The Committee of Directors of Public Relations of the Civil Defence Departments in November last recommended to the Civil Defence Executive Subcommittee that the Ministry of Information should be asked to carry out a campaign to improve home morale through the creation of an active front-line attitude among the whole population - not by exhortation but by systematically conveying to the public a picture of civilian war action of all kinds, at its best. The D.P.R.'s report is attached.
The Ministry of Information has expressed some uncertainty whether this can be done without either direct exhortation or the performance by the Ministry of Information of propaganda tasks properly belonging to individual Civil Defence departments. The D.P.-R.’s Committee has been asked to expand its proposal in more concrete terms.
The following notes are the response.
1. The present state of things is not wholly satisfactory. The press naturally presents an almost uniformly cheerful picture of public morale, and a very large section of the public is in truth waging war magnificently on the Home Front. But there are weaknesses which the country cannot afford.
Some dockers - enough to matter - play ca’ canny with Atlantic shipping. Some busmen will not commit themselves to drive in Alerts - others actually will not do so. There are men and women who stay in shelters when their city is being attacked and they ought to be fighting fire-bombs. A number of coal merchants are slow in unloading tracks. Some factory workers still spend too much time in shelters. Many householders evade billeting; many more make very heavy weather of the difficult job of lodging other people's children (and may be their mothers): others again refuse to billet industrial workers on night shift because their hours for meals and sleep are odd and trying. Many of us cling to peacetime food habits, and make rationing more of a hardship than it need be, by unreadiness to adapt ourselves or to accept the idea of a (very adequate) “iron ration”. A very large number of people do not expect from themselves much beyond an ability to “take it”. They are not alive to the urgent need of fighting back.
None of these weaknesses is negligible. Together they mount up to a serious defect in our war effort. Compulsion cannot cure them and some of them are at this moment persisting in spite of it.
2. Each of these problems is the concern of a particular department. But none can be entirely solved by that department's propaganda. In some of the instances individual departmental action would be tactically difficult, because to particularise the appeal might go some way to make it self-defeating. Thus while the Ministry of Home Security can use propaganda to mobilise firebomb fighters, the Ministry of Labour would have to use it very circumspectly in approaching the dockers. Again, a conglomeration of the necessary number of separate appeals would confuse the public and soon batter it into insensitiveness. Even where a particular appeal can be made, it cannot go all the way: it lacks the background that only a national campaign, planned and sponsored as such, can possess: and it lacks the breadth and cumulative effect of a co-ordinated campaign covering all the problems.
3. Moreover the problem at its root is not one of deficiency of morale in this or that group. It is general in its incidence. It could be described, more or less fairly, in many different ways - lack of imagination, or of courage, inertia, selfishness, ignorance. For present purposes it can most usefully - and quite truthfully - be described as under-developed team spirit.
Last May and June the urgent need was for a great spurt in individual effort at a number of points. Now the need is universal in range and rather different in nature. It is a need for stronger corporate feeling and corporate effort.
4. The simple idea that we should like to see brought to life is that the action of the people of Great Britain to-day provides the finest example of team work the world has ever seen. There is nothing new in the spirit or technique of team work in these islands. It is in our blood, in our history, and in our political institutions. It is evident in our love of sport. It is behind our Colonial administration, and the spirit of mutual help is the one that has given rise to our trade unions, our co-operative societies and national insurance schemes.
In time of war we make the most of what we already possess and faith in the power derived from voluntary team work is immeasurably superior to that of a nation dragooned for war. But to make the most of our national genius and to mobilise quickly our inherent strength, we must, through propaganda, make the idea of team work more articulate, conscious and dynamic.
5. In the midst of war itself, this should not be difficult. Military activities, and above all military victories are of all things in the world the ones most likely to increase solidarity of thought and feeling in a nation. If every citizen of that nation can be shown - as he or she can be - the direct connection between his or her own daily activity and the events of war, then war itself can be counted on to provide a succession of ideal occasions for renewing the lesson and driving it home.
Who won the Battle of Bardia? Was it just an affair of men and tanks, ships, aeroplanes? No - there were the men and women who made the weapons and munitions: there were those who grew the food to feed fighters and arms workers alike: those who billeted their children and perhaps their wives, keeping up morale in the factories and the desert by keeping their families happy: those who sailed the ships that supplied the armies and the factories: these who unloaded those ships: those who guarded our cities from air attack so that the war effort that lay behind Bardia might go on: and so on, to the end of the chapter. You, who turn out to fight fire-bombs: you, who take pride in coping with short rations and cooking a good dinner for a worker: you, who get on with your work at full speed, whatever it is - you helped to win Bardia. Every victory - and every set-back too
mutatis mutandis
- can be made to establish the fact of national team-work, and to imprint its image on our minds, just at the moment when we are emotionally ready to accept the fact and its implications. Think of the effect of a well drafted message to the civil population from a victorious general on the morrow of his triumph. The campaign would not consist of vague generalisation; it would be geared to news, to the battlefield itself.
Many civilians’ jobs today are like the jobs of workers in a certain aircraft components factory, making nondescript parts of Spitfires. Output lagged. The Management had the bright idea of assembling a Spitfire in the main shop, so that the workers could see where the parts they made fitted in, what they did and what depended on them. Output, in this real and verifiable
44
- 3 -case, went up by 50%. There was no exhortation - and no need for it. The analogy with the proposal here made seems complete.
A campaign of this nature, once it has got into its stride, could hardly fail to carry with it the weaker and more selfish members of the team. Examples held out of the team spirit in action would provide the encouragement to put everything in and to withhold nothing. It would moreover provide a picture of ourselves that we should be proud to present to the world.
6. One or two further specific ideas are now put forward. It is emphasised that they are not put forward for their own sake, and that the main proposal does not stand or fall by them. They are suggestions, no more. They will have served their purpose well if they bring to a head the effect of the foregoing paragraphs, and provoke readers of these lines to think of very much better ideas.
(a) The campaign ought not to have to do without the most effective single propaganda weapon in our armoury - the speeches and broadcasts of leading Ministers, and above all of the Prime Minister. It would be a novelty to gear a series of such speeches to the driving shaft of a single idea, but each talk would of course be highly individual in its approach to and treatment of the theme.
(b) Besides using films and broadcast talks and enlisting the help of the press, the campaign should use posters and press advertisements to focus its idea sharply, and to give the propaganda a cutting edge.
(c) The story might sometimes be built up round particular figures (imaginary) or stories (real) presenting simple unspectacular wartime achievements on the home front. Each person or anecdote could be invested with the heightened significance gained by explaining its relation to the general war effort.
(d) The theme of the campaign might be “Forty million people, mobilised for war”, or “Forty million people in the fighting Services” or “Were all in the fighting services”. Best of all, perhaps, just three words:- “Forty Million Fighters.” Such a phrase or sentence might be used explicitly in the media for which Slogans are appropriate - press advertisements, posters, sometimes films and perhaps songs.
7. It is agreed that a good deal has been done along some of the lines suggested. But not on a systematic plan, not with repetition, not with cumulative effect, not with sharp definition of the simple ideas involved.
8. It might be objected that the campaign has little or no content of explicit political ideas. It does not base itself on war aims, nor set out overtly to counter Communism. True. But its content is the idea of democracy itself, and its method is a straightforward use of two of the most powerful of all psychological forces - the force of example, and the team spirit. At this stage, in dealing with a people fundamentally united on the necessity for victory, those things are enough.
From the Committee of Directors of Public Relations of the Civil Defence Executive Sub-Committee.
