Where the unit does include a Psychological Warfare team, a duality of control arises. This requires good sense to keep in balance. The commander possesses absolute command and responsibility for the movement, protection, and operations timing of the team which happens to be attached to his unit. He should not presume to interfere in the special propaganda instructions flowing down to the team from superior Psychological Warfare echelons. Because of the pressing needs of propaganda operatives for news and for order-of-battle intelligence, it is normally desirable that they have their own signal facilities and that their routine operational communications short-circuit normal military channels. Otherwise, the unit's signal facilities will be overloaded with messages important to the Psychological Warfare team, but useless to the unit as a whole. Such absurdities as the encipherment and decipherment of routine enemy news digests should by all means be avoided. On the other hand, the command and administrative messages should go through normal military channels. In the Galahad operation against the Japanese in North Burma, in which Merrill's Marauders participated, such a double set of communications channels took a long time to develop.

Where the small-unit commander does not possess professionally trained and equipped Psychological Warfare facilities, he should no more expect to engage in offensive Psychological Warfare than to undertake chemical warfare with improvised materials. It becomes his responsibility to turn to liaison.

For example, a well trained liaison officer might receive a call from a regimental or battalion commander. He would find that the commander desired leaflets to be used in a particular tactical situation. He should be able to explain what standard ready-prepared leaflets were available, what delay would be involved in making up special leaflets, and what quantities of leaflets would be advisable. Turning back to his home headquarters, he should be able to present the commander's case to the leaflet printers or the public-address team, and should help the propaganda people in understanding the commander's problems.

Obviously, such an operation required close contact with the enemy, plus known possession of standard-wave radio receivers by enemy personnel.

Among the ground weapons used for discharge of leaflets, there are the following:

• chemical warfare shells converted to leaflet use, especially smokeshells;
• almost every variety of available artillery shell (howitzers having proved especially useful);
• rifle grenades converted for leaflets;
• leaflet bundles with a small quantity of explosive, attached to a quick fuze, packed so as to be thrown in a manner similar to the manual throwing of a grenade.

Mortars were probably the chief leaflet-throwing device on both the European and Asiatic fronts; the Germans went so far as to develop a special propaganda mortar. Smoke shells proved particularly easy to adapt.

The firing of leaflet shells is a responsibility of the unit possessing the guns. Psychological Warfare teams were not issued their own guns, save for unit protection. The actual distribution of leaflet shells was effected, taking the Fifth Army as an example, in the following manner:

• The Army Combat Propaganda Team planned, cleared, printed and packed leaflets suitable for the occasion.
• The Team cleared with the Artillery Officer, Fifth Army, an agreement for an order to use the leaflets.
• The Team's own liaison officers transmit the order to the appropriate divisions and lower echelons. The order itself prescribed the times for picking up the leaflets from the ammunition dumps.
• The Team procures the empty shells and packs them with leaflets.
• The Army order allots 150 leaflet shells per division.
• The Team specifies, in the order, the time-limit within which the shells are to be used.
• Corps and/or division selects the specific targets, the general target being all enemy concentrations within range.

In smaller units, the propaganda unit would often be placed in direct communication with a specific artillery unit, which would be charged with the responsibility for discharging the leaflet shells at opportune times. When a requesting unit asks for leaflets, and itself possesses the guns which could fire leaflet shells, it is entirely possible for the supplier to send leaflets ready-packed in the shells. However, even the most rapid shell-packing job takes considerably more time than the readying of aircraft for leaflet distribution. When it is considered that the plane not only discharges the leaflets, but delivers them from the supply point, all in one operation, it will be seen that close air-ground coordination will often do a quicker, bigger job of leaflet saturation than could be achieved by the requesting, preparing, transporting and firing of leaflet shells.

