History B Unit 3: Historical Enquiry Question 2 - Example Of Propaganda

"Propaganda means spreading ideas and opinions. Some of these opinions may be true; others may be false. The aim is the same - to get people to believe them. Every government does it in wartime. It gets people to think what it wants them to think."

JF Aylett, The Home Front (1988),

                                                        A school textbook for Key Stage 3 pupils.

Propaganda is a sort of advertising. In wartime, governments use propaganda to persuade people to support the war. Their propaganda is 'national advertising'.

Fiona Reynoldson, Propaganda (1991),

                                                                 A library book for younger children.

As soon as the war began, the British government formed the Ministry of Information to regulate all the news and propaganda. At its peak, 3000 people worked for the MoI.

At first, it was not very successful. It recruited authors to write leaflets, but some of them were not very good at it. Agatha Christie refused to do it because she felt she could only write what she believed. Loudspeaker vans did not get the message across to enough people. Leaflets dropped into Germany were full of grammatical and spelling errors.

-One early poster - to join the ATS - had to be withdrawn because the drawing of the woman was thought to be too ****.  

-Another early poster - 'Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution ... will bring us victory' - just annoyed people because it seemed like 'them' and 'us'; people asked, why should they work so the British government could win the war?  

As the war went on, however, the MoI improved. A huge opinion survey - called Mass Observation - kept track of people's opinions and feelings, and the MoI learned how to influence people properly.

One technique - was to tell people bad news as well as good. People believed what they heard when it was not all good, and the MoI found that people could cope with setbacks.

The government also used a number of different methods to control people's thoughts and feelings:

1.   Censorship: stopping certain types of information.  

•   Certain pieces of news were not broadcast because the MoI thought they would damage morale (e.g. the government covered up reports of ships sunk by Japanese kamikaze pilots).

•   Certain photos were banned (e.g. those showing dead children, and one of a bomb which had broken through into an Underground station).

•   The Communist newspaper The Daily Worker was banned in 1941 because it opposed the war.

•   Soldiers' letters were censored to delete all mention of times and places.

•   Early in the war, the MoI kept the invention…