Download Free The Ministry Of Information And British Civilian Morale During The Second World War Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Ministry Of Information And British Civilian Morale During The Second World War and write the review.

This book, first published in 1979, is an analysis of the wartime Ministry of Information, responsible for the maintenance of public morale. How was it that British morale remained high, yet the department responsible was so bad? This book examines the domestic work of the Ministry and offers an unprecedented insight into the mind of both government and people during the war. It answers key questions: How did a government department assess and set about maintaining morale? How did it handle the social and political questions associated with morale – post-war social reform, press freedom and censorship, the nature of the Soviet regime? How sound in fact was civilian morale, on the basis of the secret Wartime Intelligence reports then available? One of the most fascinating aspects of this book is the Ministry’s constant internal debate on how its responsibilities should best be carried out. It is a key work of research on the political, psychological and mass communications problems facing a society at war.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. How well did civilian morale stand up to the pressures of total war and what factors were important to it? This book rejects contentions that civilian morale fell a long way short of the favourable picture presented at the time and in hundreds of books and films ever since. While acknowledging that some negative attitudes and behaviour existed—panic and defeatism, ration-cheating and black-marketeering—it argues that these involved a very small minority of the population. In fact, most people behaved well, and this should be the real measure of civilian morale, rather than the failing of the few who behaved badly. The book shows that although before the war, the official prognosis was pessimistic, measures to bolster morale were taken nevertheless, in particular with regard to protection against air raids. An examination of indicative factors concludes that moral fluctuated but was in the main good, right to the end of the war. In examining this phenomenon, due credit is accorded to government policies for the maintenance of morale, but special emphasis is given to the ‘invisible chain’ of patriotic feeling that held the nation together during its time of trial.
Commercial, business, small, standards, environment, intenational trade, education, training.
During the Blitz, the morale of the British people was clandestinely monitored by Home Intelligence, a unit of the Ministry of Information that kept watch on the behaviour and opinions of the public and eavesdropped on their conversations. Drawing on a wide range of intelligence sources from every region of the United Kingdom, a small team of officials based at the Senate House of the University of London compiled secret reports on the state of popular morale as the Luftwaffe attacked Britain's major towns and cities between September 1940 and May 1941. Edited and introduced by two leading historians of the period, who tell the inside story of Home Intelligence and why it proved so controversial in Whitehall, the complete and unabridged sequence of reports provide us with a unique and extraordinary window into the mindset of the British during a momentous period in their history. Not only do they include in-depth reports on the effects of the bombing, including special reports on Coventry, Clydebank, Hull, Barrow-in-Furness, Plymouth, Merseyside and Portsmouth, but also insights into almost every aspect of everyday life in Britain as well as the response of the public to the shifting military fortunes of the war. Reading like the collective diary of a nation, the reports strip away the nostalgia that has grown up around the period, reminding us instead of the sufferings and sacrifices, the many frustrations and difficulties of daily life, the administrative bungling, the grumbling and petty jealousies, and the determination of the overwhelming majority to put up with it all for the sake of beating Hitler.
This book presents a new and vivid survey of politics, society, culture and military strategy in Britain between 1939 and 1945. It covers the major historical debates in these areas.
During World War II, the UK government created the Central Office of Information to act as the country s marketing and communications agency. In these desperate times, the Office produced steady streams of propaganda for the home front, for the colonies and for dissemination through occupied countries. In addition to patriotic material encouraging Britons to maintain a stiff upper lip, thousands of postcards, leaflets, posters, booklets and other promotional materials were dropped from aircraft over occupied countries in World War II. In 2000, the master set of copies was deposited with the British Library, making an enormous collection of great social and historical significance available to the public for the first time."
This historical reassessment of the World War II British bombing campaign notes that though in 1940 Churchill declared that he was waging “a military and not a civilian war” to destroy “military objectives” and not “women and children,” within eighteen months both types of targets would be struck by Bomber Command. The author searches for the reasons in “three contiguous realms” of strategic influence: moral (and legal), political, and military. The study concludes that although for much of the war “area bombing” of cities was a “tragic necessity” meeting the ‘reasonable man’s’ standard of what was decently allowable given the blunt weapons the Allies had” and the evils they faced, nonetheless Allied leaders could have and should have abandoned indiscriminate bombing in the last phases of the conflict, when more precise means were at hand and “Nazi power had been overmatched.”
Bogen beskriver og analyserer detaljeret hvordan krigens nyheder blev behandlet både fra engelsk og fra tysk side, illustreret med talrige eksempler fra årene under 2. Verdenskrig. Forfatteren var ansat i Ministry of Information, som sorterede nyhederne til hjemmefronten, og The Political Warfare Executive, som sendte propaganda til tyskerne, og til de tysk-besatte lande, og som samtidig (i Intelligence Directorate) fulgte den tyske propaganda hver dag. Bogen bygger på materiale fra både tyske og engelske arkiver.