Description
Robert Alexis McClure (March 4, 1897 – January 1, 1957) was an American general, psychological warfare specialist, and is considered the father of U.S. Army Special Warfare.
When the United States declared war on the Empire of Japan on December 8, 1941, McClure was serving as military attaché to the American embassy in London. He would later be given the additional duty of military attaché liaison to all of the European governments in exile in 1942. With these additional responsibilities, promotions would come quickly to Lieutenant Colonel McClure, becoming a brigadier general by March 1942, only nineteen months from his promotion to lieutenant colonel in August 1940.
Later that same year, McClure was appointed by Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower (“Ike”) to chief of intelligence for the European theater of operations. In preparation for Operation TORCH, Eisenhower next tapped McClure to head the creation of a new organization, one that would close the door on his twenty-seven years of experience in the regular Army to one that was wholly unconventional. U.S. psychological warfare capabilities had been mothballed following the closure of WWI. The PSYWAR framework Colonel Heber Blankenhorn and his team built to fight the Central Powers in the Great War, had been nearly forgotten through attrition and atrophy following the post-WWI drawdown. The entity, known as the Allied Forces Information and Censorship Section (INC) would be the foundation from which the U.S. psychological warfare capabilities in WWII would build. Writing to his wife Marjory in December 1942 from “somewhere in Africa,” McClure would state the following:
“My new job for which I was called by Ike very hurriedly is a continual headache…I have what I call the INC Section…I am just creating it.”
Brigadier General McClure would be given the unenviable task of consolidating several military functions into a cohesive unit: public relations, censorship and psychological warfare; with, in McClure’s own words “a slop over into civil affairs” included. The INC would include an amalgamation of military and civilian personnel from the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI); the Office of Strategic Services (OSS); the British Political Warfare Executive (PWE); and the U.S. Army.
McClure was appointed director of the newly created Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF in 1944. With the end of the war in Europe he was responsible for the Information Control Division which controlled broadcasting and newspapers in Germany during the early stage of the occupation.
