Did Britain really 'keep calm and carry on' in WW2?

Uncovering wartime morale and scepticism

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2:00Keep Calm and Carry On has long been held up as the defining spirit of wartime Britain. But was the nation during the Second World War really as united, stoic, and unquestioning, as popular memory suggests? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Stephen Casey takes Isabel King through the often surprising reality of Britain's wartime morale, from challenging official narratives to relying on Nazi broadcasts. Hello, Steve. Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

2:31OK. Now, when most people think of the Second World War in Britain, they may conjure up ideas of the so-called blitz spirit or the keep calm and carry on nature of British identity. But what drew you to write about scepticism instead? It wasn't an intention when I began, actually. I wrote a book about 20 years ago called Selling the Korean War, which looked at all different aspects of the selling of that war. The key element of that was how the battlefield was reported and how censorship and control of the battlefield shaped coverage of that particular war.

3:08Then when I was thinking about the literature on Britain, I knew there's been some excellent work on Churchill's wartime oratory. There's some good books on the Ministry of Information. But I didn't think there was anything that put the whole thing together alongside the military. So that was sort of the working idea. It was really looking at what the government was trying to achieve. And it's much easier to look at what the government is trying to achieve than whether or not it actually has any impact. So as the research began, I started using what was a real treasure trove.

3:41Other historians have used them in the past of public opinion surveys. The late 30s, early 40s was the first time when organisations were beginning to try and ascertain what the public thought. The BBC itself had listener surveys. There was mass observation, which began in 1937, which looked at attitudes in certain parts of the country. And from about 1940 onwards, the government under the Ministry of Information and the Home Intelligence Division of that ministry started collating all this information to try and ascertain what Britons were thinking about.

4:12So I then tried to piece together what the government was hoping to achieve with what actually the public was learning. And the word that kept on coming up was scepticism. And I was actually quite surprised by the level of sort of jaded, almost cynicism about what they were being told. And you mentioned the Blitz. The Blitz was one of the first examples. What the government found when German planes first started to appear in 1940 is that their system for triggering the air raids was putting too much of the country under air raid warnings.

4:43And so people were leaving work, for instance, and going to shelters and British production was beginning to lag. So what it then started to do, the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, came out actually and said that workers should try to ignore the air raid sirens unless there was very specific evidence that German planes were in the vicinity. And that sparked a good deal of cynicism. There was a sort of sense here that a Tory minister was trying to prioritise productivity over safety. And so that sort of traditional working class labour sentiment was quite sceptical and jaded of this.

5:19And it became a bit of a running sore. So this was just one of many examples of what I found was a pervasive scepticism unfolding throughout the war. It is quite surprising. I think most people won't think about people being sceptical about the war. They just think of the kind of determination aspect of it. So it's really interesting that it cropped up so much. Now, we'll get more into the propaganda initiatives that played out in wartime Britain soon.

The pre-war media landscape and Chamberlain

5:46But before we do, I just wondered if you could give us an idea of what the media landscape looked like at the time. How connected were ordinary Britons to global news and events before the war? There had been quite a transformation since the last war. And the obvious two elements had been the BBC and the fact that there is now a national broadcaster. For the first time, politicians and propagandists can reach a national audience. There's also an enormously vibrant both national and local press. And alongside that, the newsreels also are providing people who go to the cinema.

6:20People were still going to the cinema a lot, even in the middle of the air raids in 1940 and 41. There was always short films with news. So there is a lot of news out there. The extent to which I think Britons were really connected with what was going on, even in Europe, I think is doubtful before September 1938. I think a lot of people were simply ignoring and preoccupied with other day-to-day issues earlier in the 1930s. George Orwell is writing or doing his research for Road to Wigan Pier in March 1936.

6:51And he's up in Yorkshire researching that book when Hitler remilitarises the Rhineland, which is often seen in retrospect as a sort of first major event on the path to war. And what Orwell finds is that most people, virtually everyone, was talking about the football balls. What was their bet going to be? What football teams were they going to sort of support that week? And not a single person was mentioning in a pub Hitler, the Rhineland or any of these things. That demonstrably changes in September 1938. And Chamberlain, I think, is crucial in this. Chamberlain's whole version of appeasement is very much personal.

