Propaganda Intelligence
The psychological warfare operator can usually count on two basic
interests of his listener. In the field he can be sure that the enemy
troops are interested in themselves. In the enemy homeland he can be
sure that the civilians are interested in _their_ enemy--himself. He has
therefore a certain leeway in which he can be sure of doing no harm, and
may accomplish good, if he confines his propaganda to simple, factual
and plainly honest statements on these subjects. Pompousness, intricacy
and bad taste will recoil against him; it is unwise to employ these even
when the situation is well under control. In a developing situation the
propagandist can remain safe by confining himself to simple statements
as to how strong his country's armed forces are, how realistic and
effective their leadership. Elementary information giving the favorable
aspects of his economic, strategic and diplomatic situation may also
prove valuable initial propaganda.
This interest can be counted on throughout the war. The enemy is always
news. The wise enemy realizes this and keeps himself in the news,
trusting that in the wider understanding of himself, his politics and
culture there is the opening for a more favorable peace in the event of
defeat, or for a more docile submission in the event of his own victory.
Only unimportant enemies fail to become news. (Few Americans, for
example, realize that we were at war with Bulgaria in World War II. Had
the Bulgars developed sensational weapons, there would have been a
sudden upswing of interest in them. People would have realized that
Bulgaria, like Hungary and long-lost Avaria, was once a fierce Asiatic
state grafted onto the European system; the fabulous power of the Old
Bulgarian Empire would have become known, and the names of Krum, Symeon
and the Czar Samuel added to our calendar of hate. But Bulgaria never
did enough against the United States to count as an enemy, and even
succeeded, by diplomatic ineptitude, in getting into a state of war with
all the Axis Powers and all the United Nations simultaneously; Bulgaria
escaped the fame which goes with hostility. Contrast this with Japan:
thousands of Americans have learned Japanese; Japanese national
character is known to us; war has done in a five-year span what
education could not have accomplished in a generation.) The wise
propagandist can, when in doubt, play good music on the air, or he
can--with equal prudence--give the enemy his own elementary-school
history and language texts. These do no harm, and may achieve
something.
[Illustration: _Figure 28: Nostalgic Black._ Soldiers in all wars have
gotten homesick. Propaganda appeals to homesickness in many ways. One of
the simplest is the device shown in this German black leaflet, which
shows the husband turning off the alarm clock while the wife wakes up.
The printed message on the reverse makes out a discouraging case for the
soldier's opportunity to return home, pointing out that the GI in
Europe, even after victory, will face "that nasty jungle war ... in the
Far East." No identification of the leaflet is given.]
[Illustration: _Figure 29: Nostalgic White, Misfire._ Figure 30 was
carefully adapted to Japanese customs. The mere fact that the Americans
knew enough about Japan to celebrate a homey Japanese holiday was
probably enough to make the Japanese reader examine the leaflet
carefully. Here is a combined nostalgic and surrender leaflet showing
how surrender leads the Japanese soldier back to his wife and children.
The drawing looks American rather than Japanese, and it is not likely
that a genuine Japanese could have been made homesick by use of this
leaflet.]
[Illustration: _Figure 30: Nostalgic White._ On March 5 of every year
the Japanese celebrate the colorful custom of Boys' Day. Kites in the
form of carp are flown over the cities and countryside and millions of
families set out to give their little sons an excursion or some other
treat. (It is characteristic of the Japanese that there is no Girls'
Day.) This leaflet, from Psychological Warfare Branch, USAFPA, was
designed for dropping on May 5. It ends with the appeal, "You must guard
the strength of the new Japan, your treasure, your children." Thus it
combines homesickness, patriotism, and pre-surrender indoctrination.]
=News as Intelligence.= Harmlessness is, however, a poor ideal for men
at war; the propagandist who keeps out of mischief is doing only half
his job. To make his message take effect he must convey to the enemy
those kinds of information which tend to disrupt enemy unity, discount
enemy expectation of success, lower the enemy will to resist. He cannot
do so by means of recorded symphonies or tourist lectures, no matter how
well done. He must turn to the first weapon of propaganda, the news.
The official propagandist is not a newspaperman. Since he speaks for an
army or a government, his utterance is _officially responsible_. He must
be as timely as the peacetime press, but must at the same time be as
cautious as a government press agent. He is torn between two
responsibilities: his responsibility to the job of propaganda, which
requires him to get interesting information and get it out to the enemy
quickly; and his responsibility to the official policies of his own
government, which requires him to release nothing unconfirmed, nothing
that could do harm, or that might embarrass or hurt the government. (A
sort of institutional schizophrenia is common to all propaganda
offices.)
