Figure 17: Anti-Radio Leaflet. Sometimes ground-distributed leaflets were used in an attempt to counteract enemy radio propaganda. This leaflet, circulated in France by the Nazis, uses the form of an Allied leaflet and accuses the Armed SS of wanting such things as a decent Europe, and end to atrocious killings every twenty-five years, and a worthy life. Allied broadcasters are identified as Jews.

To effect this end, the British set up an agency which never had an American counterpart, the Political Warfare Executive (known by its initials, PWE). This agency had representation from the War Office, the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, and the Ministry of Information. The PWE was the policy-servicing and coordinating agency for all British external propaganda, and left the execution of its operations to the Ministry of Information (MOI) and to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). British radio propaganda maintained a high level of effectiveness. American officials and propagandists often complained that the British were running the entire war in their own national interest. The charge was unjust. The British had facilities for knowing exactly what they wished to do and when they wished to do it. If the Americans came along without clear policies or propaganda purposes, it was natural that the British should take the lead and let the Americans string along if they wished. Furthermore, the British were usually scrupulous in yielding to America's primary interest in areas they felt to be American problems—Japan, China, the Philippines. They were least cooperative when the OWI tried to spread the ideals of Mr. Henry Wallace in Burma or to explain the CIO-PAC to the Hindus.

No clear victor emerged from the Anglo-German radio war; the victory of the United Nations gave the British the last say. In the opinion of many, the British were one war ahead of the United States. They had profited by their World War I experience, and by their two years' operational lead which they had on the Americans. But side-by-side with the Germans, it is harder to appraise their net achievements. The British had immense political advantages; the resentment of a conquered continent worked for them. But they had disadvantages too. The enemy worked from the starting point of a fanatical and revolutionary philosophy; the British had the tedious old world to offer. The postwar interrogations of civilians in Germany showed that an amazingly high proportion of them had heard BBC broadcasts, and that many of the ideas and attitudes which the British propagandized were actually transmitted to the enemy. On the British side, it is almost impossible to find any surviving traces of the effect of Nazi propaganda. Had the war been purely a radio war this test might be conclusive. But if psychological warfare supplements combat, combat certainly supplements propaganda. The great British and American air raids over Europe unquestionably created an intense interest in British and American plans and purposes.

It is historically interesting to note that the Germans went on fighting psychological warfare even after the death of Hitler and the surrender of the jury-rigged government of Grossadmiral Karl Doenitz, which functioned 6-23 May 1945 at Flensburg under Allied toleration. This resulted from the inability of the 21st Army Group swiftly to initiate information control. The Flensburg radio, still under Nazi direction, emphasized Anglo-American differences with the Soviet Union in every possible way short of direct appeals. German naval radio also carried on propaganda for a while, using topics such as the sportsmanship of the German surrender, the hatred of the German Navy for atrocities committed by the Nazis, and the usefulness of the phantom government to the Western Allies.

These subversive groups were formed by political means. Propaganda aid was offered to such an extent that it was often difficult to tell how much of the quisling movement was spontaneously native, and how much mere cover for a purely German operation.

In the latter phase of the European war, the Russian Communists followed the German Nazi example of having tame natives ready to take over the government of occupied areas. In Poland, the so-called Lublin Committee took over the government from the constitutional Polish Government-in-exile at London. In Jugoslavia, the Russian-trained propagandist, Tito, seized the leadership from the recognized Minister of War, Draja Mikhailovich, after the British and American governments had shifted their support to him; later Mikhailovich was put to death. The Russian army brought along to Germany a considerable number of German Communists. In Czechoslovakia the strength of the constitutional regime was such as to compel the pro-Russians to allow the prewar leadership a precarious toehold in the new government. The same cadres of sympathetic persons who had been useful as propaganda sources for psychological warfare during the period of hostilities became useful instruments of domination after hostilities ended. The British and Americans, with their belief that government should spring from the liberated and defeated peoples, did not prepare and equip comparable groups to rival the Communist candidates; only in Italy and Greece did the friends of the Western Allies stay in power, and then only because they were the nearest equivalent of de jure authorities. In the Scandinavian and Low Countries the national leadership reemerged without prodding or interference by the Western Allies; they passed from the sphere of psychological warfare (that is, of being someone's cover) to that of world politics.

