The Allied response was on similar lines. From West German transmitters a steady volume of comparable material was directed at East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. To begin with little effort was made to hit at the morale of the Russians themselves. The Allies rightly appreciated that if the crack was to come, it would be within the satellite states. Two ‘black’ propaganda television stations, operating from the Federal Republic, one beamed into Czechoslovakia and one into East Germany, began broadcasting within hours of the outbreak of war. These had been skilfully prepared, with the aid of exiled broadcasters from those countries, to resemble closely the official communist stations. They presented themselves as being Czechoslovak Television and GDR Television, operating on a separate wavelength because of damage to transmitters on the main wavelength. They gave a service identical in pattern to the official service, but with the news, and in particular the newsfilm, selected to present the communist position in the worst possible light. Since the main stations were still transmitting, the device was readily detected, but investigations after the war showed that these stations had commanded a surprisingly high audience, due at least in part to the high quality of their transmissions. One feature was their use of recordings of popular serials and popular music programmes which ran on the official Eastern channels, which had been pirated off the air by agencies of the Federal Republic in advance, ready for re-use.
The parallel propaganda battle for the minds of people outside Europe and the United States was also fought on radio and television. Three areas were of outstanding importance: Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. Both the Warsaw Pact and the Allied powers sought from the outset to use television to prove one central point to the people of these areas — that their side was winning. There was no time to go into the question of the rights and wrongs of the struggle. What was going to influence the attitudes of Africa and the Middle East and Far East was above all which side they thought was going to win. Soviet propaganda concentrated on constant radio reports of the success of their attacks, supported by television news pictures of their forces in action — and winning. Allied propaganda was much the same, except that the message they had to convey was not one of victorious advances but of successful resistance. Every day that the Russians were held away from the Rhine was a propaganda gain of the utmost value, for it dented the image of Soviet invincibility.
In this propaganda struggle the Allies were possessed from the outset of superior resources, both technical and human. The addiction of the peoples of Western Europe and America to television in the pre-war years now proved a boon. It had given Western Europe, and above all Britain and the United States, an efficient worldwide infrastructure for the swift transmission of television pictures, via satellite, all over the globe. The structure designed to meet the world’s hunger for pictures of European football, and news, was ideal for international propaganda. Every day, in peacetime, international newsfilm agencies, together with Eurovision and the other international television bodies, had been transmitting, chiefly from centres in London, New York, San Francisco and Madrid, a steady stream of programme material. Thousands of technicians were trained for this work and accustomed to doing it. The Allies could draw, therefore, on the hundreds of television camera teams, almost all now equipped with lightweight, highly portable ENG cameras, who worked for the many television stations of the West. When the fighting broke out the American networks operated from their relatively secure base in the United States as a united body, pouring out to the rest of the world a flood of material gathered by the camera teams of all the Allied countries.
Three aspects of the battle for Europe received particularly vivid coverage. First there was the operation of the transatlantic air bridge. Day after day the television screens of the world showed the endless stream of transport aircraft bringing in and discharging into Europe men and war material from the seemingly limitless resources of the United States. Second, West German cameramen provided, with great courage and day after day, much dramatic footage of German resistance to the invaders, seen at its most spectacular along the line of the River Lippe. Not only were there shots of close combat, at once terrifying and moving, but interviews with the German infantry which left no doubt as to the strength of their morale and their great determination. Third, similar coverage was provided of the fighting through of the CAVALRY convoys at sea. No fewer than five cameramen lost their lives in this operation, for camera crews had been stationed on many of the escort craft and major transports, and others flew with maritime aircraft. Though there was considerable footage of the sinking of Allied vessels, this added a note of convincing veracity to the recording of the arrival of the bulk of the convoy. Culminating, as the work of these cameramen did, in scenes of troops moving away from the quayside in France, depleted perhaps but very formidable, this highly important battle was shown to the outside world as the victory which it was. In the field of peaceful electronics, the electronics of television, the Western technical superiority was to prove almost as important as its superiority in the electronic technology of the battlefield.
In this propaganda battle the Allies had another weapon on their side — flexibility and speed of decision. The US President made one ruling of major importance immediately upon the outbreak of war. He resisted demands that a censorship board be established to guide and select the flow of television material overseas. ‘We must trust the networks and the individual broadcasters,’ he said. ‘We must rely on them to be both patriotic and sensible.’ An ad hoc organization of television professionals was set up and given scope to make the constant, split-second decisions on the choice of material to be transmitted throughout the world upon which television depends. They were guided — and in the last resort could have been controlled — by military advisers whose task was to ensure that no information of positive military value to the enemy was sent out. For instance, no coverage was given of the points of embarkation or the detailed composition of air loads from the US, still less of the location of their points of arrival in Europe. There was no coverage of the assembling of the CAVALRY convoys, no disclosure of their exact contents or destination. Shots which showed secret equipment in detail were excluded. But even such material as this was treated much less stringently than in previous wars, for, as has already been pointed out, it was known that the Soviet Union, by means of satellite surveillance, active pre-war espionage and the early capture of much equipment in the fighting in Germany, had access to most of these secrets anyway. By and large the broadcasters were free to treat this material very much as they wished, within the general understanding that it should be fairly selected so as to give a reasonably accurate picture of the broad strategic scene. This meant that coverage of Allied losses and withdrawals was balanced by coverage of Allied resistance and counter-attack. Within this broad understanding, however, the broadcasters were left to make their own judgments.