Radio propaganda in World War II

Radio propaganda in World War II

Propaganda has been a tool for politicians, during as well as outside of wars, for a long time, and it's no surprise that the radio was quickly embraced as a propaganda tool. Unlike newspapers or fliers, radio waves can't be stopped by national borders and can reach anyone with a cheap and simple radio. The broadcasting of easy-to-sing patriotic songs in the U.S.A. before World War I was a tool to influence public opinion (even though commercial radio activity was suspended during the war). Radio propaganda soon became a way to influence a nation's own population, the civilian populations of other, hostile counties, and even the enemy troops on the field. This topic of wartime radio propaganda is far too wide for a single article, so we'll concentrate on propaganda aimed at enemy soldiers during World War II.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was a pioneer of political propaganda before World War II, famously having said "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." It is no surprise that German wartime propaganda also followed the pattern (at least in part) by broadcasting news of fictitious Allied defeats and casualties to demoralize listening Allied soldiers and civilians. The best-known German propaganda station was Germany Calling, recognized by the station announcement: "Germany calling! Here are the Reichssender Hamburg, station Bremen." (The announcement was actually false, technically making the channel "black propaganda." It was not broadcast from Bremen, but from Norddeich, a village very close to the German-Dutch border.)

The channel refined the mere repetition of fake bad news by mixing it with content that would be genuinely popular with the listeners and would thus encourage them to tune in. Jazz, considered a degenerate art form and nicknamed "Negermusik," was banned on German radio, but a special propaganda band was formed from the best German swing musicians. Named Charlie and his Orchestra after singer Karl ("Charlie") Schwedler, the band played genuinely well, albeit with lyrics that stressed how badly the war was going for the Allies, and with new lines inserted into popular American and British songs like "Here is Winston Churchill's latest tear-jerker: Yes, the Germans are driving me crazy / I thought I had brains / But they shot down my planes..." Despite the regular digs at him, Churchill reportedly enjoyed their music.

Another tool in a radio propagandist's toolbox was the use of specific personal information. Letters sent from and to prisoner-of-war camps were scoured for every mention of birth and other family events, which would then be mentioned on air.

German propaganda broadcasters were regularly given nicknames by the soldiers and civilians who listened to them. One of the best-known names on the German airwaves was Lord Haw-Haw, a name that, like others, were actually applied to multiple individuals. The original Lord Haw-Haw was Wolf Mittler, a German radio host and journalist, whose near-perfect English was described by some listeners as evocative of Bertie Wooster, the humorous English gentleman from P. G. Wodehouse's short stories. Mittler actually hated doing political propaganda and was happy to be soon replaced. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, but managed to escape to Switzerland.

Norman Baillie-Stewart was a former British officer who was drummed out of the army in 1933 for selling secrets to Nazi Germany, and imprisoned for five years after the war. Eduard Dietze was a German-British-Hungarian broadcaster born in Glasgow.

The most famous Lord Haw-Haw, however, was William Joyce, who replaced Mittler in 1939. He was born in the U.S., but grew up in Ireland, where he, still in his mid-teens, acted as an informant to the British authorities reporting on the Irish Republican Army. He later fell in with the British Union of Fascists and hoped to become the Viceroy of India under the new government of British Fascist Oswald Mosley, but such hopes were dashed when the two fell out and Joyce formed his own Nazi organization.

He fled to Germany in August 1939, the month before World War II began. He eventually found employment as a radio propagandist, and fully embraced the personality of Lord Haw-Haw. He made his final broadcast in late April 1945, during the Battle of Berlin. He was captured by British forces the next month. Intelligence soldiers spotted him as he was taking a rest while gathering firewood. After engaging him in conversation, one soldier recognized his voice and asked if he was Joyce. He reached in his pocket for his passport, but the soldiers mistook the gesture as going for his gun and shot him in the thigh.

Joyce's trial ran into an interesting legal problem: he was a U.S. citizen who was also a naturalized German, and he claimed that a British court had no jurisdiction over him, since a non-British citizen couldn't commit treason against Britain. This argument was rejected on the grounds that he falsely claimed to be a British national in order to get a British passport, and enjoying British diplomatic protection also meant allegiance to the King. He was executed in January 1946, the penultimate person to be executed in Britain for a crime other than murder.

