The Function of Psychological Warfare
Psychological warfare in the broad sense, consists of the application of
parts of the science called psychology to the conduct of war; in the
narrow sense, psychological warfare comprises the use of propaganda
against an enemy, together with such military operational measures as
may supplement the propaganda. Propaganda may be described, in turn, as
organized persuasion by non-violent means. War itself may be considered
to be, among other things, a violent form of persuasion. Thus if an
American fire-raid burns up a Japanese city, the burning is calculated
to dissuade the Japanese from further warfare by denying the Japanese
further physical means of war and by simultaneously hurting them enough
to cause surrender. If, after the fire-raid, we drop leaflets telling
them to surrender, the propaganda can be considered an extension of
persuasion--less violent this time, and usually less effective, but
nevertheless an integral part of the single process of making the enemy
stop fighting.
Neither warfare nor psychology is a new subject. Each is as old as man.
Warfare, being the more practical and plain subject, has a far older
written history. This is especially the case since much of what is now
called psychology was formerly studied under the heading of religion,
ethics, literature, politics, or medicine. Modern psychological warfare
has become self-conscious in using modern scientific psychology as a
tool.
In World War II the enemies of the United States were more fanatical
than the people and leaders of the United States. The consequence was
that the Americans could use and apply any expedient psychological
weapon which either science or our version of common sense provided. We
did not have to square it with Emperor myths, the Führer principle or
some other rigid, fanatical philosophy. The enemy enjoyed the positive
advantage of having an indoctrinated army and people; we enjoyed the
countervailing advantage of having skeptical people, with no inward
theology that hampered our propaganda operations. It is no negligible
matter to be able to use the latest findings of psychological science in
a swift, bold manner. The scientific character of our psychology puts us
ahead of opponents wrapped up in dogmatism who must check their
propaganda against such articles of faith as Aryan racialism or the
Hegelian philosophy of history.
=Psychological Warfare as a Branch of Psychology.= Good propaganda can
be conducted by persons with no knowledge of formal psychology. The
human touch, the inventive mind, the forceful appeal--things such as
these appear in the writings of gifted persons. Thomas Paine never read
a word of Freud or Pavlov, yet Paine's arguments during the
Revolutionary War played subtly on every appeal which a modern
psychologist could catalogue. But war cannot, in modern times, assume a
statistical expectation of talent. Psychology makes it possible for the
able but ordinary statesman or officer to calculate his persuasion
systematically and to obtain by planning those results which greater men
might hit upon by genius.
What can psychology do for warfare?
In the first place, the psychologist can bring to the attention of the
soldier those elements of the human mind which are usually kept out of
sight. He can show how to convert lust into resentment, individual
resourcefulness into mass cowardice, friction into distrust, prejudice
into fury. He does so by going down to the _unconscious_ mind for his
source materials. (During world War II, the fact that Chinese babies
remain unimpeded while they commit a nuisance, while Japanese babies are
either intercepted or punished if they make a mess in the wrong place,
was found to be of significant importance in planning psychological
warfare. See below, page 154.)
In the second place the psychologist can set up techniques for finding
out how the enemy really does feel. Some of the worst blunders of
history have arisen from miscalculation of the enemy state of mind. By
using the familiar statistical and questionnaire procedures, the
psychologist can quiz a small cross section of enemy prisoners and from
the results estimate the mentality of an entire enemy theater of war at
a given period. If he does not have the prisoners handy, he can
accomplish much the same end by an analysis of the news and propaganda
which the enemy authorities transmit to their own troops and people. By
establishing enemy opinion and morale factors he can hazard a reasoned
forecast as to how the enemy troops will behave under specific
conditions.
