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This display upset the leading actor and the stage managers so much that Göring pursued Daladier, begging him to return. The Bull of the Camargue snorted, refused to come back until Hitler would be reasonable. Daladier returned to Paris with a new sense of power, and the resolve to rally his nation. Tactics which the Allies then belatedly began to fight: 1) Whispering campaigns. A relativly few hired whisperers could start — and also stop — on orders from Berlin, waves of defeatist rumors and false news which swept French society. In 1939 the French Government knew enough to take this strategy seriously, established counter-whispering squads.
2) Anti-Semitism. "All intelligent and impartial observers had suspected for years that the Nazis were encouraging anti-Semitic propaganda outside of Germany, not so much to do in the Jews but simply to get the Gentiles fighting among themselves over the Jewish question. Reactionaries in the French Army, like reactionaries everywhere, were reluctant to believe this until they read about the strategy of Jew-baiting in Nazi propa ganda manuals." 3) Synchronization of Communist and Nazi defeatist propaganda. In the early days of the war the French police arrested several people hired by the Communist Party to be "professional weepers," i.e., to drive around in open cars wearing deep mourning and making a show of grief.
4) Ridicule of authority. "I had seen bands of young Nazis in the streets of Vienna playing all sorts of schoolboy tricks on the police, not out of mischief but on orders and for the purpose of destroying public respect for them." Nazi agents with pocket radio transmitters just strong enough to be picked up by reconnaissance planes were used to furnish the jesting German radio with luncheon menus, etc. of important Allied personages.
5) Violence. "Violence, in the Hitlerian theory, is displayed excessively, gratuitously, but not too frequently; the threat always remains a little shadowy and therefore all the more terrible."
6) Rousing false hopes. After taking Polish radio stations last September, the Germans proceeded to broadcast, in Polish, such "news" as that hundreds of British bombers had arrived to succor Poland. (Three weeks ago, during the retreat from Paris, U. S. correspondents reported from Tours that on the road at night men would step up to refugees and say: "Vive la France! Russia has declared war on Germany.")