Figure 46: Leaflet Distribution: The Final Result. Search of prisoners provided a fair, accurate test of how the leaflets took effect. Sometimes surrender leaflets actually came to have black market value. Enemy officers prohibited the carrying of Allied surrender leaflets, since they knew that a soldier who had one in his pocket or hidden in his clothes was halfway or more through the psychological process of surrendering. Here a German hands in a leaflet to his American captor.
National Propaganda Organizations.
Figure 47: Consolidation Propaganda: The Movie Van. Consolidation of friendly, neutral or hostile civilians in an area of operations can become a vitally important function. During the North African operations, this movie van showed newsreels and documentary films to the local people. Similar vans were used in Italy, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and other areas.
American Psychological Warfare Agencies.
From the purely theoretical standpoint, it would have been far sounder to put national policy formulation (White House and Congress), foreign policy formulation (State), strategic propaganda (State, War, Navy) into a single administrative entity than to create a new federal agency with improvised procedures, improvised security, and an improvised staff. However, the State, War and Navy Departments (at the very opening of our war) were overworked and understaffed. Many of the senior personnel regarded psychological warfare with downright suspicion and propaganda was regarded as a dirty name for a dirty and ineffectual job. Hence the old-line agencies let pass the opportunity for establishing initial control.
Figure 48: Consolidation Propaganda: Posters. An American soldier pastes American posters over Nazi ones while a French crowd looks on. (The crowd is pretty typical as to size and content, but a thousand such crowds will cover an entire town.) The poster operation shown was conducted by Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF. (OWI-PWD photo.)