The sources of news are various. Classified incoming operational reports
of the Army and Navy contain material of high interest to the enemy.
There are obvious reasons for denying access to such information to the
propaganda people. Propaganda men might think of their audience first
and security second. If they do not know the secret information, but are
advised by military consultants who do, security will be better
maintained and the propagandist will not labor under the handicap of a
double standard of information--what they know, and what they dare to
tell.
In technically advanced countries, the regular commercial facilities of
press and radio continue to do a normal news job, and usually do better
work than the drafted amateurs in the government. (What intelligence
agency in Washington could compile a weekly report as comprehensive,
well edited and coldly planned as _Time_ magazine?[32] The author often
yearned to paraphrase _Time_, rearranging it and classifying it TOP
SECRET, in order to astound his associates with the inside dope to which
he had access.) The nature of news is not affected by its
classification, and the distinction between news produced on the Federal
payroll and news produced off it often consists of the superior
professionalism of the latter.
The intelligence that goes into the making of propaganda must compete
for attention with the home newspaper of the enemy. It must therefore be
up-to-date, well put, authentic. There is no more space in propaganda
for the lie, farce, hoax, or joke than there is room for it in a
first-class newspaper. Even if exaggerations or nonsense appear in the
commercial press of his own country, the propagandist must realize that
he is Honorary G-2 to the enemy--a G-2 whose function consists of
transmitting news _the ultimate effect of which should be bad_ but which
should go forth with each separate item newsworthy and palatable. (A
little trick of the human mind helps all propagandists in this regard.
Most people have a streak of irresponsibility in them, which makes bad
news much more interesting than good. There is a yearning for bad news
and a genuine willingness to pass it along. Bad news increases the
tension upon the individual and tickles his sense of the importance of
things; good news relieves the tension, and to that extent has the
effect of a let-down.)
The palatability of news is not concerned so much with its content as
with its trustworthiness to the enemy, its seeming to deal with straight
fact, its non-editorialized presentation. (One of the reasons why Soviet
Communist propaganda, after all these years, is still relatively
unsuccessful, lies in the incapacity of the Communists to get out a
newspaper with news in it. They put their editorial slant in all their
news articles. "Man bites dog" would not make the front page in Russia
unless the dog were Stalinist and the man reactionary.)
[Illustration: _Figure 31: Oestrous Black._ Young human beings,
especially young males, are apt to give considerable attention to sex.
In areas of military operations, they are removed from the stimuli of
secondary sex references which are (in America) an accepted part of
everyone's daily life: bathing beauty photos, magazine covers,
semi-nudes in advertisements, etc. Our enemies tried to use the
resulting pin-up craze for propaganda purposes, hoping that a vain
arousal of oestrum would diminish morale. This choice Japanese item is
from the Philippines. (The best collection of these is kept in a locked
file--for experts only--at the Library of Congress.)]
The Japanese who obediently hated the Americans when it was their duty
to do so nevertheless could not help looking at maps that showed where
the Americans actually were. Nazis who despised us and everything we
stood for nevertheless studied the photographs of our new light bombers.
The appeal of credible fact is universal; propaganda does not consist of
doctoring the fact with moralistic blather, but of selecting that fact
which is correct, interesting, and bad for the enemy to know.[33]
On the friendly side of the battle lines, the procurement of our own
news is a budgetary matter. The propaganda office can subscribe to the
news tickers, newspapers, telegraph services, and so on. How much is a
matter of administrative housekeeping. In the field, the communications
officer can frequently steal news from the news agencies of his own
country or allied countries by the process of picking it out of the air.
It would be highly unpatriotic of the news agency to send him a bill in
the zone of operations, and he can classify his record copies of his
material RESTRICTED so that the owners of the material would have no
legitimate business acquiring copies that could later be taken into
court to support a claim. (Americans would not do this, of course; the
reference is to Byzantines.)
[Illustration: _Figure 32: Oestrous Grey._ This and the succeeding
illustration show a series of four leaflets which the Nazis used against
American troops in Europe. Anti-morale in intent, they rely on the
illustrations to get attention and then develop their malicious,
salacious anti-Semitic story. The series illustrates the strength and
weakness of Nazi propaganda.]
