Definition of Psychological Warfare
Psychological warfare seeks to win military gains without military
force. In some periods of history the use of psychological warfare has
been considered unsportsmanlike.[12] It is natural for the skilled
soldier to rely on weapons rather than on words, and after World War I
there was a considerable reluctance to look further into that
weapon--propaganda--which Ludendorff himself considered to be the most
formidable achievement of the Allies. Nevertheless, World War II brought
a large number of American officers, both Army and Navy, into the
psychological warfare field: some of the best work was done without
civilian aid or sponsorship. (Capt. J. A. Burden on Guadalcanal wrote
his own leaflets, prepared his own public-address scripts, and did his
own distributing from a borrowed Marine plane, skimming the tree tops
until the Japanese shot him down into the surf. He may have heard of OWI
at the time, but the civilians at OWI had not heard of him.)
Psychological warfare has become familiar. The problems of psychological
warfare for the future are problems of _how better_ to apply it, not of
whether to apply it. Accordingly, it is to be defined more for the
purpose of making it convenient and operable than for the purpose of
finding out what it is. The whole world found out by demonstration,
during World Wars I and II.
Psychological warfare is not defined as such in the dictionary.[13]
Definition is open game. There are three ways in which "psychological
warfare" and "military propaganda" can be defined:
first, by deciding what we are talking about in a given situation,
book, conversation, or study course;
second, by determining the responsibilities and authority involved in
a given task;
or third, by stating the results which are believed to be
accomplishable by the designated means.
Plainly, the staff officer needs a different definition from the one
used by the combat officer; the political leader would use a broader
definition than the one required by soldiers; the fanatic would have his
own definition or--more probably--two of them; one (such as "promoting
democracy" or "awakening the masses") for his own propaganda and
another (such as "spreading lies," "corrupting the press," or "giving
opiates to the people") for antagonistic propaganda.[14] Definition is
not something which can be done once and forever for any military term,
since military operations change and since military definitions are
critically important for establishing a chain of command.
The first method of definition is satisfactory for research purposes; it
may help break a politico-military situation down into understandable
components. The second method--the organizational--is usable when there
exists organization with which to demonstrate the definition, such as,
"Propaganda is what OWI and OSS perform." The third method, the
operational or historical, is useful in evaluating situations after the
time for action has passed; thus, one may say, "This is what the Germans
did when they thought they were conducting propaganda."
Since the first lesson of all propaganda is _reasoned disbelief_, it
would be sad and absurd for anyone to believe propaganda about
propaganda. The "propaganda boys" in every army and government are
experts at building up favorable cases, and they would be unusual men
indeed if they failed to work up a fine account of their own
performance. Propaganda cannot be given fair measurement by the claims
made for it. It requires judicious proportioning to the military
operations of which it is (in wartime) normally a part.
=Broad and Narrow Definitions.= The term _propaganda_ springs from the
name of that department of the Vatican which had the duty of propagating
the faith. A multitude of definitions is available. Among Americans,
Walter Lippmann, Harold Lasswell and Leonard W. Doob have done some of
the most valuable critical, analytical, and historical writing, but a
host of other scholars have also made contributions, some of them works
of very real importance.[15] For the purposes of explaining what this
book is about, propaganda may be defined as follows: _Propaganda
consists of the planned use of any form of communication designed to
affect the minds, emotions, and action of a given group for a specific
purpose._
This may be called the broad definition, since it would include an
appeal to buy Antident toothpaste, to believe in the theological
principle of complete immersion,[16] to buy flowers for Uncles on
Uncles' Day, to slap the Japs, to fight fascism at home, or to smell
nice under the arms. All of this is propaganda, by the broad definition.
