by Lynne Olson
Once a week, in perhaps the most popular feature of Les Français, Saint-Denis and two other members of the team transformed themselves into “les trois amis.” The amis were supposedly a group of old French pals in England who got together in various locales—pubs, restaurants, parks, a cliff in Dover (all of them complete with appropriate sound effects)—to chat about current events, prominently including the latest idiocies of the Germans. In a typical bon mot, one of the friends justified his decision to leave France by observing that he “would rather see the English in their country than the Germans in ours.”
That segment—and the entire program—appealed to the cultural identity of the French at a time when it was being undermined. Listening to “les trois amis” was like “eavesdropping in a French café,” the English writer Raymond Mortimer remarked. “We found our spirits greatly improved by their gaiety.” A letter to the Les Français team spirited out of France declared that “the very soul of French wit has fled to London.” Another smuggled letter said, “If only you could see us listening to your broadcasts. We only live for that.”
On occasion, though, Les Français’s mood was considerably more serious. That was the case on October 21, 1940, when Churchill appeared on the program for his first broadcast to German-controlled France. The prime minister enlisted Saint-Denis’s help in preparing for the broadcast. All that day, with the noise of German bombers overhead, the Frenchman worked with Churchill in his underground War Rooms beneath Whitehall, translating his speech into colloquial French.
“I want to be understood as I am,” Churchill emphasized to Saint-Denis, “not as you are, not even as the French language is. Don’t make it sound too correct.” When the translation was finished, Churchill read it aloud in his idiosyncratic French, which Saint-Denis realized was somewhat calculated, as Churchill himself admitted. “If I spoke perfect French,” he said, sipping from a glass of brandy, the French “wouldn’t like it very much.”
Saint-Denis, who introduced Churchill to Les Français listeners, stayed with him throughout the broadcast, which took place in a tiny closetlike space in the War Rooms. Because the makeshift studio was so small, the British leader made the speech, one of his most eloquent during the war, with Saint-Denis sitting on his lap. He opened it with the words “C’est moi, Churchill, qui vous parle” (“It is I, Churchill, who speaks to you”).
Reiterating his fierce belief in France’s resurrection, Churchill declared, “Never will I believe that the soul of France is dead. Never will I believe that her place amongst the great nations of the world has been lost for ever.” Liberation, like the next day’s morning, would surely come, he said. Until then, he advised the French to “sleep to gather strength for the morning….Brightly will it shine on the brave and the true, kindly upon all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn. Vive la France!”
France’s response was electric. “Every word you said was like a drop of blood in a life-saving transfusion,” the French painter Paul Maze, a friend of Churchill’s, wrote him. On the day of the broadcast, a teacher in a lycée near Paris gave his students an unusual assignment. “We are going to hear the leader of the Allied forces tonight,” he said. “The broadcast will be badly jammed, so will each of you take down every sentence he can hear properly? We will piece it together tomorrow.” The next day, the class succeeded in reconstructing the speech in full.
Considering the overwhelmingly favorable reaction, it may not have been a coincidence that just a week after Churchill’s address, the Vichy government, which had been somewhat more lenient in its curbs on the public than the German regime in northern France, imposed a harsher ban on listening to foreign broadcasts, quadrupling the penalties to a ten-thousand-franc fine and two years in prison.
One of the greatest headaches facing the Les Français team and the rest of the BBC’s French section was how to deal with Marshal Pétain and Vichy. Cecilia Reeves discovered how ticklish those topics were when she oversaw a broadcast critical of Pétain in the summer of 1940. Afterward, she told Ed Murrow that “half the French in London attacked me for attacking Pétain; the other half for paying him any mind, or not attacking him enough.” Murrow advised her to back off for the moment. “Pétain is necessary now for France,” he said. “You can attack his policy. But to attack him personally would be disastrous.”
When it came to the Vichy leader, the Les Français broadcasters were as divided as the rest of their countrymen. One of them was so passionately opposed to Pétain that he challenged a pro-Pétain colleague at the BBC to a duel. Saint-Denis, by contrast, had great esteem for the marshal and argued that condemning him too precipitously would alienate millions of Frenchmen. Unlike de Gaulle, who had attacked Pétain from the start as “the father of our defeat,” Saint-Denis refused to criticize him in the first months of his broadcasts. His caution, as well as his earlier refusal to join the Free French, infuriated de Gaulle, who repeatedly tried—and failed—to force the BBC to take Les Français off the air. The two men continued their political and personal wrangling throughout the war, yet in France, their listeners, unaware of the deep rifts and rivalries bedeviling the French community in London, thought of them as close allies.
Thanks to Vichy’s continuing cooperation with the enemy and Germany’s escalating oppression of the French (which Les Français reported and commented on), the public mood in France slowly began to shift. On October 24, 1940, Pétain met with Hitler in Montoire, a small town in central France. Soon afterward, he announced that he and his government had embarked on a policy of official collaboration with Germany; from then on, the Nazis could rely on the help of French authorities in both zones to carry out their policies, which would soon include the roundup and deportation of French Jews.
