by Lynne Olson
Thanks to the BBC, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands had a similar influence. Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, the young Dutch law student, spoke for many of his countrymen when he recalled that Wilhelmina’s pervasive presence “had been part of our world since the day we were born.” Nonetheless, when she escaped to London in May 1940, Roelfzema’s first reaction was fury at her “leaving us in the lurch. To hell with her!” He changed his mind soon afterward when he started listening to her broadcasts on Radio Orange, the BBC’s Dutch program: “The Queen had been right, obviously, to leave the country when she did, in the nick of time. We recognized the wisdom of her move and regretted our violent first reaction to the news.”
Like Haakon, Wilhelmina swiftly emerged as the soul of her country’s resistance. But while the Norwegian king’s BBC speeches were grave and dignified, Wilhelmina’s were fiery, passionate, and above all, intensely human. The Dutch found it hard to believe that this was the same distant, forbidding woman who had ruled them for more than forty years. In her first broadcast, made from Buckingham Palace on the day after she arrived in England, Wilhelmina made it clear that she would never compromise with Hitler, whom she called “the arch-enemy of mankind,” not to mention his “gang of criminals” or the “scoundrel” Dutchmen who collaborated with the Germans.
“Her speeches were highlights in our lives, especially when she attacked the Germans and the Dutch Nazis,” recalled Henri van der Zee, a Dutch writer. A joke made the rounds in Holland that Wilhelmina’s young granddaughters were forbidden to listen to her on the radio because she used such foul language when she talked about the Nazis. When German authorities confiscated the queen’s palaces and other possessions in Holland in retaliation for her anti-Nazi attacks, Wilhelmina, in her next broadcast, vented her wrath in “amazingly heated swear words,” according to German translators.
In a gesture of solidarity with the House of Orange, orange became the predominant national color in Holland—for clothing, flags, posters, even flowers (marigolds were ubiquitous). On June 29, 1940, the birthday of the queen’s son-in-law, Prince Bernhard, thousands of residents of The Hague braved the Nazis’ wrath by signing a message of congratulations to the prince and laying flowers at the statue of William of Orange in front of the queen’s palace.
For occupied Czechoslovakia, the star BBC broadcaster was not its former head of state, Edvard Beneš, a chilly, austere former philosophy professor. It was fifty-four-year-old Jan Masaryk, the country’s future foreign minister, who, of all the European exiles in London during the war, knew Britain best: he had spent twelve years there as head of his country’s diplomatic mission before Hitler conquered Czechoslovakia. Tomáš Masaryk, Jan’s father and the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, had literally put the nation on the map in 1918, and it had been Jan’s job in the 1930s and 1940s to keep it in the public eye, to establish that it was “a country,” as he wryly put it, “and not a contagious disease.”
Jan Masaryk
Before and during World War II, the tall, balding, nattily dressed Masaryk was one of the most popular diplomats in London. He charmed and cajoled journalists, socialites, and Foreign Office higher-ups alike. As a young man, he had spent several years in the United States, been briefly married to the daughter of a wealthy Chicago manufacturer, and spoke English with an American accent. A gifted pianist and raconteur, he was warm, witty, irreverent, and seemingly irresistible to women. “Jan,” said a British friend, “had only to enter a room—and society fell at his feet.” Underneath that urbane, lighthearted exterior, however, was a serious, sensitive, and highly gifted statesman—and broadcaster. Indeed, he was judged by many to be, with the exception of Churchill, the most effective Allied broadcaster of the war.
Masaryk’s first broadcast to his countrymen began with these combative words: “The hour of retribution is here. The struggle to exterminate the Nazis has begun. By the name which I bear, I solemnly declare to you that we shall win the fight and that truth will prevail.” Using simple, homely language that even the most uneducated peasant could understand, his subsequent broadcasts employed the same mix of hope, inspiration, and pugnacity. When referring to individual Nazi leaders, Masaryk was not averse to using crudity. Once, after Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s minister of propaganda, visited a theater in Prague, Masaryk said he hoped “one of the old servants at the National Theater had lit a scented candle in Goebbels’ box to fumigate the place after he left.”
Masaryk’s nickname in Czechoslovakia was “Honza,” which was also the name of the main character in a well-known Czech fairy tale called “The Tale of Honza.” Soon after he began his wildly popular broadcasts, posters appeared on walls throughout Prague with the announcement “Hear The Tale of Honza tonight at 9:30.” It took the Germans several months to figure out the posters’ real meaning.
In 1938, Masaryk had been horrified by the British betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich, telling Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, “If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world, I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, God help your souls.” Yet despite that betrayal, Masaryk never lost his love for Britain. In his transmissions to Czechoslovakia, he repeatedly paid tribute to the courage, determination, and high ideals of the British people, telling his compatriots in one broadcast that “the English know anxiety but they don’t know fear.”
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ALTHOUGH GERMANY BANNED LISTENING to BBC broadcasts in every country they occupied, they were relatively lenient, at least during the first months of the war, in the punishments handed out to transgressors in the western European nations—Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Luxembourg. But when it became clear that listening to the BBC had become a national pastime in all those countries, the Germans began to crack down, outlawing the sale and use of radios and imposing increasingly heavy fines and jail sentences on those caught with them.