Since War and Navy Department usage never put the Corps of Chaplains,
the PX system, the safety campaigns, or the anti-VD announcements under
the rubric of propaganda, it might be desirable to narrow down the
definition to exclude those forms of propaganda designed to effect
private or nonpolitical purposes, and make the definition read:
_Propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of public or
mass-produced communication designed to affect the minds and emotions
of a given group for a specific public purpose, whether military,
economic, or political._
This may be termed the everyday definition of propaganda, as it is used
in most of the civilian college textbooks.[17] For military purposes,
however, it is necessary to trim down the definition in one more
direction, applying it strictly against the enemy and making it read:
_Military propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of
communication designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given
enemy, neutral or friendly foreign group for a specific strategic or
tactical purpose._
Note that if the communication is not _planned_ it cannot be called
propaganda. If a lieutenant stuck his head out of a tank turret and
yelled at some Japs in a cave, "Come on out of there, you qwertyuiop
asdfgs, or we'll zxcvb you all to hjkl, you etc.'s!," the communication
may or may not work, but--in the technical sense--it is not propaganda
because the lieutenant did not employ that form of communication planned
and designed to affect the minds or emotions of the Japanese in the
cave. Had the lieutenant given the matter thought and had he said, in
the Japanese language, "Enemy persons forthwith commanded to cease
resistance, otherwise American Army regrets inescapable consequences
attendant upon operation of flamethrower," the remark would have been
closer to propaganda.
Furthermore, propaganda must have a known purpose. This element must be
included in the definition; a great deal of communication, both in
wartime and in peacetime, arises because of the pleasure which it gives
to the utterer, and not because of the result it is supposed to effect
in the hearers. Sending the Japanese cartoons of themselves, mocking the
German language, calling Italians by familiar but inelegant names--such
communications cropped up during the war. The senders got a lot of fun
out of the message but the purpose was unintelligently considered. The
actual effect of the messages was to annoy the enemy, stiffening his
will-to-resist. (Screams of rage had a place in primitive war; in modern
military propaganda they are too expensive a luxury to be tolerated.
Planned annoyance of the enemy does, of course, have its role--a minor,
rare and special one.)
"Psychological warfare" is simple enough to understand if it is simply
regarded as application of propaganda to the purposes of war, as in the
following definition:
_Psychological warfare comprises the use of propaganda against an
enemy, together with such other operational measures of a military,
economic, or political nature as may be required to supplement
propaganda._
In this sense, "psychological warfare" is a known operation which was
carried on very successfully during World War II under the authority of
the Combined and Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is in this sense that some
kind of a "Psychological Warfare Unit" was developed in every major
theater of war, and that the American military assimilated the doctrines
of "psychological warfare."
However, this is only one of several ways of using the term,
"psychological warfare." There is, in particular, one other sense, in
which the term became unpleasantly familiar, during the German conquest
of Europe, the sense of _warfare psychologically waged_. In the American
use of the term, psychological warfare was the supplementing of normal
military operations by the use of mass communications; in the Nazi sense
of the term, it was the calculation and execution of both political and
military strategy on studied psychological grounds. For the American
uses, it was modification of traditional warfare by the effective,
generous use of a new weapon; for the Germans it involved a
transformation of the process of war itself. This is an important enough
distinction to warrant separate consideration.
=Warfare Psychologically Waged.= Various labels were devised to name
Hitler's queer, terrifying strategy for the period 1936-1941. One
writer, Edmond Taylor, called it "_the strategy of terror_" in a book by
that name (Boston, 1940), and also "the war of nerves." Another,
Ladislas Farago, a political journalist who started out as an authority
on the Axis fifth column in the Near East and ended up in American naval
psychological warfare planning, put forth a book called _German
Psychological Warfare: A Critical, Annotated and Comprehensive Survey
and Bibliography_ (New York, 1941), which digested hundreds of German
works on topics pertaining to psychology and war, much of this material
concerned personnel practices, psychosomatic medicine, and other
non-propaganda aspects of psychology, but the book as a whole was an
impressive demonstration of how much the Germans had done to make their
war scientific. Other articles and books on the Nazi "inventions"
followed in rapid succession.
After the excitement had died down, it was found that the novelty of the
German war effort lay in two special fields:
first, the perfect or perfect-seeming synchronizing of political,
propaganda, subversive, and military efforts;
second, the use of the findings of modern psychology for the
attainment of military goals.
The Germans set the pace, in the prewar and early war period and United
Nations psychological warfare tried to keep up, even though the two
efforts were different in scope and character.
In conquering Europe, the German staff apparently used opinion analysis.
