Falling leaflets

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PETER MCINTYRE reviews The Falling Leaf, an exhibition of aerial dropped propaganda 1914-68.

The exhibition has just completed its stay at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and is to transfer British soldiers attach leaflets to propaganda balloon in 1918 to London.

During the siege of Paris in 1870 citizens fleeing the Prussian forces by balloon dropped pamphlets and leaflets on the encircling soldiers. • The idea was taken up in 1871 by the Paris Commune and the baskets of balloons were packed with propaganda to drop outside the city.

This first knownexampleof appealing directly to enemy soldiers stressing a common cause and the injustice of the attackers became one of the most sophisticated weapons of war, used with staggering cynicism by all sides in both World Wars and in all imperialist invasions.

World. War

During World War I British and French forces dropped 24 million pamphlets and leaflets into Germany.

In 1939 the RAF dropped six million leaflets in one night on German towns before was declared.

The total tonnage dropped by all sides during the war has never been accurately estimated but the Monroe bomb, developed by the US specifically for propaganda drops spread 480 million pieces of propaganda on Europe between D Day and the end of the war there.

The US in Vietnam were as extravagant in their paper weapons as in their bombing.

The US airforce dropped an estimated 48 million billion pieces of paper on the Vietnamese.

In figures that is 48,000,; 000,000,000,000:

Villages of 100 people would receive 100,000 leaflets. They used them for everything from blocking holes in the roof to toilet paper.

An exhibition of a tiny proportion of air-dropped propaganda from 1914-1968The Falling Leaf-has transferred to London from the Museum of Modern Art, The exhibition is macabre, horrifying and fascinating.

Themes recur again and againanti-imperialism, anti-communism, racism, sexism.

The exhibition takes its name from a leaflet dropped on France by Germany.

•A paper leaf was inscribed with a helmetted skull and the words:

"Autumn: The leaves are falling. We will fall like them. The leaves die because God wills it. But us, we fall because the English wish it. Next Spring nobody will remember either the dead leaves or the dead soldiers. Life will pass over our graves."

Few leaflets were that subtle. One of the most bestial on display was dropped by the RAF on Germany in 1941.

It showed a young girl with her head split in half and is captioned simply Not your child'. Nazi Germany dropped one on. London showing the victims of Dresden.

The potency of anti-imperialism was not even shunned by Goebbels.

A leaflet addressed to African troops in France showed the looting of their houses by French soldiers, with the message 'Coloured soldiers, lay down your arms' (Later the Vietcong left messages for black US soldiers with a rhyme: "I wish I were an Alabama trooper, this is what I would truly love to be; I wish I were an Alabama trooper, 'cause then I could kill the niggers legally.") • While the Nazis exhorted French black soldiers to lay down their arms, they also dropped leaflets on italy portraying black US troops raping women and desecrating churches.

Most imperialist armies found it necessary to persuade the enemy soldier that his mother/wife/girifriend was being raped or seduced or simply pining away. (Some of the coverage of the Ford strike in the British press would not be out of place here).

There is only one example of Bolshevik propaganda dropped by air-a leaflet dropped on British and American invading forces in 1919 around Murmansk.

It is sad to have to report that this, too, begins with an appeal to the soldiers to remember 'sweet home . wives and children, your sisters and sweethearts waiting for you' It goes on:

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