Sotsinzhiniring in military propaganda

During World War II, the British got the personal files of the commanders of German submarines. It seems to be not very important information for military purposes - the boats have already entered the missions, what will they do. But the tatty propaganda specialists got involved. The Allies had daily broadcasts, and here is an example:

- We appeal to you, the commander of the submarine "U-507" Lieutenant Commander Blum. For your part, it was very rash to leave your wife in Bremen, where your friend Lieutenant Commander Grossberg is currently spending her vacation. They have already been seen at least three times together in a restaurant, and your neighbor Frau Mogler says: your children are sent to their mother in Mecklenburg ...
Quote from Operation Thunderstorm - I. Bunich

Beauty, right? And, most importantly, it corresponds exactly to one of the basic methods of social-engineering penetration into the infrastructure during a targeted attack.

In general, it turned out that many modern methods of public relations went from our, English and German developments of the Second World War. And while I was writing a book about how to tell people about my company, I needed to climb to confirm and pick up a couple of historical facts. At the same time, an excellent layer of completely wild - or beautiful - stories and methods of persuasion was revealed. About them and tell.
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Oral and radio channels

One of the first technologies, developed by Dr. Goebbels, and then successfully adopted by the propaganda troops of all countries, is the most timely delivery of accurate news. For example, broadcasting a loudspeaker from the nearest hill, most often - to border detachments or detachments that sound reaches during a positional war.

The point is to convey the facts as objectively as possible and without your comments. After a few weeks of broadcasting, the enemy becomes accustomed to trusting them and listening to them - it is very easy to verify both local and global information. Actually, the Germans gave the method perfection - they broadcast what the average enemy soldier did not yet know, and therefore he willingly trusted the channel. Further, if necessary, the necessary facts were “mixed in” into the channel, or it simply gained popularity, and other, more clever methods could be used.

Then the genre of military documentary and analytical programs was born. It turned out that instead of blatantly interfering with news, one could run, for example, logical reasoning based on the interpretations of various military documents; then - to stream interviews with prisoners of war or their recorded speeches. And so on. The point is to logically bring the enemy to the fact that his business is hopeless. And so that he himself understood on the basis of the analysis of the submitted information. Broadcasting for submarines from the example at the very beginning is also a kind of such analytics, albeit a rather rare one.

Asians were famous for receiving material in particular - they forced American prisoners of war to first sign a piece of paper about good conditions in the camp in exchange for additional rations, then write one of their own, then tell it in words - and finally write down an appeal to compatriots on this the plot. Handsome men - every single step was easy to do, and as a result, exactly what was needed went on the air. At some point, they handled several tens of thousands of prisoners, and then they were simply released - it was not easy to give up their pacifist convictions even at home.

Please note - we are not talking about the distortion of facts. Just the right selection and the right feed. A little more attention to this, a little less attention to this — and now the enemy has realized what was required.

But back to broadcasting radio and sound. The third stage of the attack (after facts and analysts) is an ultimatum when the enemy is in a dangerous situation. It can force the enemy to surrender to a deliberately losing situation - which will allow not to waste ammunition and personnel for the operation. The main thing is for the enemy to clearly understand that his situation is really hopeless, otherwise doubts may arise and he will begin to resist. Awareness here was already a weapon.

In general, propaganda extremely rarely required immediate action from the enemy. It was possible to process the enemy for months so that later, when the ultimatum was put out, he took exactly the right decision.

What appeals to me most of all, it was then that very substantial compilations of information and the corresponding genres of journalism were developed. The fact is that broadcasting, for example, a car with a loudspeaker could last 3-6 minutes maximum, after which it flew to its position from a mortar. As a result, for example, our equipment complexes were recommended to be moved after every 3 minutes of broadcasting.

The transmission start signal was very important. It is always the same, always recognizable, and in the past weeks of learning the first genre of objective information is also attractive to the opponent. The enemy calms down and prepares to listen. The Allied forces know that after this sound, without extreme necessity, it is impossible to make a loud noise and interfere with the transfer. Then comes the introduction: here it turned out the most important to personally refer to the part, naming its number, for example. The goal is to establish contact, to attract attention, in essence - the “title” of the program. Then comes the payload - the main text and summary. The main text is objective and written so that you want to agree logically with it. At least, at first it corresponds to what the soldiers themselves think (according to the propagandist). They don’t put pressure on this block, they don’t call for anything, they just put the facts in front of them. Next, punching, to separate the parts, and in the summary, in fact, the conclusion. For stupid. In the end - the final part of the protocol, the story of when the next program begins. And the final signal.

