It requires strong motivation to make normal, industrious, peace-loving peoples engage wholeheartedly in war against other peoples like themselves. It requires a fierce emotional reason to persuade man joyously to kill his fellow man, or be killed by him; or woman to take pride and encourage her son or husband in taking life or sacrificing life. It requires a unity and steadfastness of purpose to make civilians endure the hardships, privations and tremendous effort required to maintain the war effort
Propaganda is the tool Governments employ to persuade their nations to support them in waging war, and to justify to the rest of the world the rightness and fairness of a particular country’s entry into, and continued waging of, war. Propaganda is necessary in two phases: firstly, when war is declared, the Government has to have the active approval of the populace to set the war machinery effectively and enthusiastically in motion. Secondly, propaganda is needed not only to maintain the effort of troops and civilians, but also to keep up morale when things go badly or last for a long time. Machineries for the dissemination of propaganda were set up with varying degrees of efficiency in the main combatant countries. In his postwar memoirs, General Ludendorff credited the British machinery with far more effect than the German, to the extent of seeing it as the Allies’ most powerful weapon. As Britain had no popular emotional reason to go to war with Germany, it was therefore immediately necessary to set up an organization to create such a reason artificially. Asquith, followed by Lloyd George, experimented with a series of Bureaux and Departments, with a rapid turnover of Directors. These included the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Colonel John Buchan, Beaverbrook, Northcliffe and Sir Edward Carson. Germany was slower to act, showed a total lack of cohesion between the various departments involved, military and civil, and frequently put out contradictory stories as we shall see.