Myths & Legends of the Second World War

by James Hayward

  Paratroops and parachute saboteurs were frequently run together to form a single menace from the air, as in the following report from 14 May. On this date a large British contingent from Holland returned by sea, including sundry consular officials, newsmen and the entire Sadlers Wells Ballet Company.

  All the passengers had a great deal to say concerning Germany’s Fifth Column in Holland. Many Nazi supporters, even domestic servants, went to the aid of the parachutists who appeared in all manner of disguises as dustmen, clergymen, policemen and postmen. They frequently knocked at a private house and at the point of their revolver demanded civilian clothing.

  Many paratroops who had been taken prisoner were boys of 16 and 17. They did not know what fighting meant and they told a Dutch officer that they had been pushed out of the plane when over their objective. One carried with him his last letter from his mother and her picture. He said he had made up his mind when he set out that he would never live to see her again.

  Little if any of this was true, and as we shall see in Chapter Six, the technique of spreading useful disinformation via travellers and passengers would be repeated later in 1940 when the myth of a failed German invasion attempt was actively promoted in America. Among the evacuees returning from Holland was Sir Neville Bland, the British Minister to the Dutch government in The Hague, who quickly prepared a report on the ‘Fifth Column Menace’. This thousand-word fantasy included the following disinformation:

  All boys of 16 to 18, completely sodden with Hitler’s ideas, and with nothing else in their minds but to cause as much death and destruction as they could before being killed themselves. They dropped on the roofs of houses, in open spaces – even in private gardens …

  Bland also told how a detachment of German troops were led to a vital bridge by a German maidservant, and warned that when the moment came, the fifth column in Britain would

  At once embark on widespread sabotage and attacks on civilians and military indiscriminately. The paltriest kitchen maid not only can be, but generally is, a menace to the safety of the country … and we cannot conclude from the experiences of the last war that ‘the enemy in our midst’ is no less dangerous than it was then. I have not the least doubt that, when the signal is given, as it will scarcely fail to be when Hitler so decides, there will be satellites of the monster all over the country who will at once embark on widespread sabotage and attacks on civilians and the military indiscriminately. We cannot afford to take this risk. ALL Germans and Austrians, at least, ought to be interned at once.

  Some credit Bland with importing the worst of the paratroop and fifth column myths into Britain, yet most had already appeared in the press. At the same time Department EH prepared a report titled ‘Operations in Holland’, containing the now-familiar litany of bizarre disguises, poisoned cigarettes, and peasant girls armed with machine-guns. In truth the main purpose of the Bland report was to help justify the mass internment of male aliens, which the Home Secretary had ordered on 13 May.

  Myth and reality were blurred further still on 16 May when the Dutch foreign minister, E.N. van Kleffens, stated for the first time that enemy parachutists had landed dressed as nuns. This picturesque image would in time become an integral thread in the mythology of the fifth column. Van Kleffens fed the falsehood first to the French press, which meant that it did not immediately catch fire in Britain. By the end of May paratroop myths had expanded beyond sky-blue uniforms, dummies and female attire to include Hunnish brutality. It was said that some dead jumpers found in Holland ‘had obviously been shot in the back – presumably by their officers in the plane when they displayed an undue reluctance to take the drop into space’. A late report at the end of May from Norway held that some Germans were being kicked out of their transports without parachutes: ‘These soldiers are ordered or thrown out of low-flying aeroplanes onto patches of snow on the hill slopes, in the hope that some of them will escape without broken limbs.’ This absurd tale was perhaps inspired by the fact that a significant number of German paratroops were killed by canopies which failed to open.

  While conceding that some of these ‘well-armed desperadoes’ had landed ‘dressed as women and girls’, The War Illustrated was prepared to accord the Fallschirmjäger a measure of respect:

  The parachute soldier is a formidable invader. He may bring with him a collapsible bicycle and may even carry a portable tent; with his iron rations he can keep going until he obtains food from the country; should he be able to make contact with a Fifth Columnist he is sure to help.

  As in Poland and Scandinavia, fifth column activity in Holland was negligible. Stories of poisoned meat, water and cigarettes were unfounded, as were signalling scares involving lights and ‘large swastikas’ burnt in fields, and the fiction that an armed band tried to storm the central police station in The Hague. Instead German Brandenburg units dressed in makeshift Dutch uniforms did attempt to capture several key border crossings, but succeeded only at Gennep, where such a unit held the bridge until relieved by an armoured train. As elsewhere, the Dutch ‘Trojan Horse’ myth gained currency from a natural reluctance to attribute failure to the poor performance of their own troops in open combat, or face up to the fact that two days before the invasion, the German military attaché in The Hague had inspected Holland’s defences by the simple expedient of conducting a tour of local tulip fields.

