CHAPTER 10
Organization for Psychological Warfare

Big jobs require big organizations. Eight billion leaflets were dropped in the Mediterranean and European Theaters of Operations alone under General Eisenhower's command. That is enough to have given every man, woman and child on earth four leaflets, and this figure, large as it is, does not include leaflets dropped in all the other theaters of war by ourselves, our allies, and our enemies. It does not include the B-29 leaflet raids on Japan, in which hundreds of tons of thin paper leaflets were dropped. Huge American newspapers were developed, edited, printed and delivered to our Allies and to enemy troops. One of these, Parachute News (Rakkasan), attained a circulation of two million copies per run; this was in the Southwest Pacific. In parts of the upper Burmese jungle and the Tibetan borderland where no newspaper was ever distributed before, the Fourteenth Air Force distributed a Japanese newspaper, Jisei, along with picture sheets for illiterate tribesmen.

In getting at the enemy, the United States printed leaflets, cartoons, pamphlets, newspapers, posters, books, magazines. In black operations enough fabrications were perpetrated to keep the FBI busy for a thousand years. Movies in all forms (commercial, amateur, all known widths, sound and silent, even lantern slides) went out all over the world. Radio talked on all waves in almost every language and code; loudspeakers, souvenirs, candy, matches, nylon stockings, pistols you could hide in your mouth, sewing thread, salt, phonograph records and baby pictures streamed out over the world. Much of this was necessarily waste. In the larger waste of war it appears almost frugal when taken in relation to the results thought to have been achieved.

Every American theater commander, given the choice of using psychological warfare or not, as he chose, did choose to use it. Every major government engaged in the war used psychological warfare, along with a number of assorted private characters, some of whom later founded governments. (The sacred government of the Dalai Lama, in forbidden Lhasa, undertook a neat little maneuver in limited overt propaganda when it printed a brand-new set of stamps for presentation to President Roosevelt; the Inner Mongols were propagandized by the Outer Mongols; the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg broadcast against the Reich.) Psychological warfare proliferated so much as to change the tone if not the character of war. General Eisenhower wrote, at the end of the European operations, that psychological warfare had developed as a specific and effective weapon of war.

The organization of psychological warfare was as much a problem as the operation. It overlapped military, naval, diplomatic, press, entertainment, public relations, police power, espionage, commercial, educational and subversive operations. Almost every nation involved had extreme difficulty in fitting these new powers and unknown processes into the accepted frame of government, and almost every national solution was different. The British and the Japanese achieved a considerable degree of unification. The Americans, Nazis and Russians were hampered by the number of competing agencies. The French were burdened through most of the war by an excess of governments. The Chinese did things in their own formal but offhand manner; the Nationalist party carried on information functions for the Chinese government, while the Communist guerrilla authorities carried on functions for the Communist party.

The lower down the echelon, the nearer the armies of the world came to standardizing psychological warfare organization. They did this for the same reason that they all organize into regiments instead of centuries, cohorts, or tribes. Modern war is a self-standardizing process if the enemy experience is to be copied, enemy techniques improved, allied assistance accepted, and military practice kept up to world standards. Psychological warfare units needed printing and radio sections; to service these sections they all needed intelligence and analysis offices; to distribute their materials they all needed agents and liaison. Black propaganda organization varied more than did white, but it was amazing to Americans, uncovering Japanese subversive-operations units, to see how much the Japanese organization resembled their own.

From the purely theoretical standpoint, it would have been far sounder to put national policy formulation (White House and Congress), foreign policy formulation (State), strategic propaganda (State, War, Navy) into a single administrative entity than to create a new federal agency with improvised procedures, improvised security, and an improvised staff. However, the State, War and Navy Departments (at the very opening of our war) were overworked and understaffed. Many of the senior personnel regarded psychological warfare with downright suspicion and propaganda was regarded as a dirty name for a dirty and ineffectual job. Hence the old-line agencies let pass the opportunity for establishing initial control.

Subsequent experience suggests that the use of existing facilities and existing agencies wherever possible instead of new ones imparts stability, discipline, and morale, and lowers the organizational friction common to all new political agencies, especially to instrumentalities in so controversial a field as propaganda. On the chart shown, for instance, it would not have mattered whether the Psychological Warfare Facility (whatever its name) were put for housekeeping purposes under the State, War, Navy Department, or the Office for Emergency Management. The essential requirement would have been to use State Department men for jobs that involved determining foreign policy, military men for tasks of a military nature and naval for navy work, and to recruit only after cadres had been established. The sponsorship of psychological warfare by one—any one—of the old-line departments might have slowed down the feverish tempo of reorganizations, quarrels, cabals, internal struggles for power and clashes with other Federal agencies which were so characteristic of OWI and its colleague organizations.

The actual conduct of psychological warfare was shown in Chart I. (No official authority exists for such a chart; the author bases it on his own observation and experience.) Only agencies themselves originating psychological warfare materials are shown. Relationships between State, War and Navy were stable, but were frequently by-passed; for example, the Zacharias broadcasts, which were our biggest political warfare experiment, did not go to the State Department until after they had started. Relationships between OSS and other agencies were erratic and cloaked in extraordinary but irregular security. The OWI ran for most purposes as an autonomous group, with occasional reference to State, Navy, and War Departments. The President in his individually official capacity was apt to improvise psychological warfare operations of high importance, without warning his subordinates of what was coming (paper knife made of human Japanese bone; the "unconditional surrender" formula). The White House staff sometimes worked through channels, sometimes not; the Harvard professor who advised on inflation was simultaneously involved with psychological warfare on continental Asia. The Secretary of the Treasury openly discussed what he would like to do with Germany in terms which the Nazi radio naturally conveyed to its own people. Within the OWI itself, the overseas operation was separated from the domestic, the broadcasters from the planners, the outposts from everybody else, during much of the war.

But the job was done!

Success was not due to the formal structure of the Office of War Information (see charts V, VI). No administrative formula could have transcended such governmental confusion. It was owing to the fact that all the people just described—who went around, with the best will in the world most of the time, minding one another's business—did in the end achieve effective results. The common denominator behind them was not the authority of the President, the discipline of the Democratic Party, or the casually designed, casually overlooked formal lines of authority. The common denominator was American civilization itself. Had we been deeply disunited, this ramshackle structure would have collapsed into chaos. But there was broad concurrence, a sense of cooperativeness, good will and good temper. A German, Russian or Japanese bureaucrat would have gone mad in the wartime mazes of the Federal system; a Chinese would probably have felt very much at home, but would have polished up the titles and honorifics a little.

The difference between our governmental organization and that of our enemies lay in the fact that to us the T/O were something that could be used when convenient, and could (without breach of faith or law) be short-circuited when convenient. Word was passed around, material exchanged, coordination effected in ways which could not be shown on any imaginable chart. It was neither a merit nor a defect, but simply an American way of doing things.

This characteristic has the effect, however, of making after-the-fact studies quite unrealistic. There is not much from the formal records and the formal charts which conveys the actual tone of governmental operations in terms of propaganda. Study of World War II organization for the sake of research and planning against possible future war would not be very profitable unless it delved into the concrete experience of individuals. The formal outlines mean nothing; they are positively deceptive unless the actual controls and operations are known. (Mr. Warburg makes it plain in his book that he thinks little of Mr. Elmer Davis' conception of his job; but he does not mention that Mr. Sherwood, theoretically Mr. Davis' subordinate, ran foreign operations without much reference to Mr. Davis or to any other part of the Federal government. Since Mr. Sherwood was closer to the White House than was Mr. Davis, this important consideration escapes being recorded on the chart: foreign operations were actually autonomous.35) Examples of how things really worked—as opposed to how they looked as though they worked—could be multiplied forever; but the soundest way of finding out sober, judicious opinion will necessarily await the writing of autobiographies and memoirs by the people concerned.

