Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  This was important at a time when the ‘America First’ movement, led by the isolationist aviator Charles Lindbergh and supported by the US Ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, thought that the USA should remain well isolated from European entanglements and foreign wars. Britain urgently needed America’s help, but when Churchill inspected civil defence in Glasgow with President Roosevelt’s envoy, Harry Hopkins, on 17 January 1941, he did not actually ask for direct intervention: ‘We do not require in 1941 large armies from overseas. What we do require are weapons, ships and aeroplanes. All that we can pay for we will pay for, but we require far more than we shall be able to pay for.’

  In the propaganda job of persuading the Americans to help, the British knew that Americans would make a better job of wooing the USA than Britons. The connection between the two countries is caught beautifully in Alice Duer Miller’s narrative verse book The White Cliffs, a superb piece of emotional propaganda that went through eleven American editions in three months in late 1940, and eight British editions in five months early in 1941.

  The White Cliffs is the story of an Anglophile New England girl called Susan Dunne who falls in love with and marries a pink Englishman from Devon in the summer of 1914, and slowly becomes ‘almost an English woman’. Her husband and his older brother are both killed in WW1, and Susan sees it as her duty to bring up her son in the expected English tradition in their inherited leaky manor. But her Yankee father sees the English as ‘the redcoat bully – the ancient foe’, and as WW2 looms, Susan is afraid that her only son will die like his father and uncle. She wonders, is contemporary England worth it?

  I thought of these years, these last dark terrible years

  When the leaders of England bade the English believe

  Lies as the price of peace, lies and fears,

  Lies that corrupt, and fears that sap and deceive.

  But then she thinks back to Elizabeth I and Cromwell and ‘the sullen might/Of the English, standing upon a right’ and she comes to understand that American quests for freedom were also rooted in English liberty.

  I am American bred,

  I have seen much to hate here – much to forgive,

  But in a world where England is finished and dead,

  I do not wish to live.

  Other Americans helped to get the message across. Quentin Reynolds was probably the best-known American print journalist in Britain. He was due to return to the United States not long after the bombing of London started in September 1940, and the Crown Film Unit wanted him to take a film about the Blitz back under his arm. Humphrey Jennings, Harry Watt and editor Stuart McAllister made London Can Take It, a strong, simple film about British stoicism amid wreckage and destruction, in ten days. Quentin Reynolds wrote and narrated its tough-guy script: ‘I am a neutral reporter… I can assure you, there is no panic, no fear, no despair in London town …. [A] bomb has its limitations: it can only destroy buildings and kill people. It cannot kill the unconquerable spirit and courage of the people of London … London can take it.’ Reynolds screened the film for President Roosevelt.

  While American entertainers cheered the British in radio shows like Hi Gang!, the BBC set up its own North American radio service in July 1940, staffed by Canadians. Its half-hour Radio Newsreel mixed actuality, eyewitness reports and short talks by members of the armed forces or civilian services. Charles Gardner’s lively description of a German air attack on a British convoy passing through the Straits of Dover on 14 July 1940, deplored by some in England for its resemblance to a sports commentary on men in mortal danger, was liked in North America because its disjointed spontaneity felt authentic. In 1940–1, the correspondents were still called ‘BBC observers’, but by 1944 they were no longer coolly detached but warmly embedded. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, the programme War Report first went on air, and vivid front-line pieces from the BBC War Reporting Unit became the norm.

  By the time the Blitz started in September 1940, the BBC was making much more of its non-British human resources and broadcasting in seventeen European languages. Sir Stephen Tallents was controller (Overseas) with John Salt as the director of European Services. Salt came from the BBC Overseas Intelligence Department, where one of his colleagues, Emile Delavenay (father of the biographer Claire Tomalin), had written an incisive study of how the German propaganda campaign sapped French morale in the first half of 1940. Another colleague, the future poet and translator Jonathan Griffin, wrote in the Monthly Intelligence Report, Europe that a campaign was needed ‘to lead people to desire an anti-Nazi revolution’, using ‘concrete facts, slogans, symbols, allusions, martyrs’. Their ideas had a strong impact on Victor de Laveleye, the programme organiser of the BBC Belgian Service, which first went on air on 28 September. On 14 January 1941, de Laveleye proposed the letter ‘V’ as an emblem to rally his listeners against the Nazis. V had universal appeal because it was the first letter of Victory in English, Victoire in French and Vrijheid (Freedom) in Flemish. Within weeks, chalked V’s were appearing on walls in Belgium, Holland and northern France. But Delavenay wanted more.

