Baker White’s own most notable contribution to the 1940 war effort is recorded in his book’s first chapter – ‘The Sea Is On Fire!’ Were the German Army (quite unused to amphibious operations) ever to invade England, it would have to cross the English Channel in some kind of landing craft. Baker White’s notion was to make them fear they might be cooked alive in the process. He wanted them to imagine a frightful double death, first blazing hot and then drowning cold. This was not a wholly new idea: ‘Greek fire’, a kind of napalm, had flared in Byzantine times, and burning ships were used by the British against both the Spanish Armada and the Napoleonic fleet.
Baker White’s immediate source may have been Dennis Wheatley. The best-selling author of The Devil Rides Out and They Found Atlantis had found no war job to date but had been busy penning the lurid (and ludicrous) adventures of his secret agent hero, ‘lean, Satanic-looking’ Gregory Sallust, ‘the man the Nazis couldn’t kill!’ in thrillers like The Scarlet Impostor, Faked Passports and The Black Baroness. However, Wheatley was close to the Security Service, and his second wife was working as an MI5 driver in May 1940. When one of her counter-intelligence passengers told her he was a bit stuck for ideas to resist invaders, Joan Wheatley suggested trying her imaginative husband. In twenty-four hours from 27 to 28 May 1940 Wheatley produced a 7,000-word paper, Resistance to Invasion, fizzing with forty-five ingenious ideas of how to ‘undermine enemy morale’, which was circulated in Whitehall. One proposal was for an oil ship to be detonated from shore, ‘so that flaming oil will spread over the water and ignite the enemy craft’.
As it happened, there was an excess of petroleum products in Britain owing to the disruption of Shell and BP’s trade with Scandinavia and Europe. General Ironside had noted it on 27 May: ‘There is far too much petrol in the coast areas, most of it unguarded.’ But Maurice Hankey, Minister without Portfolio, thought that these fossil fuels could be used ‘for defensive purposes’, so various flamethrower trials and experiments were carried out along the south coast at places like Dumpton Gap and Dungeness, which were in full view of occupied France and passing German aircraft. John Baker White saw an experiment at St Margaret’s Bay in Kent, when oil was pumped from bowsers down the cliff along pipes buried in the beach to ignition flashpoints, and he found the flame barrage’s red tongues in clouds of black smoke ‘a frightening spectacle’. It was, in fact, soon found impossible to set the sea on fire. Notwithstanding the truth, Baker White was determined to use the idea of a burning ocean to terrify the enemy.
Rumours were an established part of psychological warfare. The British called them ‘sibs’ – from the Latin sibilare, meaning ‘to hiss’ or ‘to whistle’ – and their purpose was to disturb enemy soldiers. In September 1940 Baker White put his idea of ‘setting the sea on fire’ through the three committees that vetted all sibs before release, in case they were genuinely true or compromised actual operations.
There was a tangled bureaucracy to negotiate. In July 1940, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) had been set up under Hugh Dalton, who was also head of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, founded when war broke out. SOE effectively took over the coordination of Section D (the Sabotage Service, formerly under the Foreign Office), MI (R) (guerrilla warfare, formerly under the War Office) and EH (Electra House, Propaganda to Enemy Countries, formerly under joint control of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information). Initially the idea was to split the new SOE itself into words and deeds, SO1 (Subversion/Propaganda) and SO2 (Sabotage/ Operations). The dichotomy was, in fact, disastrous. Ministry fought with ministry. Only after many months of tedious Whitehall interdepartmental turf wars did a new secret service emerge separately out of SO1. This was the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), chartered on 20 September 1941 and no longer under the Ministry of Economic Warfare. PWE’s cover name was Political Intelligence Department (PID) of the Foreign Office, and its job was all forms of propaganda against the enemy, including overall control of the BBC. As John Baker White put it: ‘A deception – a Big Lie – was a military operation. Political warfare was the machine used to project it to the enemy.’
