Psychological Warfare

by Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

Figure 16: Invitation to Treason. Another German leaflet, also from Anzio, combines the radio surrender-notice form with a political invitation to Britishers to commit treason. The Germans had a few British traitors in their "Legion of St. George," and a few American civilian renegades, but in general this line of appeal was useless. The last paragraph of the appeal is such naïve trickery that it probably aroused suspicion in the minds of the men it was supposed to persuade.

Of all these, it was soon found that the communiqués and government releases were the most important, although the bulk of the station time had to be diversified with other types of program. The Germans and British both found that radio was important as a starting point for news. It was more valuable to have the press (as in England) or rumor (as in Germany) pass along an item than it was to rely on the direct listeners. Each side sought to make opinion analyses of the enemy; some of the British studies were clever in technique. The radio propagandists had to ask themselves why they made propaganda. It is simple to make mischief, spreading rumors or putting practical jokes into circulation. Such antics do not necessarily advance a military-political cause. Sustained psychological warfare required—as both British and German radio soon found out—a deliberate calculation of the particular enemy frame of mind to be cultivated over a long period of time. When radio stations had to broadcast day after day whether anything happened or not, it became difficult to continue to circulate news without faking it and losing the confidence of enemy listeners.

On the German side, the German radio had the forced attention of the entire world. As long as the Germans had the strategic initiative for field warfare, they were in a position to make news scoops whenever it suited them. The security policies of the Allies often gave the Germans a monopoly of news on a given operation. There was never any danger that the Germans were not listened in on; the danger the Nazi operators had to worry about was disbelief. Hence the Germans tried to keep a moderate tone in their news, tried to prepare between crises for the news that would become sensational during crises.

The Germans soon learned a basic principle of war radio. They learned not to permit radio to run ahead of their military capacities. At first, when their spokesmen promised attainment of a given goal by a given time, and the army failed to live up to the schedule, the British radio picked up the unfulfilled promise and dangled it before the world as proof that the Germans were weakening. The Germans thereupon effected Army-radio liaison so that the radio people could promise only those things which the army was reasonably sure of delivering. (When Allied propaganda analysis woke up to this fact, it added one more source of corroboratory intelligence to be checked. (See page [126].))

The British had their hands full getting news out in the languages of the occupied countries. It was immensely difficult for them to follow the politics of the underground. German counterespionage, under the deadly Sicherheitsdienst, made it difficult to keep track of opinion in the occupied countries. Work against Naziism depended on the temper of the people; propaganda against collaborators had to distinguish between outright evil collaborators and those public officials who stayed on out of a sense of mistaken or necessary duty. The British did not necessarily announce themselves at any time as anti-Communist, and collaborated for short-range purposes with Communists all over the Continent. Mr. Churchill himself shifted his North Balkan political support from Mikhailovich to Broz-Tito. But it was vitally necessary to know just how and when to change support from one group to the other. Since the undergrounds had very few radio transmitters, and none of these was reliable during most of the war, the British faced the task of providing radio facilities for all of the occupied countries. The consequence was to make their radio warfare highly sensitive to politics; they had to address the right people with the right language at the right time, on penalty of failure.

Figure 17: Anti-Radio Leaflet. Sometimes ground-distributed leaflets were used in an attempt to counteract enemy radio propaganda. This leaflet, circulated in France by the Nazis, uses the form of an Allied leaflet and accuses the Armed SS of wanting such things as a decent Europe, and end to atrocious killings every twenty-five years, and a worthy life. Allied broadcasters are identified as Jews.

To effect this end, the British set up an agency which never had an American counterpart, the Political Warfare Executive (known by its initials, PWE). This agency had representation from the War Office, the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, and the Ministry of Information. The PWE was the policy-servicing and coordinating agency for all British external propaganda, and left the execution of its operations to the Ministry of Information (MOI) and to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). British radio propaganda maintained a high level of effectiveness. American officials and propagandists often complained that the British were running the entire war in their own national interest. The charge was unjust. The British had facilities for knowing exactly what they wished to do and when they wished to do it. If the Americans came along without clear policies or propaganda purposes, it was natural that the British should take the lead and let the Americans string along if they wished. Furthermore, the British were usually scrupulous in yielding to America's primary interest in areas they felt to be American problems—Japan, China, the Philippines. They were least cooperative when the OWI tried to spread the ideals of Mr. Henry Wallace in Burma or to explain the CIO-PAC to the Hindus.

No clear victor emerged from the Anglo-German radio war; the victory of the United Nations gave the British the last say. In the opinion of many, the British were one war ahead of the United States. They had profited by their World War I experience, and by their two years' operational lead which they had on the Americans. But side-by-side with the Germans, it is harder to appraise their net achievements. The British had immense political advantages; the resentment of a conquered continent worked for them. But they had disadvantages too. The enemy worked from the starting point of a fanatical and revolutionary philosophy; the British had the tedious old world to offer. The postwar interrogations of civilians in Germany showed that an amazingly high proportion of them had heard BBC broadcasts, and that many of the ideas and attitudes which the British propagandized were actually transmitted to the enemy. On the British side, it is almost impossible to find any surviving traces of the effect of Nazi propaganda. Had the war been purely a radio war this test might be conclusive. But if psychological warfare supplements combat, combat certainly supplements propaganda. The great British and American air raids over Europe unquestionably created an intense interest in British and American plans and purposes.

It is historically interesting to note that the Germans went on fighting psychological warfare even after the death of Hitler and the surrender of the jury-rigged government of Grossadmiral Karl Doenitz, which functioned 6-23 May 1945 at Flensburg under Allied toleration. This resulted from the inability of the 21st Army Group swiftly to initiate information control. The Flensburg radio, still under Nazi direction, emphasized Anglo-American differences with the Soviet Union in every possible way short of direct appeals. German naval radio also carried on propaganda for a while, using topics such as the sportsmanship of the German surrender, the hatred of the German Navy for atrocities committed by the Nazis, and the usefulness of the phantom government to the Western Allies.