Psychological WarfareLinebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
History
Psychological Warfare
Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
Psychological warfare
The British, like the Germans, had immense organizational difficulties.
The British ended up by inventing a distinction of roles. Thus they
finished World War I with two separate propaganda agencies. The Ministry
of Information, under Lord Beaverbrook, with Colonel Buchan as Director
of Intelligence, carried on civilian psychological warfare outside
Britain; the National War Aims Committee carried on civilian
psychological warfare within Britain. Military psychological warfare was
carried on by military and civilian agencies, both. The British required
five years of honest effort, bitter wrangling, and positive political
invention in order to devise a psychological warfare system sufficient
to meet the needs of a great power at war. They did not let their
administrative difficulties prevent their conduct of correct, poised and
highly moral propaganda, nor impede their use of plentiful funds and
high ingenuity in getting their propaganda across.[22]
The British set the pace in coordinating political warfare with
news-propaganda, and in effecting workable liaison between national
policy-makers and operational and public-relations chiefs of the armed
services. It is not likely that, even in World War II, the
Americans--within the looser, younger, bigger framework of our more
compendious government--achieved as good results in terms of timing.
State-War-Navy-OWI-OSS-Treasury timing of related events or news items
was obtained through most of World War II in the following manner: the
federal agency affected did whatever it was going to do anyhow, and
other federal agencies took notice after the event, initiating their
related actions, if any were feasible, then and only then. The British
sought to get around this in World War I by correlating their policy
toward various countries with their policy involving different
departments. They were not totally successful but they learned a lot;
the net product of their propaganda was, for most of its purposes,
superb.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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