  On 22 March, the lively French Service dedicated a special edition of their popular show Les Français parlent aux Français to the V. The Dutch Service did the same on 9 April. The BBC’s Assistant News Editor, Douglas Ritchie, wrote a paper on 4 May, ‘Broadcasting as a New Weapon of War’, which asserted baldly that ‘When the British Government gives the word, the BBC will cause riots and destruction in every city in Europe’. On 26 May, Ritchie chaired the first meeting of the V Committee. He knew nothing of the work of SOE, but he was running with a good idea, backed by his boss, Noel Newsome, another former Daily Telegraph colleague, now the BBC European News Editor. Other countries were picking it up: V stood for vitezstvi (victory) in Czechoslovakia, vitestvo (heroism) in Serbia, and ve vil vinne in Norway. Even in faraway Bolivia, whose Andean Indian army had been trained by Germans, defiant V’s appeared overnight on pro-Nazi buildings in La Paz.

  On 6 June 1941, ‘Colonel Britton’ made his first broadcast on the English network in London Calling Europe. This was in fact Ritchie, speaking in the quiet, conspiratorial tones of an urbane agitator, encouraging disruption in occupied Europe. This smooth, mysterious figure (who got lots of fan-mail) also spoke in polished French, German, Dutch, Polish, Czech and Norwegian. Colonel Britton said there were countless small ways of making things difficult for the Germans. You could spit in their beer or put sand in their gearboxes. You could switch labels on trains or go slow in factories.

  According to one account, at the third meeting of the V Committee in June 1941 the ingenious Oxford classicist Tom Stevens remarked that the letter V in Morse code was three dots and a dash. When he rapped it on the table, Jonathan Griffin recognised the rhythm of the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Whoever had the idea, the morse and the music were first broadcast together on 27 June 1941. From the next day onwards, the same four notes, throbbed on an African membrane drum by the percussionist James Blades in a lower-ground-floor studio in Bush House, became the BBC station identifier in Europe, beating out the pulse of resistance. The Allies were knocking at the German door.

  The Prime Minister gave the BBC campaign his stamp of approval by starting to give the ‘V for Victory’ sign with two fingers. It had to be explained to the aristocratic Churchill that it very much mattered which way his knuckles faced, to avoid giving the UK’s most vulgar gesture.*

  On 19 July 1941, Churchill broadcast a message to Europe: ‘The V sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the people of the occupied territories and a portent of the fate awaiting the Nazi tyranny.’ Goebbels reacted swiftly and ingeniously by trying to co-opt the symbol. The V was claimed as the German sign for ‘Viktoria’, and German stations started playing Beethoven’s Fifth. (Actually the German for ‘victory’ was Sieg – hence the salute Sieg heil!) The Germans hung a huge V from the Eiffel Tower. In occupied Holland, the German-controlled Radio Hilversum broadcast a Morse V, but on the Dutch street
s pro-British groups wore a white V, and pro-German groups an orange one. Chalkers on walls clarified their loyalty by added RAF to the V, or in Norway H7 for King Haakon VII.

  The tide began to turn against the V campaign after Brendan Bracken replaced Duff Cooper as Minister of Information in July 1941. There were worries that the BBC campaign might be doing more harm than good. The ‘professionals’ of the PWE, which came into being that August, did not like the ‘amateur’ V campaign because despite its popular appeal it was not coordinated with real political and military objectives. It was all mouth and trousers, impotent to deliver real resistance and sabotage at the local level as SOE was beginning to do. The last V committee met in October and the valiant V campaign was finally quashed in 1942. But it must be credited as an imaginative triumph, uplifting hearts and giving hope to the occupied.

  TIME magazine called it ‘the first antidote prescribed for the apathy of Europe’. Colonel Britton told his many listeners that ‘the V is your sign, the night is your friend’. The V army was invisible, but powerfully symbolic. ‘It is a strange army, but one to which it is an honour to belong. It is an army which the Germans fear.’

