Knowing the Enemy: Australian Psychological Warfare and the Business of Influencing Minds in the Second World War

Abstract

One of the crucial tools of war this century has been psychology, enlisted to manipulate the ideas, attitudes, conclusions and' tolerance levels of civilians and soldiers. Psychological warfare is, in fact, older than this century but the scale of its use and the central place it came to occupy in national strategy, first during the First World War and then at a greatly increased level in the Second World War, locates it as a one of the defining features of the twentieth century. During the First World War allied forces dropped a total of 26million propaganda leaflets.1 By the end of the Second World War the Royal Air Force had dropped 6000 million leaflets in Europe and the United States Tactical Air Force dropped another 8000 million.2 In 1944 and 1945, in the European theatre alone, Britain and the United States of America allocated a combined personnel of 4600 people to the special psychological warfare division under the direct command of Supreme Headquarters. Two squadrons of Flying Fortresses were allotted to leaflet dropping. As General Eisenhower explained, psychological warfare had become' a special and most effective weapon of war'.3 Adolf Hitler agreed with him, arguing that the British had secured military victory in the First World War primarily because of the effective propaganda campaigns the government launched on its own citizens.4 The British government had barely finished dismantling its psychological warfare organisations when the National Socialists established a propaganda ministry in their first week of power to train recruits in the practices that the British had used