Psychological Warfare

THE STRATEGY OF TERROR -- Edmond Taylor--Houghfon Mifflin ($2.50).

During the spring of 1940 the west of Europe felt the impact of a supremely methodical and ruthless military machine. That offensive, terrible as it was, was no better organized and perhaps no more effective than another kind of warfare which preceded it, accompanied it, and will continue. Representative governments and free peoples are the targets of these attacks. So it may be useful for the U. S. to understand them.

Of this warfare of the mind, Edmond Taylor's book is a lucid, cool and informative study. As Paris correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, Taylor watched the onset of Nazi psychological warfare, analyzed its effects on the French Government and people, learned what forms it took.

The real purpose of Nazi Propagandists Goebbels and staff, Taylor declares, "was not to convert outsiders to their cause as commercial propagandists do, but to demoralize the enemy, to destroy the cohesion, discipline and collective morale of hostile social groups." This was first fully realized by the French General Staff, to whom military intelligence furnished manuals worked out by a psychological laboratory connected with the German Ministry of Propaganda. Object: to aggravate and confuse the struggles of interests and political religions in western Europe. Of the two principal religions Taylor observes:

"One carried the banner 'Democracy,' the other 'Occidental Civilization.' Fundamentally there was no conflict between the two slogans, since neither meant anything concrete. Each one, however, served as the common bond between a number of discordant faiths polarized by the two extreme sects, Communists and Fascists, which it turned out later cared nothing respectively for either democracy or occidental civilization. ... In an emotional situation of this sort, propaganda becomes childishly easy. . . ."

By the summer of 1938 the disunity induced by the enemy in French public life amounted to a kind of multiple schizophrenia. Taylor's constant fairness is nowhere more apparent than in his explanation of the seemingly sound strategic reasons which led the French General Staff to acquiesce in the Munich settlement. But he feels that in respect to the psychological war, at that time still imperfectly understood by the Allies, Munich was a climax which very nearly ruined France. That France was not immediately ruined Taylor ascribes partly to a psychological change in Daladier. He volunteers a new and, he believes, authentic, story to explain that change: during the meeting at Munich, when Hitler sprang his famous trick--new demands even more severe than those the British and French had already rejected at Godesberg--Daladier completely lost his temper, stalked out of the room and slammed the door.

This display upset the leading actor and the stage managers so much that Goering pursued Daladier, begging him to return. The Bull of the Camargue snorted, refused to come back until Hitler would be reasonable. Daladier returned to Paris with a new sense of power, and the resolve to rally his nation. Tactics which the Allies then belatedly began to fight: 1) Whispering campaigns. A relativly few hired whisperers could start -- and also stop -- on orders from Berlin, waves of defeatist rumors and false news which swept French society. In 1939 the French Government knew enough to take this strategy seriously, established counter-whispering squads.

2) Anti-Semitism. "All intelligent and impartial observers had suspected for years that the Nazis were encouraging anti-Semitic propaganda outside of Germany, not so much to do in the Jews but simply to get the Gentiles fighting among themselves over the Jewish question. Reactionaries in the French Army, like reactionaries everywhere, were reluctant to believe this until they read about the strategy of Jew-baiting in Nazi propa ganda manuals." 3) Synchronization of Communist and Nazi defeatist propaganda. In the early days of the war the French police arrested several people hired by the Communist Party to be "professional weepers," i.e., to drive around in open cars wearing deep mourning and making a show of grief.

4) Ridicule of authority. "I had seen bands of young Nazis in the streets of Vienna playing all sorts of schoolboy tricks on the police, not out of mischief but on orders and for the purpose of destroying public respect for them." Nazi agents with pocket radio transmitters just strong enough to be picked up by reconnaissance planes were used to furnish the jesting German radio with luncheon menus, etc. of important Allied personages.

5) Violence. "Violence, in the Hitlerian theory, is displayed excessively, gratuitously, but not too frequently; the threat always remains a little shadowy and therefore all the more terrible."

6) Rousing false hopes. After taking Polish radio stations last September, the Germans proceeded to broadcast, in Polish, such "news" as that hundreds of British bombers had arrived to succor Poland. (Three weeks ago, during the retreat from Paris, U. S. correspondents reported from Tours that on the road at night men would step up to refugees and say: "Vive la France! Russia has declared war on Germany.")

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