Later it turned out that if the enemy hears the broadcasting station well, you can put the enemy’s folk music in the background. If there was time, the enemy was also allowed to listen to songs like “And the young one does not know what the guy was at the end,” or about his home. To mourn and cry, began to feel sad and nagging about the orders of the commander. This is easier to shoot.

In general, this three-stage thing is a classic of propaganda. Channel recruitment with operational information, focusing on necessary facts (still objective, but already presented simply more often than others and from different sides), an ultimatum.

Let's look at another classic attack vector, and then move on to more interesting cases.

Leaflets - maximum efficiency per word

When in Astrakhan I needed to make an advertisement for our satellite dishes with the Internet, there was nowhere to learn. The old military advised me two books, one of which was “on working with the masses”, the second one - “look there about advertising”. The book on working with the masses turned out to be a manual on dispersing meetings, where at the very beginning the author feels like sighing and lamenting that it is already impossible to use machine gun shooting over heads and therefore something must be solved in words. The second was the analysis of specific leaflets of the Allies, and it was she who gave me a lot. I think I’m not mistaken much if I say that since the Second World War, in advertising it hasn't changed a lot. So let's see.

The flyer (or today is a blog post) is fast, small and very concentrated feed. Can be applied immediately as the situation changes. It should be as simple and clear as possible (the soldier doesn’t have time to read - the flyers were often very quickly selected). One post, sorry, a flyer - one idea. It is necessary - hard arguments (types of arguments depend on the nation, for example, for the Chinese it turned out to be more important to read the “reviews” of their prisoners and suitable quotations of the wise men, and for the Germans logic on numbers and facts won.

Maximum simplicity: the soldier is hungry, angry, not enough sleep and poorly reads. It is necessary that he learned the most specific. Today, the reader is just rushing to the next tab, he has a chat in parallel, and he also goes to the subway. No much difference.

And finally, the design - such as to attract. The only time is that if the opponent introduced a punishment for picking up leaflets, then, on the contrary, it should be invisible.

Just like in our network.

Let's take a look at a couple of frequent genres. The first is a camouflage leaflet, a road apple attack vector or phishing according to modern terminology. We study the leaflets of the enemy, which are used to distribute to his own troops. Then we do exactly the same, only ours. An excellent example - in the American military units often and widely distributed materials about the danger of sexually transmitted diseases. And reasonably. The Germans took a couple of these, and wrote their own with the same promise. Only the argument was different:

“The military authorities checked 20,000 women. Over 80 percent of them turned out to be sick with venereal diseases. Among verified women, only 21 percent are prostitutes. The remaining 79 percent are distributed as follows: 61 percent are casual women who have entered into a casual relationship, 18 percent are girls who are familiar to the military (17 percent are under the age of 20). Both groups of women were mostly members of the rapidly growing society of women "V" (“Victory”), who declared their patriotic desire to console the troops. Is your girlfriend one of them too? ”.
Quote from the book Krysko V. G. - Secrets of psychological warfare (goals, objectives, methods, forms, experience). I advise you, there is just all the experience in the methodology.

What is not in the book is the fact that at that time there was a very successful BBC propaganda for the “V” movement, and after this leaflet the soldiers twitched every time they heard an advertisement on their own radio. Insanely beautiful approach.

Another very informative genre were the leaflets-passes. These are such things that you had to show the enemy so that you would be captured and not shot on the way. A difficult example is at the top of the post.

On the “pass”, the route to the nearest “prisoner of war” point was described, simple recommendations were given on how exactly to run, and then the conditions and menu of prisoners were signed. As a rule, the menu was chosen so that the enemy felt inferior, and very, very much wanted to eat. And so that he remembers about this leaflet every time he eats, and every time he sleeps in the cold.

"The daily menu of the combined forces:
Breakfast: egg, bread and butter, 2 fruits, fruit juice, milk, coffee, tea. Lunch: meat, beans or potatoes, a sandwich with cheese, sweets, fruit juice. Dinner: meat, bread and butter, greens (vegetables), egg, milk, fruit and fruit juice, coffee, tea. Prisoners feed in the same way as soldiers of the combined forces. ”

At first, such leaflets did not roll with the Japanese. It turned out that not a single Japanese trespian would raise the slogan “I surrender” above his head, this is simply humiliating in their culture. Replaced by "I stop the resistance" - and it went. True, the following peculiarity has surfaced - some have gone to the posts of Americans with grenades in their pockets and such leaflets above their heads.

Sometimes in leaflets poems or photos were thrown at home, so that the soldier would again get depressed and depressed.