7:24He has this confidence that if he can meet and sit down face-to-face with Hitler, he can try and get Hitler to tone down his goals and he can avert war. And what Chamberlain does then in mid-September 1938 is unprecedented. He gets in a plane and he flies to Germany on three separate occasions. And just that very process of we're very used to now, our leaders flying all around the world, this is unusual, unheard of, a sort of face-to-face summit. And it was so unusual, it generates enormous interest. Many newspapers report a doubling of circulation throughout September 1938, as Chamberlain's efforts to try and avert what many thought was going to be the war in September 1938 really do dominate the headlines and dominate the conversation, unlike anything before.

8:09And afterwards then, whatever Hitler does subsequently, of course, inevitably draws in what is the British response going to be. So I think that really is the crucial turning point. And it's why the book starts with that moment in Chamberlain announcing he's going to fly off to Germany to meet with Hitler. Was this also just an attempt to calm public fear of war at home? Or do you think he was just actively trying to avoid the war and he really believed that appeasement would be the way to do that? Yeah, I think there were a number of different opinions.

8:41I think a lot of people simply just want to avoid war. There had been a growing sense as early as 1932 that then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin says famously, the bomber will always get through. There's nothing we can do in Britain to protect, particularly London. London is so exposed. And so the sense that actually in a future world war will not only come with perhaps the trenches, which had created so much bloodshed in the First World War, but also civilians being targeted, especially in London. That had created a real war anxiety, as historians have talked about.

9:12And then the government had, from 1934, 1935 onwards, been trying to prepare air raid precautions, ARP in the acronym of the time, had been a key factor. The RAF had been holding mock exercises of air raids as early as the summer of 1934. So there was a real sort of sense that if any war comes, the civilians is going to be in the firing line. And there was therefore a general desire to avoid that, if possible. I think Chamberlain is different because he genuinely has confidence that he can sit down with Hitler and get him to change his mind.

9:47And partly, I think, because he's put so much personal stake in that policy, it becomes very difficult for him to backtrack. But it clings to that faith much longer than anybody else. And so even people like Lord Halifax, his foreign secretary, are becoming increasingly sceptical. Chamberlain, I think, even in the summer of 1939, is sort of hopeful that war can still be avoided. Which, for my purposes, in terms of selling the war, has, I think, a very important, unintended consequence. Because Chamberlain has really gone to the limits of trying to appease Hitler, and he's failed.

10:20And then Chamberlain acknowledges that failure in his speech announcing war on September 3rd, 1939. He says, everything I've worked for has failed. And he does it in such a downbeat way. No one can really question Chamberlain's efforts for peace, but no one can really make the argument that a negotiation is possible. So it helps to cement this pro-war consensus that encompasses not just the appeasers in the Conservative Party, but many people on the left who had also been pacifists a few short years earlier. There doesn't seem to be any alternative but to actually fight Hitler and eradicate Nazism.

10:55And so from a very early stage, there is this pro-war consensus, which is an unintended consequence of Chamberlain's real clinging to his faith that appeasement can hopefully work.

Military preparations and mass evacuation

11:06Now, you just mentioned there the number of different things that were going on to prepare the country for war, even while Chamberlain was going through his process of appeasement. When the government shifted from appeasement to active preparation for war, how effective were public information efforts at actually readying the country? It's a good point. I think the two things are connected. That's also connected with what I've just talked about. So after Munich, yes, perhaps we still need to try appeasement, but there's a huge and growing pressure both to build up Britain's military,

11:37on the one hand, hopefully to deter Hitler. If Hitler can be convinced that going to war with Britain will be disastrous, perhaps he will backtrack. But if he's not deterred, then at least we have a military that we can effectively use alongside France and perhaps even the Soviet Union to go to war. There's a huge amount of pressure. Chamberlain is reluctant to go the whole hog. His initial response, which is delayed, it's not announced until December 1938 and is not then implemented until early 1939, is voluntary. So a handbook is sent out to 20 million households across the nation,

12:10suggesting that there's various ways in which you might contemplate helping the country at time of war. You might get involved in air raid precautions. You might want to volunteer for the Territorial Army, but it's very much couched as a voluntary initiative, which does help, I think, to generate a growing sense of we're all in this together. We perhaps all need to do our bits. And the figures aren't too bad. After about a month of this propaganda campaign, roughly 400,000 people have volunteered for various services. But particularly in the Territorial Army, the numbers are lagging.

