‘Your homes will be destroyed, your family killed’: the US has dropped millions of war propaganda leaflets – but do they work?

An exhibit of psyops leaflets released in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya finally shows American people the messages that were made in their nameBy Moustafa Bayoumi For over a century, the United States military has been dropping propaganda leaflets in deliberate psychological operations, or psyops, to achieve success in war. But the key question behind the effort remains unanswered: does it even work? In 1918, the US released more than 3m leaflets behind enemy lines by plane and hydrogen balloon. To their delight, they found the leaflets helped erode morale and unit cohesion among the Germans in the first world war. Or so the story goes. Between 1942 and 1945, much of this effort was coordinated through the Office of War Information. The dropping of propaganda leaflets continued not just in the second world war but in every major war the US has been involved in since. Thanks to Khajistan, a New York-based digital and physical archive, many of these leaflets are now on display in an interactive exhibit titled Office of War Information (OWI) at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Since 2022, Khajistan, which preserves “art, words, and media from forgotten or silenced communities, from the Indu