Psychological Warfare

23 Colonel Nicolai, book cited in footnote 1, pages 160-161.

24 For a pro-Hitler view of the world, see Wyndham Lewis' Hitler, London, 1931, if a copy is to be found. The author would probably prefer for the book to disappear. It is an eloquent, very pro-Nazi book, putting the Hitlerite terminology into the English language and—what is more important—infusing into the clumsy German pattern of thinking-and-feeling a lightness of touch which makes Naziism more palatable. The book converted no one in its time, and is not apt to do harm at this late date; but it will make the English-reading reader understand some of the novelty, the revolutionary freshness, the bold unorthodoxy which made millions of people turn to Hitlerism as an escape from the humdrum heartbreak of Weimar Germany. Much of the book is devoted to the problem of power—street-fighting, mass demonstrations, slogans, symbolisms—which so fascinated the Nazis.

25 See Carl J. Friedrich, The New Belief in the Common Man, Brattleboro (Vermont), 1945, chapter III, "Independence of Thought and Propaganda," pp. 81-120, for a cogent discussion of this mentality. The present author, in Government in Republican China, New York, 1938, pp. 18-23, describes in epitome the method whereby the ancient Confucian leadership of China, while propaganda-conscious, used ideology as an economical, stable method of control and avoided its maleficent features. In one of the few poorly argued passages of a great work, Arnold J. Toynbee overlooks this peculiar characteristic of Confucianism and merely equates the Confucian dogma with those of other "universal churches" (A Study of History, London, 1939, vol. V, especially pages 654-5).

26 People's Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R., Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotzkyite Centre ..., Verbatim Report, Moscow, 1937, page 111. These trials were themselves propaganda; in this particular instance, propaganda of a rather poor order, since they failed to convince the foreign public and presumably persuaded only those portions of the Russian public who were so gullible that they needed no further persuading. For a brilliant illumination of them in terms of a readable novel, see Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, New York, 1941; the same author also has a book of essays on the totalitarian mentality under the rather fancy title, The Yogi and the Commissar, New York, 1945. On the same subject, see Louis Fischer's Men and Politics, New York, 1942.

27 This document establishing the COI, along with the other major documents pertaining to American psychological warfare, may be found in J. P. Warburg's book cited above, Unwritten Treaty.

28 In the course of a routine day of work on overseas propaganda in 1942, the author, who was then in SSG of MIS, found it necessary to get in touch with Military Intelligence proper, Naval Intelligence, the State Department, the office of the Assistant to the President, the Office of Facts and Figures, the British Political Warfare group (which was vainly seeking its American opposite number), the Office of Civilian Defense, the Research and Analysis Branch of the office of the Coordinator of Information, the office of the Librarian of Congress, the Foreign Information Service, and the Department of Agriculture. Each of these either operated propaganda, or had policy or intelligence contributions to make. The Board of Economic Warfare naturally came into the field too. This was during a period of German and Japanese victories, so that even if propaganda had been coordinated, it probably would not have been much more effective than it was. From what could be figured out later, no real harm was done at this time. Nor was much achieved.

29 The bibliographies are cited above, on page 38. The journal comes out, as its title indicates, four times a year; it is published by the School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, N. J. Every major library has it. The review section provides a good survey of new writing in the field. Journals such as The American Political Science Review, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The Infantry Journal, and The American Historical Review often have significant articles or book reviews in this field. International Affairs (Royal Institute for International Affairs, London) has excellent reviews of books arranged by geographic subheads. Opinion and propaganda topics are usually lumped together in academic studies; material on the one is apt to lead to the other.

30 San Tzu Ching, translated and annotated by Herbert A. Giles, Shanghai, 1910, pages 2 and 3. The translation quoted is not by Giles.

31 On the transmitting side, nothing could be more ruinous than mere translation, the more literal the worse, of a single basic broadcast for all audiences irrespective of language or culture. For the text of war communiqués or of official documents, this is permissible, but for news or feature broadcasts, few things could be worse. It is not possible to translate subtle psychological appeals embedded in news or commentary; such materials by their nature must follow forms acceptable to the audience, building up confidence with familiar allusions and creating a sense of "we-ness" between the actual announcer and his listeners. Equivalents can be worked out. The same basic policies can be transposed. The same source of news and intelligence can be exploited. But the actual program cannot be translated verbatim from one language to another; it must be transposed not only from one language but from one culture to another.

