ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the British Army’s approaches to processing and managing both information and emotion in the years leading up to the Second World War and during the conflict itself. It identifies how the typewriter became essential to practices of information management in the British Army and to the waging of war overall. While most of the focus on emotion in the Second World War has been on the experience and manifestation of fear, this chapter also reveals how the Army began to formally recognise the significance of specific emotional qualities for its organisation in training and recruitment. The chapter analyses the Second World War Unit Diaries and Appendices as a mediated site in which the rational framework of operational reporting, the typewriter and the Army’s management of emotions converge to shape the record of war. Using linguistic and textual analysis, this chapter assesses the impact of the typewriter on emotional registers in the Unit War Diaries of the Second World War and compares them to those of the First. It investigates ongoing tensions between individuality/bureaucracy and order/chaos in the narratives of the Appendices and reveals these records as mediated representations intervening between individual, event, institution and history.
