[Illustration: _Figure 31: Oestrous Black._ Young human beings, especially young males, are apt to give considerable attention to sex. In areas of military operations, they are removed from the stimuli of secondary sex references which are (in America) an accepted part of everyone's daily life: bathing beauty photos, magazine covers, semi-nudes in advertisements, etc. Our enemies tried to use the resulting pin-up craze for propaganda purposes, hoping that a vain arousal of oestrum would diminish morale. This choice Japanese item is from the Philippines. (The best collection of these is kept in a locked file--for experts only--at the Library of Congress.)]
The Japanese who obediently hated the Americans when it was their duty to do so nevertheless could not help looking at maps that showed where the Americans actually were. Nazis who despised us and everything we stood for nevertheless studied the photographs of our new light bombers. The appeal of credible fact is universal; propaganda does not consist of doctoring the fact with moralistic blather, but of selecting that fact which is correct, interesting, and bad for the enemy to know.[33]
On the friendly side of the battle lines, the procurement of our own news is a budgetary matter. The propaganda office can subscribe to the news tickers, newspapers, telegraph services, and so on. How much is a matter of administrative housekeeping. In the field, the communications officer can frequently steal news from the news agencies of his own country or allied countries by the process of picking it out of the air. It would be highly unpatriotic of the news agency to send him a bill in the zone of operations, and he can classify his record copies of his material RESTRICTED so that the owners of the material would have no legitimate business acquiring copies that could later be taken into court to support a claim. (Americans would not do this, of course; the reference is to Byzantines.)
[Illustration: _Figure 32: Oestrous Grey._ This and the succeeding illustration show a series of four leaflets which the Nazis used against American troops in Europe. Anti-morale in intent, they rely on the illustrations to get attention and then develop their malicious, salacious anti-Semitic story. The series illustrates the strength and weakness of Nazi propaganda.]