"Leaflets dropped on cities in Japan warning civilians about the atomic bomb, dropped c. August 6, 1945."
"America asks that you take immediate heed of what we say on this leaflet."
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/truman-leaflets/
"Airborne leaflet propaganda is a form of psychological warfare in which leaflets (flyers) are scattered in the air. Military forces have used aircraft to drop leaflets to attempt to alter the behavior of combatants and civilians in enemy-controlled territory, sometimes in conjunction with air strikes. Humanitarian air missions, in cooperation with leaflet propaganda, can turn civilians against their leadership while preparing them for the arrival of enemy troops."
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Airborne_leaflet_propaganda
"Through much of World War II, Allied bombers would sometimes drop leaflets warning of impending bombing of a city. The leaflets often told civilians to evacuate, and sometimes encouraged them to push their leaders to surrender. In August 1945, leaflets were dropped on several Japanese cities (including, supposedly, Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The first round, known as the “LeMay leaflets,” were distributed before the bombing of Hiroshima."
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/warning-leaflets/
"Leaflets were first deployed as a tactical weapon of war by the Germans during World War I to announce their imminent descent upon Paris [Fig. 1]. From that time forward, paper has rained from the skies during nearly every war (including the Cold War) to persuade the enemy to abandon its position [Fig. 2].2 More recently, a storm of text inundated landscapes in Iraq, where millions of leaflets were routinely dropped by the United States military both prior to and during the war to demoralize soldiers and civilian workers."
"The intent of psychological warfare, as the authors of Shock and Awe (an influential text focused on military strategies for psychologically disabling the enemy) indicate, is to “destroy, defeat, and neuter the will of an adversary to resist; or convince the adversary to accept our terms and aims short of using force.” To neuter is to render powerless through amputation, where shock numbs and destroys the adversary’s perception through “deception, confusion, misinformation, and disinformation, perhaps in massive amounts.”5 Part of a wartime strategy of “rapid dominance,” these attempts to deploy dubious communications capitalize on structures of doubt (as well as the capacity of media to render the real), where the unknown and unverifiable devise a contested terrain. The leaflet drop activates doubt at three primary levels: first, through its materiality—both light and easily distributed—which contributes to the construction of fact; second, through the forceful, direct and descending delivery of the leaflet, which renders information at once convincing and nearly mythical; and third, through the landscape, which as both battlefield and “outside” condition, challenges the authority of the text.
Idea Bombs
What has been called, “bombing the enemy with ideas,” the leaflet drop is a carefully orchestrated campaign to cast doubt in enemy territory, and to force the surrender of troops by a bombardment of “facts.”"
http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/leaflet-drop-the-paper-landscapes-of-war/
"The surrender leaflets used during Desert Storm are the pinnacle of success for that delivery platform"
https://sofrep.com/news/us-army-psyops-anti-isis-leaflet-drop/