32 Free advertisement.

33 Bad news about his side is not necessarily the only kind of bad news for the enemy to know. Gloomy news about our side can harm the enemy listener if his government is running a propaganda campaign to raise production, promote thrift, etc., by claiming things are worse on their side. In such a case, good news about us would be good for him. News must be fitted to the propaganda plan and to the propaganda situation.

34 Walter Lippmann's book, Public Opinion, was first published in New York in 1922 but it is still clean-cut as a basic statement of the problems of public opinion. The author's own life as a commentator is remarkable in fulfilling the mission which he implicitly set himself when writing about public opinion: the job of lifting issues into emotional and psychological contexts in which the resulting judgment will be based on socially sound factors.

35 The American newspapers between 1942 and 1945 carried intermittent accounts of these personal and political problems, frequently in the columns of commentators rather than in the regular news sections. (The book by Warburg is of course Unwritten Treaty, mentioned above.)

36 For popular histories of the OSS, see Sub Rosa: The O.S.S. and American Espionage by Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden (New York, 1946) or Corey Ford and Alastair MacBain, Cloak and Dagger (New York 1946). An exciting thriller novel by Darwin Teilhet gives an oblique and guarded description of black propaganda and clandestine polling: The Fear Makers (New York, 1945); Teilhet was himself in OSS. For an interesting description of OSS field operations, see Nicol Smith's Into Siam (New York, 1946). OSS was picturesque from the very start, and it is likely that other participants in OSS work will from time to time bring out books on their adventures.

37 Bureau of the Budget, United states Government Manual, 1946, First Edition, Washington, 1946, says of the Military Intelligence Division, "It has charge of propaganda and psychological warfare" (page 198). The fiat may be a little more precise than circumstances warrant, but it at least shows where, for the record, psychological warfare belonged.

38 See Charles E. Merriam's study, Political Power, Chicago, 1933, and his later works for suggestive approaches to the political setting of propaganda problems. He developed the terms miranda and credenda for modern political science usage.

39 While this statement is plainly a matter of individual opinion, the author considers that his own experience supports his opinion in this instance. He wrote plans on almost every operating level in the governmental and military hierarchy during World War II, all the way from drafting plans for the Joint (American) and Combined (British-American) Chiefs of Staff down to helping field agents in the China Theater work out practical little propaganda plans for their own missions, or planning the writing, use, and classification of leaflets one by one, in collaboration with OWI operators. He found planning to be fascinating at the top, and worthwhile at the bottom of the pyramid, but he found no significant correlation between the top and the bottom, save in the sense which he makes plain.

40 In the pseudo-technical propaganda slang of the OWI people, this was called "spelling out." The same people "stockpiled" "campaigns" to "needle" the enemy.

41 So far as he knows, the author was the first—about May of 1942—to urge that a surrender pass be made to look like an official document, with banknote-type engraving and with formal style. Unfortunately, it was printed in green, instead of the old-fashioned orange-gold of the U.S. Treasury yellowbacks, and was sent to the jungle areas of the South and Southwest Pacific, where everything was green to start with.

42 These suggestions are based on the comment of Major Martin Herz, who prepared the leaflets at Anzio beachhead and subsequently was leaflet expert at SHAEF.

43 No author, publisher, place or date. Issued by the unit. The reference is to page 55.

44 The Department of the Army is understood to be preparing a Field Manual and Technical Manual for Psychological Warfare which will describe the doctrines and the equipment, respectively, to be used in combat propaganda situations.