Much of this analysis has turned out to have been superb guesswork; at
the time, it looked as though the Nazis might have found some scientific
formula for determining just when a nation would cave in. In the conduct
of war, the Germans waged a rapid war--which was industrially,
psychologically and militarily sound, as long as it worked. Their
"diplomacy of dramatic intimidation" used the war threat to its full
value, with the result that the Czechoslovaks surrendered the
Sudetenland without a shot and then submitted themselves to tyranny half
a year later; the Germans wrung every pfennigs worth of advantage out of
threatening to start war, and when they did start war, they deliberately
tried to make it look as horrible as it was. The psychologists had
apparently taught the German political and military intelligence people
how to get workable opinion forecasts; German analysis of anti-Nazi
counterpropaganda was excellent. Add all this to strategy and field
operations which were incontestably brilliant: the effect was not that
of mere war, but of a new kind of war--the psychological war.
The formula for the psychological war is not to be found in the books of
the psychologists but in the writings of the constitutional lawyers. The
totality of war is a result of dictatorship within government; total
coordination results from total authority. The "secret weapon" of the
Germans lay in the power which the Germans had openly given Hitler, and
in his use of that power in a shrewd, ruthless, effective way. The
Führer led the experts, not the experts the Führer. If the Germans
surprised the world by the cold calculation of their timing, it was not
because they had psychological braintrusters inventing a new warfare,
but because they had a grim political freak commanding the total
resources of the Reich. Even in wartime, no American President has ever
exercised the authority which Hitler used in time of peace; American
Cabinet members, military and naval figures, press commentators and all
sorts of people are free to kibitz, to offer their own opinions, to
bring policy into the light of day. That is as it should be. The same
factors which made "psychological warfare" possible in the beginning of
the war were the ones which led to Germany's futile and consummate ruin
in 1944-45: excessive authority, an uninformed public, centralized
propaganda, and secret political planning.
That kind of "psychological warfare"--war tuned to the needs of
fanatically sought lusts for power, war coordinated down to the nth
degree, waged in the light of enemy opinion and aiming at the political
and moral weaknesses of the enemy--is not possible within the framework
of a democracy. Even from within Imperial Japan, Pearl Harbor had to be
waged secretly as a _purely_ naval operation; those Japanese who would
have told the Board of Field Marshals and Fleet Admirals that an
unannounced attack was the best way to unify all American factions
_against_ Japan were obviously not brought into the planning of the
Pearl Harbor raid. The Japanese still had too much of their old
parliamentary spirit left over, as Ambassador Grew's reports show; the
military had to outsmart the home public, along with the foreigners. In
the Western dictatorships, the home public is watched by élite troops,
secret police, party cells, and is made the subject of psychological
warfare along with the victim nations. Hitler could turn the war spirit
on and off; the Japanese did not dare do so to any effective extent.
"Psychological warfare" was too dictatorial a measure even for prewar
Japan; it is therefore permanently out of reach of the authorities of
the United States. After war starts, we are capable of surprising the
enemy with such things as incendiary raids, long-range bombers, and
nuclear fission; but we cannot startle with the start of war. The United
States is not now capable and--under the spirit of the Constitution, can
never be capable--of surprising an enemy by the _timing of aggression_.
If the same were true of all other nations, peace would seem much nearer
than it does.
German psychological warfare, in the broad sense of warfare
psychologically waged, depended more on political background than on
psychological techniques. Disunity among the prospective victims, the
complaisance of powers not immediately affected, demonstration of new
weapons through frightful applications, use of a dread-of-war to harness
pacifism to appeasement, the lucky geographic position of Germany at the
hub of European communications--such factors made the German war of
nerves seem new. Such psychological warfare is not apt to be successful
elsewhere except for aggressions by dictatorships against democracies;
where the democracies are irritable, tough, and alert, it will not work
at all.
The psychological warfare which remains as a practical factor in war is
therefore not the Hitlerian war of nerves, but the Anglo-American
application of propaganda means to pre-decided strategy. Let him who
will advocate American use of the war of nerves! He will not get far
with commentators publishing his TOP SECRET schedule of timing, with
legislators very properly catechizing him on international morality,
with members of his own organization publishing their memoirs or airing
their squabbles right in the middle of the operation. He would end up by
amusing the enemy whom he started out to scare. Psychological warfare
has its place in our military and political system, but its place is a
modest one and its methods are limited by our usages, morality, and law.
