Roughly speaking, this is the case. An attempt to apply the outline given in FM 101-5, Appendix I, would produce only a lamentable parody of a military document.

The situation of the military unit possessing Psychological Warfare facilities has relatively little to do with the capabilities of the Psychological Warfare unit. The morale of one's own men should have no effect whatever on the output of the radio script writers and the leaflet writers.

In combat operations, military forces meet. In Psychological Warfare, they do not. In combat operations, it is impossible for two hostile units to occupy the same territory for any length of time without both of them degenerating into a chaos of armed mobs. In Psychological Warfare operations, both sets of operations can be conducted in the same media, can address themselves to the same basic human appeals, can use the same music, the same general kind of news account, and so on.

Furthermore, no modern army ever went into operation with certain units designated as wholly and exclusively defensive, and certain others as wholly and exclusively offensive. (The Great Wall of China is the world's most celebrated example of purely defensive planning, yet it protected Chinese offensive bases for twenty-one hundred years.) But in Psychological Warfare, the Japanese-language short-wave broadcasts from San Francisco had no imaginable effect on the American forces in the Pacific. The only people who could understand them were the Japanese-language officers in G-2 and ONI offices; their personal vexation did not matter.

The offensive operations of combat troops are predicated upon finding the enemy, effecting contact, and either destroying the enemy or making him yield terrain. The defensive operations of combat troops, contrariwise, are planned with a view to resisting an enemy who has been met.

In Psychological Warfare, operators and enemy do not effect contact. The audience cannot strike back through a radio set; the enemy reader cannot throw a leaflet back at the bomber which has dropped it on him. When American planes bombed German radio stations, they did not do so because the flight commander was trying to get German propaganda off the air; they did so because the Americans were trying to break up the entire German communications network. It is almost impossible to pinpoint radio transmitters and printing presses with such accuracy as to deny the enemy all chance of talking back. In a purely physical sense, there are only two sets of measures whereby an actual defense can be set up against Psychological Warfare. Each is a measure of desperation; neither is considered effective; the Americans did not bother with either in World War II.

The first physical defense consists of radio jamming and of the planned interception of enemy leaflet raids. Radio jamming is ineffectual except in the case of an enemy possessing hopelessly inferior signal equipment. (The Japanese tried to jam our radio at Saipan, just as the Germans tried to jam BBC. They impeded reception, but they never succeeded in blocking it out altogether.)

The second physical defense consists of destroying reception facilities. It is possible to sweep an occupied territory and to sequester almost all the radio sets in use. It is possible to issue a military order that any soldier or civilian found in possession of enemy printed matter will be court-martialed and punished. These measures are useful to dictators having secret police, and among armies having the Prussian level of discipline, with the enlisted men regarded as robots. It is not to be expected that they would work against Americans.

Therefore, propaganda does not meet propaganda. Combat forces meet; Psychological Warfare forces pass one another in opposite directions.

In American practice, the forces which countered enemy propaganda were those pertaining to troop information and education—morale or special services. These did not concern themselves with propaganda to the Germans and Japanese. In the German and Russian armies of World War II, but not in the American, British, French or Japanese, there were political officers attached to the units under a variety of titles; these often took charge of propaganda to the enemy (offensive) as well as indoctrination of their own troops (defensive), but the unrelatedness of these two functions let them split apart.

Even here, the parallel between combat operations and propaganda operations breaks down. Rarely does it occur that there is a simple juxtaposition of forces, thus:

The issue is more commonly one in which the propagandist on each side attacks those troops which are retreating, cut off, suffering heavy losses, politically disaffected, or otherwise psychologically promising material for him. Of the factors which can affect troop or enemy morale, the presence of friendly propaganda is a minor one. The result then becomes complicated:

Troops who are starving or are subjected to inordinate losses will not have their propaganda-resistance heightened by pep talks. A chopped-up unit has no means of enjoying USO facilities.

Propaganda vulnerability depends most commonly on the objective situation of the audience. If the objective situation is good or neutral, one's own propaganda can supplement the good morale conditions, but even here, it does not and should not meet enemy propaganda frontally.

In so far as it can be tabulated, the visualizable propaganda situation at any given time would be something like this.

