Communication And The First World War

Despite the voluminous historical literature on the First World War, a volume devoted to the theme of communication has yet to appear. From the communication of war aims and objectives to the communication of war call-up and war experience and knowledge, this volume fills the gap in the market, including the work of both established and newly emerging scholars working on the First World War across the globe. The volume includes chapters that focus on the experience of belligerent and also neutral powers, thus providing a genuinely representative dimension to the subject.

This book reveals the impact of communications on the military operations of the British Expeditionary Force during the First World War.

In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications. In this absorbing history, Winkler sheds light on the early stages of the global infrastructure that helped launch the United States as the predominant power of the century.

This book examines language change and documentation during the First World War. With contributions from international academics, the chapters cover all aspects of communicating in a transnational war including languages at the front; interpretation, translation and parallels between languages; communication with the home front; propaganda and language manipulation; and recording language during the war. This book will appeal to a wide readership, including linguists and historians and is complemented by the sister volume Languages and the First World War: Representation and Memory which examines issues around the representation and memory of the war such as portrayals in letters and diaries, documentation of language change, and the language of remembering the war.

The entry of the Dominions and the colonies into WWI produced a mixture of languages and cultures and communication thus became an international concept. The publication 'Decoding the front' draws the attention to the wide range of possibilities that the word 'communication' covers. Around the turn of the century, modern means of communication were not well-developed but the First World War and technological progress soon changed this. Photography and film, letters, postcards and many ways of communication at the front are discussed such as radio, telephone and telegraph. But also animals such as homing pigeons, horses and dogs were still indispensable in the vast communication network; communication in the First World War was often a strange contradiction between primitive and modern technologies.

In the Second World War, the home fronts of many countries became as important as the battle fronts. As governments tried to win and hold the trust of domestic and international audiences, communication became central to their efforts. This volume offers cutting-edge research by leading and emerging scholars on how information was used, distributed and received during the war. With a transnational approach encompassing Germany, Iberia, the Arab world and India, it demonstrates that the Second World War was as much a war of ideas and influence as one of machines and battles. Simon Eliot, Marc Wiggam and the contributors address the main communication problems faced by Allied governments, including how to balance the free exchange of information with the demands of national security and wartime alliances, how to frame war aims differently for belligerent, neutral and imperial audiences and how to represent effectively a variety of communities in wartime propaganda. In doing so, they reveal the contested and transnational character of the ways in which information was conveyed during the Second World War. Allied Communication during the Second World War offers innovative and nuanced perspectives on the thin border between information and propaganda during this global war and will be vital reading for World War II and media historians alike.

During the First World War, mass media achieved an enormous and continuously growing importance in all belligerent countries. Newspaper, illustrated magazines, comics, pamphlets, and instant books, fi ctional works, photography, and the new-born “theater of imagery”, the cinema, were crucial in order to create a heroic vision of the events, to mobilize and maintain the consensus on the war. But their role was pivotal also in creating the image of the war’s end and fi nally, together with a widespread, new literary genre, the war memoirs, to shape the collective memory of the confl ict for the next generations. Even before November 1918, the media raised high expectations for a multifaceted peace: a new global order, the beginning of a peaceful era, the occasion for a regenerating apocalypse. Likewise, in the following decades, particularly war literature and cinema were pivotal to reverse the icon of the Great War as an epic crusade and a glorious chapter of the national history and to create the hegemonic image of a senseless carnage. The Mediatization of War and Peace focalizes on the central role played by mass media in the tortuous transition to the post-war period as well as on the profound disenchantment generated by their prophesies.

From the worst horrors of modern trench warfare a small handful of soldiers and nurses created a body of poetry that is so vivid and intense that one hundred years later it has engraved itself on our national consciousness. This anthology focuses on those poets who were on the front line, from the famous Sassoon, Owens and Graves, to nurses like Vera Brittain. The poems are accompanied by a brief and accessible introduction, which sets the context for a reader new to the poems, as well as short biographical profiles of the poets.