12:43And so in the spring, in April 1939, Chamberlain announces a compulsory measure. And that's sort of seen as a defeat for him. And the pressure for a compulsory measure is coming largely from the Conservative backbenchers, Winston Churchill. But it also sets the tone partly as well for the scepticism, that there's scepticism that Chamberlain is moving fast enough, which actually continues throughout the war. A lot of the pressure on the government is that the government isn't moving fast enough to deal with the Nazi menace.

13:13And there is a sort of growing sense that, yes, sacrifice needs to be made in order to fight and win this war. Now, alongside all this military preparation, one of the most famous moves in Britain's war preparations was, of course, mass evacuation. What was the reality of organising something on that scale? And how was official communication used to manage it? So there's this conjunction between, on the one hand, the local organisation and then the BBC being a big national mouthpiece.

13:43So it was possible and people listened and tuned into the BBC. So announcements were made. They were made, actually, there was a first bout of evacuation at the time of Munich in 1938, which is sort of almost a trial run. And at the time as well, local organisations, most obviously schools, but also the railways. But the schools were brought in. Teachers were then calling parents in to explain what was required of them. And there'd been quite a lot of angst because it was quite unexpected in 1938. A year later, I think there'd been a sort of mental adjustment that this is going to be necessary.

14:15So that when the announcements come around the time of the start of war in 1939, a lot of families are reluctantly prepared to go along. And because the BBC is able to make these announcements, that part of the evacuation process runs relatively smoothly. Parents turning up to schools with their children, teachers taking the children to stations and those railway companies taking the children to somewhere sort of 50 miles or so away. The problem really came more in the reception areas.

14:48There was a real sort of clash of class cultures often. A lot of the kids were from inner cities, inner city London, and they were then interacting for the first time, in many cases, with rural Britain and a very different type of Britain. And so there were real culture clashes and lots of griping. It becomes a bit of a political issue in the early months of the war. And also because the war doesn't actually unfold in Britain until the following spring, there is a bit of a reverse evacuation. That becomes the harder issue for the government to deal with.

15:20They spend quite a lot of time in those last months of 1939 trying to dissuade parents from bringing their kids back home. But they don't entirely succeed so that when the blitz does finally come the following year, there has to be yet another evacuation. But under more hostile, threatening circumstances. And did a lot of people not have any idea where they were being evacuated to in the first instance? Yes. One of the things that becomes controversial in 1940, and again, there's all the scepticism around the start of the blitz.

15:50The government is very keen to continue to publicise where children are going to, to reduce the anxiety of parents. The parents like to know. But by publicising that information, there were plenty of voices who were worried that perhaps the Germans might take that as an excuse to bomb areas and reduce morale and create panic amongst parents. And so actually in Scotland, a prohibition is put on publishing where the children are going to. That never happens in Britain. But it's one of those sort of vexed issues which feeds into the cynicism, but is in large part, I think, driven by the sheer difficulty actually of dealing with a lot of these issues.

16:28When I'm talking about public scepticism, I'm not saying this is emanating from a government that is mendacious. It's emanating from a government that is dealing with a massive high-risk set of policies, an enormously complicated set of policies. And often there isn't any obvious answer. If you do send kids to parts of the country, you announce where they're going, and then the bombers come, there's going to be one almighty political inquest on that. So these are very vexed questions, and they are generating quite a lot of obvious emotion as well.

16:58And that's where some of the scepticism is coming from as well. Yeah, absolutely. It's a very fine line to tread, isn't it? If any listeners would like to know more about the experience of evacuation during the Second World War, have a listen to our 2025 Everything You Wanted to Know episode on evacuees, where Lauren Good spoke to Joshua Levine about the realities of escaping the bombing of British cities.