In each of these instances, the propaganda operators are themselves members of an audience. Furthermore, propaganda leaks, as it were, out of the channels into which it is directed. Additionally, propaganda in all countries has to compete with the normal day-to-day preoccupations of the listener—his food, his health, his hour-by-hour activities, his tangible interpersonal relationships. Save for rare moments of intense crisis, propaganda can expect to occupy only a small fraction of the audience's attention. In dictatorships, the range of propaganda can be widened by polluting all news, all theater presentations, all churches, etc., with the "Party line," but visitors to totalitarian capitals—of both the Fascist and Communist varieties—report that most of the common people have become calloused with apathy, over-all disbelief, or skepticism as a result of overexposure to official indoctrination.

Hence a written estimate of the situation follows not from some special Psychological Warfare situation, but from the practical measures available. If desired, it can summarize the following points:

• 1. DEFINITION OF THE AUDIENCE
  • a. Medium through which reached
  • b. Anticipated attention (including means of getting attention)
  • c. Pertinent characteristics (from propaganda intelligence report)
• 2. PSYCHOLOGICAL GOALS TO BE SOUGHT
  • a. Attention of the enemy
  • b. Present-goal (if strategic, opinion or sentiment; if tactical, action)
  • c. Ultimate goal (applicable to strategic only)
• 3. LIMITATIONS OF POLICY
  • a. National political limitations
  • b. Limitation by adverse factual situation
  • c. Limitations arising from one's own security
• 4. MEDIA AVAILABLE
  • a. Kind and quality of media to be used
• 5. THE PROPAGANDA MAN
  • a. Descriptive appreciation of a typical audience member
• 6. COMPETITIVE FACTORS
  • a. Listener's non-propaganda preoccupations
  • b. Continuation of adverse indoctrination
  • c. Effect of news available both to one's self and to listener
  • d. Competitive effect of hostile propaganda
• 7. RELATION TO GENERAL (MILITARY) ESTIMATE OF THE SITUATION
  • a. Timing relationships
    • 1. Contingency plans
    • 2. Contingency prohibitions
  • b. Contribution of Psychological Warfare to operations planning
    • 1. Combat operations psychologically advisable
    • 2. Combat operations subject to propaganda exploitation
    • 3. Operations providing adverse propaganda with opportunity
  • c. Correlation of Psychological Warfare with
    • 1. Public relations programming
    • 2. Information and education plans
    • 3. Medical plans and reporting
    • 4. Countersubversive functions

Such papers might be of use, gathering together in a single document all pertinent facts. In most tactical situations, the situation would have obsolesced before the author of the estimate had finished his document. In strategic situations, it could not normally be made specific enough to be practical—at the operational level—without becoming hopelessly unwieldy. Each skill represented in the estimate does prepare other reports, and the practice of most modern armies indicates that it is better to conduct routine propaganda planning, supervision, and appreciation through liaison than to prepare elaborate documents gathering together the multifarious factors which actually affect Psychological Warfare.

In most American Psychological Warfare facilities—especially in the theaters—the estimate of the situation consisted of a brief résumé of home propaganda by the enemy (taken directly from propaganda analysis), comment on the audience by appropriate representatives from the State Department or other Federal agencies, and discussion of the audience by some kind of Psychological Warfare operations-planning and intelligence board. Some of the most valuable suggestions came from persons not concerned with propaganda—such as target-intelligence people who could anticipate enemy civilian or military shortages, or economic-warfare people who suggested vexations which the enemy listener was probably experiencing.

Therefore the psychological estimate should not be presented as a propaganda-versus-propaganda analysis; if it does, it will end as an unproductive and meaningless duel between the propagandists on the two sides. Nor should the estimate pretend to present choices with the pretense that these choices are definitely prescribed by the situation itself. In any field, an expert can hoax or befuddle a layman. A Psychological Warfare officer should present choices for what they really are—options open to him and his staff as creative writers. Policy issues, in specific cases, can be answered yes or no. This is not true of propaganda as a whole. The task of the propagandist is to create something which will arouse attention, will induce attitudes, and will eventually lead to action. It is a task of permanent offense. Its variations are as infinitely diverse as the imaginations of mankind can make them.

