These are posters advertising war bonds, public saving schemes that allow
ordinary people to chip in for the war effort. As you can see there are a lot of
them in our collection. This one says 'lend to defend the right
to be free' and shows a female factory worker whose shadow takes the form of a
Red Cross nurse. In this image we see that same poster behind four-year-old
Heather Scott, she's sticking one of those saving stamps into her booklet so
she can save up for a war bond. It was savings day at her school in
Oxfordshire and this week Heather and her classmates managed to raise two
pounds six shillings and five pence. But these images raise an important question
why were children paying for the war effort?
Well, wars are really, really expensive. That's Alan Wakefield head of the First
World War team at Imperial War Museums. In the first world war a single tank in
1918 cost about half a million pounds in today's money and the same for Spitfire
in 1940 1/2 million pounds and that's just for one aircraft and you got to
remember you don't need one Spitfire you need hundreds, possibly thousands of them
to actually fight a war. In order to pay these exorbitant costs governments did
many things. They raised taxes, they introduced rationing and other personal
restrictions, and most importantly they borrowed heavily from other countries.
But after all of that, they still had to raise yet more money and they did that
through war bonds. Well a war bond is just individual citizens lending the
government money. You know, you give your money to the government and in six to ten
years time they pay you back plus interest. That six to ten year term was
really important it meant that governments could shift these huge costs
of war further down the line, when the war hopefully was over. The main
condition of course you're investing in the government, you'll get your money
back, but you really only get your money back if your side wins a war. If your
nation happens to be on the losing side there's really little chance of you
getting your money back. But wait a minute, how did the government
get away with that? With increased taxes, reduced personal freedoms, and
constant shortages people were really suffering. So how did they get citizens
to give what little they have left to the government?
The main way they actually got people to put their hand in their pocket and buy
war bonds was by using propaganda. It's for you.
This is a personal call to everyone in this theatre.
To remember to keep on saving through your group.
The propaganda they used here was really twofold. One is to show that this is an a
national effort. people on the homefront are standing side by side with the
people at the front actually doing the fighting. The other way is to basically
vilify the enemy. You know if we lose this war
it's going to be terrible our country's going to be destroyed
civilization is going to be destroyed. And it really gets in people's minds
after two or three years of this everybody really believes.
That's right, keep on saving.
If we go back to those war bond posters in the IWM
collection we can see these efforts very clearly. During the First World War 'feed the
the guns' was a popular refrain. The advertising made a direct connection
between your cash and the bullets and bombs that would win the war. Another
tactic was the use of national iconography to evoke a feeling of
patriotism. Sir Lancelot, William Wallace, and Uncle Sam were used
amongst many other nationalistic icons to sell war bonds. Meanwhile this German
poster from 1917 makes an appeal direct from the frontline trenches 'help us to
gain victory'. This imagery is typical of German and Austro-Hungarian poster
design, where the soldier, sailor, or airman is depicted as a hero who those
at home should be proud to support. In complete contrast countries like Britain
and the USA whipped up fear by demonizing those very same servicemen.
By making the enemy seem ghastly they tried to depict the war as a fight between
civilization and barbarism, this poster shows the illegal sinking of
hospital ship Llandovery Castle by a german u-boat. But buying one war bond
wasn't enough, governments needed citizens to keep investing in the war
and to do that they had to show the public the impact of their investments.
The Battle of the Somme film, which is in the IWM collection, for example, has a lot
of emphasis on the artillery bombardment at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme
in 1916. And a lot of the audience would have been people who worked in munitions
factories or bought war bonds so they could see the direct link between their
contribution and the contribution of the fighting soldier. Yeah, they also used
iconic weapons, so weapons have captured the public imagination. So a tank would
turn up in a town in Britain for a week, it would drive into the town square,
crush some obstacles. Thousands of people would gather to get a close look at this
tank and of course once you've got close to it somebody would pop out of the
hatch and say 'would you like to buy a war bond?' and of course there's a lot of peer
pressure on you to buy a war bond and they raise millions. And it wasn't just
on the British Isles. During the Second World War the Commonwealth played a huge
part in something called the Spitfire fund, so much so that some Commonwealth
nations had entire squadrons named after them. The Spitfires were broken down by
constituent parts, from a tail fin down to a single rivet and that meant that
anyone could contribute. These standardized posters were altered to
thank each Commonwealth nation for their contribution. If you capture somebody's
imagination like this and get them very excited they're more likely to put their
hand in their pocket and give the government some money. Fast-forward to
today and we don't get asked to pay for wars in the same ways, taxes don't go up
and I don't remember ever having to save my pennies for the war in Iraq. But
that's because war is different now, the First and the Second World Wars were
threats to many countries very existence and thus governments were able to ask
far more of their citizens. The other problem is, of course, there is no
national consensus. Modern wars are quite contentious, there's a lot of politics in
modern wars and it's very hard to message them
as you could message the First and Second World War which was a fight for
civilization. And that's why despite everything thrown at her, four-year-old
Heather Scott was still willing to save her pennies. Because it was expected of her
Thanks for watching there's a lot of good posters in this episode, please let us
know which is your favourite by entering a comment below. As you're aware the
museum is closed at the moment, but we still have lots of great stories to share like
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