A vast amount of work went into the scheme. German POWS who had been postal clerks were questioned on regulations, details of postal cancellations, correct methods of packing and labelling mail sacks. Aircraft of the U.S. 14th Fighter Group, assigned to the mission, practised daily.

Forgery began on a large scale in the summer of 1944. Near-perfect fakes of 12 and 6 pfennig Hitler stamps were run off; a propaganda parody of the stamp showing Hitler as a Death's Head was also made. German envelopes were printed. The material inside looked authentically German; much of it was crudely produced, as one would expect from a clandestine group operating from inside the Reich.

Over two million names and addresses were chosen from the telephone books of Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Hamburg and Stuttgart. An army of clerks and typists was used to address 15,000 envelopes a weekdifferent typewriters and handwriting had to be used to avoid suspicion. The first mission was on 5 February, 1945. A mail train on its way to Linz in Austria was attacked, and the engine destroyed. Eight mail bags, each with about 800 letters, were dropped on target. The mail was carefully prepared to coincide with towns on the route of the target train. Envelopes were franked immediately prior to take-off to ensure the correct date appeared.

They were addressed to troops as well as to civilians. A newsletterDer Jager der Sudfront, the South Front Hunter-was sent to troops on the Italian front. Forged military envelopes had messages from the "League of German Partisans," suggesting that there was a widespread peace movement in the Army. A special newspaper, Das Neue Deutschland, was printed and dropped. It was effective enough for Himmler's paper, Das Schwarze Korps, to spend two pages denouncing it and its treacherous authors.

The propaganda itself was ingenious and highly varied. "The League of Lonely Women" was invented, which sent combat troops a highly enticing, printed letter. "When are you coming on leave? . . . We are waiting for you in any strange town you may pass through. Cut off the League symbol from the letter. Stick it on your glass when you are in any cafe, in any bar near a station. Soon a member will be with you, and all the traumas of fighting will disappear in the beauty of one night." The kick, of course, came in the tail: Don't be shy, "your wife, sister or loved one is also one of us." Scarcely a thought to keep up the morale of a jealous, worried soldier fighting on the Russian front.

Austrians were urged to master phrases like, "Mej ai slap dse dorti proschn?" (May I slap the dirty Prussian.") But one section shows how serious was the intent behind Operation Cornflakes. "Please Sir, may we hang the Gauleiter ourselves? The executioner lives right around the corner. We will provide the rope. The rope is too thin-too thick-too long-too short. The gallows is not high enough, the Gestapo functionary is too high."

It is almost impossible to tell how effective the scheme was. Only 120

mail bags had been dropped on wrecked trains when the war ended. It is known that copies of Das Neue Deutschland reached troops through the German post in Italy, that it was read by troops as far north as the Baltic, and that 90 percent of prisoners who had read it thought it either genuinely came from Germany or from Switzerland. But the secret has been kept too long to check back on the real impact.

RUMORS AND HOW TO COUNTER THEM*

BY WILBUR SCHRAMM

Rumor, limited in its audience, can be a very effective instrument of psychological operations if the communicator has an understanding of how the message is likely to be received by members of the target audience.

One of the best illustrations of how perception works, and also one of the aspects of human behavior that the psywar operator needs to understand most thoroughly, is the growth and passage of rumors. The most extensive work on rumor has been done by Allport and Postman,1 who have studied the problem not only by observing rumors in society but by setting up experimental rumor passages in the laboratory. One of the rumors they studied during the war had to do with a Chinese teacher on vacation who, shortly before Japan's surrender, drove his car into a Maine village and asked his way to a hilltop from which he could see a view that a tourist guide had told him about. "Someone showed him the way," say Allport and Postman, "but within an hour the community was buzzing with the story that a Japanese spy had ascended the hill to take pictures of the region."

What happened? Someone told the story. It was told over and over again. And as it passed from person to person, three things were happening to it. So, at least, Allport and Postman concluded from their analysis of the case.

