Even with peacetime facilities tremendous simplicity and repetition are needed to convey advertising on the radio. In wartime repetition is even more necessary. It serves the double function of driving the theme home to listeners who have heard it before, while broadening the circle of listeners with each transmission. A point of diminishing returns is soon reached but even diminished returns are often rewarding. The hardest-to-reach people are sometimes the ones it is most important to reach with a simple, basic, persuasive item. Repetition thus ensures depth of response in the core audience, while adding to the marginal audience with each additional application. What is deadly monotonous to the propagandist himself may, on the thousandth repetition, merely have become pleasantly familiar to the Propaganda Man on the other end. The author has talked to any number of clandestine listeners to our propaganda who have almost wept with rage as they told of listening to jokes, novelties, political speeches and other funny stuff when they hoped to get a clean-cut announcement of the latest military news. =Communication Through the Mails.= In World War II, propaganda was not able to make use of the mails the way that the propagandists of World War I succeeded in doing. The mails were much more intermittent. The channels into Germany through Scandinavia were not kept open except for Sweden, which was reachable, rather perilously, by air alone; Iberia was an inhospitable base. German counterintelligence was more than ruthless; it was effectively savage and made the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm seem rustic by contrast. With Japan, anything would have had to go through Soviet censorship to get there in the first place, and then meet the traditional intricacies of Japanese red tape. Mail propaganda was therefore not heavily developed. Something was accomplished, however, by use of the Portuguese, Spanish, Swiss and Chinese press. Enemy officials and private persons were known to read these, and it was possible to do a great deal toward influencing editorial content.