In the eastern European countries of Czechoslovakia and Poland, the penalties for that offense and others were far more extreme. Like the inhabitants of other Slavic nations, Poles and Czechs were regarded by the Nazis as Untermenschen, subhumans, who, in Hitler’s view, occupied land meant for the expansion of the Aryan “master race.” In both nations, listening to the BBC was punishable by death, although in Czechoslovakia, enforcement of the ban was somewhat hit-or-miss, at least early in the war. Not so in Poland, Germany’s centuries-old enemy, where the campaign of terror was far more severe. None of the other occupied countries, in the words of the historian John Lukacs, “was handled [by the Germans] with such a frightful mixture of brutality, torture and truly inhuman contempt.”
For the Third Reich, the eradication of the Poles and their nation, the destruction of their culture and identity, were primary goals. As part of that effort—which included the closing of all Polish schools, universities, and libraries—the country’s broadcasting system was shut down and all radios were ordered confiscated. A few thousand remained hidden, however, most of them in the hands of members of Poland’s widespread resistance movement, who listened to the BBC knowing they faced immediate execution if discovered. Their focus of attention was the news programs, which they transcribed and then printed in the more than 150 underground newspapers that circulated throughout the country.
Knowing that many of its listeners were risking their lives by merely turning on their radios was, for the BBC’s European Service, a major challenge and heavy responsibility throughout the war. In 1940, however, its most immediate dilemma was the question of how to deal with the crazy-quilt, divided nature of broken, humiliated France.
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* Two months after the European Service transferred to Bush House, the Maida Vale ice rink suffered a direct hit and was heavily damaged.
On June 18, 1940, a young BBC producer was told to make arrangements for a broadcast to France that night by a general who had just arrived in London. For the producer, it was a ho-hum moment. “There was no gre
at excitement over another French general, who also happened to be the under secretary for national defense,” he later recalled. “Most people in Britain hadn’t the faintest idea who the under secretary for national defense in France was.” After meeting the chain-smoking Frenchman at the doors of Broadcasting House, the producer escorted him to the studio, both of them unaware of the imbroglio that had erupted in the British government’s highest levels over the idea of Charles de Gaulle broadcasting to France.
The day before, Marshal Pétain had announced to his countrymen his plan to seek an armistice with Germany. De Gaulle, who had only just arrived in London, asked Winston Churchill if he could use the BBC to challenge Pétain’s submission to the enemy. The prime minister immediately agreed—a decision that threw his War Cabinet into a tailspin. During a meeting at which Churchill was not present, members of the Cabinet concluded that “it was undesirable that General de Gaulle, [being] persona non grata to the present French government, should broadcast at the present time.” When he learned about this, Churchill dispatched General Edward Spears to cajole his ministers into changing their minds.
As the War Cabinet feared, de Gaulle’s speech was nothing less than a repudiation of Pétain’s government and a call to rebellion. “I, General de Gaulle, now in London, appeal to all French officers and men who are at present on British soil, or may be in the future…to get in touch with me,” he declared. “Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not go out.” Later, de Gaulle would regard that broadcast as one of the most fateful moments of his life. “As the irrevocable words flew out upon their way,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I felt within myself a life coming to an end.” Speaking on the BBC, he remarked, had provided him with “a powerful means of war.”
In retrospect, that turned out to be true. Yet at the time, almost no one else shared de Gaulle’s belief in the broadcast’s importance. Very few Frenchmen heard him that night. And, for the most part, those who did listen had no idea who he was—and no interest in following him anywhere.
Under the armistice, France was split into two zones—the German-occupied north, which included Paris, and the south, governed from Vichy by Pétain and his men. Most of the French, regardless of which part of the country in which they lived, revered the aged Pétain and looked to him as their leader, whose wisdom and firm direction would help heal the trauma of the country’s collapse. “The Marshal’s authority was accepted by all with more than resignation,” noted the French historian Henri Michel. “He offered consolation and hope.”
Despite his initial lack of an audience, de Gaulle continued broadcasting over the BBC. From July 1940 onward, he and his Free French movement were given five minutes of airtime each evening for a segment called Honneur et Patrie. Over the next couple of years, the general would indeed begin to rouse many in his country to resistance and rebellion. But in 1940, the BBC’s most urgent task was to encourage and give hope to deeply demoralized France. Thanks to a daily half-hour program called Les Français Parlent aux Français, both goals were abundantly met.
Of all the BBC programs beamed to occupied Europe, Les Français Parlent aux Français was the most skillfully produced and performed and by far the most popular, becoming a cult favorite even among British listeners (at least among those who could understand French). It was, wrote Asa Briggs, “a feast of radio at its original and best,” staged, in Alan Bullock’s words, by “one of the wittiest, most brilliant bunch of broadcasters there’s ever been.”
Virtually from the day it went on the air in July 1940, the program took France by storm. An Englishman who lived in the French city of Chambéry for several months after the armistice reported that it resembled a ghost town during the 9 P.M. Les Français broadcast. “Generally at this time of night, people are out for a stroll,” he noted. “But not now. The wireless is the cause.”