Specific black propaganda operations were of considerable value. However, black propaganda is more difficult to appraise than overt propaganda. Analytical and historical studies, gauging the results obtained by Black operations in relation to their cost, are not yet available. (Certain particular operations are described later in this book, pages 208 and 237.)

The American problem of propaganda was thus not a simple one. Total psychological warfare was out of reach if we were to remain a free people. Otherwise the simple-seeming thing to have done would have been to put a government supervisor in every newspaper, radio station and magazine in the country, and coordinate the whole bunch of them together in the national interest. Simple-seeming. Actually, such an attempt would have been utter madness, touching off a furious political fight within the country and meeting legal obstacles which would have remained insurmountable as long as there was a Constitution with courts to enforce it. The simplest official action which the United States could take was therefore hedged about by the presence of private competitors who would watch it enviously, jealous of their established rights and privileges, and by the operational interference which vigorous private media would have on public media.

The then Mr. or Colonel, later General, William Donovan had tasted the delights of political warfare when President Roosevelt sent him to Belgrade to talk the Serbs into fighting instead of surrendering. He was successful; the Serbs fought. He came back to the United States with a practical knowledge of what political warfare could do if qualified personnel operated on the spot. The outbreak of the Russo-German war lent urgency to American action in the political-intelligence field as well as in the propaganda field. On 11 July, 1941 President Roosevelt issued an order appointing Colonel Donovan as Coordinator of Information. The agency became known by the initials COI.27

The primary mission of COI was the collection of information and its processing for immediate use. Large numbers of experts were brought into its Research and Analysis Branch, designed to do for the United States in weeks what the research facilities of the Germans and Japanese had done for them over a matter of years. The inflow of material was tremendous and the gearing of scholarship to the war effort produced large quantities of political, sociological, geographic, economic and other monographs, most of them carefully classified SECRET, even when they were copied out of books in the Library of Congress. However, it was not the research wing of the COI that entered the broadcasting field.

Radio work was first done by an agency within COI called FIS—Foreign Information Service. In the few months before Pearl Harbor the group became organized in New York under the leadership of Robert Sherwood, the dramatist, and got a start in supplying the radio companies with material. The radio scripts were poorly checked; there was chaos in the matter of policy; little policing was possible, and the output reflected the enthusiasm of whatever individual happened to be near the microphone. Colonel Donovan had moved into this work without written and exclusive authorization from the White House; hence there followed a lamentable interval of almost two years' internal struggle between American agencies—a struggle not really settled until the summer of 1943, well into the second year of war. The occasion for struggle arose from lack of uniform day-to-day propaganda policy and from an unclear division of authority between the operating agencies. But the work was done.

Radio operations had to be coordinated with strategy on the one hand and foreign policy on the other, and we sought to develop methods for doing this. It is significant that all the major difficulties of American psychological warfare were administrative and not operational. There was never any serious trouble about getting the facilities, the writers, the translators, the telecommunications technicians. What caused trouble were problems of personality and personal power, resulting chiefly from the lack of any consensus on the method or organization of propaganda administration.

Military Intelligence Division had created an extremely secret psychological warfare office at about the time that the COI was established; this had broad intelligence and policy functions, but no operational facilities. It was headed by Lieutenant Colonel Percy Black, who began auspiciously by putting Dr. Edwin Guthrie in office as his senior psychological adviser. This ultra-quiet office was called Special Study Group; it and the COI developed very loose cooperative relations, consisting chiefly of SSG making suggestions to COI which COI might or might not use as it saw fit. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Office was conducting independent broadcasts to Latin America; the Office of Facts and Figures was dispensing domestic information; and at the height of the psychological warfare campaigning, there were at least nine unrelated agencies in Washington, all directly connected with psychological warfare, and none actually subject to the control of any of the others.28

Chart I (Source: The author's observations.)

