Dr Bex Lewis, Research Fellow in Social Media and Online LearningCODEC, University of Durham

Depicting Death at WarSOCREL Annual Conference11th April 2013

http://ww2poster.co.uk @drbexl

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’.

Lewis, R., Unpublished PhD thesis (2004), quoting Noakes, L., War and the British: Gender and National Identity, 1939-91, 1998, p.48.

The nature of warfare…

… increasingly technologised … increasingly depersonalised

World War I: The Heroic Individual

World War I: Sport

The Spanish Civil War (1936)

• 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 SontagRead more: http://j.mp/ww2posterch2

In Situ: March 1943

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

Citizen Warriors

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

• Lewis, R., Unpublished PhD thesis, quoting Paris, M., Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850-2000, 2000, p.201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

http://ww2poster.co.uk/2009/04/1939-3-posters/

http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/theartofwar/

RURAL LIFE V URBAN DECAY

Beauty in Destruction

“Pictures Which Hurt”

Fougasse, 1940

The Human Cost?

Too much reality?

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”

Individual Responsibility?

Careless Talk in the Army

DEATH TO THE ENEMY

Depicting the Enemy

Bloody Hitler…

Enemy Ally

HEALTH & SAFETY

DANGER in the Factory (1)

DANGER in the Factory (2)

VD: A Scourge of War?

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

Post-War• “I am grateful to

your correspondents who have pointed out that the ubiquitous poster is intended to represent a widow, as I have been labouring under the misapprehension that it depicted an actual victim.”

• Mass-Observation

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?

http://ww2poster.co.uk@drbexl @ww2poster