Propaganda's role in WWII

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THE SECRET HISTORY OF WWII

The war of words

While troops and arms do their part, propaganda also proves central to military doctrine

By Mark Fritz, Globe Staff, 12/3/2001

Eighth in a series of occasional articles

What does a fighting man fear most at the front: Air raids? An all-out assault by an overwhelming ground force? The sudden debut of some scary new weapon?

All of the above, obviously. He's also agonizing over his family back home, the wife and kids facing shortages, terror attacks, the unthinkable consequences of an enemy occupation.

And consider this conscript's deepest dread. ``Maybe my wife is messing around with other men.''

The soldier was a German prisoner of war. Allied sentries had fished him out of the prisoner pen at the behest of Barbara Podoski, a US propagandist based in southern Italy during World War II. She routinely interrogated the enemy, seeking soft spots in the other side's psychological armor.

She had one here. This prisoner's cold fear of cuckoldry was the creative spark for just one of the ploys that won Podoski a Bronze Star for the art of artifice. Through various letter drops and leaflet distributions, her 10-member unit spread bogus word of a Third Reich program in which German soldiers on liberty had only to wear a pin - two hearts, intertwined - and they could have any woman. Even those with a wedding band.

``Don't be shy,'' cooed one circular. ``Your wife, mother, sister or sweetheart is one of us. We think of you and we think of the future of Germany.''

The point was to demoralize soldiers who were stuck at the front. One added benefit: Americans believed it was part of the enemy's amorality. ``It looked so authentic that The Washington Post ran it as a real story,'' chortles Podoski, now 87 and a resident of Washington.

It's a cliche to say that truth is the first casualty of war, but it's the truth. Whether the enemy is named Adolf or Aidid, Saddam or Osama, propaganda is as much a part of military doctrine as the pincher movement. Every shred of information released by the US government in wartime - whether on the battlefield or in press briefings - serves a strategic purpose.

One only needs to surf some of the 3 million pages of World War II intelligence files released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 to see how all the combatants deployed propaganda as a critical weapon in a worldwide war of words.

''It can be a greater weapon than artillery, more powerful than bullets,'' said Edwin J. Putzel Jr., former executive officer to Genneral William Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services, created during World War II and precursor to the CIA.

''I think a lot of the material coming out of the Muslim environment [today] is propaganda and frankly, stuff coming out of the American and British side probably is, too,'' he said.

The latest batch of declassified records, a collection of dazzlingly detailed documents that contain some of the last secrets of the last world war, delve deeper than any previously opened files into ground-level intelligence at its grittiest. And they reveal the rough templates that generations of US officials have followed to rattle the enemy and rally the home crowd, though often ineptly.

From the authoritative assurances about the winnability of the Vietnam War to the exaggerated accusations that Saddam Hussein had ruined the Persian Gulf by intentionally dousing it in oil in 1991, the truth sometimes takes years to surface.

The guidelines for twisting the truth can be found in the files unsealed at the National Archives II building in College Park, Md., particularly among the CIA dossiers opened in June 2000. They reveal that rockets that could arc over oceans and bombs that split atoms weren't just top secrets, but the stuff of rumors and leaks designed to frighten and confuse.

These documents drill down from the hierarchy of a horrible war to, say, a solitary US intelligence man, composing a plan to create a popular opposition to Hitler. The idea was to publish a newspaper that seemed organically German yet virulently anti-Nazi. The challenge was to distribute it.

The solution? Pack papers into hollow missile casings, load them onto Allied aircraft and, during regular bombing runs on German railroad trains, fire these flying newspaper stands into mail cars. Thanks to phone books and intelligence on areas heavily populated by German soldiers, many of the papers had specific addresses.

After the attacks, German details dutifully gathered up the scattered mail to make sure it reached its intended destination. After all, keeping the basic elements of a society functioning was essential to maintaining the collective sanity of the populace. A breakdown in routine was a concession to fear, an admission of weakness to an enemy.

So in the tightly guarded prison yard that was Nazi Germany, soldiers and civilians suddenly picked up a newspaper that denounced der Fuehrer.

Program's success hard to evaluate

How well these things worked was rarely quantifiable, even today. World War II was a global conflict that continues to shape the world, spawning a Cold War that flamed out only a decade ago with the dissolution of the USSR. The vacuum left by one superpower's implosion was filled by instability, nationalism, fanaticism, and guerrilla warfare that has defined a chaotic transition to an uncertain new era.

Elizabeth McIntosh, an OSS veteran who specialized in propaganda in the Pacific theater during World War II, sees the current Afghanistan conflict as a case in which one type of propaganda may well be working to the detriment of the other.

''I just feel that we are creating a real monster there for our purposes, while at the same time for them, they think they are creating a Mohammed,'' she said of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi fundamentalist leader suspected of orchestrating the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

''The morale operation has to be done subtly, to denigrate the leaders. So the obvious thing would be to diminish the man. He's being built up so strongly that it's going to be a tough propaganda problem to deal with.''