A year of wrangling produced the solution, after a Joint Psychological Warfare Committee had been set up under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and had failed to fulfill an effective policy-supervising function. On 13 June, 1942 the President created the Office of War Information. This agency was given control directly or indirectly over all domestic propaganda, and over white propaganda abroad, except for the Western Hemisphere, which remained under the Rockefeller Committee in the State Department. The FIS was taken from the COI, and the COI took on the new name of OSS—Office of Strategic Services—under which it retained three major functions:

• (1) continuation of scholastic and informal intelligence;
• (2) black propaganda operations (given explicit authority only in March, 1943);
• (3) subversive operations, in collaboration with regular military authority.

The OWI was placed under Mr. Elmer Davis, a Rhodes scholar and novelist who had become one of the nation's most popular radio commentators. The FIS was perpetuated under the control of Mr. Robert Sherwood, who had a most extraordinary coterie of odd personalities assisting him: Socialist refugees, advertising men, psychologists, psychoanalysts (of both the licensed and lay varieties), professional promoters, theatrical types, German professors, a commercial attaché, young men just out of college, oil executives, and popular authors (novelists, slick writers, Pulitzer winners, pulp writers, humorists, poets and a professional pro-Japanese writer, fresh off the Imperial Japanese Embassy payroll).

The War Department agency, under the Military Intelligence Service of G-2, had been renamed Psychological Warfare Branch and had executed within the G-2 structure the equivalent of a knight's move in chess, ending up at a new place on the TO with no observable change in function or authority; it had passed under the authority of Colonel (later Brigadier General) Oscar Solbert, a West Pointer with wide international and business experience; he had been out of the Army as a top official with Eastman Kodak, after a cosmopolitan army career which sent him all over Europe and gave him one tour of duty as a White House aide. With the establishment of OWI, Colonel Solbert's office fissiparated like an amoeba; the civilian half of Psychological Warfare Branch, with a few officers, went over to OWI to be a brain-trust for the foreign broadcast experts, who failed to welcome this accession of talent; the military half remained as an MIS agency until 31 December, 1943, when OWI abolished its half and MIS cooperated by wiping out the other, leaving the War Department in the middle of a war with no official psychological warfare agency whatever, merely some liaison officers. Psychological warfare became the responsibility of designated individual officers in OPD—(the Operations Division of the General Staff), an outfit celebrated for conscientious overwork, as well as in MIS and the War Department got along very nicely. Meanwhile OWI and OSS fought one of the many battles of Washington, each seeking control of foreign propaganda. The D.C. and Manhattan newspapers ran columns on this fight, along with news of the fighting in Russia, Libya, and the Pacific. For one glorious moment of OSS, it seemed that the President had signed over all foreign propaganda functions conducted outside the United States to OSS, cutting the OWI out of everything except its New York and San Francisco transmitters; the OWI was stricken with gloom and collective indigestion. The next day, the mistake was rectified, and OWI triumphantly planned raids on the jurisdiction of OSS. Meanwhile, the following things were happening:

Highly classified plans for psychological warfare were being drafted for both the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff. These were discussed at various meetings and then classified a little higher, whereupon they were locked up, lest the propaganda writers and broadcasters see them and break security on them by obeying and applying them.

Broadcasts—thousands of words in dozens of languages—were transmitted to everyone on earth. They were written by persons who had little if any contact with Federal policy, and none with the military establishment, except for formal security. The plans at the top bore no observable relation to the operations at the bottom.

Chart II (Source: Bureau of the Budget: The United States at War, Washington, 1947, p. 225.)