A big pearl of a lie is best seeded with a grain of truth. Whereas the sib that the British had imported 200 man-eating sharks from Australia to release in the English Channel was strikingly short of supporting evidence, there really were some burned Germans to support Baker White’s sib about setting the sea on fire. Churchill told the secret session of the House of Commons that the Germans had gathered ‘upwards of 1,700 self-propelled barges and more than 200 sea-going ships’ in occupied ports, ready for invasion. When the RAF attacked this German shipping in harbours from Emden to Le Havre with incendiaries and high explosive in September, the flames could be seen from Kent. Injured German soldiers were transferred to Paris hospitals and the story spread that they had been burned in a failed invasion. French wags began to stand behind the German soldiers occupying their country and pretend to warm their hands on them. Belgians swore they knew nurses who had tended hundreds of moaning Germans with burns.
The RAF dropped leaflets and a Short Invasion Phrasebook with handy phrases for ‘The Water’s on fire!’ in German, French and Dutch: (Hier brennt sogar das Wasser! Même l’eau brûle ici! Hier staat waarachtig het water in brand!) On the BBC German Service, Sefton Delmer gave mock English lessons: ‘Das Boot sinkt … the boat is sinking’ with useful verbs ‘Ich brenne … I burn, Du brennst … you burn, Er brennt … heburns … And if I may be allowed to suggest a phrase: Der SS Sturmführer brennt auch ganz schön … The SS Captain is al-so bur-ning quite nice-ly.’ Other broadcasts in German gave out the names of captured German seamen saying they had been ‘rescued’ from the sea while the fate of their unfortunate companions was not known.
All along the Atlantic coast German soldiers put two and two together and made four hundred. Captured Luftwaffe pilots had all heard the story, Wehrmacht personnel wrote home with lurid versions of it. The burning-sea story also spread through Britain (whether by accident or design) almost as fast as the Russians-with-snow-on-their-boots story had in WW1. From Dorset to Dover and from Sandwich to Shingle Street in Suffolk there were stories of dozens, scores, hundreds, no, thousands of German soldiers hideously charred and incinerated in a seaborne invasion that failed horribly sometime around the weekend of 14–15 September 1940.
In fact, only thirty-six German dead bodies were washed ashore in Britain that year, mostly Luftwaffe pilots and air crew. If they were burned, it was because they had been shot down in flames. However, the first crack at ‘The Big Lie’ was astonishingly successful. Perhaps Hitler was right when he sneered sarcastically on 4 September 1940 that ‘the British should not forget to raise their most important general to the rank of Field Marshal of the Empire. I mean General Bluff. That is their only reliable ally.’ (Hitler also made use of bluff, keeping the invasion threat going long after he had decided to turn on Russia instead.)
The German invasion came not by water but by air, because Hermann Göring promised Adolf Hitler that his airmen would win command of the skies before the army and navy crossed the sea. In 1937, while entertaining Lord Trenchard, boasting of the superior powers of his secretly rebuilt Luftwaffe, Göring took his guest outside for a magnificent firework display in the chilly night. Loudspeakers blared out an amplified recording of an artillery barrage, mixed with the whine of dive-bombers swooping to drop their whistling loads of explosive bombs. This was barely two months after the destruction of Guernica. ‘That’s German might for you,’ Göring shouted. ‘I see you trembled. One day German might will make the whole world tremble.’ ‘You must be off your head,’ the founder of the RAF angrily replied. ‘I warn you, Göring, don’t underestimate the RAF.’
From July to October 1940 the Luftwaffe and the RAF clashed above southern England in the series of air combats that became known as the ‘Battle of Britain’. Some doubt if there was ever a coherent German plan; bombers would simply bash Britain until it gave up, which it surely had
to. But the illogical British stubbornly refused to surrender, and what ensured was the mythic battle of which Churchill said, in August 1940, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ The ‘few’ were British, Canadian, Czech, Polish and South African pilots.