What could a commander do if a delegation called on him, right out in a zone of operations, and demanded a right to be heard? Suppose that he knew their complaints about food, rotation, danger, etc., to be justified, and knew at the same time that the enemy had subverted some of his men into being either dupes or traitors. Suppose his men protested a lack of deep lead-lined shelters the day after enemy leaflets instructed the American soldiers to ask for such shelters. Should he treat all such enlisted men as traitors? Suppose he is faced with the specter of political treason, subversion, and revolution? American officers have not faced such problems since the days in which George Washington was Commander in Chief. War after war, we have gone into the fight with a profound confidence in our ability to win. Future war may hold forth no such assurance. If America is injured, her troops decimated, their homes exploded or poisoned by foreign atomic attack, brand-new questions of psychological warfare will be posed. No living American has ever had to face such problems. This is no assurance that they will never occur. Upon the manhood, the fairness, the sheer intelligence of small-unit commanders there may fall the unexpected task of holding their units together in the face of disastrous psychological attack.

Sudden use of surrender leaflets on a victorious or unprepared enemy is not likely to take effect. The Japanese surrender leaflets dropped on the Americans in Southwest Pacific were issued without previous materials readying the Americans. Furthermore, they were dropped when the American situation was plainly improving, and when American soldiers were not likely to be thinking about surrender in order to get individual escape from the war.

The preparation of surrender leaflets calls for the tactical use of printing facilities. This is the job of the combat propaganda unit, with its high-speed press, its liaison with both ground and air forces, its up-to-the-minute intelligence on enemy movements, situation, and order of battle. The enemy should be given leaflets showing him how clearly he is pinned down, identifying him, generally stripping him of the sense of secrecy and the trust in his commanders that make it possible for him to go on fighting. When surrender can be effected, he should be given the simplest, plainest command the circumstances allow. In the case of the Japanese, there were difficulties on the American side about letting the Japanese come over to surrender; too many of them were suspected of having tucked hand grenades into their fundoshi. Many a Japanese started out for the Allied lines and failed to make his peaceful intentions plain enough. The result was a strong deterrent to other Japanese who may have been trying to decide whether they wanted to surrender or not.

Figure 63: Action Type: Air-Rescue Facilities. These leaflets from China Theater were designed to help the work of the Fourteenth Air Force. Action called for from the civilians included the assistance of hurt flyers, the identification of Americans as allies and not as Japanese when they parachuted to the ground, the avoidance of bridges and other bomb targets.

It was found that the bright white leaflet with the identifying stripes on it (figure 69) would be shown to our troops, who could be taught to hold their fire when they saw Japanese carrying that type of leaflet. To the Japanese, the plainness of the surrender formula was a considerable help in coming over.

Figure 64: Pre-Action News. Psychological warfare facilities can be extremely helpful in favorable situations. One of the most important ways of developing a favorable situation is to predispose enemy soldiers toward the idea of surrendering. News of surrender, emphasis on the comforts and relief of prisoners of war, and above all, emphasis on their numerousness can contribute to the actual act of surrender. This newspaper looks like a newspaper, but its chief emphasis is on the extent of surrenders.

Variations on the surrender leaflet include the following devices:

• Letters, with signatures blacked out, of prisoners of war who havefound conditions decent and who are enjoying rest, good care, and good food;
• Photographs, with the faces blocked out when security procedures or the rules of war so require, showing enemy prisoners actually enjoying the benefits of being out of the war;
• Political arguments to the effect that the highest duty of the soldier is to his country (or Emperor) and that if he dies for the sake of some general in a foolish war, he will be denying his country a fine postwar citizen like himself, needed for reconstruction and progress;
• A list of the foods available to surrenderees (see figure 13, from World War I);
• A statement of the conditions of military imprisonment, reaffirming the rules of the Geneva convention;
• The promise that the potential prisoner will be allowed mail communication with home;
• Anger-motif, showing scum and profiteers at home, and attempting to induce surrender by telling the soldier that he is being made a sucker;
• Obscene pictures, showing naked women, designed to make the involuntary celibate so desirous of women that he surrenders out of bad nerves. (Japanese idea, and did not work; the troops naturally kept the pornography but merely despised the Japanese as queer little people for having sent it. This type cannot be illustrated; the Library of Congress has copies in a locked file.)

Figure 65: Direct Commands to Enemy Forces. As the situation develops against the enemy, it becomes possible to use leaflets to force the surrender of enemy troops by direct command. This kind of appeal is lost when enemy morale remains irrationally high because of a beloved commander or some other unpredictable factor, but in normal situations it either forces the enemy commander's hand or leaves him with a deteriorating force.