It was precisely on such leaflets that the anticlamination or the classical “pyramid” of the text was well developed, when the main most important theses are brought to the beginning, and then gradually proved and disclosed. Before that, the opposite was done - first logic, then conclusions. Today and now we call the anti-climax "part to kata".

And on the leaflets were social widgets - for example, "Read and tell your comrades."

In the occupied territories, the technology of the leaflets was confidently combined with the developments of radio and sound - a pictorial and evidence series of leaflets superimposed on a three-step method of conveying information and operational news. But local people from somewhere have to find out what is happening in the world, right? The only point - if the leaflets were, in general, do not care about mistakes, it was extremely important not to screw up the language - the smallest drawback or emphasis in the telecast could be a reason for laughter.

Features of the radio protocol

The main communication standards (the beginnings of modern protocols with correction) have already begun to appear on the WWII radio exchange. This put quite interesting features on the distribution of your information across the networks of the enemy:

• Just wedging in short messages: you are waiting for the enemy station to stop calling others (waiting for answers) and brazenly transmit your message at its operating frequency. Effectively, like a hammer sickle, but in the absence of the best options at first - very cool. The goal is to bring something interesting to the enemy radio operator so that he wants to hear more. Payload'a not yet.
• In networks with the “star” architecture - the headquarters and division stations - the wedging occurred at the moment when the central one informed everyone in turn about an important message. When the broadcast is 90% made up of listeners, and the central radio operators drive the others one by one into the channel, you rush in and bring your interesting piece. 1 minute maximum.
• The next story, when the enemy is already interested - targeted messages, in particular, via radio telephone communication. Here the peculiarity is that in order to establish contact it was not necessary to wait for confirmation - they could have shot the radio operator for such confirmation. Instead, they used workarounds - either they informed in advance of the jargon what to do (report interference in a specific way, for example), or asked to press the PTT button once without sending a message, or invent something else.

If it was relatively easy to enter someone else’s airwaves, then there were no particularly bright cases of entering the TV broadcast (although the equipment was available at the later stages of the war) - the captured TV network was usually used, which was broadcast for civilians.

Principle of truthfulness of information

I often cite examples from the propaganda of England in the 1940s when I am asked at conferences about the need to be very clearly responsible for every word in advertising. And do not exaggerate. The fact is that then the BBC was required to be believed. A rather interesting situation has arisen: to prevent German bombers from taking radio stations, the broadcasting of Great Britain was reduced to one channel - in fact, BBC. And, therefore, it is worth it to screw it up once, as the whole information wave of England will lose its effectiveness.

A strict standard was adopted - telling the truth and not minimizing losses. Each program was opened by the so-called “match score” - a summary of shot down aircraft of the Kingdom and the Luftwaffe. In 1940, England’s losses became too large, and then it was possible to transform the “campaign of truth” into a “campaign of anger”, that is, to motivate aggression against the “inhumanity” of the enemy.

Later, as a result of the veracity of the campaign, two more steep side effects were obtained:

1. The British measured the effectiveness of the German counter-propaganda, and came to the conclusion that it was possible not to jam it and not even comment - a sensible Englishman understood that it was noodles on the ears.
2. On the other hand, the Germans were forced to spend money on quite complex countermeasures against English propaganda — many, including pilots, were used to listening to it as an objective source of information.

Campaign "V"

All warring parties included propaganda in different languages:

“By the summer of 1940, the German transmissions were already conducted in more than 30 languages. One of the leaders of the Nazi broadcasting compared the German short-wave stations with long-range guns, firing across all borders. In order to suppress the influence of foreign broadcasting on the German population, the Nazis banned the interception of foreign radio programs in Germany from September 1, 1939, and the death penalty was introduced for disseminating information gathered from them.

After the entry of Great Britain into the war in September 1939, the European Service was created within the structure of the BBC, which was entrusted with the task of providing information and propaganda support to the military operations of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition in the European theater of operations. Broadcasts to the European audience were conducted in both English and German, French, Portuguese, Spanish and other languages ​​of the peoples of Europe. The BBC, a German-language broadcast that started in February 1938, quickly increased the volume of broadcasts and improved their content. In an effort to counteract the impact of British broadcasting, the Nazi bloc states have jammed BBC broadcasts. In turn, the British authorities, who were convinced of the low effectiveness of Hitler’s radio propaganda, refused to reciprocate jamming German radio broadcasts to England. ”
Bespalova A.G., Kornilov E.A., Korochensky A.P.,
Luchinsky Yu.V., Stanko A.I.
HISTORY OF WORLD JOURNALISM .