[Illustration: _Figure 33: Oestrous Grey, Continued._ Concluding the
series begun in the preceding illustrations, these Nazi leaflets tried
to lower American morale by combining oestrum, resentment,
discouragement and inter-American hatred. The Dr. Mordecai Ezekiel
mentioned in No. 2 is a real person, a splendid American and
conscientious official. The Nazis used his name because it was so
plainly Jewish, hoping that the ignorance of the American troops would
permit their lies to spread.]
=The Need for Timeliness.= Some white propaganda and all black
propaganda needs to be written so as to fit in with what the enemy is
reading, listening to, or talking about in his home country. The use of
antiquated slang, an old old joke, reference to a famous man as living
when he died some time ago, lack of understanding of the new wartime
conditions under which the listener lives and worries--such things sour
a radio program quickly. In radio, the propagandist must be living in
the same time as his listeners. Since the propagandist cannot shuttle
between the enemy country and his own radio office (unless he is a
braver and more elusive man than governments ever call for); he must try
to get the up-to-the-minute touch by other means. Without it he is lost.
He will be talking about something that happened a long time ago, not
the situation which he is trying to affect.
This need may be called _timeliness_.
It can be served by obtaining all the most recent enemy publications
that may be available, by listening attentively to enemy prisoners and
captured civilians, and by carefully analyzing the enemy's current
broadcasts to his own people. The Nazis made the unnecessary mistake of
assuming that isolationism used the same old language after Pearl
Harbor. They were right in assuming that there was considerable
anti-internationalist and anti-Roosevelt sentiment left in the United
States, but they were hopelessly wrong in using the isolationist
language of mid-1941 as late as mid-1942. Pearl Harbor had dated all
that and the isolationist-interventionist argument had shifted to other
ground. When the Nazis went on using the old language, they were as
conspicuous as last year's hat at a women's club. Instead of making
friends and influencing people, they made themselves sound ignorant and
look silly. They lacked the element of timeliness. They could have
gotten it by procuring representative American publications in Lisbon
and studying them.
Propaganda is like a newspaper; it has to be timeless or brand-new. In
between, it has no value.
[Illustration: _Figure 34: Obscene Black._ One of the wildest adventures
of World War II concerns this now rare "Chinese Federal Reserve Bank"
one-dollar bill. The bank was a Japanese puppet outfit in Peiping. The
Japanese had banknotes engraved by Chinese artists, and only after the
new pro-Japanese banknotes had been issued all over the city did they
notice what the "ancient scholar" was doing with his hands. The engraver
had disappeared and the Chinese enjoyed a rare, morale-stimulating
laugh. Propaganda gestures such as this--spontaneous, saucy,
silly--achieve effects which planned operations rarely attain.]
=Opinion Analysis.= In a favorable intelligence situation, espionage can
succeed in running a Gallup poll along the enemy's Main Street. When
this is done, the active propaganda operator has some very definite
issues at hand on which he can begin work. When it is not possible to
send the cloak-and-dagger boys walking up and down the Boulevard of the
Martyrs of the Eleventh of July, propanal, properly handled, can produce
almost the same result. The opinion of the enemy can be figured out in
terms of what enemy propaganda is trying to do.
To be useful, opinion analysis must be systematic. For a while the
author had the interesting job of interviewing all the latest arrivals
from Tokyo at a certain headquarters. The travelers would usually be
pumped up with a sense of their own smartness in having evaded the
Japanese and arrived at Allied territory. You could almost hear them
thinking, "Oh, boy, if Gendarmerie Chief Bakayama could only see me
now!" They were ready, in Army parlance, to spill their guts. The only
item on which most of them maintained one-man security was the question,
"Why, chum, did you yourself go to Tokyo in the first place?" Outside of
that, they were eager to talk. (Some of them had frightfully good
reasons to be eager; the adverb is literal.) With such sources of
information, the author thought that he could find out in short order
what the Japanese were thinking.
He found out, all right. He found out every single time. The refugee
engineer said the Japanese were so depressed that there was a bull
market in butcher knives. The absconding dairyman said the Japanese
were ready to die with gloom. The eloping wife said she never saw happy
Japanese any more. The military school deserter said the Japanese lay
awake all night every night listening for American air raids. The
reformed puppet said the Japanese had just gone to pieces. Then each of
them grinned (the interviews were individual, of course), and expected
to be patted on the head for bringing such good news.
[Illustration: _Figure 35: Informational Sheet._ This British leaflet
combines a message for Arabs with instructions for British pilots forced
down in the desert. The propaganda content is closely associated with
the practical mission of the leaflet.]
