Half the battle
Half the battle: Civilian morale in Britain during the Second World War
ROBERT MACKAY
Copyright Date: 2002
Published by: Manchester University Press
Pages: 288
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155j90r
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Half the battle
Book Description:

How well did civilian morale stand up to the pressures of total war and what factors were important to it? In this important work, Robert Mackay offers a robust rejection of recent contentions that civilian morale fell a long way short of the favourable picture presented at the time and in hundreds of books and films ever since. Whilst acknowledging that some negative attitudes and behaviours existed – panic and defeatism, ration-cheating and black-marketeering, looting, absenteeism and strikes – the author argues that these involved a very small minority of the population. In fact, most people behaved well, and this should be the real measure of civilian morale, rather than the failings of the few who behaved badly. This book shows that before the War the official prognosis was pessimistic but that measures to bolster morale were taken nevertheless, in particular with regard to protection against air raids. An examination of a range of indicative factors concludes that morale fluctuated but was in the main good, right until the end of the War. In explaining this phenomenon, due credit is accorded to government policies for the maintenance of morale, but special emphasis is given to the 'invisible' chain of patriotic feeling that held the nation together during its time of trial. This book will give students of the Second World War new insights into how and why ordinary people coped with the intolerable.

eISBN: 978-1-84779-020-0
Subjects: History
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
  3. INTRODUCTION
    INTRODUCTION (pp. 1-14)

    IN HISTORICAL WRITING the term ‘civilian morale’ is often used as freely as if its meaning were unproblematic, its definition unambiguous. In reality the term is susceptible to a range of meanings. Paul Addison described it as ‘the woolliest concept of the war’.² Since it was in common use in the period under discussion, it seems appropriate to begin by asking what people at the time meant when they talked about civilian morale.

    In the wartime Ministry of Information there was a section, the Home Intelligence Division, whose principal task was to monitor the state of public morale. While the...

  4. Part I PROSPECT AND REALITY
    • 1 War imagined
      1 War imagined (pp. 17-44)

      IT WAS WISH fulfilment rather than realism that drove the phrase ‘a war to end wars’ into the public consciousness during the unprecedented slaughter of 1914–18. When that nightmare was at last over, there was a natural human desire to believe its like could never again be contemplated, that it really had been ‘a war to end war’. For a decade or more a traumatized mankind was in denial about its historic complacency towards the use of war as an instrument of policy. Pacifism became a mass movement of international dimensions. Millions of people, seasoned politicians among them, placed...

    • 2 War experienced: September 1939–May 1941
      2 War experienced: September 1939–May 1941 (pp. 45-90)

      THE HOLOCAUST did not happen. Although air raid sirens sounded in London within minutes of the expiry of Britain’s ultimatum to Germany, it proved a false alarm. And the falseness of the alarm persisted. For a full eight months, until the Anglo-French expedition to Norway, apart from isolated engagements at sea, both sides held their fire. No massed flights of German bombers appeared above Britain’s cities to batter the citizens into submission. The ‘Phoney War’, as it was called, was a big anti-climax, an absolute confounding of everyone’s expectations. If there was a problem of public morale it was nothing...

    • 3 War experienced: 1941–45
      3 War experienced: 1941–45 (pp. 91-138)

      WITH THE ENDING of the Big Blitz in May 1941 the war as experienced on the home front changed and with it the nature of the challenge to civilian morale. Instead of living with the pervasive threat of invasion and the daily experience of violent assault from the air, the country entered a period of improved outlook abroad and relative quiet at home. The bombing slackened off and return to a semblance of normality was possible. Britain was no longer alone in her fight: first the Soviet Union and then the USA became allies. The fear that the war would...

  5. Part II EXPLANATIONS
    • 4 Persuading the people
      4 Persuading the people (pp. 141-185)

      MANY OFFICIAL and semi-official words and images were devoted to sustaining civilian morale during the Second World War. The attempt to explain the state of mind of the British people in this period might begin, therefore, with a consideration of the nature of these words and images, the thinking that lay behind them and what effect, if any, they had on the targeted audience. As discussed in Chapter 1, the importance of modern mass communications to the state of public morale in time of war was recognized by the Government of the day in 1935 in its initiative to create,...

    • 5 Easing the strain
      5 Easing the strain (pp. 186-220)

      THE CAPACITY OF HUMAN BEINGS not under military discipline to withstand danger and endure deprivation had been put to the test in the First World War. Governments could take some comfort from the remarkable results of that test. Yet there was at the same time a warning in the experience: the capacity had limits. When tested beyond those limits the result that could be expected was at best crippling apathy and defeatism, at worst revolution. In Britain, as shown by Stephen Taylor’s views (discussed at the beginning of Chapter 4), this reality was well understood by those in charge of...

    • 6 Beveridge and all that
      6 Beveridge and all that (pp. 221-247)

      RECONSTRUCTION AND SOCIAL REFORM plans, it might be thought, were an obvious means of sustaining the morale of the nation: a vision of a more benign future during the necessarily arduous and stressful struggle that occupied the immediate present. Richard Titmuss suggested that in the summer of 1940 the nation’s leaders consciously or unconsciously recognized that assurances of social reconstruction were, indeed, an essential ingredient in the strategy to keep morale high and keep the nation united.¹ Until 1943, however, the Government did not make any formal initiatives in this direction, and did not make peace aims – as distinct...

  6. CONCLUSION The invisible chain
    CONCLUSION The invisible chain (pp. 248-266)

    IN THE FIRST PART of this study an attempt was made to consider afresh the familiar civilian experience of the Second World War in Britain with a view to assessing how well the morale of the ordinary people came through that time of trial. That it did not break was not the point at issue – no one has ever suggested it did. The issue was, simply, where on the continuum from ‘low’ to ‘high’, from ‘poor’ to ‘good’ would one, in retrospect, place the spirit and behaviour of the people during those six years.

    This investigation arrived at an...

  7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
    BIBLIOGRAPHY (pp. 267-274)
  8. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 275-282)
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