Choice is perpetually before the Psychological Warfare propagandist. But it is the wide choice of what he can think up, not the narrow choice dictated by fixed terrain, by specific enemy capabilities, by concrete physical necessities. Adolf Hitler himself, in the near-delirium of his last days of life, recognized this. He told his followers to hold out; German propaganda might still provoke the "inevitable" American-Soviet clash which would save Germany. He said he would choose one side or the other—he didn't much care which. Thus, at the end, the range of propaganda possibilities deceived even the arch propagandist, despite the bold shrewdness he had shown in the past. He knew, as his generals did not, that in the realm of the psychological, the "factor of the unexpected" is always a large one, and hoped to the last to turn it to his ends. His premises were right, even though his conclusion was fatal for him.

In a particular type of instance, estimates of the antagonist's propaganda capacity form a part of normal military operations. This occurs in the instance of allied operation: when the outside ally fears that the local ally may be subverted. Such was the state of France in relation to Britain in 1940, of Central China in relation to the Americans in 1944, of the Balkan states in relation to the Third Reich in 1945. In such instances, estimate of the enemy propaganda becomes a vital part of the total military estimate. The principles stated below can be applied by changing the direction of their application. Propaganda analysis can, in situations like this, provide cues for effective action and correct timing. In this type of situation, the outside ally cannot afford to sit by and hope for the best. By black operations he too must prepare to re-subvert the local ally if the local ally goes over to the enemy. In Rumania, Bulgaria and puppet Serbia the Germans were not successful; in Italy they created the Fascist Italian Social Republic and brought a large part of Northern Italy back into the war. In China, Allied pro-Communist sympathizers hoped that the Japanese would subvert the Generalissimo so badly that America would build up Yenan as a precautionary measure; but the Generalissimo stood firm, and the Yenan maneuver lingered on as an unpleasant memory between certain Americans and certain Nationalist Chinese. This type of situation mixes politics, economics, propaganda and warfare to such a degree that no sound estimate can appraise one factor without including the others.

Naturally, no sane Theater commander would rely on psychological warfare alone for the accomplishment of a military result. It is possible, nevertheless, to allow for planned good luck—good luck which one has created with many months of hard work. When psychological warfare is used in conjunction with invasion, its planned use (to judge by the results found in World War II) might often justify commanders in using minimum rather than maximum allocations of troops for the protection of lines of communications against guerrilla or civilian attack. If the Nazis had chased the Soviet peasants through the woods with soup kitchens, free movies, and mittens for the babies, they would not have had so many furious partisans sniping at them.

Psychological warfare can be relied upon to a considerable degree to step up enemy panic in the application of a rapid forward movement. The Japanese in China panicked whole regiments of local volunteers plumb out of existence by the use of fast-marching Chinese-speaking plainclothes troops, some of whom may have been air-dropped. In the Nazi establishment of the first salient through to Abbeville, the psychological aspects of the blitzkrieg helped prevent the British and French from re-forming a continuous line and led eventually to the pocketing of the British at Dunkirk.

Psychological warfare can also be counted on, tactically, to speed up the reduction of isolated enemy positions when these positions are clearly beyond hope of rescue. All the psychological warfare people need to do is to go in with map leaflets, surrender leaflets, loudspeakers and a near-by radio. The unit may not give in instantly, but the unit would be superhuman if it fought as well in the face of persuasion as it would have fought without psychological attack. In the mopping-up of Japanese in the Pacific island fighting, psychological warfare teams and techniques undoubtedly eased and speeded the process.

These references are to tactical estimates. Strategic propaganda is beyond estimate. All it can do is to weight the probabilities a little more favorably than would be the case without it. If the United States had not dropped the Japanese surrender proposal in Japanese all over Japan, the Japanese government leaders might have been more inclined to resist surrendering. If the Germans had not softened up the French before the Great Western Blitz of 1940, they might have needed more time, days or weeks more to reduce France, and thus might have faced a united French overseas Empire even after France-in-Europe fell. The success of a strategic propaganda operation cannot be guaranteed in any plan. It would be foolhardy optimism to think that psychology can assume a major portion of responsibility for direct military results. It would appear that the Soviet Red Army, despite its propaganda-conscious Communist background, never passed the whole buck to psychological warfare. The Russians never appeared to leave the artillery at home in order to take the loudspeakers or leaflet mortars along. They made brilliant, almost terrifying use of pre-belligerent propaganda; they used propaganda tactically with immense success in the taking of prisoners; they used psychological warfare, with a heavy infusion of political warfare, more drastically for consolidation and occupation purposes than did any of the other United Nations. But like everyone else, they seem to have used strategic propaganda for whatever it might bring in—immediate generalized effect, and the ultimate production of windfalls.

