Content note. Wartime leaflets include racial and political caricature, atrocity claims, threats, a sexualised appeal aimed at enemy troops, and safe-conduct offers that were also a means of pressure. They are shown as they were issued, from several sides, as evidence of what each issuer told its audience. Showing a leaflet is not endorsing it.
Short answer
A propaganda leaflet is a small printed sheet, dropped from aircraft, fired in shells, floated on balloons or handed out, meant to reach an audience that posters and broadcasts cannot: enemy soldiers, civilians under occupation, or voters at a campaign stop. This page shows leaflets from the United States, Britain, Austria-Hungary, the Soviet Union, Japan, Iraq and Chile, each tagged by technique, with the same method for every issuer.
What makes a leaflet different from a poster
A poster is displayed to whoever walks past it. A leaflet is delivered to a person, so the issuer chooses an audience and often a moment: soldiers in a trench, civilians in a city about to be bombed, a unit that has just lost its officers. Many leaflets in this collection were issued by military units to enemy troops or civilians, and they often carry features a poster rarely does: serial or code numbers, a safe-conduct pass to be shown on surrender, a second language, or a request to pass the sheet on. Leaflets from political campaigns and parties, such as the 1828 handbill below, use the same format to reach voters. The collection records the issuer, audience and stated purpose of each one, and applies one working definition of propaganda to all of them (how FRAME defines propaganda). For the doctrine behind military leaflet programmes on one side, see US psychological-operations doctrine; for the other major sides, see Soviet agitprop. For the poster counterpart to this page, see propaganda posters.
Before aircraft: a campaign handbill, 1828
Leaflets did not begin with air power. In the 1828 United States presidential campaign, supporters of John Quincy Adams circulated "coffin handbills" against Andrew Jackson, which the Library of Congress traces to the Republican editor John Binns. This broadside, headed "Some Account of some of the Bloody Deeds of General Jackson", runs six black coffin woodcuts, each labelled with the name of a militiaman executed under Jackson's orders, above dense columns of narrative. The loaded title and a list built only from killings charged against Jackson are the tells: name-calling and card stacking. The catalogue notes a companion broadside on the same theme. Read the technique: name-calling and card stacking.
The First World War: leaflets to soldiers on both sides
A British balloon leaflet of 1918, in German and marked "By balloon", shows an American soldier carrying the Stars and Stripes at the head of a column that runs back through marching ranks and transports to the Statue of Liberty at New York, above the word "Frankreich". The unbroken column and the fixed bayonets stage American manpower as arriving without limit: bandwagon and fear appeal. The scan comes from a Saxon artillery gunner's family collection of Allied leaflets picked up on the Western Front in 1918. Read the technique: bandwagon.
The same war produced leaflets from the other side. A text-only Austro-Hungarian leaflet headed "Soldati italiani!" tells Italian troops that the monarchy never wanted war with Italy, that Trieste is "never Italian", and that Italy's ministers, aided by Gabriele d'Annunzio's "foolish bluster", led them into the war. Blame is placed on named Italian politicians and on Britain, and the leaflet closes with "the English merchant" as "this vampire". It is tagged name-calling and scapegoating, the same tags a British or American leaflet would receive for the same moves. Read the technique: scapegoating. More on the war's propaganda: WW1 propaganda posters.
The Second World War: leaflets to enemy civilians and troops
Luftpost was a German-language leaflet newspaper dropped by the Royal Air Force over Germany. Issue 16, of 2 September 1941, sets a photograph of two Hitler Youth boys beside an article on boys "falling by the hundred thousand in Russia", and two boxes below: "Fallen" (German losses, from "official Russian reports") against "Risen" (share prices of arms firms). The selective pairing and the closing question to parents carry the appeal: card stacking, fear appeal and name-calling. The page names only the Royal Air Force as the source. Read the technique: fear appeal.
Content note: Wartime leaflet that alleges German soldiers dishonoured Finnish women and stages children left fatherless This object is shown as it was published. Why 
A Soviet leaflet, photographed in early 1942 and held in the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive, is addressed to "Finnish soldier!" It opens with a child's voice calling "Father, come home!", tells him that his real enemies are "the Hitlerites" rather than the Russians, and ends with two boxed safe-conduct passes, one in Finnish and one in Russian. The risk that his children will be left fatherless, and the blame placed on Hitler's side for the war, are the fear appeal and scapegoating tells, the same tags given to the Austro-Hungarian leaflet above. No issuing unit is printed on it.
Content note: Drawn woman and suggestive first-person text addressed to enemy soldiers. This object is shown as it was published. Why 
A Japanese military leaflet distributed during the Battle of the Philippines is in English, with a hand-lettered headline, "Don't wait to die", beside a pencil-style drawing of a smiling woman and a first-person text that begins "Before the bombs fall" and "Before the terror comes". The headline and the two "before" lines stage imminent death from bombing, and the text offers one remedy, intimacy with the speaker. This is a fear appeal in an unusual register, and it is shown as issued.
