Abstract
Warfare is rarely confined to the sphere of combat alone. In the Second World War the role of military intelligence was pivotal and the employment of propaganda to undermine the loyalty of enemy subjects reached new heights of sophistication. It was a war of the airwaves in which propaganda was beamed across enemy frontiers, and the enemy’s cable and wireless signals intercepted and decoded. The war also saw the extensive use of censorship to screen the correspondence of private individuals for disloyalty or the revelation of sensitive information, and to filter the accounts of the war received by the general public in the newspapers, at the cinema and over the airwaves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Michael Smith, Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (London: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1998) and the accompanying Channel 4 television series.
See also F. W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret: the Inside Story of Operation Ultra, Bletchley Park, and Enigma (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974). This book revealed to the wider public the astonishing secret of the intelligence war centred upon Bletchley Park.
See Rosaleen Smyth, ‘Britain’s African Colonies and British Propaganda During the Second World War’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, XIV, 1 (1985).
Hugh Denham, ‘Bedford-Bletchley-Kilindini-Colombo’, in F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (eds) Code Breakers: the Inside Story of Bletchley Park (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 270.
Michael Smith, The Emperor’s Codes: Bletchley Park and the Breaking of Japan’s Secret Ciphers (London: Bantam, 2000), p. 129.
Alan Stripp, Codebreaker in the Far East: How the British Cracked Japan’s Top Secret Military Codes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 93. Chapter 4, ‘Delhi’; chapter 7, ‘Japanese Codes and Ciphers: What Were They Like?’ ; and chapter 10, ‘How Were They Intercepted?’.
Martin Thomas, ‘Signals Intelligence and Vichy France, 1940–44: Intelligence in Defeat’, in David Alvarez (ed.) Allied and Axis Signals Intelligence in World War Two (London: Frank Cass, 1999), p. 190.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Rosier’s foreword in Aileen Clayton, The Enemy is Listening: the Story of the Y Service (London: Crecy Books, 1993), p. 11.
See Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicle of Wasted Time II: the Infernal Grove (London: Collins, 1973), chapter 3, ‘On Secret Service’.
John Bright-Holmes (ed.) Like It Was: the Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge (London: Collins, 1981).
MNA. Mauritius and the War (Port Louis: Indian Cultural Association, 1940).
RHL. Mauritius Colonial Annual Report 1946 (London: HMSO, 1948). See Part 1, chapter 1, ‘General Review of the Period 1939–45’.
Carnegie Library, Curepipe. J. R. Pillet, Entre Nous: Bulletins de Propagande du Poste Radio St Denis (November 1940 — February 1942) (St Denis: Editions du Bureau de la Presse, 1942).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2001 Ashley Jackson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jackson, A. (2001). The Secret War: Censorship, Radio Propaganda and Code-Breaking. In: War and Empire in Mauritius and the Indian Ocean. Studies in Military and Strategic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919540_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919540_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-42850-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-1954-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)