Tactical psychological warfare can be estimated, though to a limited extent, as part of a tactical potential of either the enemy or one's own side. Strategic propaganda can be planned and evaluated only in terms of the diffuse general situation, with the reasonable and fair expectation that if properly employed it will better the position of the user. It sometimes achieves results which astound even the originators, but these results cannot be calculated (except by hunch) in advance. Nevertheless, the operation is well worth trying since it has incalculable possibilities and is quite inexpensive in relation to the gross cost of war.

PART THREE
PLANNING AND OPERATIONS

CHAPTER 10
Organization for Psychological Warfare

Big jobs require big organizations. Eight billion leaflets were dropped in the Mediterranean and European Theaters of Operations alone under General Eisenhower's command. That is enough to have given every man, woman and child on earth four leaflets, and this figure, large as it is, does not include leaflets dropped in all the other theaters of war by ourselves, our allies, and our enemies. It does not include the B-29 leaflet raids on Japan, in which hundreds of tons of thin paper leaflets were dropped. Huge American newspapers were developed, edited, printed and delivered to our Allies and to enemy troops. One of these, Parachute News (Rakkasan), attained a circulation of two million copies per run; this was in the Southwest Pacific. In parts of the upper Burmese jungle and the Tibetan borderland where no newspaper was ever distributed before, the Fourteenth Air Force distributed a Japanese newspaper, Jisei, along with picture sheets for illiterate tribesmen.

In getting at the enemy, the United States printed leaflets, cartoons, pamphlets, newspapers, posters, books, magazines. In black operations enough fabrications were perpetrated to keep the FBI busy for a thousand years. Movies in all forms (commercial, amateur, all known widths, sound and silent, even lantern slides) went out all over the world. Radio talked on all waves in almost every language and code; loudspeakers, souvenirs, candy, matches, nylon stockings, pistols you could hide in your mouth, sewing thread, salt, phonograph records and baby pictures streamed out over the world. Much of this was necessarily waste. In the larger waste of war it appears almost frugal when taken in relation to the results thought to have been achieved.

Every American theater commander, given the choice of using psychological warfare or not, as he chose, did choose to use it. Every major government engaged in the war used psychological warfare, along with a number of assorted private characters, some of whom later founded governments. (The sacred government of the Dalai Lama, in forbidden Lhasa, undertook a neat little maneuver in limited overt propaganda when it printed a brand-new set of stamps for presentation to President Roosevelt; the Inner Mongols were propagandized by the Outer Mongols; the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg broadcast against the Reich.) Psychological warfare proliferated so much as to change the tone if not the character of war. General Eisenhower wrote, at the end of the European operations, that psychological warfare had developed as a specific and effective weapon of war.

The organization of psychological warfare was as much a problem as the operation. It overlapped military, naval, diplomatic, press, entertainment, public relations, police power, espionage, commercial, educational and subversive operations. Almost every nation involved had extreme difficulty in fitting these new powers and unknown processes into the accepted frame of government, and almost every national solution was different. The British and the Japanese achieved a considerable degree of unification. The Americans, Nazis and Russians were hampered by the number of competing agencies. The French were burdened through most of the war by an excess of governments. The Chinese did things in their own formal but offhand manner; the Nationalist party carried on information functions for the Chinese government, while the Communist guerrilla authorities carried on functions for the Communist party.

Figure 39: Leaflet Production: Military Presses. The machines shown are Davidson presses, widely used by the Americans in all theaters of war. The unit shown is Psychological Warfare Branch during the Leyte operations. The leaflet being run off is addressed to both Filipino guerrillas and Japanese troops, facilitating a difficult three-way operations whereby Japanese are told to surrender to Filipinos, Filipinos told not to kill surrendering Japanese, and Americans instructed to receive prisoners from Filipinos.

Figure 40: Leaflet Production: Rolling. When round bombs were used, the leaflets had to be rolled into round packages to fit. Forty thousand leaflets could be packed into one bomb, and a Mitchell bomber could carry seventeen such bombs. (Photo by Ninth Air Force Combat Camera Unit.)