The U.S. Army Forces, Pacific, Psychological Warfare Branch issued a leaflet to Japanese troops in about 1944 in which two officers in American service dress haul on a rope that cuts a pale shipping lane running from the oil derricks and rubber and tin stores of Southeast Asia to Japan. The severed lane with ships strung along it asserts that fuel and raw materials will stop reaching Japan. It is also tagged fear appeal, the same tag as the Soviet and Japanese leaflets above.
The Korean and Vietnam wars: leaflets as policy
A Korean-language leaflet of 1952, serial 1321, issued by United Nations Command psychological warfare, shows a bearded scholar teaching students beneath scrolls of Confucian virtue words, and the same old man bent under a huge load while a stout, cigarette-smoking man orders him to work. A 1993 conference paper that reproduces it from the Kennedy Special Warfare Museum names the stout man as Kim Il Sung; the leaflet itself names no one. The virtue-word backdrop set against a before-and-after picture is the tell: glittering generalities and scapegoating. Read the technique: glittering generalities.
The Chieu Hoi ("Open Arms") programme used leaflets and posters to invite fighters to rally to the Saigon government. A 1966 sheet printed by the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office says that more than 2,400 fighters in Phu Yen had returned and that "hundreds of others are now eagerly returning." It quotes a named rallier, guerrilla squad leader Lê Diện, who says he felt he would "sooner or later die in a clash with Allied forces". A running count stated by the issuer, a named witness and a safe-conduct pass are the bandwagon, testimonial and fear-appeal tells. Other Chieu Hoi leaflets in the collection, including Australian-issued ones, carry the same kinds of tags. For the programme, see Cold War propaganda posters.
From 1980 on: leaflets by other issuers
Content note: Wartime leaflet pairing a devotional portrait of Imam Ali with a warning that divine wrath will pursue attacking troops. This object is shown as it was published. Why 
A Persian-language leaflet from the Iraqi armed forces, dated by Commons only to between 1980 and 1988, is addressed to Iranian troops, with a portrait captioned as Imam Ali. It presents Iraq as keeper of the Imams' shrines, warns that God's and the Prophet's household's wrath will pursue any attacker in this world and the next, and tells the reader to surrender in order to survive. The devotional portrait lends its prestige to the threat: transfer and fear appeal. Read the technique: transfer.
Content note: Wartime leaflet showing gas-masked soldiers, an explosion and a biohazard sign, with a threat of retribution. This object is shown as it was published. Why 
A Coalition leaflet in English and Arabic from February 2003, published by the U.S. Navy, shows a line of gas-masked soldiers before a fireball and a biohazard sign under the words "Do not use weapons of mass destruction", with a reverse threatening "swift and severe retribution" and personal accountability for unit commanders. The U.S. Navy release says Coalition aircraft dropped such leaflets in the weeks before the March 2003 invasion. The pairing of a picture of the harm with a named consequence aimed at a specific audience is the fear-appeal tell.
Not every modern leaflet is addressed to an enemy. A pamphlet for the "Sí" campaign in Chile's 1988 plebiscite, held by the Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional, sets a man lifting a baby beside the claim "Never has anyone done more for the Chilean family" and a grid of figures: housing solutions, births attended, free education, milk, and a country that "eliminated child malnutrition". Only credits are counted, with no costs or contrary figures: card stacking, and a virtue claim to match. The same method is applied to it as to a leaflet from any side.
How to read a propaganda leaflet
The questions that apply to posters apply here, with two additions. Ask who delivered it and how: a leaflet dropped over an army, one pushed under a door, and one handed out at a rally are different acts even when the words are similar. And ask what it offers the reader: many military leaflets pair a threat with a safe-conduct pass, which is an offer and a pressure at once. The five general questions (who issued it, who it was for, what it asks, which technique carries it, and what it leaves out) are set out in propaganda posters, and worked examples of each classic technique from several sides are in propaganda examples.
Browse propaganda leaflets
The grid below shows leaflets from the collection. Each opens an object page with the holding institution, a link to the original record, a verbatim transcription with a labelled translation, and the rights basis for hosting. For every object, not only leaflets, use the full collection, filtered by technique, era, country and medium.
Sources and rights
Leaflets here come from the Library of Congress, the U.S. National Archives, Europeana, Wikimedia Commons, the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive and the Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile, among others. Rights bases vary and are stated on each object page: works published before 1931, U.S. government works, items released by the holding institution under an open licence, and works whose rights status is noted as limited. Transcriptions are verbatim, and translations are labelled as such.
