Secret Warriors

by Taylor Downing

  Many feared, possibly correctly, that by bringing the press barons inside government Lloyd George intended to create his own fiefdom in order to muzzle press criticism of his premiership. Rumours abounded that Northcliffe and Beaverbrook were moving into offices in Downing Street. Some believed that in the post-war world Lloyd George would use them to build up his own reputation and bolster his popularity. He was acting like a dictator, they felt, riding roughshod over political conventions. Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet, wrote that he thought the reason for Northcliffe’s appointment was because Lloyd George wanted to raise funds for a new party organisation, describing it as a ‘shady business’.9 Many senior officials, especially in the Foreign Office, felt it was inappropriate to allow the ‘press gang’ access to confidential information. A confrontation was inevitable.

  Beaverbrook brought in a new group of advisers, as his predecessors had done, forever widening the group who were to influence the development of propaganda. Many of the new intake were from the City – men like Sir Harold Snagge, a director of Barclays Bank; Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen, a tobacco magnate; and Sir Eric Hambro, another banker (whose wife was already working in Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty). Writers such as Arnold Bennett and Hugh Walpole were also given senior positions. Walpole was another author who was able to litter his novels with characters based on individuals he met while carrying out his secret war duties. He had worked for the Red Cross in Russia and was charged with coordinating the flow of propaganda to the newly born Soviet state. In the new ministry, John Buchan was made Director of Intelligence, charged with processing information for the propaganda departments.

  Buchan was also to be responsible for inviting foreign journalists to tour British war factories, and it was in this capacity that he met Lowell Thomas, an American journalist searching for an individual whose dramatic wartime story could be promoted to help lift morale. Buchan put Thomas in touch with Allenby’s headquarters in Palestine, where stories were beginning to spread about a young intelligence officer who was leading an Arab revolt in the desert. Thomas went with a cameraman to the Middle East, where he met Colonel T.E. Lawrence, writing up the story as a series of illustrated lectures and films that had the titles With Allenby in Palestine and With Lawrence in Arabia. They proved hugely popular and made both Thomas’s reputation and that of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. This phase of the propagandists’ work gave birth to at least one enduring legend of the war.

  Beaverbrook continued to do battle with the Foreign Office, just as Buchan had before him. Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, and Lord Hardinge, his Permanent Secretary, were formidable opponents, continuing to insist on Foreign Office control over the distribution of propaganda overseas. Used to getting things his own way, Beaverbrook was not good at the patient game of point scoring and jockeying for position in the hierarchy of government. While Balfour pretended to respect the position of the young new ministry, he then carried on exactly as before. Feeling that there, was no point in having a ministry to control information if he was unable to manage its various elements, on 13 June he wrote to Lloyd George, ‘I am nearly worn out with my effort to put this Ministry on its legs.’10 But the situation on the Western Front was critical and the Prime Minister did not reply. The dispute with Balfour escalated further. On 1 July, Beaverbrook offered his resignation, but Lloyd George was again too busy to see him and did not respond. Later in the month, Lloyd George tried to mediate and came up with a compromise. Balfour did not accept it. Beaverbrook had lost his battle.

  Beaverbrook did not make a good minister.11 Unsuited to a situation in which he had to play a subordinate role, he was too direct, too pushy and too much of an outsider, both as a Canadian and as a press baron, to progress within the corridors of established power in Britain. He had great skills and a brilliant ability to find the popular way of approaching a subject, but he was unable to use these in government. He could rage and shout, and offer his resignation. But it made no impression on the mandarins of Whitehall. As Stanley Baldwin said of him at the time, ‘The Minister of Information is a man of very strong personality. Men with strong personalities have this in common, that the magnetism that comes with that personality either attracts or repels.’12 In October Beaverbrook successfully resigned, giving ill health as the reason. His health was indeed poor – he had an operation for a glandular swelling in his neck – but more than anything he had been worn down by the process of government. He would return to writing, journalism and running his newspapers.

  By contrast, Northcliffe, appointed by Lloyd George to run the Enemy Propaganda Department at Crewe House in Mayfair, did a masterly job. The operation he led has been described as bringing ‘the greatest victory ever achieved by war propaganda’.13 Lloyd George wanted to launch an offensive directly against enemy morale and Northcliffe did this on a vast scale. Once again he brought in outsiders, including writers, journalists and historians, who managed the policy for him.

  His department’s first target was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Northcliffe identified as the weak link among the countries at war with the Allies. Henry Wickham-Steed, the foreign editor of The Times, ran the campaign with the assistance of young historian Robert Seton-Watson, an expert on the various peoples ruled by the Hapsburg monarchy. Northcliffe quickly realised that if the Allies could make it clear that they favoured independence for the many nationalities within Austria-Hungary, such as the southern Slavs (or Jugo-Slavs), the Croats, Czechs, Poles and Slovaks, then they could weaken the military effort of the Austro-Hungarian armies by enticing soldiers to desert. If successful, this might hasten the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and fundamentally weaken Germany’s war effort.

  The problem once again lay with the Foreign Office, which had not yet decided its post-war policy towards the ethnic groups of central Europe. Balfour refused to be steamrollered into making policy in order to meet the demands of propaganda, which he saw as putting the cart before the horse. Northcliffe, however, wanted the go-ahead as quickly as possible. In April, a congress in Rome, held to clarify Allied policy, declared support for the many different nationalist groups governed by the Hapsburgs. The War Cabinet told Northcliffe to go ahead with his offensive as long as ‘no promise... [was] made to the subject peoples of Austria that we could not redeem’.14 Northcliffe’s department employed a variety of techniques to achieve its objective. Leaflets were dropped over the lines where Austro-Hungarian troops were stationed. A weekly newspaper was produced and smuggled into central Europe. On the Italian Front, gramophone discs of patriotic, nationalist songs were played in no man’s land, directed towards the Austrian lines. Colour pictures of religious and nationalist symbols were distributed. The result was that thousands, possibly tens of thousands of Slav soldiers deserted. Many of them crossed to the Italian lines carrying copies of the leaflets and said to their captors, ‘I have come because you invited me.’15 Many front-line units had to be replaced with more trustworthy troops.

  The Austro-Hungarian offensive against the Italian lines in June was a failure, and as the military situation in the west deteriorated for the enemy powers, the Austro-Hungarian Empire finally began to crumble. In October, new independent nations were proclaimed in Prague, Warsaw and Zagreb. Even the Hungarians declared they were now a separate state. The Austrian armies fell apart. As the Italian army cautiously moved forward, more than three hundred thousand men deserted. The Austro-Hungarian navy surrendered to the Yugoslav National Council at Pula. In early November, what was left of Austria-Hungary signed an armistice. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire had not all been down to the propaganda campaign, but it certainly helped.

  When it came to directing propaganda at Germany, Northcliffe called in novelist H.G. Wells to help define policy, appointing alongside him John Headlam-Morley, a specialist on German history. A supporter of socialism in his younger days – although he had always approved of Britain going to war in 1914 – Wells had also been a great believer in world
government and advocated the creation of a global state in which the emphasis would be on the improvement of science and not the development of nationalism. Wells realised that the defeat of Germany was tied to the establishment of a ‘world peace that shall preclude the resumption of war’ in some sort of international organisation like a ‘League of Free Nations’.16 Wells said that propaganda against Germany must make it clear first, that the Allies would continue with the war until they had secured complete victory; second, that the Allies had nothing against the German people, but were determined to destroy the militaristic leadership that had led Germany to war and sustained it ever since. In other words, to avoid financial ruin, utter destruction, starvation and military humiliation, the German people must throw off their current imperial government and negotiate with the Allies. It was a clever line to pursue, as it encouraged moderate Germans who would want their country to participate fully in the systems, such as the League of Free Nations, created after the war. Again, Balfour felt he was being pressured into a formulating a foreign policy simply in order to suit the propagandists, another case of being asked to proclaim his war aims before ready to do so. However, on this occasion he declared himself to be ‘in general agreement with the line of thought’.17

