1939 Emergency Powers Act
On 3rd September, 1939, the House of Commons passed the Emergency Powers Act. This enabled the British government to virtually do what it liked with the freedom and property of any citizen simply by issuing the appropriate regulation without reference to Parliament. Censorship was imposed on overseas mail, and telephone trunk lines, though the public did not know this, were tapped. By October, a National Register of all citizens had been completed. Everyone received a buff-coloured identity card with a personal number of six or seven digits. (1)
A few days after the passing of the Emergency Powers Act, a secret internal government was circulated. The unnamed official stated: "The people must feel that they are being told the truth. Distrust breeds fear much more than knowledge of reverses. The all-important thing for publicity to achieve is the conviction that the worst is known… the people should be told that this is a civilians' war, or a People's War, and therefore they are to be taken into the government's confidence as never before…. What is truth? We must adopt a pragmatic definition. It is what it is believed to be the truth. The government would be wise therefore to tell the truth and, if a sufficient emergency arises, to tell one big, thumping lie that will then be believed." (2)
1939 Emergency Powers Act
Two days before the outbreak of war, the government established the Ministry of Information. The plans for the ministry had been drawn up by Rex Leeper, the head of the Foreign Office news department. Under this scheme the ministry would be responsible for distributing all information concerning the prosecution of the war and for propaganda at home and abroad. (3) John C. Davidson, the chairman of the Conservative Party, described the plans for wartime propaganda machinery as something "of which any totalitarian state would be proud". (4)
Only a week into the war the new ministry was made to look ridiculous when news leaked through the Paris media that a British Expeditionary Force was on French soil. At first the War Office confirmed the news to journalists. Then it changed its mind and called in the police to confiscate the first editions of the newspapers. This included raiding newspaper offices and stopping trains and pulling over cars driving out of London to stop newspapers reaching the public. When Francis Williams, editor of the Daily Herald, pointed out to the Ministry of Information, that the presence of British troops had been broadcast several times by French radio, and that its censorship policy was not working, its spokesman replied: "The newspapers might have published more details. You can't expect us to not to trust the newspapers." (5)
In the first four weeks of the war the staff of the Ministry of Information, grew from 12 to 999, of which only 43 were journalists. Newspapers complained about this attempt at censorship. The Daily Express said that soon Britain would need leaflet raids on itself to tell its own people how the war was going. Magor-General John Hay Beith, the War Office's director of public relations, took the unusual step of writing to The Times to explain why this policy had been developed and pointed out that the Germans were being so successful on the propaganda front. However, Beith promised improvements. "A large body of correspondents, including a fully representative American contingent... are now with the forces in France." (6)
Dunkirk
A group of fifteen British and nine American journalists were allowed to travel with British troops to Europe. They were looked after by a group of Old Etonian, military officers, who were often drunk. This included the large landowner, Charles Tremayne, who was known to drink neat gin for breakfast and consumed three bottles of it every day. O. D. Gallagher, who worked for The Daily Mail later told Phillip Knightley: "The conducting officers were such astounding caricatures of British army regular officers and upper classes as to be scarcely credible. They were either drunk half the time or half drunk all the time." (7)
Just over 338,200 troops (of whom 150,200 were French) were brought out through Dunkirk, mainly between 26th May and 4th June, and crossed the Channel to Britain in naval ships and in a flotilla of small craft assembled for the occasion. The total casualties of the British Army in France was 68,111. In all, 338,226 men were brought to England from Dunkirk, of whom 139,097 were members of the French Army. Left behind in France were 2,472 guns, 20,000 motorcycles, and almost 65,000 other vehicles. Almost all of the 445 British tanks that had been sent to France with the BEF were abandoned. Six destroyers had been sunk and nineteen damaged. The RAF had also lost 474 aircraft. (8)
General William Ironside, chief of the Imperial General Staff, told Anthony Eden, "This is the end of the British Empire." Churchill appealed to the newspapers not to present it as a major defeat. The Daily Mirror described the operation as "Bloody Marvellous" and the Sunday Dispatch suggested that divine intervention had been responsible. It pointed out that Dunkirk had followed a nation-wide service of prayer and that during the evacuation "the English Channel, that notoriously rough stretch of water which has brought distress to so many holiday-makers in happier times, became as calm and smooth as a pond... and while the smooth sea was aiding our ships, a fog was shielding our troops from devastating attack by the enemy's air strength." (9)
The New York Times went along with this message: "So long as the English tongue survives, the word Dunkirk will be spoken with reverence. For in that harbour, in such a hell as never blazed on earth before, at the end of a last battle, the rags and blemishes that have hidden the soul of democracy fell away. There, beaten but unconquered, in shining splendor, she faced the enemy." (10)