Figure 41: Leaflet Distribution: Attaching Fuzes. Packaged leaflets must spread out. Bundles of paper which fall intact make little impact on the enemy unless they hit him on the head. Their subsequent employment is rarely related to propaganda. To be effective, leaflets must scatter. World War II saw the adaptation of various scattering devices, of which the most effective was the barometric fuze, shown here. The others included self-timing packages, slip-strings which unwrapped the package in the air, and a belly-tank which fed leaflets out at any desired speed, either in a continuous stream or in bursts.

The lower down the echelon, the nearer the armies of the world came to standardizing psychological warfare organization. They did this for the same reason that they all organize into regiments instead of centuries, cohorts, or tribes. Modern war is a self-standardizing process if the enemy experience is to be copied, enemy techniques improved, allied assistance accepted, and military practice kept up to world standards. Psychological warfare units needed printing and radio sections; to service these sections they all needed intelligence and analysis offices; to distribute their materials they all needed agents and liaison. Black propaganda organization varied more than did white, but it was amazing to Americans, uncovering Japanese subversive-operations units, to see how much the Japanese organization resembled their own.

Figure 42: Leaflet Distribution: Packing the Boxes. Sometimes boxes were used instead of bombs. These, being square, facilitated the packing process, since the rectangular packages could be used just as they came out of the printshop. The fuze is attached to the package, not to the box.

Figure 43: Leaflet Distribution: Loading the Boxes. Boxes were built to fit the bomb bays. Boxes were opened, one after the other, by a trip lever, shown above at left. Each box can be emptied in turn, giving the pilot the opportunity to select more than one target.

Figure 44: Leaflet Distribution: Bombs at the Airfield. Leaflet bombs, filled with rolls such as those shown in figure 40, are delivered to the bomber. The scene shown is somewhere in England. Officers and men picked up British slang for leaflet operations, and called such missions "nickelling."

Figure 45: Leaflet Distribution: Loading the Bombs. The bombs were loaded as shown. The entire bomb dropped out of the plane and was disintegrated in the air by a small explosive charge. No illustration can do justice to the sight of such a bomb in the actual dropping, since the leaflets tend to look scattered or to disappear under normal flight conditions. Army motion picture films preserve the process for the official record, however.

Figure 46: Leaflet Distribution: The Final Result. Search of prisoners provided a fair, accurate test of how the leaflets took effect. Sometimes surrender leaflets actually came to have black market value. Enemy officers prohibited the carrying of Allied surrender leaflets, since they knew that a soldier who had one in his pocket or hidden in his clothes was halfway or more through the psychological process of surrendering. Here a German hands in a leaflet to his American captor.

Figure 47: Consolidation Propaganda: The Movie Van. Consolidation of friendly, neutral or hostile civilians in an area of operations can become a vitally important function. During the North African operations, this movie van showed newsreels and documentary films to the local people. Similar vans were used in Italy, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and other areas.

From the purely theoretical standpoint, it would have been far sounder to put national policy formulation (White House and Congress), foreign policy formulation (State), strategic propaganda (State, War, Navy) into a single administrative entity than to create a new federal agency with improvised procedures, improvised security, and an improvised staff. However, the State, War and Navy Departments (at the very opening of our war) were overworked and understaffed. Many of the senior personnel regarded psychological warfare with downright suspicion and propaganda was regarded as a dirty name for a dirty and ineffectual job. Hence the old-line agencies let pass the opportunity for establishing initial control.

Figure 48: Consolidation Propaganda: Posters. An American soldier pastes American posters over Nazi ones while a French crowd looks on. (The crowd is pretty typical as to size and content, but a thousand such crowds will cover an entire town.) The poster operation shown was conducted by Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF. (OWI-PWD photo.)

Subsequent experience suggests that the use of existing facilities and existing agencies wherever possible instead of new ones imparts stability, discipline, and morale, and lowers the organizational friction common to all new political agencies, especially to instrumentalities in so controversial a field as propaganda. On the chart shown, for instance, it would not have mattered whether the Psychological Warfare Facility (whatever its name) were put for housekeeping purposes under the State, War, Navy Department, or the Office for Emergency Management. The essential requirement would have been to use State Department men for jobs that involved determining foreign policy, military men for tasks of a military nature and naval for navy work, and to recruit only after cadres had been established. The sponsorship of psychological warfare by one—any one—of the old-line departments might have slowed down the feverish tempo of reorganizations, quarrels, cabals, internal struggles for power and clashes with other Federal agencies which were so characteristic of OWI and its colleague organizations.

