Oh For a Visual War - the Wartime Newsreel
North Africa and the Mediterranean, 1941
Digital photography, satellite transmission and the internet now mean that images of war can appear at home almost instantaneously. Easy to use digital cameras also enable amateurs to send pictures home, or wherever, so that both good news and bad news might come to us in our study or living rooms more or less instantly.
In the First World War images of conflict in Europe took months to appear in Australian newspapers. The photos had to come by ship. Moving images were rare. There were some experiments in filming battle scenes. But those few films didn't reach the public. By the Second World War, however, movie cameras were more advanced and war cameramen played a major part in keeping up morale and rallying the home front.
In Sydney, late in 1941, film goers at the State Theatre lined up to see Lionel Barrymore in Dr. Kildare Goes Home. A few blocks away at the Lyceum Theatre they queued to see another screen star, Jeanette MacDonald, in the Hollywood movie Maytime. These audiences, and others around Australia, also saw a wartime newsreel - movie footage from the battlefields of the Libyan Desert in North Africa. More war newsreels followed. Moving pictures from the front became a regular feature in Australian cinemas in 1941. They were a new kind of film, bringing Australians closer to their men in battle than ever before, albeit from the safety of a seat in the cinema. And they were propaganda.
Damien Parer and his movie camera at Tobruk
Acknowledgement: Australian War Memorial Negative Number 009508
In 1939, when the Second World War broke out, newsreels (or 'gazettes' as they were sometimes called) were already an established feature of cinema programs. They were usually about eight minutes long. Although they occasionally broke important stories, they were mostly lightweight in subject matter and screened for entertainment. But the war changed expectations. The public wanted to see the wartime scenes they read about in newspapers or heard about on the radio.
Newsreel companies were keen to profit from the new demand for a visual war. At the same time the Australian government was keen to control content in the 'national interest' - that is, to ensure newsreels were effective as propaganda. So they had to be stirring, rallying, heartening. They had to make people care about the war, and fire them up to do more for the war effort at home.
In Australia, control of newsreel content was easy, as the government set up the unit that filmed the war overseas. The companies that distributed newsreels in Australia could not afford to do that. In August 1940, the Commonwealth Department of Information (DOI) created a 'Cinematographic and Photographic Unit' headed by the famous cameraman Frank Hurley. Others in the Unit were younger men - cameramen Damien Parer, George Silk, Ron Maslyn Williams and soundman Alan Anderson. Within months they were in Cairo, ready for action. They got an equipment truck and a driver, 'Pambo' Morrison, who was a former snake handler!.
Acknowledgement: Australian War Memorial Negative Number 005655
In Egypt the Unit was stressed from the start. Hurley was a bit of an autocrat. George Silk got bitten on the nose by a dog but he didn't get rabies. Diarrhoea went around. Some of their equipment was run down and facilities were poor. Parer turned bathrooms and lavatories into darkrooms or workrooms. There was some rivalry between the cameramen. And some differences of style that might be explained by a 'generation gap' or perhaps by artistic temperament. Parer, for example, didn't think all that much of Hurley's bossy-ness or of his work. He said so in a letter to the avant-garde Sydney photographer Max Dupain, a close friend:
He [Hurley] must be number one at all times. So poor old Parer has been shoved in the back somewhere - also Hurley hasn't much news sense which is necessary to the job; he goes mad about bloody native boats and mosques and clouds (cumulus variety only) - while the war correspondents lick us to the news stuff. I agree with you Max that [Hurley's] stuff lacks design he goes for big rugged scenery and worries about 'quality' but his imagination is limited - don't think he could produce something fine. (McDonald 2004:66)
Chasing the Battlefront
Despite these frictions, the Photographic Unit was ready for action late in 1940. Their timing was a bit of good fortune. They were in Egypt as the Australian 6th Division combined with British forces to drive the Italians out of Libya. Libya at that time was part of Mussolini's Empire. The 'Western Desert Offensive' as it was called (when they realized they were winning) was an astonishing success. Earlier in 1940, the Allies had suffered defeat after defeat in Europe. In the skies over the English Channel the Royal Air Force had saved Britain from invasion, but otherwise the news from the battlefronts was all grim - German forces were still unchecked on land, triumphant from Poland to the Pyrenees.
