For example, the German High Command sought to avoid bragging about anything they could not actually accomplish. They often struck blows without warning but they never said they would strike a blow when they knew or believed that they could not do it. The British and Americans made up 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 therefore had additional grounds for supposing that the ramps they had bombed were a part of the secret weapon the Germans bragged about. The British further knew that the Germans would try to counter the psychological effect of the announcement of Allied D-Day with some pretty vivid news of their own. When the German radio began mentioning secret weapons again, the British suspected that the Germans had gotten around the damage done to the ramps. D-Day came; the Germans, in one single broadcast designed to impress the Japanese and Chinese, announced that 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.
ENEMY MENTION OF SELECTED TOPICS, FIRST HALF-YEAR, NUMBER OF MENTIONED TOPICS PER 10-DAY PERIOD, WITH REFERENCE TO NAVAL WARFARE, FOOD SUPPLY AND SECRET WEAPONS]
In order to follow this type of propaganda, a quantitative chart is needed. A sample imaginary chart for a three-month period is given in chart IV. This chart reveals at a glance the fact that the enemy kept mentioning food supply and naval warfare until the middle of March, because he presumably thought his blockade runners would bring in more food. After March, food drops in emphasis but naval warfare continues to be stressed. In May, following enemy admission to himself of the hopeless naval situation, naval warfare drops almost altogether out of sight. Foodstuffs continue to be modestly mentioned as the enemy explained away minor difficulties, but the use of secret weapons propaganda shows that the enemy propagandists had to have something sensational to keep up the courage of the home audience. Whether the enemy really had a secret weapon or not, depends on the national character, past records, and so forth. The Germans and Japanese both said they had world-shaking secret weapons. The Germans delivered; the Japanese did not.