London’s Croydon Aerodrome was attacked on 18 August, when the Home Guard managed to shoot down a Dornier with 180 rounds of rifle fire. Central London and the City were first hit by the German air force on the night of the 24th. Then it became a war of tit for tat. RAF Bomber Command bombed ‘military targets’ in the German capital Berlin. Major Nazi reprisal bombing started at teatime on Saturday, 7 September 1940. A huge armada of enemy aircraft flew up the Thames estuary in broad daylight, over 300 bomber planes with more than 600 fighters protecting them. The journalist Virginia Cowles, weekending in the country, saw them in the distance like a swarm of insects. They were heading for the wharves and warehouses of the East End of London where the riches of the British Empire were unloaded and stored at the sprawling docks. The Port of London Authority Docks had forty-five miles of quays and moved a third of the UK’s imports and a quarter of its exports. Three big railway stations – London Bridge, Waterloo and Charing Cross – were knocked out, water mains and sewage pipes were broken, gas and electricity cut. Two hours after the ‘All Clear’ sounded, another 250 bombers returned at night, their path clearly lit by flames, to add their tonnage of explosives and incendiaries to the inferno below. More than sixty major blazes and a thousand smaller ones made it the worst conflagration since the Great Fire of London. From five miles away, you could read the Evening Standard by it in the blackout.
Colonel John Fisher Turner, in charge of creating dummy airfields, was put on his mettle by the Blitz. His job was to improvise and coordinate the military and civil bombing decoy systems from his office at Shepperton Studios. From November 1940 he set in motion the decoy fires of the QF sites, and the Special Fires of the SF or ‘Starfish’ sites. As Colin Dobinson showed in Fields of Deception: Britain’s Bombing Decoys of World War II (Methuen, 2000), these decoy fires were set in country outside urban areas where further bombs would do no harm. The idea was to simulate the different visual effects of burning buildings; the aim of these second-degree decoys was to catch the attention of the second and third waves of Luftwaffe bombers who would then unload their bombs uselessly on what they thought were the right targets. Cans of creosote and roofing-felt generated what the manual calls the ‘large spluttering fire’, while big drums of creosote with rolls of roofing-felt stuffed in end-on led to ‘heavy initial smoke fire’. The ‘dull basic fire’ was a brazier of coal, ignited by flare cans. With the addition of a header tank of oil and a structure of pipes, this became the ‘coal drip fire’, which flared up dramatically when fuel was sprinkled on it. Eventually forty-two towns had 130 ‘Starfish’ systems helping to protect them. As German use of incendiaries increased in 1941, so did the sophistication of the dummy Special Fires mimicking what the Germans called the Brandbombfeld or ‘firebomb field’. These later Starfish were laid out in patterned groups and ignited in relays. They contained ‘basket fires’, crates of wood wrapped in wire netting and hessian, containing wood shavings, sawdust and flammable waste, soaked with layers of creosote. These burned impressively for an hour and were interspersed with ‘crib fires’ of firewood and coal, dramatic boiling oil fires and yellow-flamed ‘grid fires’. The Luftwaffe were not always deceived, for they had their own decoys, but sometimes they were, because navigation in those days was not always accurate. Dobinson concludes that Colonel Turner’s decoys probably wasted about 5 per cent of the German bombing effort, and may have spared nearly 2,600 civilians from death and over 3,100 from serious injury.
20
Radio Propaganda
‘There is no question of propaganda,’ Sir Samuel Hoare told the House of Commons in his capacity as Lord Privy Seal on 11 October 1939. ‘It will be publicity and by that I mean straight news.’ To British ears, the word ‘propaganda’ is unpleasant. In 1928, Arthur Ponsonby’s Falsehood in War-Time exposed many myths of WW1, showing how in that war ‘propaganda’ came to mean misrepresentation and manipulation. The connotations have remained since mostly negative; except, of course, when you truly believe in what is being propagated or put forward.
The documentary film-makers were one such band of believers. John Grierson first used the word ‘documentary’ in a 1926 newspaper review he wrote of Robert Flaherty’s anthropological film about Western Samoa, Moana, saying that it had ‘documentary value’. From 1929 ‘documentary’ became the self-defining term for an important group of British film-makers associated with Grierson who were interested in ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. Grierson worked closely with a public relations man of genius, a remarkable British civil servant, Sir Stephen Tallents, who had been wounded in the trenches with the Irish Guards, and worked on social reforms with William Beveridge. In 1926, Tallents became the secretary of the Empire Marketing Board. Playing on Tallents’s internationalist vision, John Grierson persuaded him that cinema could help make the British Empire ‘come alive’. Accordingly, after getting some ideas from Rudyard Kipling at Burwash, Tallents commissioned a film from Walter Creighton called One Family, in which a small boy falls asleep over his geography lesson and dreams a dream of the British Empire. A 1930 review found it ‘the most extraordinary picture yet made by a British firm’:
The portions of the film dealing with men at work express that work with a force and honesty that has never been seen in British films on a large scale, and has rarely been equalled, even in Soviet productions.
