subversive warfare

subversive warfare. In parallel with war at sea, on land, and in the air, another aspect of warfare flourished from 1939 to 1945: war by propaganda and sabotage, aiming at the subversion of the opposing side so that soldiers folded up without fighting. This was in accord with a very ancient principle of war, laid down by the Chinese sage Sun Tzu in the fourth century bc: that the supreme art of generalship is to subdue the enemy without any battles.

All the principal war leaders (being politicians) paid close attention to propaganda, and to what would now be called the polishing of their own images as almost superhuman—a fact kept secret by all of them at the time, as a matter at once of political decency and of expediency. One could not be seen admiring oneself in a looking-glass; but one could make sure the glass was kept polished bright. All affected to despise their opponents, as criminal warmongers; all encouraged cartoonists to do their worst in illustrating this. Many savage results of this policy are on file; a few are still familiar.

At the start of the war, Chamberlain's government in London believed that Germans would listen to reason. For months, RAF Bomber Command scattered over western Germany leaflets compiled by the foreign office and the ministry of information, setting out the reasonableness of the Allied case against Nazi expansion. They had no perceptible impact on German opinion, though the leaflet raids gave aircrew some essential training in night navigation.

Leaflet-dropping went on all through the war, even after the dropping of bombs became much more common; it was practised by the Luftwaffe as well as by the British and US air forces. New methods for delivering leaflets by artillery shell were developed, as had been done (with considerable success, in rotting German Army morale) in the last year of the First World War. The Americans invented a leaflet bomb, to improve distribution from the air. Leaflets had several objects: to attempt to sap the morale of enemy troops and civilians, to the point of provoking desertion or riot; to provide cover for drops nearby of agents or stores for secret resisters (see SOE); and to supply occupied countries where wireless sets had been confiscated with news of the progress of the war. No one has ever established how much, or how little, impact these leaflets had.

Forged pamphlets were also frequently used by both sides (see Political Warfare Executive for a British example). They were called black propaganda, because inadmissible by the government that produced them. White propaganda was based on facts, albeit distorted to favour those disseminating it; black depended largely on lies and deceit. Disseminating leaflets sometimes called for less haphazard means than scattering them from aircraft, but seems not to have been beyond several secret services' capacities. Though the results are unquantifiable, the effort was presumed, by all the countries that used it, to have had some weakening influence on their opponents' war effort.

Occupying forces, the Germans in particular, made lavish use of posters, to instruct civilians in what to do, or to announce uses made by the occupiers of their power to punish. It was neither very difficult nor very dangerous to deface posters, by simply tearing them down or painting them out, or by adding slogans to them such as the variants on H7, by which Norwegians signified loyalty to their exiled King Haakon VII (1872–1957), or the ubiquitous V for Victory sign.

Broadcasting was more important and more effective. This was on the whole a pre-televisual age, though in Paris television continued to broadcast for two hours daily, to a small audience of the well-to-do. Sound broadcasting became the essential wartime news medium; called, behind the scenes, white propaganda. It provided news much faster, if less permanently, than any newspaper, as well as providing a steady source of entertainment in blacked-out cities and in countrysides deprived of the means of transport. In all the warring nations, government exercised control over what—particularly what news—was broadcast. In the Soviet Union, wireless sets were confiscated or were untuneable: they could only receive official programmes. In many parts of Nazi-occupied Europe, wireless sets were confiscated, sooner or later, by the occupiers. While the BBC retained its independence of the British government (only during the general strike of 1926 has it ever come directly under crown control) it never made difficulties about withholding anything that government did not want publicly known, and provided a regular channel through which ministers could address the country. Churchill in particular made use of radio; some of his broadcast speeches, such as the one on the night the Germans attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA), are still vividly remembered. Roosevelt also was master of the ‘fireside chat’, through the much more diffuse radio networks of the USA. Mussolini, Hitler, and Goebbels, on the other side, broadcast occasionally to sustain their nations' morale; as, rather rarely, did Stalin.

In the USA, Stephenson, who ran all British secret activities west of the Atlantic, brought off an important coup in 1940–1: he succeeded in persuading a great many newspaper owners and broadcasters that anti-Nazism was a more constitutional attitude to adopt than the hitherto prevalent isolationism. It was not he alone who did this; but the fundamental change-round in American press and hence public opinion was of great importance.