Figure 18: Anti-Exhibit Leaflet. In the China Theater, we heard that the Japanese had organized a big exhibit in Canton, showing the starved and apathetic population some pieces of shot-down planes as demonstration of defeat of American air power. We made up this leaflet quickly, and dropped it on the city while the exhibit was still in progress. (China, 1944.)

When Washington agencies wanted to find out what the broadcasts really were saying, the actual working offices at New York and San Francisco, their feelings hurt at not having been consulted by the Joint Chiefs, refused (on their security ground) to let anyone see a word of what they were sending out. This baffled other Washington agencies a great deal. (The author, who was then detailed from the War Department to OWI, outflanked this move in one instance by getting a report on a San Francisco Japanese Broadcast from the Navy Department. It had been monitored by an American submarine out in the Pacific.)

Large overseas offices were set up at various foreign locations. Some of these went down to work quickly, efficiently, smoothly, and did a first-class job of presenting wartime America to foreign peoples; others, with the frailties of jerry-built government agencies, lapsed into inefficiency, wild goose chases, or internal quarrels.

Lastly, the poor British officials continued to wander around Washington, looking for their American opposite numbers in the propaganda field—looking for one and always finding a dozen.

That was in 1942-1943.

By 1945, this had all become transformed into a large, well run, well integrated organization. Three weeks before Japan fell, the OWI finally prepared an official index of its propaganda "Directives"—that, is, of the official statement of what kinds of propaganda to make, what kinds not to make. The overseas units had been associated with the metropolitan short-wave. Personnel had been disciplined. Techniques had become more precise. Under the command of Lieutenant Commander Alexander Leighton, an M.D. who was also a psychiatrist and anthropologist, careful techniques were devised for the analysis of Japanese and German morale. Comparable though dissimilar work on Europe had been done by a staff associated with Harold Lasswell. The propaganda expert Leonard W. Doob had been appointed controlling and certifying officer for every single order of importance.

The military relationship had been clarified. The War Department, acting through G-2, had reestablished a psychological warfare office under the new name of Propaganda Branch, under the successive commands of Lieutenant Colonel John B. Stanley, Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Buttles, and Colonel Dana W. Johnston. The new branch undertook no operations whatever, but connected War Department with OWI and OSS for policy and liaison, and represented one-half of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (an appropriate naval officer from a comparable office representing the other half) at the weekly policy meetings of OWI. Military needs in psychological warfare had been settled by regarding the Theaters in this respect as autonomous, and leaving to the respective Theater Commanders the definition of their relationships with OWI and OSS, and their use of each. OSS and OWI had passed the stage of rival growth, and consulted one another enough to prevent operational interference. Each had sufficient military or naval supervision to prevent interference with cryptographic security, communication and deception operations.

These military establishments are better described under operations, since it was their functioning which defined—down to the limit of present-day experience—American military doctrine concerning the conduct of psychological warfare in theaters of war. In concluding the historical summary of psychological warfare, it is interesting to look at three major points which emerge plainly from the experience of World War II—points which either were not discovered in World War I, or else failed to make an impact on the minds of the responsible officials and informed citizens.

The first of these is simple. It became almost a litany with Colonel Oscar Solbert, when he sought to indoctrinate civilian geniuses with military proprieties: Psychological warfare is a function of command. If command chooses to exercise it, it will succeed. If command neglects it, or if it is operated independently of military command, it will either interfere with the conduct of war proper, or it will be wasted. It took us two bitter years to learn this lesson. Political warfare cannot be waged without direct access to the White House and the Department of State; field operations cannot be conducted unless they meet at some common staff point with field command. No one can succeed in improvising alleged policy and presenting that policy as United States policy, and get away with it. Sooner or later actual policy catches up with him. In the field, no civilian can write leaflets for air or ground distribution unless he has some idea of when, where, why, and how they will be used.

