Psychological warfare

Psychological warfare is a tactic used to demoralize one’s opponent in an attempt to insure victory in battle. By feeding into the pre-existing fears of the enemy, psychological warfare causes terror, encourages opposing forces to retreat, and can end a battle before it begins. This form of warfare has matured over time from the intimidating military maneuvers of the Mongols to the spreading of leaflets over Japan in World War II and Afghanistan in more recent years. New technologies such as the radio, television, and the internet have helped carve the face of modern psychological warfare ever creating new ways to reach the opposition. We can be sure that as long as war exists, new forms of psychological warfare will be formulated all in an attempt to ensure victory and dominance on the battle field.

Definition

Psychological warfare is a tactic used to demoralize one’s opponent in an attempt to ensure victory in battle. By feeding into the pre-existing fears of the enemy, psychological warfare causes terror, encourages opposing forces to retreat, and can end a battle before it begins. Alternatively, it may involve an attempt to sway the enemy's viewpoint towards one's own position, leading him to abandon the fight. Such methods often include the use of propaganda, and may be supported by military, economic, or political means.

The U.S. Department of Defense has defined psychological warfare (PSYWAR) as:

"The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives."

Historical Examples

Biblical Times

The Tanak or Old Testament provides us with examples of psychological warfare from biblical times. During the time before Israel had a king, Judges were raised as leaders to rule the people. These Judges were both political and military leaders, directing some of the most influential battles in the history of Israel’s attaining the Holy Land. Gideon, one of the earlier and greater Judges, used psychological warfare to defeat enemies that greatly out-numbered his own forces. In Judges 7:16-22, there is an account of his battle with the Midianites, Amalekites, and other Eastern tribes who now inhabited the area the Hebrews believed promised to them. The story goes that with a diminished group of only 300 men, Gideon defeated his enemies. Under Gideon’s instruction, each man carried with him a horn and a torch in a jar so to hide its light. At their leader’s mark, the men broke the jars revealing the light of the torches while yelling, “A sword for YWHW and for Gideon!” Their enemies were terrified and believed they were surrounded by a vast army. In the confusion, the now panicked army turned on itself, killing one another rather than the attacking force. Gideon’s force held the group from retreating and decimated their adversaries. If not for this use of cunning and planning, Gideon and his army would not have been able to overcome the formidable foe.

The Mongols

Genghis Khan, leader of the Mongols in the 13th century, AD, united his people to eventually conquer more territory than any other leader in human history. This was undoubtedly an exceptional accomplishment, but would have been impossible to achieve had it not been for the use of psychological warfare. Next to mobility, defeating the will of the enemy was the greatest weapon of the Mongols. Before attacking a settlement, the Mongol general would demand tribute and submission to the Khan or threaten to otherwise attack. The Mongols would threaten a village with complete destruction should a single arrow be fired. Most of the initial nations to be conquered, such as the nations of Kiev and Khwarizm, refused to surrender. Consequently, the Mongol general would engage his cavalry in a series of choreographed maneuvers that slaughtered the enemy. He would spare a few, however, allowing them to take their tales of the encroaching horde to the next villages. This created an aura of insecurity with the resistance, eventually supplanting the will of the villagers. Often times, this in itself procured the Mongol victory. Another tactic employed by Genghis Khan was the nocturnal use of fire to create an illusion of numbers. He ordered each soldier to light three torches at dusk in order to deceive and intimidate enemy scouts. In one infamous incident, the Mongol leader Tamerlane built a pyramid of 90,000 human heads before the walls of Delhi, to convince them to surrender.

Propaganda Warfare During WWII

Most of the events throughout history involving psychological warfare utilized tactics that instilled fear or a sense of awe towards the enemy. But as humanity continued into the 20th century, advances in communications technology acted as a catalyst for mass propagandizing.

One of the first leaders to relentlessly gain fanatical support through the use of microphone technology was Adolf Hitler. By first creating a speaking environment, designed by Joseph Goebbels, that exaggerated his presence to make him seem almost god-like, Hitler then coupled this with the resonating projections of his orations through a microphone. This was a form of psychological warfare, because the image that he created for himself greatly influenced and swayed the German people to eventually follow him to what would ultimately become their own destruction. Churchill made similar use of radio for propaganda.

