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This chapter focuses on the reorganization of British propaganda and military intelligence in 1942 following the creation and growth of the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). It discusses the impact of the PWE on the European service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and highlights the problem in the operation of the PWE. It explains that there were differences within the PWE and the absence of Director-General Bruce Lockhart were often sharp divergences of viewpoint.

This chapter establishes whether the different forms of British white propaganda were consistent. The print and broadcast treatment of a series of key events ranging from the British attack upon the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir to the D-Day landings in Normandy are compared. The internal planning by Department Electra House, Special Operations Executive propaganda section, Political Warfare Executive and the British Broadcasting Corporation is also evaluated. The propagandists divided the French into three: the apathetic, the anti-British and the pro-British. Adolf Hitler's invasion of the USSR caused pro-Soviet feeling to sweep through Great Britain. Leaflets continued to be dropped after D-Day, but their role was limited. The British propaganda organisations overcame the issues that they encountered, whether these came from objectives bringing them into conflict with other bodies prosecuting the war effort or arose from problems encountered in what propaganda had to report.

This chapter describes machinery in order to show the creation and development of the British propaganda system, first presenting the background provided by the First World War and inter-war treatment of propaganda and its consequences on planning prior to 1939. It then discusses the development of the propaganda organisation after the outbreak of the Second World War. The legacy of First World War activities affected attitudes towards propaganda and influenced inter-war British planning. The establishment of Political Warfare Executive (PWE) was ‘the logical outcome of the initial lack of proper planning for enemy propaganda before World War Two broke out’. PWE's black propaganda to France was less offensive, but secrecy remained important. Different elements of 1930s planning were carried out in isolation from each other, so that only after the outbreak of the Second World War could the conflicts created be revealed and resolved.

This chapter investigates the gyrations of British propaganda and media from the 1941 forging of the Anglo-Soviet alliance, through the wartime honeymoon and into the post-war deterioration of the relationship, and also addresses Britain's acknowledgement of a Cold War in January 1948. The Foreign Office thought that the regular flow of news from the upcoming Paris Peace Conference would continue the trend and do much of the anti-Soviet work for them. The failure of the London Conference of Foreign Ministers in late 1947 was the justification and signal for the new policy. By early 1948, the British news media had created a frame in which the Soviet Union was a brutal, untrustworthy adversary, which shaped the news that created the Cold War consensus. At that point, the government created the Information Research Department to spread this consensus overseas and reinforce it at home.

This chapter addresses the year 1955, just after the thaw following Joseph Stalin's death but before the Anglo-French debacle at Suez, which led to a revamping of Britain's global propaganda strategy. The traditional role of London as a centre for world news allowed British propaganda to fit more or less unobtrusively into existing channels, to be more likely to be accepted as legitimate news and thus influence the creation of common sense overseas. Finally, the fact-based propaganda of the Information Research Department and its cool, detached tone blended well into the Anglo-American journalistic tradition of facticity and objectivity. In the interest of propaganda, the British Foreign Office had eroded national media barriers based on routine and tradition, subsidised international news on hard-to-find topics and encouraged international media connections that served its interests.

This chapter considers the reactions of the French people, the Vichy authorities and the Germans to British white propaganda. The methods of distribution used by ordinary French people to further circulate British propaganda, the means employed by the authorities in France to prevent them and more general views about propaganda are explained. It seems unlikely that the Vichy postal censors opened all correspondence, so some may have got through simply by chance. The evidence of collection and circulation shows that the leaflets were carried out covertly. The evidence from France was almost entirely favourable in its judgement of leaflet propaganda and British Broadcasting Corporation broadcasts. German and Vichy French measures to prevent people from reading, collecting, hearing and circulating British propaganda indicate the authorities' fears about the pervasive influence that it could have.

This chapter discusses how Britain came to dominate the world news system in the nineteenth century and to develop covert and overt propaganda and information management techniques in two world wars. World War II saw many of the same British propaganda techniques in neutral countries, especially the USA in 1939–41. The British government was deeply committed to maintaining Britain's great power status after the war, and a large-scale media influence was almost as essential as military power in achieving that goal. The British Broadcasting Corporation emerged from World War II with a greatly expanded audience and a good reputation for objectivity and truth-telling. British journalists were conditioned after World War II. They were less likely to accept the staff of propagandists, and public information officers that stayed on after the war as government public relations became institutionalised through such offices as the Central Office of Information.

This chapter mentions the key questions posed throughout this study and confronts the central question: was the British propaganda campaign directed at France between 1940 and 1944 an effective and well-directed use of resources? British propaganda machinery was not as efficient or well organised as it might have been, and certainly not before the formation of Political Warfare Executive in September 1941. The distribution methods and their effectiveness in ensuring how widely propaganda was received is perhaps the most crucial area of all: no matter how good the propaganda itself, without the means of delivery, it could have no impact. Propaganda created costs for the German and Vichy authorities. Leaflets were almost certainly used for that purpose – indeed, the German and Vichy authorities suggested that they should be.