In the first place, it was being leveled. Details were being omitted: The courteous and timid, but withal honest, approach of the visitor to the native of whom he inquired his way; the fact that although he was certainly Oriental his precise nationality was unknown. Likewise not mentioned was the fact that the visitor had allowed himself to be readily identified by people along the way; and that no one had seen a camera in his possession.

In the second place, the story was being sharpened:

Having accepted their special interpretation of the Chinese scholar's visit, the rumor agents accentuated certain features while minimizing others. The sharpening of selected details accounts for the overdrawn dramatic quality of the final story. What in the original situation was Oriental became specified as Japanese; what was merely a "man" became a special kind of man, a "spy." The harmless holiday pursuit of viewing the scenery became the much sharper, sinister purpose of espionage. The truth that the visitor had a picture in his hand became sharpened into the act of "taking pictures." The objective fact that no pictures of any possible value to the enemy could be taken from that particular rural location was overlooked.

*Excerpts from The Nature of Psychological Warfare, Operations Research Office, The Johns Hopkins University, Chevy Chase, Md., 1953, pp. 64-68.

In the third place, the story was assimilated:

In the Maine countryside resident natives have had little contact with Orientals. Like most Occidentals they are unable to distinguish a Chinese person from a Japanese. They had only one available rubric for Orientals, firmly implanted in their minds by wartime news and stories: the "Japanese spy." No other category was available for the classification of this unusual visitation.

A Chinese teacher-on-a-holdiay was a concept that could not arise in the minds of most farmers, for they did not know that some American universities employ Chinese scholars on their staffs and that these scholars, like other teachers, are entitled to summer holidays. The novel situation was perforce assimilated in terms of the most available frames of reference.

This process-leveling, sharpening, and assimilation-seems to characterize the passage of all rumors. You can test it yourself, as Allport and Postman did, by playing a kind of parlor game: write a brief story; then whisper it word for word to a guest, who will whisper it to the guest on the side of him, and so around the room. When the story comes back to you, compare it with the original. This has been done in the laboratory many times, in the transmission of both pictures and words, and the same general principles of perception seem to apply.

Consider what was happening in the incident of the Chinese teacher. The villagers were trying to give the incident a meaning. They perceived those details that added up to a meaning, selecting some details, rejecting others, distorting some, adding some (for example, the camera). The important question, of course, is this: what controlled their selection? They were obviously selecting in terms of the frames of reference available to them (which did not include Chinese teachers on vacation in Maine), and in terms of their needs, moods, and anxieties as that moment. The war was much on their minds. Japanese were objects of fear, distrust, and hate. Protecting their country was a high value of great importance to them. Their suspicion of foreigners was of long standing. They had been exposed to the Government's campaign for security of information, to spy movies, to the knowledge that cameras were prohibited around defense installations. And all this added up to a frame of reference, in terms of which they perceived this new event. As Allport and Postman put it:

A yellow man-a Jap-a spy-photographic espionage. One idea led to the other with almost mechanical inevitability until the final conclusion emerged. . . . The three-pronged process of leveling, sharpening, and assimilation reflects the rumor agents' "effort after meaning." The facts of the situation, but dimly understood, did not provide the meaning that the strange visitation required. Hence a single directive idea took hold-the spy motif-and in accordance with it, discordant details were leveled out, incidents sharpened to fit the chosen theme, and the episode as a whole assimilated to the pre-existing structure of feeling and thought characterisite of the members of the group among whom the rumor spread.

Rumors are clearly an important weapon of psywar. But let us look at them here only in terms of the perceptual processes they illustrate and of what they mean to the psywar operator who wants to know how a message is likely to be received.

If you want to anticipate how an intelligent enemy will defend himself you can look at some of America's experiences in rumor defense during World War II.

In general, this country used two kinds of defense against rumor. The government agencies preferred the indirect method of smothering rumors with facts, that is, they did not repeat rumors even for the purpose of refuting them. The theory behind this defense is (a) that "rumor flies in the absence of news" and (b) that to repeat a rumor even for refutation may spread it farther. Therefore agencies like OWI, when they learned of a dangerous rumor, would release facts in answer to it without ever mentioning the rumor.

