Psychological Warfare. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
or operational procedures unknown in peacetime life. Sometimes, by great effort, a nation can transform a small available cadre into large, new and effective units on the political, military, economic or social fronts. Even then, the character of the war effort will be colored and influenced by the experience of the men undertaking it. The British had, in 1914, one of the world's finest news systems, a highly sophisticated press, and extensive experience in international communication for technical and commercial purposes, notably the undersea cable system, and they turned these to war use with considerable smoothness. The Germans had a far more regimented press and a more limited network of commercial and technical connections. The British, furthermore, had a diplomatic and consular service of superb quality; comparable German services included a much higher proportion of bunglers and enthusiasts.
From the very beginning the British had the lead. They nailed German propaganda as propaganda, while circulating their own as news, cultural relations, or literature. The Germans who boasted that they were a "cultured" people had their naïveté rewarded when the British let the German word Kultur become a synonym for boorish pedantic arrogance. The Germans had the awful habit of putting many of their own unattractive emotions into words, and the even more ruinous habit of then printing the words. In many instances, the British simply let the Germans think up braggadocio or vengeful phrases, then circulated the German phrases to the world. The English language was permanently enriched by some of these: strafe comes from the German plea that God "strafe" (punish) England. The actual "Hymn of Hate" was originally a song made up by Germans for Germans. The word "Hun" was applied to the German Army by Kaiser Wilhelm himself, and so on. Furthermore, the Germans created in their press and information services a condition of bureaucratic snafu which has rarely been excelled in any war. National character certainly worked out its automatic vengeances in World War I.
The American psychological warfare effort of 1917–1919 also drew heavily on familiar skills: the American press, second only to that of the British at the time; the church, Y.M.C.A., and Chautauqua groups; and the wealth of private clubs which flourish under our liberal system of laws and usages. Other nationalities made efforts similarly in keeping with their peacetime facilities. The Japanese were adroit, but even at that time confused by the mix-up of trying to be a "civilized" power but simultaneously expansionist. The French showed high professional skill in adapting their military and diplomatic personnel to propaganda tasks. France's position as battleground ensured her of the rage of her own people and the sympathy of neutrals, giving propaganda from Paris a hearing. The Chinese, though undergoing the downfall of the Yüan Shih-k'ai dictatorship and lapsing into chaos, maintained an impeccable diplomatic front and played a weak hand for everything it was worth; they had their private quasi-war with the Japanese in 1915. That they did so while putting the blame for Allied disunity squarely on the Japanese where it belonged is to their credit.
The weight of the propaganda war, as of the material war, fell on its prime contestants, Britain, Germany, and the United States. The private and revolutionary groups which emerged as the revolutionary governments played a vigorous part because they had few other functions to distract their attention. The Republic of Czechoslovakia got its start in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1918, and fought psychological warfare from the instant it took form; not till later did it assume the weightier and more expensive responsibilities of ruling and warring.
The British Effort.
In World War I, the British made most of the mistakes and learned most of the lessons which the Americans were to make and to learn in World War II. The British Foreign Office formed a War Propaganda Bureau in 1914, but a great deal of the effort was done by private facilities (patriotic associations) or by lower political and military echelons of the government and armed forces—and without coordination. Things became so confused that at the mid-point of the war, the British organized a Department of Information with Colonel John Buchan at its head. (Buchan will be remembered by all adventure-lovers as author of The Thirty-nine Steps, The Courts of the Morning, and other first-class thrillers; he was also made a peer under the style, Lord Tweedsmuir, and became a popular Governor-General of Canada.) Buchan did not always get along with the committee which floated above him, telling him how to run his business.
The British, like the Germans, had immense organizational difficulties. The British ended up by inventing a distinction of roles. Thus they finished World War I with two separate propaganda agencies. The Ministry of Information, under Lord Beaverbrook, with Colonel Buchan as Director of Intelligence, carried on civilian psychological warfare outside Britain; the National War Aims Committee carried on civilian psychological warfare within Britain. Military psychological warfare was carried on by military and civilian agencies, both. The British required five years of honest effort, bitter wrangling, and positive political invention in order to devise a psychological warfare system sufficient to meet the needs of a great power at war. They did not let their administrative difficulties prevent their conduct of correct, poised and highly moral propaganda, nor impede their use of plentiful funds and high ingenuity in getting their propaganda across.22
The British set the pace in coordinating political warfare with news-propaganda, and in effecting workable liaison between national policy-makers and operational and public-relations chiefs of the armed services. It is not likely that, even in World War II, the Americans—within the looser, younger, bigger framework of our more compendious government—achieved as good results in terms of timing. State-War-Navy-OWI-OSS-Treasury timing of related events or news items was obtained through most of World War II in the following manner: the federal agency affected did whatever it was going to do anyhow, and other federal agencies took notice after the event, initiating their related actions, if any were feasible, then and only then. The British sought to get around this in World War I by correlating their policy toward various countries with their policy involving different departments. They were not totally successful but they learned a lot; the net product of their propaganda was, for most of its purposes, superb.
The German Failure In Propaganda.
German writers, after World War I, sometimes attributed the superiority of the British in propaganda to the innate fiendishness of Britishers as contrasted with the gullible purity of Germans. The psychoneurotic non-com who made himself famous to the world's cost did not make this mistake. In Mein Kampf Hitler stated categorically that the British had understood the professional touch in propaganda while the Germans had not. Hitler's contempt for the masses was shown in his explicit statement of their inattentiveness, their poor response to formal logic, their affirmative reaction to simple one-sided reiteration. He said: "[In England] … propaganda was a weapon of the first class, while with us it was a sop to unemployed politicians. … " German nationalists of whatever stripe found themselves in accord when they blamed their military defeat on the enemy's use of propaganda. They thus succeeded in maintaining the myth, already sedulously inculcated for two centuries, that the German army could not be beaten in the field. The extremists and crackpots among them went on to develop the "stab-in-the-back" theory that an unbeaten Germany was betrayed from within by Jews, socialists, and democratic people. (The mutually exclusive alternatives—namely that either Allied propaganda was fiendishly good, and the Germans merely innocent victims, or else that Allied propaganda was ineffectual and the anti-war sentiment a purely German development—did not keep the Hitlerites from exploiting both alibis simultaneously.)
The postwar period of the 1920's saw, therefore, the curious spectacle of the Germans lauding American psychological warfare, and counting it as a major factor of defeat, while the Americans naturally emphasized the fighting record of American troops.
As for Kaiserist propaganda, it started out with the twin curses of amateurishness and bureaucracy, each of them crippling but deadly when paired. German writers and scholars ran wild in 1914 and 1915 in trying to put the blame on the Allies; amateurish in public relations, they succeeded in arousing a tremendous amount of antagonism. They were handicapped by the ponderosity of the German Imperial Government, by the intervention of persons unfamiliar with news or advertising (at that time the most obvious sources of civilian propaganda personnel),