Читать книгу Psychological Warfare - Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger - Страница 39

In World War I, the British made most of the mistakes and learned most of the lessons which the Americans were to make and to learn in World War II. The British Foreign Office formed a War Propaganda Bureau in 1914, but a great deal of the effort was done by private facilities (patriotic associations) or by lower political and military echelons of the government and armed forces—and without coordination. Things became so confused that at the mid-point of the war, the British organized a Department of Information with Colonel John Buchan at its head. (Buchan will be remembered by all adventure-lovers as author of The Thirty-nine Steps, The Courts of the Morning, and other first-class thrillers; he was also made a peer under the style, Lord Tweedsmuir, and became a popular Governor-General of Canada.) Buchan did not always get along with the committee which floated above him, telling him how to run his business.

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.