When the Wehrmacht was defeated at Stalingrad, or the IJN defeated at Midway, did the average German or Japanese citizen know about it?
Did the Allies also try to exaggerate victories and minimize defeats?
(Even if the Nazis or Japanese wanted to present an illusion of victory, at some point after the tide turned it would be in the regime’s interests to let the citizenry know about the imminent Allied threat closing in tighter and tighter on them by the day?)
“In war, truth is the first casualty.”
The Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote that about 2,500 years ago, and things really haven’t gotten that much better.
The U.S. had the Office of War Information, which was in charge of both disseminating actual information and generating propaganda. This led to a staff revolt and several key resignations in the middle of the War.
In Germany, the flow of information was tightly controlled by the Ministry of Propaganda. Obviously, people saw things like trains going toward the battlefronts full of soldiers and coming back empty.
Oddly enough,the Germans heard news of their surrender before the Allies did.
Japan, being an island nation, was even more isolated. Japan officially censored its press long before the War. Japan’s Information Bureau officially blacklisted journalists. In 1941 the government began censoring mail. By the end of the War the few newspapers left published only official notices.
The average German certainly knew about the defeat at Stalingrad; Goebbels made a propaganda meal out of it, and it was the occasion for and focus of his notorious Sportpalast speech. The principal theme of Goebbels’ home front propaganda was that Germany was in terrible danger, and running that theme is not consistent with presenting the progress of the war as an unbroken series of German victories.
More info on Stalingrad: Before the end the news about Stalingrad got sparse and stopped entirely. An intelligent German could infer it wasn’t going to end well for them. But, as noted, German media did officially announce the surrender of the trapped forces.
As the war progressed, just by battle locations alone, the German people could figure out how the war was going. Toss in the amount of bombing going on, the increased scarcity of basic needs, the depletion of the young male population, etc., they knew in overall terms the situation.
On Midway. Not only did the Imperial Japanese Navy not tell the Japanese people, they didn’t even tell the Army!
Many Japanese people thought that the war, while having an experience like the German people, was going more or less okay right up until the end. The big difference was dearth of actual coverage of battles. The surrender came as quite a shock.
The BBC has a reputation for objectivity, to the extent that Germans sometimes tuned in to BBC broadcasts to find out how the war was REALLY going.
But even the BBC couldn’t help being cheerleaders for the British side to some extent.
Japanese “news” coverage of the warwas farcical.
Horrific defeats in the Pacific campaign were treated as proof of eventual victory, since the Allies were being drawn toward the heavily defended home islands where they would be crushed. :dubious:
Did Japan not have a problem with obtaining food?
I don’t know about ‘more or less OK right up to the end’. Besides an increasingly effective blockade and resulting shortages of basic items including food, there was a large bombing campaign against the Home Islands by 1945. And unlike Germany, Japan had not been subject to that all along. Any Japanese could see for themselves by 1945 that the war was going very badly. This is even seen in literature like "Temple of the Golden Pavilion"by Yukio Mishima. It’s more of a question who realized the inexorable tide of the war prior to the B-29 campaign reaching full swing and virtual completion of the blockade, and when. Elites had reached an open consensus that the situation was critical by the time of the defeat in the Marianas in June 1944; it’s why Tojo’s cabinet fell that July.
Whether Japan would surrender or citizens would be expected to fight collectively to the death was a somewhat different question.
The casualty lists are a very good indication, And one which is hard to hide,
The starvation, bombing campaigns, and training to repel the US army with sticks was something of a clue.
The American media were quite open, often to a fault. Correspondents had to pass their reports through official censors but they tended to remove details rather than the big picture. The public knew when things were going badly about as much as when they were going well.
Even details were hard to bottle up. The most famous example is the utter censorship of all things related to atomic energy that was put in place in 1943, although there had been self-imposed guidelines since Pearl Harbor. Even so, the Office of Censorship received hundreds of reports of newspapers accidentally releasing information, sometimes because they were reporting on official sources.
Code breaking, though, was kept a far better secret in both America and England, and so were other technologies like radar.
In short, where reporters were allowed and embedded, the public got a good account of the war. Where they could be kept outside, the leaks were rare and rarely damaging.
“Truth is everywhere attended by a bodyguard of lies”.
As I understand it, British official news might well be less than complete, in the interests of both military security and maintaining morale (so, for example, the sinking of the Lancastria, and some particularly gruesome individual air raid disasters, as at Bethnal Green and East Ham, were very much played down), and sometimes it was over-optimistic, as with the contemporary reports of comparative losses in the Battle of Britain. But policy was to be as factual as possible in reporting news, and to keep that separate from undercover disinformation and propaganda aimed at the enemy. But naturally the BBC would indeed be a “cheerleader” for the war effort - whyever wouldn’t it?
In the early stages of WW2, there was some official anxiety, in the absence of much real news in the “phoney war” period, that too many people were listening to “Lord HawHaw” on German radio, whose inventions and exaggerations sounded as though they came from some sort of secret sources.
