Morale on the ‘home fronts’, 1914-1945: Its transnational construction and destruction

On 26 February 2026, the European Studies Centre and the Centre for Global and Imperial History welcomed Sheldon Garon, Nissan Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University, to deliver the annual lecture in European History. In a lecture entitled "Morale on the Home Front (1914–1945): Its Transnational Construction and Destruction", Garon examined how the elusive concept of "civilian morale" became one of the twentieth century's most consequential—and destructive—strategic ideas. Difficult to define yet repeatedly invoked with confidence, morale became a language through which states justified attacks on cities, food supplies and, ultimately, civilian endurance itself.

The lecture formed part of Garon's broader ERC project, The Global War on Civilians, which explores how it became accepted that victory could be pursued not only through defeating armies and navies but also by directly targeting civilian populations. Rather than treating this development as a series of separate national experiences, Garon argued for a transnational history of learning and adaptation, in which governments observed one another's practices, borrowed strategic ideas across borders and gradually constructed new kinds of "home fronts" designed both to sustain their own populations and to undermine the morale of their enemies.

Garon organised his argument around three interconnected dimensions of modern warfare: aerial bombardment, blockade and morale itself. He traced the origins of the concept to the First World War, when governments increasingly sought to monitor, measure and influence the "general mood" of civilian populations living under wartime strain. Food blockades, particularly those directed against Germany, rested on the expectation that deprivation would eventually provoke unrest, social disintegration and political collapse. At the same time, governments in Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain began producing remarkably systematic reports that claimed to assess civilian morale with striking confidence. As Garon observed, these documents often resembled weather forecasts, describing morale as though it could visibly strengthen, weaken or "crack" under pressure.

The emergence of strategic air power gave this logic an even more destructive force. Garon showed how wartime bombing and interwar military thought increasingly treated civilian morale as a legitimate military objective. During the First World War, both British and German planners hoped that attacks on cities would generate panic and weaken the enemy's willingness to continue the conflict. In the interwar years, theorists such as Hugh Trenchard and Giulio Douhet developed these arguments further, insisting that psychological damage might ultimately prove more decisive than physical destruction, particularly within large, industrial and densely interconnected urban societies. In this vision, cities ceased to be merely centres of production or administration and instead became the psychological nerve centres of national resistance.

One of the lecture's most original contributions lay in demonstrating that these ideas did not remain confined to Europe. Japanese officials closely studied European experiences of wartime mobilisation and civil defence, while assumptions about bombing, blockade, urban vulnerability and civilian morale circulated across different theatres of war. Garon traced the movement of these concepts into the Asia-Pacific, showing how Japanese bombing campaigns in China and, later, American firebombing and blockade against Japan drew upon similar assumptions about the fragility of civilian endurance. By the end of the Second World War, he argued, this strategic way of thinking had become deeply embedded. Its influence extended beyond the conflict itself, shaping post-war American social psychology and wider understandings of morale as something that could be measured, managed and manipulated.

The discussion explored a number of wider implications. Participants asked about the relationship between total war and colonial violence, the Soviet experience, the effectiveness of economic sanctions, and the growing influence of psychology and psychiatry in shaping modern military thinking. Garon repeatedly emphasised that transnational circulation did not produce uniform outcomes. States borrowed similar concepts but adapted them to different political, military and imperial contexts. Bombing campaigns in colonial settings, for example, often pursued objectives that differed from those of interstate warfare, even while employing similar ideas about panic, punishment and the "moral effect" of violence. These exchanges reinforced one of the lecture's central methodological arguments: writing a connected history of war against civilians requires attention not only to the diffusion of ideas but also to the different ways they were interpreted, adapted and deployed.

The lecture ultimately offered a striking reinterpretation of the modern home front. Rather than viewing civilian populations simply as passive victims of war, Garon demonstrated how they became central objects of military planning and strategic imagination. Morale emerged not merely as an abstract psychological concept but as a weapon in its own right—something to be measured, protected, weakened and, where possible, destroyed. By tracing the transnational circulation of these ideas across Europe and the Asia-Pacific, Garon argued that the history of twentieth-century warfare cannot be understood within national boundaries alone. Instead, it must be seen as a connected history of observation, adaptation and escalating violence in which civilians increasingly became both the means and the target of modern war.

By Yangyang Zhao (ESC Events Assistant)