Indeed, even though Afghanistan has been reduced to the fractured, feudal state it was before the Taliban took power in 1996, bin Laden clearly won round one of the propaganda war, said Yoram Schweitzer, a researcher at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel.

Schweitzer has specialized in the way terror groups use propaganda and information as essential tools. Two months before the Sept. 11 attacks, Schweitzer wrote an analysis of a film in which bin Laden was shown telling his people to kill Americans and Jews as part of their religious duty.

''In recent weeks, bin Laden has made another impressive media comeback, with a spectacular propaganda show in which he threatened to attack American and Israeli targets,'' Schweitzer wrote in a June analysis entitled ''Bin Laden Productions Ltd.''

Now, he thinks bin Laden's main goal in attacking the United States was to trigger the sort of response that took place in Afghanistan.

''Bin Laden represents a very small minority,'' Schweitzer said. ''For him the motivation was to solicit this kind of reaction and enlarge by great numbers his supporters.''

The United States has had mixed results in putting one evil face on a broad, complex threat. Saddam Hussein's survival of the Persian Gulf War raised his status in some parts of the Islamic world, even though Iraq has a secular regime. You can buy a beer in Baghdad.

''Saddam is the greatest heretic of everybody,'' Schweitzer said. ''Bin Laden is serving, like Saddam, as a symbol. It remains to be seen if he can turn this into concrete support.''

Propaganda a primary weapon in Nazi arsenal

Though some people say the current information age has made it easier for enemies to manipulate the media, consider this observation:

''The effective propagandist must be a master of the art of speech, of writing, of journalism, of the poster and of the leaflet. He must have the gift to use the major methods of influencing public opinion such as the press, film and radio to serve his ideas and goals, above all in an age of advancing technology. Radio is already an invention of the past, since television will probably soon arrive.''

This is an excerpt of a 1934 speech that Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich's propaganda minister, gave a year after Hitler took power in Germany. Goebbels drafted the blueprint for ''the big lie,'' blaming what the Nazis characterized as the avarice of Jews for keeping Germany from climbing out of the hyperinflation and ruin of World War I and global depression. He and Hitler built the myth of Aryan superiority, the blond, blue-eyed icon that towered over the substratum of humanity.

A German propaganda official in Turkey, who defected to the Allies in 1944, wrote for the OSS a report on what he called ''the main internal political weapon of Hitler.''

The official, identified only as a former reporter named Fiala, said Hitler rose to power by promising prosperity. ''Why did Hitler fight the Jews?'' he wrote. ''Because he knew that he had to eliminate an entire property-owning class in order to give people the positions, the money, and the offices he promised.''

In the opening years of World War II, the Germans contended that the Americans were fighting on behalf of the Jews. Allied propagandists countered by downplaying the unfolding genocide as only one aspect of a global threat, believing that virulent anti-Semitism in the United States might cripple support for a war that Americans overwhelmingly wanted to avoid.

Even a grass-roots effort to create a safe haven for Jewish refugees in the British colony of Palestine was thwarted in part by a US intelligence campaign, the declassified files reveal.

With support for a Jewish state growing among influential Americans, OSS Middle East desk officer Stephen Penrose convinced many prominent Americans to reconsider, arguing in one memo that the move would prompt hundreds of millions of Muslims to make ''a fanatically religious issue'' of a Jewish state for ''the next two or three generations.''

Putzel says Donovan was determined to master the manipulation of information. In 1942, the OSS set up a psychological operations think tank headed by Harry Murray, a Harvard psychology professor. Hollywood and the domestic press were enlisted to keep Americans behind the war effort. The files are filled with dispatches that journalists for major news organizations filed directly to the OSS.

Putzel said the muckraking columnist and radio commentator Drew Pearson was used as Roosevelt's main media mouthpiece, while movie directors such as John Ford were commissioned to make patriotic films. German expatriate actress Marlene Dietrich was used for Allied radio broadcasts aimed at German troops, just as the English-speaking radio personality known as Tokyo Rose was used by Japan to both entertain and taunt American troops.

One OSS memo mentions Donovan's idea to make a movie about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but the records indicate he didn't care much for the rough cut he screened in 1943. He sent it back for some unspecified revisions.

''We improvised from day one,'' said Putzel, who attended Harvard with Donovan and joined his New York law firm. ''Donovan had to create something out of whole cloth.''

Putzel said one of the most dazzling executions of lies came from Barbara Lauwers, a Czechoslovakian OSS agent who planted articles and spread leaflets meant to convince Czech and Slovak conscripts to desert the German army. ''We got 600 soldiers coming through the lines in one night,'' Putzel said.

Barbara Lauwers later became, by marriage, Barbara Podoski, the Bronze Medal winner for ''Operation Sauerkraut.''

