3) In what ways did the British government attempt to hide the effects of the Blitz from the people of Britain?
Information, communication and propaganda are well established, effective and important instruments to boost morale, manipulate opinion and help in war efforts.
The Blitz was aimed at manipulating victory for the Germans by breaking morale of the British people through mass destruction. The British government had to use various different methods to hide the effects of the Blitz from the people of Britain to defeat the very design of the Germans. Further, the government required to monitor the press to prevent negative news and anything that might help the enemy from being published or broadcast. For instance, early in the war, Britain kept the invention of radar secret, it said that RAF pilots had been eating carrots and could see in the dark.
Monitoring and control of the press is called censorship. Therefore, press censorship becomes inevitable during war. The Ministry of information was made responsible for censorship and government propaganda. The government censored all the information that was to reach the public via mass media. Information that would bring down the morale of the people was never published. Numerous photographs and stories weren’t published during the Blitz. The Treachery Act that was set up in 1940 gave the government the right to now imprison anyone whose actions were a threat to the morale of the people of Britain, because a demoralized population would be likely to surrender. Photographs that showed large numbers of casualties and a lot of destruction weren’t allowed to be published such as a photograph taken of a school playground in Catford, London was withheld because it showed dead children and one of a bomb which had broken through into an Underground station. If people saw a photograph of dead children they would naturally feel awful about what was happening and they would come to think about how innocent children had to pay with their lives and this would be a blow to the morale. Looting became very common in the towns and cities during the war as many people had left their homes, the government made sure to hide pictures of looting. The levels of panic and hysteria amongst the people started rising alarmingly and this would be a negative image to show to the public and therefore this too was censored. The report on the bombings in Coventry where four thousand people were killed in an air raid lasting for ten hours on the 14th of November 1940 was never shown to the public. After each bombing the ARP Wardens carried out a quick clean up service where they immediately cleared up all the bodies strewn across with parts of their bodies blown out, which would be a horrific sight for anyone to see. Images or articles of dead air-raid victims, wounded soldiers or houses destroyed by bombs were strictly censored. 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, the government also checked films, photographs and documents to make sure that no such information was published that the enemy might have found useful.