Figure 66: Basic Types: Contingency Commands. Leaflets can be made up in advance to govern typical situations which may arise. This "Command to the Scattered German Troop Units" orders all isolated German remnants to surrender to the nearest Allied force.

Figure 67: Tactical Surrender Leaflets. Enemy troops often fail to understand why they should surrender. Under such circumstances, it is useful to send them a map, showing them plainly what their situation is. If misrepresentation is done at this point, it will be at the cost of loss of credence later on. These leaflets were prepared to prevent Japanese units in the Philippines from staging last-ditch fights after surrender of Japan. Similar maps had been used for tactical purposes earlier.

The effective surrender leaflet frequently turns language difficulties into an asset. Whole series of leaflets will teach the enemy soldier how to say, "I surrender," in the language of the propagandist. The words, "Ei sörrender," were made familiar to every German soldier; it is simply the phonetic spelling of English for Germans to pronounce. Surrender is not merely a case of transferring loyalties; it is a highly dangerous operation for most infantrymen. It takes nerve if done deliberately. The voluntary surrenderee risks being shot by some exasperated officer or comrade on his own side; he risks court-martial for treason if his surrender is wilful and his side wins the war; he may run into a trigger-happy enemy who will shoot him; he may fail to make himself understood to the enemy. Therefore surrender leaflets try to catch some simple procedure, to indoctrinate the enemy soldier with routine things which he can do when the opportunity arises. Of all leaflets, those most effective (most closely tied in with unconscious preparation for eventual conscious choice) are the ones dealing specifically with concrete treatment of prisoners of war. The surrender leaflet itself can be used as an authorization to surrender. The enemy soldier who carries a leaflet around with him, just in case he may need it, is already partially subverted from enemy service.

Figure 68: Basic Types: Surrender Leaflet. The surrender leaflet shown was not welcomed by the Japanese because it indicated that the Japanese soldier using it wished to surrender. This was very vulgar and depressing indeed, and few Japanese soldiers would accept such a humiliation. Except for its wording, the leaflet is good. As large as a big magazine cover, it is white with red and blue trim and can be identified readily.

Black action appeals may teach the enemy troops how to malinger, may present political or ethnic arguments to troops known to be members of minorities or satellite nationalities (for example, Poles in Nazi service), with the intent that these mutiny, or may—at the very end of a war—call upon enemy troops as units to cease resistance and to await a later opportunity for organized surrender.

Figure 69: Improved Surrender Leaflet. The new leaflet which did bring the Japanese in was better phrased. It did not mention the nasty word, surrender, but said, "I Cease Resistance." It also showed the Japanese how to carry the leaflet so as to persuade the triggery Americans that he was not holding a hand grenade behind it. The back of the leaflet, instead of being left blank, showed happy Japanese prisoners enjoying American captivity, their faces left identifiable as Japanese but blanked out enough to head off individual identification. Compare this with figure 4, the Passierschein we used on the Germans.

Ultimate success came with the development of loudspeakers on tank mounts. These developed a range of two miles with the result that they had real value in combat operations. In April, 1945, a loudspeaker tank with the XIX Corps made an average of twenty broadcasts a day during action. Short talks were given to the enemy troops just before attack. Attacks were then withheld long enough to permit prisoners to come in. The attacks were then launched, lifted after a pause to permit more prisoners to come in, and finally pushed through. This tactic worked particularly well at road blocks where enemy troops were flanked. In the Teutoburger Wald a whole platoon was persuaded to surrender. At Hildesheim two hundred and fifty prisoners came over together. Elsewhere in the drive into Germany, the Germans came over in even greater numbers, but the situation was then so obviously at its best for us that they probably would have responded similarly to command banners, black words on white background, such as the ancient Chinese imperial forces used to carry around for tactical communication with bandits and rebels.

On Okinawa tank-mounted loudspeakers were ingeniously hooked up. The American tank officers and crews obviously could not speak good colloquial Japanese. The Japanese troops were dug in like rodents, and in a condition of desperation that made them fight cruelly and suicidally. Even if the Americans shelled the openings of their cave mouths or ran armored bulldozers over the holes, burying Japanese alive, there was the chance that the Japanese would run through long underground passages and pop up later, possibly at night, to cause more damage before they were killed. With Americans and Japanese unable to talk to one another, this condition might have led to a severe loss of American life in mopping up hundreds upon hundreds of such minute Japanese strongholds. The American tanks had loudspeakers mounted on many of them; they had radio telephone communication, that could be used between the different tanks on a tank team, or—it was an alternative, and could not be used simultaneously—could be employed for the commanding tank to communicate back to headquarters.