The Belgian director discovered that the letter V for the occupied territories has about a general meaning - either Victory or Freedom (Vrijheid). Morse’s point-to-dash designation of the letter V coincided with the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

“Radio listeners began to repeat these sounds in all possible ways as a sign of support for the resistance movement,” writes Welch. “Throughout the occupied territory of Europe, people plotted the letter V and tapped it with a“ Morse code ”, demonstrating their solidarity ... July 19, 1941 Winston Churchill approvingly spoke of it in his speech and since then began to depict the V sign with his fingers.”
Psychological techniques that helped win the Second World War
Fiona Macdonald
BBC Culture

The result can be observed even now - the gesture “V” on two fingers is quite popular in England. Just do not confuse, if you turn the fingers and show how we have "two more beers" - it turns out "go to the ass."


A lot of spies slept in sign language, ordering beer - here, for example, you had to bend your thumb.

There is a popular myth in RuNet that during the bombing raids there was a case with a non-existent match. Two hours a commentator in the most severe fog (not allowing air defense to work) commented on the BBC to the whole of London accurate marks and beats. And it kept the Germans from the next raid. So, there is no exact historical evidence for this (or rather, replicas are cited), and the myth seems to have come from a rather popular game about a match that did not exist. But some indirect evidence suggests that something like that happened.

“One Saturday a big football match was played between Celtic and Rangers. Bombing raid on Clydeside. The commentator was RE, Kingsley (REX). In the late morning, however, it has been noted that a letter has been sent. But it wouldn’t be raid. So, REX Kingsley didn’t really need to be able to complete the game, such as cheering and chanting. He even announced that it was a gloriously sunny day. It was really like the life of the German Luftwaffe. ”

Another of the technologies developed at that time is worth noting, again, not new, but from the time of Diogenes, the technology of the repeating thesis brought to perfection. If the Greek and Roman uncles simply recommended in their speeches on the forum to repeat the main idea at the beginning, middle and end with different words, then here they went further. How do you like 11 variants of a leaflet with the same thought, but with different proving facts? It looks really like the different opinions of several different sources, and not one.

In the same period came the first working HADI-cycles, in particular - on the flyers-passes. It worked like this: suppose the enemies give up a little. Well, ok, let's launch more layouts and see what sounds more convincing. We believe the more soldiers come with - and then replicate along the whole front. The simplest example of such a cycle in an ordinary city in peacetime is three announcements on a wall with different phones: according to which one is called better, it continues to develop further in the genetic algorithm as a parent.

The mechanics of the everyday story were worked out (mainly in the occupied territories) - this is a scheme for the rapid shift of moral guidelines so that recipients from “this is unacceptable” would go to the state of “well, this is statistics”. Science of conviction paced by leaps and bounds.

The Germans tried to use the modern political course of “chattering” in counter-propaganda. This is when an adversary broadcasts about the success of a particular leader, and then the exploits of Chuck Norris are attached to him. As a result, the listener does not know what to believe. But something did not go. As it turned out a decade later, it was necessary to mask the chattering under one’s own channel — that is, for example, to let camouflage leaflets with excessive praise, and not to do so from the German wave.

Emotional resonance has been studied a lot (this is when something alongside a good person can also be considered good - when a politician stands alongside a famous actor, for example). But such subtle details objectively became effective much later, in peacetime. Rather, the genre-technical things came to the fore. For example, German propaganda, together with the speed of information, introduced the “presence effect”, which today is just a technique of journalism. This is, for example, when a journalist talks about a collision in a day, but still bends down, and the camera is very unsteady, someone runs around in terrible agitation and screams.

A theory of mediators was developed for the intelligentsia and officers. What is now used to work with bloggers in advertising campaigns. The task of the media is not to give information, but to bring in rumors that will be picked up by opinion leaders. Already the result of processing these rumors will be significant for the average person who consults with friends. Therefore, the goal is not a direct conviction, but the creation of an ecosystem in which opinion leaders are forced to discuss issues that are beneficial to you.

English and our blocks have paid a lot of attention to language and symbolism. The seizure of terms was extremely important - for example, not a "perfidious attack", but a "peacekeeping operation", not "killed all living things", but "completed the liberation of the territory", not "poured onto the city 50,000 destructive elements", but "produced carpet bombing on strategic objects "and so on. Years later, standards were introduced to show their losses on television to others — if, for example, they were equal in words, then the proportion in the picture of the time of their destruction to others was 1:10. And so on. Quite a few examples of working with images have the good old Sontag.

In general, the next time you watch a professionally made video on TV, you may recognize the technology of 1939. They are definitely there.