Their comments were worthless. What the enemy thinks _in general_ is
worth nothing unless your troops are already in his suburbs. What an
informant thinks the enemy thinks is worth even less. What do you,
reader, think right now? What do you think you think? See? the question
is nonsensical. To work, it has to be specific: What do you think about
the price of new suits? What do you think about Senator O'May and
Congressman MacNaples? Do you think that we will ever have to fight
Laputa? Are you satisfied with your present rate of pay? Why?
What a person thinks--his opinion--is workable in relation to what he
does. In practical life his opinion takes effect only when it is part of
the opinion of a group. Some groups are formed by the common opinion and
have nothing else in common: at a spiritualist meeting you may see the
banker sitting next to his own charwoman. Most groups are groups because
of things which the people _are_ (Negroes, descendants of Francis Bacon,
the hard-of-hearing); or things they _do_ (electrical workers, lawyers,
farmer, stamp collectors), or things they _have_ (factory owners,
nothing but wages, apartment houses) in common. The community of
something practical makes the group have a community of opinion which
arises from the problems they think they face with respect to their
common interests. Such groups are not only opinion groups, they are
interest groups. It is these groups that do things _as groups_. It is
these groups that propaganda tries to stir up, move, set against each
other, and use in any handy way. (Few individuals belong to just one
group at a time; the groups are almost illimitable in number.)
The propagandist should not get the idea that just because a group
exists it is a potential source of weakness or cleavage. Workers are not
always against employers, nor the aged against the young, nor women
against men, nor shippers against railwaymen. In a well run society,
groups have interest only for limited purposes. Railwaymen are not
permanently hostile to truckers, shippers, fliers, canal operators. At
the moment they may be maddest of all at the insurance companies because
of some quarrel about insurance premiums and risks.
The poor propagandist tries to butt in on every fight, even when there
is none. Often his propaganda is received the way an intervenor is
received in most family quarrels, with the bland question, "_What_
fight? We ain't mad." Sound propaganda picks only those group issues
which are acute enough to stand a little help from outside. If outside
help would be a kiss-of-death to the group that is helped, then black
propaganda instead of white is indicated. In any case, sound operating
intelligence is the first precondition to the attempted psychological
manipulation of enemy groups.
[Illustration: _Figure 36: Counterpropaganda Instructions._ The
Wehrmacht in the West had a unit bearing the code designation Skorpion.
This unit combined the functions of offensive and defensive propaganda,
which remained separate throughout the war in the U.S. Army. The
information service sheet shown provides clear, simple leads for
counterpropaganda by selecting usable (usable for the Germans, that is)
items from Allied sources. From this raw material, morale officers could
make up their own leaflets, lectures, or broadcasts.]
=Profile of Opinion.= Opinion analysis can present a _profile of enemy
opinion_. To make a profile, proceed as though assembling a photo-strip
map taken by an aerial camera. Take the whole enemy country and divide
it into major groups by percentages. Select, particularly, those groups
you are interested in addressing. If you have _kamikaze_-minded
collaborators, send them in to the enemy country to ask a thousand
enemies the same question, selecting the thousand the same way that the
total population is made up. If the country is 32% Catholic, the
thousand interviewees should include 320 Catholics. If the country is
36% urban and 61% rural (3% unexplained), get 610 of your interviewees
from the country. The questions do not have to be asked in precisely the
same form, but they should bear on precisely the same issues. When your
agents come back you have a poll. If you do not have agents, then use
the percentages from reference books, and try to estimate how many
definite groups have what specific grievances. You are then in a
position to proceed.
=Interrogation.= When processing prisoners of war, it is an excellent
idea to deal with them for morale intelligence as well as for general
and assorted military information. Questions should not aim at what the
prisoner thinks he thinks about God, his leader, his country, and so on,
but should concern themselves with those things which most interest the
prisoner himself. Does his wife write that the babies have enough
diapers? How is the mail service? Is he worried about war workers
getting his prewar job? How much money is he saving? How is the food?
How were the non-coms--did they treat him right? Did he get enough
furloughs? Does he think that anybody is making too much money at home?
Most men carry over into military services the occupational interests
which they had as civilians. A carpenter in uniform, even though he may
be a good infantry top sergeant, is still a carpenter, and information
can be obtained from him as to the problems of skilled labor, of union
members, of the poorer city dwellers, and so on.
The profile obtained from civilian polls or from propanal can then be
paralleled in the field. Set up a graph showing the entire enemy army.