News coverage in the UK was in any case limited by the rationing of newsprint (newspapers were mostly not more than a handful of pages) and the BBC’s broadcasting monopoly - nothing like today’s 24-hour news agenda and more or less worldwide connectivity. German news was of course even more tightly controlled, and although lots more people knew more about what was really happening than the authorities might have liked (whether from reading between the lines or from information sent back by men at the front), they also knew they needed to be careful in what they said and who they said it to.
Both sides would often turn to euphemisms like “strategic withdrawal” and “shortening lines of supply”. But German official news often did simply lie outright (like staging an alleged Polish raid on a radio transmitter as supposed justification for launching the attack on Poland) until things happened that couldn’t be denied.
Japan was getting bombed pretty heavily…
A single Japanese (or German, or Russian, or English or Italian for that matter) civilian would know that he personally was having a rough time. But when your son’s mail from the front has been censored so it doesn’t say much more than “Hi, Mom,” and all the media you’re allowed to read or listen to is telling you that everything is going well, and their side has it much worse than our side, and you don’t have any first-hand knowledge of what’s going on in the rest of your country – it’s pretty easy not to know how bad things really are.
Remember, only a tiny percentage of Americans knew that FDR used a wheelchair almost all the time, and the newsreels of him “walking” were carefully staged and really showed him being more or less dragged along by aides. And that wasn’t even “officially” censored.
Again in case of Japan that argument falls down around the end of 1944 and into 1945. By then it wasn’t censored letters from the front and censored media, it was a massive bombing campaign which had not previously existed, and everyone having increasing difficulty feeding themselves.
At some earlier point that argument would have merit, as it might in other Axis countries before the sh*t really hit the fan respectively in each. But likewise in Italy by summer 1943 when the Allies started landing in the country or Germany when the Allied and Soviet armies reached the country’s borders on each side in late summer 1944, civilians in those countries didn’t need media to tell them the war was going badly for their country. Although in 1942 Axis civilians wouldn’t necessarily have felt the war had turned against them, fully informed people didn’t necessarily think that the way we do with hindsight. And knowledge of heavy battle casualties didn’t mean one’s side was going to lose: the eventually winning side’s public had to endure news of numerous battle deaths among people they knew, especially in WWI for example. And every war goes badly for the people killed and maimed and their loved ones, obviously.
Three years ago, we busted open the west wall of our house to put an addition on and found inside it a bunch of old newspaper from the Second Wold War. Most were from the summer and fall of 1941, which I am sure most will recall was not a sensational time for the Allies.
I was struck at the frankness, honesty, and matter-of-fact nature of the coverage. One front page had a map of Russia showing the progress of the Nazi advance. The tone of the paper was shockingly forthright, and yet there was a sort of grim determination under it all, as if everyone involved, writer and reader both, were all thinking “well, this is going pretty badly, but we’ll win somehow.”
Or, if you don’t want to bust down any walls, you can read selected papers from that era in the comfort of your own time continuum. Just pick a paper with a large number of issues (e.g. Lodi News-Sentinal and many others) and enter a date in the “Date” box.
It’s especially interesting to read the articles and then compare them with Wikipedia articles to see what they got right and what they got wrong.
Western Allied media (Soviet media pretty different as it was pre and postwar) tended to give the real story at a high level, seldom trying to paint defeats as victories or hide significant disasters altogether. It, and the official press releases it used, did however sometimes put a more positive spin on things in lower level terms of losses suffered and inflicted on the enemy.
A couple of examples in accounts of the early fighting by the USAAF in the Philippines: the Colin Kelly story as publicized (B-17 pilot killed after delaying his bailout to allow his crew more time after being damaged by Japanese Navy fighters in a wholly unsuccessful bombing mission) was considerably glossed up, some accounts in the press even had the a/c crashing on a Japanese ship, completely made up. Likewise the first USAAF fighter ‘ace’ of WWII, Buzz Wagner, didn’t claim as many Japanese Army fighters in his original combat reports as he was officially credited with in public accounts of early Philippines combat, let alone what the IJA fighters actually suffered (the latter sort of discrepancy was routine and not necessarily deliberate; in this particular case the detailed records of the IJA fighter units which must have been involved didn’t survive, it’s clear from the general narrative of IJA air ops it was them, also clear from complete surviving IJN fighter unit records that it wasn’t them, so actually unknown but again Wagner didn’t claim as many as claimed officially on his behalf to get to 5 for ‘ace’).
It was a more deferential age in general, with much less prying into the private lives of politicians. But I thought this was one of those open secrets - didn’t Roosevelt himself refer to it publicly (albeit late on) when he delivered some speech to Congress or somewhere like that while seated? I seem to remember that from a recent TV documentary about him.
Or maybe it was one of those half-acknowledged things - that people knew he’d been ill, but assumed he was managing, that sort of thing. Something of the sort happened in Churchill’s second premiership, when he’d had a stroke and everyone around him was covering for several months.
“I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say, but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.”
From his speech to Congress about the Yalta talks, given March 1, 1945 (43 days before his death).