The Western Desert battles became a series of swift Allied victories against Italian forces. Australians at home came to know the names of tiny little lice-ridden, sand-blown towns on the Mediterranean coast as well as they knew the names of their own suburbs - names like Sidi Barrani, Bardia, Tobruk, Derna, Benghazi and, later, El Alamein.
The combined Australian and British forces swept through these Italian strongholds, seizing them, taking thousands of prisoners and pressing on. Close behind, and sometimes in the midst of the action, was the 'Cinematographic and Photographic Unit' - meaning a few men, a few cameras, some sound equipment and a truck.
These were the storytellers, the cinematographers, photographers and journalists (the ABC was there too) who connected the battlefront with the home front. They were constantly moving in pursuit of another story, often taking risks as great as any front line soldier. Sometimes the teams split up leaving a 'one man band' to cover an impossible amount of ground. For instance, Hurley and Anderson covered the Desert Offensive in January 1941 while Parer joined HMS Ladybird and covered the bombardment of Italian troops from the sea. When offensive turned to defensive and German forces under General Rommel besieged the Australian 9th Division at Tobruk, Hurley and Parer were there. Then Parer went to Greece. The ABC journalist Chester Wilmot went with him. Wilmot then moved on to cover the deeds of the Australian 7th Division in Syria, but went back to Tobruk in time to link up, once again, with Parer.
Parer first met Wilmot at Tobruk. In the thick of the fighting, the Photographic Unit's truck ranged up alongside the ABC Radio van. Wilmot heard a military policeman shout: 'Blimey Bert, propaganda goes to war'. It was the beginning of an association that would carry into the siege at Tobruk, and later to Kokoda (in New Guinea) where the filmmaker and the reporter met up once again. Parer's biographer, Neil McDonald, sensed the basis of the friendship:
Wilmot was an intense, heavy-set man, a year older than Parer, who spoke with the slightly British accent required of Australian broadcasters in the 1940s. Often opinionated, frequently in argument (but never personal), he was the kind of tough, competent professional Parer was drawn to ÷Wilmot came to admire Damien's 'gameness' and his willingness to share the dangers of the soldiers he photographed, just as Parer came to value Wilmot's ability to go beyond simple description and to analyse the political and military strategy underlying the events they were both reporting. (McDonald, 2004:93)
Hurley and George Silk also voyaged in and out of Tobruk during the siege. The harbour was Tobruk's lifeline - it meant that ammunition, food and other supplies could come in from Egypt and badly wounded soldiers could go out. It meant the cameramen and reporters could come and go, though this was at great risk to their lives as the boat 'run' to and from Alexandria was perilous. Tobruk was held by British troops and the Australians' 9th Division for eight months. It became an epic story, ideal for newsreels and for lifting morale at home.
Seeing the War - Movies and Morale
Two well-known Sydney companies - Movietone and Cinesound - packaged the newsreels for the Australian cinema audiences. But the Department of Information's photographic team did the fieldwork. Hurley's team sent home film footage and photographs from the Western Desert and from Tobruk. The images were vetted by the Commonwealth censors and then passed on to the newsreel companies for editing, embellishing (with archival footage), and screening to the general public.
The first of the newsreels was a scoop. Tragically, the British camera team in North Africa was hit by a bomb, the driver killed and the cameramen put out of action for a time. And so Hurley's team shot the only film footage of the first Western Desert victories. The canisters of film were rushed back to Cairo by car, to be put into developing tanks and 'fixed'. Then copies were sent on to London and Sydney to be censored, edited and embellished for the screen. Audiences cheered when they saw vast lines of Italian prisoners moving along under a minimal guard. The footage gave the false impression that the fighting had been easy. Another problem was the lapse of time between 'shooting' the footage in Africa and screening it at the movies back home. The situation in North Africa had changed. The victorious Australians who had chased Italian forces westward across the top of North Africa were being chased eastward by German forces, over the same ground. Audiences in 1941 complained about seeing outdated newsreels of victory in the desert at the same time as they were reading newspaper reports of later reversals and of the Australians desperately holding out at Tobruk.
