Fundamentally there two ways to defeat an enemy. Destroy them, or cause them to loose the will to fight, indeed it usually a combination of both. The attritional war of WW1 ended when the Germans could see no point in going on.

So why talk about leaflet drops in relation to the Royal Artillery ? In the modern targeting process Psyops is often part of the mechanism in reducing the enemies will to fight, the use of firepower being integrated with non kinetic methods.

So this information posted by Phil B is very interesting;

This is an interesting piece about early psyops. Was leaflet dropping eventually agreed to be lawful and did Scholtz & Wookey slip back into obscurity?

The Allied leaflets enraged the Germans, who actually placed captured British pilots who dropped them on trial for their lives. In one very famous case, the Germans condemned two British pilots, Captain E. Scholtz and Lieutenant H.C. Wookey to prison. The two pilots were shot down and captured near Cambrai on 17 October 1917. They were charged with "the distribution in September 1917 of pamphlets detrimental to German troops." They were tried, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to 10 years at hard labor. The British government threatened severe reprisals against German officers, so in April 1918 the pilots were pardoned by the Kaiser and sent to a regular POW camp at Karlsruhe. According to Blankenhorn, the Americans, "fully aware of the enemy threats, made it a point to fly defiantly low as possible and drop their leaflets directly on German positions." This so embarrassed the British that they returned to the airplane for leaflet drops in the last weeks of the war. He also states that some British pilots burned the leaflets in their hangars to avoid carrying them over enemy lines.

Dr. Philip M. Taylor, author of "Munitions of the Mind - A History of Propaganda from Ancient World to the Present Day," Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1995, discusses the legal issue in more depth:

For most of 1918 , the principal method of distributing enemy propaganda was leaflets not airplane. This was because at the end of the 1917, four captured British airmen were tried by a German court martial for 'having distributed pamphlets containing insults against the German army and Government among German troops in the Western Theatre of War.' Although two of the accused were acquitted due to lack of evidence, and although the court itself questioned the ruling about whether this act was a violation of international law, two officers were sentenced to ten years imprisonment. When news of this punishment reached the war office in January 1918, all leaflet dropping by airplane was suspended. Reprisals were threatened, resulting in the pardoning of the two British officers, who were returned to their camps and treated as normal prisoners of war. But the Air Ministry remained reluctant to commit its men and machines to leaflet raids and the suspension order remained in force until October 1918, barely a month before the end of war.

http://www.psywarrio...anWWIPSYOP.html

Source: RFC/RAF Leaflet Drops