Shaping the official message

17:21Now, Steve, once the country was at war, who was in charge of shaping the public message? Was it a shared venture, or was it a hardline government role? Yes, it was a shared venture within government. And of course, from May 1940, it's a coalition government. And I think this is also partly by design. What Britain is trying to do throughout the war is obviously contrast itself with the enemy. We are not the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany. We don't have the Goebbels propaganda machinery.

17:53We don't have that level of coercion, which is creating conformity amongst the enemy states. We're muddling through. And it's all a whole idea that we're muddling. And I think there is an element of that. Yes, we have a Ministry of Information, which is established at the outbreak of war, but it's very much a clearinghouse. It doesn't have a huge amount of control over what the army or, say, the Navy do. And, of course, the big beasts in the cabinet, and most obviously Winston Churchill, are the ones who can dominate the debate when they go on the BBC. The first major sort of name of the Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, who becomes Minister with the coalition being formed in May 1940, also does quite good work throughout the time of the fall of France.

18:33So you also get ministers. Ernest Bevin, who becomes Minister of Labour in the coalition government, is enormously important in shaping manpower mobilisation throughout 1941 and 1942. He's often giving speeches, trying to exalt people into certain lines of work. And so there is a sort of informal division of labour. But actually, it is, in some senses, a case of muddling through. And the Ministry of Information in particular, as I mentioned, has very little control over what, particularly, say, the Royal Navy is doing and is often very, very much disappointed and opposed to the Royal Navy's almost complete clampdown on any information,

19:12particularly in the early months of the war, when naval operations are about the only newsworthy event that's out there. Speaking of the Ministry of Information, in your book, you talk about when the Ministry made a notable misstep by issuing and then withdrawing a bulletin about British troops in France quite early on in the war. Was this seen as a one-off teething problem in public communications, or did it set a lasting tone of distrust? In an important sense, it was just a one-off teething problem. This was just a few weeks into the war.

19:42It was relatively small numbers. So when Britain declares war, we have pledged to send our small expeditionary force across to France, as in 1914. And of course, there is an expectation that the war perhaps might unfold, like in 1914, and this army will be in battle quite quickly. And so there is a desperate demand, particularly amongst the press, to try and find out what's going on. The Ministry of Information releases the news, then very quickly after tries to withdraw that release. But newspapers have already been printed. They've already been circulated. The Ministry tries to recall them and then finally realises the cat is out of the bag and so has to proceed.

20:16And so it comes under quite a lot of criticism for that. But I think a couple of things happen. And it's then not for another six or seven months that the war actually does then really break out. And when it does, those first defeats, first of all, in Norway, which helped bring down the Chamberlain government, but then even more so disastrously in France, where Britain's main ally collapses in just six weeks. Those are such big events that they really overshadow everything else. And the early teething problems of this British Expeditionary Force going over and just really sitting inactive for the winter of 3940

20:52get sort of forgotten in those major events that unfold in the spring of 1940.

Newspapers, rumors, and enemy broadcasts

20:58You highlighted a key point there, which is the role of newspapers. Of course, it was one of the key ways in which many people got their news at the time. What were newspapers using to make their reports? And did rumour sometimes outpace official news in this period? The government does have a huge amount of ability to shape the news. And particularly in wartime, a lot of front pages are just military bulletins or cabinet briefings. There are these ongoing relationships in Whitehall and Westminster between politicians and the press.

21:30The military, and not just the military in London, the war office in London, but as the war expands, the headquarters in Cairo or Singapore, various places around the world, there's a huge amount of information just simply being handed out to reporters who are based all day in these headquarters and who are basing their stories either on briefings or on bulletins released, so official communiques. Increasingly, newspapers also send out their own reporters to try and get the story, the frontline story. But that's often more colour information about what it's like to be at the front, what actually are conditions like,

22:07what's the average British fighting man experiencing a long way from home. And in both those cases, both the official bulletins but also war correspondence reports, what tended to happen, especially at times of defeat, is that the government would simply clamp down. And it would clamp down for quite obvious reasons, operational security. You didn't want to give a rampant enemy any more information to enable it to perhaps encircle yet more of your troops in France in 1940 or Malaya and Singapore in 1942.

