Sometimes communications come by force
We are ever evolving our approach to the comms side of national security, but sometimes, as the Dambusters Raid 80 years ago showed, deeds can speak
I’m not afraid to admit that I first encountered the great Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung in the context of a war film. When I was young, I devoured war films like a wolf hungry from months in the forest, from stiff-upper-lip classics like Reach for the Sky (1956) to then-recent, full-colour Cold War thrillers like the magnificent Hunt for Red October (1990). (I may come back to war films in a later essay: they shaped me deeply.) A particular favourite, because I had been enthralled by the book, was The Eagle Has Landed (1976), a starry, boisterous and clever tale of a German plot to kidnap Churchill from Norfolk. It was principally a Michael Caine vehicle, but there were stalwarts like Anthony Quayle (as Admiral Wilhelm Canaris), Donald Pleasance (Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler) and a larky but occasionally intense turn by Donald Sutherland as disillusioned IRA man Liam Devlin.
Jung intruded into my pre-adolescent consciousness in a conversation which Colonel Max Radl (Robert Duvall), a battered and mutilated Eastern Front veteran now working in intelligence, talks idly to his assistant, Sergeant Karl Hofer (a young Michael Byrne).
Radl: Are you familiar with the works of Jung, Karl?
Hofer: I am aware of the works of Jung, not familiar, Herr Oberst.
Radl: A very great thinker. A rational man. And yet he speaks of something
called synchronicity—events having a coincidence in time, creating the feeling that a deeper motivation is involved.
I bring this up partly because it is an amusing memory for me but mainly because this week I experienced a kind of synchronicity (though Jungians will no doubt tell me that my understanding gleaned from a 50-year-old Second World War romp from the Lew Grade stable is somehow superficial). Earlier in the week, I sat in on a meeting with the young and formidably energetic chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Alicia Kearns, and one subject which came up was “strategic communications”, which, in a national security setting, means a coordinated focus on the impact of policy and the integration of audience impact into the planning process. So, for example, Kearns worked in the Foreign Office before being elected to Parliament, and in 2015 she was appointed the cross-government lead for the communications aspect of UK operations against ISIL. Every part of a military intervention, from ministerial contributions in Parliament to airstrikes, has a “public relations” impact, and that needs to be a consideration from the very earliest stages.
The other part of this synchronicity was the recent 80th anniversary, on 16/17 May, of Operation CHASTISE, the pinpoint attack on three dams in the Ruhr Valley by Avro Lancasters of the RAF’s 617 Squadron. The Dambusters, led by the hauntingly young, driven, sometimes irascible Wing Commander Guy Gibson, dropped innovative, specially designed Upkeep “bouncing bombs”, the brainchild of Barnes Wallis, to give them a chance of making an impact on the huge concrete dams. Two of the dams, the Möhne and the Eder, were breached, while the third, the Sorpe, was only damaged; the effect on German industrial output is disputed to this day, but it was certainly not a major strategic blow, despite around 1,600 civilians being killed, most of them prisoners or slave labourers. The RAF paid a high cost. Of the 19 Lancasters which took part in the raid, eight were lost, along with 53 aircrew killed and three taken prisoner. Gibson himself returned safely, though he would die 16 months later, in September 1944, crashing in the Netherlands on his way back from a raid on Bremen. He was 26, and, a little known fact, had been selected as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Macclesfield at the general election due after the end of hostilities.
These two apparently disparate subjects, strategic communications and Op CHASTISE, somehow became intertwined in my brain and would not untangle themselves. After some hours, I realise why my mind had put the together. I had always known that, in strict practical terms, the Dambusters raid had made little impact on the course of the war. But then it occurred to me: that was not in itself a failure. It was more a feature than a bug. The argument is often advanced that the improbably heroism and ingenuity of the raid was a boost to Britain’s morale at a dark time—in early summer 1943, after the surrender of Paulus’s Sixth Army at Stalingrad but before the world’s largest tank battle at Kursk, an Allied victory was by no means assured and must anyway have seemed terrifyingly distant—and that is exactly the point. The raid was an example of strategic communications at the most intensely kinetic end of the spectrum, its major impact measured not in terms of hours of production lost by the factories of the Ruhr, but by the impression made that the RAF could go anywhere, strike anything, and find ways to eliminate even the most awkward and well-defended of targets in occupied Europe.
