SGM Herbert A. Friedman (Ret.)

Office of Strategic Services Morale Operations Training Leaflets

Training and war game leaflets are an interesting subject because by definition, they will be cruder and less finished than the leaflets produced by a psychological operations unit during a war.

In wartime, the unit will have the best artists, translators, writers and even printing presses and inks. The leaflets will be inspected, the quality of the printing and the color checked carefully and then they will be dropped over specifically selected targets. Their leaflets are meant to be dropped on an enemy and survive sun, rain and snow, pass the tests of time and convince that enemy to comply or surrender.

The training leaflet is generally a simple test given to students asking them to prepare a leaflet on some subject. It might just be one or two students and they are expected to do all the work with whatever data or instruction they have on hand. They are still in school and have not yet perfected their military occupational specialty. Because the training leaflets are so crude, they would generally never be used against a real enemy where credibility is important.

War game leaflets are similar, except the PSYOP troops will have graduated and joined a unit. However, since the war game is just for play and training by combat forces, to test their mettle and strategy, there will be just a few PSYOP people involved and they will make some simple and meaningless leaflets with very limited printing abilities in the field as part of the general “horse and pony show.” In other words, everyone knows it is a war game and the 82nd Airborne Division is not going to convince the 101st Airborne Division to surrender by implying their wives are lonely and seeing other men. So, it is an opportunity to produce propaganda in the field, to show what a PSYOP team can do, but it is understood that it serves no purpose except to train the troops.

How shall we approach this article? I hope to talk a bit about training, perhaps show some of the instructional books that teach students how to prepare leaflets and then show a selection of training and war game leaflets prepared by different people and units. I have about 150 articles on real leaflets used during wartime on this website and this is a good chance for the reader to see where the artists and writers that produced those leaflets came from and how they were trained. I will limit the leaflets I depict but the reader should understand that I could show hundreds of such leaflets. Every young soldier in school being trained in PSYOP is producing such leaflets as we speak. They learn by trial and error as the leaflets are picked apart and critiqued by their instructors.

A WWII Office of War Information Training Leaflet
It is worth noting that the students cheated and used a current Filipino Patriotic Image

One of the earliest mentions of training leaflets in my library is a booklet entitled OWI Leaflet Maneuvers dated 6 October 1944. It explains how a class was ordered to prepare a propaganda leaflet. The class was held in San Francisco without benefit of instruction or advice on leaflet technique from anyone with field experience. In other words, eight new OWI agents were tasked with producing five leaflets completely on their own. The leaflets were for use in Burma, New Guinea, the Philippines, Japan and Borneo. The students were assigned an artist named Gene Schnell, a Japanese translator named Sung Soo Whang, and a Davidson Printing Pressman names Richard Hubert.

Brave Soldiers of the Thirteenth Division!

The team was given no advice on how to prepare a leaflet. This was entirely their project. This leaflet is tactical in style and targets Japanese troops in Burma based on a change of command in the Japanese forces prior to a major counter-attack. You can tell this is an early practice leaflet because it bears a map on one side and yet it is never mentioned in the text and does not explain to the Japanese soldiers how it is to be used. This is a major error. The map depicts the military situation and is labeled “Burma” at the lower left. The Short text at the right says:

After the battles of the brave Kokang over the last three months you can see the status of it all.

The text on the back says in part:

Brave Soldiers of the Thirteenth Division!

Your victories in the campaigns of Malaya and Java have established you as brave and gallant troops. Because you fought so valiantly and heroically in the battle of Java, you were chosen as the spearhead of the drive into India…Despite your courage, despite your great sacrifice, Imphal is not yet yours.

The planes in the skies belong to the Allies. Your supply lines become weaker day by day. Look about you. Is not the ground strewn with the bodies of your comrades who have died uselessly because of lack of medicine?

The Allied armies stand before you. They, too, are strong and brave. But, they are also well fed and there are many more of them than there are of you.

Soldiers of Japan! To die uselessly in a hopeless battle in which you can gain nothing for your country is ignominious.