With these sweeping reservations in mind, it is worth noting the organization of OWI (internal). The Domestic Operations Branch can be dismissed with brief mention. It proved to be the object of profound suspicion on the part of many members of Congress, and its function was to stimulate and assist inward media of public information in support of the war effort. The Domestic Operations Branch never superseded other U.S. government informational services (State, Agriculture, Treasury, War, and so on), so that it was the wartime supplement to the governmental supplement to the regular news and information system, which remained private. This precluded intimate coordination of domestic and overseas propaganda and rendered illusory any hope that domestic propaganda, as eavesdropped by our enemies, could be used as an instrument of war.

The Overseas Operations Branch had two basic missions. Within the United States it was the operating and controlling agency for government-owned or government-leased world-wide short-wave. For actual overseas purposes, it was the rear echelon of both the Navy and Army theater facilities and of its own OWI Outposts. The Outposts were themselves under OWI for certain purposes; for other purposes they were subject to the chief of mission (ambassador, minister or chargÉ) of the U.S. in the foreign country, and still other purposes under the American military commander having local jurisdiction. (OWI-Delhi, for example, was under the office of the American High Commissioner in India; also under the Rear Echelon Headquarters of the Commanding General, United States Army Forces, China-Burma-India Theater; also under OWI-New York for supply of its printed materials, most personnel and needed presses; under OWI-San Francisco for supply of its wirelessed news; and under OWI-Washington for general policy, hiring and firing, and everything else.)

In terms of its own global radio, OWI prepared planning and control materials in Washington and relayed these to New York and San Francisco. The radio facilities in these cities then transmitted the material overseas. Through the first three years of the war, the precise nature of the Washington controls was in question, enforcement remained a perplexing problem, and coordination between planning and execution remained unsolved in part. By the spring and summer of 1945, OWI had solved most of these problems, chiefly by means of circulating the Area I, II, and III chiefs to the operating offices. When personal relations were satisfactory (as in the instance of Mr. Owen Lattimore, chief in OWI San Francisco, Mr. George Taylor, chief of Far East in Washington, and Mr. F. M. Fisher, chief of China Outpost in Chungking, all of them China experts) coordination might be difficult but was never exasperating.

In terms of supply, the materials gathered by the other agencies went to the Outpost Service Bureau, which ran a virtual informational Sears Roebuck for the outposts. Foreign demands for American materials were unpredictable. The OWI learned rapidly and effectively, and the material going out of the outposts to foreign audiences very soon reached a high level of quality.

Other psychological warfare agencies at the national level were the CIAA (Coordinator of [later the Office of] Inter-American Affairs) which conducted propaganda exclusively to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which serviced the Joint Chiefs of Staff with intelligence and policy materials, and served as a home base for its own units which operated abroad under Theater authority. No U.S.-based black propaganda operations were reported to the public.36

Reduced to the concrete terms of definite policy execution (as opposed to the making of policies that might or might not ever reach their supposed executors) and the routine working of operations, the national level was not important except for the two functions stated above, global shortwave, and source of supply. The decisive choices were made in the theaters or at the outposts, half the time in ignorance of what Washington policy-makers had decided in conclave on that particular topic. (When the author was in China, he found that the OWI China outpost decoded its week-to-week propaganda instructions only after they were hopelessly obsolete; they were then filed.) The theaters were able to use psychological warfare as and when they pleased. Between the ETO and Washington close politico-military coordination was possible. Between Washington and the others it was impracticable.

The War Department participation in the control and planning of psychological warfare is shown by Chart VII, which represents the situation as of 1945. The Propaganda Branch, attached to G-2 as a staff agency and not to Military Intelligence Service as an operating agency, served to carry out the psychological warfare functions of the War Department.37 The Chief of the Branch represented the Joint Chiefs of Staff at OWI meetings, along with his Navy confrÈre; he took care of official messages to the Theaters pertaining to psychological warfare matters, and his office itself performed a few limited functions. (One of these functions required the author to get up at four-thirty mornings in order to digest the overnight intake of enemy propaganda. He was joined in this by Teheran-born, Columbia-trained Edward K. Merat. It was with real relief that he saw the Nazi stations go off the air. He was then able to pass the early-bird business to his Persian colleague.) The Branch also made up propanal studies whenever these were warrantable at the General Staff level. The Deputy Chief (Air) was the vestigial remnant of a short-lived Army Air Forces propaganda establishment; he had direct access to the air staff, and took care of things having a peculiarly air character. (The abbreviations under Theaters are explained below, on page 187, since Theater nomenclature for psychological warfare was never standardized.)

With the termination of hostilities, though it was not the juridical finish of the war, both OSS and OWI were swept out of existence. By executive order of 20 September 1945, effective ten days later, OSS was broken up; the scholastic portions were dismembered and reassembled into the Department of State, where they presumably helped collate material for the new interdepartmental Central Intelligence Group (CIG). The operational parts were handed over to the War Department. For all the author knows, some distressed colonel may have a desk full of fountain-pens which explode, transmit radio messages, or can be used for invisible tattooing, along with an edible blotter, a desk telephone which is really a hand grenade and a typewriter which is a demountable motor scooter; such speculations are delightful topics on which to dwell, but the day of black propaganda is over. Obsolescence reduces all things, even OSS, to absurdity.

The OWI perished a more lingering administrative death. It was transferred to the Department of State as an operating unit under the name Interim International Information Service (IIIS) and a new Assistant Secretary of State, Mr. William Benton, took over its sponsorship. Later, under the abbreviation OIC (Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs), it was coordinated on January 1, 1946, with preexisting State department offices and with certain leftovers from the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA). It retained the global broadcasts on a limited budget; it still served the surviving outposts, which were being integrated with diplomatic and consular offices overseas; and for Korea, Japan, Germany, Austria, and Venezia Giulia, it acted as the supplying service for the Military Government information programs in those areas. The Bureau of the Budget took over limited domestic functions when the OWI passed out of independent existence on 31 August 1945.

The only aspect of psychological warfare that does not show on the chart is the Japanese political warfare system—by the test of success, the best developed by any belligerent during World War II. The Japanese very early learned the simple rule: Political warfare cannot convert a sub-subsistence economy and government into a satisfactory system, but political warfare can convert a subsisting area into one that has the illusions of prosperity and national freedom. To succeed in the face of economic difficulty, political warfare must be shrewd, simple, insistent, and backed up with a touch of terror. The Japanese moved into the Western colonial areas of the Far East between 1940 and 1942 (Indo-China, Malaya, Indonesia, the Philippines, parts of China, Burma, and areas inhabited by substantial Indian minorities). They organized the following "independent" governments:

• The Imperial Government of Manchukuo;
• Federated Autonomous Inner Mongolia;
• The Reorganized National Government of China, superseding earlier puppets;
• Malai (under Japanese military control but promised ultimate independence);
• The Republic of the Philippines;
• The Empire of Vietnam (later the Vietnam Republic);
• A dictatorship in Burma of the Adipadi;
• Republic Indonesia;
• Azad Hind (Free Indian government-in-exile) and the Azad Hind Fauj (quisling Indian National Army, which put large forces into the field against British-controlled Indian troops and helped to neutralize the entire military potential of India);
• The independent Kingdom of Cambodia (made independent by telling the helpless King that he need not let the French come back).

These Japanese-sponsored governments flew their own flags, had enough troops to help Japan police their home areas, developed psychological warfare facilities with intensive Japanese assistance, and went through all the motions of independence. In 1944, some of them even held an international conference at Tokyo, thanking Japan for liberating all the non-White States and adopting high-sounding resolutions. (The Siamese puppet ambassador to this meeting had the unforgettable name of His Excellency, the Honorable Witchit Witchit Watakan!)