  The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had begun to use wireless effectively in 1938 when ‘C’, Admiral Sinclair, hired Richard Gambier-Parry to organise a secret two-way radio communications network, independent of the Foreign Office’s existing system. (The two were eventually combined into the Diplomatic Wireless Service in 1946.) Gambier-Parry had been a public relations officer of the BBC and the UK general sales manager of the American radio manufacturer Philco. He poached the best technical people from among his old wireless contacts and from the Royal Navy to set up Special Communication Units (SCUs) whose job was to handle the traffic to and from embassies and officers abroad, and also to pass on information from the GC&CS at Bletchley Park to military commanders. Eventually, in 1941, Gambier-Parry’s unit, Section VIII, took over the Radio Security Service. They were quite distinct from the Royal Corps of Signals who usually did military ‘sparks’, and for additional mobility they put two-way wireless sets into Packard cars and converted Dodge ambulances.

  During the war, Gambier-Parry’s section also installed and operated the first covert short-wave radio stations in Britain. In all, there were forty-eight of these clandestine stations, broadcasting in fourteen foreign languages The radio stations were officially referred to as RUs, or ‘Research Units’, and sometimes as ‘freedom’ stations. The first of these, code-named G1, went on air in May 1940 just before British troops began to be evacuated from Dunkirk harbour. G1 was a rather desperate response to the secret stations or Geheimsender run by Goebbels’s ‘Büro Concordia’ in Berlin. These German outfits included the New British Broadcasting Station which first began hectoring Britain in February 1940, to be followed in June and July by other ersatz German stations, Radio Caledonia, Workers’ Challenge, Christian Peace Movement and Welsh National Radio.

  The German broadcaster on the British-run secret ‘freedom’ station Das wahre Deutschland – on air from 26 May 1940 until 15 March 1941 – was Dr Carl Spiecker. Spiecker had a history in subversive radio, having run a secret Freiheitsender from the outskirts of Paris, broadcasting an essentially conservative appeal to the opposition in Nazi Germany on behalf of the anti-Nazi social democratic Deutsche Freiheitspartei. Spiecker’s British programmes were now recorded at Wavendon, one of several large country houses on the borders of Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire that had been taken over by government agencies. All were within a ten-mile radius of Bletchley Park where the Government Code and Cipher School was now based. Sir Campbell Stuart’s enemy propaganda organisation, EH, had moved to the riding stables at Woburn Abbey, and after the death of the Duke of Bedford in 1940 took over the whole house as its Country Headquarters (CHQ). The huge grounds, the menagerie of animals, and the gallons of cheap drink available for the isolated staff added what David Garnett called ‘more than a touch of madness’ to the atmosphere.

  The second German-speaking ‘Research Unit’ or secret station started by the British, code-named G2, was Sender der Europäischen Revolution (Radio of the European Revolution), a left-wing intellectual station that broadcast from November 1940 to June 1942. It was soon followed by Rumanian, French, Italian, Norwegian, Danish and Czech clandestine stations. G2 was staffed by exiled German Marxist political scientists and took a revolutionary socialist, left-of-New-Statesman line: the workers should throw off the yoke of Nazidom in the spirit of European community good will, and so on. It was run by the clever socialist Richard Crossman, who, although brilliant and attractive (he married three times) was also a contumacious maverick. Even the bullying wartime Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, who first hired Crossman for propaganda work, was afraid of his capacity to quarrel. Sefton Delmer thought that Sender der Europäischen Revolution was poor radio, because Crossman did not exercise proper political and editorial control. In his genial way, however, Delmer never quarrelled with Crossman, but just made sure they kept to their different spheres. Crossman eventually rose to become director of Political Warfare against the Enemy and Satellites, while Delmer became director of Special Operations against the Enemy and Satellites. Crossman did ‘white’ propaganda, and Delmer ‘black’.