In cinemas around Australia, audiences watched footage of Australian soldiers bailing up Italian troops at Tobruk and elsewhere. They witnessed Australians under siege from General Rommel's German forces. Cinemagoers saw heroic images of the anti-aircraft gunners on the clifftops above Tobruk harbour. They saw the dust covered infantry men, 'living like rats' in the forward trenches, some of them just 400 metres from the enemy. As well, they saw the daily routines - the water carriers at work moving to the front lines, the naval convoys hastily unloading in Tobruk harbour, the night skies lit up by tracers and anti-aircraft fire, patrols preparing to go into No-Man's Land, artillery men in clouds of gun-smoke in the sand hills, a cricket match in the rubble-strewn streets of the town, the printing office of 'Tobruk Truth'. Most of all, the newsreel footage from Tobruk showed the story of an effective resistance - of a siege that could not be broken; of a defiance of Nazi power that suggested the war could be won.
Thousands of Italian soldiers taken prisoner in North Africa
Acknowledgement: Australian War Memorial Negative Number 005406
The cameramen shot their film, then wrote up descriptive notes, a sort of dot point or numbered guide to their film footage. These notes were called 'dope sheets' and some have survived from the siege of Tobruk. An excerpt from Damien Parer's dope sheets on the front line or the outer perimeter at Tobruk reads as follows:
(SHOTS FROM HERE TAKEN IN THE SALIENT ÷ A POINT ON THE PERIMETER THAT HAS BEEN INDENTED BY THE ENEMY).
17 Medium shot showing men camped on the salient awaking and getting down in their dug-outs
18 Medium shot of men crawling along trench from one dug-out to another.
19 Close-up Man entering dug-out÷ other men are preparing breakfast.
20 Group of three men eating their breakfast in the dug-out.
21 Men eating in the dug-out. In the background can be seen the fireholes in the wall.
22 Close shot man eating. He turns suddenly and, lifting the hessian, looks outside. (SOUND OF SHELL WHINING THROUGH THE AIR NEEDS TO BE DUBBED ON HERE.)
23 Shrapnel shell burst over the perimeter
Photographs and moving footage that came out of Tobruk became vital to civilian morale at a time when other theatres of war seemed so grim. The Australians' defence of Tobruk was an epic endeavour, but its place in Australian history also came from news and newsreel promotion - from its value to the propaganda war. The very name became a symbol of endurance and defiance by Australian troops.
Perhaps there is an analogy with 1917 - when the Western Front in Europe was a stalemate of mud and blood but Australians at home could take comfort from 'triumphant' photographic images of the Light Horse (the mounted units) in Palestine. In the same way Tobruk was heartening - but this time the images were moving.
The newsreel changed the way people 'saw' the war, how it was judged and remembered. Photographs and film have an immense power to shape our sense of history, to determine what we know of events, how we feel about them and how we remember them. The first of the Australian wartime newsreels, made by Hurley and his team, coincided with a desert war in which the AIF was initially successful and then, during the siege, defiantly heroic. The Western Desert conflict was Australia's first moving picture war. It fitted the propaganda requirements of government and nation to a 'T' - 'T' for Tobruk
You can click on this link to view about ninety seconds of film footage shot by Damien Parer at Tobruk in 1941. As you view this film, think about the following questions:
What does the sequence tell us about the routines of life at Tobruk during the siege? Why might Parer have thought these images were worth showing to the Australian public? Remember that a soundtrack commentary would be added for the newsreel in the cinema. How do you think cinema audiences would have reacted to these images?
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Neil McDonald 2004, Damien Parer's War, Lothian Books, Melbourne.
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About the author
Peter Cochrane is a freelance writer based in Sydney. Formerly he taught history at the University of Sydney. At present he is writing a history of the beginnings of responsible government and democracy in New South Wales. That project is to be called The Friends of Liberty. His most recent book is a work about Australian photographers in World War One: The Western Front (ABC Books, 2004).
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Propaganda is the organized circulation of information or messages designed to create or influence public opinion. It could be said that everyday advertising is propaganda, but the word is usually used to describe political messages. Propaganda is often characterized by simplistic arguments, emotional appeals, exaggeration and distortion.
