Death at WarDr Bex Lewis

Death Day Conference15th May 2010

http://ww2poster.co.uk

Where shall we go…?

Context: Total War, including the First World War Nationalism & Citizenship The Ministry of Information

Poster Campaigns Rural Life V. Urban Decay Careless Talk Costs Lives Death to the Enemy Health & Safety

Total War

During the war, a ‘shared sense of national identity had to be mobilised amongst the people of Britain’. Achieved partly through propaganda posters, more and more people ‘were encouraged to identify themselves as active citizens, as active members of the nation’, a citizenship ‘to be earned by communal and individual service of one’s nation in wartime’.

PhD thesis (2004), quoting Noakes, L., War and the British: Gender and National Identity, 1939-91, 1998, p.48.

First World War

A public notice aims to inform or command. A poster aims to seduce, to exhort, to sell, to educate, to convince, to appeal. Whereas a public notice distributes information to interested or alert citizens, a poster reaches out to grab those who might otherwise pass it by.

Susan Sontag

Benedict Anderson ‘Imagined Communities’

what ‘makes people love and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name’

http://tinyurl.com/imaginedcommunities

The boundaries between the civilian and the combatant soldier were blurred during the war, with ‘propagandist attempts to personify the entire population as heroic’.

PhD thesis, quoting Paris, M., Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850-2000, 2000, p.201.

The “Citizen-Soldier”

Ministry of Information

• Central governmental publicity machine

• Formed September 1939

• Tell the citizen ‘clearly and swiftly what he is to do, where he is to do it, how he is to do it and what he should not do’.

RURAL LIFE V URBAN DECAY

Beauty in Destruction

CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES

“Pictures Which Hurt”

Abram Games (1914-1996), War Office

1940: Infantry ‘an understanding of what

the ranker thinks, does and, perhaps more important, does not do’, as the army mentality was different from that of the ‘outside world’.

1941: Recruiting Posters for RAC

1942: “Official War Office Poster Designer”

DEATH TO THE ENEMY

HEALTH & SAFETY

HEADING TO THE FUTURE

The day will come when the joybells will ring again throughout Europe, and when victorious nations, masters not only of their foes but of themselves, will plan and build in justice, in tradition, and in freedom..' The Rt. Hon. Winston S. Chuchill, C.H., M.P. Jan. 20th, 1940

1945-46

Conclusions

Death conspicuous by its ever-present absence.

Variety of campaigns Mixed responses

‘Harsher’ images more accepted in the armed forces despite the notion that the civilian was part of the ‘fighting front’.

Thank you for your time…

QUESTIONS?