  The same phantom menace ran riot through Belgium and France. In Belgium the security service, which should have known better, warned that German parachutists had landed in several parts of the country, dressed as civilians and equipped with miniature wireless transmitters. In fact no parachute troops were dropped anywhere in Belgium or France. Nevertheless on the 14 May it was officially announced that enemy agents ‘dressed in light brown uniforms with buttons stamped with the swastika’ had repeatedly attacked the police. Another story ran that among Dutch refugees were SS men in ringletted wigs and false beards, posing as orthodox Jews from Amsterdam. An official order was even issued that all advertising for Pacha chicory was to be removed:

  Complicity on someone’s part had permitted the Germans to put on the back of them indications useful to parachutists landing in the locality… He needed only to find the nearest Pacha chicory sign, which might be in a grocery shop or along a public highway, and on its back he would find cryptic indications giving him the location of the nearest German agent and how to find him … This was later confirmed by repeated radio warnings.

  The story was no less false than in 1914, when precisely the same myth had attached to advertising for selected brands of food, usually Maggi soup. Indeed the humble chicory root was held in great odium in Belgium in May 1940. While the rapid fall of the fortress at Eban Emael was attributed to death rays and poison gas, the following year an American magazine claimed the fort had been blown up by German saboteurs, who in peacetime had grown chicory in nearby caves, and surreptitiously packed the caverns with explosives.

  Several books published in 1940 and 1941 faithfully promulgated any number of tall stories, the most popular being Through the Dark Night by the prolific James Lansdale Hodson, who had been in Belgium and France as a war correspondent for the Sketch. Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that Hodson (and others) considered the spread of true lies as a legitimate activity in wartime, and some of his copy was undoubtedly provided by the War Office and the Ministry of Information. On 13 May he recorded:

  A Belgian lady of title I met today in Brussels told me, ‘The Germans have been dropping booby traps shaped as watches and writing-pencils and trinkets. When picked up they have exploded; and the Maire has now issued a warning proclamation’ … Near Brussels six Germans were captured dressed as nuns – a familiar story, but in this case well-authenticated.

  As well as dropping men dressed as women, and adolescents with automatic pistols, it appeared that the shiftless Luftwaffe was not beneath employing women as aircrew:

  I heard of a machine brought down in Flanders which had three girl
s in it as pilot, navigator and gunner, with a male sergeant. But my officer informant had the story second hand only, though he said the man who told him was reliable and saw them.

  In Louvain, so Hodson learned

  One man much suspected burnt the Belgian flag in the market place with loud protestations that he couldn’t have it falling into German hands. Was the smoke a signal? Nobody knew.

  From the Royal Ulster Rifles, near the town of Bossuyt, he heard

  Hereabouts news and rumours of Fifth Columnists at work were plentiful, including spies dressed as British officers visiting headquarters – tales mostly unverified. But at all events an arrow of the type used by the enemy to locate HQ was found in a ploughed field – a large arrow fashioned in the soil, with three gramophone records at the tail.

  The First World War myth of sinister officer spies, resurrected in the popular film The Foreman Went to France, was also repeated by Hodson in relation to the withdrawal from the Dyle by the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment:

  Men in British uniform acted suspiciously and may well have been spies. First a Guards colonel who asked them to break orders and take up a new position, second a brigade major who said the road was impassable when it was not, and third a brigadier who ordered a bridge in Tournai to be blown despite protests that it was still much needed.

  And from the Black Watch:

  A regiment the Black Watch relieved told them that a hundred Germans had crossed the bridge in threes, dressed in battle-dress, and singing ‘Tipperary’… Some of the Germans killed were wearing clothes of khaki material – possibly parachutists.

  And from the Royal Scots:

  A Scots soldier told how they captured some parachutists dressed as Belgians, but lost a comrade doing it – ‘for,’ he said, ‘the Germans held up their hands, but one raised in surrender held a grenade which, as we got near, he threw.’

  Similarly propagandist accounts by Douglas Williams (The New Contemptibles, 1940) and Bernard Gray (War Reporter, 1941) also peddled stock myths of signals, snipers, sleepers and crop signs. However, few were truly contemporary and fail to stand up as reliable historical sources.

