"A nation getting ready to strike a la Pearl Harbour may prepare by alleging
American aggresion. A nation preparing to break the peace frequently gets
out peace propaganda of the most blatant sort, trying to make sure that its
own audience (as well as the world) will believe the real responsibility to
lie in the victim he attacks. Hitler protested his love of Norwegian
neutrality; then he hit, claiming that he was protecting it from the
British. No hard and fast rules can be made up for all wars or all
beligerents. The Germans behaved according to one pattern; the Japanese
another."
"For example, the German High Command sought to avoid bragging about
anything they could not accomplish (Johnno: see USA's performance on North
Korea which would involve engaging China with it hundreds of millions of
ready for war population) They often struck blows without warning but they
never said they would strike a blow when they knew or believed they could
not do it. The British and Americans made a timetable of this, and were able
to guess how fast the Germans thought they were going to advance in Russia.
Knowing this, the British and Americans planned their propaganda to counter
the German boasts; they tried to pin the Germans down to objectives they
knew the Germans would not take, in order to demonstrate to the peoples of
Europe that Nazi Germany had finally bitten off more than it could chew."
"Later the Allies remembered this German habit when the Nazis on the radio
began talking about their own secret weapons. When the British bombed the
V-1 ramps on the French coast, the German radio stopped that talk. The
British had additional grounds for supposing that the ramps thay had bombed
were part of the secret weapons that the Germans bragged about. The British
further knew that the Germans would try to counter the psychologigal effect
of the annouoncement of Allied D Day with some pretty vivid news of their
own. When the German radio began mentioning secret weapons again, the
British suspected the Germans had got around damage done to the ramps. D-Day
came; the Germans, in one single broadcast designed to impress the Japanese
and Chinese, announced the secret German weapon was about to be turned
loose, and that more such weapons would follow. One day later the first V-1
hit London."