On the other hand, nongovernmental organizations and civilians put their faith in rumor clinics, which chiefly took the form of newspaper columns or radio programs in which rumors were selected for ridicule and refutation. The theory here was to bring rumors out into the open into a climate of fact and understanding, where they could not flourish. Such evaluation and study of these rumor clinics as was made indicates that (a) there was no evidence that newspaper rumor clinics, filled with ridicule and negation as they were, actually served to spread any rumors farther; (b) however, it was regarded as possibly dangerous to print a rumor in bold-face type, or to repeat the rhythms and slogan-like qualities of some of the more effective rumors; (c) it was felt that radio rumor clinics were more likely than printed clinics to spread a rumor, because of the dialtwisting habits of American listeners; and (d) there was some slight evidence that the clinics impeded the spread of rumor, and no doubt whatsoever that they succeeded in making their communities rumorconscious.

Along with these defenses, of course, there was a poster, newspaper, and radio campaign aimed at security of information. Typical slogans were "Think before you talk," "Enemy ears are listening," "Don't kill her daddy with careless talk." This is standing operating procedure (SOP) for any country at war.

NOTES

1. G. Allport and L. Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Holt, 1947).

"PRACTICAL JOKES"*

BY EDWARD GEARY LANSDALE

Some inactive avenues are opened when PSYOP is thought of as an opportunity to play "practical jokes." Results often justify the concept.

Conventional military men think of combat psywar almost exclusively in terms of leaflets or broadcasts appealing to the enemy to surrender. Early on, I realized that pyswar had a wider potential than that. A whole

*Excerpts from In the Midst of Wars: An American's Mission to Southeast Asia, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1972, pp. 71-75. Reprinted with the permission of the author, copyright holder.

new approach opens up, for example, when one thinks of psywar in terms of playing a practical joke. We all know that many people risk their lives and safety to paint slogans and appeals on walls in forbidden territory, motivated as much by anticipation of the antics of their outraged enemies as by ideology or patriotism. Low humor seems an appropriate response, somehow, to the glum and deadly practices of Communists and other authoritarians. (I recall a case in Europe once, when militant youths were to partake in a massive street demonstration. The Communist party had followed the book, systematically placing its cadre to incite the demonstrators into acts of violence. Police and military forces were ready to prevent this with tear gas, rifles, and bayonets. But bloodshed was avoided. A ribald benefactor brought out cauldrons of hot chocolate and coffee and invited the would-be demonstrators to share his brews-which he had laced generously with a powerful laxative. The militants found themselves with more urgent business to attend to than street brawls.) When I introduced the practical-joke aspect of psywar to the Philippine Army, it stimulated some imaginative operations that were remarkably effective.

To the superstitious, the Huk battleground was a haunted place filled with ghosts and eerie creatures. Some of its aura of mystery was imparted to me on my own visits there. Goosebumps rose on my arms on moonless nights in Huk territory as I listened to the haunting minor notes of trumpets playing Pampanguena dirges in the barrios or to the mournful singing of men and women known as nangangaluluwa as they walked from house to house on All Saints' night telling of lost and hungry souls. Even Magsaysay believed in the apparition called a kapre, a huge black man said to walk through tall grass at dusk to make it stir or to sit in a tree or astride a roof smoking a large cigar.

One psywar operation played upon the popular dread of an asuang, or vampire, to solve a difficult problem. Local politicians opposed Magsaysay's plan of moving more troops out of defensive garrisons to form further mobile and aggressive BCTS [battalion combat teams], and in one town the local bigwigs pointed out that a Huk squadron was based on a hill near town. If the troops left, they were sure the Huks would swoop down on the town and the bigwigs would be their victims. Only if the Huk squadron left the vicinity would they agree to the removal of the guarding troops. The problem, therefore, was to get the Huks to move. The local troops had not been able to do this.

A combat psywar squad was brought in. It planted stories among town residents of an asuang living on the hill where the Huks were based. Two nights later, after giving the stories time to circulate among Huk sympathizers in the town and make their way up to the hill camp, the psywar squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks. When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels,