Alfred de Grazia - Military Activity

Military Activity

In World War II, Alfred de Grazia served in the ranks from private to captain, in artillery, intelligence, and psychological warfare. He received training in this then new field at in Washington D.C. and the newly established Camp Ritchie, Maryland. He served with the 3rd, 5th and 7th US Armies and as a liaison officer with the British 8th Army. He took part in six campaigns, from North Africa to Italy (Battle of Monte Cassino) to France and Germany, receiving several decorations. He co-authored a report on psychological warfare for the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force. By the end of the war, he was Commanding Officer of the Psychological Warfare Propaganda Team attached to the headquarters of the 7th Army. With his fiancée, then wife, journalist Jill Oppenheim, he carried on an extensive wartime correspondence of well over 2,000 lengthy letters, probably one of the largest such correspondences still extant, published on the web under the title "Letters of Love and War." He wrote manuals of psychological warfare for the CIA for the Korean War and organized and investigated psychological operations for the Department of Defence during the Vietnam War. His reports on psychological operations, now largely declassified, include Target Analysis and Media in Propaganda to Audiences Abroad (1952), Elites Analysis (1955), as well as Psychological Operations in Vietnam (1968).