The Office of Strategic Services also had such training programs and new agents were tested on their ability to produce meaningful leaflets that used specific themes for propaganda. Prospective OSS Morale Operation agents were given a project of a 100-day hypothetical military operation. They were given intelligence for an invasion of Japan and a review of combat operations. This exercise took place after the alleged capture of the cities of Shiogama, Matasushima and Sendai. The three communities would be governed by one administration. The agents also received a set of problems encountered by the occupying military government and were asked to solve them. At the top of this article we see a set of the training leaflets produced by one group of candidates.

STUDENTS OF PSY WAR NO. 1

This training leaflet shows that the students training in the Psywar school at Ft. Riley sometimes had fun. It is in the John H. Remak collection, University Library, University of California, Santa Cruz. Remak was a member of the American Psychological Warfare Branch in Europe during WWII.

 

OWI Students bound for Europe

Other OWI candidates trained for action in Europe. The above leaflet appears to be a legitimate leaflet for Germany and is titled German Soldiers – Choose for yourselves! In fact, as the back of the leaflet shows, it was designed by OWI students at the technical Training School on Huntington, L.I. The leaflet seems to be an advertisement for the Davidson Printing Press.

PSYOP continued to be taught and practiced through the Korean War, the Cold War, Vietnam and up to the present time.

1968 Military Assistance Command Vietnam PSYOP Guide

In Vietnam numerous publications were used to train the troops on how to prepare and distribute leaflets. The PSYOP Guide has chapters entitled: PSYOP planning, Leaflets, Newspapers, Posters, etc.

Leaflet Printing and Dissemination Guide

The U.S. Army Broadcasting & Visual Activity, Pacific produced an undated Leaflet Printing and Dissemination Guide. It contained chapters such as: Leaflet selection, Leaflet sizes, Papers, Weight, and Preparing the Leaflet Bundle.

Why is this Viet Cong Guerrilla Confused? What did we do wrong?

Another 42-page training booklet was entitled: Communicating with Vietnamese Thru Leaflets. It was prepared in an effort "to improve the quality of leaflets being produced by American PSYOP personnel in Vietnam.”

How to Prepare Copy for 7th PSYOP Publication

The 7th PSYOP Group was located on Okinawa and had PSYOP sections that worked in Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand and Japan. They often prepared leaflets for other units busy on the battlefront. This booklet explains what the PSYOP soldier must do to make his leaflet ready to be printed by the 7th Group. The booklet is for the soldier in the field and discusses layout, printing, inks, color, text and a host of other features that go into a viable propaganda item.

How to Prepare Copy for RSC Manila

Sometimes the printing jobs were really big and needed a major printing plant. In such a case the material might be sent to Regional Service Center, run by the United States Information Agency. This booklet discusses photo offset printing, layout, photographs, artwork, different types and sizes. During the Vietnam War, RSC Manila ran around the clock and printed millions of leaflets, magazines and pamphlets.

Field Expedient Guide

The printing guide was prepared by the U.S. Army Broadcasting and Visual Activity Pacific, which would later become the 7th PSYOP Group on Okinawa with detachments in Vietnam, Korea and numerous other nations. The leaflet is meant for units in the field far from a professional printing operation. It explains printing that is portable, simple to operate, available, neat and inexpensive. What I like about this booklet is that it was meant to be used by Korean troops. How do we know? Someone has printed directions in the Korean language and taped them over the English-language instruction.

I often played Aggressor when I taught infantry tactic to troops. All the instructors would get together in the middle of the night and sneak up on our own students in the field and try to catch them unprepared and kill them (in theory) That always led to an interesting class the following day. However, we had no special uniforms or tactics. We just played it by ear, maybe drawing a big soviet star or hammer and sickle with chalk on a vehicle if we decided to use one. Later, when I trained troops to hold try and defend Germany against Russian invaders in a training scenario called the “Fulda Gap,” I acted as both friendly and aggressor forces as I taught the men how to defend while at the same time using the scenario to slowly push them back as they were attacked by superior Russian armored divisions. 

