ABSTRACT
The willingness of civilians to contribute to the war effort was a matter of decisive military importance because Britain’s armed forces depended on the industrial and organisational skills of the home population. The responsibility for maintaining civilian morale fell to the Ministry of Information (MOI), which began work in September 1939 but which had been planned since 1935. It attempted to counter the efforts of Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, though the MOI’s title deliberately implied that the Ministry was engaged primarily in disseminating information, not in social control or political indoctrination. The first Minister of Information, Lord Macmillan, summarised for the cabinet in 1939 the three central messages which were to be carried to the public: what Britain was fighting for; how Britain was fighting; and the need for sacrifice if the fight was to be won. Macmillan’s stewardship of the Ministry was generally regarded as a failure and his two successorsSir John Reith and Duff Cooper-fared little better. In fact the MOI attracted intense criticism in the first two years of the war; it was seen to be expensive, bureaucratic, overstaffed and ineffective; the patronising tone of its early efforts was captured in a poster which read, ‘YOUR courage, YOUR cheerfulness, YOUR resolution, will bring us victory’— people were entitled to ask what the Ministry meant by ‘you’ and ‘us’. It was only when Brendan Bracken became Minister of Information in July 1941 that the MOI began to operate effectively, working well with the three main branches of the wartime media to support civilian morale.
