Abstract
The shadows of past wars, and particularly the most recent, hang over those conflicts which threaten to overtake us. Thus the shade of the First World War darkened the inter-war years, and the shadow of the Vietnam War, or the ‘Vietnam syndrome’, deeply influenced US’ views until the Gulf War in 1990–1991. These shadows were shaped by war correspondents and ministerial speeches at the time and later by novels, memoirs and films. Much of their impact was unconscious and it interacted with other influences. We know, for example, from opinion polls that, since the Second World War, the US public have favoured the Air Force over the other services. On the other hand, the Europeans have been more sceptical and fearful of the impact of airpower on civilians. We can presume that this is because the US homeland has never been the victim of air attacks unlike every major European country, and reading or hearing reports of the blitz on London was not the same as being there. But it may also be that the US public wanted to fight wars which favour a country, like their own, with the most advanced technology.
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Notes
M. J. Armitage and R. A. Mason, Air Power in the Nuclear Age: 1945–1984 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1985), Chapters 2 and 5.
Kate Adie, The Kindness of Strangers (London, Headline, 2002), p. 195 ff.
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The newspapers had carried articles on wars before this but usually relied on reports from officers serving in the armed forces, to the fury of their commander. See Lieutenant Colonel Gurwood, Selections from the Dispatches and General Orders of the Duke of Wellington (London, John Murray, 1841), p. 319.
J. B. Atkins, The Life of Sir William Howard Russell: The First Special Correspondent (London, 1911), pp. 158–160.
See, for example, Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (London, Zodiac Press, 1980).
Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (New York, PublicAffairs, 2002).
R. N. Stromberg, Redemption By War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence, The Regents Press of Kansas, 1982).
Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, Port Arthur: The Siege and Capitulation (Edinburgh, William Blackwood, 1907), p. 484.
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F. A. McKenzie, Tokyo to Tiflis: Uncensored Letters from the War (London, Hurst and Blackett, 1905), p. 247.
Alan Moorehead, The End in Africa (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1943), pp. 97 and 155.
Stephen Badsey, The Media and International Security (London, Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 218–222.
P. Knightley, The First Casualty (New York, Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1975), p. 109.
H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees it Through (London, Hogarth Press, 1994, first published 1916).
Gavin Roynon (ed.), Home Fires Burning: The Great War Diaries of Georgina Lee (Stroud, Sutton, 2006), p. 199.
Mark Pottle (ed.), Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter 1914–1945 (London, Phoenix, 1999), p. 81.
Steve Tatham, Losing Arab Hearts and Minds: The Coalition, Al Jazeera and Muslim Public Opinion (New York, Front Street Press, 2006).
Admiral Sandy Woodward with Patrick Robinson, One Hundred days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander (London, HarperCollins, 1992), p. 348.
Philip Towle, Pundits and Patriots: Lessons from the Gulf War (London, Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, 1991).
On Northern Ireland, see Desmond Hamill, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland 1969–1985 (London, Methuen, 1985);
on the partisan warfare in Yugoslavia, see Milovan Djilas, Wartime: With Tito and the Partisans (London, Secker and Warburg, 1980).
Philip Towle, ‘The British debate about European conflicts’ in Lawrence Freedman (ed.), Military Intervention in European Conflicts (Oxford, Political Quarterly/Blackwell, 1994), p. 94 ff.
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© 2009 Philip Towle
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Towle, P. (2009). The Media and War. In: Going to War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234314_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234314_5
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