the New. In that same year he was employed by the Federal Department of Information to provide liaison between the chiefs of staff and the press. Bean was also involved in the creation of the National Archives of Australia. In 1942 on retiring as Official War Historian of the First World War, he accepted Prime Minister Curtin's invitation to chair what was then known as the War Archives Committee to recommend procedures for the collection and preservation of records created during the Second World War. Bean, along with other historians, had lobbied for this initiative as prior to that time Australia possessed no national archives resulting in World War I records being destroyed. After the war, during Bean's seventeen year chairmanship, the Committee expanded its scope to include all Commonwealth records thereby establishing the foundations for the management of the official records of the Commonwealth of Australia. In 1943 Bean published War Aims of a Plain Australian. Its message was much the same as that of In Your Hands, Australians: "May we all play the game with larger wisdom than in 1918 and with our whole strength, so as to win not only the war but the peace – this time". After some unsuccessful lobbying, Bean persuaded the Curtin Government to sponsor a history of the Second World War, recommending the appointment of journalist Gavin Long as official historian. Subsequently, in 1943, Long was appointed general editor of the Official History of Australia in the Second World War, which eventually comprised five series totalling twenty-two volumes of which he, Long, wrote three volumes. Bean was a member of a committee of twenty-one representative citizens in Sydney, who in 1943, wrote to Prime Minister Curtin commending the Kimberley plan (a Jewish Settlement Proposal in the Kimberley) pointing out that "Australia should acknowledge her increased moral and political responsibilities to the world at large, and extend all possible aid to persecuted peoples." The proposal was ultimately unsuccessful. In 1944 Bean wrote the Anzac Requiem - a short meditation on Australian service and sacrifice in both World War I and the then current World War II. Bean recorded it in August 1946 for radio broadcast on Anzac Day, 25 April 1947, and possibly on subsequent Anzac Days. In 1946 Bean produced a single-volume history of the Great War, Anzac to Amiens: A Shorter History of the Australian Fighting Services in The First World