In the third place, the psychologist can help the military psychological
warfare operator by helping him maintain his sense of mission and of
proportion. The deadliest danger of propaganda consists of its being
issued by the propagandist for his own edification. This sterile and
ineffectual amusement can disguise the complete failure of the
propaganda _as_ propaganda. There is a genuine pleasure in talking back,
particularly to an enemy. The propagandist, especially in wartime, is
apt to tell the enemy what he thinks of him, or to deride enemy
weaknesses. But to have told the Nazis, for example, "You Germans are a
pack of murderous baboons and your Hitler is a demented oaf. Your women
are slobs, your children are halfwits, your literature is gibberish and
your cooking is garbage," and so on, would have stiffened the German
will to fight. The propagandist must tell the enemy those things which
the enemy will heed; he must keep his private emotionalism out of the
operation. The psychologist can teach the propaganda operator how to be
objective, systematic, cold. For combat operations, it does not matter
how much a division commander may dislike the enemy; for psychological
warfare purposes, he must consider how to persuade them, even though he
may privately thirst for their destruction. The indulgence of hatred is
not a working part of the soldier's mission; to some it may be helpful;
to others, not. The useful mission consists solely of making the enemy
stop fighting, by combat or other means. But when the soldier turns to
propaganda, he may need the advice of a psychologist in keeping his own
feelings out of it.
Finally, the psychologist can prescribe media--radio, leaflets,
loudspeakers, whispering agents, returned enemy soldiers, and so forth.
He can indicate when and when not to use any given medium. He can, in
conjunction with operations and intelligence officers, plan the full use
of all available psychological resources. He can coordinate the timing
of propaganda with military, economic or political situations.
The psychologist does not have to be present in person to give this
advice. He does not have to be a man with an M.D. or Ph. D. and years of
postgraduate training. He can be present in the manuals he writes, in
the indoctrination courses for psychological warfare officers he sets
up, in the current propaganda line he dictates by radio. It is useful to
have him in the field, particularly at the higher command headquarters,
but he is not indispensable. The psychologist in person can be dispensed
with; the methods of scientific psychology cannot. (Further on,
throughout this book, reference will be made to current psychological
literature. The general history of psychology is described in readable
terms in Gregory Zilboorg and George W. Henry, _A History of Medical
Psychology_, New York, 1941, and in Lowell S. Selling, _Men Against
Madness_, New York, 1940, cheap edition, 1942.)
Propaganda can be conducted by rule of thumb. But only a genius can make
it work well by playing his hunches. It can become true psychological
warfare, scientific in spirit and developed as a teachable skill, only
by having its premises clearly stated, its mission defined, its
instruments put in systematic readiness, and its operations subject to
at least partial check, only by the use of techniques borrowed from
science. Of all the sciences, psychology is the nearest, though
anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, area studies and
other specialties all have something to contribute; but it is psychology
which indicates the need of the others.
=Psychological Warfare as a Part of War.= An infantry officer does not
need to study the whole nature of war, in order to find his own job.
Tradition, military skill, discipline, sound doctrine--these have done
the job for him. Sun Tzu, Vegetius, Frederick, Clausewitz and a host of
lesser writers on war have established the place of combat in war, and
have appraised its general character.
How much the traditional doctrines may be altered in the terrible light
of atomic explosion, no one knows; but though the weapons are novel, the
wielders of the weapons will still be men. The motives and weaknesses
within war remain ancient and human, however novel and dreadful the
mechanical expedients adopted to express them.
Warfare as a whole is traditionally well defined, and psychological
warfare can be understood only in relation to the whole process. It is
no mere tool, to be used on special occasion. It has become a pervasive
element in the military and security situation of every power on earth.
Psychological warfare is a part of war. The simplest, plainest thing
which can be said of war--any sort of war, anywhere, anytime--is that it
is _an official fight between men_. Combat, killing, and even
large-scale group struggle are known elsewhere in the animal kingdom,
but war is not. All sorts of creatures fight; but only men declare,
wage, and terminate war; and they do so only against other men.
Formally, war may be defined as the "reciprocal application of violence
by public, armed bodies."
If it is not _reciprocal_, it is not war, the killing of persons who do
not defend themselves is not war, but slaughter, massacre, or
punishment.
If the bodies involved are not _public_, their violence is not war. Even
our enemies in World War II were relatively careful about this
distinction, because they did not know how soon or easily a violation of
the rules might be scored against them. To be public, the combatants
need not be legal--that is, constitutionally set up; it suffices,
according to international usage, for the fighters to have a reasonable
minimum of numbers, some kind of identification, and a purpose which is
political. If you shoot your neighbor, you will be committing mere
murder; but if you gather twenty or thirty friends, together, tie a red
handkerchief around the left arm of each man, announce that you are out
to overthrow the government of the United States, and _then_ shoot your
neighbor as a counterrevolutionary impediment to the new order of
things, you can have the satisfaction of having waged war. (In practical
terms, this means that you will be put to death for treason and
rebellion, not merely for murder.)
