I love rummaging through the archives and the best part is finding those unexpected items tucked into a folio that seem random but provide a totally different perspective on the research topic. It’s like Clio has placed an easter egg. Last year I found a copy of the pantomime script written and performed by the Rome-area Army Welfare Service at Christmas 1944 stuck between pages of dry meeting minutes. Last weekend it was a note and article shared with Ronald Adams, Adjutant General (AG) attempting to explain the psychology of the German people and their will to fight. What could Britain learn from the Germans? Would it involve having to deal with, pardon my language, ‘morale’?
The news in April 1942 was depressing for Britain. The Empire was contracting rapidly with the fall of Hong Kong, the loss of Malaya, the surrender of Singapore, and the Japanese advance into Burma. The British Army did not seem to be able to get the hang of fighting and was retreating from Rommel’s counter offensive in North Africa. The low levels of morale was highlighted in the Censor Reports, which showed that 45% of letters from troops serving overseas mentioned being ‘browned off’.[1] More worryingly perhaps, the Morale Report showed that there was a distinct lack of solidarity among the troops serving at home,
‘the ordinary soldier does not fully identify himself with the Army; he looks with detachment upon it and those who control it, and thinks of those in authority, whether political or military, as his governors rather than as his leaders.’[2]
One of the causes for this feeling of dislocation with the military, the report surmises, is a lack of a reason to fight,
‘the nearest thing that the ordinary soldier has to a conscious ‘war aim’ is to make sure that he will have a home and a job and what he regards as a fair deal after the war.’
The new conscripts needed something positive to be fighting for, not simply to maintain the status quo. The report warns that if the troops are not given a better reason to fight, they may choose ‘to adopt the views and remedies of extreme political parties, and to find the answer to all their questions in Russia, about which it is evident that they know very little and think a great deal.’ The Ministry of Information reported that a growing apathy towards the war was apparent in the civilian population and there were worries that this could spread to the troops.[3] The lack of military victories increased the pressure on the Services to try to provide an answer to the question, ‘What’s the point of it all?’. Napoleon’s maxim that ‘The moral is to the physical as three is to one’ was very much on the AG’s mind.
The messy topic of morale had to be grasped firmly and better understood. In a note from the Army Council in February 1942 they blamed the military failures on morale:
“The loss of Malaya, Hong Kong, and the withdrawal in Burma, are all due to the low morale of our troops. There are many causes and they must be set right. This war is going to be won or lost on morale. We are too apt to leave the problem alone. Morale is a psychological problem like sex, and therefore the Britisher is almost ashamed to talk about it.’[4]
No talk of morale please, we’re British!
Clio’s easter egg was an article from the British Medical Journal titled, Psychology as an Instrument of Military Strategy shared among the committee members on 23 April 1942.[5] The article, written by R.D. Gillespie, presents the findings of the American Committee for National Morale on their analysis of Germany’s use of psychology to mobilise their population to provide a reason to fight. Tracing this mobilisation back to their 1918 defeat and the nation’s desire for revenge, it argues that there was a concerted effort in Germany to build morale from 1929 with the introduction of psychological methods into the Army. Aspects of indoctrination via political training, teaching history, and the harnessing of a racial and mythological ideals are discussed, but most surprisingly, the article does not link the will to fight solely to the Nazis. It quotes Feder in 1920, who said ‘The form of State best suited to the German character is civilian power centralized in the hands of one supreme leader.’ Regardless of the accuracy of this assessment of the Germany’s will to fight, the article highlights that
‘The preparations of civilians is regarded as almost as important as the preparation of fighting troops for total warfare.’
Despite the systematic indoctrination of ‘might is right’, Germany’s reliance on the SS to monitor and intimidate the population is cited by the article as proof of the inherent weakness in this use of psychology.
So could Germany teach the British anything about morale? The covering note that accompanied the article was thankfully skeptical,
‘our national upbringing certainly renders a large proportion of the methods adopted by the Germans unsuitable of application to our troops and people.’
However, the note does make the point that Germany has an important advantage over Britain in respect to morale because
“the Germans can emphasise the material benefits to be derived from conquest and the certainty of vengeance, with the disappearance of Germany as a nation in case of defeat, whilst we are up against our ‘island psychology’ which has never had to visualise the horrors of war and the necessity of making our incentive to victory a moral rather than material one.”
This is a theme that is taken up by Fennell, who describes the ‘ideological vacuum’ in Britain during the war.[6] In his essay ‘War & Society’, Neiberg (2006) points to the social and cultural beliefs of a soldier as being central to their reason to fight and goes on to argue the need for militaries to recognise these values (or at least operate within them).[7] The growing awareness of the importance of morale led to a range of programmes, and policies at home and overseas to provide a good reason to fight. One such morale boosting event was arranged by ENSA in September 1942, the free Cathedral Steps concert at St Paul’s in London (see my article, Providing a Reason to Fight). Perhaps more significantly in terms of filling that ‘ideological vacuum’, the Beveridge report was published at the end of 1942 with its outline of reforms for a future welfare state, but that’s another story…
I look forward to finding more Clio easter eggs rummaging through the archives in the coming months!
[1] Jonathan Fennell, Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War, Armies of the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 157.
[2] ‘WO 193/453: Morale Committee Papers, 1942 Feb.-1945 Oct’, WO 193/453: Morale Committee Papers, 1942 Feb.-1945 Oct. Morale Report May-July 1942.
[3] ‘TNA WO 193/453’.
[4] ‘WO 193/423 : Maintenance of British Morale’, WO 193/423.
[5] ‘TNA WO 193/423’. Memo dated 25th February 1942 from Executive Committee of the Army Council.
[6] Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 234.
[7] Neiberg, p. 48.