If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Paper War: Nazi Propaganda In One Battle, On A Single Day Cassino, Italy, May 11, 1944, from Mark Batty Publisher is a stunning graphical look at the Nazi war machine’s most powerful weapon: Propaganda.
On May 11, 1944, as the 8th Indian Division of 13 British Corps prepared for the Battle of Monte Cassino, the waiting soldiers were bombarded with Nazi propaganda leaflets from a mortar battery on the Cassino side of the Rapido River. As 
the Germans identified various ethnic divisions, soldiers were targeted with leaflets in English, Polish, and for the Indian Division, Urdu and Hindi.
In retaliation, the Allies barraged the German soldiers with a safe conduct leaflet, and a “contemptuous ‘Wo ist Hitler?’ (Where is Hitler)” leaflet.
As Peter Batty, an Indian soldier who collected the leaflets wrote “In spite of the volume of propaganda material fired at us on that Thursday in May, the effects that it had on us was considerably less dramatic than those minutes of total silence that we had experienced earlier in the afternoon of the 11th” when a standstill in artillery fire created “an unnatural quiet.”
Included in Paper War are Batty’s own sketches and notes made during the Battle of Cassino, an introduction to “Words at War”, and the leaflets themselves. The leaflets target human fears about home, as in the case of one dropped on the Poles–it in Polish soldiers were told that the English were treating them worse than “colored colonial armies”, and that their absent families were feeling the hardships of war without their help.
The Indians were told that “big India” shouldn’t be ruled by “little Britain”, and that Indian soliders should fight not for the Allies but to free India.
World War II aficionados will treasure this casebound collection that takes readers into a May day in 1944, and the Nazi mindset that anything could be accomplished by persuading the masses through constant repetition. On this day however, the constant repetition by the masters of propaganda fell on deaf Allied ears.
Stumble it!
