=Maximum Performance of Personnel.= Another limitation, to be found in any psychological warfare operation, is that imposed by the types of personnel available. It would be a rash commander who assumed that he had air support because he saw airplanes--without knowing whether air crews were available. A microphone does not make a propagandist. Personnel using the speaking voice have to be good speakers; merely knowing the language is not enough. Writing personnel must be up to the level of professional writers. On the other hand, the available personnel must not be driven above its limits of performance: often an attempt to do a too-professional job will defeat the propaganda. (When the Japanese pretended to be perfectly American, and used the corny obsolete slang of the 1920's, they aroused more contempt than they would have done had they confined themselves to rather bookish, plain English.)
The psychological warfare operation must be gauged to the personnel facilities no less than to the material facilities. (In China, the author sat in with an expert on medieval and modern Japanese art, who was writing leaflets which were to be dropped on the Japanese garrisons of the Yangtze cities. The expert wrote pure, dignified Japanese, but the Chinese-Japanese language experts brought up the point, "Would the Japanese common soldier understand this kind of talk?" For a while, we had no plain-spoken Japanese at hand, and we had to send our Japanese leaflets from Chungking up to Yenan, where the Japanese Communists read the leaflets and wrote back long detailed criticisms.)
Whenever the politico-military situation permits, it is sound procedure to check output with live enemies, either interned civilians or captured military personnel. A shrewd interrogator can soon find out whether the comments from the enemy jury are honest or not.
Intelligent psychological warfare procedures have often turned liabilities into assets. Absence of a good orchestra has compelled propagandists to make up current music schedules by recording enemy musical programs, re-broadcasting them with new spoken commentary. Failure to obtain native speakers (such as genuine home-grown Japanese, or Chinese with the properly slurred Wu dialect) has led to the use of substitutes that proved better than the original. There is no point in trying to establish _rapport_ with the enemy unless you talk his language with effortless perfection on the one end of the scale--or else admit that you really are a foreigner, on the other end of the scale. It is easier to build up the image of a trustworthy enemy than it is to create trust in a traitor. Frequently the attempt to talk the enemy's own language is less successful than a frank acceptance of handicaps.