22:38So there were very obvious reasons for the clampdown. But it's in those moments when there's very little official information coming that a couple of things happen. One is that, particularly before Pearl Harbour, there are a bunch of aggressive American reporters who are reporting for their own newspapers without British censorship. And a lot of British newspapers have ongoing relationships with US newspapers. And so at the time of the Norway campaign, for instance, when Britain is clamping down quite hard on British reporters,

23:10a Chicago Daily News reporter writes the first story of what a catastrophe is unfolding in Norway, which even newspapers like the Daily Mail, which is normally very much inclined towards supporting the government, publish on page one. So that often undermines the official rosy portrait or the official lack of news. And increasingly as well, and interestingly, newspapers have to publish something. And sometimes, perhaps quite frequently, they resort to German communiques. Mass Observation does a survey of British newspapers in the summer of 1940

23:44and points out every national newspaper except the Daily Mirror regularly publish German communiques. The Times often has them on page one. And so the British can sort of see, OK, this is what we're saying, this is what the enemy is saying. And they have a sort of choice of who they want to believe. And because often their own government isn't producing anything at all, they don't really have much of an option. And the BBC also faces this problem because Lord Hoorhoor, who is based out in Germany and is broadcasting German propaganda, is competing with the BBC. And when the BBC is given very little to announce, people just turn the dial and turn into German broadcasts,

24:18which happened quite often in the summer of 1940. So there are these other ways of trying to learn about what's going on. And of course, as the war comes home and people can observe with their own eyes what's happening in the Blitz, rumour tends to unfold. People in Blitz cities tended to think that the government is just massively underplaying the destruction they've seen with their own eyes. So rumour in Coventry, for instance, in November 1940 was rife. So all of these things sort of are problems for the government.

24:49Of course, I was just about to say, when the war comes home and it's the Blitz and people are faced with it head on, they don't need to rely on communicators. They're seeing it with their own eyes. It must have really highlighted the difficulty of kind of wrestling with reporting, but also not damaging morale.

The reality of the Blitz

25:08And it leads me quite nicely onto my next question, which is, Blitz spirit, the idea that Britons would keep calm and carry on, is one of the most enduring images of the war. Was this a manufactured propaganda message or was it something organic that just emerged from the lived experience of the Blitz? I think a little bit of both, actually. There is a Blitz spirit, but I think a couple of things happen. I think there is an intentional effort early on in the Blitz. Churchill makes a famous broadcast on the 11th of September 1940, when he talks about the tough fibre of these Londoners and we can take it.

25:41And the King then subsequently announces the George Cross for valour for those heroes, civilian heroes in the Blitz. And there is a big effort by newspaper reporters, the same newspaper reporters, who, of course, are experiencing those dangers alongside the people in the tube stations or public shelters. And they are also sort of sharing and behaving in the same way. And where their criticisms tend to focus on is that not that Britons can't take it, but the government needs to do more to basically improve conditions in the public shelters.

26:15The government in 1939 had announced the Anderson Shelter and provided the equipment to construct Anderson Shelters. But that was fine for people who had a back garden who could dig the shelter. But for those working class Londoners who didn't have a garden, what were they to do? They went in public shelters and the conditions in many of those were fairly abysmal early on in the war. So that's where a lot of the griping comes. And also a lot of concern is around the fact that perhaps some Britons, and this becomes a more complex and controversial subject,

26:46there are Britons who simply aren't sitting around and taking it. They're trekking. People are trekking into Epping Forest from the east end of London. People are trekking in the southern port cities that get really hammered in 1941 into the countryside to avoid it. The government's enormously sensitive to that. But they really do want to portray a Britain that is taking it by night and still manning the factories by day because production becomes a key way in which Britain is going to win the war. So there is a need to try and not just manufacture that image, but also ensure that reality.

27:18We've got to keep on because how are we going to win the war otherwise? And there is, I think, a deep sense somewhere that this scepticism that might unfold is you've got to be fairly optimistic in 1940 to 1941 to conjure a scenario where Britain can win the war. So you do therefore need to conjure up images and ways around which we can try and make our war effort ultimately successful. And of course, that's not just that our morale won't collapse, but it's also that our productive capacities will remain in high gear.