Once the habit of listening to broadcasts had been formed, an opening was made for subversives: users of black rather than white propaganda. Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) had seen this first, back in the 1920s. Goebbels took the idea over. German broadcasts helped to undermine French morale in the winter of 1939–40, before the fall of France in June 1940. French morale was in fact under attack from two sides: from the Germans and from the French Communist Party, acting under the Comintern's orders and seeking to persuade the French that capitalism was in its death-throes, not worth the slightest struggle. This two-sided attack helped to drain from one of the world's most prestigious armies its will to fight, and played a large part in securing the Germans' overwhelming triumph in May– June 1940.

Goebbels then turned his broadcasts against the UK; never realizing that ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, as his Berlin announcer was scornfully nicknamed from his Mayfair accent, promptly became to the English a figure of fun (see Joyce).

Was it possible that what did not work against the UK would work against its originator, Germany? SO1, the propaganda branch of SOE—removed in August 1941 to become the Political Warfare Executive (PWE)—attempted through two short-wave stations to weaken the morale of the Wehrmacht by black propaganda broadcasts. Sefton Delmer's Soldatensender Calais, aimed at the German Army, and Donald McLachlan's Kurzwellensender Atlantik, aimed at U-boat crews, pretended to come from Wehrmacht sources that were both anti-British and anti-Hitler. They used a frankly scabrous tone, mixing news items with descriptions of the private lives of German high commanders and of the wives and girlfriends at home of German soldiers and sailors on duty at the front, for this, they thought, would attract a bored audience. ( Stafford Cripps once picked up one of these broadcasts by accident and was so shocked, when he discovered where the broadcasts came from, that he tried to get the whole enterprise suppressed.) Again, how much actual impact these programmes exerted has never been established.

More than 170 broadcasting stations worked, at one time or another, in Europe during the war; most of them black, like the Italian Radio Himalaya which pretended to work from northern India, or the Voix Chrétienne through which Moscow sought to influence the occupied French. More publicly, Moscow Radio provided, throughout the war, a platform from which the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union could proclaim to the world what communist policy was; it gave essential guidance to foreign comrades, who might have trouble in keeping up with the twists and turns of the party line and, again, exercised a no doubt appreciable if unquantifiable impact.

Vatican radio was less outspoken, as the Pope's concordat with Mussolini had mildly muzzled it; but another voice could be heard in central Europe, which provided fresh, unvarnished news of the course of the war. This was Radio Suisse, broadcasting from Lausanne, valuable to those who could pick up its broadcasts as a check on all the combatants, for it gave a clear, neutral account of events. The BBC, early in the war, took the decision also to publish the news unvarnished, even if markedly unfavourable to the British; when the BBC and Radio Suisse both said the same thing, as they usually did, the listener could believe it to be true.

The Japanese also made effective use of radio during the war; but until they precipitated the China incident in July 1937, they despised propaganda. They even refused to use the word, preferring the appropriate phrase ‘thought war’. However, they then realized that they needed to adopt western techniques; and once they had overrun American, British, and Dutch colonies in South-East Asia in early 1942, they wasted no time in establishing several short-wave transmitters there. (It is interesting to note that short-wave receivers had been banned in Japan since 1932.) They broadcast the benefits of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere to those who lived in the lands the Japanese now occupied, and emphasized the downfall of their former colonial masters; they also carried on an intensive radio war against Australia as well as one against Allied forces fighting the Pacific war (see Tokyo Rose for an example).

These broadcasts struck the right chord among their Asian listeners when, during the early—and, for the Japanese, successful—months of the war they questioned Australia's ‘White Australia’ policy. Other successful programmes, which certainly had their eager listeners in Australia and in the USA, were those in which prisoners-of-war sent messages home. These broadcasts were sent out unscheduled between other propaganda items, so that anyone wanting to hear the prisoners had to listen to the complete programme. But on the whole Japanese broadcasts aimed at Australia showed that, in order to have any impact, propaganda must be relevant and is better based on truth than on falsehood. As the Japanese were losing their war within a year of entering it, it was difficult for them to fulfil either of these preconditions. So, for example, when Japanese broadcasters described Japan's material shortages as being ‘only psychological’ and the fall of Okinawa as ‘the quintessence of Japanese strategy’ (quoted in L. Meo, Japan's Radio War on Australia 1941–1945, Melbourne, 1968, pp. 152–3) it is not surprising that they were not taken very seriously. (For the subjects of Japanese broadcasts about the course of the war, see Chart.)

