Unrestricted
(Expires 24 September, week following Festival.) Standing instructions make Banyan Tree Festival difficult topic with which to deal. If operators can suggest means of referring to Festival without violating prohibitions against religious offense, encourage them to try. Monitoring and diplomatic sources show that Provisional President is utilizing Festival to consolidate his position. If he can be attacked, do so.
The other need of the actual operator is material. The script writer needs actual texts of everyday enemy speech in order to keep his slang and idiom up to date. The artist needs correct photographs of enemy cities in wartimes so that the leaflet picture he makes will not look as outmoded as a crinoline or a Model T. All of them need all the information they can get about their own country—good handbooks, dictionaries, elementary histories, textbooks in fields which they may not know. It is amazing how hard it is to explain America to foreigners; the American soon finds out how little he knows his own country, and needs information about his own background along with current materials concerning the enemy.
Where radio propaganda is in question, the script-writers and broadcasters will read the enemy radio propaganda if they do not get enough fresh non-propaganda material concerning their audience. Sooner or later this will degenerate into alternate soliloquies of the radio men on each side, each watching the other to see if he got a rise out of him last time. OWI people frequently expressed idiot glee at having made Radio Tokyo frantic. The OWI men were the first to admit that their glee was pointless, since it was the Japanese broadcaster and not the Japanese audience who responded. But for lack of current information about the enemy the propagandist will refer to his own professional opponent. There is, of course, a very substantial difference between a change in enemy propaganda occasioned by a real inroad which one's own propaganda had made in enemy opinion, and a change that consists simply in angry or smart backtalk. Finding that difference is the responsibility of propanal, not of the operator.
Pre-Belligerent Planning.
One of the most useful functions of the pre-belligerent plan lies in the periodic exercise which it gives in propaganda discipline. Information and intelligence agencies frequently see their jobs so technically that they lose sight of the need for coordination within the mechanism of an entire government. Press relations people try to get stories in the papers. Radio people try to maintain listener interest. Educational officers are concerned with the teachability of their materials. Spokesmen of the different agencies in related fields (such as shipping, air transport, currency control, social welfare) are apt to comment on a particular situation without reference to the needs of an inclusive national policy. How much advice was handed out on the occasion of the ultimatum to Tito? The Jugoslav authorities plainly risked politico-psychological pressure from us; they came prepared for the consequences; but both American official and private opinion expressed a wild medley of recommendations, suggestions, and analysis. Federal officials showed no better discipline than did the private citizens. Pre-belligerent planning may be forced on the United States by eventual international crises, but before that stage is reached, private and governmental persons working in the informational field might do well to consider how readily they could offer or enforce cooperation in the event of a real emergency.
Figure 51: Basic Types: Start of War. This leaflet embodies almost all possible mistakes in psychological warfare. It was prepared to explain why war came between America and Japan, but was not even begun until many months after Pearl Harbor. The heading and style are official and formal. The message is no more than a footnote to history. Its last fault redeemed it; no arrangements were made for dropping it.
Psychological Warfare Plans.
The general plan then goes on to state the conditions which will govern the operating agencies. The important part of this section lies in guessing where the operating agencies are likely to need coordination and where not. If the plan is to reveal highly important and therefore secret strategy, it should merely sketch the broad outlines of the processes intended, leaving to experts the responsibility of determining specific do's and don'ts. In such a case, however, the plan should not leave room for inter-agency or inter-personal doubt as to where the interpretive function lies. Too often, highly formal agreements are interpreted out of existence by propagandists who are interested in adding their own proposals to those set forth and agreed upon in the plan. When definition of the plan in operational terms[40] is needed, the location of the sub-definer should be made very plain unless the propaganda establishment itself happens to be remarkably well organized and in no further need of definite prescriptions of function.