• Sceptic Isle by Steven Casey (Oxford University Press £26.99, 392pp)

The paradox of the Second World War is that to spend more than five years defending freedom and crushing the Nazis, we resorted to draconian measures – ‘fighting a war for democracy, while threatening to silence dissent’, as we read in this book.

Morale was a constant concern. To keep the populace buoyant, and to avoid blind panic and despair, the government insisted on withholding grim statistics. The actual horrors were suppressed, ‘surrounded in great secrecy’.

Dunkirk, for example, was not reported as a humiliating retreat. It was instead ‘a miracle of deliverance, achieved by valour, perfect discipline, and faultless service’. Churchill’s fight-them-on-the-beaches rhetoric rubbed in this heroic, steadfast interpretation of what was virtually the Army’s annihilation.

All this sort of thing was masterminded by the Ministry of Information, the headquarters of the propaganda industry, which became the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Safety first: little girl fits her doll with a gas mask in 1938

If that sounds sinister, it’s worth remembering that at the time, on the BBC, in radio comedies with 16 million listeners, such as It’s That Man Again, officialdom and bureaucracy was affectionately mocked as the Ministry of Aggravation and Mysteries, inhabited by characters called Sir Short Supply and Colonel Chinstrap.

You’d not have found any equivalents in Nazi Germany – anyone deviating from strict militaristic ideals ‘ran the risk of torture by the Gestapo’, says Steven Casey.

Yet laughter, the lampooning of bland-faced establishment figures and public officers, and the satirising of our institutions, was crucial to morale. Posters and leaflets told people to ‘Keep a Cheerful British Smile on Your Face’, to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’.

The schemes worked. Pots and pans, even egg whisks, were collected to be melted down for Spitfires and Hurricanes, as if for a jolly jape.

Chamberlain may have been flying back and forth to Munich for chats with the fuhrer, but the mood at home was belligerent, with little support for appeasement. The public was in favour of conscription. The Home Guard, or Dad’s Army, ‘an increasingly efficient military force’, received half a million volunteers.

Looks can be deceiving: A female member of Air Raid Precautions staff applies her lipstick between emergency calls, circa 1940

A full year before the actual declaration of war, people were fitted for gas masks. Anti-aircraft and coastal defence units were mobilised, as was the fleet. The RAF cancelled leave. Trenches were dug in parks. Plans were made for children to be evacuated.

Once hostilities began, to continue this idea of an Ealing Comedy England, reports were vague and misleading. Names of casualties, and the precise numbers of those killed, were not to be divulged. The BBC played records rather than tell the public that 5,730 people had been killed in the first three weeks of the Blitz. ‘The result was a sanitised view of the Blitz that did little to impress those who had personally witnessed the grim reality.’

By September 1941, 43,675 civilians and 48,973 men in uniform had been killed. When 503 tons of bombs fell on Coventry, a cordon of soldiers was placed ten miles around the city to stop reporters.

Newsreel footage was censored. Photographing air-raid damage was not allowed – this despite, on the Clyde, 35,000 of the 47,000 inhabitants now being homeless.

The Ministry of Information, on Churchill’s orders, did not wish the public to know ‘distressing details’. News on damage to British ships was forbidden, as were reports of the German U-boats’ success in disrupting our food supplies. We were not to know about the torpedoing of aircraft carriers. Official briefings were ‘relentlessly upbeat’. Meanwhile, Luftwaffe losses were massively exaggerated.

When Paris was to be occupied, ‘people were in complete ignorance’ of the situation, i.e. that Britain might be invaded next.

It was altogether patronising and condescending, the way the Establishment and those in authority assumed the general public was ‘quite unprepared for the shock of realisation of the true position’.

Posters were a crucial edition to wartime propaganda

The Holocaust went unreported, on the grounds that stories of the atrocities came from ‘sources that could not immediately be verified’. Rumours of concentration camps were officially dismissed as ‘exaggerated, if not fabricated’.

It took Richard Dimbleby to break down in tears as he began speaking into a BBC microphone in Belsen to wake everybody up: ‘I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom.’

But still in cinemas or in the newspapers, we had tales of the bombed Swansea, which ‘has its chin up and is able to take it’. Taking a direct hit was another excuse for bouncing back: ‘In the kitchen, among the debris, wives contrived to cook their husbands’ meals.’

The reality of being a Land Girl was never like the sunny images on the recruiting posters. Rationing meant genuine hardship, but the Dig For Victory campaign made it seem everybody was merrily harvesting their own spuds and carrots – and the number of allotments did go from 815,000 in 1939 to 1,400,000 by 1943.

Homegrown: The number of allotments did go from 815,000 in 1939 to 1,400,000 by 1943

I misread the title of this book as The Septic Isle, and whilst I knew the reference was to Shakespeare’s ‘sceptred isle’, I thought it was going to be a book about infections. And in a sense, it is: the contamination of truth, the inflammation of the body politic when all aspects of existence are subjected to complete censorship.

But it is important to note that the government’s propaganda and censorship operation was in the interests of our war effort.

Steven Casey has produced a brilliant and richly detailed study, deeply thought-provoking, of how narratives of the war were shaped and presented; how the public was psychologically manipulated, massaged and fooled.