The History of Psychological Warfare. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
and other attention-getting materials. Morale services are the prime overt defense against enemy psychological warfare, and by a program of keeping the attention of the troops, can prevent the enemy from establishing effective communication. During World War II, the Armed Forces Radio Service of the United States established global radio service for Americans, and incidentally turned out material of top importance to United States propaganda. Naturally, enemy and allied peoples would pay more serious heed to communications from Americans to Americans than they would to materials which they knew had been concocted for themselves. The American morale services in the last war indignantly rejected the notion that they were a major propaganda facility, rightfully insisting that their audience counted on getting plain information, plain news, and plain education without ulterior propaganda content. The fact that in a theater of war all communication has propaganda effect was not always taken into account, and only on one or two critical occasions was there coordination of stress and timing.
It must be said, however, that propaganda by any other name is just as sweet, and that the conviction of the propagandist that he is not a propagandist can be a real asset. Morale services provided the American forces with news, entertainment, and educational facilities. Most of the time these morale facilities had huge parasitical audiences—the global kibitzers who listened to our broadcasts, read our magazines, bought our paper-bound books on the black markets. (It was a happy day for Lienta University at Kunming, Yünnan, when the American Information and Education set-up began shipping in current literature. The long-isolated Chinese college students found themselves deluged with good American books.)
The morale services lost the opportunity to ram home to their G.I.-plus-foreign audience some of the more effective points of American psychological warfare, but they gained as propagandists by not admitting, even to themselves, that they were propagandists. Since the United States has no serious inward psychological cleavages, the general morale services function coordinated automatically with the psychological warfare function simply because both were produced by disciplined, patriotic Americans.
In the experience of the German and Soviet armies, morale services were parts of a coordinated propaganda machine which included psychological warfare, public relations, general news, and public education. In the Japanese armies, morale services were directed most particularly to physical and sentimental comforts (edible treats, picture postcards, good luck items) which bore little immediate relation to news, and less to formal propaganda.
Related Civilian Activities.
In a free nation, the big media of communication will remain uncoordinated even in time of war. The press, the stage, motion-pictures, part of the radio, book publishing and so on will continue. Psychological warfare has in such private facilities a constantly refreshed source of new material for news or for features. By a sparing but well considered liaison with censorship, psychological warfare can effect negative control of non-governmental materials, and can prevent the most overt forms of enemy propaganda from circulating on the home front.
News becomes propaganda when the person issuing it has some purpose in doing so. Even if the reporters, editors, writers involved do not have propaganda aims, the original source of the news (the person giving the interview; the friends of the correspondents, etc.) may give the news to the press with definite purposes in mind. It is not unknown for government officials to shift their rivalries from the conference room to the press, and to provide on-the-record or off-the-record materials which are in effect ad hoc propaganda campaigns. A psychological warfare campaign must be planned on the assumption that these civilian facilities will remain in being, and that they will be uncoordinated; the plan must allow in advance for interference, sometimes of a very damaging kind, which comes from private operations in the same field. The combat officers can get civilian cars off the road when moving armored forces into battle but the psychological warfare officer has the difficult task of threading his way through civilian radio and other communication traffic over which he has no control.
Psychological warfare is also closely related to diplomacy. It is an indispensable ingredient of strategic deception. In the medical field, psychological warfare can profit by the experiences of the medical corps. Whenever a given condition arises among troops on one side, comparable troops on the other are apt to be facing the same condition; if the Americans are bitten by insects, the same insects will bite the enemy, and enemy soldiers can be told how much better the American facilities are for insect repulsion. Finally, psychological warfare is intimately connected with the processing of prisoners of war and with the protection of one's own captured personnel.
Psychological warfare is a field to itself, although it touches on many sciences and overlaps with all the other functions of war. It is generally divisible into three topics: the general scheme of psychological warfare, the detection and analysis of foreign psychological warfare operations, and the tactical or immediate conduct of psychological warfare. Sections of this book deal with each of these in turn. In each case it must be remembered, however, that psychological warfare is not a closed operation which can be conducted in private, but that—to be effective—psychological warfare output must be a part of the everyday living and fighting of the audiences to which it is directed.
CHAPTER 3
Definition of Psychological Warfare
Psychological warfare seeks to win military gains without military force. In some periods of history the use of psychological warfare has been considered unsportsmanlike.12 It is natural for the skilled soldier to rely on weapons rather than on words, and after World War I there was a considerable reluctance to look further into that weapon—propaganda—which Ludendorff himself considered to be the most formidable achievement of the Allies. Nevertheless, World War II brought a large number of American officers, both Army and Navy, into the psychological warfare field: some of the best work was done without civilian aid or sponsorship. (Capt. J. A. Burden on Guadalcanal wrote his own leaflets, prepared his own public-address scripts, and did his own distributing from a borrowed Marine plane, skimming the tree tops until the Japanese shot him down into the surf. He may have heard of OWI at the time, but the civilians at OWI had not heard of him.)
Psychological warfare has become familiar. The problems of psychological warfare for the future are problems of how better to apply it, not of whether to apply it. Accordingly, it is to be defined more for the purpose of making it convenient and operable than for the purpose of finding out what it is. The whole world found out by demonstration, during World Wars I and II.
Psychological warfare is not defined as such in the dictionary.13 Definition is open game. There are three ways in which "psychological warfare" and "military propaganda" can be defined:
first, by deciding what we are talking about in a given situation, book, conversation, or study course;
second, by determining the responsibilities and authority involved in a given task;
or third, by stating the results which are believed to be accomplishable by the designated means.
Plainly, the staff officer needs a different definition from the one used by the combat officer; the political leader would use a broader definition than the one required by soldiers; the fanatic would have his own definition or—more probably—two of them; one (such as "promoting democracy" or "awakening the masses") for his own propaganda and another (such as "spreading lies," "corrupting the press," or "giving opiates to the people") for antagonistic propaganda.14 Definition is not something which can be done once and forever for any military term, since military operations change and since military definitions are critically important for establishing a chain of command.
The first method of definition is satisfactory for research purposes; it may help break a politico-military situation down into understandable components. The second method—the organizational—is usable when there exists organization with which to demonstrate the definition, such as, "Propaganda is what OWI and OSS perform." The third method, the operational or historical,