Weaponizing Truth: The Spectrum of American Psychological Warfare in World War II

Abstract

As international unrest intensified throughout Europe and the global community in the years leading up to World War II, the United States found itself balancing its commitment to its democratic ideals with the demands of a rapidly escalating global conflict. While European powers had long embraced unorthodox methods of warfare – including propaganda, counterintelligence, and psychological operations – prior to World War II, the U.S. was constrained by a moral ambivalence that kept it isolated from foreign affairs and averse to those unorthodox strategies. However, with time, this hesitation gave way to experimentation. By 1942, the U.S. government had two dominant information agencies: the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which adopted covert, deceptive operations modeled after British and Nazi German propaganda systems, and the Office of War Information (OWI) which championed transparent, overt, information policy. While past scholarship has examined American psychological warfare in World War II by framing the OSS and the OWI as fundamentally opposed, this thesis argues that both institutions operated along a shared spectrum of informational practices. Drawing on institutional archival records and propaganda outputs from both organizations, as well as wartime psychological studies, I demonstrate that American propagandists used psychological research and rhetorical tools to weaponize truth and adjust its use in response to shifting wartime demands. This thesis introduces a conceptual framework that situates propaganda as a dynamic practice between two poles of informational strategy: transparency and instrumentality. While the OSS established itself as an instrumental organization that weaponized information in service of military objectives, the OWI began as an organization committed to transparency but increasingly relied on selective framing and persuasion. Examining how psychological insights and rhetorical strategies enabled propagandists to calibrate their messaging and fluctuate between transparent and instrumental adaptations of truth in their propaganda. Ultimately, I argue that American psychological warfare was defined by a dynamic process in which truth became a strategic resource. By tracing how these practices were institutionalized during the war, this study illuminates the origins of the modern informational sphere and contextualizes the continued entanglement of persuasion, truth, and power in the contemporary information landscape.