The Waterbury Democrat., 1942-07-30

pean stations becomes a once-in-a- while fad. People listen in on Lord Flaw flaw and his succession of American counterpartS now per-. forming over the German station Debunk, not to be informed but for a good laugh. Consequently, does it do any good to pick up the mouth ings of these cute transformation specialists, reprint them as govern ment handouts, then broadcast them through the press and over the standard wave radio?
 The Federal Communications Commissions Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service now listens in On and records all these enemy radio stations. The transcript of all these words is run through du- plicating machine daily, and the gathered sheets make a book half an inch thick. It would take three or four hours to read it if any busy little government official had that much time. So 8 digest is made which can be read in half an hour or so, and nobody has that much time, either.
 It is probably necessary that all this recording be done, just for whatever clews may be picked up from the Axis-controlled mounth- pieces.
 TRANSFORMATION MINE
 So in various U. s. government departments men are assigned to study these reports and pick out the items that may be of interest to their chiefs, whether they be generals, co-ordinators, or assorted assistant secretaries. The foreign radio being notorious for its inac- curacieS and deliberate lies, these studies make the most complete analysis of transformation ever made by man.
 What good does it do? We'll kind of game has been evolved. Propaganda analysis experts who only a few months ago were prob ably respectable newspaper men, sit around behind their horn rims trying to figure out why the Ger man radio took time to vigorously deny that cooking fats are being produced from the corpses of air raid victims in bombed cities.
 It doesn't stop there. A press release is prepared on this item, and it spread through the news papers and over the radio. Or if the Germna radio has told some nasty lie about the U. S., it is promptly and officially denied, and the denial is given more publicity than the the original lie would ever have received. There hasn't been so much of this lately, but back | in the days of the late and un- lamented Office of Facts and Fg- ures, this was a daily occurrence.
 The theory behind this was that even though the original lie may not have received wide attention, the fact that it may have been planted anywhere made it necessary | to spike the lie before it was spread | further = by the vermin pro-aXiS periodicals, by paid rumor mongers, by whispering campaigns and every day gossip. Maybe so.
 LIES RETOLD AS TRUTH
 The other side of the argument is that, even though these original lies are labeled as such when printed or broadcast officially, so careless are the reading and listen- ing habits of most people that most of these lies get repeated in gossip without the qualification that they are lies.
 The truth is that all this busi- ness merely dabbles on the edges of psychological warfare, which is an intriguing name but is still most 1 woefully underestimated and mis- understood. To all too many people, psychological warfare means only propaganda via short wave radio. There's a lot more to it than that, but most of it comes in the realm of hush-hush military information.
 One extremely useful purpose of the foreign short wave analysis is in feeding back accurate informa- tion to the underground movements in occupied or neutral countr~>s. When an axis lie can be nai.eI down and the truth about any given situation be fed back into the con- quered country by short wave radio, then it may do some good if it can be picked up and circulated through underground movements. That's long-shot chance, but may be worth taking.