According to Atlanta author Noel Griese, putting the U.S. troops in a fighting state of mind was key. To that end, U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson ordered one of his most trusted advisors to Europe to oversee troop information to mentally prepare U.S. armed forces.
Arthur W. Page, the man chosen for the job, had headed the Joint Army and Navy Committee on Welfare and Recreation (JANC) from the beginning of the war. JANC had oversight responsibility for all troop morale activities – USO shows, the Red Cross, the Stars and Stripes newspaper, Yank magazine, radio broadcasts, film distribution and many other activities designed to keep up troop morale.
According to Griese, Page joined Doubleday, Page & Co. after graduating from Harvard in 1905, five years after his father and Frank N. Doubleday created the firm. Page was with Doubleday until 1926, when he left to join AT&T as its first vice president for public relations.
On April 5, 1944, Page departed for England on a secret 100-day mission for Stimson. His main assignment, according to Griese, the author of Arthur W. Page: Publisher, Public Relations Pioneer, Patriot, was to oversee indoctrination of American forces.
Col. Oscar N. Solbert, chief of morale and special services for the European Theater of Operations, had overall responsibility for troop information, education and morale. Page was sent to assist him, particularly with getting troop commanders to cooperate in troop information efforts.
As he had in World War I, when he served on Gen. John "Black Jack" Pershing's staff, Page declined a commission in World War II. He went to England as a civilian, with the assimilated rank of colonel, knowing he would be better able to work with Solbert if he neither outranked nor underranked him. He stayed in Europe for more than three months, through D-Day and long enough after to make a visit to Cherbourg on the continent.
Page helped Solbert and his staff coordinate troop information through the Stars and Stripes newspaper, Yank magazine, daily broadcasts of the Army News Service (ANS), Army films and newsreels and troop information meetings. He prepared schedules of what was to be said to soldiers each week, sat in on military staff meetings as emissary of the secretary of war and wrote the statement to be given to soldiers as they embarked for the Normandy beaches.
In remarks to AT&T's Information Department after returning from England, Page explained what he had done: "We spend considerable time and effort (at AT&T) trying to persuade the people in the Bell System—in print and otherwise—to be courteous and polite… This was the same process in the Army in exactly the opposite direction. The job there was to persuade the men in the Army to be anything but polite to the Germans," he said.
"Now, the method was to have a pamphlet for discussion by the officers with all the men once a week, an inset in the daily paper once a week, a radio program which gave the same picture over the radio once a week, plus plugs all through the week and occasionally Yank, the Army weekly magazine, would help out when it could. All of that was directed so that if the fellows missed it at one count they got it on the rebound somewhere else.
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From D-Day forward, the troop orientation job became one of keeping soldiers informed, particularly on the lessons being learned in combat. Stars and Stripes became the main vehicle for rapidly informing troops of combat lessons. For the first few days after the beachhead was established, the staff continued to print the paper in London, with copies shipped to France. Soon after the invasion, however, the staff moved to the Cherbourg foothold on the continent, where firsthand information was more readily available, and began printing a continental edition of the newspaper there.
Page recognized the effectiveness of combat information printed in Stars and Stripes. "After the first three or four days of the invasion the Germans tried the same old 'white flag' trick and offered to surrender, but when our men went up to get them they were shot down," he told AT&T employees. "The men wounded in that were interviewed and it was printed in the paper. About four days later a G2 officer asked if we would not please write how to take prisoners safely. They… had not taken any in the last few days."
While in London, Page developed a liking for Maj. Arthur Goodfriend, who wrote for Stars and Stripes and handled other troop information duties. Goodfriend, in later life a controversial employee of the U.S. Information Service, and author of The Twisted Image, a book critical of U.S. information programs in India, earned Page's respect because he kept up-to-date on GI vernacular by periodically donning a private's uniform and slipping into combat units with replacements.
Today, Page is regarded as one of the two most influential public relations practitioners of the 20th century. "Arthur Page, an in-house public relations adviser to AT&T from the 1920's through the 1940's, embraced the concept of good corporate citizenship and pushed AT&T to be open and honest in its press dealings. The tension between proponents of Bernays-like manipulation and Page-style transparency has existed in the business ever since," said Timothy L. O'Brien in a New York Times story about the importance of the two.
Griese, who has written more than a dozen nonfiction books, became interested in Page while teaching at the University of Wisconsin journalism school. His biography of Page (Anvil Publishers, ISBN 0970497604), available at bookstores and online, has been named to the short list of the best books ever written on public relations.