During WWII, psychological warfare was used effectively by the American military as well. The enormous success that the invasion of Normandy displayed was a fusion of psychological warfare with military deception. Before D-Day, Operation Quicksilver created a fictional "First United States Army Group" (FUSAG) commanded by General George Patton that supposedly would invade France at the Pas-de-Calais. American troops used false signals, decoy installations, and phony equipment to deceive German observation aircraft and radio intercept operators.

LeMay bombing

This had the desired effect of misleading the German High Command as to the location of the primary invasion, keeping reserves away from the actual landings. Erwin Rommel was the primary target of the psychological aspects of this operation. Convinced that Patton would lead the invasion, as he was clearly the best Allied armour commander, Rommel was caught off-guard and unable to react strongly to the Normandy invasion, since Patton's illusionary FUSAG had not "yet" landed. Confidence in his own intelligence and judgement was also reduced enough that the German response to the beachhead was simply not decisive. Had Rommel reacted strongly with all he had to the initial invasion, it might have subsequently failed. The edge provided by his hesitation and uncertainty was pivotal in the overall war effort and outcome.

America also used psychological warefare with some success in Japan during the same ware. The Lemay bombing leaflets over Japan at the end of WWII was a major move by American forces. These documents, containing propaganda in Japanese, fostered distrust of Japanese leaders and encouraged the surrender of Japanese forces.

Lord Haw-Haw

Lord Haw-Haw was the nickname of an announcer on the English-language propaganda radio program of World War II, Germany Calling. The program was broadcast by Nazi Germany to audiences in Great Britain on the mediumwave station Radio Hamburg and by shortwave to the United States, starting on September 18, 1939 and continuing until April 30, 1945, when Hamburg was overrun by the British Army.

The name Lord Haw-Haw is most commonly associated with the Irish-American William Joyce, a former member of the British Union of Fascists, whose on-air style approximated to a sneering mockery of the British military effort against the Germans. More generally, however, the name Lord Haw-Haw applied to the various announcers who took part in the broadcasts, including Lieutenant Norman Baillie-Stewart(who would have had the proper upper-class accent for the part that the more plebeian Joyce lacked). The catchy pseudonym is variously attributed to a "Fleet Street cartoonist" or a correspondent with the Daily Express . Joyce, in fact, had a singular Irish-American-English-German accent; his distinctive pronunciation of "Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling" was readily recognized by his listeners, who, in the early days of the war, attributed to him an intimate and sinister knowledge of everything going on in all the towns and villages of England. Perhaps because of the fear his alleged omniscience had inspired, Joyce was hanged for treason on January 3, 1946, after having been captured in northern Germany just as the war ended. As J.A. Cole has written, "The British public would not have been surprised if, in that Flensburg wood, Haw-Haw had carried in his pocket a secret weapon capable of annihilating an armoured brigade."

Axis Sally

File:Axissallymug.jpg

Mugshot of Sisk from the US Bureau of Prisons

"Axis Sally" (November 29, 1900 – June 25, 1988) was a female radio personality during World War II. Born Mildred Elizabeth Sisk in Portland, Maine, she took the name Mildred Gillars as a small child after her mother remarried and moved to New York City where young Mildred dreamed of becoming an actress, but she met with little success.

Gillars studied drama at Ohio Wesleyan University, but dropped out before graduating. She found employment in Europe, working as an English instructor at the Berlitz School of Languages in Berlin, Germany, in 1935. Later, she accepted a job as an announcer and actress with Radio Berlin, where she remained until Nazi Germany fell in 1945.

With her sultry voice, Gillars was a well-known propagandist to Allied troops, who gave her the nickname "Axis Sally." Her most infamous broadcast was made on May 11, 1944, prior to the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France. Gillars portrayed an American mother who dreamed that her son had been killed in the English Channel. An announcer's voice made the message clear: "The D of D-Day stands for doom… disaster… death… defeat… Dunkerque or Dieppe."