  From July 1918, literature was smuggled into Germany from neutral Holland and Switzerland calling on the German people, exhausted by four years of war, to demand peace. In addition, vast numbers of leaflets were printed and dropped from aircraft over German lines. Some were carried in high-flying balloons, sent to float east towards Germany in the hope of reaching the civilian population as well. The total numbers of leaflets dropped amounted to 1.7 million in June, 2.2 million in July and 4 million in August.18 Some leaflets claimed the Allies were making huge advances along the Western Front, others, listing the numbers of submarines sunk or captured, made it clear that the U-boat campaign had failed. Most reminded the Germans that tens of thousands of American troops were arriving daily in France. Another regular feature was to point out the gains Allied armies were making in Greece, in Italy, against Bulgaria and in Palestine. Every leaflet strongly emphasised the heavy German losses and the futility of making further sacrifices for a lost cause.

  As the German army went into retreat in the west, even more leaflets were dropped: 3.7 million in September, 5.4 million in October. The Germans punished those who read the publications and offered three marks to every soldier who handed in a leaflet to an officer, eight marks for a book. But German officers collected only about one-tenth of the leaflets dropped, so it can be deduced that most of them were read and kept. One German writer described the leaflets as ‘English poison raining down from God’s clear sky’. The German military chief, Marshal von Hindenburg, described how the propaganda leaflets intensified the demoralisation of German soldiers, writing, ‘The enemy seeks to poison our spirit... He bombards our Front, not only with a drumfire of artillery, but also with a drumfire of printed paper. Besides bombs which kill the body, his airmen throw down leaflets which are intended to kill the soul.’ Hindenburg recorded that soldiers sometimes took the leaflets home with them on leave, where they were passed ‘from hand to hand’ and widely discussed ‘at the beer table, in families, in the sewing room, in factories, in the street. Unsuspectingly many thousands consume the poison.’19 Once again, as with Austria-Hungary, it was military defeat in the field that caused the Germans to sign an armistice. But it is clear that the Allied propaganda campaign in the last months of the war made a major contribution to the collapse of morale that led to this defeat.

  Northcliffe had proposed an active propaganda campaign of dropping leaflets as long ago as September 1914. His proposal had been turned down at the time, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff saying that propaganda was ‘a minor matter – the thing was to kill Germans’.20 It was yet another indication of how far propaganda had come during the war years. In November, on the eve of the armistice, Northcliffe resigned as Director of Enemy Propaganda, his job done. Now he could return to his favourite pastime of leading his newspapers as they attacked the government and its policies.

  Despite their obvious skills in managing public opinion, North-cliffe and Beaverbrook were, strangely, denied control over one vital area, propaganda at home. That was still controlled by the NWAC. During 1918, the NWAC organised large patriotic rallies across the country, often with music hall stars – the celebrities of the day -turning up to provide entertainment. Soldiers gave positive talks on their experiences at the front in an effort to bolster support for the war factories. Five mobile film projection vans were sent to areas where there were no cinemas. In Birmingham, on what was called ‘Win the War Day’, a big procession passed through the city led by a tank. Much of this was fairly crude, and some of it harked back to the old claims of German atrocities: a ‘Crimes Calendar’ was produced in which each month highlighted a different enemy atrocity.21 More than anything, however, an exhausted and war-weary nation was kept going by the growing certainty that victory was not far off.