Often, propaganda aims to win public support for a politician, a political movement or a policy. Sometimes, it can be negative, attacking or criticizing an opposing party, politician or idea. In most cases, propaganda appeals more to emotion than to reason. Propaganda techniques include:
1. Identifying one's own 'side' with words or images that have a popular emotional appeal. Propaganda may include images of a strong leader, a wholesome family, a beautiful countryside, a prosperous economy. Iconic images may be included - the national flag, historical figures, modern heroes. Words may be used that stir positive emotions - 'our nation'; 'our proud history'; 'our democracy'; 'our brave soldiers'; 'shared dreams'; 'brave vision'; 'confident future'.
2. Using negative images and words to depict 'the other side'. There may be dark and troubling images of conflict and destruction. Opponents may be depicted in unflattering, unattractive and ugly ways. Words like 'traitor', 'threat', 'evil' and 'un-Australian' may be used when describing opponents.
3. Claiming that there is a simple conflict between good and evil, with no shades of grey; claiming that one's own position is totally good and admirable, and that the 'other' is totally bad, with no redeeming features.
4. Using information selectively - using facts, statistics and quotations that support one's own position, while leaving out anything critical about that position, and anything positive about the opponent.
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Francis (James) Hurley (1885-1962) joined the AIF in August 1917 as one of two Australian official photographers. He was already famous, having been the photographer on several expeditions to the Antarctic. He covered some of the bloodiest and most terrible battles on the Western Front in 1917, then traveled to Palestine to cover the exploits of the Australian Light Horse against the Turks. In both these theatres of war his photography and cinematography added to his fame. Between the two World Wars he became a renowned adventurer and filmmaker and shot some of the footage for Charles Chauvel's famous war movie Forty Thousand Horsemen, released in 1940. When the Second World War was underway he was appointed to head the Commonwealth Film and Photographic Unit and once again was sent to the front, this time in North.
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The Italian Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was the son of a blacksmith and a schoolmistress and was himself a schoolteacher in early adulthood, but only for a year. He was a socialist agitator in the early 1900s and a journalist for 11 years before resigning from the Socialist Party in 1915. He fought briefly in the First World War, was wounded, and returned to Milan to once again work as a journalist. By 1919 Italy was in political turmoil and Mussolini joined a fascist group agitating for revolutionary change. A Fascist Party was formed in 1919. Mussolini was part of the fascist gangs that broke up Communist meetings and fought running battles with opponents in the streets of Bologna, Florence, Milan and other Italian cities. He rose to power in the Fascist movement. In October 1922, in the midst of political chaos in Italy, King Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini Prime Minister at the head of a coalition of fascists and nationalists. Mussolini assumed dictatorial powers before the year was out and ruled Italy throughout the inter-war years. In 1940 he joined Hitler and Germany in the war against Britain and France. However, his enthusiasm for the war divided the nation and by 1943 the political ground had shifted beneath his feet. He was forced to resign and was imprisoned in July 1943, but he was rescued from the Apennines by German parachutists just three months later. He was installed at the head of a Fascist Government in northern Italy but in April 1945 he was captured by Italian partisans and shot. His corpse was taken to Milan and hung in the Piazzale Loreto and was not treated with respect, to put it mildly.
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In Australia prior to 1914 there was no formal way of censoring news at the behest of government. But after the outbreak of the First World War the head of the AIF, Major-General William Throsby Bridges, devised a system for the control of all cable and wireless communication throughout Australia. At the same time Australian newspapers were affected by censorship of cables at the London end, because these cables were the main source of overseas news. An office of Deputy Chief Censor was established in Melbourne and closely linked to the Chief Censor's office in the War Office in London. Similar developments were under way in other parts of the Empire and within twelve months a global network of censorship cooperation and restrictions was in place.
By 1916, censorship had become a political weapon in the Australian government's struggle against those people and organizations opposed to the war. Trade unions and the labour press, in particular, were targeted, as were radical political organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
During the Second World War, censorship was the responsibility of the Ministry of Information, created on 4 September 1939. As in the First World War, the staff and the resources working on censorship grew considerably as the war went on. The Ministry's censorship responsibilities covered all the media. But it was especially proactive in producing newsreel footage and other film for the cinema and, also, in supplying editorial material for newspapers. So censorship and propaganda were really two sides of the one coin. The usual justification for government censorship was 'military necessity', but as in the First World War, political considerations also came into play. The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (p.139) points to one example - the case of Prime Minister John Curtin setting up the Press Censorship Advisory Committee in April 1942 in order to smooth relations between his government and newspaper editors and proprietors. The need to control information was considered a crucial part of the war effort. There were some very tense times in the relationship between the newspapers and the Department of Information, especially with the Chief Censor, E.G. Bonney. But overall the relationship was cooperative.