Behind the pageantries of Japanese political warfare, economic and social realities were horrid. The Japanese printed money which had far less backing than cigar store coupons. They bankrupted all non-Japanese business so that Japanese carpetbaggers could buy their way in cheap; businesses owned by white foreigners were expropriated out of hand. They cut off communications, spread terror, raised the price of food, put hospitals out of business, degraded schools—and received the devoted loyalty of large parts of the cheated populations. It did not matter to millions of Burmese whether they had lived well under British rule or not; the British did not let them have their own flag, did not let them send ministers and ambassadors, did not let them run a scow up and down the river with a mortar on it, calling it a navy. The miranda, the pageantry of politics, was what mattered—not law-and-order, democracy, security, education, health.38

The same story might have been repeated on a larger scale throughout the Far East, perhaps ultimately leading to something like Lothrop Stoddard's old nightmare, The Rising Tide of Color. Countervening factors included the presence of Chinese agitation both Kuomintang and Communist in leadership, guerrilla operations throughout Southeast Asia, and the ruinous economic effects of American submarine and Fourteenth Air Force anti-shipping operations. Shipping losses drove the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere below subsistence level and created a condition where even the most fanatic patriot realized the disadvantages of the situation.

The Japanese put all the captured radios to work. They had traitors of all kinds on their side—including, it is shameful to admit, Americans, Russians, British, Australians, and French. (Despite the fact they occupied all of Guam, they never used a single Guamanian traitor—testimony to the simple loyalty to the U.S. of the Chamorro people and to the popularity of the long-established U.S. naval government on the island.)

Japanese psychological warfare failed because the real warfare behind it failed. The Japanese could not whip their over-docile troops into a fighting frenzy without allowing those troops to behave in a way which made deadly enemies for Japan among the peoples she came to "liberate." The Japanese did not have sense enough to be satisfied with 100% return per year on their money, but wrecked the conquered economic systems with inflation, poor management, and excess exploitation. Even the quislings became restless under the poor occupation policies of the Japanese, and before the war was over a considerable number of the Japanese quislings re-quislinged back to the United Nations side.

In contrast, the American psychological warfare structure included Theater operating units, usually called PWB (Psychological Warfare Branch), although it became PWD (Psychological Warfare Division) in SHAEF and did not grow beyond TPWO (Theater Psychological Warfare Officer) in China Theater. The supreme authority was, of course, the Theater Commander, on whose responsibility the operation had to be carried out. When propaganda bungled and got into the field of political trouble, it was the Theater Commander and not the subordinates who took the blame. Every theater was under the command of a general, except for Central Pacific (under Admiral Nimitz, and he used an Army colonel as his propaganda chief). In most theaters, the Political Adviser was the buffer between psychological warfare and the commander himself; in Southwest Pacific and later the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, Japan, General MacArthur instituted the office of Military Secretary and made this officer responsible for reporting to him personally the developments in the propaganda field.

Subject to local variation, the Theater agencies faced similar problems. They had to serve in turn as a rear echelon to service the needs of combat propaganda, while working as the actual operating agencies for the bigger radio programs and the preparation of strategic leaflets. As the areas behind them became more consolidated, displays and films took their place beside news and leaflets as chores that had to be performed. Communications facilities were a problem. Purely military facilities could not, of course, be overloaded by the lightly coded transmission of hundreds of thousands of words of political and other news and guidance; the psychological warfare establishments had to jerry-build communications facilities out of what they could borrow from Army, or obtain from OWI supplies in the United States, or buy locally.

In most Theater organizations, the chief was a military man and the staff was partly military and partly civilian. Under General Eisenhower, PWD was not only Army and OWI but included OSS, on the American side, along with British partnership, French participation, and other Allied personnel as well. Under General MacArthur, OWI participated under strict Army control. Under General Stilwell, no Theater organization as such was set up; the G-2, the Political Adviser or the General himself handled propaganda matters when they turned up. Under General Wedemeyer, there was a Theater officer. Under General Sultan, the OWI ran itself; the Outpost serviced the Theater. Under General Clay, Information Control Service, OMGUS, became an integral part of military control. The same thing happened in General MacArthur's reorganized PWB—an organization termed CIES (Civil Information and Education Section) had the organization and personnel not only of the American structure, but the usable purged parts of the Joho Kyoku obedient to its command and liaison. Other Theaters had comparable arrangements, each suited to the Theater.

The common features of all Theater establishments were:

• (1) Liaison or control from Army, State, and OWI, sometimes including OSS.
• (2) Responsibility to the Theater Commander.
• (3) Direct operation of strategic radio.
• (4) Preparation of strategic leaflets, and sometimes of tactical leaflets as well.
• (5) Use of local, native, or allied personnel.

Within the Theater staffs, the psychological warfare facilities were to a great extent assimilated for control and movement of personnel, supply, and so on. The G-3's and G-4's of the Theaters normally serviced the PWB's along with the rest of their work. The OWI and other civilian persons were put into uniform and given simulated rank, sometimes wildly disproportionate to their Army counterparts. The Army G-2's naturally worked with the PWB intelligence facilities; in some Theaters the G-2 was ex officio the chief of psychological warfare, as was the Assistant Chief of Staff G-2, War Department General Staff, himself at home. G-1's usually kept out of the way of psychological warfare and the housekeeping of the units was in most cases autonomous.

Responsibility for financing psychological warfare was never established as doctrine. The State Department kept most of it off its budget, leaving the actual payments up to the War Department and the OWI to figure out. Oftentimes this resulted in a curious sort of neo-capitalism within the U.S.-owned socialism of the Army. The two agencies would hold on to property as though it were private property, on the basis of immediate title, without reference to the plain fact that all of it was paid for in the end by the United States Treasurer. (OWI once murmured threateningly about bringing its radio material home from Manila rather than let General MacArthur's people highjack it. Such talk ended when the material was declared surplus or stolen.)

The tactical leaflet (page 211) came into its own with such units. It was possible to develop high-speed routines for using intelligence swiftly. Maps were dropped on the enemy in unfavorable situations. Order of Battle became highly important for psychological warfare purposes when enemy units could be addressed by their proper unit designation or by the name of their commanders. Intelligence was brought into play: bad food, bad supply, poor command, or mishandling of enemy forces in any way brought prompt propaganda comment.

Radio was the least useful for tactical operations simply because enemy troops do not carry private portable radio sets around with them. Radio was of high value in consolidation operations, passing along instructions to liberated populations, and telling civilians in the line of approach about measures which they could take for the common benefit of themselves and of the Allies.

A constant problem, never completely ironed out, was the use of airplanes for dropping purposes. The leaflet producers had, in all Theaters, a tendency to prepare excellent leaflets, bale them, and send them along to the airfields in the expectation that an overworked, unindoctrinated air force staff would automatically pick up the leaflets, develop dropping mechanisms, pack the leaflets into planes, take them out and drop them to the right language-groups at the right time in the right place. This was of course as absurd from the aviators' side as it was, to the civilians, to let their brain-children accumulate in hangars or warehouses. For strategic droppings, systematic arrangements could be made through proper official channels, and a regular air operation detailed to do the job. Tactical dropping did not allow enough time for elaborate staff work in each instance, and recourse was had to psychological warfare liaison officers (either Army officers or civilians with the approximate status of Tech-rep, technical representative, a familiar sight on World War II airfields) to get in touch with the units, help them install dropping facilities, explain the leaflets to the actual pilots and bombardiers, and thus obtain a high degree of cooperation. In almost every theater, this policy succeeded, and a wide variety of leaflet bombs, leaflet dispensers, and other leaflet-circulating gadgets was developed.

