It is not possible to separate public relations from psychological warfare when they use the same media. During World War II, the Office of War Information prepared elaborate water-tight plans for processing war news to different audiences; at their most unfortunate, such plans seemed to assume that the enemy would listen only to the OWI stations, and that the American public releases issued from Army and Navy would go forth to the world without being noted by the enemy. If a radio in New York or San Francisco presented a psychological warfare presentation of a stated battle or engagement, while the theater or fleet public relations officer presented a very different view, the enemy press and radio were free to choose the weaker of the two, or to quote the two American sources against each other.
Psychological Warfare and Morale Services.
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.
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.