Edward Murrow, of CBS, the radio station, was the only dissenting voice when he claimed that "there is a tendency to call the withdrawal a victory." (11) However, this was something only available to an American audience. Phillip Knightley, the author of The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker (1982), has pointed out that "it was not until the late 1950s and early 1960's - nearly twenty years after the event - that a fuller, truer picture of Dunkirk began to emerge." (12)
Ministry of Information
Soon after Winston Churchill became prime minister he appointed Lord Beaverbrook, the press baron, as Minister of Air Production. However, his other role was to control what the press had to say about the government. Some of Churchill's ministers, including Clement Attlee, who loathed Beaverbrook with a "rare intensity for such a calm man". However, it was an inspired choice and as Lieutenant General Ian Jacob pointed out: "Beaverbrook as minister of aircraft production is still Beaverbrook the press king." (13)
Duff Cooper became the new Minister of Information. Cooper had been one of the main figures in the downfall of Neville Chamberlain when he resigned from the government over appeasement. Churchill took a keen interest in what the newspapers said about him and Robert Barrington-Ward, the editor of The Times described him as having the press "rather on the brain". (14) Churchill would often get very upset with what appeared about him but was less interested in other issues. Cooper was upset by Churchill's lack of support and Michael Balfour, who worked in the Ministry of Information, quoted him as saying: "When I appealed for support from the PM, I seldom got it. He was not interested in the subject. He knew that propaganda was not going to win the war." (15)
People soon became aware that the government was keeping information from them. The Nazi government took advantage of this situation and William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw) provided an alternative news source on the war. Joyce's broadcasts came from studios in Berlin and relayed over a network of German-controlled radio stations that included Hamburg, Bremen, Luxembourg, Hilversum, Calais, Oslo, and Zeesen. The German Büro Concordia organisation, which ran several black propaganda stations, many of which pretended to broadcast illegally from within Britain. At the height of his influence, in 1940, Joyce had an estimated six million regular and 18 million occasional listeners in the United Kingdom. (16)
These broadcasts encouraged the spreading of rumours that undermined the war effort. Early in the war a schoolmaster was jailed for advancing "defeatist" theories to his pupils. Attempts were made to stop the spreading of stories that would damage the war effort.. An Emergency Regulation in June 1940, made it an offence to circulate "any report or statement" about the war which was "likely to cause alarm or despondency". Fines up to fifty pounds could be imposed if you were found guilty of the offence. (17)
The government was highly successful in providing false information on the Battle of Britain: As A. J. P. Taylor, the author of English History: 1914-1945 (1965) pointed out that the pilots helped them in this: "Pilots on both sides naturally exaggerated their claims in the heat of combat. The British claimed to have destroyed 2,698 German aeroplanes during the battle of Britain and actually destroyed 1,733. The RAF lost 915 aeroplanes. Fighter command had 656 aeroplanes on 10 July, and 655 on 25 September." (18)
Primary Sources
(1) W. J. West, Truth Betrayed (1987)
On 26 April 1939, Chamberlain announced that he was introducing conscription. In doing so he scrapped a policy, first enunciated by Baldwin in 1936, that Britain would never introduce conscription in peace time and repeated by Chamberlain himself not four weeks before… In this highly charged situation the world was startled by an announcement that the Duke of Windsor had decided to break the silence he had imposed on himself since his abdicated, in May 1936, and broadcast to the world an appeal for world peace. Over 400,000,000 people heard the broadcast, but it has remained almost entirely unknown in Britain since it was banned by the BBC.
(2) Secret internal government memo entitled The Preservation of Civilian Morale (September, 1939)
The people must feel that they are being told the truth. Distrust breeds fear much more than knowledge of reverses. The all-important thing for publicity to achieve is the conviction that the worst is known… the people should be told that this is a civilians' war, or a People's War, and therefore they are to be taken into the government's confidence as never before…. What is truth? We must adopt a pragmatic definition. It is what it is believed to be the truth. The government would be wise therefore to tell the truth and, if a sufficient emergency arises, to tell one big, thumping lie that will then be believed.
(3) Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker (1982)
The 1939 Emergency Powers (Defence) Act authorized the government to do virtually what it liked to prosecute the war, without reference to Parliament. Every press, commercial, or private message leaving Britain, whether by mail, cable, wireless, or telephone, was censored. Everyone, including newspaper editors, was prohibited from "obtaining, recording, communicating to any other person or publishing information which might be useful to the enemy". The Ministry of Information was brought into being two days before the war and grew in four weeks from a staff of twelve to a notorious 999.
(4) Lance Price, Where Power Lies: Prime Ministers v the Media (2010)
Without exception war provokes tension between journalists and the government no matter how united the country might be in opposing the enemy. Ministers believe they have a right to impose their views and tend to interpret media criticism as something akin to treason. New structures for disseminating information are established, almost invariably involving the military, and any hesitation about using the law to keep the media in line quickly evaporates. So it was in 1939. Even the ultra-loyal J. C. C. Davidson would be moved to describe the plans for the wartime propaganda machinery as something "of which any totalitarian state would be proud."