Artillery distribution also played a significant part. For front-line situations artillery could do the job better than planes, without risking aircraft in a quasi-combat operation. Leaflet bombs of considerable scope appeared, and could be made to fit almost any appropriate weapon. Circulation was also effected by means of clandestine operations to friendly civilians, frequently combined with air-drop of weapons, medicine, and other essentials.

The organization of all these new functions has changed military organization. A whole new series of units were attached in echelon, each fitted to the appropriate level for its work. The rear-area functions and strategic propaganda work always required a considerable proportion of civilian aid, since some of the best workers in this line were persons who either did not wish to join the Army or whom the Army did not wish to have join it. These psychological warfare organizations were unbelievably cheap, even if measured by the most conservative estimates of their success. It is impossible that the army of the future, whether American or foreign, will overlook this source of assistance. Psychological warfare nowhere replaced combat, but it made the impact of combat on the enemy more effective.

CHAPTER 11
Plans and Planning

With most military planning, it is feasible to work from the top down, define the strategic objective and then work out the actual requirements of the operation in advance. This is not true of psychological warfare.39 The objectives may be defined, and in the process of definition the general needs of a propaganda agency may be clarified. If a plan calls for a press or a radio, somebody can requisition a Davidson Press or a Hallicrafter radio and get ready to use it. But the plan cannot define goals, set time limits for the achievement of the goals, relate the goals to one another in a scheduled pre-fixed program of success, establish terms whereby psychological victory can be told from psychological defeat.

Psychological victory exists only in terms of the military victory which it is designed to assist. Psychological defeat, no matter how much critics or the enemy propagandist may allege it, can be proved to exist only when an actual defeat makes it real. Psychological plans are always contingency plans for the assistance of military operations. They are dependent on the military operation and they cannot be checked against fact except in terms of the military operations they ostensibly support.

Unfortunately, they were not always written with these reservations in mind.

Similarly, in psychological warfare, planning can be made realistic if it starts with the individual operation for the control of which the planning is done. Define the operator as anyone having a task in the actual preparation, production or transmission of propaganda materials, whether through electric communications or by print. The operator is not usually a person with a high security classification, yet he plays his indispensable part in fulfilling the highest and most secret strategy of the war. How can a plan be written that will be useful in carrying out the actual (and highly secret) strategy of the war while meeting the needs of an inexpert individual way down at the bottom of the control system? The answer is, of course, that no such plan can be prepared. Different plans are needed for successive phases.

The operator needs simple but basic materials. If he is a producer of some kind—such as a creative writer, an artist, a singer, a program arranger, a newscaster who does his own scripts and so on—he is likely to be a person with ideas of his own. Individual creativeness cannot usually be turned on and off like a faucet. Low-ranking and disciplined though the hired writer may be, he is still subject to the inward frailties of authors if he is any good. (This particular author sympathized deeply with some poor American Japanese who were given unbelievably dull outlines and told, "Turn this into exciting Japanese material! Give it pep! Make it rock them off their tatami! But don't get away from that outline one damn inch!" The nisei rolled their eyes; they did a poor job, as they knew that they would.)

The person who has to be told day in and day out how to operate is no operator at all. Psychological warfare is no place for unsuccessful short-story writers or would-be radio commentators. It demands professional standards, and it has more than professional difficulties. Therefore what the operator needs is not technical instruction but general guidance.

He must be told what he can say, what he cannot say. He should whenever possible be given some reason for perplexing or cryptic instructions. He should be helped to become familiar with what we are trying to tell the enemy. There is nothing classified about that, since the enemy is to be told it as soon as possible. The guidance given the operator should be:

• (1) Plain.
• (2) Feasible. (This sounds superfluous, but was not so during World War II when operators were sometimes told to attack such-and-such an enemy institution without referring to it directly or indirectly.)
• (3) Organized. (The material at OWI was not organized until the last several months of the war, with the result that hundreds of thousands of words of propaganda commands remained in force, technically, but un-indexed and arranged only by weekly form.)
• (4) Specific in showing timing. (General controls should not be issued at the beginning of operations; when revised, the revision should supersede the revised section, and not be placed beside it. Other provisions should be given expiration dates, after which they pass out of effect.)
• (5) Mandatory. (Control should be expressed in do or don't; personal advice is better conveyed through informal channels.)
• (6) Non-security or low-classified. (This material, for the operators, should be accessible to the operators. Often the most important operator—the best newsman, the most effective leaflet artist—may be a rather doubtful citizen, an alien, or even an enemy volunteer. He cannot follow guidances unless he knows them, and it makes a farce of security for his superior to be able to tell him the guidance, so that he can memorize it, but not able to give him the document itself.)

These rules, though simple, are not always easy to follow. Here is an example of a bad guidance:

The exaggeration may seem apparent, but it is a fair sample of the worst directives as actually issued and many, though not quite so bad, were near it. The same guidance in more acceptable form would read:

The other need of the actual operator is material. The script writer needs actual texts of everyday enemy speech in order to keep his slang and idiom up to date. The artist needs correct photographs of enemy cities in wartimes so that the leaflet picture he makes will not look as outmoded as a crinoline or a Model T. All of them need all the information they can get about their own country—good handbooks, dictionaries, elementary histories, textbooks in fields which they may not know. It is amazing how hard it is to explain America to foreigners; the American soon finds out how little he knows his own country, and needs information about his own background along with current materials concerning the enemy.

Where radio propaganda is in question, the script-writers and broadcasters will read the enemy radio propaganda if they do not get enough fresh non-propaganda material concerning their audience. Sooner or later this will degenerate into alternate soliloquies of the radio men on each side, each watching the other to see if he got a rise out of him last time. OWI people frequently expressed idiot glee at having made Radio Tokyo frantic. The OWI men were the first to admit that their glee was pointless, since it was the Japanese broadcaster and not the Japanese audience who responded. But for lack of current information about the enemy the propagandist will refer to his own professional opponent. There is, of course, a very substantial difference between a change in enemy propaganda occasioned by a real inroad which one's own propaganda had made in enemy opinion, and a change that consists simply in angry or smart backtalk. Finding that difference is the responsibility of propanal, not of the operator.

One of the most useful functions of the pre-belligerent plan lies in the periodic exercise which it gives in propaganda discipline. Information and intelligence agencies frequently see their jobs so technically that they lose sight of the need for coordination within the mechanism of an entire government. Press relations people try to get stories in the papers. Radio people try to maintain listener interest. Educational officers are concerned with the teachability of their materials. Spokesmen of the different agencies in related fields (such as shipping, air transport, currency control, social welfare) are apt to comment on a particular situation without reference to the needs of an inclusive national policy. How much advice was handed out on the occasion of the ultimatum to Tito? The Jugoslav authorities plainly risked politico-psychological pressure from us; they came prepared for the consequences; but both American official and private opinion expressed a wild medley of recommendations, suggestions, and analysis. Federal officials showed no better discipline than did the private citizens. Pre-belligerent planning may be forced on the United States by eventual international crises, but before that stage is reached, private and governmental persons working in the informational field might do well to consider how readily they could offer or enforce cooperation in the event of a real emergency.

The general plan then goes on to state the conditions which will govern the operating agencies. The important part of this section lies in guessing where the operating agencies are likely to need coordination and where not. If the plan is to reveal highly important and therefore secret strategy, it should merely sketch the broad outlines of the processes intended, leaving to experts the responsibility of determining specific do's and don'ts. In such a case, however, the plan should not leave room for inter-agency or inter-personal doubt as to where the interpretive function lies. Too often, highly formal agreements are interpreted out of existence by propagandists who are interested in adding their own proposals to those set forth and agreed upon in the plan. When definition of the plan in operational terms40 is needed, the location of the sub-definer should be made very plain unless the propaganda establishment itself happens to be remarkably well organized and in no further need of definite prescriptions of function.

