In the Second World War, the home fronts of many countries became as important as the battle fronts. As governments tried to win and hold the trust of domestic and international audiences, communication became central to their efforts. This volume offers cutting-edge research by leading and emerging scholars on how information was used, distributed and received during the war. With a transnational approach encompassing Germany, Iberia, the Arab world and India, it demonstrates that the Second World War was as much a war of ideas and influence as one of machines and battles.
Simon Eliot, Marc Wiggam and the contributors address the main communication problems faced by Allied governments, including how to balance the free exchange of information with the demands of national security and wartime alliances, how to frame war aims differently for belligerent, neutral and imperial audiences and how to represent effectively a variety of communities in wartime propaganda. In doing so, they reveal the contested and transnational character of the ways in which information was conveyed during the Second World War.
Allied Communication during the Second World War offers innovative and nuanced perspectives on the thin border between information and propaganda during this global war and will be vital reading for World War II and media historians alike.
Author(s): Simon Eliot; Marc Wiggam
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: xii+236
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Foreword
Communications and Propaganda and the Second World War
The home front
Notes
Abbreviations
Introduction
Notes
Chapter 1: The Ministry of Information on the British Home Front
Prewar planning
Unresolved questions
“Go to it”?
Efficiency over power
The Campaigns Division
Legacies
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 2: Lend to Defend: The National Savings Committee During the Second World War
Themed weeks
Competition
Notes
Chapter 3: A Citizen-soldier “Must Know What He Fights For and Love What He Knows”: The Work of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs between 1941 and 1945
Teaching the troops
Theater of war
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 4: Britain To-day, Bulletins from Britain, and Britain: Some Semi-official British Periodicals in the United States During the Second World War
Competing periodicals?
A new approach
Notes
Chapter 5: Teamwork: Carlton Moss, US Propaganda Film, and the Fight for Black Visibility in the Second World War
The Negro Soldier and African American Memory
Teamwork: Imagining Double Victory
Forgetting Teamwork: Double Victory Denied
Notes
Chapter 6: Allied War Correspondents’ Resistance to Political Censorship in the Second World War
North Africa
The German surrender story
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 7: “The Rot Must Be Stopped Even at the Cost of Some Public Discussion”: Anti-Semitism in the Polish Forces as a Crisis of Policy and Public Information
Anti-Semitism and the soldiers
Poland
The UK
The activists
The Jewish community
Denouement
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 8: “For a German Audience We Do Not Use Appeals for Sympathy on Behalf of Jews as a Propaganda Line”: The BBC German Service and the Holocaust, 1938–1945
The BBC German Service in British foreign policy and war on Germany
From Kristallnacht to the outbreak of war, November 1938–August 1939
From the outbreak of war to the German attack on the Soviet Union, September 1939–June 1941
From the war against the Soviet Union to the defeat of Germany, June 1941–May 1945
Notes
Chapter 9: Inventing a New Kind of German: The BBC German Service and the Bombing War
The voice of Britain
Imagined audiences
Telling the truth about bombing
Notes
Chapter 10: Diverging Neutrality in Iberia: The British Ministry of Information in Spain and Portugal During the Second World War
Notes
Chapter 11: “Innocent Efforts”: The Brotherhood of Freedom in the Middle East During the Second World War
The Brotherhood’s origins, 1940–41
The Brotherhood expands, 1941–43
From oral propaganda to “Education for Citizenship,” 1943–45
The Brotherhood after the war
Notes
Chapter 12: “The Meek Ass between Two Burdens?”
Introduction
The BBC in India
Insights into BBC war programming
Imperial soft power and the BBC
Impact of BBC India programming
Conclusion
Notes
Contributors
Index