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Rationing and the home front

30:16Another major feature of keeping the country running at war from the home front was rationing. How were these restrictions presented to the public as a shared effort for the war? A key element, and even really before rationing was really required from a very early stage, which the Chamberlain government in late 1939 introduces rationing, and it becomes a key element of that policy is fairness.

30:46And I think most people buy into that sense that rationing is the fair way. It's a way of showing that we're all in this together. And so it is widely popular. It's also, I think, a way in the gender roles of the time as well, of course, is that women are on the so-called kitchen front while men are on the fighting front. It's a way of basically, this is how they can do their bit for the war by not just embracing rationing and having their ration book, which is their very physical manifestation of being part of the war effort, but also by doing things such as not wasting anything.

31:19And so this whole anti-waste campaign, which is a key element of this drive as well, I think that is a very powerful message. Plus also as well, digging victory gardens as well, and people doing their bit by growing their own vegetables. So I think all this is a way of activity generating some sense of we're all in it together. And interestingly, rationing is one of those instances whereby most of these attacks don't come from the institution of rationing. They come from a sense that the government isn't moving fast enough.

31:50It's not doing enough. When there were big debates in 1941, Lord Walton, the increasingly popular minister, it's one of his dodgier moments, he's attacked largely from MPs who think he's not moving fast enough. There needs to be more rationing, not less. And so the scepticism that is often bubbling beneath the surface is not questioning the war effort. It's questioning how quickly the war effort is being mobilised. And I think that's also an important dynamic in the whole process as well.

32:20Yeah, absolutely. I guess people were very aware of their own existence during the war and how much they were impacting on it. We've talked an awful lot about the people at home, but what about morale of the troops? Understandably, a lot of discussions around wartime propaganda focus on those at home. But how did it infiltrate the lives of soldiers? How did strategies change depending on the audience? That's a very good point, actually. And I think one starting point here is the way in which World War II is different. The most distressing moment for most people who live through World War I is the knock on the door and the telegram saying that your loved one is missing or killed in action.

32:58And that was the way it worked in previous wars, that it had been the home front waiting for bad news from the fighting front. For the first few years of World War II, civilian deaths in Britain were roughly the same as deaths in the military overseas, 40-odd thousand. And so for the first time, actually, a soldier in the Middle East, for instance, could also contemplate and worry about the possibility that they might have the dreaded telegram. And so the military is enormously aware of the detrimental morale effects this could have.

33:31Back in England, people are encouraged to put names and addresses in their ration books of people in the military that can be contacted should they fall victim to a German bomb. And then the military in various theatres goes out of its way to try and provide information, even compassionate leave to anybody who has had relatives who've fallen victim to the bomb. So there's a lot of effort to try and sort of connect the two. But actually, it's one of the things that makes World War II different. But in other and many other respects, of course, there are two different things going on here, isn't there?

34:04The military is distant. It's much more regimented. It has also much more limited tools at its disposal to try and improve morale. You can only give so much leave. There's only so much entertainment you can provide. Back on the home front, however regimented Britain becomes, it's nowhere near as regimented as military life. And the government also has enormous tools at its disposal to facilitate fun. I think one of the ways in which you try and bolster morale throughout the long years of the war are you allow football matches to take place, even when there's the threat of German bombers coming.

34:40Likewise, you allow cinemas and concert theatres to remain open. You make it relatively easy for books to evade some of the stricter paper rationing so that people can try and at least enjoy certain things while they're drudging through the daily chores of wartime life. In the military, there's far less scope for that, which I think is where the BBC comes in. The BBC is enormously important in conveying entertainment, both domestically, but also through its forces programme, which is beamed to the soldiers.

35:13And this is really where Vera Lynn comes in, one of the biggest names from the war period. Her programme, Sincerely Yours, is a great way of providing the troops with entertainment, but also with a way of perhaps connecting them through entertainment back to their families in Britain. And so I think this is, again, another way in which morale is much more connected between the home and fighting fronts in this war compared to the previous war. We've discussed a lot, understandably, of Britain and the interplay between the home front and soldiers on the front elsewhere in the world.