After the Montoire meeting, Pétain’s popularity gradually declined throughout the country, with a growing number of the French (although still a small minority) expressing outright opposition to him and his government. Among them was Michel Saint-Denis, who, nine months after the fall of France, finally decided to take Pétain on. “Tonight,” he told his listeners on March 19, 1941, “I must speak to you about the poor Marechal…who let himself be influenced by the parasites surrounding him and who took a position in favor of the enemy.” It was time, he said, to confront both Vichy and the Germans.
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SAINT-DENIS WAS NOT THE first BBC broadcaster to encourage occupied Europeans to throw off their passivity. Two months earlier, Victor de Laveleye, the organizer of BBC programs to Belgium, had urged his compatriots to demonstrate their resistance to German rule by scrawling the letter V on the walls of buildings throughout the country. De Laveleye, who had served as Belgian minister of justice before coming to London, told his listeners that the letter would serve as a symbol to unite and rally their sharply divided nation. (Belgium’s population in the north spoke Flemish, a variant of Dutch, and had close cultural and religious ties to the Netherlands, while Belgians in the south spoke French and were intimately linked to France.) As de Laveleye noted, V was the first letter of both the French word “victoire” and the Flemish word “vrijheid” (“freedom”), not to mention the English word “victory.”
Belgians accepted de Laveleye’s challenge with gusto, chalking Vs on walls, doors, pavements, and telegraph and telephone poles. So did a growing number of the French, many of whom learned about the V campaign by listening to the BBC’s Belgian service. Although de Laveleye’s initiative was meant for Belgium, it spread across France in a matter of days. In both countries, chalk sales skyrocketed. A letter to the BBC from Normandy noted “a multitude of little Vs everywhere.” A correspondent from Argentière in the French Alps reported “an avalanche of Vs, even on vehicles and on the roads.” A Marseille resident remarked that his city was so inundated with Vs that there was “not a single empty space.”
In London, Les Français devoted a special program to the V sign, which included a catchy song urging the program’s lis
teners to adopt what had become the alphabet’s most famous letter:
Il ne faut pas
Désespérer
On les aura!
Il ne faut pas
Vous arrêter
De résister!
N’oubliez pas
La lettre V
Écrivez la!
Chantonnez la!
V!V!V!V!V!*
By early spring of 1941, the BBC’s entire European Service had taken up the V campaign, with similar results. Not long afterward, someone realized that the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony sounded like Morse code for the letter V—dot-dot-dot-dash. Those notes, played on a kettle drum, became the European Service’s call sign, and they, too, spread like wildfire throughout occupied Europe. People hummed and whistled them. Restaurant diners tapped them with spoons on their glasses and cups. Train engineers blasted them on their whistles. Schoolteachers called their students to order by clapping their hands with the V rhythm. When a British bomber used its landing lights to flash the letter V over Paris, its crew watched the city light up with Vs beamed back from cars and apartment windows.
The V campaign was, as the historian Tom Hickman noted, “the first pan-European gesture of resistance,” helping Europeans shed their sense of helplessness and come together in thumbing their noses at the Germans “who paraded in their streets, packed their restaurants, and were billeted in their homes.” Exposed repeatedly to the V sign, a German soldier, according to Victor de Laveleye, could no longer doubt that he was “surrounded by an immense crowd of citizens eagerly awaiting his first moment of weakness, watching for his first failure.”
As it turned out, Europeans were not the only ones caught up in V madness. In the neutral United States, jewelers sold V brooches and earrings, and Elizabeth Arden featured V for Victory lipsticks. Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential candidate, sported a V tiepin. But the most celebrated champion of the V symbol was Winston Churchill, whose raised right hand, with his index and middle fingers pointed up in the shape of a V, became his signature gesture for the rest of his life. In a BBC speech to the Continent in the summer of 1941, Churchill called the V sign “a symbol of the unconquerable will of the people of the occupied territories and a portent of the fate awaiting Nazi tyranny. So long as the people of Europe continue to refuse all collaboration with the invader, it is sure that his cause will perish and that Europe will be liberated.”
A German poster in occupied Holland tries to appropriate the BBC’s highly successful V campaign by insisting that “V Means That Germany Is Winning on All Fronts.”
The extraordinary success of the V campaign was sourly acknowledged by none other than Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s master propagandist, who noted “the intellectual invasion of the Continent by the British radio, an invasion of which the letter V was the symbol.” Incredibly, in their attempt to neutralize the campaign, Goebbels and the Germans appropriated the letter V for their own use. German-controlled radio stations in Norway, the Netherlands, and other captive countries began using the first bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to open their programs. In Amsterdam, a thirty-foot banner, bearing the words V FOR VICTORY WHICH GERMANY IS WINNING IN ALL EUROPE ON ALL FRONTS, hung from one of Queen Wilhelmina’s palaces. Huge V streamers adorned the main hotels of Oslo, and the Germans draped a gigantic V sign on Paris’s Eiffel Tower. In Prague, one of the main thoroughfares was renamed Victory Street, with large Vs painted down its center; in Poland, Vs were printed on the front pages of German-run newspapers.