45 In the postwar period a great many reflective publications began to appraise what had happened in the PsyWar field. One of the best of these is Daniel Lerner's Sykewar: Psychological Warfare Against Germany, D-Day to VE-Day (New York, 1949), which covers the European operation in detail. This was followed by Propaganda in War and Crisis, edited by Daniel Lerner (New York, 1951). A heavier work, covering many of the same problems is The Language of Politics, by Harold D. Lasswell, Nathan Leites and associates (New York, 1949). Leonard Doob's work on propaganda, long the leading American text in the field, was issued in a revised, postwar edition (New York, 1948); the postwar book does much to put "psychological warfare" in perspective. A simpler text than Doob's, useful for less advanced students, is Frederick C. Irion's Public Opinion and Propaganda (New York, 1950). A manual directly pertaining to psychological warfare is America's Weapons of Psychological Warfare edited by Robert E. Summers (New York, 1951); this also contains a bibliography which is helpful to the layman. Three outstanding works summarize the postwar propaganda position of the U.S. Government: Charles A. H. Thomson's Overseas Information Service of the United States Government (Washington, 1950) shows the continuity of the problem from war to peace; Wallace Carroll's Persuade or Perish (Boston, 1948) argues the necessity of maintaining an opinion offensive; and Edward Barrett's illuminating discussion, Truth is Our Weapon (New York, 1953), brings the story down to the Eisenhower Administration.

46 New insights into the nature of the Soviet antagonist were presented by three related monographs originally prepared inside RAND Corporation, the research facility which often works with the U.S. Air Force. Nathan Leites, The Operational Code of the Politburo (New York, 1951), digests Soviet fundamentals of international behavior. Margaret Mead's Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (New York, 1951) applies anthropological and psychiatric methods of analysis; this book, to the military or general reader, should be prefaced by reading her distinguished work, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, which is now available in an inexpensive, paper-bound reprint (Mentor Books, New York, 1952). Philip Selznick makes the point that organization is itself a Communist power-achieving instrument in his The Organizational Weapon (New York, 1952), the third of the RAND group. Lt. Col. William R. Kintner, a Regular Army officer, prepared the challenging study of the specific military content of Communist thinking in The Front is Everywhere (Norman, Oklahoma, 1950). Among the many good recent books about the Communist challenge, R.N. Carew Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism (New York, 1951), is outstanding for its dispassionateness while James Burnham's The Coming Defeat of Communism (New York, 1951) is a ringing appeal to our side to meet the challenge. Stefan T. Possony, in A Century of Conflict (Chicago, 1953), presents the most coldly damning and most far-ranging critique of Communist operations which this writer has seen. Willmoore Kendall rendered Americans a service with his careful translation, editing and introduction of A. Rossi, A Communist Party in Action (New Haven, 1949), while Bob Darke, in a British counterpart, gives a less intellectual and much abbreviated description of the British Communist set-up and operations in The Communist Technique in Britain (London, 1952). Communist revelations of "capitalist" conspiracies which tell more about the haunted, anxious, nasty minds of the Communists than about our own operations are, among others, L. Natarajan, American Shadow Over India (Bombay, 1952), and Jean Cathala, They are Betraying Peace (Moscow, 1951).

47 Paul M. A. Linebarger, "Communism as a Competing Civilization in Southeast Asia," a contribution to Southeast Asia in the Coming World, Philip W. Thayer, editor (Baltimore, 1952).

48 For a contrary point of view, see the works by Harry Stack Sullivan, Brock Chisholm, and others.

49 Problematical in all such attempts of working officers to define "victory" is the serious intellectual issue of avoiding means which by themselves defeat the ends which are sought. If the means are "dangerous" or "immoral" by the standards of the society which applies them, their value becomes low indeed. For the covert side of U.S. operations, see the breezy and popular volumes on OSS: Lt. Col. Corey Ford and Major Alastair MacBain, Cloak and Dagger: The Secret Story of OSS (New York, 1946); Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden, Sub Rosa: The OSS and American Espionage (New York, 1946); and the most vividly concrete narration of the group, Elizabeth P. MacDonald, Undercover Girl (New York, 1947). For an astonishing work which seems to violate security on every page, see Commander Roy Olin Stratton, SACO—The Rice Paddy Navy (Pleasantville, N. Y., 1950); this is the description of a Navy group in China which the author shows to be more covert than OSS itself. A dry, German view of Anglo-American espionage in Holland is given in that superb, true-life adventure story, H. J. Giskes, London Calling North Pole (London and New York, 1953).

