Big jobs require big organizations. Eight billion leaflets were dropped in the Mediterranean and European Theaters of Operations alone under General Eisenhower's command. That is enough to have given every man, woman and child on earth four leaflets, and this figure, large as it is, does not include leaflets dropped in all the other theaters of war by ourselves, our allies, and our enemies. It does not include the B-29 leaflet raids on Japan, in which hundreds of tons of thin paper leaflets were dropped. Huge American newspapers were developed, edited, printed and delivered to our Allies and to enemy troops. One of these, Parachute News (Rakkasan), attained a circulation of two million copies per run; this was in the Southwest Pacific. In parts of the upper Burmese jungle and the Tibetan borderland where no newspaper was ever distributed before, the Fourteenth Air Force distributed a Japanese newspaper, Jisei, along with picture sheets for illiterate tribesmen.
In getting at the enemy, the United States printed leaflets, cartoons, pamphlets, newspapers, posters, books, magazines. In black operations enough fabrications were perpetrated to keep the FBI busy for a thousand years. Movies in all forms (commercial, amateur, all known widths, sound and silent, even lantern slides) went out all over the world. Radio talked on all waves in almost every language and code; loudspeakers, souvenirs, candy, matches, nylon stockings, pistols you could hide in your mouth, sewing thread, salt, phonograph records and baby pictures streamed out over the world. Much of this was necessarily waste. In the larger waste of war it appears almost frugal when taken in relation to the results thought to have been achieved.
Every American theater commander, given the choice of using psychological warfare or not, as he chose, did choose to use it. Every major government engaged in the war used psychological warfare, along with a number of assorted private characters, some of whom later founded governments. (The sacred government of the Dalai Lama, in forbidden Lhasa, undertook a neat little maneuver in limited overt propaganda when it printed a brand-new set of stamps for presentation to President Roosevelt; the Inner Mongols were propagandized by the Outer Mongols; the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg broadcast against the Reich.) Psychological warfare proliferated so much as to change the tone if not the character of war. General Eisenhower wrote, at the end of the European operations, that psychological warfare had developed as a specific and effective weapon of war.
The organization of psychological warfare was as much a problem as the operation. It overlapped military, naval, diplomatic, press, entertainment, public relations, police power, espionage, commercial, educational and subversive operations. Almost every nation involved had extreme difficulty in fitting these new powers and unknown processes into the accepted frame of government, and almost every national solution was different. The British and the Japanese achieved a considerable degree of unification. The Americans, Nazis and Russians were hampered by the number of competing agencies. The French were burdened through most of the war by an excess of governments. The Chinese did things in their own formal but offhand manner; the Nationalist party carried on information functions for the Chinese government, while the Communist guerrilla authorities carried on functions for the Communist party.
Figure 39: Leaflet Production: Military Presses. The machines shown are Davidson presses, widely used by the Americans in all theaters of war. The unit shown is Psychological Warfare Branch during the Leyte operations. The leaflet being run off is addressed to both Filipino guerrillas and Japanese troops, facilitating a difficult three-way operations whereby Japanese are told to surrender to Filipinos, Filipinos told not to kill surrendering Japanese, and Americans instructed to receive prisoners from Filipinos.
Figure 40: Leaflet Production: Rolling. When round bombs were used, the leaflets had to be rolled into round packages to fit. Forty thousand leaflets could be packed into one bomb, and a Mitchell bomber could carry seventeen such bombs. (Photo by Ninth Air Force Combat Camera Unit.)
Figure 41: Leaflet Distribution: Attaching Fuzes. Packaged leaflets must spread out. Bundles of paper which fall intact make little impact on the enemy unless they hit him on the head. Their subsequent employment is rarely related to propaganda. To be effective, leaflets must scatter. World War II saw the adaptation of various scattering devices, of which the most effective was the barometric fuze, shown here. The others included self-timing packages, slip-strings which unwrapped the package in the air, and a belly-tank which fed leaflets out at any desired speed, either in a continuous stream or in bursts.