The dirty war of Sefton Delmer

There is an obvious problem with trying to judge who ‘won’ a propaganda war. Unlike its physical counterpart, there is virtually no real-world evidence either way, and everyone involved has spent years learning how to spin, manipulate and outright lie about reality to try to shape it into what they want. As a result, it remains the conventional wisdom – among those who think of such things, at least – that despite their eventual and total defeat in the second world war, it was the Nazis who won the propaganda war of their era.

British efforts at demoralisation and appealing to the better nature of German citizens or soldiers were often naff, and where they weren’t, they were hampered by the government’s insistence on ‘unconditional surrender’ from Germany, with no carve-outs – long said to be one of the best propaganda tools to keep Germans unified behind the Nazi party.

How to Win an Information War is an effort to counter that prevailing narrative, arguing that a morally ambiguous black ops propaganda operation, led by the Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer, offered an effective counter to the Nazi operation, but grounded it in free-thinking – as opposed to the Nazi theory that people wanted to be led.

From this, Peter Pomerantsev, a Ukraine-born senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute, draws frequent parallels to the modern propaganda challenges of tackling disinformation and false narratives, mostly grounded in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It is a riveting, revisionist and subtle retelling of second world war propaganda, though one whose lessons for today are at best ambiguous.

Delmer might have agreed with the mainstream telling of Britain’s propaganda efforts in the early years of the war, as at the time he was sidelined (with mounting frustration), owing to his birth in Germany and Australian parentage.