Winston Churchill and his signature “V” gesture.
The BBC’s Noel Newsome, who broadcast to Europe three times a week in the guise of an anonymous British “man in the street,” made savage fun of the Germans’ effort to adopt the V sign as their own. “Soon, perhaps,” Newsome remarked to his listeners, “the Germans will be forced to pretend that the letters RAF stand for the Luftwaffe and that [de Gaulle’s Free French symbol] the Cross of Lorraine is a new type of swastika.”
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BY EARLY 1941, THANKS in no small part to the BBC, much of captive Europe was finally emerging from the lethargy of defeat. When de Gaulle, in a BBC broadcast, urged the French to stay home for one designated hour on January 1, 1941, as a sign of protest against German occupation, hundreds of thousands complied. Passive though it was, the protest was France’s first organized anti-German demonstration. “The [French] underground movement was built up by the BBC,” the resistance leader André Philip said later in the war. “We needed help from outside, and the BBC gave that help.”
In Norway, meanwhile, teachers, clergymen, actors, and theater directors all staged mass protests against German control. In the Netherlands, thousands of university professors and students stayed away from classes to protest Nazi persecution of Dutch Jews. When the Germans there began to round up Jews in early 1941, “virtually the entire working population of Amsterdam and other nearby cities,” the Dutch historian Louis de Jong noted, went on strike. The two-day action, which German police put down by force, was, de Jong believed, “the first and only anti-pogrom strike in history.”
Buoyed by the success of the V campaign and other signs of nascent resistance, Noel Newsome and Douglas Ritchie, Newsome’s deputy in the European Service, wanted to go even further, using the BBC to spark open warfare against the Germans. As early as July 1940, Newsome told European Service staffers that they should encourage their listeners to “desire an anti-Nazi revolution rather than to fear it”—a campaign that would end in a “great uprising of the peoples against a morally and spiritually bankrupt tyranny whose actual material strength is waning.”
In calling for aggressive action, Newsome was following the lead of Frederick Ogilvie, John Reith’s successor as BBC director general, who, the month before, had urged the BBC to adopt the motto “Every patriot a saboteur.” As Ogilvie saw it, “a civilian population which is not actively hindering the enemy are in effect traitors to the common cause.”
British intelligence officials swiftly squelched Newsome and Ogilvie’s quixotic idea, underscoring the absurdity of promoting a European revolt against Hitler just weeks after his stunningly successful blitzkrieg. Newsome was quite wrong in his blithe assumption that Germany’s strength was diminishing, they said. How could Europeans be expected to rise up when the Reich so totally dominated the Continent and almost no one expected Britain to survive?
With the British still holding out a year later, Newsome and Ritchie decided it was time to revive the concept of a BBC-led revolution on the Continent. Ritchie, who, like Newsome, hosted a weekly broadcast to English-speaking listeners in occupied Europe, told his audience that they were “the unknown soldiers. Millions of you…A great silent army, waiting and watching. The V is your sign.” In a memo to BBC higher-ups, he was even more forceful: “When the British Government gives the word, the BBC will cause riots and destruction in every city in Europe.” Under Ritchie’s direction, an unofficial committee was set up to “encourage, develop, and coordinate British broadcasts to enemy-occupied countries about action against the Germans.”
Others in the BBC and the government strongly disagreed with what they viewed as the European Service’s meddling. For one thing, Newsome and Ritchie were encroaching on the functions of the Special Operations Executive, a new government agency set up to promote resistance activities in occupied Europe. For another, the idea of a mass European rebellion in the near future continued to be hopelessly out of touch with reality.
Already, the Germans had begun to crack down on the mild defiance sparked by the V campaign. In the French town of Moulins, German authorities imposed “severe punishments” on town residents in retribution for the epidemic of Vs and other anti-German inscriptions daubed on walls and other surfaces. On April 29, 1941, the German radio in Paris broadcast a chilling warning to those in France inclined to continue the campaign: “Silly people, you can take up your chalks again and put in full this time, the word you began so
well—‘Victims’—in blood red letters.” A few days later, the BBC received a letter from Vichy France that noted, “Many speak of revolt…but what can we do? We have no weapons, although it is true we still have chalk.”
Such communications reinforced the anxiety of many at the BBC about “giving any kind of false lead to people to start firing guns…until the time was right.” As one staffer put it, “We were not the ones who’d be put up against a wall if anything went wrong.”
* * *
* Don’t despair,
Don’t stop resisting,
We will beat them!
Don’t forget the letter V,
Write it!
Sing it!
V! V! V! V! V!
The genteel St. Ermin’s Hotel, tucked away from London’s bustle on a quiet side street in Westminster, seemed an unlikely spot for the hatching of plots to incite violence and revolution. A Victorian redbrick dowager of a building, St. Ermin’s was known for its tree-lined courtyard and a spectacular soaring lobby featuring a rococo plaster ceiling and curved balcony. There, at the turn of the century, guests could enjoy afternoon tea while listening to the soothing strains of a small string orchestra.