Strategic communications, or, as we would have conceptualised it more crudely 50 years ago, “propaganda” is hardly new. The projection of political messages is as old as the human instinct to conquer and control, and one of the first extant examples is the huge Behistun Inscription, a relief carved into a cliff face near Kermanshah in western Iran which lists the ancestry of Darius the Great, enumerates the territories under his control and then narrates a series of battles he had won over various rebellious groups. Overall it is an emphatic advertisement of the power and position of the Persian king, ascribed in the text to the “grace of Ahura Mazda”, the supreme being of Zoroastrianism.
What is new, however, is the deeper understanding of strategic communications which we have now. One of the most thoughtful writers on the issue is Commander Steve Tatham PhD RNR, who saw active service with the Royal Navy in Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan, and commanded 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group, served as military liaison to the Joint Intelligence Committee and was the Royal Navy’s public spokesman during Operation TELIC, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a 2008 paper, Tatham noted:
Conveying information messages to specific audiences, in order to affect behavioural change for specific political objectives, may well prove more decisive in future battles than the placement of bullets and bombs upon a target.
He stressed that one of the most fundamental elements of strategic communications was that it had to be a cross-governmental effort, a thread running all the way through a particular policy. More generally, he proposed the following definition of strategic communications (“stratcomms”):
A systematic series of sustained and coherent activities, conducted across strategic, operational and tactical levels, that enables understanding of target audiences, identifies effective conduits, and develops and promotes ideas and opinions through those conduits to promote and sustain particular types of behaviour.
While it would be anachronistic to pin this label on Op CHASTISE, I think viewing the Dambusters through the prism of stratcomms does make your perception more nuanced and more thoughtful.
Let us concede, for a moment, the most extreme argument that the Dambusters’ destruction of two of the three Ruhr dams had minimal effect on German industrial production. We know that steel production in the Ruhr dropped by about 75 per cent in the immediate aftermath of the raid, that the destruction of two hydroelectric power stations and the damage to seven more left the region suffering power shortages for at least two weeks and that coal production dropped sharply. But it has been argued that this disruption was temporary and certainly did not make a strategically significant difference to the German war effort. Certainly, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the head of RAF Bomber Command, who had been cajoled into authorising the raid, regarded it as having been a wasteful failure, remarking in 1945 that “The material damage was negligible compared with one small area attack”. Certainly Winston Churchill’s public proclamation of “unparalleled devastation” was an ambitious piece of hyperbole.
Does this mean that the enterprise was a failure? Through the lens of strategic communications, by no means. The evidence from reports by local Nazi Party officials to Berlin suggests that public opinion in the Ruhr depicted the raid as “an extraordinary success on the part of the English”. In London, photographs of the damage taken by Spitfires from the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit were quickly shown on the front pages of national newspapers, revealing the effects of 617 Squadron’s unusual and savagely demanding mission.
Moreover, the precision of Operation CHASTISE, for all the 1,600 people killed by floodwater, managed to decouple the mission in the popular imagination from the awe-inspiring but catastrophically destructive conventional bombing raids on the major cities of Germany. Sir Max Hastings, author of a recent study of CHASTISE, summed it up like this: “The story seemed to reflect a heroism that was victimless… it carried none of the moral baggage that has become associated with the offensive against Germany’s cities”.
The raid was a mine of small stories of heroism. The Lancasters had flown incredibly low to release the Upkeep bombs effectively, so low that some collided with power lines on approach. To achieve the necessary height of 60 feet—terrifyingly low in a large, four-engined aircraft like the Lancaster—given that the standard barometric altimeters were nowhere near accurate enough, each aircraft had two spotlights mounted underneath it, one under the nose and one under the fuselage, the beams from which would converge on the surface of the reservoir when the required altitude was achieved. This ingenious measuring trick was not, as the legendary film The Dambusters (1955) showed it, a brainwave of Gibson while visiting the theatre, but was the innovation of a scientist at the Ministry of Aircraft Production, Ben Lockspeiser (later the founding president of CERN), who recalled a similar idea being mooted by Coastal Command earlier in the war. Much of this would remain secret, but it fuelled an impression of technical prowess and ingenuity.
