Another audience were the neutrals; countries not participating in the war. The idea of using propaganda for them was to influence them into joining the Allies in order to have a stronger army against the Germans. Like the people of Britain, propaganda was used to stir up what they felt towards the enemy into a negative perspective. The centre headed by Gilbert Parker had an aim to persuade the USA to join the Allies. They went about this by sending pamphlets, books, and leaflets to the editors of local newspapers of the USA. British propagandists used the fact that 128 Americans were drowned after the German U-boat torpedoed the Lusitanian in 1915 to prepare the Americans’ opinions for war.
The most important audience was the people of Britain which was organised by the Ministry of the Interior. The people of Britain were told where to work, what to eat, and what to do in their free time and more importantly, what to think. Censorship was used also to prevent the people from viewing information which can be seen as a negative part to the war which could possibly alter what they thought about and felt towards the war. There were also other important aims, including wanting to unite the Nation and support a just cause. Since Lord Kitchener predicted that the war was going to be a long fight, as many men as possible was going to be needed so propaganda was also used to recruit men, and also to recruit others for war industry to help create weapons for the soldiers.
As the war went on there were food shortages, so the people of Britain were advised to conserve their food and fuel supplies and also to increase the production of food. The behaviour of the people of Britain was also to be regulated, there were campaigns against alcohol abuse and sexual indulgence and any form of activity considered to have a negative effect on the war effort. There was also a use of church support; people were told that God was on their side.
Censorship was not the only form of control by the government. There were many advertising and poster campaigns undertaken by the Ministry of the Interior. These posters were designed to do four things: To raise morale and keep it high; to inflame the nation against the enemy; to make people act in certain ways; to encourage overseas allies to support Britain’s war effort and persuade enemies to end the war.
A common aim of propaganda was to stir up the emotions of the Britons. Posters including images of German soldiers supposedly doing wicked things such as torturing the innocent, who could easily be the person looking at the poster. This would make the viewer feel hatred towards the enemy, making them get the impression that there is a good reason for fighting this war. Other emotions were also played on with the propaganda used. The Ministry of the Interior realised that if people believe they are fighting for a good cause, and if they think they will win, they will work harder. Posters showing Britain working happily as a nation to defeat the enemy were made because it kept the morale high.
A poster which showed British streets compared to Belgium streets was used to make people feel sympathetic as streets of Belgium were destroyed during the war, making them an unsafe place to live in. This poster, like many others, made people feel hatred towards the enemy and also guilt, as the Britons were living in safe places, where children were free to play outside. They would also feel guilty because our soldiers were out there; fighting off the enemy, preventing our streets from being destroyed and those who see the poster weren’t doing anything to help support the army and the war. The main emotion played on by this poster would be gratitude. The government wanted people to support the war so they made the soldiers look like heroes as they protected us and our streets, preventing them from being destroyed like in Belgium. This poster was designed to get eligible men to join the army, so they can return the favour and help protect.
Guilt is also caused by the fact that people have dies for your life and safety, but you are doing nothing to save others. Pictures of triumphant British soldiers marching over conquered land would make the patriotic sign up to the army as they would think that there efforts can help the victories happen too. There were posters showing soldiers fighting, they are used to portray them as heroes, so men who had not enlisted would have as they would want to be looked at as a hero by their friends and family.
Another poster created by the Ministry of Interior was used to affect other emotions of the Britons. It showed a German woman wasting water which was needed by a wounded British soldier. This was aimed at women because help on the medical side was needed. This would persuade the woman to contribute to the army because they would pity the nurse, and it would also make them feel pride, as they would know that no British woman would do such an awful thing.
The feelings of escapism and reassurance were used too as they made people think that by fighting they could realise their dreams as a famous war hero like all of the ones shown all around them, or comfort you that you will not die on the front. Reassurance would also come in the form of humour, which degraded the enemy, therefore making them smaller and apparently easier to beat. Cartoons and films mocked the enemy by building on publicly recognized caricatures and stereotypes of the enemy.
To prevent the people of Britain from getting a negative view about the war, the government decided to control all of the news, only showing news which would not affect the way people would think about the war into a negative way. This was called censorship. The idea was to only show news which would make the war seem easy for the Allies. During the first few months on the Western Front the British battleship HMS Audacious was sunk, and the people of Britain were never told about this. Instead of these disastrous stories, news about great victories and heroic efforts were shown.
The people of Britain were not allowed to see what was really going on in the war; everything which would allow them to know was censored. Letters and postcards sent to and from soldiers in the front were heavily censored. The government did not want to dispirit the soldiers on the front line or people back at home. Most of the letters were censored by the soldiers themselves, as they did not want to worry their relatives back home so they decided to not include all information about the Front. The government used censorship as propaganda, because they thought that if people had access to all of the information, like casualty statistics for instance, people would choose not to support the war. They wanted to keep morale high, which is why they censored the information about how terrible the war was in postcards from the frontline.
