. An analysis by BuzzFeed News has claimed that ‘in the final
three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news
stories on Facebook generated more [reader] engagement than the top stories from
major news outlets such as the New  York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post,
NBC News and others’.9
‘Fake news’ has come into the spotlight because of the role it is alleged to have
played in the US presidential election and in the UK’s Brexit result in the referendum
on the European Union. However, it has not been convincingly demonstrated that it
had a decisive role in determining the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and
there are good reasons to be wary of suggestions that a democratic outcome was the
result of people being duped by ‘fake news’. Most of these items came from opaque
and hitherto unknown media outlets. Among the most widely shared were stories that
made false claims about Hillary Clinton and her campaign team. In the UK, the Brexit
result has sometimes been attributed to ‘fake news’. However, the examples of ‘fake
news’ repeatedly cited are politicians’ campaign statements (such as the ‘£350m a week
for the NHS [National Health Service]’ claim) and partisan press coverage, which do
not fall within any rigorous definition of ‘fake news’.10
‘Fake news’ is not a new term, nor is there anything new in revelations that politicians
and governments have been shown to have lied to their people (especially in times of
war). What is new is the public’s response to it. We evidently are quite happy to believe
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‘We Are All Propagandists Now’ 319

untruths and the concomitant replacement of verification with media algorithms that
tell us what we want to hear. Where, therefore, do we find the roots and antecedent
of this resurgence of ‘fake news’? Some academics and journalists attribute this new
concept to the rise of a new kind of ‘post-truth’ politics – an expression of frustration
and anguish from a liberal class discombobulated by the political and economic
disruptions of 2016. I would suggest, however, that the recent phenomenon of ‘fake
news’ began with the disinformation (‘spin’) that accompanied the Iraq War (2003). The
continuous claim on the part of the perpetrators that they acted in good faith, in the
face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, convinced the public that indifference
to truth by the political establishment had become the norm in politics. This resulted
in a long-term toxic mistrust of government and so-called experts. The fact that former
prime minister Tony Blair and senior figures of his government continue to remain
in stubborn denial suggests not only a ‘hyper-reality’ – that evidence and ‘truth’ are
irrelevant in the face of an unbending instinct – but also gives rise to the conviction
that reality is shaped through the exercise of power. As Blair stated in his speech to the
Labour Party conference in September 2004, ‘I only know what I believe.’11
What is the nature of the sites on social media disseminating ‘fake news’? ‘Fake-
news’ sites are staffed not by journalists but by individuals who see a commercial,
political or other opportunity in gaining the algorithms Facebook, Google and other
networks and platforms use to connect their users with news stories. ‘Fake news’
travels fast on social media, where algorithms connect users (mainly the younger
generation) to news by second-guessing what the user might like, rather than assessing
the quality of the source. As it thrives, it attracts advertisers hungry for audiences in
the digital environment. Digital programmatic advertising follows these people with
their own algorithms that track their ‘clicks’, ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ and places advertising
wherever they browse. Internet and social media have transformed communication,
giving disinformation and deception in markets and politics added potency. This
may partly be explained by the economics of information. Social media provides not
only individual platforms to express views and prejudice and conspiracy theories
but also an economic platform as well. Witness the trend in the wake of the June
2017 Manchester bombings, where, using social media and driven by an insatiable
desire to register more ‘hits’ on their individual sites, people started spreading ‘fake
news’ claiming to have been present and capitalizing on the event, oblivious to the
suffering of victims’ families. Such ‘fake news’ is almost entirely governed by a desire
for personal aggrandizement. Truth and evidence are secondary to the expression of
individual prejudices that encourage similarly minded people and groups to coalesce
around blinkered messages in a sort of news in a fact-free vacuum.
‘Fake news’ combines or contains elements of propaganda, conspiracy theory and
rumour. In a very basic sense, ‘fake news’ is ‘information’ known by its creator or
disseminator to be false, masquerading as a genuine news story. ‘Fake news’ or ‘post-
truth’ can fend off even incontestable facts (the so-called ‘backfire effect’). It is designed
to mislead or misrepresent. Like propaganda, ‘fake news’ is dynamic and flexible, and,
like propaganda, the problem is not primarily definition but function and effect. False
news has always been present in the form of rumour. However, it is now more visible,
through the manifold and diverse media channels available to and created by the
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public and through the extensive publicity given to the phenomenon of ‘fake news’
in the mainstream media. One consequence of this is the emergence of the notion
of ‘denialism’, which challenges accepted authoritative opinion with a ‘better’, more
acceptable truth (Holocaust denial would be a good example). Denialism has moved
from the fringes to the centre of public discourse, largely due to new technology,
which has allowed previous marginal voices to access information more easily and to
disseminate it more widely.
There is a danger in overreacting to ‘fake news’. Overreaction is likely to intensify
existing fascination with it and may incite deep mistrust of government if the proposed
solutions are considered excessive or anti-democratic. The concern, and this partly
explains why the British government launched its enquiry into ‘fake news’, is that
these unexpected shifts occurred because reason had been subverted by demagogues
deploying new information technologies and because voters disregarded argument,
reason and evidence in favour of manipulated emotion and ‘fake news’. A  closer
analysis of recent political events suggests far more complex explanations, with social
media and mobile technology being one – albeit an important – factor. In a post-Brexit
Britain, so-called ‘fake news’ can be found right across the political spectrum. Most
attention has been given to the Brexit campaign’s ‘direct lie’ that a vote to leave the
EU would provide £350 million a week for the NHS. Subsequent critical scrutiny of
this claim has not ostensibly damaged politicians who voted to Leave, which suggests
that many of their supporters did not take such promises literally and that they were
propelled by two other, interrelated factors, immigration (EU nationals ‘flooding’ into
the country) and nationalism (regaining of borders and sovereignty).
For their part, the government and the Remain campaign chose not to concentrate
on the advantages of remaining a member of the EU but immediately launched ‘Project
Fear’, an emotional appeal about the dire economic and financial consequences of
leaving the EU. The campaign deployed unverifiable figures to substantiate a vision
of Armageddon. One could argue that while some voters were guided by their own
values, others were undoubtedly swayed by the propaganda (one way or the other) and
a large minority used their vote to leave, imagining it would be a protest against what
was widely perceived to be a cynical political exercise and an expected outcome that
Britain would remain in the EU.
But this does not mean that the historic shifts of 2016 were engineered by cyber-
leaks or psychometric profiling. While propaganda played an important role in
explaining Brexit and Donald Trump’s (unexpected) victory, both outcomes were as
much a product of the long-standing despair of large numbers of people who feel
economically marginalized by a failing liberal democratic system as they were of
‘fake news’. This partially explains why a third of those who participated in the French
presidential election in May 2017 voted for Marine Le Pen, while more than one in ten
went to the ballot box only to submit a spoilt or blank vote. ‘Post-truth’ politics and
‘fake news’ too often absolve so-called ‘liberals’ from responsibility for their defeats
and past failures.
However, genuine concerns remain and need to be addressed. The economics of
the Web is destroying the possibility of financing serious news and raises the question
of whether readers want a cautious fact-checked article when it is cheaper and much
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‘We Are All Propagandists Now’ 321

