Operation Cornflakes

Operation Cornflakes (1944-1945) was a World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Morale Operation (MO). Operation Cornflakes involved tricking the German postal service, Deutsche Reichspost, into inadvertently delivering anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens through mail.

The operation involved special planes that were instructed to airdrop bags of false, but properly addressed, mail in the vicinity of bombed mail trains. When recovering the mail during clean-up of the wreck, the postal service would hopefully confuse the false mail for the real thing and deliver it to the various addresses.

The OSS was formed from the division of the Foreign Information Service (FIS) and the Coordinator of Information (COI), a division that President Roosevelt enacted by Executive order 9128. The remainder of the COI was renamed the Office of Strategic Service. The newly formed OSS was under jurisdiction of the Joint Chief of Staff, giving the OSS the capability and status of a military branch. The overarching goal of the operation was to disrupt the morale of the German people by using a method of large scale psychological operation (PSYOP) that the British MI6 had been pushing into service with the help of the Royal Air Force (RAF). Also by using the same pattern of mission that a previous OSS operation in Hungary undertook the OSS would craft their more intricate Operation Cornflakes. The distribution of propaganda in letters and distributed by the German postal system was thought to be an ideal method of reaching the German population and undermine the support of Adolf Hitler.

Operation CORNFLAKES began with OSS officials collecting any and all German POWs that had experience with the German postal service or Reichspost. These POW’s were coerced with meals in exchange for information in collection, sorting, canceling and delivery of the mail. The OSS did not infiltrate Germany directly because they felt it necessary to focus their efforts in the liberation of France in 1944, but by the waning years of the war Secret Intelligence agents of the OSS could be found trickling in. The information gathered however came from nearby outposts in neutral countries that would supply the OSS with information. With this information the OSS and German exiles scoured the telephone directories and pulled over two million, randomly selected names registered within the Reich to send forged letters to. A unit of the OSS out of Rome claimed to have forged over 15000 envelopes a week. Within the letters contained writings about family happenings and gossip about non-existent people, the idea being that the domestic mail was not censored unlike the business mail. The letters coming out of Rome to be mailed were completed in different cities around Rome. The envelopes were to be addressed and sealed in Sienna, then down to Rome where they would be placed into the counterfeit bags where the mail would be finally sent to Bari to be routed and canceled.

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Wikipedia