50 See the works of Freda Utley, Herbert Feis, the Linebarger-Djang-Burks political science text (New York, 1954), and others, not to mention the contributions by Mao, Liu Shao-ch'i, and other Communist leaders.

51 The author himself pleads guilty to having criticized the French unduly without accepting a reasonable share of U.S. responsibility for the situation in Indochina (Paul M. A. Linebarger, "Indochina: The Bleeding War," Combat Forces Journal, March 1951), and was deservedly rebuked from some French readers for his denigration of French imperialism. The author cannot endorse as wise, shrewd, or kind the French political decisions in Indochina, hut he can say that the Americans who made (or failed to make) basic policy concerning that area have been as irresponsible and foolish as the French. He trusts that, by the time this note reaches print, a more effectual Franco-American understanding will have replaced the previous difficulties.

52 Psychological warfare is, of course, neither very psychological nor is it necessarily warfare. Indeed, within the context of a rigidly purist and scholastic definition, psychological warfare is not psychological, in that most of its operations are very definitely not a part of present-day scientific psychology. Neither is it warfare because it can be operated before war, during war, after war, or contemporaneously with and apart from war. As pointed out above, war involves the inescapable content of public lawful violence. It is hard to ascribe violence to a short-wave broadcast or to a leaflet. In Korea in 1951 the author heard that a Chinese soldier was found dead—mashed by a leaflet bomb which had failed to explode at the proper altitude. If this story is true, that particular soldier was one of the few genuine war victims of military or strategic propaganda both so pretentiously called "psychological warfare" by Americans of the mid-twentieth century.

Anthony Leviero, who summarized American PsyWar in The New York Times in a series of articles between 9 December and 14 December 1951, is both an experienced general staff officer and a first-class newspaper man. His comment in 1953 on the new Operations Coordinating Board was encouraging or ominous. He stated in his Times dispatch of 4 September 1953 that the William Jackson committee had found that "psychological warfare did not exist as such." If this meant that the new OCB was to sweep aside the limitations of top-secret pedantic definitions and move toward a refreshingly concrete manipulation of the world scene, the news was encouraging indeed. If the new Board was, however, to be dedicated to the manufacture of new, complicated and secret definitions of its own, the news was bad. Given the time-lag on the declassification of Government materials, it may be twenty-five years, or 1978, before the precise definitions of 1953 are available to the public. The tendency of the Board to succeed or to fail will be evident by the time this material is in print; given the personalities involved, the prognosis appeared optimistic.

53 This kind of issue has not been neglected in our public discussions or our schools. Two sides of one famous case are given in Owen Lattimore, Ordeal by Slander (New York, 1951) and the bitterly anti-Lattimore book by John T. Flynn, The Lattimore Story (New York, 1953). A serious intelligent attempt to answer some of the problems posed by PsyWar and the resulting loyalty issues within a democracy are the works of Nathaniel Weyl, Treason: The Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History (Washington, 1950), and The Battle Against Disloyalty (New York, 1951). A formidable presentation of what the Communists are doing is offered in Ralph de Toledano, Spies, Dupes, and Diplomats (New York and Boston, 1952) and in Major General Charles A. Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy (New York, 1952). The kind of round-table often intellectually conceived and executed within American schools is well portrayed in the special issue of Columbia Journal of International Affairs (New York, spring, 1951), in which the entire issue is given to a synthesis of international problems in the propaganda field under the heading "Propaganda and World Politics." Stefan Possony's magistral A Century of Conflict (Chicago, 1953) provides an excellent general framework.

54 Nothing in previous U.S. experience prepared Americans for the invasion of the individual personality which has long been accomplished by the Communists but which was first publicized in adequate fashion after the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950. The pioneer book in this field, and still the best, is Edward Hunter's Brain-Washing in Red China (New York, 1951). This author has known Mr. Hunter for twenty-odd years and can vouch for him as a man with a sober respect for fact, though he does have a vivid taste in adjectives; he has seen not only Mr. Hunter but has gone over some of the raw material which Hunter used and can testify to the reality and sympathy with which Hunter portrays this rather gruesome process. On a different scale, Wilbur Schramm has given a description of what happens when The Reds Take a City (New Brunswick, 1951), in a book of that name written jointly with John W. Riley.

