Qadesh - War and PR

If you believe the Hittites, the Egyptians were routed in 1274 BC and fled home with their tails between their legs. If you believe Ramesses II, the Egyptians won a stupendous victory. Or, at least, he did: the pictorial account of the battle on the walls of the Ramesseum shows a giant pharaoh trampling all before him while his miniature soldiers look on in awe.

Ancient warlords believed in PR. But with no mass media their audiences were generations as yet unborn, so it was all a question of having the last word.

Alexander was determined to be remembered as a second Achilles (and in our part of the world has succeeded, though it’s a different matter on the other side of the Euphrates). He enlisted a historian, Callisthenes of Olynthus, to accompany his epic journey of conquest and write it all down. Sadly they had a row half-way along and Callisthenes disappeared from history. A suitable fate, you might say, for a PR man.

Winston Churchill was asked if history would treat him kindly. ‘I am sure of it’, he replied, ‘because I shall write it’. And so he did. He was not above presenting his version of the facts and making sure that contrary evidence was suppressed. For example, he realised that his notorious ‘spheres of influence’ agreement with Stalin would damage his reputation as a champion of the free world and directed that it should be kept secret – which it was, but not for long.

Haig was responsible for wasting hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives on the Somme and at Ypres (though he was also responsible for the 1918 campaign which defeated Germany and ended the war). He was a man of supreme self-confidence and believed himself to be divinely inspired, keeping a detailed daily diary which formed the basis for letters and dispatches to the King. It was revealed after the war that he falsified many entries retrospectively to show that his decisions were never ill-conceived.

When William beat Harold’s army at Hastings in 1066 it was important to prove that God was on his side. In the twentieth century he would probably have made a propaganda film but in the eleventh the answer was the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts Harold swearing fealty to William during his sojourn in Normandy. This event established William’s right to rule England, though it took years of brutal suppression to turn his claim into reality. Did it actually happen? No-one knows, but William’s army of occupation accepted the tapestry story as authentic.

Julius Caesar’s accounts of his campaigns in Gaul are models of military history: detailed, exciting and written by his own hand, they reveal the mind of a master-strategist at work. Here, too, the author had an ulterior purpose: to establish his credentials as the number one Roman of his time. His subjugation of the Gauls was meant to win support among the Senate, most of whom loathed him. We all know how it ended: Caesar’s ambition overcame his respect for tradition – ‘the die is cast’ – leading to the destruction of the Republic, and of himself.

During World War Two the use of mass communication to control people’s ideas reached its zenith. We do not need to dwell on Goebbels’ demonic skill in perverting the minds of young Germans. PR was used more ‘innocently’ by the US Marine Corps when it attached journalists from American towns and cities to its front-line formations with the task of sending home stories about the daring deeds of marines from Des Moines, Duluth and Detroit. The result, as intended, was a flood of applications from the best of the US Army’s recruits. The Marines became an elite and have remained so ever since.

Montgomery was a virtuoso in the use of PR. His victory at El Alamein, Britain’s first in three long years of war, was acclaimed out of all proportion to its significance, and indeed out of all proportion to Montgomery’s skill as a commander. Given its overwhelming superiority in men, machines and supplies, it can be argued that the Eighth Army should have beaten Rommel much more quickly and with far fewer casualties. Nevertheless, Montgomery’s self-esteem and his adroit use of the press created a popular ‘Monty Myth’, which out-lasted his failure in Normandy and the disaster at Arnhem.

People today are less credulous – at least as far as affairs of state are concerned. The concocted evidence used by the American and British governments to justify the invasion of Iraq was exposed almost immediately. Thanks to investigative journalists and the phenomenon of the internet we can, if we wish, dissect and reject the stories which our politicians try to propagate. It may be that their efforts are subject to the law of diminishing returns. But one thing is certain: attempts to re-write history with a particular slant, whether on papyrus, paper or plastic, will continue for as long as military leaders believe they can manipulate the truth.