MI7 the ministry of propaganda

Telegraph:

Propaganda is probably as old as government itself, and so we shouldn’t be too surprised to read that A A Milne, creator of the immortal Winnie-the-Pooh, was part of MI7B, a secret First World War propaganda outfit. He was by no means the only writer to wield his pen in war.

In those days the MI designation – with us still as MI5 and MI6 – referred to numbered departments in the War Office’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. Not all did secret work – straightforward mapping and recording the orbat (order of battle) of potential enemies were relatively public aspects.

MI5 was the directorate’s fifth department, responsible for security and counter-espionage. What we now know as the Security Service emerged from it, but the designation stuck. MI6 was the department that provided interpreters who helped with interviewing foreign refugees, which the Secret Service – better known now as SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service – found useful both as a source of information and as cover for its officers. Again, the name stuck.

Milne’s MI7B was established in 1916 to help counter the effects of mounting war losses, industrial discontent, peace activists and German propaganda abroad. In fact, this was really the bureaucratic incorporation of an existing propaganda outfit set up by the journalist and Liberal Party politician, Charles Masterman. Formally called the War Propaganda Bureau, it was better known to those on the inside track as the Wellington House operation. In a brilliant exercise in improvisation, Masterman made effective use of his pre-war literary and artistic contacts to counter German propaganda in the US. He secretly sponsored books by reputable academics to send to influential Americans, and recruited writers such John Buchan, HG Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Within a month of the outbreak of war, Masterman had commissioned a book by his novelist friend Ford Madox Ford (who was in fact half-German), which was published six months later as When Blood is their Argument (a quote from Henry V – “For how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument”). This was not the crude German-bashing and flag-waving that seems to have made Milne unhappy, but a balanced and informed argument to the effect that the admirable German culture had been turned on its head by the ascendance of militarist Prussia.

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That is some heavyweight literary talent.  They are some of the biggest names in literature in the early twentieth century.  This was a very sophisticated operation.  I am not sure any recent effort has included writing novels.  In World War II there were several movies made to push the war effort.