Although its staff was entirely French, Les Français was the brainchild of a young Englishwoman named Cecilia Reeves, a talks producer in the BBC’s French section. A graduate of Cambridge’s Newnham College, Reeves had joined the BBC in 1933 as a member of its foreign liaison department, which assisted non-British broadcasters who used BBC facilities to transmit their stories and other material to their home countries.
Among the foreigners was Edward R. Murrow, then in his early thirties, who became a friend of Reeves’s and other bright, talented young staffers at the BBC. He and his British colleagues had the same views about truth and independence in broadcasting. “We were giving in full the bad news, the hellish communiqués,” said one BBC editor, “and this meshed with Ed’s desire to tell the truth even if it was a hard and nasty truth. There was a complete meeting of minds on that.”
Reeves, who made the arrangements for Murrow’s broadcasts and inspected his copy before its transmission, had a particularly close relationship with him. She was in the studio late one night in 1937 when, having returned from covering the German takeover of Austria, Murrow, looking “shattered and terribly fatigued,” described the Nazis’ orgy of violence against Austrian Jews. After the broadcast, he asked her to come back with him to his apartment, where, over tumblers of whiskey, he talked to her until dawn about the atrocities he had seen. “I still have a picture of the horror…this hideous picture, and of the agony with which he told it,” she said.
After the war began, Reeves was sent to the BBC’s Paris office. She returned to London just before France fell and was assigned the job of putting together a team of Frenchmen to broadcast to their newly occupied homeland. In doing so, she drew on her experience with Murrow and his broadcasting style, which was considerably more informal and colloquial than that of BBC announcers. Pictures in the air were what Murrow wanted. Throwing out the rigid, traditional rules of news writing and broadcasting, he was calm and conversational in his broadcasts, sometimes telling his stories in the first person singular, just a friend chatting with other friends.
Before the war, Reeves had also been impressed with CBS’s innovative European news roundups, which featured reporting and analysis by Murrow and other CBS correspondents. She thought that a similar format would be perfect for broadcasts to France, given the French passion for discussion and argument.
To oversee the program, she chose a charismatic French theater director named Michel Saint-Denis, who had come to Britain in 1930 after founding and leading an avant-garde theater group in France. By 1939, Saint-Denis was regarded as one of the most innovative stage directors in London, working closely with such theatrical luminaries as John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, and Alec Guinness. His 1937 version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, starring Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, and Michael Redgrave, is still regarded as a landmark production of twentieth-century British theater. After the war, Saint-Denis would help found two major drama schools—the Old Vic Theatre Centre in London and Juilliard in New York. Arguably, however, his greatest achievement was his wartime work at the BBC.
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ALTHOUGH ALREADY FORTY-TWO YEARS old when war broke out, Saint-Denis returned to France from London and rejoined his old World War I regiment. Attached to the British Expeditionary Force as a liaison officer and interpreter, he was evacuated at Dunkirk. He came back to Britain infuriated by France’s capitulation to Germany and determined to do all he could to help liberate his homeland. That, however, did not mean joining de Gaulle’s Free French forces: like many Frenchmen in London, Saint-Denis was put off by what he viewed as the general’s haughty arrogance and autocratic style of leadership. He was about to enlist in the British army when Reeves persuaded him he could help France more by working at the BBC.
Despite his lack of broadcast experience, Saint-Denis instinctively understood radio’s potential as a powerful weapon in this war. According to a BBC colleague, he treated “the mike as an old friend from the beginning” and trained the six men he hired for the Français team—a cartoonist, an actor, an artist, a poet, and two journalists—to do the same. To protect their families in France from Ger
man retribution, several members of the team, including Saint-Denis (who had a wife, a mistress, and children by both women living there), adopted pseudonyms: the name he chose, “Jacques Duchesne,” had been the nom de guerre of the spokesman of the working-class supporters of the French Revolution.
Agreeing with Cecilia Reeves that unadorned propaganda wasn’t going to convince anyone, Saint-Denis turned politics into entertainment, using humor, drama, and music in imaginative, sophisticated ways to discuss and analyze the political and military events of the day. “The French frequently were not scrupulous in following the official directives,” one BBC executive recalled. “If they had, [their broadcasts] would have sounded like official directives….Instead, they struck a note that the listeners understood instinctively.” Another BBC official remarked of Saint-Denis, “With a message to give and enough theatrical experience to invent original ways of giving it, half an hour’s propaganda became more exciting in his hands than any other radio program I have ever heard.”
Every evening from July 1940 to October 1944, the shirtsleeved members of the Saint-Denis group gathered around microphones in a small, stuffy underground studio at Bush House. Occasionally the muffled crump of a nearby bomb blast could be heard in the studio, but Les Français never stopped broadcasting. At the beginning of each program, Saint-Denis spoke to his audience in the guise of a fictional working-class Frenchman; as this earthy, shrewd, patriotic character, he tried to bolster the spirits of his compatriots. The program’s daily news segment reported Allied setbacks and losses as well as victories, following the BBC’s credo that telling the truth would do more to win over its listeners than lying to them.