The second lesson of World War II, set forth by Colonel Solbert and Dr. Edwin Guthrie was simply this: Atrocity propaganda begets atrocity. Everyone knows that war is cruel, sad, shameful to the soul of man; everyone knows that it hurts, degrades, injures the human body; everyone knows that it is not pleasant to undergo, nor even to look at. If any particular war is worth fighting, it is worth fighting for some reason other than the crazily obvious one—the fact that it is already war. It is a poor statesman or general who cannot give his troops and people an inspiring statement of their own side in war. Atrocity propaganda reacts against war in general; meanwhile, it goads the enemy into committing more atrocities. The anti-atrocity rule was not lifted in World War II (save for one or two notable exceptions, such as President Roosevelt's delayed announcement of the Japanese having executed the Doolittle flyers) except for the specific purpose of preventing some atrocity that seemed about to occur in a known situation from actually occurring. Atrocity propaganda heats up the imagination of troops, makes them more liable to nervous or psychoneurotic strain. It increases the chances of one's own side committing atrocities in revenge for the ones alleged or reported. Furthermore, atrocity propaganda scares the enemy out of surrendering, and gives the enemy command an easier responsibility in persuading their troops to fight with last-ditch desperation.

The third lesson was equally simple: America does not normally produce psychological warfare personnel in peacetime, and if such personnel are to be needed again, they will have to be trained especially and in advance.

• (1) An effective working knowledge of U.S. government administrationand policy, so that the purposes and plans of the government may be correctly interpreted.
• (2) An effective knowledge of correct military and naval procedure and of staff operations, together with enough understanding of the arts of warfare, whether naval or military, to adjust propaganda utterance to military situations and to practical propaganda operations in forms which will dovetail.
• (3) Professional knowledge of the media of information, or of at least one of them (book-publishing, magazines, newspapers, radio, advertising in its various branches), or of some closely related field (practical political canvassing, visual or adult education, etc.).
• (4) Intimate, professional-level understanding of a given area (Italy, Japan, New Guinea, Kwangtung, Algeria), based on first-hand acquaintance, knowledge of the language, traditions, history, practical politics, and customs.

On top of these, there may be a possible fifth skill to make the individual perfect:

• (5) Professional scientific understanding of psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, political science, or a comparable field.

The man who steps up and says that he meets all five of these qualifications is a liar, a genius, or both.

There is no perfect psychological warrior.

However—and the qualification is important—each psychological warfare team represents a composite of these skills. Some members have two or three to start with, the others virtually none. But all of the personnel, except for men with peculiarly specialized jobs (ordnance experts; cryptographers; translators; calligraphers), end up with a professionalism that blends these together. They may not meet professional standards as officials-officers-journalists-Japanologists-psychoanalysts when they return from psychological warfare operations against the Japanese, but they have met men who are one or more of these, and have picked up the rudiments of each skill—enough, at least, to suspect what they do not know.

The advertising man or newspaperman (skill 3) who goes into psychological warfare must learn something of the enemy, neutral or friendly groups whom he addresses (skill 4), something of United States civilian government procedures (skill 1), something of military or naval organization and operations (skill 2) and ideally something of psychology or sociology or economics, depending on the topic of his work (skill 5).

Figure 19: Propaganda Against Propaganda. As an occasional stunt, propaganda is directed against propaganda. Hitler did so in his book, Mein Kampf. The leaflet, shown in the original and in facsimile, was used by the Allies on the Germans in the West. A German leaflet, addressed to their own troops ("defensive propaganda"), was picked up, X'd out, copied, and refuted.

The psychological soldier deals with enemy troops in their civilian capacity; he addresses them as men, he appeals to their non-military characteristics in most instances, and he does not follow sportsmanship, as men did in other wars, by helping the enemy command maintain discipline. Furthermore, the soldier works with writers, illustrators, translators, script-writers, announcers and others whose skills are primarily civilian, and he takes his policy cues from the civilian authority at the top of the war effort. An infantry colonel does not have to worry about what the Secretary of State is saying, if the colonel is on the field of battle. But an officer detailed to psychological warfare must remain attuned to civilian life even if he has seen no one out of khaki for two months straight.