At headquarters, American Japanese, whose American accents had been trained out of their voices in special public-speaking classes, sat ready and waiting.

The tank team would come into the valley, and the American commander would look the situation over. He would cut his radio telephone into communication with headquarters, and would then say:

"Hillside ahead of me. No characterizing features. Five or six holes, but I can't tell which ones have Japanese in them. I can get up the hill. There are two trees at the crest of the hill, and a bunch of these native graves over on the left."

The American-Japanese at headquarters would say: "Regular announcement, sir? Do you want them to assemble by the graves or at the trees?"

"Tell them to stand in front of the graves. That way they'll be coming down hill. Want to be cut in?"

"Yes, sir," says the headquarters man.

The tank commander would then cut his radiophone into a relay, and the tanks which had loudspeakers would automatically connect the loudspeaker units direct with the radio telephone. A voice, loud as the voice of a god, would fill the entire valley, coming from everywhere at once and speaking good clear Japanese:

"Attention, Japanese troops, attention! This is the American tank commander calling. I am going to destroy all resistance in this valley. Attention! I have flame-throwers. These will be used on all dugouts and caves. Attention! Flame-throwers will be employed. Gunfire will close the cave mouths. No Japanese personnel can expect to escape. Japanese personnel commanded to cease resistance. Japanese personnel commanded to cease resistance. Japanese personnel must assemble in front of native burial place, to American left flank, Japanese right flank."

The tank commander would watch, while the loudspeakers blared. First one Japanese, then more would come in small knots to the assembly place as directed. The commander would then cut the American-Japanese back in and say,

"I think they're holding out on the hill crest. Try that. Just a minute or two. If they don't start coming, I'll go after them and cut you in just when I reach the top...."

"Yes, sir. Which part of the hill crest, sir?"

"I can't tell. Anywhere."

Figure 70: End of War. This leaflet helped the war to end, just as did the great leaflet which submitted the Japanese surrender terms back to the Japanese people. On one side the leaflet carries news from the Wehrmacht's last defeats; on the other it takes up the future of Germany as determined by the Crimea Conference.

The speakers would be cut back in: "Attention, Japanese forces remaining on hill crest. Japanese forces just behind us under command of Colonel Musashi surrendered last night and are now well taken care of. You are being given the same chance. Attention, I will soon come up the hill...."

A few more Japanese figures, small as ants on a sand dune, would come into sight on the hill and begin clambering down to the point of surrender.44

PART FOUR
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE AFTER WORLD WAR II

CHAPTER 14
The "Cold War" and Seven Small Wars

The period after 1945 has turned out to be considerably more turbulent than most Americans expected. Though the victory over Fascism and Japanese militarism has proved to be psychologically and historically complete, the struggles between the victors have developed such mistrust and bitterness as to create a present-day equivalent of the Thirty Years' War, rather than a period of peace as it was understood by educated men of the nineteenth century.

Along with many other military and political phenomena, psychological warfare has been thrust into a period of "no war and no peace" which has proved to be extraordinarily difficult for Western men to deal with either emotionally or intellectually.45 Such phrases as Churchill's term, "the Iron Curtain," and Walter Lippmann's coinage, "the Cold War," have become a part of civilized speech throughout the world. They have obscured almost as much as they have explained. It is entirely conceivable that an adequate description of the present historical period will only be written after the forces now operating have ceased to be significant; at that future time it may be possible for serious and reflective men to determine what happened in the middle of the twentieth century.

An event such as the liberation of Indochina from Japanese military occupation in 1945, met competently and reasonably by the standards of an anticipated "world of 1946," which unfortunately never materialized, led to the frustrations, bloodshed, deceit, and warfare of the late 1940s, and by 1954 became partially intelligible as a facet of the free world's struggle against Communism.