55 A sharp contrast between the old politics and the new is shown by the unfortunate book prepared in the Department of State and now hastily, even guiltily, allowed to go out of print by the United States Government Printing Office because it showed that some Americans were guilty or naïve enough to try to love and trust the Soviet state within the same system as our own. One does not know whether to laugh or to weep at the spectacle of men lamenting the fact that they were once innocent and hopeful. The book, prepared by the late Harley Notter and others, is Department of State Publication 3580, General Policy Series 15, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation (Washington, 1949). That not all was innocence, even when things so seemed, is amply attested by Freda Utley's controversial but brilliant summary, The China Story (Chicago, 1951).

56 The function of decision-making has been brilliantly though solemnly explored in Richard C. Snyder, H. W. Bruck and Burton Sapin, Decision-making as an Approach to the Study of International Politics (Princeton, N.J., 1954.)

57 For a contrary point of view, see Tensions That Lead to War, edited by Hadley Cantril (Princeton, 1950).

58 The author had the opportunity of observing opsearch in the Korean war on three different occasions: September 1950, March 1951, and November and December 1952 and early January 1953. He visited Korea itself twice and also spent a great deal of time, part of it in a public capacity and part of it as a free-lance author, in the periphery of that war—areas such as Hong Kong, Indochina, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaya, Burma, Indonesia, and India.

59 Several novels have touched on PsyWar problems. The most hard-hitting of the lot is Jerome Weidman, Too Early to Tell (New York, 1946). Covert PsyWar whispering techniques are thinly disguised and much improved, technically, in Darwin Teilhet, The Fear Makers (New York, various dates). The covert side of some of these adventures is portrayed, among others, by W. Stanley Moss, A War of Shadows (New York, 1952); Ray Franklin Kauffman, The Coconut Wireless (New York, 1948); and Chin Kee Onn, Silent Army (New York, 1953). As exciting as fiction are Mark Gayn and John Caldwell, American Agent (New York, 1947), describing the work of an enthusiastic amateur, and L. C. Moyzisch, Operation Cicero (New York reprint, 1952), portraying a first-class professional. Alexander Foote, Handbook for Spies (London, 1949), and J. V. Davidson-Houston, Armed Pilgrimage (London 1949), are interesting distillations of personal experience which touch on espionage and PsyWar.

60 The author professes he would like to write a preliminary work on this subject himself some day, if no one else essays the task first.

61 V = Victory day.

62 Edward Hunter, Brain-Washing in Red China (New York, 1951).

63 If one good book can be mentioned without prejudice to the many other good books in the same field, attention can be drawn to the excellent undergraduate text which explores the present U.S. position on the press, George I. Bird and Frederic E. Merwin, The Press and Society (New York, 1951). At the opposite end of the spectrum, see Oleg Anesimov, The Ultimate Weapon (New York, 1953). The first book takes the U.S. as it is and does not envisage profound responses coming as the inevitable accompaniment of frightful change; the second book states the outside problem in shocking terms, but asks of Americans things which neither they nor their press are ever apt to approve.

64 The development of this activity was handed to the Chief of Army Field Forces, in whose G2 section Colonel Donald Hall was the PsyWar officer. The first of these courses with its supporting textbook was not ready for release by the Army General School until 1949, just one year before the Korean conflict began. In 1949 likewise appeared the first officially approved Army field manual on the subject of psychological warfare support of military operations.

65 Teams from this detachment, armed with leaflets and loudspeakers, were sent to and participated in major maneuvers in continental United States, in the Caribbean area, and in Hawaii. These teams were attached to the "enemy" forces, and exposed the maneuver troops to military propaganda in action. The Tactical Information Detachment suddenly suspended its planning of simulated propaganda operations for Exercise Pluto in 1950. As the only PsyWar operational unit in the Army, the Detachment was hustled off to Korea.