The inclusion of actual political and military goals in a propaganda plan is an exceedingly ambitious undertaking. The goal, "To foster a spirit of nationalism and independence among the Eastern Arachosian people to the end that they may revolt and set up their own pro-Allied government," is a commitment beyond the reach of normal propaganda. It comes closer to requiring all the facilities of the operating state, financial, diplomatic, covert, and paramilitary, to put it into effect. The goal, "To give sympathetic circulation to Eastern Arachosian autonomist sentiments so as to promote interference with the occupying power," is much more nearly attainable. Military goals are often described by propagandists as attainable by means of propaganda alone, but there is no known example of psychological warfare having attained a strictly military goal without assistance by other means of warfare. Goals such as "the defeat of ——," "the surrender of ——," or the "destruction of ——," have no place in practical propaganda planning, since they are pretentious or deceptive. More legitimate are the goals actually obtained by propaganda, such as "encouragement of a spirit of factionalism which may assist defeat ...," "promotion of war-weariness that will make the process of surrender more easily accomplished ...," and "appeals for the destruction of ——." Such points may appear minor, but it is the overstatement of the propaganda case that has many times goaded disinterested outsiders into becoming skeptics or opponents.

Political and military goals can be described only in terms of hopes; effective psychological goals—goals resting in the form of opinion which it is desired to create—are very concrete. If enemy surrender is desired, propaganda leaves to the operator no further scope for revenge themes which will frighten the enemy away from surrender. If the enemy leader is to be discredited on the basis of having poor military judgment, the contrasting good judgment of the enemy general is a necessary ingredient. The psychological goals have to be framed in terms of how much the enemy listener, the Propaganda Man, can stand and can believe. (See page 153.) Since he listens irregularly, furtively, and half-antagonistically, propaganda will defeat itself if it shifts from goal to goal with logical but finespun dexterity. Psychological goals are attained only by sustained, consistent patterns of propaganda; they have to be plain, repetitive, and insistent. Political and military goals can be anything the planners feel like including as a pious wish. They might as well consist of a current re-statement of political and military aims for the subject or area at the time of planning. They are beyond the reach of practical psychological warfare.

National-level and general staff level plans have to be made up in much the same way. If the plan is good it will provide for its own circulation to all government instrumentalities which do in fact conduct propaganda in the particular field involved. It does no good to adopt a plan for the encouragement of the Filipinos and the inducement of cooperation among the Filipino officials of the Japanese-sponsored Republic (which means a tone of conciliation toward Filipino leaders or officials who hold puppet titles) if a cabinet member keeps calling publicly for the immediate execution of any Filipino who ever had dinner with a Japanese. It is useless to try to cooperate with Communist guerrillas in West K'tai on the argument, "We all oppose the Axis together! Ideologies don't matter when brave men fight side by side"—if at the same time the guerrillas know we have a strong domestic campaign on against Communism. Telling a Communist that ideologies don't matter is like saying to a Jesuit, "Let's skip the superstitions, Father, and leave religion out of it. Get down to business." To some kinds of people, ideology is business. The broad propaganda plan should make choices that reflect the judgment of the reviewing officers. If they are made in a vacuum, without taking into consideration the actual opinion of the audience group, they might as well not be made at all.

Propaganda plans must be circulated to non-propaganda agencies in order to make sure that routine public relations or announcements of current or contemplated action, and statements of basic policy do not contradict or neutralize the plan once it is put into effect. Frequently months of propaganda work can be undone by a tactless speech from somebody in the same government but in an unrelated agency. Authoritative circulation of the plan—which means that the plan must be neither long nor over-secret—can help forestall such mistakes. Speech clearance, requiring review of all official and policy-making speeches in advance of delivery, is the surest safeguard against overt collision between different spokesmen. In World War II it was applied with some success, but the exceptions were so conspicuous that the effective coordination passed almost unnoticed.

Wise consolidation plans give urgent priority to the restoration of the home-grown informational media and recreational facilities of the occupied territory. Definite anticipation of shortages in radio facilities, newsprint, ink, paper, and other supplies can ensure prompt reopening of consolidated facilities under way. The propaganda operators may tell higher echelons that the local people are not competent, cannot be trusted, and so on, but General MacArthur's experience in Japan would seem to indicate that no army can carry on consolidation propaganda as efficiently as the conquered civilians themselves can, provided the civilians have:

• (1) Reasonable though restricted freedom of utterance, so that they can know what they may or may not say;
• (2) Prompt liaison for security and policy clearance, so that they can get an authoritative yes-or-no answer on proposed projects, enabling them to maintain operation without intolerable delays;
• (3) Friendly professional assistance in meeting material and staff shortages;
• (4) A series of phases, marking off the forms and methods of control so that the controlling staff can plan for a first phase of doing its own publishing and broadcasting, a second phase of letting the local people work under license with close supervision and technical help, and a third phase of permitting them freedom within the normal censorship limits of military government. The American DISCC's (District Information Services Control Commands) in the American Zone of Germany did an excellent job in moving rapidly from phase one to phase two in 1945 and 1946.

It must be repeated that plans are effective only when transposed into plain, simple, usable guidances for the actual operatives. When a plan is so secret or so involved that the only people who could carry it out are not allowed to know anything about it, it becomes a sad self-defeating effort.

CHAPTER 12
Operations for Civilians

Plainly, psychological warfare operates against civilians with as much effect as it does against troops. Indeed, under the rather high standards set for modern warfare by The Hague and Geneva conventions, psychological warfare is left as one of the few completely legitimate weapons which can on occasion be directed against an exclusively civilian and noncombatant target. Even though World War II erased most of the distinctions between military and civilian, leaving civilians in the vertical front line of all air war, psychological warfare gained. It became a more useful instrument for bettering war. Civilian interest in propaganda became no mere matter of emotional loyalty or philosophical preference, but a life-and-death matter to its recipients. After fire raids it would be a madman who would disregard an enemy bomb-warning leaflet without trying to figure out its application to himself and his children.

Short-wave does make it possible for advanced standard-wave propaganda stations to pass along material which has been prepared in the homeland. Large staffs can do the work. The news can be put through a large, alert, well organized office. Features can be prepared by real professionals, acted out by a number of actors, put on records, reviewed, and then relayed to the standard-wave station whenever needed. The Americans at Radio Saipan thus broadcast right into Japan, and were able to transmit materials which could not possibly have been put on the air with the staff working on the island. The people at Saipan were mostly telecommunications technicians, engaged in picking up the short-wave from Hawaii or San Francisco and in passing it on into the enemy country on the standard wave length. Millions of Japanese heard our Saipan standard-wave broadcasts, in contrast to the dozens or hundreds who had heard our short-wave previously.

The use of homeland facilities makes possible the advance preparation of a large collection of material ready for broadcast. In security-sensitive or otherwise dubious situations, four or five alternate programs can be worked out for the same amount of program time. On wire recorders or disc records, the proposed material can be passed around in finished form, reviewed, selected, censored, and approved. This would not be true of a hurried station working far forward in the zone of operations.

Short-wave has its own advantages, however, apart from its utility as a means of getting program material to the relay stations. Short-wave can and will be picked up by the enemy monitors and enemy intelligence systems. It will also be heard by persons of power, wealth, and influence, irrespective of the economic or political system of the enemy. The big shots of any system know how to transcend limitations that awe or defeat the ordinary man. The short-wave transmitter speaks therefore to the enemy government, to the groups which compose the enemy government, and to the individuals in or out of the enemy government who are leaders in their own country. We found that the Joho Kyoku and the Gaimusho (Foreign Office) in Tokyo were mimeographing a daily summary of our San Francisco broadcasts, and we thus knew that anything we said over San Francisco would be heard by the most influential men in Japan. Captain Ellis Zacharias, U.S.N., spoke Japanese and had known most of the Japanese leaders personally before the war; with government monitoring known to exist he felt free to address the Japanese leaders personally and directly with assurance his words would reach them, and his broadcasts are confessed by the Japanese themselves to have played a contributory part in bringing about the Japanese decision to surrender.