Finally, war must be _violent_. According to the law of modern states,
all the way from Iceland to the Yemen, economic, political, or moral
pressure is not war; war is the legalization, in behalf of the state, of
things which no individual may lawfully do in time of peace. As a matter
of fact, even in time of war you cannot kill the enemy unless you do so
on behalf of the state; if you had shot a Japanese creditor of yours
privately, or even shot a Japanese soldier when you yourself were out of
uniform, you might properly and lawfully have been put to death for
murder--either by our courts or by the enemies'. (This is among the
charges which recur in the war trials. The Germans and Japanese killed
persons whom even war did not entitle them to kill.)
The governments of the modern world are jealous of their own monopoly of
violence. War is the highest exercise of that violence, and modern war
is no simple reversion to savagery. The General Staffs would not be
needed if war were only an uncomplicated orgy of homicide--a mere
getting-mad and throat-cutting season in the life of man. Quite to the
contrary, modern war--as a function of modern society--reflects the
institutional, political complexity from which it comes. A modern battle
is a formal, ceremonialized and technically intricate operation. You
must kill just the right people, in just the right way, with the right
timing, in the proper place, for avowed purposes. Otherwise you make a
mess of the whole show, and--what is worse--you lose.
Why must you fight just so and so, there and not here, now and not then?
The answer is simple: you are fighting against _men_. Your purpose in
fighting is to make them change their minds. It is figuratively true to
say that the war we have just won was a peculiar kind of advertising
campaign, designed to make the Germans and Japanese like us and our way
of doing things. They did not like us much, but we gave them
alternatives far worse than liking us, so that they became peaceful.
Sometimes individuals will be unpersuadable. Then they must be killed or
neutralized by other purely physical means--such as isolation or
imprisonment. (Some Nazis, perhaps including the Führer himself, found
our world repellent or incomprehensible and died because they could not
make themselves surrender. In the Pacific many Japanese had to be killed
before they became acceptable to us.) But such is man, that most
individuals will stop fighting at some point short of extinction; that
point is reached when one of two things happens:
Either, the defeated people may lose their sense of organization, fail
to decide on leaders and methods, and give up because they can no
longer fight as a group. This happened to the American Southerners in
April, 1865. The President and Cabinet of the Confederate States of
America got on the train at Richmond; the men who got off farther
down the line were "refugees." Something happened to them and to the
people about them, so that Mr. Davis no longer thought of himself as
President Davis, and other people no longer accepted his commands.
This almost happened in Germany in 1945 except for Admiral Doenitz.
Or, the defeated people can retain their sense of organization, and
can use their political organization for the purpose of getting in
touch with the enemy, arranging the end of the war, and preparing,
through organized means, to comply with the wishes of the conquerors.
That happened when Britain acknowledged American independence; when
the Boers recognized British sovereignty; when Finland signed what
Russia had dictated; and when Japan gave up.
Sometimes these things are mixed. The people might wish to make peace,
but may find that their government is not recognized by the enemy. Or
the victors may think that they have smashed the enemy government, when
the new organization is simply the old one under a slightly different
name, but with the old leaders and the old ideas still prevailing.
It is plain that whatever happens wars are fought to effect a
psychological change in the antagonist. They are then fought for a
psychological end unless they are wars of extermination. These are rare.
The United States could not find a people on the face of the earth whose
ideas and language were unknown to all Americans. Where there is a
chance of communication, there is always the probability that one of the
antagonistic organizations (governments)--which have already cooperated
to the extent of meeting one another's wishes to fight--will
subsequently cooperate on terms of primary advantage to the victors.
Since the organizations comprise human beings with human ways of doing
things, the change must take place in the minds of those specific
individuals who operate the existing government, or in the minds of
enough other people for that government to be overthrown.
The fact that war is waged against the minds, not the bodies, of the
enemy is attested by the comments of military writers of all periods.