Use several graphs if the army splits along racial, national or plainly
sectional lines. On each graph, enter the component groups. From the
poll or from the interrogations, list the dissatisfaction in terms of
seriousness with which the dissatisfyee attributes to it; it is not what
you think he should worry about that is important. It's what actually he
does worry about. His weighting counts. Make up a scale, quantitative
on the actual count of mentions of particular gripes. (For example, out
of 699 prisoners, of whom 167 were union members in civil life, there
were 234 separate voluntary mentions of dissatisfaction with the enemy
government's labor union policy). When that quantitative count changes
up or down, you have a definite guide with which to control your own
propaganda policy.
[Illustration: _Figure 37: Defensive Counterpropaganda._ The "National
Socialist Leadership Staff of the Wehrmacht" got out this Communications
for the Troops as a guidance sheet for company talks. The content
includes "Thoughts About the Volkssturm," "The Celebrated American
Freedoms," and "Small Requests, but Important." This issue is dated from
January 1945.]
Or you can proceed qualitatively. List enemy dissatisfaction under terms
such as these for any one issue (shoe rationing, health facilities,
minority rights, esteem for government leaders, etc.): Prisoner--
(1) is completely satisfied and has no complaints.
(2) has a few complaints but is generally satisfied.
(3) has many complaints and does not expect improvement.
(4) is despondent about the whole situation.
(5) is definitely antagonistic to home authorities in this matter.
Rate each prisoner or captured civilian according to your best judgment.
Then make up percentage lists of the grounds for dissatisfaction of each
component group in the enemy society. (This latter figure will be
impressive in documents but will not mean as much for practical purposes
as will the more specific percentages under each separate head.)
If you feel like showing off, average everything into everything else
and call it the Gross Index of Total Enemy Morale. This won't fool
anyone who knows the propaganda business, and you won't be able to _do_
anything with or about it, but you can hang it on a month-by-month chart
in the front office, where visitors can be impressed at getting in on a
military secret. (Incidentally, if some smart enemy agent sees it and
reports it back, enemy intelligence experts will go mad trying to figure
out just how you got that figure. It's like the old joke that the
_average_ American is ten-elevenths White, 52% female, and always
slightly pregnant.)
=Specificity.= Good propaganda intelligence provides:
(a) news;
(b) military intelligence which can be released as news;
(c) military intelligence which cannot be released as news, but
knowledge of which will prevent the propaganda operator from making
mistakes or miscalculations in reporting the news;
(d) enemy news;
(e) up-to-the-minute enemy slang, hobbies, fads, grievances, and other
matters of current public attention;
(f) specific grievances of specific groups and of the nation as a
whole, should these arise;
(g) information about probable inter-group conflicts;
(h) types and forms of discontent with enemy authority;
(i) identification of unpopular or popular enemy personalities;
(j) all other information that will enable the psychological warfare
operator to act promptly and sympathetically in taking the side of
specific enemy individuals against their authorities or other enemy
groups.
[Illustration: _Figure 38: Black "Counterpropaganda."_ Seeing that the
Germans had a good counter propaganda medium, the Allies decided to use
it themselves. They issued this "counterpropaganda" sheet, shown in
original and facsimile in English. The "blackness" is not very black,
since few Germans would consider this to be German in origin, once they
had read it.]
Enemy opinion cannot be manipulated in general. It must be met on its
own ground--the current everyday thoughts of enemy citizens and
soldiers. These thoughts do not usually concern grandiose problems of
political ethics. They are practical like your own.[34] They must be
appealed to in a way which makes the listener really listen, makes the
reader stop and reread, makes them both think it over later. Getting the
attention of the enemy is not enough. Most enemies will pay plenty of
attention to you--too much, at times. Getting sympathetic attention is
what counts.
This can be done only with specific grounds. With the news, you and he
have a genuine common interest. Using his real troubles as a link, you
must create that common interest. The force, the effectiveness of your
argument may make him forget that it is the enemy who has brought his
attention to this issue. You must leave him with the feeling, "By golly,
that fellow is right!"
But to talk about his troubles, effectively, you must know what they
really are. You must see it his way before you start showing him that
his way is your way, that you think that he is really on your side, and
that his bosses' side is wrong, incorrect and doomed to get whipped,
anyhow. Propaganda can operate only on the basis of _specificity_. Real
persuasion can be sought only on the basis of real sympathy with real
troubles. Old, incorrectly guessed, or poorly described issues are worse
than none at all.