Censorship also extended to the training camps and the battlefields. Soldiers' mail was censored and there were severe restrictions on the use of unauthorized cameras. Soldiers who carried their own private cameras, for example, were meant to have them registered with the intelligence officer in their Battalion. Before they went into battle the soldiers were supposed to hand their cameras in.
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There were mounted military units in the various Australian colonies as far back as 1854. Before 1870 they were identified as cavalry or yeomanry or mounted rifles. By 1885 all six colonies had some mounted forces in their military establishment. These were usually based in rural areas with headquarters in a country town.
In the Boer War (1899-1902), large numbers of mounted rifle units were raised in each colony in order to join the British army in South Africa in the fight against the Boers.
After Federation in 1901 the mounted forces were reorganized in 'light horse brigades' in each State. Light Horse formations fought in the First World War at Gallipoli (without their horses), on the Western Front and in Palestine where the horses proved to be very useful. For a brief outline of the history of Australian Light Horse see the entry under 'Light Horse' in the Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1999), pp.349-352. This brief outline also covers the demise of the mounted units in the period between the two world wars when mechanization and firepower made horses redundant.
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Peter Cochrane's article links most obviously with the study of the Second World War, and in particular with Australia's role in that war. The article provides insights into the significant campaigns in North Africa, where (as Peter describes) initial victories were quickly followed by stunning reversals.
Students at school often study the place of military campaigns in the development of 'Australian nationhood' and 'Australian identity'. There is still a strong popular belief that Australia 'became a nation' on the steep slopes of Gallipoli in 1915, where the Anzac Legend was formed, with its image of the brave, resourceful and compassionate digger. Some historians have suggested that the Kokoda campaign in New Guinea in 1942 is a more appropriate symbol of nationhood. In these debates, it is usually recognized that the 'Rats of Tobruk' - the Australian soldiers who withstood the hardships of that siege - also embodied qualities that are seen as 'typically Australian'. Peter's article points out how important newsreels were in carrying that message to a news-hungry Australian public.
Of course, there is an alternative point of view - one that suggests it would be preferable if the sense of Australian national identity and national character were not linked so powerfully to wartime experiences, and to the exploits of young men. That point of view questions whether Australian identity is too militaristic and too masculine.
Peter Cochrane's article is valuable in another way - as part of the history of technological change in Australia and the world. Young people living in the early twenty-first century may find it hard to imagine a time when world events could not be seen 'live' on television; a world in which film footage of an overseas event could take weeks to arrive in Australia. Today, satellite-borne television images and instantaneous Internet connections open immediate windows on the world. This article about Second World War newsreels highlights 'change' in the study of 'Time, continuity and change'.
Peter's reference to 'propaganda' opens up another area of study - the issue of who controls information. During the Second World War, what Australian audiences saw depended on where the film crews were located, what they chose to film, how the footage was edited, what the Commonwealth censors allowed to be shown, and how the companies Cinesound and Movietone packaged their newsreels for cinema audiences. (All this means that newsreels need to be handled carefully as historical sources; clearly, they can't be treated as true and complete records of an historical event.) The issue of 'who controls information' is still alive today. What people know about dramatic world events often depends on editorial decisions made by CNN, News Limited, Al Jazeera and other media giants. Governments are keen to influence that process; in the recent Iraq War, journalists were 'embedded' with the armed forces of the US-led coalition. Some commentators questioned whether this compromised the journalists' commitment to accurate reporting of the conflict. In 2004, the staggering popularity of Mike Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 was a reminder of the ongoing media battle to win the hearts and minds of the public. That battle has been going on since ancient times, when rulers and military leaders built triumphal arches, minted celebratory coins and wrote self-serving books to win popular support. It's a battle worth studying in history classrooms.
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