Figure 49: Consolidation Propaganda: Photo Exhibit. When newsprint is short, a photo exhibit has great appeal to civilians. In backward countries, people sometimes waited their turn to get a chance to see the American pictures. Even in Cherbourg, the French city shown, these passersby are showing a very real interest in the picture display.

The actual conduct of psychological warfare was shown in Chart I. (No official authority exists for such a chart; the author bases it on his own observation and experience.) Only agencies themselves originating psychological warfare materials are shown. Relationships between State, War and Navy were stable, but were frequently by-passed; for example, the Zacharias broadcasts, which were our biggest political warfare experiment, did not go to the State Department until after they had started. Relationships between OSS and other agencies were erratic and cloaked in extraordinary but irregular security. The OWI ran for most purposes as an autonomous group, with occasional reference to State, Navy, and War Departments. The President in his individually official capacity was apt to improvise psychological warfare operations of high importance, without warning his subordinates of what was coming (paper knife made of human Japanese bone; the "unconditional surrender" formula). The White House staff sometimes worked through channels, sometimes not; the Harvard professor who advised on inflation was simultaneously involved with psychological warfare on continental Asia. The Secretary of the Treasury openly discussed what he would like to do with Germany in terms which the Nazi radio naturally conveyed to its own people. Within the OWI itself, the overseas operation was separated from the domestic, the broadcasters from the planners, the outposts from everybody else, during much of the war.

But the job was done!

Success was not due to the formal structure of the Office of War Information (see charts V, VI). No administrative formula could have transcended such governmental confusion. It was owing to the fact that all the people just described—who went around, with the best will in the world most of the time, minding one another's business—did in the end achieve effective results. The common denominator behind them was not the authority of the President, the discipline of the Democratic Party, or the casually designed, casually overlooked formal lines of authority. The common denominator was American civilization itself. Had we been deeply disunited, this ramshackle structure would have collapsed into chaos. But there was broad concurrence, a sense of cooperativeness, good will and good temper. A German, Russian or Japanese bureaucrat would have gone mad in the wartime mazes of the Federal system; a Chinese would probably have felt very much at home, but would have polished up the titles and honorifics a little.

The difference between our governmental organization and that of our enemies lay in the fact that to us the T/O were something that could be used when convenient, and could (without breach of faith or law) be short-circuited when convenient. Word was passed around, material exchanged, coordination effected in ways which could not be shown on any imaginable chart. It was neither a merit nor a defect, but simply an American way of doing things.

This characteristic has the effect, however, of making after-the-fact studies quite unrealistic. There is not much from the formal records and the formal charts which conveys the actual tone of governmental operations in terms of propaganda. Study of World War II organization for the sake of research and planning against possible future war would not be very profitable unless it delved into the concrete experience of individuals. The formal outlines mean nothing; they are positively deceptive unless the actual controls and operations are known. (Mr. Warburg makes it plain in his book that he thinks little of Mr. Elmer Davis' conception of his job; but he does not mention that Mr. Sherwood, theoretically Mr. Davis' subordinate, ran foreign operations without much reference to Mr. Davis or to any other part of the Federal government. Since Mr. Sherwood was closer to the White House than was Mr. Davis, this important consideration escapes being recorded on the chart: foreign operations were actually autonomous.35) Examples of how things really worked—as opposed to how they looked as though they worked—could be multiplied forever; but the soundest way of finding out sober, judicious opinion will necessarily await the writing of autobiographies and memoirs by the people concerned.

With these sweeping reservations in mind, it is worth noting the organization of OWI (internal). The Domestic Operations Branch can be dismissed with brief mention. It proved to be the object of profound suspicion on the part of many members of Congress, and its function was to stimulate and assist inward media of public information in support of the war effort. The Domestic Operations Branch never superseded other U. S. government informational services (State, Agriculture, Treasury, War, and so on), so that it was the wartime supplement to the governmental supplement to the regular news and information system, which remained private. This precluded intimate coordination of domestic and overseas propaganda and rendered illusory any hope that domestic propaganda, as eavesdropped by our enemies, could be used as an instrument of war.