35:47But I just wanted to pull at something a little bit that you mentioned in your book, which was at one point in the war, Britain marketed the conflict as the battle of the empire. What tensions did that framing create among people living under British colonial rule at the time? Yeah, that plays out in lots of different ways. One of the themes of the book actually is whatever the propagandists do via speeches, pamphlets and posters is often massively overshadowed by what happens on the battlefield. And I think a good illustration of this is over the empire.

36:21Yes, in the autumn of 1940, the Ministry of Information unfolds this Empire Crusade campaign, which is itself sort of interesting language, but it doesn't really have that much impact, even in Britain. And of course, what it subsequently has very little impact in particularly India, which becomes one of the major problem cases for the India office and the cabinet back in London. The biggest challenge comes from Japan's declaration of war and the very rapid collapse in Hong Kong, Singapore and Burma.

36:52And these are the things that really drive the challenge to British rule and really create the most tensions. I think where tension tends to come in war news and propaganda is not so much over what becomes the key elements of decolonisation post-war. It's more with vis-a-vis the dominions because Australia, New Zealand, Canadian troops are fighting in large numbers. The interesting thing actually is that the censor in London is relaxed about telling the world Australian, New Zealand troops are fighting in Egypt.

37:23They're reluctant to release the names of British units. So there's a growing concern in the Desert War that the British public thinks that Australia is winning the war, for instance. And so questions are then asked about that. Don't we have any English troops fighting there, for instance? So there are tensions there in terms of the portrayal of the war news. But when it comes down to that sort of fundamental tensions, I think that's being shaped more by the reality of the battles on the ground than anything the propagandists actually do.

Reporting the Holocaust and the end of war

37:51Now, of course, something we haven't yet discussed, which is an incredibly important part of this story, is the Holocaust. As details began to reach Britain, how did the press and the government handle communicating the horrors of the concentration camps to the public? I came at this whole issue previously in my previous career. I'm an American historian. And I've written widely about the American home front. And the dominant historical interpretation of that is just how reluctant the Roosevelt administration, even newspapers like the New York Times, which has Jewish ownership, how reluctant they are to publicise any news of the Holocaust until relatively late in the day.

38:32And so that's my sort of starting point. I was struck, actually, how relative to the American debate, I think the British establishment is more willing to publicise and confirm news of the Holocaust from 1942 onwards. The church, certain newspapers are publishing stories from a fairly early date onwards. And it's also impacting on, for instance, the Labour Party. Inside the Labour Party, some of the leading voices, like Herbert Morrison, who's home secretary for much of the war, is very much of the belief that Britain and the Allies need to reintegrate Germany quickly after the war.

39:09Now, the news of the Holocaust is something that starts to rejig Labour opinion. And so it becomes much more inclined towards a harsh peace because people are buying into the fact that actually what's going on here in occupied Europe is beyond the power and there needs to be consequences from that. So I think relative to the other sort of major democracy in the war, I think we are more inclined to both cover and believe these reports.

39:39That said, however, it's not until Dimbleby from the BBC goes in and broadcasts actually the liberation of Belsen, which is a concentration camp, not an extermination camp. But even so, the sites there are so horrific. And it's not until he insists that his BBC producers air this story that it really strikes home. So I think there's an element of people of some level of taking in what's going on, but it's not until the very end of the war and a British reporter with their own eyes sees the sheer horror of some of these sites.

40:17The Daily Express also runs lots of actual images of what's been found. And that does really appall people. But that's not until April 1945, till relatively late in the war. And it does feed into a sense that perhaps Britain needs to be harsh towards a post-war Germany. Among these horrors, of course, there is the underlying relief that the war is coming to an end. How did public mood shift as the end of the war drew nearer? The key moment when it becomes clear that the war will end is when D-Day is launched in June 1944 and D-Day succeeds.