more profitable to follow partisan media outlets such as Breitbart or the Canary.12
Second, recent political events suggest a rise in anti-intellectualism that feeds popular
movements; that at pivotal moments in Western democracies, citizens are increasingly
suspicious of so-called ‘experts’. There are no longer facts, only interpretations.13
Third, there are genuine concerns about what are sometimes referred to as ‘digital
echo chambers’ that are characteristic of internet use. There is evidence to suggest that
audiences are increasingly sceptical about the messages which they receive from the
media – both online and offline. In times of crisis and uncertainty, some of them turn
to voices that echo their own concerns and fears, even if they are strident, extreme,
ill-informed and divisive. In this context, the social media have become a platform
for reinforcing our opinions, while ignoring points of view we disagree with. ‘Fake
news’ is a modern manifestation of the historic phenomenon of ‘improvised news’: the
process by which individuals spread rumours in order to express emotional reactions,
to reinforce the existing prejudices of a targeted audience, test political views and make
sense of the world around them.14 It is connected to inherent behaviours in human
communications, especially at times of crisis or uncertainty. What has changed,
however, is the scale and speed of transmission. The challenge is to engage with,
identify and expose ‘fake news’ without compromising liberal democratic freedoms.
Again, this challenge is not new: it was faced by successive wartime governments.
The problem of ‘false news’ is set against a backdrop of a changing news culture. The
concentrated media landscape that prevailed in the post-war period has given way to a
more polarized political culture in which individuals with different political views are
less likely to agree on ‘facts’ or their relative importance. The growth of the internet and
mobile technology has created an atomized news culture in which individuals can find
evidence to support their conspiracy theory of choice and in which the mechanism
for the mass dissemination of ‘information’ is in the hands of the many with few
restrictions or controls. One of the major consequences of the World Wide Web is that
there are (largely) no gatekeepers who insist on accuracy before publishing, and lies
and conspiracy theories are given the same status as ‘truth’.
In this Information Age, it is not unreasonable to expect governments and other
groups to conduct propaganda and censorship  – in times of both war and peace
(e.g. the Bush administration’s ban on photographing coffins returning to the United
States with the bodies of soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq, or generally
denying terrorist groups the oxygen of publicity). Equally, citizens and consumers
should be able to hold the global elite media to account by demanding viewpoints and
perspectives from across the spectrum of public opinion, disseminated by open and
diverse channels of communications.
Arguably, propaganda is most effective when it is less noticeable. In a totalitarian
regime  – indeed in any closed society  – propaganda is more obvious and visible
and largely tolerated for fear of the consequences of objecting to or questioning the
‘message’. In a so-called open society, propaganda is much more problematic when it is
hidden and integrated into the political culture. Once exposed, people feel duped and
betrayed, and this serves only to reinforce the pejorative association with the practice
of propaganda, deemed to be at odds with that open society. Too often, effective
propaganda is associated with the control of the flow of information and with duplicity
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and falsehood. But propaganda has the potential to serve a constructive purpose.
Writing in 1928, Edward Bernays, who did so much to frame the nature of modern
advertising, argued, ‘Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that
propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and
help to bring order out of chaos.’15
Perhaps the key here is the multiplicity of voices. While the opportunities for the
sharing of plural viewpoints are greater than ever before, social networks encourage us
to spend more time in discussion with those who are likely to share our prejudices and
preconceptions. This reinforces pre-existing belief systems that determine whether we
choose to accept or reject the information we receive. At the same time, the declining
readership and financial pressures faced by newspapers, partly a result of the loss
of advertising revenue to the internet, combined with the pressure to break a story
in the age of twenty-four-hour rolling news, have discouraged costly investigative
reporting and reduced incentives to check information. The growth of the internet has
exacerbated the problem of ‘fake news’ rather than created it. Falsehoods do not rely
on the internet to spread but can circulate in print media or as the result of traditional
political campaigning. It is perfectly possible to argue that in democracies politics
has nothing to fear from propaganda. Propaganda is merely a process of persuasion
that forms a normal part of the political dynamic and, as such, it could be argued
that we need more propaganda, not less. Citizens have to be more informed and arm
themselves with a greater understanding of the nature and processes of the Information
Age. Whatever definition of propaganda we choose to use or, indeed, whether we need
more or less propaganda – we have been living through the age of propaganda. The
relationship between politics, propaganda and public opinion is both complex and
controversial. It is a relationship that has changed in the light of new technology and
different types of warfare. But throughout, propaganda, power and persuasion are all
about winning hearts and minds, and that remains as relevant today as it always has.
On a positive note, the only lasting solution to the issues outlined above may be found
in long-term integrative educational programmes, both on how we receive news in the
digital age and on the fundamental belief systems that underpin our democracy. Every
generation must refight the battles of the Enlightenment.

