The Third World War: August 1985 полностью

This policy of strict censorship prevailed throughout the three weeks of the fighting in Europe. Whether it could have lasted in such a rigid form if the conflict had gone on much longer is another matter. There were already signs of restiveness by the third week. In Britain the policy received its most severe test when Birmingham was destroyed. For the first twenty-four hours after the attack the authorities declared a complete ban on all pictures from the scene — pictures which were in any event difficult to secure. Coverage was concentrated on the size of the rescue operation, on scenes of fire brigades and rescue squads moving into the area, and on the damage on the periphery. But such was the wave of rumour and alarm which spread throughout the country that the government rapidly reversed this decision, and decided that only the truth would meet the situation. It therefore allowed the full story to be told, encouraged no doubt by the knowledge that the counter-blow on Minsk had already done much to loosen the links between the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites.

The propaganda war, which was to a large extent a television war, was not, however, fought by the combatants for the minds of their own peoples only. It was also a war to influence the minds of the enemy, and the minds of the neutrals — and of their allies. Both sides saw immediately that the most effective propaganda they could make use of would be to emphasise the sufferings of their troops, giving the widest possible exposure to those scenes of casualties and damage which were being so carefully censored out. Within Germany the communist bloc were able to make immediate use of the East German and Czechoslovakian wavebands, already readily viewable within Western Europe, to disseminate such pictures. They reinforced this, particularly in the case of Britain, by disseminating material from satellites, utilizing for this purpose the fourth television channel which existed on most British sets, and which had by 1985 still not been used for entertainment. It should be added here that the main reason for this had, ironically, been the decision to divert into improved defence expenditure the resources which might otherwise have gone to financing further television. Though the British authorities were able to jam this wavelength, the Soviet Union were still able to infiltrate a considerable volume of material aimed at damaging the morale of Western audiences. It was almost all of terrible casualties, shown in close-up, of shocked and exhausted prisoners, of mile upon mile of damaged tanks, smashed vehicles and the wreckage of every kind of equipment. Many sequences showed shocked and wounded Allied prisoners pleading, whether genuinely or with false voices dubbed over, for peace.

The Allied response was on similar lines. From West German transmitters a steady volume of comparable material was directed at East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. To begin with little effort was made to hit at the morale of the Russians themselves. The Allies rightly appreciated that if the crack was to come, it would be within the satellite states. Two ‘black’ propaganda television stations, operating from the Federal Republic, one beamed into Czechoslovakia and one into East Germany, began broadcasting within hours of the outbreak of war. These had been skilfully prepared, with the aid of exiled broadcasters from those countries, to resemble closely the official communist stations. They presented themselves as being Czechoslovak Television and GDR Television, operating on a separate wavelength because of damage to transmitters on the main wavelength. They gave a service identical in pattern to the official service, but with the news, and in particular the newsfilm, selected to present the communist position in the worst possible light. Since the main stations were still transmitting, the device was readily detected, but investigations after the war showed that these stations had commanded a surprisingly high audience, due at least in part to the high quality of their transmissions. One feature was their use of recordings of popular serials and popular music programmes which ran on the official Eastern channels, which had been pirated off the air by agencies of the Federal Republic in advance, ready for re-use.