=Propaganda: Definitions.= Propaganda has been defined (above, page 39).
It remains to distinguish some of the other technical and professional
terms which apply in this field. In operational terms, propaganda can be
distinguished by the consideration of five elements:[18]
1. Source (including Media)
2. Time
3. Audience
4. Subject
5. Mission
These factors are given in approximate order of importance to the
analyst, and provide a good working breakdown for propaganda analysis
when expert staffs are not available. The five factors can be remembered
by memorizing the initial letters in order: S-T-A-S-M. The last factor,
"Mission," covers the presumed effect which the enemy seeks by
dissemination of the item.
Without going into the technique of field propaganda analysis (described
below, page 115), it is useful to apply these analysis factors to the
definition of some subordinate types of military propaganda.
_Source_ is the most important. If the source is open and acknowledged,
the government issuing it is putting the propaganda on the record before
the world, and must therefore issue the propaganda with a certain amount
of dignity and with an eye to the future. If the source is faked, then
it is important for the government or army to make sure that the faking
is a good job, and that the propaganda cannot readily be traced back.
Two very different techniques are employed. Open sources require
responsible public officials, preferably men with international
reputations, who will get the best effect from use of the name and
facilities of the government. Use of an open source usually (but not
always) implies belief of the disseminator in the veracity of his
materials. Fabricated sources require persons adept at illicit
imaginativeness, impromptu forgery, and general devilment, combined with
a strong sense of discipline and security. The United States was so
chary of mixing the two kinds of propaganda during World War II that it
operated them in different categories, giving rise to the three
following types:
_White propaganda_ is issued from an acknowledged source, usually a
government or an agency of a government, including military commands at
various levels. This type of propaganda is associated with overt
psychological operations.
_Grey propaganda_ does not clearly identify any source.
_Black propaganda_ purports to emanate from a source other than the true
one. This type of propaganda is associated with covert psychological
warfare operations.
White propaganda is shown in figure 4, which does everything possible to
make the message the official message of the British and American
governments. The border is done up in handsome banknote fashion; the
great seals of the nations are handsomely displayed; the signatures of
the commanding generals are shown as further attestation of the
openness and good faith of the issuer of the propaganda.
Figure 38 was also prepared by British-American authority; it too had
the job of making Germans surrender. But in this case, nothing was done
to make the British-American source evident; indeed, every effort was
made to hide the source, so that the German who read it would think that
it came from within his own territory. The two different kinds of
propaganda were both of them needed; each supplemented the other but
they had to be kept apart as far as possible.
In the field of radio, the difference between Covert and Overt was even
more plain. During World War II, the ether over Europe was filled with
appeals from radio stations both public and covert in character. The
British spoke to the Germans over B.B.C., making no effort to conceal
the fact that they were British. But they also spoke to the Germans over
clandestine stations, which pretended to be free-lancing Nazis, German
army stations, or freedom group operations. The Germans, comparably,
beamed official German news to the United States in English; but they
also pretended to be Americans broadcasting from an isolationist radio
in the American mid-west. In some cases, the belligerent powers used the
identical radio transmission facilities for overt and covert propaganda.
Radio Saipan, under the Americans, was most of the time the relay for
the acknowledged San Francisco programs; intermittently OSS borrowed it,
and it then became a "Japanese" station. (Under such conditions, black
radio cannot remain black very long.)
In terms of the timing, propaganda can be subdivided into two further
categories, strategic and tactical. Strategic propaganda is conducted
with no immediate effect in view. Its purpose is to wear down the enemy
by psychological changes that may extend over months. Figure 19, warning
the Germans of the remote future, is an example of this in leaflet form.
Tactical propaganda is operated to accomplish an immediate short-range
purpose, and normally does not cover a long time-span. Only in a few
cases, such as leaflets for a besieged enemy unit, is tactical
propaganda run for a purpose that encompasses a long delay between the
operation and the expected result. These two forms may be defined as
follows:
_Strategic propaganda_ is directed at enemy forces, enemy peoples, and
enemy-occupied areas in their entirety, and--in coordination with
strategic planning--is designed to effectuate results planned and
sought over a period of weeks, months, or years.
