BBC

BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), an independent organization established in 1922. Its television broadcasts, which had begun in 1936, closed down on 1 September 1939, but through radio the BBC played an important role in subversive warfare and in boosting the morale of servicemen and the civilian population. Its monitoring service kept track of foreign broadcasts and it had its own war correspondents. By the time of the Normandy landings in June 1944 (see OVERLORD) a special ‘War Reporting Unit’ had been formed to supply eye-witness accounts of the fighting in Normandy and later elsewhere in north-west Europe.

Broadcasting propaganda to Allied and neutral countries via the BBC was guided by the Ministry of Information, while broadcasts to enemy and occupied countries were organized by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). By the end of 1943 the BBC was broadcasting in 45 languages and the broadcasting services throughout the British Empire retransmitted many of its programmes. It was over the BBC that Chamberlain announced that war had been declared, that Churchill spoke to the nation, that de Gaulle made his rallying call to his countrymen on 18 June 1940, and that King George VI read his annual Christmas message to his people. SOE also arranged for the broadcasting, on a regular basis, of coded messages to resistance groups in occupied countries.

Initially, domestic broadcasting was restricted to one wavelength (called the Home Service) so that if one transmitter had to be shut down—because it might help guide German bombers to their targets—other transmitters were able to take over. However, the Forces Programme, using two wavelengths, which was started in January 1940 to entertain troops in France, soon attracted larger civilian audiences in the UK than the Home Service. During the course of the war programmes included such diverse favourites as The Brains Trust, Tommy Handley's ITMA (It's That Man Again), which by 1942 had become as much a national institution as the BBC itself, and Vera Lynn, ‘the sweetheart of the forces’ singing in her programme Sincerely Yours.

But it was the news bulletins which had the largest audiences and their reliability, both at home and in occupied Europe, became renowned. They were read by broadcasters (such as Alvar Liddell) who always announced their names at the start of each bulletin so that listeners could become familiar with their voices and would know that the source genuinely was the BBC. The commitment of these bulletins to the truth, slanted though it was by the need to sustain morale, probably made them the most effective propaganda the BBC broadcast during the war years.

Bibliography

Briggs, A. , The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 3: The War of Words (Oxford, 1970).
Hickman, T. , What Did You Do in the War, Auntie? The BBC at War (London, 1995).