CHAPTER 12
Operations for Civilians
Plainly, psychological warfare operates against civilians with as much effect as it does against troops. Indeed, under the rather high standards set for modern warfare by The Hague and Geneva conventions, psychological warfare is left as one of the few completely legitimate weapons which can on occasion be directed against an exclusively civilian and noncombatant target. Even though World War II erased most of the distinctions between military and civilian, leaving civilians in the vertical front line of all air war, psychological warfare gained. It became a more useful instrument for bettering war. Civilian interest in propaganda became no mere matter of emotional loyalty or philosophical preference, but a life-and-death matter to its recipients. After fire raids it would be a madman who would disregard an enemy bomb-warning leaflet without trying to figure out its application to himself and his children.
Short-wave Radio.
Short-wave does make it possible for advanced standard-wave propaganda stations to pass along material which has been prepared in the homeland. Large staffs can do the work. The news can be put through a large, alert, well organized office. Features can be prepared by real professionals, acted out by a number of actors, put on records, reviewed, and then relayed to the standard-wave station whenever needed. The Americans at Radio Saipan thus broadcast right into Japan, and were able to transmit materials which could not possibly have been put on the air with the staff working on the island. The people at Saipan were mostly telecommunications technicians, engaged in picking up the short-wave from Hawaii or San Francisco and in passing it on into the enemy country on the standard wave length. Millions of Japanese heard our Saipan standard-wave broadcasts, in contrast to the dozens or hundreds who had heard our short-wave previously.
The use of homeland facilities makes possible the advance preparation of a large collection of material ready for broadcast. In security-sensitive or otherwise dubious situations, four or five alternate programs can be worked out for the same amount of program time. On wire recorders or disc records, the proposed material can be passed around in finished form, reviewed, selected, censored, and approved. This would not be true of a hurried station working far forward in the zone of operations.
Short-wave has its own advantages, however, apart from its utility as a means of getting program material to the relay stations. Short-wave can and will be picked up by the enemy monitors and enemy intelligence systems. It will also be heard by persons of power, wealth, and influence, irrespective of the economic or political system of the enemy. The big shots of any system know how to transcend limitations that awe or defeat the ordinary man. The short-wave transmitter speaks therefore to the enemy government, to the groups which compose the enemy government, and to the individuals in or out of the enemy government who are leaders in their own country. We found that the Joho Kyoku and the Gaimusho (Foreign Office) in Tokyo were mimeographing a daily summary of our San Francisco broadcasts, and we thus knew that anything we said over San Francisco would be heard by the most influential men in Japan. Captain Ellis Zacharias, U.S.N., spoke Japanese and had known most of the Japanese leaders personally before the war; with government monitoring known to exist he felt free to address the Japanese leaders personally and directly with assurance his words would reach them, and his broadcasts are confessed by the Japanese themselves to have played a contributory part in bringing about the Japanese decision to surrender.
Standard-wave.
With short-distance standard-wave broadcasting to an enemy known to have millions of radio receivers, strategic radio becomes effective. The chance is provided for building up a consistent group of listeners, for influencing their morale and opinions, and for circulating rumors that will reach almost every single person in the enemy population. The temptation to perform tricks, to lapse back to peacetime standards of radio-as-entertainment or radio-as-advertising, is a constant one. The propagandist knows that he is being heard, and he fears that his audience will lose interest if he does not stimulate them with a brilliantly variegated series of programs.
Black radio comes into its own on standard wave. The British could put the mysterious anti-British, anti-Hitler broadcaster Gustav Siegfried Eins on the air, with his rousing obscenities, his coarse but believable gossip, his wild diatribes against the Allies and against the Nazi scum who got in the way of the glorious German army. He was so good that for a while even American propanal thought he might be a spokesman for the saucier members of the Wehrmacht general staff. The Germans could broadcast proletarian propaganda on the Lenin Old Guard station, foaming at the mouth whenever they mentioned the crazy vile Fascist swine Hitler, and then going into tantrums because the Communist party needed all the brave glorious leaders who had been murdered by the fat bureaucrat Stalin. Ed and Joe could talk out of Bremen and pretend to be scooting around the American mid-west, one jump ahead of the G-men with their trailer and concealed transmitter, telling the rest of the Americans the low-down about "that goof Roosevelt and his Jewish war," but Ed and Joe were not good enough to fool anybody. Black radio is great fun for the operators, but its use is often limited to a twisted kind of entertainment designed to affect the morale of dubious groups. It leaps to sudden importance only in times of critical panic when it can add the last catalyst to national confusion, precipitating chaos.