The dictum of Carl von Clausewitz that "war is politics continued by
other means" is simply the modern expression of a truth recognized since
antiquity. War is a kind of persuasion--uneconomical, dangerous, and
unpleasant, but effective when all else fails.
=Ideology.= An ideology is a system of deep-rooted beliefs about
fundamental questions in human life and affairs.[11] Ideology also plays
a part in psychological warfare. A difference in beliefs which does not
touch fundamentals is commonly termed a difference of _opinion_. You may
believe in high tariffs; and I, in no tariff. You may believe in One
World; I may not. You may support Republicans; I, Democrats. Despite
these differences both of us can still believe in dollars as a method of
paying income, in marriage as a system of setting up the family, in
private property for most goods industrial or personal, in the
Government of the United States, in majority rule, in democratic
elections, in free speech, and so on.
If our difference of opinion is so inclusive that we can agree on
nothing political, our differences have gone from mere opinion into the
depths of _ideology_. Here the institutional framework is affected. You
and I would not want to live in the same city; we could not feel safe in
one another's presence; each would be afraid of the effect which the
other might have on the morals of the community. If I were a Nazi, and
you a democrat, you would not like the idea of my children living next
door to yours. If I believed that you were a good enough creature--poor
deluded devil--but that you were not fit to vote, scarcely to be trusted
with property, not to be trusted as an army officer, and generally
subversive and dangerous, you would find it hard to get along with me.
It was not metaphysical theories that made Protestants and Catholics
burn one another's adherents as heretics in early wars. In the
seventeenth century, the Protestants knew perfectly well what would
happen if the Catholics got the upper hand, and the Catholics knew what
would happen if the Protestants came to power. In each case the new
rulers, fearful that they might be overthrown, would have suppressed the
former rulers, and would have used the rack, the stake, and the dungeon
as preventives of counterrevolution. Freedom cannot be accorded to
persons outside the ideological pale. If an antagonist is not going to
respect your freedom of speech, your property, and your personal safety,
then you are not obliged to respect his. The absolute minimum of any
ideology is the assumption that each person living in an ideologically
uniform area (what the Nazi General Haushofer, following Rudolf Kjellen,
would call a _geo-psychic_ zone) will respect the personal safety, etc.,
of other individuals in the same area.
In our own time, we have seen Spaniards get more and more mistrustful of
one another, until years of ferocious civil war were necessary before
one of the two factions could feel safe. Spain went from republican
unity to dictatorial unity in four years; in neither case was the unity
perfect, but it was enough to give one government and one educational
system control of most of the country. The other countries of the world
vary in the degree of their ideological cohesion. Scandinavia seemed
serene until the German invasion brought to the surface cleavages,
latent and unseen, which made Quisling a quisling. Russia, Italy,
Germany and various other states have made a fetish of their ideologies
and have tried to define orthodoxy and heresy in such a way as to be
sure of the mentality of all their people. But most of the countries of
the world suffer from a considerable degree of ideological confusion--of
instability of basic beliefs--without having any immediate remedy at
hand, or even seeking one.
=Education.= Education is a process usually institutional by which the
people of a given area transmit to their successors, their own children,
the purely practical information needed in modern life, together with a
lot of other teachings designed to make good men and women, good
citizens, good Christians or other believers, of them. In the democratic
states this process is ideological only in some parts of the curriculum;
elsewhere in the field of opinions, the government seeks to control
ideology only negatively--through laws concerning obscenity, blasphemy,
subversion, and so on.
In the states which are ideologically self-conscious and anxious to
promote a fixed mentality, the process of education is combined with
agitation and regulation, so that the entire population lives under
conditions approximating the psychological side of war. Heretics are put
to death or are otherwise silenced. Historical materialism and the
Marxian "objectivity," or the _Volk_, or _Fascismo_, or
_Yamato-damashii_, or "new democracy" is set up as the touchstone of all
good and evil, even in unrelated fields of activity. Education and
propaganda merge into everlasting indoctrination. And when such states
go to war against states which do not have propaganda machinery, the
more liberal states are at a disadvantage for sheer lack of practice in
the administrative and mechanical aspects of propaganda. Education is to
psychological warfare what a glacier is to an avalanche. The mind is to
be in both cases captured, but the speed and techniques differ.