Another useful medium for influencing opinion was film (see also culture sections of the major powers). All warring governments kept close control over the brief newsreels that then prefaced almost every cinema show, just as they controlled newspaper communiqués of war correspondents and made sure that their own leaders and armed forces were well depicted in them, by contrast with the other side's. In the dark of a cinema, fairly brave citizens might dare to boo a leader they greatly distrusted; this was sometimes an early sign that the other side's propaganda was beginning to bite.

Films could also be used directly as propaganda vehicles. The British film industry had begun to show great skill in documentary film-making in the 1930s, and many films useful to the war effort followed; while, on the German side, Victory in the West (Sieg im Westen) at least has become a classic—a brilliant evocation of the Wehrmacht's triumphs in the Netherlands, Belgium and France in 1940.

The other principal formative influence on opinion was the press. One of the first steps Axis occupying forces always took, to secure their hold on a newly-conquered country, was to take over the principal newspaper offices as well as the broadcasting stations. Newspapers thereafter printed the Wehrmacht or other official communiqués, with leading articles carefully slanted to secure obedience to the conquerors' will.

Almost at once, a clandestine press began to appear in most occupied countries. Bernard Ijzerdraat, who published the very first Dutch clandestine broadsheet as early as 15 May 1940, the day after the Dutch Army surrendered, was unusually quick off the mark; he had thousands of followers, all over occupied Europe. The Dutch in the end produced more than a thousand clandestine titles, the French even more; some of these were, like Ijzerdraat's, merely cyclostyled sheets, sometimes only a single sheet; others were well printed, up to a dozen pages long, and distributed in tens of thousands.

Distributing a clandestine newspaper was quite as dangerous as any other form of resistance; quite as liable to lead to prison, concentration camp, gallows. Receiving one was not quite so dangerous—one could always say it had simply been pushed through the letterbox by an unknown hand; but to be found in possession of several different sheets, or several copies of a single one, was certainly counted as a crime and might involve heavy penalties.

Much attention has been devoted by historians to the clandestine press, because historians like to handle archival evidence, and this is the obvious archival side of resistance. Yet as sources for what life in occupied territory was like, clandestine newspapers have several faults: their coverage could not help being incomplete, they were produced under severe and dangerous conditions, and many of them were intended to promote the aims of a particular political party, with consequent bias in their outlook. They must not be conflated with the morning newspaper produced in a free country, which the biggest of them did their best to resemble, for their sources and origins were entirely different. Naturally, they were most prevalent in the most highly developed and literate societies, where there were plenty of small presses available on which they could be printed. In general, it can safely be said that they had a sizeable (though, again, unquantifiable) impact on public opinion, turning it away from the idea that people ought to do what they were told to the idea that an Allied victory was not only desirable but attainable.

Their news-carrying function mattered; when men and women could read for themselves how the war was going on distant fronts, they could form a sounder opinion of how well-based Axis control in their immediate neighbourhood might be; hence the awesome importance of the battle of Stalingrad, because it was a manifest, colossal setback for the German Army that had hitherto been presented by Goebbels as invincible. The fall of Tunisia three months later, at the close of the North African campaign, with an even larger toll of Axis prisoners-of-war, had a reinforcing if a less dramatic effect.

The fate of the intelligentsia, which considered it had a duty to keep public opinion up-to-date, varied from one occupied area to another. In Poland and in south-east Europe and Asia anyone with any sort of academic qualification was at once interned (the Soviet authorities took as much trouble over this in Poland and the Baltic States as the Germans did), and kept from any sort of public pronouncement at all. In Norway all the history teachers were at one time arrested, and interned in nasty conditions on moored ships; they succeeded in maintaining their peaceful protest against teaching history on the lines to be laid down for them by the Gestapo. In the rest of occupied Europe some teachers took the side of the occupier, and were allowed to remain at work, while others tried to take up a more resistant stance—usually after some months or years had passed. Axis censorship of all publications was automatic. It was possible for the ingenious to introduce doubles entendres into their work, which their compatriots would see but the censors would miss: hence, for example, a spurt of publications in Dutch discussing resistance to the Spaniards during the Eighty Years War of 1568–1648, using methods that could be used against the Nazis.

One other subversive influence over public opinion was available, as it had been for centuries: the sermon, in church or chapel (see also religion). Though priests had few openings left to them in Poland, in western and southern Europe they were comparatively undisturbed. It was noticed by those trying to organize escapes (see MI9) that, outside Iberia, a stranger could throw himself with confidence on the mercy of any country priest, who would be unlikely as a Christian to hand him over to the Gestapo or to the local police, even if he could provide no actual help. The more senior Roman Catholic Church hierarchy was much less reliably anti-Axis, with a few notable exceptions such as Canon Kir of Dijon (after whom this operation is named).

