Psychological Warfare

Figure 20: Re-Use of Enemy Propaganda. Leaflets sometimes develop an enemy pictorial or slogan theme and use it effectively against the original disseminators. Employing the colors and insignia of the U.S. Air Force, this Nazi leaflet for Frenchmen makes no attempt to minimize American bombing to the French. Instead, it uses the Allied heading, "The hour of liberation will ring...." Then it adds the grim point, "Make your will, make your will."

One operation alone probably repaid the entire cost of OWI throughout the war. The Japanese offered to surrender, but with conditions. We responded, rejecting the conditions. The Japanese government pondered its reply, but while it pondered, B-29s carried leaflets to all parts of Japan, giving the text of the Japanese official offer to surrender. This act alone would have made it almost impossibly difficult for the Japanese government to whip its people back into frenzy for suicidal prolongation of war. The Japanese texts were checked between Washington and Hawaii by radiophotograph and cryptotelephone; the plates were put into the presses at Saipan; the big planes took off, leaflets properly loaded in the right kind of leaflet bombs. It took Americans three and a half years to reach that point, but we reached it. Nowhere else in history can there be found an instance of so many people being given so decisive a message, all at the same time, at the very dead-point between war and peace.