Personnel was probably the biggest field problem of the entire war. Should psychological warfare be needed again, it will take careful culling of personnel to obtain the necessary staff and operators. The continuation of psychological warfare techniques, in part at least, by both civilian and military agencies in time of peace will, it may be hoped, provide the U.S. with a cadre for the next time. Very little of the living experience of the Creel Committee was carried over into OWI. Walter Lippmann, who had worked with both Creel and Blankenhorn, was not a participant. Carl Crow, the advertising man and writer from Shanghai, worked on China for the Creel Committee in World War I and on China again for OWI in World War II. He was exceptional, and took no major part in setting up indoctrination. One of the OWI executives in 1946, shortly after his return to civilian life, read James Mock and Cedric Larson's account of the Creel Committee, Words That Won the War (Princeton, 1939); his interest was avid. When he finished, he said,

"Good Lord, those people made the same mistakes we made!"

He had forgotten that the Creel Committee record had been available all the way through.

Figure 20: Re-Use of Enemy Propaganda. Leaflets sometimes develop an enemy pictorial or slogan theme and use it effectively against the original disseminators. Employing the colors and insignia of the U.S. Air Force, this Nazi leaflet for Frenchmen makes no attempt to minimize American bombing to the French. Instead, it uses the Allied heading, "The hour of liberation will ring...." Then it adds the grim point, "Make your will, make your will."

One operation alone probably repaid the entire cost of OWI throughout the war. The Japanese offered to surrender, but with conditions. We responded, rejecting the conditions. The Japanese government pondered its reply, but while it pondered, B-29s carried leaflets to all parts of Japan, giving the text of the Japanese official offer to surrender. This act alone would have made it almost impossibly difficult for the Japanese government to whip its people back into frenzy for suicidal prolongation of war. The Japanese texts were checked between Washington and Hawaii by radiophotograph and cryptotelephone; the plates were put into the presses at Saipan; the big planes took off, leaflets properly loaded in the right kind of leaflet bombs. It took Americans three and a half years to reach that point, but we reached it. Nowhere else in history can there be found an instance of so many people being given so decisive a message, all at the same time, at the very dead-point between war and peace.

The Japanese had done their best against us, but their best was not enough. We got in the last word, and made sure it was the last.

The Soviet government was the one government in the world which could be even more totalitarian than Nazi Germany. Many Americans may consider this a moral disadvantage, but in psychological warfare it has very heavy compensating advantages. The Soviet people were propaganda-conscious to an intense degree, but the authorities took no chances. Revolutionary Communist themes were brilliantly intermingled with patriotic Russian items. Army officers were given extraordinary privileges. Everyone was given epaulettes. The Communist revolutionary song, the famous Internationale, was discarded in favor of a new Soviet hymn. History was rewritten. The Czars were honored again. The Church was asked to pray for victory. The Soviet officials were able to tailor their social system to fit the propaganda. They did so, even to the name of the war. They call it the Great Patriotic War. Outsiders may murmur, "What war is not?" But the Russian people liked it, and the regime used traditionalism and nationalism to cinch Communism in the Soviet Union.

In their combat propaganda the Russians were equally ruthless and realistic. They appealed to the memory of Frederick the Great of Prussia, they reminded the Germans of Bismarck's warning not to commit their forces in the East, they appealed to the German Junker caste against the unprofessional Nazi scum who were ruining the German army, and they used every propaganda trick that had ever been heard of. They turned prisoners into a real military asset by employing them in propaganda, and talked a whole staff of Nazi generals into the Free Germany movement.