What public opinion then was remains a largely unanswered, unanswerable question; but a few solid points do emerge from attempts to study it. One of these is that, as the war progressed, public opinion in the Axis-occupied countries went through a 180-degree turn. At the moment of catastrophe, when the occupiers first arrived, survivors thought only of the simplest things: where to sleep, how to eat, how to keep the children warm. It was manifestly necessary to do whatever the occupying powers laid down: to be courteous and obedient to them, in all their manifestations. Years later, as the moment of liberation visibly and audibly approached, the turn-around was complete; hardly anybody took any more notice of the occupation rules, almost everybody was looking out for opportunities to work with the incoming Allied forces. A very few, very obstinate resisters had been against the invaders from the start; a very few, very obtuse adherents to collaboration tried to stick to them at the end.

There was an interesting intermediate stage, when the occupied had got over the first shock of defeat, had got used to the sight of enemy uniforms, and had not necessarily decided that occupation was permanent. At this moment, as a later famous French clandestine leaflet pointed out, it was no longer necessary to be quite so deferential to the conqueror. If a passing soldier asked the time, one's watch had stopped; if he asked the way, one had never heard of the place he wanted to go to; it was not, indeed, necessary to speak to him at all. The age-old schoolchild's technique of ‘sending to Coventry’—what the Irish called boycotting—could be used with some effect against the morale of third-line Axis forces in garrison towns. Such a line might be followed generally when public opinion had turned round far enough.

This turn-around was largely the product of press and broadcasting; partly it was the product of what neighbours said to each other, but what the neighbours said depended in turn on what they had heard and read; which depended, again, on the general course of the war.

Whispering campaigns—the deliberate spreading of gossip, which the originators might know to be false—were used, sometimes with effect, by the Nazis and the communists in the late 1930s in Germany and the USSR, both as a means of enforcing the control of the secret police over the public, and to weaken trust in their own governments in countries which Germany or the USSR meant to take over. It became generally known in both countries that a horrible fate in a concentration camp or the GUlag awaited anyone who came out publicly against the government: this sufficed. Similar rumours were spread, with effect, in occupied lands.

SO1 made some some early attempts at rumour-mongering also, starting by launching the rumours in London pubs and studying how they circulated. How to devise and to launch a rumour became a routine part of the training of British subversive agents thereafter; results abroad, again, remain unobserved.

Direct appeals by megaphone to the other side's soldiers to desert were sometimes made—the British, Germans, and Soviets all used the technique, sometimes with effect. These appeals had extra strength if they could be addressed to a particular unit, or at least to a particular nationality, which depended on how good the tactical intelligence was on the megaphonic side.

The training, dispatch, and control of subversive agents was the task of several wartime secret services, notably the British SOE, the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the German Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst (see RSHA), and the Soviet NKVD. Their tasks were to be distinguished sharply from those of spies—intelligence agents—who in the UK and sometimes in the USSR had different controlling bodies, MI6 and the GRU, but in the American and the German secret services came ultimately under the same head.

The Americans called political warfare psychological warfare. Eisenhower's headquarters in North Africa had an Anglo-American psychological warfare branch, 60 strong, to conduct propaganda locally and against the opposing Italo-German forces, which moved on into Italy with the Allied Expeditionary Force and reckoned to play its part in helping to defeat the Axis. It was recruited jointly from OSS and from PWE. An even larger, similar branch formed part of SHAEF.

Subversive agents might have specific tasks of sabotage, of purely military or industrial importance, or more general tasks, political in their aim. Large advances in sabotage technique were made during the war, principally under the inspiration of G. T. Rheam, a steel engineer who was in charge of SOE's sabotage training school at Brickendonbury in Hertfordshire, north of London; they were assisted by the invention, in England as the war began, of plastic explosives.

A distinction was early made between readily traceable sabotage, blowing objects up with a bang, and undetectable sabotage—insaississable was the almost untranslatable French word for it. The foreign office, which in 1940–1 at least had considerable influence over SOE's policies, favoured the latter and less obvious course. This was far from easy to arrange, but, by an odd irony, the Germans' notorious orderliness did provide opportunities for undetectable sabotage. All trains transporting material for the Wehrmacht had to carry it in trucks bearing, low on one corner, a label stating the content, origin, and destination of the truck. Railway procedures ensured that, every two or three hundred kilometres, goods trains would pause in marshalling yards, where they had to be re-labelled. The staff officers who had laid down the rule, far from the noise and dirt of the yards, did not take in that all the railwayman who held the pile of labels had to do to cause confusion was to put the top label at the bottom of the pile. Many railwaymen thought of this for themselves; many more were encouraged to do it by SOE and OSS agents; it caused a great deal of minor nuisance, for which no individual could be blamed.