40:56Until the British and the Americans have landed back on the continent. Ultimate victory is likely, but it's not imminent. And then particularly with the liberation of Paris in the late summer of 1944, that's really when, militarily speaking, people can see the end in sight. But interestingly, that coincides with the V-Rocket attacks, both the V-1 but then the V-2 rockets from September onwards. And so although there is a sort of growing sense of relief, that's interspersed by a real sense of demoralisation.

41:29I think London, in many respects, can London take it? It still can take it, but it's finding it harder to take those attacks in the war has been dragging on for so long. And these are particularly discombobulating moments when these weapons come across. And so there is a real sense of massive war weariness throughout the second half of 1944 into 1945. And that factors into something I just mentioned, which is this desire for vengeance against Germany. The opinion polls and the opinion surveys being conducted by September 1944 show a country that is really sort of completely had it with Nazi Germany.

42:06It is really, really quite vindictive. And of course, then when Bomber Harris launches the Dresden raid in February and almost unintentionally an RAF public relations officer admits that terror bombing is now being unleashed, that doesn't really have any negative impact back home. There is a sort of sense, no, whatever is required to both win the war and to perhaps extract vengeance on this country that has plunged us into so many years of death and destruction.

42:38And as I point out, even when VED comes around, there is a sort of sense of war weariness. A lot of people can't really believe the war is going to be over. And even if it is over soon, they're still going to be rationing. A clear majority of Britons are in August 1945 still really quite down at the prospect of Britain's role in this new post-war world. The fact that the problems that the war has created are going to be so intense, particularly when the atomic bomb is dropped, but also the ongoing austerity, which is clearly in Britain's near future, that there is surprisingly little rejoicing apart from on those days in May 1945,

43:17when everyone goes out into the streets and celebrates the actual conclusion of war in Europe. Throughout this interview, we've discussed a lot about the difference between public opinion, public feeling and trust of propaganda and government and the media and how they all interplay.

Parallels to modern political distrust

43:35So as a final question, I wanted to ask, what do you think we can learn from wartime propaganda today? In our current climate, we see a lot of distrust of politicians and most of us have access to information and misinformation 24-7. What parallels can be drawn between public messaging now and that of wartime Britain? Yeah, I think the point I would really like to stress, and I think I've alluded to earlier, is that for the most part, the people in charge in Britain in World War II are well-meaning patriots who want to win the war as quickly as possible.

44:08The people challenging them are well-meaning patriots who perhaps differ over how the war can be won. So this is not a bunch of mendacious leaders who are out there to try and mislead their public, who are justifiably cynical of what's going on. But even so, because the nature of public policy at any time is difficult, it's a tough job. It's particularly tough in World War II. The stakes are so high that it creates plenty of scope for legitimate questioning, which doesn't actually,

44:40I don't think, in World War II become particularly corrosive. I think we are entering a period of time now where the distrust and the cynicism is moving into a corrosive. And it's partly because there are certain leaders in democracies who purposely go out of their way to mislead. It's also because whatever we think of the BBC or news journalism, there are gatekeepers there. There are certain editorial standards that need to be met before someone will publish a story.

45:10Yes, newspapers did publish Nazi propaganda, but it was a genuine recognition that the people who were mendacious, the people who were deliberately lying, were the enemy. They were on the other side. And so that was always sort of factored into how people read that. Whereas our own side perhaps just needs to get its act together, was where the scepticism or cynicism is going. I think the trouble is with modern political life, I think social media lacks those gatekeepers. I think there are too many unscrupulous politicians who simply are just reckless with the truth.

45:42And of course, these politicians aren't purely in the authoritarian world, sadly. And so I think we are entering a far more problematic era. And I think one of the great things, I think one of the reasons why, that although there is scepticism in World War II, it remains within bounds. There isn't really any questioning of the overall objective. It's a questioning of how to perhaps get there. And as I say, it's not ultimately corrosive. I do fear, however, for modern society,

46:15because some of these same prerequisites are no longer in place. Yeah, it's a scary truth that we live in today. Thank you so much for joining me today, Steve. Not at all. Great pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

46:29That was Stephen Casey speaking to Isabel King. Stephen is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. And his latest book is The Skeptic Isle, How the British Government Solved the Second World War. How the British Government Solved the Second World War. Thank you.