Aggressors drop leaflets urging surrender

Since the Aggressors wanted the American troops to know what it is like in a real battle they used both leaflets and loudspeakers in an attempt to destroy their morale and cause them to surrender. In the picture above we see a package of safe conduct passes bearing the Aggressor symbol and the “Surrender Now” text being loaded on a small aircraft to be dropped on American troops.

 

The leaflets being read by U.S. Troops on the ground

I should mention that in the majority of small training exercises American troops would never see the formal Aggressor forces. They were used in the major war games where divisions were moved around the battlefield. In a small exercise it is more likely that a local PSYOP unit would play the aggressor and make the broadcasts and print the leaflets. Familiarizing the American soldier with enemy propaganda is a critical part of his training. The soldiers must be able to differentiate true news from fake news.

A Post Korean War Training Exercise

For those that would like an idea of what a real war game or training exercise is like, I present this report on EXERCISE FALCON from the Charlotte Observer of 1 November 1953. The Korean war had ended July 1953, and many of the lessons learned from that “Police Action” appear in this exercise.

The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division playing itself was supported by the 2nd Loudspeaker and Leaflet Company (2 L&L). The company had four loudspeaker teams in the field during the exercise. The messages, both live and recorded were written by the company’s scriptwriters. Two of the Teams supported the Division, the other two supported the aggressor forces. The PSYOP forces on both sides worked in the front lines sending surrender appeals by loudspeaker and dropping leaflets. At night, the loudspeakers played soft music and the Aggressors broadcast the sexy “Voice of Monica,” an “Axis Sally” type broadcaster on tapes made by the 8th Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company in their mobile studios.

In addition to the loudspeaker messages, the 2 L&L’s Intelligence and Publication Sections produced a leaflet each day of the exercise, printed by the 7th Reproduction Company. Up to 40,000 of these leaflets were dropped daily on the opposing forces. To keep their own troops informed, the company also published 50,000 copies of a daily newspaper called Combat each day.

During the exercise, the Psychological Warfare Board conducted field and laboratory tests of the latest equipment designed for PSYWAR purposes. The Board had recently conducted a four-day leaflet dissemination test where they performed mock leaflet raids on 12 North Carolina cities.

Psychological warfare has proven its value in WWII where General Eisenhower complemented it had “proven its right to a place of dignity in our military arsenal,” and in the Korean War where General Mark Clark said that “65% of all prisoners were directly influenced by the intense propaganda campaign.”

The Leaflets

   

Warning

The 5th Loudspeaker and Leaflet Company was deployed to Germany during the Korean War. Since there was no “hot” war in Europe at the time, the unit concentrated on training and preparing leaflets for war games. Above is one of my favorite leaflets by the Company. This October 1951 “Combine” war game leaflet is designed to frighten the enemy by telling them of the deadly (but imaginary) Kreuzotter snake. Allegedly the leaflet worked to some extent because the enemy troops are said to have been afraid to sleep on the ground, and instead slept in their vehicles.

We know very little about this cartoon bit it certainly fits well here

 

Black Widow

Some units also threatened the enemy with spiders instead of snake. The training leaflet produced by the 3rd Reproduction Company of the 1st Radio Broadcasting and Leaflet Battalion at Ft. Bragg, NC, in March 1955 threatens the enemy with the poisonous black widow spider. The funny thing is that the back of the leaflet shows the black widow as a woodland spider when it is actually more of a house spider. They are mostly found in dark, dry shelters such as barns, garages, basements, and outdoor toilets. They are rather docile and will only bite if provoked. The back of the leaflet depicts the spider and the text:

Black widow spiders are known to be in this area. Smaller than an inch in size, it is impossible to see them at night. The poison which black widows inject into their victims is deadly – fifteen times more potent than rattlesnake poison. The Widow seeks a warm place to rest at night – like beside a sleeping man. If you remain awake you might feel it.

Lithographed as a training mission of the 3rd Reproduction Company
1st Radio Broadcasting and Leaflet Battalion, Ft. Bragg, N.C.

Danger – Black Widow Spiders

We don’t know who produced this variation of the black widow spider leaflet, but I think it is a bit more impressive. I don’t know if it scared any of the wargamers, but it certainly is a good biology lesson.

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