Another "compound character" of pro-German propagandists was Axis Sally. The most famous person behind the name was Mildred Gillars (née Sisk), an American woman who moved to Germany in 1934 to study music, and became an announcer at (and the highest-paid employee of) the German State Radio in 1940. In 1941, Mildred ignored the official U.S. State Department advice to leave Germany, as she wanted to stay with her fiancé, a naturalized German (who was sent to the Eastern Front shortly afterwards and died there).

Gillars ran several programs. Home Sweet Home Hour, which concentrated on demoralizing U.S. forces in Europe by talking about how their wives and girlfriends were cheating on them back home. Midge at the Mike was American music mixed with defeatist propaganda, anti-Semitic rants and outbursts against President Roosevelt. GI's Letter-box and Medical Reports were aimed at the American home front and used information from captured U.S. airmen to spread worry to their families. She also interviewed U.S. soldiers in POW camps and offered them a chance to record a message for their families; the records were then edited to give the impression that they were well-treated and sympathetic to the Nazis.

After the war, a prosecutor was dispatched to Germany by the U.S. attorney general specifically to track down Gillars. The man's only lead was a B-17 (Read our earlier article) crewman who was shot down, and interviewed by a woman using the name "Barbara Mome" in a POW camp. The prosecutor learned that a woman using the same name was selling furniture at second-hand stores – one store owner eventually revealed "Mome's," (really Gillars's) address under "intensive interrogation," leading to her arrest. She was charged with ten counts of treason but only convicted on one: she was stripped of her U.S. citizenship, sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison and a fine of 10,000 dollars ($128,000 today). She was released on parole in 1961. She converted to Catholicism in prison and lived in a convent for a while after her release, but remained an unrepentant Nazi until her death.

Rita Zucca was a lesser-known Axis Sally, an Italian-American woman who spent her teenage years in Italy, then returned to the country in 1938. She renounced her U.S. citizenship in 1941 to save her family's property from expropriation under Mussolini's government. Zucca, 30 at the time, was hired by the Italian government in 1943 to copy Gillars's success – despite the fact she lost a previous job as a typist after she was caught copying anti-Fascist pamphlets. Much to Gillars's chagrin, Zucca's voice was often mistaken for hers, and she finished her broadcasts with the sign-off "a sweet kiss from Sally." She was captured in June 1945 in the home of her uncle in Turin, where she took refuge after Axis forces collapsed in Northern Italy.

The U.S. government tried to prosecute her, but failed, since she renounced her U.S. citizenship before started broadcasting. She was subsequently tried by an Italian military tribunal for collaboration with the Fascists and sentenced to four and a half years – she served nine months before being released as part of a general amnesty.

Tokyo Rose was the Japanese equivalent of Axis Sally, and similarly covered several individuals, the most famous being Iva Toguri D'Aquino, born Ikuko Toguri. Born to Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles, Toguri was a Christian, a Girl Scout and a patriot. She sailed to Japan in early July 1941 to visit an ailing relative, and was issued a Certificate of Identification for the trip as she didn't have a passport. The next month, she applied for a passport at the U.S. Consulate in Japan so she could go home. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December, while her request was still being processed, and she was denied a certification of her citizenship.

Stuck in Japan, Toguri found herself between a rock and a hard place. She could only have qualified for rationing stamps if she renounced her U.S. citizenship, something she refuse to do. She found employment as a typist at a news agency, and later at Radio Tokyo.

In November 1943, several Allied prisoners of war were forced to broadcast English-language propaganda, under threats of torture and execution according to them. The leader of the group was Australian Major Charles Cousens, who was captured during the Fall of Singapore (Read our earlier article) and aided in the task by a U.S. Army captain and a Philippine Army lieutenant. Cousens knew Toguri from before, since she used to risk her life smuggling food into the POW camp he was interred in, and brought her onboard the propaganda project. Toguri was reluctant to work on anti-American propaganda, but Cousens promised her that she would never have to say anything specifically against the U.S. He kept his promise, and Toguri only played in humorous sketches and introduced music. In fact, the group tried to discredit their own material by inserting innuendo and double entendres their Japanese handlers missed but native speakers would have noticed. Toguri was paid the equivalent of $7 a month, but still found a way to buy food and smuggle it into POW camps.

