The Americans at A.E.F. concentrated on morale and surrender leaflets. They did work that was superb from the point of view of common-sense psychology. They used British and French experience in applying techniques of leaflet distribution, making inventions and improvements of their own. Balloons and airplanes were the chief methods for air distribution; the plane-borne leaflet bomb was a development of World War II. Extensive improvements were made in the procedures of leaflet distribution by means of mortars.
The morale leaflets used the anti-militarist, pro-democratic sentiments of the world at that time. The autocracy and inefficiency of the German government provided an excellent target. Since propaganda against the upper classes was not yet regarded as a Communist monopoly, considerable appeal was introduced for the common German soldier against his generals, nobles, officials, and capitalists. German nationalism was attacked by means of sectional appeals to Lorrainers and Bavarians. The news that America was in fact producing vast weapons, that the American army was truly in Europe, that the German retreats were really serious—these were used in morale form (see below, page [212]) rather than as spot-news leaflets.
It was in the primary mission of combat propaganda—the inducement to surrender—that the Americans excelled themselves. They produced limitless appeals (see [Figure 13]) promising the Germans first-class American food when they surrendered. Emphasis was indeed on all surrender themes—good food, human care, privileges under international law, patriotic value of remaining alive, opportunity to return to loved ones, and so forth. But the Americans went over these variously, and came back to the topic of food. For an army of hungry men who knew that their homeland starved behind them, the enumeration of things to eat had obsessive value.
Haughty and incompetent, the German high command tried to counteract Allied leaflets—particularly the American leaflets—by the use of appeals to "disregard propaganda." While the German armies plainly backed down toward defeat, such German statements preached about the situation. They did not put the common soldier's plight in concrete terms. They did not say, "You will be unemployed, poor, sick, dishonored, lonely, if you surrender. Your wife will be beaten by Frenchmen, your daughters raped by savages, your father and mother starved to death by the food prices." Such tactics had to wait for a later war. In 1918, the German command, senile and fussy, pointed out that enemy leaflets were propaganda (nasty! nasty!) and that good German soldiers would remember their duty. For men who probably imagined they could smell white bread baking, bacon frying, and coffee cooking across the lines, such wordage was nonsense. The Germans came on over to surrender.
Figure 13: Surrender Leaflet from the AEF. Though this American combat leaflet from World War I copies the original form of the German Feldpostkarte (field postcard, an early precursor of the V-mail form), it is not black propaganda since neither source nor intent is concealed. "When you are taken prisoner, by the Americans, give this to the first officer who checks your identities." The prisoner is commanded to fill in his own battle-order history. By marking out appropriate items, he indicates whether he is hurt or not and can explain that he is well cared for and fed "beef, white bread, potatoes, beans, plums, genuine bean coffee, milk, butter, tobacco, etc."
Captain Blankenhorn's unit, without benefit of psychologists, developed a German morale analysis chart. This was made up before scientific polling had become a common technique, and was consequently based on a group of selected known factors given arbitrary weight and then averaged into a total. It was not, "number of German prisoners per hundred who express attitudes characterized by doubt" but "the U-boat situation," "unity in Germany," and other abstracted generalities which were used as controls. The chart was carefully kept, and sought to follow morale from its causative factors rather than by a percentage count of attitudes discovered in the newspapers or among prisoners.