The Realities of War
Mike Finn looks at the Liverpool press to find out what people back home were told about conditions on the Western Front.
In 1920, the war correspondent Philip Gibbs published his account of The Realities of War. Although Gibbs assiduously denied that his reporting from the Front during the Great War had in any way been false, he conceded that it had been incomplete. Gibbs excused this apparent dereliction of duty with an appeal to a higher moral imperative – his obligation to spare his readers the full truth of the suffering and dangers faced by their loved ones on the battlefield.
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