After the war, two U.S. reporters offered her a year's wages for an exclusive interview. Once the interview was recorded, they reneged on their offer and tried to sell the transcript as Toguri's "confession." She was held for a year but released after none of the authorities found any evidence of wrongdoing. Once again, she tried to return home, but an American radio host and gossip columnist lobbied against her. She was eventually arrested again and returned to the U.S. and tried for treason.

Resorting to multiple occasions of perjury, the prosecution managed to get a conviction of disproportionate harshness: Toguri was fined $10,000, lost her U.S citizenship and sentenced to 10 years in jail. She was released after six years on a presidential pardon by President Gerald Ford.

Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally and Lord Haw-Haw might be the best-known faces of World War II radio propaganda, but the Axis efforts arguably fell behind the British practice in sophistication. The most notable name on the British side was Denis Sefton Delmer, a journalist of Australian heritage.

Born in Berlin and fluent in German, Delmer became the first British journalist to interview Adolf Hitler in 1931 with the help of SA-leader Ernst Röhm. (Read our earlier article) The next year, he covered the Nazi Party during the 1932 German federal election, traveling with Hitler on the latter's private plane. At the time, the Nazis were sure he was an agent of the Secret Intelligence Service, while the British authorities thought he was a Nazi sympathizer. He returned to Britain after covering the German invasions of Poland and France. When Hitler offered peace terms to Britain, Delmer published a spirited reply in which he wrote the British hurl the terms "right back at you, in your evil-smelling teeth." His piece was so hostile that Goebbels concluded it must have been approved by the British government, since no news publication would publish something like that without an official go-ahead.

Delmer was recruited by the Political Warfare Executive for their black propaganda campaign. His first radio show starred a fictional German man known as "the Chief," a fervent Nazi and Hitler-supporter making pirate broadcasts from somewhere within Germany. Such a figure would attract the attention of other Nazis, but there was a twist: while the Chief was loyal to Hitler, he despised not only Churchill, "that flatfooted son of a drunken Jew," but also the "Party Commune," the low- and mid-level functionaries of the Nazi Party, whom he accused of moral corruption, sadomasochistic orgies and betraying the Nazi cause. The Chief's channel was simply called Gustav Siegfried Eins, the German phonetic code for "GS1," an appellation designed to pique the listeners' interest: was it short for Geheimsender ("Secret Station")? Or perhaps Generalstab ("General Staff")?

GS1 went on air in May 1941 to take advantage of the uncertainty in Germany created by Rudolf Hess's inexplicable flight to Britain (Read our earlier article). The character was killed off in late 1943 in a broadcast which simulated the German authorities finding the Chief and gunning him down in front of the radio. There was a hiccup thanks to a non-German-speaking broadcast engineer, who accidentally played the critical part about the Chief's death twice.

Delmer's next two projects were Soldatensender Calais ("Soldiers' Radio Calais") and Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik ("German Short-Wave Radio Atlantic"), designed specifically to reach German soldiers and U-boat crews, respectively. Both channels used the same radio station, a facility built specifically for the purpose in Southeast England, the most powerful broadcast transmitter in the world at the time. The channels did not explicitly claim to be official German military stations, and their listeners in the German armed forces knew they were British, but they still kept up the appearances with native-level German speakers and the use of the most modern German military jargon; this way, soldiers caught listening could believably claim that they thought the channels were German.

The broadcasts lacked the heavy-handedness of Axis propaganda broadcasts, but used the same basic method of mixing genuinely interesting material such as music and sports news with items designed to erode morale. Atlantik, for example, once broadcast a piece about German doctors heroically fighting diphtheria in children's camps. While the report sounded positive on the surface, its listeners out on the Atlantic were led to wonder about poor conditions back home. Atlantik also reported about unofficial football matches between U-boat crews at base, including not just the results but also the nicknames of players – all information gathered from POW letters and interviews with POWs. Records of the latest popular German music was acquired through neutral Sweden and flown to Britain by Royal Air Force planes, while American hits were supplied by the Office of Strategic Services. Additional music was recorded by the band of the Royal Marines, and by a German band that was captured while entertaining Rommel's (Read our earlier article) Afrika Korps.

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