Donovan believed so strongly in the power of propaganda that he turned up in Allied-occupied China in the closing days of the Pacific war, where the OSS based its morale campaign directed at Japan. When Donovan appeared, Elizabeth McIntosh was sitting at her desk with her colleague, Jane Smith-Hutton, blithely blowing up condoms.

Because there were no balloons available in which to insert leaflets, the Morale Operations agents had to improvise, not expecting the country's first chief of central intelligence to walk through the door and find them sitting behind desks cluttered with inflated prophylactics. Smith-Hutton stammered out some red-faced explanation, but Donovan didn't seem to get it, recalls McIntosh. ''Carry on,'' he said.

McIntosh had been a reporter for the Scripps Howard news service who happened to be posted in Hawaii. Her goal was to work overseas, particularly in Japan, and she lived with a Japanese family in Hawaii in order to learn the language. Then came Pearl Harbor.

McIntosh was among the creative types that the OSS sought out for its Morale Operations unit. Posted first in New Delhi and then China, she and her colleagues worked in tandem with OSS guerrilla units in Japanese-occupied Burma, where the Burma Road was a key supply line of the Pacific theater.

Members of the OSS's Detachment 101 would ambush and kill a Japanese mail courier, then spirit the material by submarine to agents like McIntosh.

''We had a bunch of postcards and would change all the meanings,'' she says of the missives, which had already passed through Japanese censors. ''Most were written in pencil. They'd say things like, `We are here defending the emperor.' We'd erase it and change it to `We are hungry and we are starving. Why have you deserted us?'''

The records on the China-based missions show how elaborately propaganda encompassed efforts to incite resistance and sabotage, discredit collaborators and demoralize Japanese troops who had ''become depressed over the developments in the war, particularly the news of bombings of Japan,'' according to one early 1945 OSS report on the China theater.

Another report described how US Army soldiers and local Chinese sent hundreds of water-tight bamboo tubes filled with leaflets, news briefs, and posters down the Yangtze River, towards enemy-occupied territory. Included were cartoons ''designed to make the Japanese ridiculous, hateful and contemptible.'' Field agents also spread posters showing how to immobilize a Japanese staff car by urinating in the gas tank.

For its part, Japan's government told countries it was invading that World War II was a fight against European colonialism. The Americans got one of their first looks at how Japan was portraying the war in late 1942, when the two sides repatriated groups of foreign nationals. The declassified files contain the OSS debriefings of Americans returning home after Japan bombed Pearl Habor. ''Pearl Harbor Day was made into a monthly observance,'' one report noted.

By 1945, the OSS propaganda effort was so sophisticated that the types of rumors being spread had nicknames. ''Boogie Man,'' was a rumor used ''to create terror and panic; secret weapon, death ray, etc,'' one OSS report said.

Vatican intelligence, not always considered reliable, nevertheless said fear among the Japanese citizenry was palpable, and that the people expected the war to end in a ''strange and sudden'' manner. In August 1945, President Harry S. Truman dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Media glut hinders control of information

Fear, in fact, is one of the most potent components of propaganda. After the Sept. 11 attacks, bin Laden turned up on television gloating about the fear gripping America. And while the lethal string of anthrax-laced letters could have come from any combination of crackpots and copycats, it is adding to the omniscient facade bin Laden has sought to create.

Putzel said the information overload of the current era has turned every whisper to a scream. There is often too much information to control.

''I think one of our problems is the desire to broadcast everything. When we have a national commitment to deal with an enemy or a potential enemy there ought to be some reasonable limits on the information,'' he said. ''Saddam Hussein or bin Laden or you name it is looking at the same broadcasts we are.''

Americans have lived in such an open society that they are oblivious to the enmity triggered by the United States' paramount role as the economic, military, and cultural behemoth of the world, Putzel says.

''We seem to feel we can relax in our environment. But there's a huge part of the world that is anti-American,'' said Putzel. ''It is so easy to get the public unduly excited. It has caused the American public to be edgy and it's a perfect time for groups to erode morale.''

Rather than just relying on Washington, state and local leaders should be doing more to strengthen a soft society's ability to face its fears, says Putzel, a former mayor of Naples, Fla.

''I think a lot of lessons in World War II could be of great use now,'' Putzel said. ''But several generations of individuals come along, and to many of them, the Second World War is no different than the War of 1812.''

That 19th-century conflict offers an example of how Americans have rebounded from attacks on their homefront. The 40-year-old United States survived the rematch with the British empire even after the enemy had set fire to the Capitol and the mansion of President James Madison. First Lady Dolley Madison wouldn't get into her getaway stagecoach until grabbing the portrait of George Washington.

Though the presidential mansion was badly damaged, it was rebuilt on an even grander scale. The exterior smoke damage was covered with heavy coats of white paint. Hence the nickname, the White House. The painting of Washington still hangs.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 2001


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