In terms of its own global radio, OWI prepared planning and control materials in Washington and relayed these to New York and San Francisco. The radio facilities in these cities then transmitted the material overseas. Through the first three years of the war, the precise nature of the Washington controls was in question, enforcement remained a perplexing problem, and coordination between planning and execution remained unsolved in part. By the spring and summer of 1945, OWI had solved most of these problems, chiefly by means of circulating the Area I, II, and III chiefs to the operating offices. When personal relations were satisfactory (as in the instance of Mr. Owen Lattimore, chief in OWI San Francisco, Mr. George Taylor, chief of Far East in Washington, and Mr. F. M. Fisher, chief of China Outpost in Chungking, all of them China experts) coordination might be difficult but was never exasperating.
Chart V (Source: OWI administrative memorandum. Courtesy of Dr. E. P. Lilly.)
Chart VI (Source: OWI administrative memorandum. Courtesy of Dr. E. P. Lilly.)
In terms of supply, the materials gathered by the other agencies went to the Outpost Service Bureau, which ran a virtual informational Sears Roebuck for the outposts. Foreign demands for American materials were unpredictable. The OWI learned rapidly and effectively, and the material going out of the outposts to foreign audiences very soon reached a high level of quality.
Other psychological warfare agencies at the national level were the CIAA (Coordinator of [later the Office of] Inter-American Affairs) which conducted propaganda exclusively to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which serviced the Joint Chiefs of Staff with intelligence and policy materials, and served as a home base for its own units which operated abroad under Theater authority. No U.S.-based black propaganda operations were reported to the public.[36]
Reduced to the concrete terms of definite policy execution (as opposed to the making of policies that might or might not ever reach their supposed executors) and the routine working of operations, the national level was not important except for the two functions stated above, global shortwave, and source of supply. The decisive choices were made in the theaters or at the outposts, half the time in ignorance of what Washington policy-makers had decided in conclave on that particular topic. (When the author was in China, he found that the OWI China outpost decoded its week-to-week propaganda instructions only after they were hopelessly obsolete; they were then filed.) The theaters were able to use psychological warfare as and when they pleased. Between the ETO and Washington close politico-military coordination was possible. Between Washington and the others it was impracticable.
The War Department participation in the control and planning of psychological warfare is shown by [Chart VII], which represents the situation as of 1945. The Propaganda Branch, attached to G-2 as a staff agency and not to Military Intelligence Service as an operating agency, served to carry out the psychological warfare functions of the War Department.[37] The Chief of the Branch represented the Joint Chiefs of Staff at OWI meetings, along with his Navy confrère; he took care of official messages to the Theaters pertaining to psychological warfare matters, and his office itself performed a few limited functions. (One of these functions required the author to get up at four-thirty mornings in order to digest the overnight intake of enemy propaganda. He was joined in this by Teheran-born, Columbia-trained Edward K. Merat. It was with real relief that he saw the Nazi stations go off the air. He was then able to pass the early-bird business to his Persian colleague.) The Branch also made up propanal studies whenever these were warrantable at the General Staff level. The Deputy Chief (Air) was the vestigial remnant of a short-lived Army Air Forces propaganda establishment; he had direct access to the air staff, and took care of things having a peculiarly air character. (The abbreviations under Theaters are explained below, on page [187], since Theater nomenclature for psychological warfare was never standardized.)