What Tallents encouraged in British documentary film-makers was public service propaganda. These non-commercial films looked at the social utilities that linked everybody – electricity, gas, post, railways, shipping, telephones, wireless, and so on – and were the first that allowed ordinary people to speak to the camera. The documentary film-makers were not embarrassed by the word ‘propaganda’. John Grierson’s epigraph to Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film, published by Faber in January 1936, ‘I look upon cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist’, is confirmed in his introduction to the book:
Our own relation to propaganda has been simple enough. We have found our finances in the propaganda service of Government Department and national organisation … Documentary gave to propaganda an instrument it needed and propaganda gave to documentary a perspective it needed. There was therefore virtue in the word ‘propaganda’, and even pride; and so it would continue for just as long as the service is really public and the reference really social. If however, propaganda takes on its other more political meaning, the sooner documentary is done with it the better.
Most British journalists recoil from the word ‘propaganda’ as though from a poisonous snake, yet it is really a pet which sits on their desk. All journalism is propaganda when it presents a case or seeks to persuade, because the estimation of ‘news value’ and the ordering of an argument is intimately linked to a belief system. The greatest journalists understand this. ‘I was a professional recorder of events, a propagandist, not a soldier,’ wrote one of WW2’s finest reporters, Alan Moorehead, of himself. Purge ‘propaganda’ of negative associations and see it as a branch of rhetoric, or as information directed to public service, and we may get nearer to the way the British came to see it in WW2. In 1936, Sir Stephen Tallents became controller of public relations at the BBC, where a parallel process to Grierson’s ‘imaginative interpretation of everyday life’ was going on among the first radio documentary feature-makers, like John Pudney and Stephen Potter.
In May 1940, the telephone rang at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. After a long pause, the Hon. Harold Nicolson, the epicene National Labour MP for West Leicester, was told to hold on for the new Prime Minister. Nicolson had written a Penguin Special in three weeks in October 1939, Why Britain is at War, which sold 100,000 copies, and Churchill was inviting him to join the Ministry of Information. As par
liamentary secretary to the minister, Duff Cooper, Nicolson found himself in ‘the most unpopular department in the whole British Commonwealth of Nations’. (Men from the MoI were known as ‘Cooper’s Snoopers’.) But Nicolson applauded the British public’s ‘healthy dislike of all forms of Government propaganda’ and sympathised with the ‘unconquerable minds’ of citizens and journalists frustrated by wartime limitations. Britain was not the Third Reich and nor was he himself ‘imitating the technique of Doctor Joseph Goebbels’. In the article he wrote at the end of 1940 for the BBC Handbook 1941, Nicolson explained ‘the essential difference between the theory and practice of German, or totalitarian, propaganda, and British, or democratic, propaganda’. The first was a ‘smash-and-grab raid on the emotions of the uneducated’ and the second an appeal to the intelligent, free mind. ‘Totalitarian propaganda is akin to revivalism; democratic propaganda is akin to education.’
Nicolson was sometimes encouraged by the British people’s spirit, but sometimes was in despair:
I am feeling very depressed by the attacks upon the Ministry of Information … And it may be true that if our propaganda is to be as effective as that of the enemy, we must have at the top people who will … be caddish and ignorant enough to tell dynamic lies. At present the Ministry is too decent … We need crooks.
Duff Cooper had already found one: Sefton Delmer. ‘Don’t drop your reporting for the Daily Express,’ the latest Minister of Information said to the journalist, newly escaped from the fall of France with all the other journalists, ‘but if you could fit in the occasional German broadcast on the BBC we shall all be most grateful.’
Radio was Sefton Delmer’s destiny. When he came to write the first volume of his autobiography, he remembered the summer of 1914 when he was with his mother and sister in the German spa of Bad Sachsa and they watched a cinematograph of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke. A few days later troops in field-grey uniforms camped in the water meadows and a signals unit mounted a brand-new field wireless station, erecting a huge mast, fixing the antennae and cranking the motor of their electric generator. Its roaring splutter was ‘the first echo of twentieth century war’ for the ten-year-old boy.
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