Psychological Warfare. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
properly slurred Wu dialect) has led to the use of substitutes that proved better than the original. There is no point in trying to establish rapport with the enemy unless you talk his language with effortless perfection on the one end of the scale—or else admit that you really are a foreigner, on the other end of the scale. It is easier to build up the image of a trustworthy enemy than it is to create trust in a traitor. Frequently the attempt to talk the enemy's own language is less successful than a frank acceptance of handicaps.
In actual practice this means that either—
(a) the speaker should be authentically perfect in use of the enemylanguage, whether spoken or written as script; or
(b) the speaker should make no effort to conceal his foreign accent.
In British broadcasts to Germany, for example, it was found to be desirable for the radio announcers to have British accents in their German, rather than the Viennese or Jewish lilt which many of them did have. A Nazified audience was so infected with anti-Semitism that no Jewish speaker could carry much weight, no matter how cogent his arguments nor how eloquent his appeals. The British tone in the voices of other speakers actually helped carry conviction. The Germans were prepared to listen to a genuine Britisher, and might have been disappointed if he had spoken letter-perfect German.21
Furthermore, with the perfect speaker of the enemy language there is always the question, "What is that guy doing over there?" A traitor is less appealing than an open enemy spokesman; a traitor has to be sensationally good in order to get across at all. Lord Haw Haw was one of a kind, but he seems to have had genuine theatrical talent along with a crazy zeal which persuaded his hearers that though he was on the wrong side, he did believe his own line. The perfect speaker, whether enemy renegade or friendly linguist, has an inglorious role at the beginning of war, when enemy morale is high and the enemy population has not had time to think over the problem of changing sides. Only toward the end of the war, or in any morale downgrade, the man who says, "Come on over! See? I'm here. It's fine," has a chance of being believed.
The propaganda administrator must use his personnel thoughtfully. It is a waste of talent and—in advance field units, of life as well—to impose tasks which operatives cannot handle. An American nisei from California should not be asked to talk slangy Edokko Japanese; a soldier detailed to psychological warfare, because of some special linguistic qualification, should not be considered a great journalist, radio commentator, or actor just because he speaks the right language. If he is given a microphone, and the feeling of having an audience (one that cannot write adverse fan mail), it will be easy for the average man to overestimate the effect of his own talk. The intelligent officer tries to see his staff as the enemy would see them; he keeps their limitations in mind. If they speak the enemy language perfectly, they fall under suspicion as traitors; if they speak it poorly, they may sound like bunglers or jackasses. Nevertheless, propaganda must come from men and through words written by men, and the flavor must be fitted to the situation. Advance planning should therefore consider the available personnel as an actual factor in estimating the situation.
Counterpropaganda.
Counterpropaganda could be listed as a limitation, as the enemy combat strength is sized up in physical warfare. This, however, is one of the points at which psychological warfare differs from other forms. If the propaganda message is worth putting across, it need not be geared to what the enemy is saying. Enemy propaganda should, in well conducted operations, be taken into account only when it becomes an asset. That is, the enemy need only be heeded when he tells a whopping lie, or comes forth with a piece of hyprocrisy so offensive to his own people that it needs little improvement to be adapted for counterpropaganda. Most enemy themes are beyond reach, especially those of inter-ideological warfare. The Nazis and Russians made the best propaganda against each other when they got down to the basic necessities of life, not when they were trying to weave finespun theories about each other's way of thinking or of life. Refutation is a joy; it is delightful to talk back. But the best propaganda is only incidentally counterpropaganda. It uses enemy blunders and counteracts enemy success by building up unrelated successes of its own.
This does not mean that propaganda analysis is not needed. Somewhere in every psychological warfare unit there must be an intelligence group servicing the operation. If, for example, the enemy has announced that the candy your aviators are dropping is poisoned (and has proved it by dropping some of "your" candy, made by his black-operations boys and actually poisoned), there is no point in calling him a liar; you may not know for some time whether poisoned candy has been dropped or not. If the enemy commander has shown his troops photographs of prisoners whom your side has taken and "murdered" (according to his well staged photos), it is not a good idea to ask people to surrender without sending along equally convincing pictures of well cared for prisoners. If the enemy alleges that you and your allies are rioting in the streets or stealing each other's womenfolk, or that one of you is doing all the fighting while the other sits around in safe staging areas, it may be a good idea to send along some leaflets showing inter-allied cooperation on your side, or to run a few radio shows on the subject.
This consists merely of reckoning the enemy propaganda as part of the psychological warfare situation, and of using the enemy as part of the background to your own advantage. The moment you start letting him take the initiative, your propaganda wags along behind his. Tell his people something he can't deny. Let him sit up nights worrying about how he will counteract you. Make him drive his security officers crazy trying to release figures that will please your G-2 in order to reassure his home audience. Really good propaganda does not worry about counterpropaganda. It never assumes that the enemy propagandist is a gentleman: he is by definition a liar. Your listeners and you are the only gentlemen left on earth.
CHAPTER 5
Psychological Warfare in World War I
World War I saw psychological warfare transformed from an incidental to a major military instrument, and later it was even called the weapon which won the war. The story spread, since the Germans liked to imagine that they had been talked out of winning, and since ex-propagandists among the Allies enjoyed thinking that their own cleverness had been decisive when even the tremendous violence of trench warfare had produced nothing more than a stalemate. If psychological warfare is considered in the broad sense, it seems plain that it was among the decisive weapons of 1914–1918. The political decency of the Allies, the appeal of President Wilson's Fourteen Points, the patent obsolescence of the Kaiser and what he stood for, the resurgence of Polish, Baltic, Finnish, Czechoslovak and South Slav nationalisms—all these played a real part in making Germany surrender in 1918. More real than the role of guns, men, ships, planes, tanks? This cannot be answered: it is like asking of a long-distance runner whether his heart, lungs, legs, or head contributed most to his success. Since war is waged by and against all parts of the human personality—physical condition, skills, intelligence, emotions, and so on—it is impossible to distinguish between the performance of one kind of weapon and the other in the attainment of a goal itself complex—governmental surrender. Only a weapon which left no enemy survivors could claim for itself undisputed primacy in victory.
Propaganda came to prominence in war because the nations involved had made mass-communications part of their civilian lives. The appearance of huge newspapers, systematic advertising, calculated political publicity, and opinion manipulation in other forms made it inevitable that skills which developed in civilian life should be transferred to the military. In general, the psychological warfare efforts of each belligerent were the direct equivalent of his peacetime nonpolitical propaganda facilities. (By way of exception, the peculiar genius of the Bolshevik leaders stimulated a propaganda effort disproportionate to the facilities, either of personnel or matériel, to be found in pre-1914 Russia.)
Nations rarely change their basic character in time of war. When war starts it is usually too late to re-educate generations already grown up, teach them wholly new skills,