Figure 33: Oestrous Grey, Continued. Concluding the series begun in the preceding illustrations, these Nazi leaflets tried to lower American morale by combining oestrum, resentment, discouragement and inter-American hatred. The Dr. Mordecai Ezekiel mentioned in No. 2 is a real person, a splendid American and conscientious official. The Nazis used his name because it was so plainly Jewish, hoping that the ignorance of the American troops would permit their lies to spread.
The Need for Timeliness.
This need may be called timeliness.
It can be served by obtaining all the most recent enemy publications that may be available, by listening attentively to enemy prisoners and captured civilians, and by carefully analyzing the enemy's current broadcasts to his own people. The Nazis made the unnecessary mistake of assuming that isolationism used the same old language after Pearl Harbor. They were right in assuming that there was considerable anti-internationalist and anti-Roosevelt sentiment left in the United States, but they were hopelessly wrong in using the isolationist language of mid-1941 as late as mid-1942. Pearl Harbor had dated all that and the isolationist-interventionist argument had shifted to other ground. When the Nazis went on using the old language, they were as conspicuous as last year's hat at a women's club. Instead of making friends and influencing people, they made themselves sound ignorant and look silly. They lacked the element of timeliness. They could have gotten it by procuring representative American publications in Lisbon and studying them.
Propaganda is like a newspaper; it has to be timeless or brand-new. In between, it has no value.
Figure 34: Obscene Black. One of the wildest adventures of World War II concerns this now rare "Chinese Federal Reserve Bank" one-dollar bill. The bank was a Japanese puppet outfit in Peiping. The Japanese had banknotes engraved by Chinese artists, and only after the new pro-Japanese banknotes had been issued all over the city did they notice what the "ancient scholar" was doing with his hands. The engraver had disappeared and the Chinese enjoyed a rare, morale-stimulating laugh. Propaganda gestures such as this—spontaneous, saucy, silly—achieve effects which planned operations rarely attain.