What such polemics overlook is the terrifying probability that events may happen so rapidly that no one on either the Communist or anti-Communist side is capable of assimilating a new datum, such as the development of the hydrogen bomb, the death of Stalin, or the appearance of Israel among the nations, until well after the event has occurred. The occurrence of public events in all past civilizations has involved a considerable number of public agreements on the major hypotheses concerned; as pointed out earlier in this book, the antagonists in older wars usually, though not always, knew what the war was about. Today the spiritual, psychological, logical, and scientific inconsistencies and paradoxes within each system are so deep as to make the definition of long-range goals almost impossible. Any one goal, such as the establishment of peace, the appreciation of an international system of alliances against aggression, the maintenance of national sovereignty, the protection of a free-enterprise economy, the assurance of self-determination to non-self-governing peoples, or the like, may, if emphasized, contradict the concomitant goals which support it.

In the next chapter, concerning strategic information operations of the United States Government in the foreign field, there will be further discussion of the psychological strengths of the free world; we will say at this point that in the light of the strategic and military contexts of the postwar period the free world has had the advantages of modesty, relaxation, and elasticity. Among Americans, even among intelligent Americans, it is frequent to find the assumption being made that the chief strength of the free world consists of its legal rights and its democratic political processes, rather than in its actual (not merely formal) toleration of many points of view and its actual relaxation of the populations under its control.

Since the free world is not committed to victory as much as is the Communist world, it can afford more defeats without a corresponding loss of morale. Since the free world has not promised a Utopian future, it can go from the reality of the 1950s to whatever realities the 1960s or the 1970s may bring without a sharp letdown in morale or widespread heartbreak among its most gifted advocates. In Cold War terms the free world is committed to fighting, but not to victory, while the Communists are committed to the actual though remote promise of triumph for their system throughout the world. The citizens of the United States can therefore contemplate the survival of the USSR or its annihilation and replacement by a democratic Russia with equanimity; their Soviet opposite numbers, group for group and class for class, cannot be as detached from the struggle.

Over all of us there hangs the entirely uncertain future raised by possible use of atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, and other novel weapons—a future about which former Governor Adlai Stevenson felt so gloomy that he said another war would end civilization. (The rejoinder can, of course, be made that if another war would end civilization anyhow, win, lose, or draw, the United States might as well disband its defense forces now and enjoy life for the few short years that remain.)

It can even be argued that Yalta, and everything for which Yalta stands, was a tragic mistake and yet a blessed one. If the Western powers had not attempted to deal amicably with the Soviet Union at Yalta the Western peoples, already hypersensitized in matters of conscience, might have attributed to themselves and to their posterity an unbearable burden of guilt. We and our children might have gone down fighting while wondering in our innermost hearts, "Why didn't we make a real try to avoid war with Soviet Russia?"

Though the Teheran and Yalta agreements have been violated by the USSR almost from the moment they were concluded, it can be argued that the Western world was wise in experimenting with appeasement because it liberated our consciences for future struggle. No one can possibly argue that we did not try to get along with the Communist system, that we failed to offer the Communists a reasonable share in the world of power politics, or that we threatened the Communists with aggression during the course of our anti-fascist struggle. For better or for worse, we did try to get along with them. We have failed.

Why have we failed?

The failure seems to be much more on the side of the Communists than on the side of the free nations. Though it is possible for Left-liberals or hypercritical intellectuals to find fault with the U.S. and British position in this respect or that, short of extreme nit-picking it must be argued that the Communists jumped the gun on the Western powers in almost every case. Tito, while still in agreement with Moscow, proved implacable toward the constitutional Yugoslav government and the Church as they had existed before 1941. While Roosevelt was still living the Lublin Poles prepared a savage double-cross of the London Poles. Whether Communist action arose from a lamentable fear of our own aggressiveness, or a Machiavellian plan to conquer the world does not, at any time, matter very much; what matters is the almost indisputable fact that in many parts of the world the Communists undertook the initiative against the anti-Communists.

(The first edition of this book, Psychological Warfare, was written in 1946 and published in 1948; the second edition is being completed eight years later, in 1954. Any reader who contrasts the two editions will see at a glance that the author, although suspicious of Communism, had no real anticipation of the fury or seriousness of the Communist attack upon the non-Communist world, nor of the strategic arguments and responsibilities which the free world would therewith be forced to accept.)