The Ministry of the Interior also wanted to convince people that they were fighting for a good cause, and to do this they set about inflaming the public against the enemy. To stir up this public hatred the government showed atrocities which were supposedly ‘carried out’ by the enemy. Hostile rumours were also created about the enemy too, one example is that newspapers reported that the Kaiser had described the British army as a “contemptible little army,” when this was really created by the British government as a way of using humour and patriotism to raise morale while British troops were making their way through France.
A leaflet spreading rumours of revolting news was produced by the British Ministry of Information. It was said that there was a ‘corpse-conversion factory’ close behind German lines. It was reported that this factory was used to turn dead bodies into fat and oils to make candles and boot polish. There was no doubt to the existence of this factory, it even quoted from a German newspaper, though the quotation was out of context (it actually referred to the conversion of horse and other animal remains).
It was in 1915 when the government decided to take control of the newspapers. As the war progressed, independent newspapers decided to distribute news which was more balanced, sometimes even anti-war articles, but the government intervened and closed these papers down. Two years into the war the government eventually allowed individual reporters to go to the Front, but only good news was allowed to be focused on and only. These reports that were made by the reporters were all positive reports because the government would not allow any off-putting news. Photographs were also censored; taking pictures of dead soldiers was banned, as it could show the war in a pessimistic way.
The government was being cautious about making sure the enemy did not see any of their sensitive information. Even magazines for railway enthusiasts were in trouble as the censors believed them to be revealing too much about Britain’s infrastructure. Over 360,000 articles, photographs, and private telegrams were inspected by the government press bureau and Intelligence. Since there had never been a war which included trench warfare and so many deaths had taken place before, so the people of Briton who weren’t involved in the war could not begin to even imagine how many people were dying and how awful the trenches really were. If they were all told the truth then it would come as a shock to them and they would want to stop the war, turning against the whole idea of it.
Before 1916, when war-weariness had begun to set in, it could be said that the governments control on information and propaganda campaigns were not necessary, such was the British passion for the war. The private sector produced masses of effective propaganda of its own accord. Leading authors, such as HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Hardy, all signed a Declaration by Authors in support of the war. Many of them, at no cost to the government, produced patriotic publications. The history department at Oxford University produced a five volume-explanation of why Britain was justified in going to war, also known as the red book because of it cover. This ‘red book’ sold 50,000 copies.
The film industry followed the same suit, so there was no need for the government to create propaganda films, British film makers made them themselves. Film makers produced two hundred and forty films between the years 1915 and 1918, with very view being commissioned by the war department. In film and cinema the propagandists had a whole new way of manipulating the opposition. Propaganda in films was used in two ways: two mock and ridicule the enemy and to show the truth of war.
The cinema division of the Department Of Information had made short length cartoons such as the ‘Bully Boy’ to mock the Kaiser as early as 1914. However, the majority of the films made about the war were trying to show the reality of the trenches and battles. The British Topical Committee for War Films was a group of film companies who joined together to make and sell films to the war department. It was said that an audience of 9 million people had viewed the film ‘For the Empire’ by the end of 1916. The committee made some of the most famous films of the war including ‘The Battle of Somme’, which was said to be a successful propaganda film. It included real scenes from the actual battle, including real casualties and it also included scenes which weren’t real but the audience was not told which of the scenes were which. It also showed the people that there was no glamour to war, but that it was a gritty, terrible thing.
This film was very successful as the people of Britain were talking about it, as it was their first chance to see what the conditions were really like in the war, hoping to get closer to the truth. Some anti-war campaigners approved of the film because it showed the horrors more truly than any previous film, but some people were shocked at the realism.
Even children had propaganda forced upon them. Toys, books and comics were made to encourage patriotism and the Germans were depicted as the weak, cowardly and treacherous enemy. The English soldiers were shown to be brave, modest and successful. These products sold well as many editions of them were released even into the 1930s. A magazine called ‘The Boy’s Own’ published a patriotic issue in October 1915, which contains an article about British boy’s work in wartime. This, and other mediums like it aimed at boys, can be seen as effective as many boys chose to disguise their age and sign themselves up to fight.
The public were given a clear message of what to do through the huge amounts of propaganda used. Propaganda did seem very important, as it prevented negative attitudes towards the war from the Britons. Without it weariness could have set in much earlier and the war effort would not have gone as far as it actually did. There could have been major differences in the whole war if there was no propaganda, differences which could have easily affected the Allies, such as the joining of America, the support of all of the people back home and also the amount of volunteers which might not have enlisted.
Overall I think propaganda was indeed very important, especially because of the reasons listed above. It kept the minds of the Britons focused on the war effort and rallied them and allies abroad to our cause. Without propaganda the world today might have been different than it is, because without it we could have lost the war.