After the war, Gillars was captured and eventually flown back to the United States in 1948. She was charged with 10 counts of treason, although she was actually only tried for eight. The sensational, six-week trial ended on March 8, 1949. After long deliberations, the jury convicted Gillars on only one count of treason. Gillars was sentenced to 10 to 30 years. Mildred Gillars died of natural causes at the age of 87.

Tokyo Rose

Tokyo Rose was a name given by United States forces in the South Pacific during World War II to any of several English-speaking female broadcasters of Japanese propaganda.

The name is usually associated with Iva Toguri D'Aquino, a United States citizen who was in Japan at the start of the war. In 1949, D'Aquino was tried and convicted of treason by the United States government, based on perjured testimony. She was later pardoned by U.S. President Gerald Ford.

Iva Toguri

Other Wartime Radio Personalities

Seoul City Sue

"Seoul City Sue" is the nickname given by American GIs to the female announcer of a series of North Korean propaganda radio broadcasts during the Korean War.

She first went on the air in early August, 1950. She would read the names off of dog tags from killed American soldiers to a musical accompaniment.

Later that month, she was identified as American-born Mrs. Anna Wallace Suhr, wife of a Korean newsman, by the Methodist Missionary Organization. The group said that Suhr, at the time in her mid-40s, was a former missionary schoolteacher in Korea, and had tutored American diplomats' children in Seoul. Suhr's defenders claimed the dull tone of her broadcasts as proof that she was being forced to make them.

Hanoi Hannah

Trinh Thi Ngo (born 1931), known as Hanoi Hannah, was a Vietnamese woman who, during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, read broadcast radio messages and propaganda to convince U.S. troops to go AWOL, a psychological warfare scheme set forth by the Communist North Vietnamese. She made three broadcasts a day talking to American soldiers. She read the list of the newly killed or imprisoned Americans, tried to persuade American GIs that the American involvement in Vietnam was unjust and immoral, and also played popular American anti-war songs to incite feelings of nostalgia and homesickness amongst GIs. Here is an excerpt of one of her usual broadcast speeches:

How are you, GI Joe? It seems to me that most of you are poorly informed about the going of the war, to say nothing about a correct explanation of your presence over here. Nothing is more confused than to be ordered into a war to die or to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on. (Hanoi Hannah, 16 June 1967)

Postwar military and political methods

The Cold War raised psychological techniques to a high art and merged them with economic warfare, character assassination and brainwashing. Some techniques that were used include:

• Broadcasting of white noise to convince eavesdroppers that encryption was in use — and to waste vast sums of time and money trying to decrypt it.
• Recruiting particularly innocent-appearing individuals to be spies or saboteurs so that, when revealed or captured, doubt would be cast on many more individuals.
• Various methods to ensure that any captured agent implicated as many innocent others as possible, for instance, maximizing the number of questionable contacts.

"Information age"

As these techniques impinged on the civilian realm, the threat grew, and the paranoia eventually emerged that the government could wage psychological warfare on its own people through the censorship of information. This inadvertently influenced several anti-government/anti-establishment social revolutions in the 1960s and 1970s, including counter-culture and anarchism.

The so-called "information age" that began in the 1980s was arguably a simple extension of the psychological warfare mindset and principles throughout all civilian activities of developed nations, but especially the English-speaking countries. Growing exponentially through the rise of radio, broadcast television, satellite television, and cable television, and finally manifesting itself on the Internet, the power of those who framed facts about the world steadily grew during the postwar period. A failed UNESCO effort to put countries in more control of reporting about themselves was evidence that many in the developing world saw the extreme danger of most of their citizens learning about their own country from Western news sources.

Recent military psychological warfare methods

US PsyOps leaflet used in Afghanistan meant to inspire fear among the terrorist groups targeted. This was done in hopes to subvert confidence and encourage surrender.