The Overseas Operations Branch had two basic missions. Within the United States it was the operating and controlling agency for government-owned or government-leased world-wide short-wave. For actual overseas purposes, it was the rear echelon of both the Navy and Army theater facilities and of its own OWI Outposts. The Outposts were themselves under OWI for certain purposes; for other purposes they were subject to the chief of mission (ambassador, minister or chargé) of the U. S. in the foreign country, and still other purposes under the American military commander having local jurisdiction. (OWI-Delhi, for example, was under the office of the American High Commissioner in India; also under the Rear Echelon Headquarters of the Commanding General, United States Army Forces, China-Burma-India Theater; also under OWI-New York for supply of its printed materials, most personnel and needed presses; under OWI-San Francisco for supply of its wirelessed news; and under OWI-Washington for general policy, hiring and firing, and everything else.)

In terms of its own global radio, OWI prepared planning and control materials in Washington and relayed these to New York and San Francisco. The radio facilities in these cities then transmitted the material overseas. Through the first three years of the war, the precise nature of the Washington controls was in question, enforcement remained a perplexing problem, and coordination between planning and execution remained unsolved in part. By the spring and summer of 1945, OWI had solved most of these problems, chiefly by means of circulating the Area I, II, and III chiefs to the operating offices. When personal relations were satisfactory (as in the instance of Mr. Owen Lattimore, chief in OWI San Francisco, Mr. George Taylor, chief of Far East in Washington, and Mr. F. M. Fisher, chief of China Outpost in Chungking, all of them China experts) coordination might be difficult but was never exasperating.

Chart V (Source: OWI administrative memorandum. Courtesy of Dr. E. P. Lilly.)

Chart VI (Source: OWI administrative memorandum. Courtesy of Dr. E. P. Lilly.)

In terms of supply, the materials gathered by the other agencies went to the Outpost Service Bureau, which ran a virtual informational Sears Roebuck for the outposts. Foreign demands for American materials were unpredictable. The OWI learned rapidly and effectively, and the material going out of the outposts to foreign audiences very soon reached a high level of quality.

Other psychological warfare agencies at the national level were the CIAA (Coordinator of [later the Office of] Inter-American Affairs) which conducted propaganda exclusively to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which serviced the Joint Chiefs of Staff with intelligence and policy materials, and served as a home base for its own units which operated abroad under Theater authority. No U.S.-based black propaganda operations were reported to the public.36

Reduced to the concrete terms of definite policy execution (as opposed to the making of policies that might or might not ever reach their supposed executors) and the routine working of operations, the national level was not important except for the two functions stated above, global shortwave, and source of supply. The decisive choices were made in the theaters or at the outposts, half the time in ignorance of what Washington policy-makers had decided in conclave on that particular topic. (When the author was in China, he found that the OWI China outpost decoded its week-to-week propaganda instructions only after they were hopelessly obsolete; they were then filed.) The theaters were able to use psychological warfare as and when they pleased. Between the ETO and Washington close politico-military coordination was possible. Between Washington and the others it was impracticable.

The War Department participation in the control and planning of psychological warfare is shown by Chart VII, which represents the situation as of 1945. The Propaganda Branch, attached to G-2 as a staff agency and not to Military Intelligence Service as an operating agency, served to carry out the psychological warfare functions of the War Department.37 The Chief of the Branch represented the Joint Chiefs of Staff at OWI meetings, along with his Navy confrère; he took care of official messages to the Theaters pertaining to psychological warfare matters, and his office itself performed a few limited functions. (One of these functions required the author to get up at four-thirty mornings in order to digest the overnight intake of enemy propaganda. He was joined in this by Teheran-born, Columbia-trained Edward K. Merat. It was with real relief that he saw the Nazi stations go off the air. He was then able to pass the early-bird business to his Persian colleague.) The Branch also made up propanal studies whenever these were warrantable at the General Staff level. The Deputy Chief (Air) was the vestigial remnant of a short-lived Army Air Forces propaganda establishment; he had direct access to the air staff, and took care of things having a peculiarly air character. (The abbreviations under Theaters are explained below, on page 187, since Theater nomenclature for psychological warfare was never standardized.)