  Two days after the Armistice, the War Cabinet decided to close down the Ministry of Information. Maybe they had sensed the general feeling that Lloyd George should not be allowed to use the experts gathered in Norfolk Street to boost his own personal standing. The notion that propaganda, if a necessary evil in war, was not suited to peacetime government also prevailed. Whatever the reasoning, Information was the first of the wartime ministries to be shut down. Masterman said, ‘They’re getting rid of me. I dare say that’s right. But if I were them I’d keep the department going, to work in favour of a reasonable peace.’22 Buchan was asked to liquidate the ministry and had the task of dismissing staff and reallocating its assets. There was a general sense that with the war won it was time to go, and he told Masterman, ‘I am not sorry to get quit of the business.’23

  Somehow, despite the pressures of war, of writing his mammoth History and countless weekly news digests, as well as running the Department of Information and then playing a senior role in the ministry, Buchan had still found time to write two novels. The more successful of these, Greenmantle, published in 1916, again centred on the exploits of Richard Hannay.24 Convalescing after the Battle of Loos, Hannay is asked to take on a mission to track down Muslim extremists organising a jihad against British rule in the Middle East and India. The book was informed by much that Buchan had learned in office and was so successful that it outsold The Thirty Nine Steps. After the war, however, Buchan collapsed in exhaustion for some weeks. He eventually rejected a life in public affairs and bought a house in Oxfordshire, moving there to concentrate on his writing. He had lost several of his best friends during the war, along with his youngest brother. For years he lived in the shadow of the war and wrote many books of remembrance and tribute. Like many of his generation in the 1920s, he felt a sense of guilt that he had survived when others had not.

  Of the assets that Buchan had to dispose of there were all the films, photographs and paintings made and recorded under the auspices of the Ministry of Information. In March 1917, the War Cabinet had agreed to establish as a memorial to the wartime sacrifice a museum to record all aspects of the war relating to Britain and her empire. Sir Alfred Mond was appointed its director and Charles Ffoulkes, Master of the Armouries at the Tower of London, was made curator. Mond visited Haig at GHQ, and in the last year of the war, with the help of senior army figures, Ffoulkes began to collect artefacts such as trench signboards, disused field artillery pieces, war relics and military machines of every sort. Lorries visited waste dumps, gathering up huge collections of rifles, machine guns, flags, posters, maps and endless spoils of war. No doubt suitably puzzled, soldiers still fighting the war described these early museum curators as ‘souvenir collectors’, but as Ffoulkes later wrote, One had to consider that while such things might be of transitory value for the moment our business was to make history, or rather to record history.’25 After some debate, as the memorial was intended to reflect the work of all the Commonwealth arm
ies, it was decided to call the new enterprise the Imperial War Museum.

  On 1 January 1919, about 42,000 photographs, along with the paintings of more than thirty official war artists, were transferred from the defunct Ministry of Information to the new museum. The ministry had opened a shop in Coventry Street in London at which members of the public could buy copies of photographs, and this had proved immensely popular. The shop too now became a part of the museum.26 Ffoulkes wrote, ‘What a collection it was... War conditions on all fronts and at sea, an almost complete photographic survey of the whole of the British front... in fact all aspects of what was then the greatest war in history, and miles and miles of cinematograph films.’27

  King George V opened the Imperial War Museum at its first home at the Crystal Palace in south London in June 1920. A crowd of 40,000 people gathered for the occasion, at which the director, Sir Alfred Mond, made it clear that the museum was ‘not a monument of military glory but a record of toil and sacrifice’ in which ‘everyone who took part in the war’ would find ‘an example or illustration of the sacrifice that he or she made’.28 From the beginning, the museum included objects relating to women’s war work, war factories and industrial production as well as to the activities of the army, navy and air force. It interpreted its brief widely and even collected letters and songs containing examples of war slang, some of which were thought to be so profane that they had to be kept under lock and key and could only be read by Very discreet members of the staff’.29 In November of that year the museum began to acquire the official films made for the War Office, the Admiralty and the Air Force, in order that they ‘might be classified and preserved as records’. Six hundred and thirty separate films were collected.

  The museum proved a huge success from the day of its opening, with more than 1.4 million visitors in its first nine months.30 In 1936 it moved to its permanent home in Southwark at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, a lunatic asylum once known by a shortened version of its name as ‘Bedlam’. The outstanding work of the photographers, filmmakers and war artists, along with the records of the men and women who had fought or otherwise taken part in the war, or who had toiled on the Home Front, found a permanent home. One hundred years later these unique records can still be studied, assessed, reviewed and copied.