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By Al Zdon
The Persian Gulf War was as nearly as much a war of words as it was a war of missiles, tanks, jet fighters and M-16s.
A unit from Minnesota, the 13th Psychological Operations Battalion,
played a crucial role in that war, a role that with a perspective of 10 years looks even larger.
While Saddam Hussein was preparing for the "mother of all battles," the Minnesotans were going quietly about their
business of getting Saddam's troops to desert or surrender.
By the time the U.S. and its allies took control of Kuwait, there were only about 85,000 troops remaining to fight — instead of the 400,000 Saddam
had sent to control his captured nation. What happened to the rest? Some had been captured, some had been killed, but most of them had just gone home.
"We were the only battalion geared to do POW psychological
warfare," Jim Noll said in a recent interview. Noll was the lieutenant colonel in charge of the 13th Psyops Battalion when it was called to active duty in December of 1990.
"By the end of the war, seven out of 10
Iraqi soldiers had deserted. In some units only 10 percent might have been left in the forward positions. In some cases, there were not enough Iraqi soldiers left to drive their vehicles."
Noll is a native of
Wabasha, a graduate of Winona State College in 1967, and was a teacher in St. Cloud when he got his draft notice in 1968. "I turned in my grade cards on June 4th, and on June 5th I was in the Army."
After OCS, he
joined the 101st Airborne and took part in the three and one-half month battle for Firebase Ripcord in Vietnam as a platoon leader. He was wounded twice during that action.
He earned a Silver Star and Bronze Star
in addition to his Purple Hearts.
Noll got out of the Army in 1971, returned to teaching, and also joined the Army Reserve at Ft. Snelling. Along the way, over the next two decades, he was named commander of the
13th Psyops Battalion.
The Minnesotans were activated in December of 1990 and sent to Ft. Bragg where the unit had two weeks to get organized. It arrived in Saudi Arabia on the 13th of January.
Noll was the
highest ranking Minnesotan to serve in the Persian Gulf War.
The battalion's job was to make the enemy quit without fighting, but how do you go about getting an enemy to go home?
For the 13th Psyops Battalion,
it started in the POW camps run by the Allies. A number of Iraqis had been taken prisoner during the early skirmishes of the war. Others trickled in as time went by.
Part of the Psyops job was to get the
prisoners to comply with regulations and keep the problems at a minimum. Another job was to interview the prisoners and find out ways to convince their comrades who were still in arms to desert or surrender.
"The
MPs carried the weapons, and they were the bad guys. We were the good guys," Noll said. "The MPs greatly respected the Psyops people because we made their job so much easier."
For instance, the Psyops people
would show movies every night just outside the fence. If the prisoners had not behaved that day, they saw no movie. "We had some Iraqi movies that were made according to strict Muslim laws, but they didn't want to
see those. They wanted to see 'Superman.'"
Cigarettes, extra food and candy were also used to reward good behavior or cooperation. The Iraqis were provided with prayer mats and signs that indicated the direction
to Mecca. "We wanted to show them that we were taking good care of them, and so they had no fear in surrendering to Americans."
The psychological specialists would interview prisoners from morning to night.
Unlike American prisoners of war who are trained to keep silent, the Iraqis generally had no compunction about spilling the beans about troop placements, missile locations or other valuable war information.
They
also didn't mind talking about who might be trying to escape. "We tried to identify who the Republican Guards and the secret police were. We wanted to isolate those who we felt had the potential to cause
problems.
"They had no code of conduct. They would simply tell all, about underground munitions dumps, or units that hadn't been in combat yet, whatever."
From these interviews, a strategy was developed to
convince the Iraqis to leave their units.
"You've got to remember that many of the Iraqi units were isolated electronically from other units. The U.S. was blocking most of the radio signals, and we were
overriding Iraqi radio. In some cases we were replacing their messages with our own messages."
The U.S. would air drop little portable radios into an Iraqi unit to help get the word out. At other times, thousands
of leaflets would be dropped.
One strategy was to warn the Iraqis of an impending bombing attack and then follow through. "We would tell a particular unit that we would bomb them within 24 hours and they must
leave. A lot of them would do just that. We would follow through on the bombing so they knew we were telling the truth.
"The next day we would inform the next Iraqi unit in line that we would be bombing within 24
hours. We'd tell them to just leave the area and leave their equipment. A lot of them would go home. They'd just start hoofing it."
Noll noted that the Iraqis had been waiting for war for many months, and many
had earned a furlough at home. "Those who had any brains never came back."
The psychological warfare in the end saved many lives, on both sides. "I know many American lives were saved because so many Iraqis had
deserted or chose not to fight when we arrived. Many of them were holding up our leaflets to surrender with."
The leaflets were based on the intelligence the Psyops battalion had gained from prisoners. Some
showed large bombers dropping their payloads. Others showed tank units how to surrender. Others showed Americans landing from the sea (a military ploy to divert Iraqi defenses. The U.S. never did land from the sea.)
Others were printed on fake Iraqi money so the soldiers could conceal them in their wallets.
In the end, over 14 million leaflets were dropped to Iraqi troops. Some were even delivered in bottles that washed up
on shore.
The pictures were important. "Many Iraqis only had enough education to read the Koran, and that was it."
Once a leaflet was developed, it was tried with the prisoners to find out how effective it
might be. In one case, a leaflet went out with a red border. The Iraqi troops had been instructed that red meant danger, and the leaflets were not used. After switching to a green border, the results improved
dramatically.
Noll had Saudi and Kuwaiti soldiers who were bilingual assigned to his unit that helped with the testing of the materials by working with the prisoners of war.
The Iraqis also tried some crude
psychological warfare of their own. One particular leaflet told American soldiers that Bart Simpson was at home with his wife. Apparently the Iraqis didn't realize that Bart was a cartoon character.
Only once in
the POW camps was there a major problem. A typhoon hit one of the camps one night, and the guards, who were not U.S. soldiers, deserted their posts. Psyops soldiers with speaker backpacks went into the camp where
chaos reigned, and with the help of local officials restored order.
In addition to the Psyops units working in the camps, each American unit had three psyops specialists assigned to it. The job of these tactical
units was to make contact with the enemy and encourage them to surrender.
The strategy was especially important because when the U.S. did attack, the armored units raced across the desert to confront Iraqi tank
units. In the process, many Iraqi army units were simply bypassed. It was important to convince those bypassed units to surrender rather than fight.
When Kuwait had been retaken by the Allies, Noll entered the
city the next day. He urged the command to release his tactical units, spread out throughout the American forces, so they could be used to help control the huge influx of enemy prisoners.
The Americans also
trained the Saudis in the aspects of psychological warfare and dealing with prisoners because the prisoners were soon turned over to the Saudi army for safekeeping.
The 13th Psyops Battalion left in May, and
turned over all the POW camps to the Saudis.
"My unit may have saved thousands of lives during the war, on both sides."
Noll returned to his home south of Forest Lake just in time for his daughter's first
communion. In the next year, he volunteer for the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, and he returned to command the 88th Regular Supply Command. His last job in the Reserves was as director of personnel for a
six-state area, including about 25,000 soldiers.
He retired in June 1999 as a colonel.
Noll is a teacher at Forest Lake Southwest Junior High School. He and his wife, Rose, have eight children.
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