Equally effective was the technique of Hasek's Good Soldier Schweik: pretending to be willing, while working maddeningly slowly and not quite right. The BBC encouraged those who were sent on forced labour into Germany to imitate Schweik, and not work too industriously for their Axis masters. In DORA for instance, French intellectuals making V-2s (see V-weapons) under murderous conditions, including close SS supervision, managed to sabotage more than they completed by taking care not to do anything exactly as they ought, unless they were under an SS man's immediate eye. This helps to account for the large proportion of V-2s that failed to reach their intended targets.

Clerks and telephone operators compelled to work for the Germans could also use imperceptible sabotage with ease; misrouteing calls was as easy as mislaying files, as exasperating to the enemy and as difficult to blame on an individual.

These tactics were often not much more than pinpricks; more serious troubles could be brought on by traceable sabotage. Telephone lines, then almost essential for the running of a large army or air force's supply services, were vulnerable both to interception, which might provide invaluable intelligence (see Source K), and to direct attack, which might spread untold confusion. Blowing up a telephone pole was so simple an exercise that hundreds were demolished by resisters under training, not all of whom remembered that more trouble was caused by felling a pole at a corner than by felling one in a straight line, and that it was indispensable to gather up plenty of the fallen wire and carry it away—not only for the price it would fetch on the black market, but because the occupying force would have to replace it. And might it not be possible to ambush the replacing party?

More sophisticated attacks could be mounted on buried long-distance telephone cables, or even—given luck and the right friends—on telephone exchanges. Here it was necessary to be careful: if an Allied invasion was anywhere near imminent, the Allies would themselves need to use the telephone exchanges, and would not want them permanently damaged. An invaluable side-effect of telephone sabotage in Europe was that it compelled the Germans to make more use of wireless; thus providing more material from which the decipher staff could conjure up intelligence (see ULTRA, 1).

Similarly, guerrillas in touch with an Allied High Command which intended attacks on road or railway bridges were instructed, in such cases, not to cause damage that would be likely to take more than a week to repair. It was not something that an amateur could judge with any ease. For instance, an enthusiastic but ignorant party of OSS saboteurs in south-west France lay low in the hills, and—meaning only to make a temporary break in a main railway line—issued forth to destroy, by miscalculating the amount of explosive they used, three arches of a railway viaduct: just when the local railway authorities wanted to send trains over it to feed the population. Unknown to the OSS, the Germans had just left.

Industry had by this time become so intricate that extra attractive sabotage targets could be found in mines producing valuable raw materials, notably chrome and wolfram, needed by the German armaments industry to make some kinds of armour. Factories were another fruitful target for sabotage. Many worked with mass production methods; any intelligent saboteur could be taught how to spot the one or two machines on which a production line depended, and how to put them out of action, thus bringing the whole line to a standstill. When a factory depended on electric power, it was likely to contain a transformer station: burn up the transformer, and the factory must stop.

Aircraft were fragile; by breaking a small part, a whole machine might be rendered unserviceable. Railway engines were more robust, but were often laid up for the night in round-houses; bold saboteurs could raid a round-house, and damage (say) the right-hand piston on every steam locomotive, putting them all out of action. Railway track was vulnerable; the best railway saboteurs made sure that they had excellent intelligence from friends on the railway staff, so that they attacked troop or ammunition trains, rather than trains full of civilians.

Ammunition's vulnerability to sabotage goes without saying. Dumps were therefore carefully guarded; so were airfields (the RAF Regiment was formed specifically for this purpose). It would be interesting to know what proportion of the enlisted force of each combatant power was spent in guarding such vulnerable points; this was certainly something about which strategists bothered. A single saboteur, R. B. Mayne, a member of the Special Air Service, once destroyed 47 Axis aircraft in a single night by putting a small incendiary bomb in each—more than any pilot in Fighter Command shot down in the whole war. But there were not many men as brave as Mayne; and high commanders mostly preferred to stick to the methods of war they had learned in staff college, instead of trusting to devices they thought underhand.

