Psychological Warfare

Similarly, in psychological warfare, planning can be made realistic if it starts with the individual operation for the control of which the planning is done. Define the operator as anyone having a task in the actual preparation, production or transmission of propaganda materials, whether through electric communications or by print. The operator is not usually a person with a high security classification, yet he plays his indispensable part in fulfilling the highest and most secret strategy of the war. How can a plan be written that will be useful in carrying out the actual (and highly secret) strategy of the war while meeting the needs of an inexpert individual way down at the bottom of the control system? The answer is, of course, that no such plan can be prepared. Different plans are needed for successive phases.

The operator needs simple but basic materials. If he is a producer of some kind—such as a creative writer, an artist, a singer, a program arranger, a newscaster who does his own scripts and so on—he is likely to be a person with ideas of his own. Individual creativeness cannot usually be turned on and off like a faucet. Low-ranking and disciplined though the hired writer may be, he is still subject to the inward frailties of authors if he is any good. (This particular author sympathized deeply with some poor American Japanese who were given unbelievably dull outlines and told, "Turn this into exciting Japanese material! Give it pep! Make it rock them off their tatami! But don't get away from that outline one damn inch!" The nisei rolled their eyes; they did a poor job, as they knew that they would.)

The person who has to be told day in and day out how to operate is no operator at all. Psychological warfare is no place for unsuccessful short-story writers or would-be radio commentators. It demands professional standards, and it has more than professional difficulties. Therefore what the operator needs is not technical instruction but general guidance.

He must be told what he can say, what he cannot say. He should whenever possible be given some reason for perplexing or cryptic instructions. He should be helped to become familiar with what we are trying to tell the enemy. There is nothing classified about that, since the enemy is to be told it as soon as possible. The guidance given the operator should be:

(3) Organized. (The material at OWI was not organized until the last several months of the war, with the result that hundreds of thousands of words of propaganda commands remained in force, technically, but un-indexed and arranged only by weekly form.)

(4) Specific in showing timing. (General controls should not be issued at the beginning of operations; when revised, the revision should supersede the revised section, and not be placed beside it. Other provisions should be given expiration dates, after which they pass out of effect.)

(6) Non-security or low-classified. (This material, for the operators, should be accessible to the operators. Often the most important operator—the best newsman, the most effective leaflet artist—may be a rather doubtful citizen, an alien, or even an enemy volunteer. He cannot follow guidances unless he knows them, and it makes a farce of security for his superior to be able to tell him the guidance, so that he can memorize it, but not able to give him the document itself.)

Without superseding instructions concerning religion, we may use the occasion of the Sacred Banyan Tree Festival to needle the Provisional President. Make a dramatic story of the President's life. Undermine his use of religion to bolster the dictatorship.

(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.