_Tactical propaganda_ is directed at specific audiences, usually
named, and is prepared and executed in support of localized combat
operations.
Another set of distinctions can be set up, depending on the relationship
of the propaganda operation to the simultaneous hostile propaganda
operations, namely offensive or defensive propaganda. Before the advent
of World War II, this distinction appeared to be significant but
experience on almost all fronts indicated that it meant little when
applied to day-in day-out necessities of actual practice. Propaganda is
so intimately keyed to the news and opinion situation that it does not
usually bear elaborate pre-operational analysis. Elaborate planning very
often ends up in the locked files; the distinction of offensive and
defensive means little in routine work. However, for the sake of the
record, the distinction can be listed:
_Defensive propaganda_ is designed to maintain an accepted and
operating form of social or other public action. (Soviet propaganda
for the Five Year Plans is a conspicuous instance.)
_Offensive propaganda_ is designed to interrupt social action not
desired by the propagandist, or to predispose to social action which
he desires, either through _revolutionary_ means (within the same
society) or _international_, either diplomatic or belligerent (between
different societies).
Another set of distinctions arises from the purpose which the propaganda
officer or group may have in mind for the people whom he addresses.
These distinctions, like offensive-defensive, are theoretical rather
than practical, and did not often appear in the actual operations,
although all the more hush-hush plans made elaborate references to them:
_Conversionary propaganda_ is designed to change the emotional or
practical allegiance of individuals from one group to another.
_Divisive propaganda_ is designed to split apart the component
subgroups of the enemy and thereby reduce the effectiveness of the
enemy group considered as a single unit. (An instance is provided by
the Allied effort to make German Catholics think first as Catholics,
then as Germans.)
_Consolidation propaganda_ is directed toward civil populations in
areas occupied by a military force and is designed to insure
compliance with the commands or policies promulgated by the commander
of the occupying force.
_Counterpropaganda_ is designed to refute a specific point or theme of
enemy propaganda. (Japanese charges of American atrocities usually
followed American charges of Japanese atrocities.)
Except for those terms that are firmly rooted in the literature of
propaganda, most of the distinctions can be forgotten; the basic
distinctions are those determined by the task involved, and not by the
propaganda content.
World War II brought up a very sore issue between military and civilians
with respect to propaganda in areas with unsettled governments--such as
Darlanist North Africa, Communist China, all of Siam. (See, also,
discussion of World War II, below, page 77 ff.) In these areas every
military act involved the definition of the political relations of the
United States Government to the governments locally enjoying authority.
Were we at war with them, or not? And so on. In these cases, politics
itself became a vital foundation to propaganda, especially when the
local authorities were themselves active in the propaganda field. The
American theater and unit commanders had to decide what kinds of
political promises they could or could not make. In this job, they had a
more difficult task than did the British, who possessed in the Political
Warfare Executive a pooling facility which coordinated foreign policy
with propaganda.[19] Could we promise freedom from France to the
Algerians? Or immunity to the Siamese who re-doublecrossed in the matter
of allegiance and got ready to subvert the Japanese? Or the Yenan people
who wanted us to highjack the Generalissimo as a price of their support?
Or the Indonesians who might oppose the Japanese and already opposed the
Dutch? Such questions transcended propaganda. Their decision made
propaganda, or unmade it; but the deciding power was outside the
authority of the propaganda people.
Political warfare is therefore, in administrative terms, a higher-level
activity than propaganda, and may be defined as follows:
_Political warfare consists of the framing of national policy in such
a way as to assist propaganda or military operations, whether with
respect to the direct political relations of governments with one
another or in relation to groups of people possessing a political
character._
Such policy-framing does not normally fall within the authority of the
Army or Navy, though these may be consulted and called upon to effect
appropriate military action. An outstanding instance of the use of
political warfare was President Roosevelt's impromptu enunciation of the
theme "Unconditional Surrender" at Casablanca. The theme affected not
only our propaganda, but the types of surrenders which American generals
could accept from Germans.