VE-Day - British Newspapers

VE Day as reported by British newspapers: relief, joy and a saucy comic strip:

In 1945, Britons were the world’s most enthusiastic newspaper readers. The habit of buying daily national newspapers extended throughout every social class. About 80% of British families read one of the mass circulation London dailies and two-thirds of middle-class families also bought a serious title such as The Times, Manchester Guardian or The Scotsman.

The BBC is rightly given the lion’s share of credit for bolstering the British wartime effort on the Home Front. But newspapers also served massive audiences of engaged readers and, crucially, they could and did perform roles the BBC could not. Newspapers were better able to hold the wartime government to account on issues that mattered to ordinary Britons. Examples of this include coverage of the overseas evacuation of children, air raid shelter policy and food rationing.

Some also brought a sense of irreverent fun to alleviate the hardship of what the Daily Mirror, most successful of the wartime titles, described on VE Day as “five years eight months and four days of the bloodiest war in history”.

But such candour about the endurance that brought victory was not the element in the Mirror’s editorial mix that did most to attract left-leaning servicemen and made it the most popular daily for Britain’s fighting men and their families.

That was sex appeal delivered with a dose of demotic humour in the form of the cartoon beauty Jane. The cartoon strip had been created in 1932 by the cartoonist Norman Pett as “Jane’s Journal, the Diary of a Bright Young Thing”. Pett had originally used his wife Mary as the model for Jane but as the war advanced the role was taken over by former champion swimmer and model Chrystabel Leighton-Porter.

She became a potent symbol of British cheerfulness and Winston Churchill described her as the country’s “secret weapon”.

...

Throughout their reporting on May 8 1945, newspapers reflected public frustration that the official announcement of the end of hostilities in Europe had been postponed. The surrender of all German forces had been agreed at Reims on May 7. But the chief of the German high command, Field-Marshall Keitel, did not sign the formal instrument of unconditional surrender until shortly before midnight on May 8.

https://theconversation.com/ve-day-as-reported-by-british-newspapers-relief-joy-and-a-saucy-comic-strip-137906

Vers l'armée de métier (1934)

.de Gaulle against Maginot line; Vers l'armée de métier; Vichy France > .

22-7-26 France's Hx & Geostrategic Choices in Central Europe - gtbt > .

22-11-7 Charles de Gaulle | Vers l'armée de métier (subs) - Katz > . skip > .

23-5-14 French Defence Strategy & Rearmament - strategic autonomy, Hx - Perun > .

Vers l'armée de métier est un ouvrage de stratégie militaire écrit par Charles de Gaulle, paru en 1934.

Après la Première Guerre mondiale, le pacifisme gagne la société française, et l'idée de la supériorité de l'armée française se répand dans le peuple comme dans les élites de l'armée. Mais cette supériorité est illusoire, et la victoire de 1918 empêche de voir les changements majeurs apportés dans la conduite de la guerre par l'apparition des chars. L'infanterie est toujours au cœur de l'outil militaire français, alors que les chars ne sont pas vus comme une arme autonome.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vers_l%27arm%C3%A9e_de_m%C3%A9tier .

War Leaders versus Press

23-2-8 [Propaganda - Effective Emotional Manipulation] - OBF > .

Throughout the war, Churchill took little interest in government propaganda from a strategic point of view, since he believed that Hitler could be beaten only by armed force, not by words. However, he took an intense interest in how the press was depicting the government and him personally, amounting to an obsession.

Churchill would often phone the Ministry Of Information at midnight and demand that copies of the next day’s newspapers be sent over to Downing Street or Chequers for him to read in bed. He would scour each page for reporting that he considered disloyal and complain bitterly to Minister of Information Brendan Bracken – his former Parliamentary Private Secretary – who would then have to smooth things over with editors.

Churchill shared this dislike of the press with other members of his coalition War Cabinet, including Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Home Secretary Herbert Morrison. On several occasions Churchill and Morrison threatened full blown government regulation and censorship and on one occasion threatened to close down the Daily Mirror completely.

http://thecasualobserver.co.za/churchill-lady-astor-classic-insults-and-witticisms/ .