=Salesmanship.= Salesmanship is related to psychological warfare.
Propaganda is often compared to another art of our time--industrialized
salesmanship through mass printing and telecommunications. This bad
parallel was responsible for much of the inept American propaganda
overseas in the early part of the war; some of our propagandists had a
fundamental misconception of the nature of wartime propaganda.
Allegiance in war is a matter of ideology, not of opinion. A man cannot
want his own side to lose while remaining a good citizen in all other
respects. The desire for defeat--even the acceptance of defeat--is of
tragic importance to any responsible, sane person. A German who wanted
the Reich to be overthrown was a traitor to Germany, just as any
American who wished us to pull out of the war and exterminate American
Jews would have been a traitor to his own country. These decisions
cannot be compared with the choice of a toothpaste, a deodorant, or a
cigarette.
Advertising succeeds in peacetime precisely because it does not matter;
the choice which the consumer makes is of slight importance to himself,
even though it is of importance to the seller of the product. A
Dromedary cigarette and an Old Coin cigarette are both cigarettes; the
man is going to smoke one anyhow. It does not matter so much to him. If
Dromedaries are associated in his mind with mere tobacco, while Old
Coins call up unaccountable but persistent memories of actresses' legs,
he may buy Old Coins. The physical implements of propaganda were at hand
in 1941-1942, but we Americans had become so accustomed to their use for
trivial purposes that much of our wartime propaganda was conducted in
terms of salesmanship.
In a sense, however, salesmanship does serve the military purpose of
accustoming the audience to appeals both visual and auditory. The
consequence is that competing, outside propaganda can reach the domestic
American audience only in competition with the local advertising. It is
difficult for foreign competition to hold attention amid an almost
limitless number of professionally competent commercial appeals. A
Communist or Fascist party cannot get public attention in the United
States by the simple expedient of a "mass meeting" of three hundred
persons, or by the use of a few dozen posters in a metropolitan area.
Before the political propagandist can get the public attention, he must
edge his media past the soap operas, the soft drink advertisements, the
bathing beauties advertising Pennsylvania crude or bright-leaf tobacco.
The consequence is that outside propaganda either fails to get much
public attention, or else camouflages itself to resemble and to exploit
existing media. Clamorous salesmanship deadens the American citizen to
his own government's propaganda, and may to a certain extent lower his
civic alertness; but at the same time, salesmanship has built up a
psychological Great Wall which excludes foreign or queer appeals and
which renders the United States almost impervious to sudden ideological
penetration from overseas.
=Psychological Warfare and Public Relations.= Psychological warfare and
public relations are different in the direction in which they apply.
Psychological warfare is designed to reach the enemy. Public relations
is designed primarily to reach the home audience. Both reach neutrals,
sometimes confusingly much. In some nations, the two functions were
combined in a single instrumentality, as in the Japanese _Joho Kyoku_
(see page 184, below). The American army and navy traditions of public
relations are based on the ideas that the news should be as complete as
military security may permit, that it should be delivered speedily and
interestingly, that it should enhance the confidence of the people in
their armed services, and that its tenor (no less than its contents)
should not aid the enemy morale. These ideas are justified in terms of
sound newspaper practice, but they can lead to a weak psychological
warfare position when we must deal with an inventive and enterprising
enemy.
It is not possible to separate public relations from psychological
warfare when they use the same media. During World War II, the Office of
War Information prepared elaborate water-tight plans for processing war
news to different audiences; at their most unfortunate, such plans
seemed to assume that the enemy would listen only to the OWI stations,
and that the American public releases issued from Army and Navy would go
forth to the world without being noted by the enemy. If a radio in New
York or San Francisco presented a psychological warfare presentation of
a stated battle or engagement, while the theater or fleet public
relations officer presented a very different view, the enemy press and
radio were free to choose the weaker of the two, or to quote the two
American sources against each other.