Notes
1 See, in particular, David Welch, Propaganda: Power and Persuasion (London, 2013);
Persuading the People: British Propaganda in World War II (London, 2016) and World
War II Propaganda: Analyzing the Art of Persuasion during Wartime (Santa Barbara,
CA, 2017).
2 Cf. Daniel C. Hallin, The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam (Oxford, 1986)
and William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War (Lawrence,
KS, 1989) with Susan A. Brewer, Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda
from the Philippines to Iraq (Oxford, 2009).
3 Lizzie Dearden, ‘Isis Claims Propaganda “More Powerful than Atomic Bomb” as
Group Forms Strategy for Survival’, Independent, 14 February 2017, available at http://
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‘We Are All Propagandists Now’ 323

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-propaganda-atomic-bomb-
survival-strategy-iraq-syria-islamic-state-icsr-report-amaq-rumiyah-al-a7579511.html
(last access 28 July 2018).
4 For a perceptive analysis of the Russian experience see Arkady Ostrovsky, The
Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War (London, 2015).
Some would suggest that the insidious propaganda methods of Russia and China
have diminished the role of diplomacy in international negotiations. But equally
President Trump’s instinct to by-pass such well-established channels in favour of more
spontaneous and less reflective social media resulted in his extraordinary response to
North Korea’s ‘major’ missile launch in September 2017. Admonishing South Korea for
attempting to ‘appease’ a ‘rogue nation’, Trump tweeted that ‘they [North Korea] “only
understand one thing!” . . . Fire and fury like the world has never seen’: Amy Davidson
Sorkin, ‘Donald Trump’s Reckless Response to North Korea’s Nuclear Test’, New York
Times, 3 September 2017.
5 A recent study prepared by the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of
Excellence (StratCom) into Russian attempts to destabilize western Baltic nations
considered Twitter-mentions of NATO and one or more of the host countries
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in the period 1 March–30 August 2017. It
discovered that two in three Twitter users who write in Russian about the NATO
presence in Eastern Europe are robotic or ‘bot’ accounts. Together, these accounts
created 84 per cent of the total Russian-language messages. The English-language
space is also heavily affected: one in four active accounts was probably automated
and was responsible for 46 per cent of all English-language content. Including bots,
Russian-speaking users are thus, on average, twice as active as their English-speaking
equivalents. StratCom’s headline finding was that 70 per cent of accounts active in
Russian were predominantly automated. The equivalent for English-language content
is 28 per cent. The report concluded starkly that ‘the democratising possibilities of
social media appear – at least in the case of Twitter in Russia – to have been greatly
undermined. The findings presented have practical implications for any policy
maker, journalist, or analyst who measures activity on Twitter. Failure to account
for bot activity will – at best – result in junk statistics.’ StratCom, Robotrolling, 1
(2017), available at http://www.stratcomcoe.org/robotrolling-20171 (last access 28
July 2018).
6 The Observer editorial characterized the press and TV as being ‘left firing analogue
bullets in a digital age’: Observer, 10 June 2017, available at https://www.theguardian.
com/commentisfree/2017/jun/10/observer-view-general-election-theresa-may-debacle
(last access 28 July 2018).
7 This is the definition offered by Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, ‘Social Media
and Fake News in the 2016 Election’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31: 2 (2017), pp.
211–36.
8 Together with Jo Fox and David Coast, I submitted a written report that can be
found on: http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/
evidencedocument/culture-media-and-sport-committee/fake-news/written/48239.
html (last access 28 July 2018). The submission includes historical examples of ‘fake
news’. I have used some of the points we made in our submission in the following
analysis.
9 Craig Silverman, ‘This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories
Outperformed Real News on Facebook’, BuzzFeed News, 16 November 2016, available
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324 Propaganda and Conflict

at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-
outperformed-real-news-on-facebook (last access 28 July 2018).
10 For three analyses in the spate of the Brexit result and Trump election victory see
Matthew d’Ancona, Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back
(London, 2017); James Ball, Post Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World (London,
2017); and Evan Davis, Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We
Can Do about It (London, 2017).
11 The phrase he used in context was, ‘Instinct is not science. I’m like any other human
being, as fallible and as capable of being wrong. I only know what I believe.’ For the
full speech, see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3697434.stm (last access 28
July 2018).
12 Ball, Post Truth, is particularly strong on explaining the economics of the Web.
13 Witness Kellyanne Conway’s (Counsellor to President Trump) use of the phrase
‘alternative facts’ to explain events that never occurred. Conway’s phrase, which
does not stand the test of rational analysis, reminded many critics of ‘Newspeak’, the
obfuscating language in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 (1949).
14 Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (New York, 1966).
15 Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York, 2005), p. 168.
 325

