The BBC at War

The Second World War was the first total war: because of the Blitz, the massive bombardment of British cities by the German air force, British were as much involved in the battle zone as the troops were, and so, of course, was the BBC. It was also the first ideological war, a conflict of words in which radio played a more important role than did the medium of print. And besides these challenges the BBC had broadcasting duties which would be normal in any war: to provide an extensive and credible news service and to raise and maintain national morale with a varied programme of entertainment.

At midnight on 4 November 1942 the British people finally heard good news about the course of the war with Germany. The BBC was able to announce that the British Army had achieved a decisive victory over the Italian and German Panzerarmee west of the railway half of El Alamein in Egypt. The tattered remnants of Rommel’s once proud Africa Korps were in full retreat.

In the following term paper, I will examine the way the BBC worked during the Second World War by using the reporting on El Alamein as a representative example. First of all it will be examined how the BBC developed and worked during the time between 1939 and 1945, including the different types of offered programmes but also the way the staff worked under the adverse circumstances of war. Then the battle of El
Alamein will be explained, although it will not be possible to go too much into detail.
After these explanatory chapters the practical analysis of War Reports of the battle of El Alamein follows. It was not easy to collect these examples because there is only a limited number of old recordings available on the internet. Even though I contacted the BBC archive, they could not help me. So I had to rely on the sources provided on the
internet. My original plan was to compare the Germans reports with the BBC ones. However, there were no German audio clips available even though I got in contact with many archives.