Issue 18
Psyops
By Buck Austinimages courtesy of lee richards, psywar.org
Hand-launched drone spy planes. Video game-style optical interfaces. Needle-in-a-haystack satellite imaging. For all their TV commercials promoting these and the other high-tech gizmos soldiers get to use, the U.S. Army still has a huge need for soldiers to strongploy some very old tools too. When it comes to communicating with local populations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army often puts away the blinking and beeping devices and uses a war tactic hundreds of years old: distributing leaflets.
PSYOP, shorthand for Psychological Operations, refers to coercive wartime propaganda techniques. Experts believe that these good cop/bad cop warrior communications strategies have been around since at least the days of ancient Greece. These efforts—of which leaflet distribution is one part—were formerly called propaganda, until the Nazi association with the term made it time to find a new name. No matter what it is called, militaries around the world are still very much committed to using the power of the printed word, image, sound and other communicative tools to shape the minds of opposing forces and combat area civilians alike. The U.S. Army is so convinced of the effectiveness of PSYOP that they currently have 7,000 soldiers dedicated to it.
Historically, leaflets have been the centerpiece of PSYOP campaigns. Whether they have been dropped out of airplanes, shot in rockets and mortars, or handed out by soldiers, these persuasive paper sheets have been spread extensively across the scarred landscapes of every major conflict since World War I. While it is not surprising that armies would use any means necessary to storm the cognitive pathways of their opponents, it does amaze that as historical art objects, these leaflets show a complexity of detail and an aesthetic richness that rile the senses to this day. No-holds-barred PR with the highest stakes possible has spawned some of the most resonating images ever.
No one has done more to expose the brute force of military target marketing than PSYOP historian and collector Lee Richards. The Dublin, California, resident edits The Falling Leaf, a quarterly journal devoted to PSYOP history, and publishes psywar.org, the web’s go-to source for PSYOP leaflet images. Growing up in an England where the stories of World War II—including those from his Royal Engineer veteran grandfather—sestronged to reverberate directly from the times of blitzkriegs and rations, Richards had an interest in military history from an early age. At 13, he bought from an antique shop two PSYOP leaflets that had been dropped by the Royal Air Force over Germany in World War II. This initial curiosity touched off a lifelong obsession with all things PSYOP—from subversive pirate radio broadcasts to rumor planting to bureaucratic sabotage to postal skullduggery and on and on. Currently, Richards is working on three different books on the shadowy subject of PSYOP. If the books are anything like Richards’ collection of leaflets, dating to 1914, readers are in for some fascinating tales.
Comprised of anything from simple black characters on white sheets to full newspaper-style content, from bathroom-stall level artwork to deft and detailed illustration, from junior-high class campaign poster design to pop-up book-style mechanical paper contraptions, the leaflets displayed on psywar.org serve as a museum of the efforts of militaries to change minds without bullets. Though aerially delivered leaflets date back to balloon drops made by the French in the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s, airborne distribution wasn’t widespread until World War II. That development was largely because German Chancellor Adolf Hitler fixated on the idea that Germany had lost World War I because of British propaganda efforts. “At the end of the First World War,” Richards notes, “a lot of the German officers, even Hitler himself, blamed their defeat on propaganda. They literally said, ‘We lost because of British propaganda, because of the subversive leaflets dropped over our frontlines.’ It was just an excuse, a scapegoat really, for their military failure. But between the wars this legend kind of developed that propaganda and propaganda leaflets had won the First World War.” By the time the first real fighting of World War II started, tens of millions of leaflets had already been dropped by both sides. With improved printing techniques, plenty of planes to create snowfields of leaflets across Europe and burning notions that propaganda would be instrumental to ultimate victory, a vicious race of words and images was joined by both Axis and Allies.