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340

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 341

Index

7/7 (terrorism) 9; see also terrorism artworks

9/11 (terrorism) 9, 279–80, 306–7, 312, Allegorical Scene with Three Moons
314; see also terrorism (Chagall) 72
Animal Destinies (Marc) 67
Academy Awards 120, 125 Portrait/Head of a Monk (Fouquet) 69
Adam, Ronald 233–4 Portrait of a Woman with Two Noses
Admiralty, War Office and Press (Picasso) 72
Committee 22–4, 27, 33 Self-Portrait dedicated to Paul Gauguin
advertising 17, 188–9, 285–6, 297–8, 308, (van Gogh) 67
319, 322 Sumpflegende (Klee) 73–7
Afghanistan 307, 312–14, 321 Two Harlequins (Picasso) 67
AIDS 280–1 Zwei Reiter am Strand (Liebermann) 73,
Air Raid Precautions (ARP) 149, 151 77–8
Albania 150–1, 153–4, 158 Asch, Solomon 276
Allen, Denis 165, 175–6 Asquith, Herbert Henry 21, 24–5, 28–9,
Al Jazeera 313, 315 31–4, 40, 313
Al-Qaeda 270, 307, 312, 314–16 Asquith, Margot 28, 32
Alving, Alf 192–4 ‘asymmetrical warfare’ 312, 315
‘America First’ 122 Athens 149–55, 157–8
American Medical Association (AMA) Atlanta Penitentiary 192, 198
204; see also periodicals Attlee, Clement 110, 210–12, 224
Amiens dispatch 21–3, 31–4
Anglo-Boer War 22–3, 26, 32, 34 Baggallay, Lacy 167, 172
Anti-Lies Bureau 141 Baghdad 314
anti-Semitism 144–5; see also Holocaust Balcon, Michael 116, 119
‘Apostles’ (Special Operations Executive) Baldwin, Stanley 50–1
150–3, 155, 158–9 Balfour, Michael 93
appeasement 48, 50, 141, 147 Ballmer, Karl 72
Arab Spring 316–17 Barbirolli, John 244–5
Army Staff College, Camberley 25 battle fatigue, see mental health
Arntz, Wilhelm 75 Battle of Britain 213–14, 292–3
art Battle of Le Cateau 21, 29–30, 32
looting of 57–61, 64, 67–73, Battle of Mons 26–9
76–80 Battle of the Marne 21, 33–4
as propaganda 95–6, 104 BBC, see British Broadcasting Corporation
trade in 57–61, 67–71, 75–80 Beckmann, Max 63–4, 71
see also artworks Belsen, see concentration camps
art history 58–9, 62, 64, 95 Bernays, Edward 2
Arts Council, see Council for the Bernstein, Sidney 126, 128–31
Encouragement of Music and the Arts Beveridge Report 102, 210
342

342 Index

Beveridge, William 210; see also Beveridge Second World War (Greece) 155, 158–9
Report Bücher, Karl 15
Bevin, Ernest 215, 240–1 Buchholz, Karl 65–6, 84
Beyeler, Ernst 75 Burdenko Commission 175–6
Bidwell, George Chandos 231–7, 240–1, Bush, George H. W. 312
243, 245–6 Bush, George W. 280, 307, 314, 321
bin Laden, Osama 314, 316 Butler, R. A. (Rab) 104
Blair, Tony 307, 319
Bletchley Park 140 Caccia, Harold 151–2
Blitz 9, 119, 157, 305 Cadogan, Alexander 171, 173, 175, 230
Blum, Léon 51–2 Cairo 150–1, 155, 159, 231
Boer War, see Anglo-Boer War Callwell, Charles 23–5
Böhmer, Bernhard A. 65–6 Cambridge History of the First World War 17
Bormann, Martin 68 Canada 106, 143, 303–7
Bowman, Thomas 152–4, 157 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
brainwashing 6, 186–7 (CBC) 303–4
Brexit 1, 318, 320 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) 57
Britain ‘Carlos the Jackal’ 307
in the Cold War 229–47, 285–6, 297 cartoons 153–4, 158
in the First World War 21–34, 39–46, Cavendish Bentinck, Victor 230–1
215 censorship 22, 31, 33, 145, 152–3, 169–70,
post-war reforms in 102–3, 147, 210–11 270, 304, 308, 316, 321
relations with France 39–53, 138–9 self-censorship 28
relations with Germany 24, 106–7, 109 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 187, 277
relations with Greece 150–2, 154, 159 Central Office of Information (COI) 127,
relations with Italy 155 209–12, 220, 285–6, 296
relations with Poland 163–78, 229–47 Chagall, Marc 57, 63, 72, 86
relations with the Soviet Union 104, Allegorical Scene with Three Moons 72
163–78 Chamberlain, Neville 50, 141
relations with the USA 131, 271, 273 Changchun Film Studio 255–6, 258, 261,
in the Second World War 6, 8–9, 95, 263
99–110, 115–32, 137–47, 149–59, 214, Chaplin, Charlie 100
219–21 Chiang Kaishek, see Jiang Jieshi
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) China (People’s Republic)
95, 240, 269–70, 273, 275, 313 civil war 253–4, 256–7, 259, 265
British Council 6, 188–9 constitution of 255
activities in Bulgaria 241 foundation of 253, 255
activities in Czechoslovakia 236, 241, ‘Land Reform’ campaign 258, 260
244–5 and media control 269–70, 316
activities in Hungary 244–5 relations with Soviet Union 253–4, 256
activities in Poland 230–47 US involvement in 195
activities in the Second World War war against Japan 255–9, 265
229–30, 240 see also Chinese Communist Party
activities in the USA 273 (CCP); ‘Guomindang’; Jiang Jieshi;
creation 229–30, 269–70 Korean War; Mao Zedong
British Empire 106, 150, 155, 289; see also Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 253–7,
Commonwealth 261, 265
British Expeditionary Force (BEF) Churchill, Clementine 40–2, 45, 48–52
First World War 21–34, 40–3, 46 Churchill, Winston 9
 343

