UK press warns of Nato war with Russia – newspapers are clearly keen to avoid mistakes of WWII

“Britain must prepare for war. America won’t save us this time,” declared the headline on a column in the Daily Telegraph on January 19. The Daily Mail, meanwhile, asserted on January 18 that Nato is “braced for all-out war with Russia in the next 20 years”. It cited a Nato official’s advice that civilians should “prepare for cataclysmic conflicts and the chilling prospect of being conscripted”.

The Sun has alerted its readers to the prospect of “wars in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea in five years”. In the Spectator, a recent column noted the defence secretary Grant Shapps’ assertion that the UK is “moving from a post-war to pre-war world” and suggested that “the west must stop playing Mr Nice Guy”.

Another column in the New Statesman similarly warned that a “worldwide, bipolar military conflict” will be “the organising principle of geopolitics for years to come”. It quoted Shapps as saying: “Old enemies are reanimated. New foes are taking shape. Battle lines are being redrawn.”

As fears of a new war emerge, I have delved into the newspaper print archives to explore how journalists reported the risk of conflict during the years before the world wars of the 20th century.

Press coverage in the years preceding the second world war served a generation of readers haunted by the appalling death toll of mechanised trench warfare between 1914 and 1918. Public concern was reinforced by fear of bombing, which newspapers and cinema newsreels depicted in searing images from the civil war in Spain between 1936 and 1939 and the Japanese bombing of China in 1931.

Despite the nature of Hitler’s regime in Germany, the Conservative prime minister of the time, Neville Chamberlain, was determined that British newspapers must promote appeasement. Press management became a political priority for Chamberlain.

He was helped to achieve it by two key lieutenants. Downing Street press secretary George Steward and Sir Joseph Ball, the chairman of the Conservative Research Department, worked closely with the prime minister to persuade British newspapers that appeasement was in the national interest. Chamberlain insisted that hostility to his approach would weaken Britain’s influence abroad.

Read more: How Neville Chamberlain's adviser took spinning for the PM to new and dangerous levels

Munich agreement

When Chamberlain negotiated the notorious Munich agreement with Hitler in September 1938, The Times did not oppose the transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany without Czech consent. Instead, Britain’s most prestigious establishment broadsheet declared that: “The volume of applause for Mr Chamberlain, which continues to grow throughout the globe, registers a popular judgement that neither politicians nor historians are likely to reverse.”

It predicted that Chamberlain’s diplomacy would end in “an era when the race for armaments will be seen for the madness that it is and will be abandoned because it has ceased even to be profitable”.

The mass market Conservative Daily Mail chastised Labour’s Clement Attlee for complaining about the “shameless betrayal” of the Czechs and accused Attlee of issuing “frothy diatribes”. It promoted Conservative optimism that the agreement would guarantee peace.

The liberal Manchester Guardian loathed Hitler and harboured grave doubts about appeasement, but it could see no practical alternative. In a leader column on October 3 1938, it caut