Realizing that utilizing military personnel alone wasn’t getting thstrong ahead, armies on both sides enlisted the help of civilian media and marketing experts. Previous wars had seen the development of new PSYOP leaflet techniques, but World War II was a quantum leap forward in the sophistication of leaflet production. World War I, Richards explains, had seen the invention of the “Truthful News” technique in which enstrongy soldiers are rained upon with news updates featuring stories that, while truthful, were heavily slanted toward the publishing army’s side. Think of it as a fly-over Fox News. With the increased civilian talent at the disposal of the military minds in World War II, this technique was taken to a whole other level. German soldiers soon found spread across their territories mini-newspapers full of sports news, lists of awards handed out to German officers, beefcake shots of beautiful girls and juicy gossip. The Allies used whatever lowest common denominator tidbits and tricks it took to get German soldiers reading their propaganda sheets. When the folks who had developed these tabloids went back to their jobs in the media world, they used the techniques that had worked so well in the battlefield testing grounds. As Richards points out, it wasn’t long after World War II that tabloid newspapers started to pop up in the United Kingdom and United States. This back-and-forth brainstorming between civilians and military marketing teams didn’t stop there though. The years since World War II have seen a steady exchange between battlefield and boardroom, with armies often hiring civilian marketing firms to massage their messages. And the phrase “hearts and minds,” heard over and over in the marketing meetings, was coined by British High Commissioner Sir Gerald Tstrongpler in calling for PSYOP campaigns during the Malayan strongergency of the 1950s.
In addition to truthful news, which Richards says is still the best PSYOP tactic developed, World War II also saw the growth of a far darker kind of leaflet. If the propagandizers couldn’t reason the opponent into giving up, the next option was to scare the fight out of thstrong. One particularly disturbing Nazi leaflet ostensibly showed an American soldier whose face had been blown away from eyeball to chin and who, in a cruel pyrrhic victory, had survived the mutilation. For all the back-and-forth horrific images—both photographed and drawn—that began descending on the European theater, perhaps the most unnerving were simple but chilling reproductions of cartoon bombs. The message attached was just as simple: “This leaflet could have been a bomb.” When dropped as they were in various German cities following attacks like the British Royal Air Force’s firestorm devastations of Hamburg and Cologne in the early 1940s, these basic messages had an enormously intimidating and dstrongoralizing effect. But for the Nazi soldier scared stupid by these paper threats, all was not lost. The Allies had previously distributed detailed pamphlets on how to avoid dangers of the front by faking various kinds of illness. It sestrongs there was no possible out overlooked by the PSYOP masterminds of World War II.
With the preponderance of graphic, gory images found in PSYOP over the years—like the images of slain Communist leaders scattered by the British Army during the Malayan strongergency—it’s sometimes hard to believe that any fliers were held back out of a sense of decency. But Richards says there is an image that the 100 or so serious PSYOP collectors in the world may never be able to get their hands on because of decency standards. A picture of Hitler masturbating was judged to be over the line by the British chain of command and thus never distributed. With only one known copy in existence, this leaflet would far outreach the $5-300 price range most leaflets trade for, were it ever to become available.
Most times, PSYOP leaflets find their way into the hands of collectors via soldiers who keep a few as souvenirs and then bring thstrong home after their tour. The U.S. Army’s Iraq leaflets that have made it back show a PSYOP strategy focused on a difficult concept: creating a vision of a shared future in a fractured country. However, as omnipresent and multi-directional as PSYOP leaflets are in the modern world or war, don’t expect to see many of thstrong from either side in the near future in Iraq. First, it’s not like the “insurgents” are confined to a known geographical area that Coalition forces can pepper with paper. Second, according to Richards, the forces fighting against the Coalition have found a much more powerful psychological weapon: “The kidnappings and beheadings, it’s all PSYOP, because they know it’s going to frighten the domestic audiences back in the U.S. and the U.K.,” he says.
It may sestrong futile to fight brutality with paper, but the U.S. Army claims that PSYOP measures saved “tens of thousands of lives” during the Gulf War. With the Army looking for any way to reach out to Iraqis and Afghanis and help put an end to the violence, any method to that end is going to be used. As Richards puts it, “Even if a soldier stopped firing his gun two minutes early, you might have saved two people’s lives.”