ABSTRACT
The heavy hand of win-the-war bureaucracy was ubiquitous during World War II, making popular culture and the war effort virtually inseparable. All media were working under the constraints of “maintaining morale,” and the adage that politics and art make for wretched bedfellows is painfully obvious in the great quantity of bad films that were made about the war and in the creation of a musical canon that was virtually unlistenable. It is encouraging that audiences approached these art forms with a sophistication that often frustrated the official government line.
