All sides employed a variety of theatrical devices, each determined to ensure a hit. Leaders orchestrated and shaped what was an ongoing, evolving history, creating a theatrical framework on both the home front and the front lines by applying elements of drama and new technologies that formed a consensual reality, a reality that fueled a media and entertainment industry that in turn-sometimes subtly, sometimes loudly-manipulated and maintained the illusions within and surrounding the war. Many still remembered the devastating toll taken by World War I, and governments sought the most effective means of shaping emotions and opinions in this new conflict.
If you lived through the 1930s and 1940s and had an interest in the world around you, you may have been aware that political, military, and media leaders used elements of drama and social psychology in the course of World War II. The result of this investigation is a wholly distinctive and often surprising work of history, a book that manages to cast a fresh light on the most obsessively studied conflict in human history. Their ambitions were similar, but each leader had his own distinct methods, his own carefully created script for elaborately produced and often wildly successful acts and campaigns of deception to win hearts and minds on the frontlines and the home front. Each side employed uniforms, meticulously staged events, and broadcast their messages via all media availablemotion pictures, radio broadcasts, posters, leaflets, and beyond. Impression management, the art of political spin, was employed to drive the message home with the careful use of black and white propaganda. Brilliantly conceived oratory was applied to underscore each vision. Each area of the media was fully exploited. He presents the war as a drama that evolved and developed as it progressed, a production staged and overseen by four contrasting masters: Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin.Įach leader used all the tools at his disposal to present his own distinctive vision of the global drama that was the Second World War. In this fascinating new book, bestselling author and historian Nathaniel Lande explores the Great War at the heart of the twentieth century through the prism of theater.
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