  It was Delmer, when setting up the eleventh secret station in April 1941, who first called the ‘Research Units’ ‘black’ stations. The simplest distinction between ‘white’ and ‘black’ propaganda is one of origin, between the labels on the tins, as it were, rather than between their contents. The BBC label is ‘white’ and well known; its propaganda is clearly marked as ‘British Broadcasting’. The strategy of ‘white’ propaganda is to tell the truth consistently over time. In the long run, if you are frank about reporting your defeats, your listeners are more likely to believe in your victories. The tactics of ‘black’ radio, on the other hand, are short-term, rumour-filled, and deceptive. If you were to hear a station calling itself, let us say, Gustav Siegfried Eins, broadcasting in German, purportedly from German territory, and you were not sure of its origin, its agenda or the personnel behind it, you might well be listening to a ‘black’ station, actually run by the British.

  The distinction between ‘white’ and ‘black’ propaganda was not at first simply between truth and lies. On one of Delmer’s German ‘black’ stations, Christus der König (Christ the King), the Austrian Roman Catholic priest Father Andreas truthfully informed German listeners about what the Nazis were doing to the Jews and the Slavs in extermination camps like Auschwitz. It was factual and true, and only ‘black’ because no one knew exactly where the broadcasts were coming from. To give Christus der König more force with the faithful, Delmer got SOE to spread the rumour in Europe that it was actually a ‘black’ station of Vatican Radio.

  But under the aegis of Sefton Delmer, the contents of the propaganda tins became very different indeed. ‘Black’ broadcasting began to diverge sharply from ‘white’ because the camouflage of secrecy gave ‘black’ a licence to deceive that essentially truthful ‘white’ did not have. (The deception could be a simple and confusing mixed message, said Delmer, like spitting in a German’s soup before crying out ‘Heil Hitler!’) Although they were driven by the same aim of defeating the enemy, ‘white’ propaganda became the open right hand presenting whatever HM Government was prepared to acknowledge publicly, ‘black’ the closed left fist concealing whatever it could disavow.

  G3, the third German station, which began broadcasting on 23 May 1941, was Delmer’s first ‘black’ baby. Gustav Siegfried Eins, or GS1, was a right-wing station with freedom to use the same kind of bad language with which Workers’ Challenge from Germany was turning the English airwaves blue. GS1 was different from the other secret stations because it pretended to be absolutely all for the Führer. It aimed ‘to get across subversive rumour stories under a cover of nationalist patriotic clichés’. Delmer’s mentor, Leonard Ingrams, favoured ‘operational propaganda’, or actually getting people
to do things, and in a memo to Ingrams a fortnight after the secret station began broadcasting, Delmer said: ‘We want to spread disruptive and disturbing news among the Germans which will induce them to distrust their government and disobey it.’ He added: ‘We are making no attempt to build up a political following in Germany. We are not catering for idealists. Our politics are a stunt …’

  Gustav Siegfried Eins came on air on the eve of Delmer’s thirty-seventh birthday. A fortnight earlier, there had been a bizarre episode when Hitler’s beetle-browed Deputy Führer and right-hand man, Rudolf Hess, was captured after parachuting into Scotland to try and talk peace to the unwitting Duke of Hamilton. Naturally, Hess’s defection became the subject of Gustav Siegfried Eins’s first seven-minute broadcast. In it, the ranting character known as der Chef, ‘the Chief’ or ‘the Boss’ (Hitler’s nickname on the election tour that Delmer covered), loudly denied the rumour that Hitler could have had anything to do with Hess’s mission to England, thus covertly spreading it. There were nearly 700 more of these short broadcasts before the station’s life ended dramatically with the burst of gunfire that cut off the speaker on 18 November 1943. The idea was to make people think that the Gestapo had finally caught up with der Chef. Actually, of course, it was another deception in the British ‘black’ operation.

  If ‘black’ broadcasting is ‘pretence’ broadcasting, then the principal speaker must be totally convincing. Der Chef fitted the bill. The man had to sound like a right-wing, patriotic German, probably a tough but frugal Prussian landowner, a Junker on his uppers, outraged by the ostentatious corruption and incompetence of scheming perverts and bigwigs in the Nazi and SS hierarchy who were profiting at home from the sacrifices of the decent and honourable Wehrmacht abroad. Der Chef used vigorous and obscene soldier’s language to castigate his many enemies. In his very first talk, the British Prime Minister was called ‘that flat-footed bastard of a drunken old Jew Churchill’, which all added to the effect of a genuine German speaking his mind.