Only in radio did the Russians retain some of their old revolutionary fire with its irritating qualities for non-Communist peoples. This was explicable in terms of the audience. The Russians could keep their domestic propaganda half-secret by imposing a censorship ban on those parts of it, or those comments on it, which they did not wish known to Communists abroad. The censorship was a permanent institution, in war and out, and therefore did not impose special difficulty. They could keep their front-line propaganda quiet, since they did not allow their Allies to send military observers up front, and the Nazis could be counted on not to tell the world about effective anti-Nazi propaganda. But their radio propaganda had to be audible to everyone. Hence the radio propaganda was the least ingenious in using reactionary themes effectively. The Russians and Germans both used black radio, but since each policed the home audience rigorously against the other, it is possible that the efforts cancelled out.

Under "Chiang the Chairman," the Chinese national government waged a dignified, humane kind of psychological warfare against Japan. Few people remember an odd chapter out of modern history, the Chinese bombardment of Nagasaki, although it is possible that Asiatic historians of the future will make a substantial contrast between the Chinese who struck the first blow at that city and the Americans who struck the last. Shortly after the outbreak of the full quasi-war between China and Japan in 1937, the Generalissimo ordered his bombers to attack Japan. American-built Chinese bombers appeared over Kyushu, the first invaders to show up since the shoguns repelled Kublai Khan 656 years earlier. But instead of dropping bombs, they dropped leaflets denouncing aggression and inferentially pointing out that while the Japanese were uncivilized enough to bomb their fellow-Asiatics, the Chinese were too civilized to undertake reprisals in kind.

The Generalissimo's troops also had fraternization and front-line propaganda, but not to the extent to which the Chinese Communists did. The Generalissimo himself followed a very liberal (not in the Leftist but the true sense) political line toward Japan. He uttered no threat of vengeance. He was the first leader of a great nation to say that the Japanese Emperor question was to be settled by letting the Japanese themselves choose their own form of government after the war was all over. He had Japanese on his political staffs—democratic persons whom his officials encouraged—and regular Japanese broadcasts were kept up throughout the war on the Chungking radio.

PART TWO
ANALYSIS, INTELLIGENCE, AND ESTIMATE OF THE SITUATION

CHAPTER 7
Propaganda Analysis

Opinion analysis pertains to what people think; propaganda analysis deals with what somebody is trying to make them think. Each form of analysis is a new and flourishing field in civilian social research; the bibliographies of Smith, Lasswell and Casey, and the current reviews in the Public Opinion Quarterly29 demonstrate the existence of a large and growing literature on the subject. Each year, new textbooks in the field or current revisions of old ones can be counted on to bring scholastic and scientific findings up to date.

Technical writings on visual education, religious conversion, labor organization, practical politics, revolutionary agitation, and on commercial advertising have frequent bearing on propaganda analysis.

Propaganda cannot be analyzed in a logical vacuum. Every step in the operation is intensely practical. There is nothing timeless about it, other than that common sense which is based on the nature of man. The ancient Chinese three-character classic, from which several billion Chinese have tried to learn to read, says:

Freely translated, this means, "When people are born, they all start good, but even though they all start out about the same, you ought to see them after they have had time to become different from one another by picking up habits here and there!"30 The common nature of man may be at the basis of all propaganda and politics, but incentives to action are found in the stimuli of varied everyday environments. Certain very elementary appeals can be made almost without reference to the personal everyday background ("cultural-historical milieu") of the person addressed. Yet in a matter as simple as staying alive or not staying alive—in which it might be supposed that all human beings would have the same basic response—the difference between Japanese and Americans was found to be basic when it came to surrender. To Japanese soldiers, the verbal distinction between surrender and cease honorable resistance was as important as the difference between life and death. The Japanese would not survive at the cost of their honor, but if their honor were satisfied, they willingly gave up.

Propaganda is directed to the subtle niceties of thought by which people maintain their personal orientation in an unstable interpersonal world. Propaganda must use the language of the mother, the schoolteacher, the lover, the bully, the policeman, the actor, the ecclesiastic, the buddy, the newspaperman, all of them in turn. And propaganda analysis, in weighing and evaluating propaganda, must be even more discriminating in determining whether the propaganda is apt to hit its mark or not.