Most uses of the term psychological warfare refers to military methods used recently by the United States and other countries such as:

• Distributing pamphlets, e.g. by the U.S. in the Gulf War in 1991, encouraging desertion
• Renaming cities and other places when captured, such as the change from Saddam International Airport (named after Saddam Hussein) to Baghdad International Airport when he was removed from power
• Systematic rape of enemy civilians to humiliate the enemy and to break their will to fight
• "Shock and awe" military strategy
• Terrorism (as "asymmetric warfare")
• Projecting repetitive and annoying sounds and music for long periods at high volume towards groups under siege ( questionable, as when this source of sound is defeated it would assuredly moralize the defending troops. )
• The use of vehicles to create mobile broadcasting stations, allowing the U.S. military to verbally harass and agitate Taliban fighters in Afghanistan so that they emerged from hiding places and engaged US troops.
• Terror bombing of enemy cities and war against defenceless civilians in order to break the enemy's will
• Spreading rumors, hoaxes, and wild stories

Baghdad Bob

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (Arabic محمد سعيد الصحاف also Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf) (born 1940) is a former Iraqi diplomat and politician. He came to wide prominence around the world during the 2003 invasion of Iraq|2003 Invasion of Iraq, during which he was the Information Minister of the country.

Al-Sahaf is probably most known for his daily press briefings in Baghdad during the 2003 Iraq War, where his lies, fantasies, and colourful description of his enemies reached meteoric heights as the war progressed and caused him to be nicknamed Baghdad Bob (in the style of "Hanoi Hannah" or "Seoul City Sue") by commentators in the United States and Comical Ali (an allusion to Chemical Ali, the nickname of former Iraqi Defence Minister Ali Hassan al-Majid) by commentators in the United Kingdom.

On April 7, 2003, Al-Sahaf claimed that there were no American troops in Baghdad, and that the Americans were committing suicide by the hundreds at the city's gates, despite the fact that the imminent fall of Baghdad and the Hussein government was obvious to those aware of the progress of the war, and that American tanks were patrolling the streets only a few hundred meters from the location where the press conference was held. His last public appearance as Information Minister was on April 8, 2003, when he said that the Americans "are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks. They will surrender, it is they who will surrender".

Although appearing as obvious lies to a Western public, the descriptions uttered by al-Sahaf were well received in parts of the Arab world most fiercely opposed to the war. Thus the quick fall of Baghdad was to some a total surprise, and Syrian television did not broadcast images of the events. Many in Arab countries who were interviewed later were incredulous and were forced to conclude that Sahaf and their own media had been lying all along, comparable to a similar watershed event that came out of the Arab-Israeli wars several decades earlier.

Conclusion

Psychological warfare is a tool used to demoralize one's adversary in an attempt to ensure victory. Over time, this device has evolved from Genghis Khan’s brutal tactics to the hypnotizing words of Tokyo Rose and Baghdad Bob. While the application of psychological warfare is ever changing, the underlying goal remains the same; to attack one’s enemy wholly body and mind, and in doing so, attempting to ensure victory.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Cole, J.A. Lord Haw-Haw & William Joyce: The Full Story (New York, 1965)

External links

• Pentagon psychological warfare operation
• OSS - The Psychology of War
• Summary and MP3 Audio of an April 1945 broadcast excerpt by Lord Haw-Haw, from an Imperial War Museum website

• Secret files released on Lord Haw Haw's wife, from a November 2000 CNN article

• My father and Lord Haw Haw, a February 2005 story from The Guardian

• World War II magazine article
• Mug shots
• Profile of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (BBC News)
• We Love the Iraqi Information Minister.com - fan site with quotes and pictures
• Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf fanpage
• BaghdadBob.com- a list of political humor and several Bob items
• Video profile of al-Sahhaf (2:37, Sky News, in Windows Media Format)
• "An interview with Hanoi Hanna"
• Time Magazine, August 21, 1950 Vol. LVI No. 8
• Korean War Discussion List email archives
• UNITED STATES ARMY IN THE KOREAN WAR: SOUTH TO THE NAKTONG, NORTH TO THE YALU
• Ibid, Footnote 51
• Army News Service

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