‘Your homes will be destroyed, your family killed’: the US has dropped millions of war propaganda leaflets – but do they work?

A new interactive exhibit by the digital archive group Khajistan displays some of the psyops leaflets released in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya to audiences in New York, which means that, finally, the American people can see and judge the messages that were made in their name. For The Guardian, I wrote about the exhibit and examined the genre of the war leaflet. Below is an excerpt, but you really must check out the piece at The Guardian. The layout is awesome.

For over a century, the United States military has been dropping propaganda leaflets in deliberate psychological operations, or psyops, to achieve success in war. But the key question behind the effort remains unanswered: does it even work?

In 1918, the US released more than 3m leaflets behind enemy lines by plane and hydrogen balloon. To their delight, they found the leaflets helped erode morale and unit cohesion among the Germans in the first world war. Or so the story goes.

Between 1942 and 1945, much of this effort was coordinated through the Office of War Information. The dropping of propaganda leaflets continued not just in the second world war but in every major war the US has been involved in since.

Thanks to Khajistan, a New York-based digital archive group, many of these leaflets are now on display in an interactive exhibit titled Office of War Information (OWI) at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

Since 2022, Khajistan, which preserves “art, words, and media from forgotten or silenced communities, from the Indus to the Maghreb”, has collected hundreds of propaganda leaflets from US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, along with a collection of leaflets dropped on Japan during the second world war.

While the official narrative is that psyop leafleting is hugely successful, internal documents reveal a complicated picture. One example is a now declassified 1971 report from the US air force that challenged psyops’ putative successes in Vietnam.

In that war, the amount of paper falling from the south-east Asian skies was immense. From 1968 to 1971, the US and the south Vietnamese government dropped about 5bn leaflets a year over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the report says, dispensing them “by the handful in 0-2Bs [a type of aircraft] or dumped wholesale in loads of 12 million from C-130s properly characterized as ‘B.S. [bullshit] Bombers’”.

Why bullshit? The air force document found that leaflets “often transgressed elementary rules of persuasion and therefore lacked credibility”. They “violated a basic rule” of persuasion, namely that “allegations about oneself or the enemy should not diverge widely from the facts as the target population sees them”. Upon closer examination of interviews with enemy prisoners of war, the air force found that the leaflets were not exactly used as intended.

“One PoW [prisoner of war] explained why he had two leaflets in his possession at the time of his capture,” the report says, “they were ‘carried as paper with which [the] source could roll his cigarettes.’ Another source explained that everyone in his unit ‘including the cadre, used leaflets as toilet tissue.’ Soldiers in some units collected the leaflets as souvenirs.”

Read the rest (and view the rest) here…