Index 343

The Gathering Storm 40, 48, 50–2 democracy 1–4, 52, 119–25, 165, 187–8,
Great Contemporaries 44, 46–7 210, 275, 303, 318
in the First World War 22, 27–8 ‘denialism’ 320
in the interwar period 39–56 desertion 116, 146–7
in the Second World War 102, 105, 125, Dickson, Paul 212–13, 216, 219, 224
141, 147, 164–9, 172–6, 230–1 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport
Thoughts and Adventures 43–4 Committee (UK Parliament) 3
The World Crisis 45–6, 53 Directorate of Military Operations 23
cinema 94–5, 99–102, 115–16, 137–8, 211 disability 155, 188, 209, 212, 215, 221–2,
Soviet cinema 108, 253 224; see also veterans
see also films; Hitchcock, Alfred Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 215
Clark, Kenneth 101 Disarmament Conference (Geneva) 39
Clark Kerr, Archibald 169, 171–4 ‘disposal commission’ (German art) 64–6
Clemenceau, Georges 43–8, 51, 53 Dix, Otto 57, 63–4, 71
Coca-Cola 188 Dogger Bank incident 22
cognitive dissonance 8 Drobnig, Ulrich 75
Committee of Imperial Defence 22, 28
Committee on Medical Research (CMR) Eden, Anthony 144, 164–171, 173–6,
192, 198 230–1
Commonwealth 106, 143; see also British Egypt 149, 151, 155, 170
Empire Eisenhower, Dwight 275–6
communication studies 16, 272 Eisenstein, Sergei 99, 253
concentration camps 115, 128–31, 138, Ernst, Max 63
142, 144–5, 191–2, 203–4 ‘exchange contracts’ (German art) 59, 66
conscientious objectors 147
consent 15, 17, 186–7, 192 Facebook, see social media
Corinth, Lovis 66 FactCheck.org 2
Council for the Encouragement of Music fake news 2–4, 311, 317–22; see also
and the Arts (CEMA) 103–4 post-truth
‘counter-propaganda’ 186, 189, 269–73, Falsehood in Wartime, see Ponsonby,
275–80, 314 Arthur
Coventry 109, 140 fascism 121–3, 125, 139–43, 153–5, 272–3,
Coward, Noel 9 308
Credi, Lorenzo 69 Fayolle, Émile 41–3, 45
Crossman, Richard 130, 275 Feiniger, Lyonel 63
cyberspace, see Internet Fermor, Patrick Leigh 149
fifth column 122–3, 138–9, 143, 155
D-Day 108 film studies 95
Dachau, see concentration camps films
DAESH, see ISIS 49th Parallel (1941) 138
Dalton, Hugh 149 Address Unknown (1944) 146
Davis, Angela 278 Am Abend aller Tage (2017) 58
Davis, Myron 195–6, 198–202 Appointment in Berlin (1943) 141–2
Dazhong Dianying 258, 261, 264 Battleship Potemkin (1925) 100, 253
‘Degenerate Art’ (exhibition) 58–66, 71, Berlin Correspondent (1942) 142
73–5, 77 Cage of Gold (1950) 214
Delaunay, Robert 66 Chetniks! (1943) 138
Saint-Séverin 66 Chicken Little (1943) 274
Demandolx-Dedons family 69, 85 The Dam Busters (1955) 214
344

344 Index

Death Mills (1945) 131 News Department 169–71

Dong Cunrui (1955) 255, 258–61, 263–5 Northern Department 165, 173, 177
The First of the Few (1942) 116, 137, 214 Förster, Otto 69
The Hour before the Dawn (1944) 147 Fouquet, Jean 69, 77
Landfall (1949) 214 Portrait/Head of a Monk 69
Let George Do It (1940) 138, 141 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 69
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp France
(1943) 125 in the First World War 26, 29, 39–46
The Life of Emile Zola (1937) 144 relations with Britain 39–53, 138–9
Liu Hulan (1950) 255–8, 259, 260, 264–5 in the Second World War 107, 126–8,
The London Blackout Murders (1942) 138, 146
140–1 see also French Resistance
London Can Take It (1940) 9 French Committee 211–12
The Man From Morocco (1944) 139 French, John 21, 24, 32–3, 40
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) 187 French Resistance 107, 126–8, 138, 146
Mr. Emmanuel (1944) 145–6 Friedmann, David 77–8, 87–8
Passport to Destiny (1944) 142 Führermuseum (Linz) 67–9
Scotland Yard Investigator (1945) 140 Fyfe, Hamilton 30–1
Secrets of Scotland Yard (1944) 140
Shang Gan Ling (1956) 258, 260, 261–4 Gaddi, Taddeo 69
Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror Gainer, Donald St. Clair 233–4, 236
(1942) 141 Gamelin, Maurice 49, 51–3, 141
The Sound Barrier (1952) 214 genocide 165; see also war crimes
Target for Tonight (1941) 115, 128, 214 ‘German Atrocity Film’ 128–31
This Above All (1942) 147 German Concentration Camps Factual
This Was Paris (1942) 138–9 Survey, see ‘German Atrocity Film’
Tonight We Raid Calais (1943) 139–40 Germany
Triumph of the Will (1935) 106, 279 coming to terms with its past 80
The True Glory (1945) 129, 131 in the First World War 4, 24, 27, 29–33
The Undefeated (1950) 188, 209–24 relations with Britain 39–53, 106–7,
The Yellow Canary (1943) 142–3 109
see also cinema; Hitchcock, Alfred; relations with Italy 154–5
Hollywood; Thomas, Dylan relations with the Soviet Union 53
First World War Studies 17 relations with the USA 121
Fischer, Theodor 66–7 in the Second World War 95, 163, 167–
Flandin, Pierre-Étienne 50–2 72, 175–7
Fleming, Ian 117 the Third Reich 7, 57–61, 67, 80, 94, 187,
Foch, Ferdinand 43–7, 53 303
Fohn, Emanuel 66 Gestapo 126, 128, 138, 142, 144, 146
Fohn, Sofie 66 Gilliat, Sidney 129
folk wisdom 271–2 The God That Failed (1949 book) 275
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) Goebbels, Joseph 59–65, 68, 93, 120, 145–6,
273 187; see also Ministry of Propaganda
Foreign Broadcast Information Service and Public Enlightenment
(FBIS) 273 Gomułka, Władysław 242, 244, 247
Foreign Office (Britain) 127, 150, 164–78, gonorrhoea 192
230, 234–7, 244 Goodwill, Arthur 150–1
Central (European) Department 165, Göpel, Erhard 69
169–70, 172, 174 Göring, Hermann 67, 107
 345

Index 345

Goudstikker, Jacques 69 Hollywood 94–5, 115–17, 125–6, 139,

Government Code & Cypher School 144–5, 195, 222, 224
(GC&CS), see Bletchley Park Holocaust 76, 131, 143–4, 163
Great Depression 118 denial of 320
Great German Art Exhibition 62–3 Hoover, J. Edgar 122–3
‘Great Patriotic War’ (Soviet Union) 8 House of Commons 29, 32–4, 39, 144, 211;
Greece 149–59 see also Digital, Culture, Media and
Ministry of Propaganda 158–9 Sport Committee
relations with Britain 150–2, 154, 159 House of Lords 27
Grosz, George 63, 71 House of Representatives (US) 177, 273
Gryphon Films, see Strand Films House Committee on Un-American
Gulf War 307–8, 312–13 Activities (HUAC) 273
‘Guomindang’ 254–7, 259, 265 Houseman, John 120
Gurlitt, Cornelius 57–80 Howard, Leslie 115–16, 214
Gurlitt, Helene 65 human rights 165
Gurlitt, Hildebrand 57–8, 61–4, 80 Hussein, Saddam 307, 314–15
Gurlitt, Louis 67 Huxley, Aldous 2
Gurlitt, Wolfgang 65
Gwynn, Howell A. (‘Taffy’) 22, 28, 32 ideology 3, 63, 185, 117–22, 125–6, 185–7,
209, 253–4, 263–4, 275, 287, 304, 308
Haberstock, Karl 65 Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, see ‘Carlos the
Haig, Douglas 25 Jackal’
Halvorson, Harold 65 information management 2
Hankey, Robin 177 information warfare 1–2, 312, 314, 316
Hartung, Hannes 76 Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA)
Heckel, Erich 64, 67, 71 2, 272
Hemingway, Ernest 123 International Red Cross (IRC) 163, 169,
Hermsen, Théo 69, 71, 85 171–2
Hertmann, Ingeborg 78 Internet 3, 185, 270–1, 275, 279, 315–19,
Hess, Rudolf 107 321–2; see also social media
Himmler, Heinrich 62 Iraq 312–16
Hinkel, Heinz 61 Iraq War 279, 307–8, 312–13, 319, 321
Historikerstreit (‘historians’ dispute’) 187 ISIS 306, 315–16, 318
Hitchcock, Alfred 115–32 Islamic State, see ISIS
The 39 Steps 116, 120 Italy 106, 121, 245, 307
Aventure Malgache 126–8, 131 attack on Greece 150–4
Bon Voyage 126–8 occupation of Albania 151, 158
Foreign Correspondent 117–20, 131–2 relations with Britain 155
Lifeboat 123–6, 131 relations with Germany 154–5
Psycho 125 see also Mussolini, Benito
Rebecca 117, 120 Ivy, Andrew 204–5
Saboteur 120–3, 132
Torn Curtain 125 Japan 106, 121, 145, 191–2, 255–9, 265, 275
see also ‘German Atrocity Film’ Jebb, Gladwyn 166
Hitler, Adolf 39, 51, 62–3, 68–9, 107, 138, Jennings, Humphrey 9
146, 153–9, 271–3 Jesuits 269
Hofer, Carl 64, 71 Jiang Jieshi 254, 256–7, 259
Hoffmann, Heinrich 62 Joffre, Joseph 46
Hofmann, Franz 64 Johnson, Samuel 270–1
346

346 Index

journals, see periodicals Lissitzky-Küppers, Sophie, see Küppers,

journalism 16, 93, 200–1, 304–8, 313–15 Sophie
studies 15–16 Lloyd George, David 43, 45–6, 313
see also newspapers; photojournalism; Locarno, see Treaty of Locarno
press; war reporters London Pride (song) 9
Joyce, William, see ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ 95, 141–2
Lorrain, Claude 69
Kandinsky, Wassily 63, 65–6, 84 Loucheur, Louis 43–4, 48–9
Composition 66 Love, Hate and Propaganda (documentary
Katyn massacre 163–78 series) 189, 303–9
German propaganda on 170–1, 178 Luce, Henry Robinson 195, 200
see also Burdenko Commission Ludendorff, Erich 4, 15
Keynes, John Maynard 103–4 Lusitania 279
Khrushchev, Nikita 164, 177, 188, 242, 244,
276, 306 magazines, see periodicals
Kiggell, Lancelot 25 Maginot Line 51–3
Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 63–4, 84 Maisky, Ivan 167–8
Kitchen Debate 188, 306 malaria 192–8, 203–5
Kitchener, Herbert 21–2, 24–8, Maniadakis, Constantinos 152–4, 157, 159
32–4, 102 Manvell, Roger 137
Klee, Paul 63, 73–4, 76, 86–7 Mao Zedong 253–5, 257, 260, 262–5
Sumpflegende 73–7 Marc, Franz 63, 66–7
Kollwitz, Käthe 64–5, 71, 84 Animal Destinies 67
Korean War 177, 186, 193, 219–23, 255, Marketing, see advertising
258, 261–3 Marne, see Battle of the Marne
Kosovo 279, 313 masculinity 103, 219, 291
Kristallnacht 65 Matisse, Henri 57
Küppers, Paul Erich 73 McCarthyism 276
Küppers, Sophie 73–5 McDonald’s 188
McLaine, Ian 93
Lammers, Hans Heinrich 68 media history 16
Lasswell, Harold D. 2, 16, 272 media studies 16
Laughton, Charles 116 medical ethics 191–3, 200, 203–5
Le Pen, Marine 320 Meister, Aloys 16
leaflets 154, 312–13; see also pamphlets Memory of the Camps (1985 film), see
League of Nations 165 ‘German Atrocity Film’
Lehmbruck, Wilhelm 64, 71 mental health 218–19
Leibbrand, Werner 203–4 Menzies, Stewart 150, 156
Leipzig University 15 Meredith, Burgess 108
Lenbachhaus Museum 75–6 Mers-el-Kebir 139
Leopold, Nathan 194, 199, 201–2 Metaxas, Ioannis 150–4
Liberal Party (UK) 21, 28, 41 Middle East Media Research Institute
Library of Contemporary History, see (MEMRI) 279
Weltkriegsbücherei Mihailovich, Draja 138
Liebermann, Max 57, 73–4, 77–8 Ministry of Defence (MoD) 286, 289,
Zwei Reiter am Strand 73, 77–8 291–2, 296
Lippmann, Walter 2, 185–6, 271–2, 276–7 Ministry of Information (MOI) 17, 93–4,
Lissitzky, El 74–5 101–4, 110, 115, 126–9, 131, 137,
Lissitzky, Jen 74–6 140–1, 150–5, 158, 209–11
 347

Index 347

Ministry of Pensions 209, 212–16, 218, 220, Nivelle, Robert 46

223–4 Niven, David 116
Mitford, Unity 143 Nixon, Richard 188, 278, 306
MO5(h), see Directorate of Military NKVD, see People’s Commissariat of
Operations Internal Affairs
‘Model Worker’ 253, 255–6, 258–65 Nolbandov, Sergei 128–9, 131
modernity 61, 290–3 Nolde, Emil 63–5, 67, 71, 84
Möller, Ferdinand 65–6 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
Molotov, Vyacheslav 173–4 (NATO) 220, 270, 279
Monet, Claude 80 Northern Ireland 296–7
Mons, see Battle of Mons Nuremberg Code 192, 205
Mons dispatch, see Amiens dispatch Nuremberg trials 176–7, 203
Monthly Science News 231, 237 Doctors’ Trial 188, 191–2, 200, 203–5
Moore, Arthur 30–1
morale 15, 101, 104, 141, 193–4, 273–4, Obama, Barack 280, 316
313 Office of War Information (OWI)
Müller, Otto 64 95, 121, 124, 129, 131, 140–1, 273–4,
Müller-Hofstede, Cornelius 77 280
Münster University 16 Official Secrets Act (1911) 22
Murrow, Edward R. 276 Olivier, Laurence 116
museums O’Malley, Owen 174–6
Imperial War Museum 17, 131 Operation Desert Storm 312
Provinzialmuseum, Hanover 74 Organisation for the Prohibition of
Mussolini, Benito 154, 158–9 Chemical Weapons (OPCW) 3
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) 185 Orwell, George 144

Napoleon 27, 138 Palairet, Michael 150–1

National Advisory Council on the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)
Employment of the Disabled 215 307
National Association for the Advancement Pals Battalions 34
of Colored People (NAACP) 124–5 pamphlets 15, 154–5, 286–93, 295–8, 300
National Press Photographers Association panopticon 197
(NPPA) 200 Parachute Regiment (UK) 288, 293, 295
National Service 215, 220–1, 223, 285, 287, Parker, Dorothy 120
290, 300 Parliamentary Recruiting Committee 29,
nationalism 217, 254–6, 258–65, 320; see 34
also patriotism Parsons, Tony 9
Neagle, Anna 142–3 patriotism 17, 121, 205, 213, 272, 286–7,
newspapers 314; see also nationalism
Daily Chronicle 29 Pearl Harbor 9, 120–1, 123, 142
Daily Mail 28, 30–1, 221 Pearson, Gerald 212–13, 219
Evening Post 212 Pechstein, Max 64, 71
Manchester Guardian 28 People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs
Morning Post 28–32 (NKVD) 163, 177
New York Times 57, 118, 124, 144, 318 ‘people’s war’ (Britain) 8, 119, 137
Pravda 168, 171, 172 periodicals
The Times 21, 24–33, 108, 222–3 Britain To-day 231, 237
see also journalism; periodicals; Documentary News Letter 103, 107, 109,
photojournalism; press; war reporters 119–20
348

348 Index

Journal of the American Medical and state control 94, 186

Association (JAMA) 204 studies 3, 5, 15, 59, 79, 94, 96, 187–8,
LIFE Magazine 188, 194–6, 198–205 272, 308
see also newspapers success of 7–8
Pétain, Philippe 45–6 and technology 311
photography 188, 195–200 Propaganda Ministry (Germany), see Reich
editing of 199, 201–2 Ministry of Propaganda and Public
photojournalism 195, 198, 200–1 Enlightenment
Picasso, Pablo 67, 72 psychology 6, 109, 166, 186–7, 274, 276,
Portrait of a Woman with Two Noses 72 312; see also mental health
Two Harlequins 67 ‘psyops’ 312
Pirie, Ian 149–59 public relations 57, 205, 308, 312
Pitt, William (the Younger) 26–7 in the military 193
Poincaré, Raymond 48–9, 51 Putin, Vladimir 1, 96, 164
Poland 163, 229–247
government-in-exile 144, 163, 165–7, Raczyński, Edward 167, 177
169, 174, 231–2 radio 95, 99–100, 140–2, 158, 171, 186–7,
post-war condition of 229–32 235–7, 271–5, 312–13
relations with Britain 173, 178, 229–47 Radio Berlin 168
relations with the Soviet Union 169, Radio Free Europe (RFE) 270, 275
171–4, 242, 246 Ragen, Joseph 193–4
Political Warfare Executive (PWE) 171 Ramsay Macdonald, James 48
Ponsonby, Arthur 1, 4, 16, 272 recruitment (armed forces) 27, 29, 32,
Posse, Hans 67 220–2, 285–300
postcards 153–4 Red Cross, see International Red Cross
posters 17, 34, 63, 95, 158–9, 286–7, 290, rehabilitation (medical) 209, 212, 215–19,
293, 298–300 222–4
post-truth 1, 96, 311, 318–22; see also fake Reich Chamber of Culture 61–2
news Reich Ministry of Propaganda and Public
post-war restitution 59, 66, 71–2, 78, 80 Enlightenment 59, 61, 63–8
Powell, Michael 125, 128 reparations 48–9
press Repington, Charles à Court 26–7
in Britain 21–6 Riddell, George 23–4
see also journalism; newspapers; Riefenstahl, Leni 106–7, 305
photojournalism; war reporters Roberts, Frank 165–72, 174–5, 178
Press Bureau 22, 28–9, 31–3 Rockefeller Foundation 272–3
Press Committee, see Press Bureau Romania 152, 241–2, 244–5, 270, 308
Press Office, see Press Bureau Room 40 (codebreaking) 140
Pressburger, Emeric 125, 128 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 118, 144, 170,
Production Code Administration (PCA) 172–4, 195
121–2 Rosenberg, Alfred 63
Propaganda Rotha, Paul 119–20, 212
and art 60 Routier, Monsieur 152–4, 157
black 4 Royal Air Force (RAF) 126, 139, 142, 147,
continuing relevance of 308 155, 157, 213–14, 292–6, 298
cultural 5–6, 94–6, 187–8, 229–30, 246 Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) 290,
definitions of 4–6, 10, 17, 229 298
ethics of 5, 308, 318 Royal Marines 288–90, 296, 300
in peacetime 209–10 Royal Navy 22, 235, 289–93, 295, 297, 300
 349

Index 349

Royal Signals 293–4 submarines 291–2

rumour 4, 71–2, 141, 153, 155–6, 167–9, Summerfield, John 101
269, 273–80, 319, 321 Sun Yatsen 254
Russia 1, 3, 270, 280, 316; see also Soviet Supreme Headquarters Allied
Union Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) 128–30
Russo-Japanese War 22 Swansea 99–100, 110
Swinton, Ernest 34
Salisbury 3 Switzerland 146
Sargent, Orme 165, 173–4 art trade in 57, 66–7, 75–6, 79–80
Sassoon, Siegfried 96 Syria 3, 315
Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl 64, 67, 71
Schönhausen Palace 66–7, 70–1 television 123, 270, 279, 312–13, 315; see
Schweitzer, Hans 63, 83 also British Broadcasting Corporation;
Second Gulf War, see Iraq War Canadian Broadcasting Corporation;
Section D (MI6) 149–51, 159 Love, Hate and Propaganda
Serbian Peasant Party 153 ‘Ten Year Rule’ (disarmament) 48
Servatius, Robert 200, 203–5 terrorism 280, 306–7, 314–16, 321; see also
Sikorski, Władysław 167–9, 172 7/7; 9/11; ‘war on terror’
Skripal, Sergei 3 Thomas, Dylan 99–110
Smith, Frederick Edwin (F.E.) 28, 31–3 18 Poems 99
social media 3, 79, 185, 316–22 Balloon Site 568 101, 103
Société Radio-Canada, see Canadian The Battle for Freedom 106
Broadcasting Corporation CEMA 103–4
Sorenson, Thomas 185 A City Reborn 109
South African War, see Anglo-Boer War Life and the Modern Poet 99
Soviet Union The Map of Love 99
in the Cold War 275–9 New Towns for Old 102–3
relations with Britain 22, 104, 163–78 Our Country 108
relations with Germany 163 Return Journey 100
relations with Poland 163–78, 230–3, A Soldier Comes Home 109
242, 244, 246–7 These Are the Men 106–7
relations with the USA 275–9 Twenty-Five Poems 99
in the Second World War 8, 163–78, 315 The Unconquerable People 107–8
see also Russia Under Milk Wood 99–100
Spanish Civil War 139 Wales – Green Mountain, Black
Spears, Edward 41–2, 53 Mountain 105
Special Operations Executive (SOE) Young Farmers 104–5
149–59 Thomson, George Pirie 93
Speer, Albert 63, 67 Tito, Josip Broz 138
Spiers, Edward, see Spears, Edward To the Heroes of Corfu (1869 poem) 152–3
sport 287–9, 291–2, 297, 299–300 total war 15, 312
Stalin, Josef 163, 165, 167–8, 171–6, 231, totalitarianism 121, 187, 269, 273–5,
242 303–4, 321
Stateville penitentiary 192–8, 203–4 trauma, see mental health
Steinbeck, John 123–4 travel 289
The Moon is Down 124 Treaty of Locarno 39
Strand Films 101–3, 109, 110 Truffaut, Francois 122–3, 126
Strang, William 165, 172, 175 Truman, Harry 186
Stuttgart 16 Trump, Donald 1, 280, 318, 320
350

350 Index

Twentieth Century-Fox 123 War Propaganda Bureau, see Wellington

Twitter, see social media House
war crimes 29–31, 163, 175–8, 203; see also
United Nations 106, 139, 166, 170, 261 Nuremberg trials
UN Charter 314 ‘war on terror’ 279–81, 306–7, 312–14, 316
United States Information Agency (USIA) war reporters 21–2, 28, 33, 315; see also
185, 269, 277–9 journalism
United States of America (USA) war trauma, see mental health
in the Cold War 275–9 Washington Conference Principles on
in the First World War 118 Nazi-Confiscated Art 76
internationalism of 195 Watt, Harry 9
isolationism of 118 weapons of mass destruction 185–6, 314
relations with Britain 118, 131, Wellington House 23
271, 273 Weltkriegsbücherei 16
relations with Germany 121 Weygand, Maxime 46, 53
relations with the Soviet Union 275–9 whispering campaigns 153, 155–7
in the Second World War 6, 8, 94–5, Wilder, Billy 131
120–5, 191–2, 273–5, 315 Wolfowitz, Paul 9
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) 103,
van Dyck, Anthony 69 147
van Gogh, Vincent 67 Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) 298
Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC)
67 298–9
veterans 210, 212, 215–16, 218, 222, 224; Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) 299
see also disability World Wide Pictures 212–13, 216
Viertel, Berthold 120 Wybrałem Polskę, see Bidwell, George
Viertel, Peter 120 Chandos
Vietnam War 271, 277–8, 312–13
Volksgemeinschaft 7 Yugoslavia 138, 151–3, 158, 230, 241
volunteers 21–2, 26–7, 29, 31–2, 192–4,
222 Zanuck, Darryl F. 145
Voss, Hermann 67–70 Ziegler, Adolf 61, 63, 81
Zuckerman, Solly 130
Wales 101, 105, 108, 110, 140 Zweite, Armin 75