Weathermen

Cold War Propaganda ... "stop war by killing fellow countrymen" ...

.Student Rioters: Who Were The Weather Underground? | War/Peace - Time > .

Radical student activists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn who founded the anti-Vietnam war group "The Weathermen" at the University of Michigan in 1969 and who's members carried out two dozen bombings of government building including an attempt to bomb the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, several major banks and police stations through out the US.

The Weather Underground was a radical left wing militant organization first active in 1969, founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. Originally known as the Weathermen, the group was organized as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) national leadership. Officially known as the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) beginning in 1970, the group's express political goal was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow American imperialism.

The FBI described the WUO as a domestic terrorist group, with revolutionary positions characterized by black power and opposition to the Vietnam War. The WUO took part in domestic attacks such as the jailbreak of Timothy Leary in 1970. The "Days of Rage" was the WUO's first riot in October 1969 in Chicago, timed to coincide with the trial of the Chicago Seven. In 1970, the group issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government under the name "Weather Underground Organization".

In the 1970s, the WUO conducted a bombing campaign targeting government buildings and several banks. Some attacks were preceded by evacuation warnings, along with threats identifying the particular matter that the attack was intended to protest. Three members of the group were killed in an accidental Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, but none were killed in any of the bombings. The WUO communiqué issued in connection with the bombing of the United States Capitol on March 1, 1971 indicated that it was "in protest of the U.S. invasion of Laos". The WUO asserted that its May 19, 1972 bombing of the Pentagon was "in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid in Hanoi". The WUO announced that its January 29, 1975 bombing of the United States Department of State building was "in response to the escalation in Vietnam".

The WUO began to disintegrate after the United States reached a peace accord in Vietnam in 1973,[8][page needed] and it was defunct by 1977.

The group took its name from Bob Dylan's lyric, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", from the song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (1965). That Dylan line was also the title of a position paper distributed at an SDS convention in Chicago on June 18, 1969. This founding document called for a "White fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other radical movements to achieve "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and form a classless communist world".

We Can Do It! - iconic poster (43-2)

"We Can Do It!" is an American WW2 wartime poster produced by J. Howard Miller in 1943 for Westinghouse Electric as an inspirational image to boost female worker morale.

The poster was not widely seen during WW2. It was rediscovered in the early 1980s and widely reproduced in many forms, often called "We Can Do It!" but also called "Rosie the Riveter" after the iconic figure of a strong female war production worker. The "We Can Do It!" image was used to promote feminism and other political issues beginning in the 1980s. The image made the cover of the Smithsonian magazine in 1994 and was fashioned into a US first-class mail stamp in 1999. It was incorporated in 2008 into campaign materials for several American politicians, and was reworked by an artist in 2010 to celebrate the first woman becoming prime minister of Australia. The poster is one of the ten most-requested images at the National Archives and Records Administration.

After its rediscovery, observers often assumed that the image was always used as a call to inspire women workers to join the war effort. However, during the war the image was strictly internal to Westinghouse, displayed only during February 1943, and was not for recruitment but to exhort already-hired women to work harder. People have seized upon the uplifting attitude and apparent message to remake the image into many different forms, including self empowerment, campaign promotion, advertising, and parodies.

After she saw the Smithsonian cover image in 1994, Geraldine Hoff Doyle mistakenly said that she was the subject of the poster. Doyle thought that she had also been captured in a wartime photograph of a woman factory worker, and she innocently assumed that this photo inspired Miller's poster. Conflating her as "Rosie the Riveter", Doyle was honored by many organizations including the Michigan Women's Historical Center and Hall of Fame. However, in 2015, the woman in the wartime photograph was identified as then 20-year-old Naomi Parker, working in early 1942 before Doyle had graduated from high school. Doyle's notion that the photograph inspired the poster cannot be proved or disproved, so neither Doyle nor Parker can be confirmed as the model for "We Can Do It!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Do_It! .

Myth of Rosie the Riveter - On the Homefront - WW2 > .
Was Rosie the Riveter a Real Person? > .

Rosie the Riveter - Rockwell (43-5) ..
Rosies - Women in Manufacturing ..
We Can Do It! - iconic poster (43-2) ..