Today’s post is the ninth weekly blog post I have done and I am excited to share that the podcast is going smoothly, kind of. Things are coming together and looking pretty good so we’ll see how it turns out soon. In this post however I will be talking about something cool I learned more about this week that relates back to art. 

When we were going through Canada’s contributions to the war we looked at a lot of posters and advertising that said things like “ support you men” and “ do your part”. The images were always different depending on what they were adverting, but the message to help our troops stayed the same.

This propaganda really interested me for some reason. At that time these were main factors in convincing people to sign up for the military and also who would support them. There strategies were some what straight forward, they would be aimed at young men or supporting those who are on the battle field. They would use phrases like “ protect what’s yours” and do you part by buying this or that”. Some were also targeted at farmers or those who could aid Britain with supplies, these posters would ask for them to send as much of their crop as possible as in the UK they were slowly running out of food and ammo.

That is just what I thought about the posters, but lets look at what others say about this method.

According to Wikipedia and Imperial War Museum Britain and many other countries as well used propaganda in many forms to influence the people into supporting the war effort. Some media included newspapers, posters, film, and radio. The day after Britain joined the war, they started creating all these types of propaganda. In 1939 they created three posters, one telling people to defend their freedom, one was about keeping positive, and the last one is still well known to this day as the “keep calm and carry on” poster.

Other posters asked people to sign up to volunteer for work as well as warning them of possible dangers. These two below were ones I liked. The first one called “Mr.Hitler” is a poster about what hitler “ wants to know” with a title of “ careless talk cost lives”. The poster talks about how talking about important information could be very dangerous to everyone and encourages people to take caution about they are talking about. I thought this one was cleverly made and makes a strong point as well. The next on his a bold poster which asks the women of Britain to sign up for work in the factories. As we know women had an incredibly important role in the war along with the soldiers, they took over the work when the men went away and did a very good job. The colours in this poster are very eye catching and gives a sense of empowerment which is why I think it is a good poster. 

As mentioned posters were just one form of propaganda. Others like the radio were used just as effectively throughout the war. For example as stated in the Wikipedia article, British victories during the war were announced on the radio to all of the public to keep a positive morale, and they were also broadcasted to Germany to lower morale over there.

These tactical strategies are what allowed Britain to win the war and without them who knows what would have happened. These were some parts of the discussion we had this week which I thought was cool.

That’s all for now.