The operation also made an icon of Gibson. He was awarded the highest award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross, being invested by the Queen (the King was absent in North Africa) in June 1943. Now holding the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and Bar and the Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar, he was the most highly decorated serviceman in Britain, and, after taking luncheon with the prime minister and his wife at Chequers in July, he boarded the RMS Queen Mary for a publicity trip to North America which took in Canada and both coasts of the United States. Gibson wrote a memoir entitled Enemy Coast Ahead which was serialised in The Sunday Express in late 1944 and early 1945, before a single volume was issued in 1946. In what seems like the most incongruous move, in February 1944 he was the guest on an episode of Desert Island Discs, answers gently coaxed out by the urbane and smooth-voiced Roy Plomley.
If we put Operation CHASTISE in that wider framework, therefore, in the way we would do almost without thinking nowadays, it becomes much more difficult to dismiss it as a futile gesture with no effect on German industry. It was daring and technologically sophisticated raid on targets which were high-value but hard to hit, it breached two of its three targets, and it was a bountiful stock of imagery which would slot neatly into the government’s narrative and supply a morale boost to the beleaguered British people.
The government knew the value of these moments, had done at least since Churchill had become prime minister in May 1940. It had exploited the possibilities of fictional heroism with films like Went The Day Well? (1942), The Day Will Dawn (1942), One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) and Tomorrow We Live (1943). It was also always ready to exploit the public images of our many mind-meltingly brave and often deeply eccentric military heroes, like Shimi Lovat, the commanding officer of the 1st Special Service Brigade who waded ashore on D-Day accompanied by his personal piper; Douglas Bader, the iron-willed RAF pilot who had lost both legs in a crash in 1931 but returned to frontline duty and was awarded the DSO for his leadership during the Battle of Britain; or Geoffrey Keyes, at 24 the youngest lieutenant colonel in the British Army, awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross when he was killed leading a raid on General Erwin Rommel’s headquarters in Libya in 1941.
We are learning all the time. The NATO-led intervention in the First Libyan Civil War in 2011 had been a successful exercise for the communications function of the UK’s new National Security Council. It had been directed from the centre of Whitehall, with the National Security Communications Team hand-in-glove with Downing Street officials, daily meetings with ministers and an efficient relationship with the White House Office of Communications. Dr Emma Briant, in her Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for global change, summed the process up like this:
Rather than explaining the UK’s foreign and domestic priorities to different audiences, messages intended for the persuasion of a foreign or enemy audience are instead being incorporated into government output for the domestic media audience, which has now become integrated into the international realm.
The National Security Capability Review of 2018 announced that the National Security Communications Team would be significantly expanded, partly as a response to the novichok poisonings in Salisbury that June, as the UK authorities were felt to have responded well in comms terms. Alicia Kearns’s work coordinating the campaign against ISIL was specifically mentioned as “vital in damaging the perception of Daesh, and reducing their ability to recruit”. The “refresh” of the government’s Integrated Review: Responding to a more contested and volatile world, published in March 2023, acknowledged that the field is still in development and lessons are emerging every day from the conflict in Ukraine. It pledges to “raise national security communications capabilities through a new curriculum delivered by the College for National Security”.
One of the most striking, and most daunting, aspects of modern government is the sheer crushing weight of information available both legitimately and illegitimately to anyone which access to the internet. This is not a trend we can arrest, much less reverse, so governments must become more agile and sophisticated in their approach to the power of information and its use as a weapon, often one of a first-strike capability. Learning will continue as long as the technological landscape evolves, but it also gives us a better ability to look back and, ideally, to learn. With our modern perspective, Operation CHASTISE seems both much more plausible but also more successful. Man cannot win by bombs alone, but by every word.