With short-distance standard-wave broadcasting to an enemy known to have millions of radio receivers, strategic radio becomes effective. The chance is provided for building up a consistent group of listeners, for influencing their morale and opinions, and for circulating rumors that will reach almost every single person in the enemy population. The temptation to perform tricks, to lapse back to peacetime standards of radio-as-entertainment or radio-as-advertising, is a constant one. The propagandist knows that he is being heard, and he fears that his audience will lose interest if he does not stimulate them with a brilliantly variegated series of programs.

Black radio comes into its own on standard wave. The British could put the mysterious anti-British, anti-Hitler broadcaster Gustav Siegfried Eins on the air, with his rousing obscenities, his coarse but believable gossip, his wild diatribes against the Allies and against the Nazi scum who got in the way of the glorious German army. He was so good that for a while even American propanal thought he might be a spokesman for the saucier members of the Wehrmacht general staff. The Germans could broadcast proletarian propaganda on the Lenin Old Guard station, foaming at the mouth whenever they mentioned the crazy vile Fascist swine Hitler, and then going into tantrums because the Communist party needed all the brave glorious leaders who had been murdered by the fat bureaucrat Stalin. Ed and Joe could talk out of Bremen and pretend to be scooting around the American mid-west, one jump ahead of the G-men with their trailer and concealed transmitter, telling the rest of the Americans the low-down about "that goof Roosevelt and his Jewish war," but Ed and Joe were not good enough to fool anybody. Black radio is great fun for the operators, but its use is often limited to a twisted kind of entertainment designed to affect the morale of dubious groups. It leaps to sudden importance only in times of critical panic when it can add the last catalyst to national confusion, precipitating chaos.

The beginning and end of standard-wave transmission is news. News (see page 135) uses standard appeals. It should be factual but selectively factual. Repetition of basic themes is much more important than the constant invention of new ones. The propaganda chief has nothing to do, day in and day out, but to think of his own programs. He becomes familiar with them and bored by them. He visualizes his Propaganda Man as a person who hears all transmissions and is understandably bored by them, overlooking the interruptions that listeners face, the long gaps between the programs they hear, the weather interference, the static, the police measures.

Even with peacetime facilities tremendous simplicity and repetition are needed to convey advertising on the radio. In wartime repetition is even more necessary. It serves the double function of driving the theme home to listeners who have heard it before, while broadening the circle of listeners with each transmission. A point of diminishing returns is soon reached but even diminished returns are often rewarding. The hardest-to-reach people are sometimes the ones it is most important to reach with a simple, basic, persuasive item. Repetition thus ensures depth of response in the core audience, while adding to the marginal audience with each additional application. What is deadly monotonous to the propagandist himself may, on the thousandth repetition, merely have become pleasantly familiar to the Propaganda Man on the other end. The author has talked to any number of clandestine listeners to our propaganda who have almost wept with rage as they told of listening to jokes, novelties, political speeches and other funny stuff when they hoped to get a clean-cut announcement of the latest military news.

Something was accomplished, however, by use of the Portuguese, Spanish, Swiss and Chinese press. Enemy officials and private persons were known to read these, and it was possible to do a great deal toward influencing editorial content.

Major mail-propaganda operations were conducted against us, however. The Nazis, as part of their prebelligerent planning and operations, sent enormous quantities of propaganda through the United States mail—sometimes postage-free under the frank of Congressmen. The Japanese, down to the time of Pearl Harbor, kept large public-relations staffs running at full speed in New York, Washington, and other American cities. They helped their American friends with money and by heavy purchase of copyright material friendly to Japan—thus making it unnecessary for any author to report himself as a Japanese paid agent, and they offered Japanese "cultural and educational" information to interested persons. It really was cultural and well done. By talking about Japanese poetry, religion and cherry blossoms, and omitting all war propaganda, the handsome little booklets kept alive the memory of a hospitable, quaint, charming Japan. Some of this material was mailed directly from Japan to the United States.

Since mail propaganda depends on the freedom of the mails, it is much more apt to be used by a dictatorship against us than by us against a dictatorship.

• (1) Communications from the legitimate authorities (whether government-in-exile,underground, or friendly quisling) of the civilians addressed.
• (2) Newspapers in air format, reduced in scale, but with a heavy proportion of the normal peacetime features of the audience's own press.
• (3) Novelty materials appealing to children, who are apt to be among the most industrious collectors of leaflets, disseminating them far and wide with less danger of reprisal from the occupying power or the police than adults might face. (Good adult leaflets are as interesting to children as are leaflets especially designed for them. The use of color printing, vivid illustrations, pictures of air battles, how-it-works diagrams of weapons, and so forth, may reach the teen-age audience best if it gives no indication of being aimed at them.)
• (4) Gifts—soap, salt, needles, matches, chocolate and similar articles dropped to civilian populations. (This demonstrates the wealth and benevolence of the giver. Countermeasures to enemy use of this type of propaganda consist of dropping a few duplicates of his gifts, containing poison-ivy soap, nauseating salt, infected-looking needles, explosive chocolate, etc. The Germans are reported to have followed this procedure against the American air gifts dropped to Italy and France. With the avoidance or the spoilage of gifts, the propaganda effect becomes so confused that both sides find it worth desisting for a while.)
• (5) Appeals to women. (Women, statistically, are around 50% of the population of any country. With the diversion of men to fighting operations the percentage of women in the home population rises and in wartime it may become 60% or 70%. They face social and economic problems much more immediately than do men because the responsibility for maintaining homes and children normally falls on them. Evidence of humane intentions, of reluctance to wage the most cruel forms of war, of attempts to help civilians escape unnecessary danger, can bring women into the participating enemy group for relaying propaganda.)

The pamphlet shown in figure 6 is an excellent example of the medium. Though it carries a complex message, it can be read by persons at the lowest educational level. It meets enemy propaganda over a whole range of themes. It is apt to be disseminated farther, whether initial distribution be by ground or by air.

Unlike the leaflet, the pamphlet is sometimes hard to conceal. For well policed areas, it must be supplied with a protective disguise if it is to be passed along. One ingenious pamphlet made up by Dennis McEvoy and Don Brown at OWI for dropping on the Japanese, started out with a warning: "Enemy! Warning! This is an Enemy Publication, issued by the United States Government. Finder is Commanded to take this to the Nearest Police Station Immediately! Enemy!" The pamphlet gave a general statement of Japan's bad war position, and was addressed to Japanese policemen and police officials. The cover urged the policemen not to keep the pamphlet, nor to destroy it, but to pass it on up through channels to their superiors as an instance of enemy propaganda. (We never found out what the Japanese police actually did when they got these.)

One Japanese black leaflet assumed the proportions of a book, and was made up in the familiar format of the pocket-sized twenty-five-cent volumes. With a New York dateline, a copyright notice, and even a printers' union label all neatly falsified, the book expressed opposition to Roosevelt's war. It was circulated by the Japanese as a captured enemy book, presumably, in order to convince their own people and their Asiatic associates that opposition to World War II existed within the United States itself.

Almost all belligerents issued malingerer's handbooks during the war. These started out with statements that the medical control system was inadequate, that each man had to look out for himself, and that feigned sickness was often the only alternative to real sickness. Disguised as entertainment booklets, "instructions" accompanying medicine, or even as official handbooks (of the enemy government) for this and that purpose, the leaflets gave detailed instructions on how to fake tuberculosis, heart trouble, and other diseases.

