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 Radio.= Short-wave radio is the chief burden-bearer of
long-distance psychological warfare. It is more useful as a means of
connecting originating offices with standard-wave relay stations than as
a direct means of communication. Even in free countries, short-wave sets
are not often plentiful. The conditions of reception, from a purely
technical point of view, are often undesirable; recreational material
does not go through since a short-wave listener will put up with the
static when he is receiving vital, vividly presented news, but often
will not try to make out soap opera or music over the squawks of the
ether, and the use of short-wave reception in wartime implies a
deliberate willingness on the part of the listener to do something which
he knows to be disloyal or dangerous.
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.
=Standard-wave.= The most effective use of radio is that which falls
within the receiving capacity of the ordinary receiving sets owned or
used by the enemy population. This means the establishment of
transmitting facilities close enough to the enemy territory for the
programs to get through. As between the United States and Japan from
1941 through 1944, this was very difficult. No Americans ever dared join
the Shantung guerrillas, whether Kuomintang or Communist, with
transmitters; and as long as we broadcast from the safety of our side of
the ocean, we could only hope that occasional freak conditions would
echo programs into Japan two or three times a month. With the British
and the Germans, it was altogether different; the two countries were
virtually touching, and each could cover the entire enemy territory.
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.
=Communication Through the Mails.= In World War II, propaganda was not
able to make use of the mails the way that the propagandists of World
War I succeeded in doing. The mails were much more intermittent. The
channels into Germany through Scandinavia were not kept open except for
Sweden, which was reachable, rather perilously, by air alone; Iberia was
an inhospitable base. German counterintelligence was more than ruthless;
it was effectively savage and made the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm seem
rustic by contrast. With Japan, anything would have had to go through
Soviet censorship to get there in the first place, and then meet the
traditional intricacies of Japanese red tape. Mail propaganda was
therefore not heavily developed.
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.
=Leaflets.= The types of leaflets are described in the next chapter
(page 211), in the course of discussing leaflets addressed to troops.
Each leaflet designed for a military group has its civilian equivalents.
In addition to the military types, overt propaganda leaflets for
civilians should include:
(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.)
=Pamphlets.= Where air-dropping facilities are plentiful, leaflets can
be supplemented by pamphlets. Pamphlets have the advantage of giving the
propagandist more space for texts or pictures, enabling him to tackle
enemy arguments in detail or in depth. Pamphlets can present sustained
arguments, and thus come closer to meeting the domestic propaganda
facilities of the enemy on even ground. They are especially useful in
countering or neutralizing those enemy arguments which depend either on
formal argument or on misapplied statistics, and which therefore require
point-by-point confutation.
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.
=Subversive Operations.= Propaganda to friendly civilians whose country
has been overrun by the enemy can be effectively promoted by
collaboration with local patriots--unless political considerations
prevent such collaboration. This type of operation requires careful
cooperation between propaganda (overt), subversive facilities, and
intelligence personnel. World War II saw the type used on all fronts.
The Japanese made especially bold use of it during the conquest of
Malaya, the occupation of Burma, and the Chinese Railway Campaigns of
1944. Natives on the enemy side were regarded by us as quislings; the
Japanese honored them as patriots and duped them effectively.
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.
=Motion Pictures.= In consolidated areas, allied or neutral territory,
and the home jurisdiction, motion pictures for civilians can be employed
as a major propaganda instrument. The combination of visual and auditory
appeal ensures a concentration of attention not commanded by other
media. In both World Wars, the U.S. made extensive use of film.
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.