By spreading disinformation, diplomats could occasionally be persuaded to play a part in subversive warfare, though many of them, like high commanders, liked to feel they were fighting with their hands clean. SOE in its early stages had trouble finding diplomatic cover in British legations; as the war went on, British ministers became more bellicose. The ambassador in Madrid was persuaded to let his staff do what they could to foment German–Italian antagonism, by suggesting to the Italians that the Germans were too suspicious of them; and the minister in Stockholm was able to make judicious use of a homosexual on his staff to mislead the Germans about British diplomatic inclinations. A former Polish officer who happened to have links with Japan was able to sow some Japanese–German dissension by calculated indiscretions in Lisbon. All this was in addition to the more direct methods of deception in use through double agents working to the Abwehr.

Sometimes subversive agents had to get in touch with smugglers; the British armaments industry, short of ball-bearings and special steels, was to some extent dependent on quantities of both that SOE managed to smuggle out of Sweden in blockade runners. There is an unwritten chapter of SOE's history that would cover its dealings in the international diamond market.

However, sabotage apart, the main task of subversive agents was not economic, but politico-military. This was particularly the case on the Eastern Front, where a highly developed partisan movement came under rigid control by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, acting for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Partisan units usually began spontaneously, where a few Red Army soldiers, separated from their units but still combatant-minded, fell in with villagers past whom the German Army had swept who were also prepared to resist occupation. Where villagers did not want to join in, committed partisans were quite ready to apply some judicious terror to make sure that they did. By the end of 1941, Beria, who had charge of the NKVD, had succeeded in establishing radio contact with a few partisan units, and eventually the partisans received orders by radio, and supply and reinforcements by air, in much the same way as SOE or OSS agents at work among the local populations in occupied countries in western or southern or northern Europe, though on a less sophisticated scale. In all these cases, the objects were the same: to put the other side into a state of lasting unease about the security of their communications with the fighting fronts, to unsettle the morale of rear-area troops, to sabotage dumps, trains, road transport, and airfields, and to keep the local population up to the task of detesting the invaders and all their works.

When the Allied advance came closer, agents' and partisans' tasks became more specifically tactical: sometimes to hold open, sometimes to demolish or obstruct particular bridges or defiles, to report precise locations and identities of enemy headquarters and forces, and as soon as the area was overrun to provide guides and guards. Considerable successes were reported, both on the Eastern and on the Western and Southern Fronts, and there were innumerable examples of gallantry; just as there were innumerable examples of penetration by double agents, betrayal by locals who changed their minds about which side they wanted to support, and fearsome atrocities of reprisal.

Occasionally, whole areas would come out in support of the Allied advance; the Guards Armoured Division for example was mobbed when eventually it reached Brussels, as Leclerc's 2nd Armoured Division (Deuxième Division Blindée) had been mobbed when it entered Paris a fortnight earlier. Many towns in southern France and northern Italy cherish the myth that they liberated themselves; a myth that usually, on close inspection, means that the local resistance forces took over an hour or two after the last serious German forces had left. Just as the French Army had surrendered in many areas, in 1940, in 1944–5 in a few areas outside Germany there were widespread German surrenders; and inside Germany in the closing stages there were many more.

In the Far East conditions were by no means the same, partly for a simple racial reason: it was impossible for agents of European origin to disguise themselves as Asiatics and blend in with the local population, as British, American, and Soviet personnel could easily enough manage to do in Europe. Moreover, morale in the Japanese Army was high enough for most of the war to ensure that very few Japanese ever surrendered—it had come to be regarded as the ultimate disgrace for a soldier.

There was also a political difference. The Japanese presented themselves at first as the heralds of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, an Asiatic replacement for the European- or American-dominated colonial regimes that had preceded them; though before long it became clear to occupied Malays, Javanese, Sumatrans, Filipinos that they had simply changed one imperial master for another. Rules imposed by Japanese rear-area troops (for example that civilians passing a Japanese sentry had to bow, even if the sentry was sitting down, smoking a cigarette) soon made it clear who the new bosses were.

In these circumstances, the sort of clandestine work that had been attempted in Europe was all but impossible. SOE in the Far East did nevertheless manage in one case at least to organize local resistance thoroughly enough to kill 10,000 Japanese soldiers as they retreated from the Karen hills during the Burma campaign in 1945.

M. R. D. Foot

Bibliography

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Rhodes, A. , Propaganda: the Art of Persuasion: World War II (London, 1976).