=Psychological Warfare and Morale Services.= All modern armies, in
addition to public relations, also employ morale services
facilities--officers or employees whose function it is to supply troops
with entertainment, educational materials, political indoctrination, and
other attention-getting materials. Morale services are the prime overt
defense against enemy psychological warfare, and by a program of keeping
the attention of the troops, can prevent the enemy from establishing
effective communication. During World War II, the Armed Forces Radio
Service of the United States established global radio service for
Americans, and incidentally turned out material of top importance to
United States propaganda. Naturally, enemy and allied peoples would pay
more serious heed to communications from Americans _to_ Americans than
they would to materials which they knew had been concocted for
themselves. The American morale services in the last war indignantly
rejected the notion that they were a major propaganda facility,
rightfully insisting that their audience counted on getting plain
information, plain news, and plain education without ulterior propaganda
content. The fact that in a theater of war _all communication has
propaganda effect_ was not always taken into account, and only on one
or two critical occasions was there coordination of stress and timing.
It must be said, however, that propaganda by any other name is just as
sweet, and that the conviction of the propagandist that he is not a
propagandist can be a real asset. Morale services provided the American
forces with news, entertainment, and educational facilities. Most of the
time these morale facilities had huge parasitical audiences--the global
kibitzers who listened to our broadcasts, read our magazines, bought our
paper-bound books on the black markets. (It was a happy day for Lienta
University at Kunming, Yünnan, when the American Information and
Education set-up began shipping in current literature. The long-isolated
Chinese college students found themselves deluged with good American
books.)
The morale services lost the opportunity to ram home to their
G.I.-plus-foreign audience some of the more effective points of American
psychological warfare, but they gained _as propagandists_ by not
admitting, even to themselves, that they _were_ propagandists. Since the
United States has no serious inward psychological cleavages, the general
morale services function coordinated automatically with the
psychological warfare function simply because both were produced by
disciplined, patriotic Americans.
In the experience of the German and Soviet armies, morale services were
parts of a coordinated propaganda machine which included psychological
warfare, public relations, general news, and public education. In the
Japanese armies, morale services were directed most particularly to
physical and sentimental comforts (edible treats, picture postcards,
good luck items) which bore little immediate relation to news, and less
to formal propaganda.
=Related Civilian Activities.= In a free nation, the big media of
communication will remain uncoordinated even in time of war. The press,
the stage, motion-pictures, part of the radio, book publishing and so on
will continue. Psychological warfare has in such private facilities a
constantly refreshed source of new material for news or for features. By
a sparing but well considered liaison with censorship, psychological
warfare can effect negative control of non-governmental materials, and
can prevent the most overt forms of enemy propaganda from circulating on
the home front.
News becomes propaganda when the person issuing it has some purpose in
doing so. Even if the reporters, editors, writers involved do not have
propaganda aims, the original source of the news (the person giving the
interview; the friends of the correspondents, etc.) may give the news
to the press with definite purposes in mind. It is not unknown for
government officials to shift their rivalries from the conference room
to the press, and to provide on-the-record or off-the-record materials
which are in effect _ad hoc_ propaganda campaigns. A psychological
warfare campaign must be planned on the assumption that these civilian
facilities will remain in being, and that they will be uncoordinated;
the plan must allow in advance for interference, sometimes of a very
damaging kind, which comes from private operations in the same field.
The combat officers can get civilian cars off the road when moving
armored forces into battle but the psychological warfare officer has the
difficult task of threading his way through civilian radio and other
communication traffic over which he has no control.
Psychological warfare is also closely related to diplomacy. It is an
indispensable ingredient of strategic deception. In the medical field,
psychological warfare can profit by the experiences of the medical
corps. Whenever a given condition arises among troops on one side,
comparable troops on the other are apt to be facing the same condition;
if the Americans are bitten by insects, the same insects will bite the
enemy, and enemy soldiers can be told how much better the American
facilities are for insect repulsion. Finally, psychological warfare is
intimately connected with the processing of prisoners of war and with
the protection of one's own captured personnel.
Psychological warfare is a field to itself, although it touches on many
sciences and overlaps with all the other functions of war. It is
generally divisible into three topics: the general scheme of
psychological warfare, the detection and analysis of foreign
psychological warfare operations, and the tactical or immediate conduct
of psychological warfare. Sections of this book deal with each of these
in turn. In each case it must be remembered, however, that psychological
warfare is not a closed operation which can be conducted in private, but
that--to be effective--psychological warfare output must be a part of
the everyday living and fighting of the audiences to which it is
directed.