Bold black propaganda operations can often embarrass the enemy. The dropping of a few hundred tons of well counterfeited currency would tend to foul up any fiscal system. Peacetime counterfeiters operate with poor materials, secretly, and in small shops. When instructed, a government agency can do an astoundingly good job of counterfeiting. The United States is on the vulnerable side of this operation, because our money happens to be the most trusted and most widely hoarded in the world. Various governments are believed to have run off substantial numbers of United States twenty and fifty dollar bills. A less offensive operation consists of giving the enemy populace sets of ration cards, along with simple suggestions on how to finish the forging job so as to make it convincing. The Nazis were especially subject to this kind of attack, since German methodical bookkeeping required a large number of documents to be in the possession of each citizen. Falsification of any of these made the German officials go mad with confusion.

To a country suffering from too much policing, the transmission by black propaganda of facsimile personal-identity cards in large numbers would be welcomed by many common citizens and would keep the enemy police procedure at a high pitch of futile haste. The essence of this, as of all good black propaganda, is to confuse the enemy authorities while winning the thankfulness of the enemy people—preferably while building up the myth within the enemy country that large, well-organized groups of revolutionists are ready to end the war when their time comes.

If white propaganda is to be compared to incendiary bombing, in that it ultimately affects the enemy armed services by disorganizing the homeland behind them, black propaganda may be compared to the tinfoil strips used in anti-radar. Black propaganda strikes directly at enemy security. It gives him too much to do, and thus increases the chances for agents down on the ground to succeed in their lonely, dangerous work.

Procurement can be either through direct governmental manufacture of the finished product, or by subcontracting to nongovernmental agencies. Propaganda films normally make a point of displaying the military prowess and civic virtue of the distributor.

Officially distributed films are, however, almost always overshadowed by pure entertainment films. The wartime official movie can penetrate no deeper than can the unofficial picture. Financial and commercial control, plus censorship, limits the periphery into which motion-picture showings can be extended. Often the private film will be shown when a public one would be suppressed. And in time of peace, the propaganda movie has ever sharper competition from its private competitors. Few propaganda movies have ever achieved the spectacular impact of some private films in portraying the American way of life. Tahitians, Kansu men, Hindus and Portuguese would probably agree unanimously in preferring the USA of Laurel and Hardy to the USA of strong-faced men building dams and teaching better chicken-raising.

Only rarely does the cinema penetrate enemy territory or reach clandestine audiences. Its direct contribution to critical-zone psychological warfare is therefore slight. Perhaps television may in course of time combine attention-holding with transmissibility.

CHAPTER 13
Operations Against Troops

In every instance of systematic American use of psychological warfare against enemy troops during World War II, affirmative results were discerned after the operation had been in effect for a short while. Figure 46 shows the consummation of the troop propaganda program; these Germans are surrendering and they carry the Allied leaflets with them. By the latter phases of the liberation of France, 90 per cent of the enemy prisoners reported that they had seen or possessed Allied leaflets and the most famous leaflet of them all, the celebrated Passierschein (see figure 4) came to be as familiar to the Germans as their own paper money.41 Since every enemy who surrenders is one less man to root out or destroy at a cost of life to one's own side, the sharp upswing of enemy surrenders was a decided military gain.

Two separate types of psychological reaction are to be sought in the enemy soldier's mind. The first consists of a general lowering of his morale or efficiency even when he is not in a position to perform any overt act, such as surrendering, which would hurt his side and help ours. This may be called MO, or morale operations. The second type of action is overt action (surrendering, deserting his post of duty, mutinying) which can be induced only if the appeal is expertly timed.

Operations against troops must be based on the objective military situation. Suffering and exertion increase realism; plain soldiers are not apt to be talked over by propaganda unless the propaganda is carefully cued to their actual situation. All propaganda should be based on fact; propaganda to troops must be based not merely on fact, but must show shrewd appreciative touches of understanding the troops' personal conditions. Propaganda is not much use to a nation undergoing abject defeat, for the troops on the victorious side will be buoyed up by the affirmation of victory from their own eyes.

Troop propaganda must therefore aim at eventual willing capture of the individual—not at surrender by his individual initiative. It must implant the notion that he may eventually be trapped, and that if that happens he should give up. The propaganda must not meet the soldier's loyalty in a head-on collision but must instead give the enemy soldier the opportunity of rationalizing himself out of the obligations of loyalty ("true loyalty requires survival and therefore surrender"). The steps, therefore, needed for good propaganda to actual combat troops include the following:

• first, the notion that the enemy soldier may have to surrender as his side loses or retreats ("other [named] units have surrendered, with so-and-so many men; you will have to, too");
• second, themes which make the enemy soldier believe that an all-out effort is wasted or misapplied;
• third, the idea that he or his unit may find themselves in a hopeless situation soon;
• fourth, identifying the next authentically bad situation with the "hopeless" situation;
• fifth, concrete instructions for the actual surrender.42

Morale operations on the white side included such items as the following:

• Sending mournful poetry leaflets to Japanese units which were known to be demoralized for lack of home furlough (China Theater);
• Dropping beautiful colored pictures of luscious Japanese victuals on starving troops (North Burma);
• Showing the Japanese Sad Sack in a cartoon, fighting everywhere while his officers get all the liquor, all the food, all the girls, and all the glory, while the common soldier ends up cremated (Southwest Pacific);
• Demonstrating that the Nazi pets on the German High Command have disrupted the splendid German military tradition and have thrown out the really competent professional generals (Soviet-German front);
• Pinning the nickname, Der Sterber (roughly, "Old Let's-go-get-killed!"), on a German general who had boasted of his willingness to expend personnel (Anglo-American and Soviet radio);
• Telling the German troops they were dying for a cause already lost (Italy);
• Reporting back to the Germans the statements made by prisoners, to the effect they were damned glad that they were out of the fighting (France);
• Telling the Japanese on Attu and Kiska that just as surely as the kiri leaf, symbol of death, would fall in the autumn, they too would fall (North Pacific);
• Telling the Japanese homeland and troops that the Japanese Emperor had loved peace but that the militarists had dragged the Sacred Empire into war ("Peaceful is Morning in the Shrine Garden" leaflet; designed for Aleutians, used over Japan);
• Telling the Chinese in China that the Americans would soon cut the Japanese conquered empire in two with Asiatic landings, and then dropping the leaflet, written in simple Chinese which could be figured out by Japanese, on the Japanese troops (China);
• Congratulating imaginary agents in ostensible code over the voice radio for the excellent work they have allegedly done in the enemy home country (all theaters).

Morale operations, to be effective, must be aimed at the actual, specific morale with which they are concerned. Well fed troops cannot be frightened by the remote prospect of starvation. Well officered troops cannot be induced to mutiny. Troops with good mail service cannot be made homesick. However, weak points in the enemy organization can and do provide targets for morale operations. The defeat situation imposes tremendous strain on both the individual soldier and on officers in positions of responsibility. At such times, disunity rises to the surface, rumors spread more readily, and propaganda operations against morale can have devastating effect. (Allied psychological warfare against Germans in 1944-45 was aimed both at general officers and at the mass of the German troops—operations against the officers being founded on the common-sense premise that if large-scale German surrenders were sought, they could best be obtained by influencing those Germans who had the authority to surrender.)

A curious point developed. German morale in the higher grades was worse than in the lower. In the very last year of the war, despite the terrible air raids on their homeland behind them, the German troops on the Western front underwent only slight morale deterioration—in comparison with what they should have undergone had their morale borne a direct relationship to the strategic position of Germany as a whole. On the other hand, the morale among general officers and staff officers became wretched. The putsch of the generals the previous summer was merely a foretaste of the demoralization of the German higher command.

