Propaganda, censorship and war films protected American morale during World War II, according to Kenneth Rendell, the keeper of an uncensored museum on the war.
Rendell addressed administrators and ROTC students from eleven different area schools, including Boston University, Brandeis University and Boston College last night in the School of Management. He was speaking as the annual Colonel John W. Pershing Military History Lecturer.
He said many governmental actions, while seeming extreme in retrospect, were in fact necessary.
Rendell said the American government, in cooperation with the media, tried to downplay the horrors of war and sustain American morale.
“During the first two years, the news was heavily censored,” Rendell said. “[The reporting] was, in retrospect, such a transparently positive attitude, it was so strong it couldn’t be called a slant, that it was amazing that people actually believed this stuff. But it is what people did need to believe.”
Media censorship was necessary during the war because of the American public’s low tolerance for wartime casualties, Rendell said.
“It was crucially important to keep home front morale high,” Rendell said. “America could, after all, conceivably tire from the war and get out of it.”
Rendell stressed the importance of remembering the war in context. His diverse array of stories and facts highlighted the horrors on the front lines and the fears on the home front.
While the Iwo Jima picture of the marines raising the flag on Mt. Surabachi remains imbedded in American history, Rendell said few people know that half the marines in that picture were dead by the time the picture was developed.
He shared several stories about what he said was the American government’s paranoid conduct during the war, including talk of painting the White House black to protect it from air raids and issuing special money emblazoned with the word “Hawaii” to protect it from use in the case of a Japanese takeover.
Soldiers were happy to get wounded and shipped back home and generals consciously sent in newly recruited units in first because battle fatigue’s detrimental effect on experienced soldiers, he said.
Though World War II ended quickly with the dropping of the atomic bomb, Rendell said military and governmental officials minted tens of thousands of extra purple hearts because they expected to invade Japan and sustain massive casualties. He said the military did not have to mint any new hearts until last year because of the overestimate.
Because of the national expectation of invasion, Rendell said, the American people were heavily in favor Truman’s use of the atomic bomb in 1945.
“There is no question to me that the American people would have lynched Harry Truman if he had put off [the use of] the atomic bomb,” Rendell said.
“Everybody at home is more afraid about what is going to happen [in battle] than what’s going on [at home], while there’s nothing they can do to control that,” said Chris Morris, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. “They should really focus on what they can control and let everybody out on that aircraft carrier or out on that base or in that jet worry about that sort of thing.”
General Fred Woerner, a professor in BU’s department of International Relations, said he agreed with the media’s cooperation with the government.
“If it is judged necessary in order to mobilize the nation and sustain the war effort, in other words maintaining the morale of the nation, then do it,” Woerner said.
Air Force Cadet Jamie Gurmendia was not so quick to agree.
“It’s a really tough issue personally for me, it’s very hard to sacrifice the truth of any sort, for any reason,” said Gurmendia, a senior in the College of Communication.
Rendell said his uncensored museum of World War II artifacts can be visited by appointment.
“[The museum is] very intense,” he said. “There are no children allowed, no cameras allowed and political correctness is found under Joseph Goebbels, in the third Reich section where it started and belongs.”
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