This unusual situation arose from the fact that the National Socialist propaganda machinery was still working on the masses of the troops. The political officers still made speeches. The troops were given pep talks, information about the war (hopelessly distorted information, but information none the less), and promises of privileges and comforts which—while they rarely materialized—were cheering. Simultaneously, German army discipline in the Prussian tradition, never known to be wishy-washy or weak, was sharply stiffened. Furthermore, the plain soldiers carried over to the months of defeat those propaganda attitudes which they had been taught in the prewar and war years by Hitler's incessant domestic propaganda.

In contrast with common troops, the officers had the professional skill to understand the advantages possessed by the Allied armies. The officers knew enough about global and continental strategy, about the immediate strategy of the Western front, about economic factors and so on, to see that the situation was genuinely bad. Furthermore, the officer class had been less indoctrinated in the first place—many of them having personally despised the Nazis while welcoming Naziism as a means of getting the "cattle," the common people, into line behind the Wehrmacht—and those of them concerned with propaganda naturally became critical of all propaganda, including their own government's, and communicated their criticisms to their brother officers.

German defenses against Allied psychological warfare worked. The German troops fought on when they had no business fighting, when their own generals thought it was time to quit and held out only because the S.S. and Gestapo promised ready death to any high officer who even whispered the word, "Defeat!"

This German defensive success was based on two factors:

• (1) The good condition of the German troops in terms of food, supply, communications, and weapons;
• (2) The coordination of all morale services for the purpose of defensive psychological warfare.

A common Landser, tough and ready in a whole division full of well fed, well armed men, could not be expected to undergo despair because freight-car loadings hundreds of miles away had dropped to zero. He might see that the Luftwaffe was less in evidence; he might grumble about mail, or about having to use horse transport, but as long as he could see that his own unit was getting on all right, it was hard to persuade him that defeat was around the corner. In World War I, the German troops at the time of surrender were much better off than most of them thought they were; in World War II, they thought they were better off than they actually were. The Germans may not have been in perfect shape, but they were incomparably better off than the starving scarecrows with whom Generalissimo Chiang was trying to hold back the Japanese in West Hunan or the Americans who had fought despair, fever and Japanese—all three at once—on Bataan.

Along with their relatively good immediate condition, which masked and hid from them the strategic deterioration of the Reich to their rear, the German troops had the services of morale officers who were actually defensive psychological warfare operators.

In some units (more on the Eastern front than the Western) the Germans had PK units—Propagandakompanie, or propaganda companies. These were organizationally very interesting. They combined the functions of a combat propaganda company—printing, radio work, interrogation of prisoners, etc.—with the job of morale builders. Their services were available not only for use against the enemy, but for aid to the German troops themselves. Since they were currently informed of Allied propaganda lines, they were able to distribute counteracting propaganda at short notice and were even capable, on occasion, of forestalling Allied propaganda themes in advance.

Defensive psychological warfare in the Wehrmacht and, so far as it is known from Russian articles and fiction, in the Red Army as well, depended on unit-by-unit indoctrination with contempt of the enemy, mistrust of his news facilities, fear of his political aims, and hatred for the whole enemy mentality. Propaganda officers, countersubversive operatives, public relations men, and information-education officers were either in the same office or were in fact the same men. Combination of functions made possible the use of flexible counteracting propaganda.

Most of this counteracting propaganda was not counterpropaganda, technically speaking. It was not designed against Allied propaganda, but for German morale. Morale-building was not left to occasional recreational facilities, newspapers for troops, USO entertainment and the like, but was compelled through the use of internal espionage, affirmative presentation of the German case, and unified informational operations. This German tactical defensive psychological warfare was neither a total success nor a total failure; insofar as it helped the Wehrmacht hold out, it aided the last-ditch Nazi war effort.

Such defensive psychological warfare might work against sensational enemy black operations, against attempted political division, and against fabrication of the news—provided it was carried out in an expert fashion. It could not change morale deterioration resulting from practical deterioration within the troop unit itself, except to decelerate the rate of decline. It would not make up for poor leadership. Nothing makes up for poor leadership.

Defensive psychological warfare at higher levels remains a self-contradiction. As pointed out above (page 159), good psychological warfare is never directed merely against other psychological warfare. It is directed at the mind of the target audience, at creating attitudes of belief or doubt which lead to the desired action. Getting and keeping attention is one of its major missions, and psychological warfare which starts by fixing attention on the enemy presentation is doomed from the start. One of the most conspicuous examples of this was President Roosevelt's sensational message of 15 April 1939, addressed personally to the German Chancellor, Hitler, asking that Hitler promise not to invade 31 countries which Roosevelt listed by name. Defensive in tone, the message gave Hitler the chance to answer over the German world-wide radio while his Reichstag laughed its derision and applause. President Roosevelt's message was decent, sane, humane; it was inspiring to the people who already agreed with him; but it created no attitude in the Germans to whom it was addressed. A sharp, bullying, implicitly threatening speech from President Roosevelt might have penetrated the German mentality of the time, even Hitler's; reasonable reproach did not work. It was not aimed at creating any specific emotional reaction in the German mind.

Finally, it must be mentioned that defensive psychological warfare must include countersubversion and counterespionage. The Cheka—Soviet secret police in its first form—once boasted that "capitalist trouble-makers and saboteurs" could not long function in Russia because the countersubversive police were over a hundred million strong. What they meant was that they had trained and bullied the population into reporting anyone and everyone who seemed out of line. An attitude of popular cooperation with countersubversive agencies can be achieved only when those agencies are efficient, respected, and properly presented to the public. Psychological warfare can defend its homeland against enemy operations in kind only if it creates an awareness of propaganda and makes the public critical of attitudes or opinions adverse to national policy. Inexpert official tactics, or the general denunciation of dissent, makes the citizen believe, with Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, that "... the law is a ass, a idiot."

Where the unit does include a Psychological Warfare team, a duality of control arises. This requires good sense to keep in balance. The commander possesses absolute command and responsibility for the movement, protection, and operations timing of the team which happens to be attached to his unit. He should not presume to interfere in the special propaganda instructions flowing down to the team from superior Psychological Warfare echelons. Because of the pressing needs of propaganda operatives for news and for order-of-battle intelligence, it is normally desirable that they have their own signal facilities and that their routine operational communications short-circuit normal military channels. Otherwise, the unit's signal facilities will be overloaded with messages important to the Psychological Warfare team, but useless to the unit as a whole. Such absurdities as the encipherment and decipherment of routine enemy news digests should by all means be avoided. On the other hand, the command and administrative messages should go through normal military channels. In the Galahad operation against the Japanese in North Burma, in which Merrill's Marauders participated, such a double set of communications channels took a long time to develop.

Where the small-unit commander does not possess professionally trained and equipped Psychological Warfare facilities, he should no more expect to engage in offensive Psychological Warfare than to undertake chemical warfare with improvised materials. It becomes his responsibility to turn to liaison.

For example, a well trained liaison officer might receive a call from a regimental or battalion commander. He would find that the commander desired leaflets to be used in a particular tactical situation. He should be able to explain what standard ready-prepared leaflets were available, what delay would be involved in making up special leaflets, and what quantities of leaflets would be advisable. Turning back to his home headquarters, he should be able to present the commander's case to the leaflet printers or the public-address team, and should help the propaganda people in understanding the commander's problems.

... the first attempt to coordinate artillery, leaflet and radio propaganda. The station had learned the location of the billets of various [Nazi] units in the town, together with the names of their key personnel. With this information, a "game" was arranged with the artillery. One day, at a certain time, these units were addressed by name and their members were told to go outside their buildings and five minutes later they would receive a message. Precisely, five minutes later, leaflet shells released the messages advising surrender. The ability of the Americans to do things like that impressed the German soldiers with their hopeless position more than words.