  The canard that enemy personnel were abroad dressed as nuns is one of the most enduring and colourful legends of the Second World War, but was almost certainly a deliberate fiction. The story was perhaps intended to portray the enemy as both godless and perverse, without resorting to the crucifixion stories circulated during the First World War. The myth was born in Paris on 16 May, when the Dutch foreign minister, van Kleffens, staged a distraught press call at which he claimed that German parachutists had descended on Holland ‘by the thousand’ dressed ‘in the cassocks of priests and in the garb of nuns or nurses’. Later in 1940 his book The Rape of the Netherlands would slavishly repeat each and every fifth column myth ad nauseam.

  The nun story took time to catch on, and appears in very few contemporary diaries, although an RAMC captain, J.H. Patterson, describes an amusing incident near Tournai on 19 May. After ordering his CSM to inspect a suspicious column of nuns, Patterson noted that particular attention was paid to hands, feet and chins, resulting in a verdict that the sisters were definitely female. The accounts later given by several BEF veterans of encounters with hairy-handed nuns in hobnailed boots are no less dubious than supposed first-hand sightings of the Angel of Mons, reported in 1915 several months after the fact. For instance, this story offered by Williams in The New Contemptibles:

  At one place, a British officer stumbled upon several Germans undressing in a wood and putting on nuns’ clothing. A horse cart awaited them nearby in which, no doubt, they intended to penetrate the British lines. Needless to say, they did not continue their journey.

  Even as late as 1961, historian Richard Collier was prepared to accept an almost identical report at face value:

  Gunner William Brewer and four mates, retreating to Dunkirk, were drinking tea near a farmhouse when Bombardier ‘Geordie’ Allen came doubling white-faced. ‘Did you ever see a bloody nun shaving?’ Stealing across the pasture, all five men saw what they’d always taken to be the tallest of tales: two German paratroopers, white coifs discarded, crucifixes dangling, shaving behind a haystack. Seconds later, the ‘nuns’ fell dying, riddled with .303 fire, the blood a dark spreading stain on the black habits.

  The nun myth was particularly popular in France, including the tale of a nun unmasked as a Nazi thug and killed on the spot by an angry mob. Indeed the poet Jean Cocteau is said to have observed that ‘along all the roads in France, only nuns fastening their puttees were to be seen’.

  In Britain the nun myth seems not to have caught on until the end of May. On the 24th a Ministry of Information Home Intelligence summary noted ‘the usual crop of rumours about “hairy-handed nuns” and parachutists’, together with ‘a house full of blind refugees which were alleged to be in possession of machine-guns’. On the same date, beneath the headline ‘Sister of Mercy Caught Shaving’, the Eastern Daily Press reported:

  Miss Elsie Seddon, one of six Salvation Army social workers who reached England yesterday … told how on one of the many occasions she had to leave her car for shelter in roadside woods from enemy bombers French soldiers pounced upon her. They apparently believed that she was either a parachutist or a spy. When she proved her identity they apologised and explained that only a day or so ago they had found a ‘sister of mercy’ hastily shaving in the same woods. ‘She’ was a German parachutist.

  Suspicious nuns quickly became a popular talking point, a fact reflected in Mass Observation reporting. A diary entry on 30 May by Naomi Mitchison illustrates the point:

  We discussed German agents in disguise. Archie said he had often noticed what big feet nuns had, and probably the half of them were men. The conversation, as Scottish Presbyterian conversations do, then became extremely ribald.

  That in Britain the story was never more than a joke is clear from John Lehmann’s biography of Leonard and Virginia Woolf:

  A rather absurd spy mania broke out, and a few days after the fall of Paris, Leonard, his poise recovered, produced a wonderful story of how, on a train journey to London, Virginia had insisted in a stage whisper that a perfectly innocent nun who got into their carriage was a Nazi paratrooper in disguise.

  An odd variation on the masculine nun theme was noted by diarist Margery Allingham in The Oaken Heart:

  The weekly comic papers had nothing on the new Jerry in the matter of invention. Startled soldiers told you extraordinary tales of trickery, among them stories of fierce long-haired women in Belgian farms who turned out to be stalwart Nazis carrying disguise to the point of farce.

  The tale of the bogus nun captured the popular imagination like no other, and was singled out for special attention in a broadcast by Harold Nicolson, then Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Information. On the subject of the chatterbug, he warned:

  He will say that his brother in law – chatterbugs always have innumerable brothers in law – was in the train from Derby when a nun entered and started to read a religious book. The book dropped from her lap, and as she stooped to retrieve it she disclosed a manly wrist complete with a tattooed inset of Adolf Hitler.

  Despite the fact that De Jong’s carefully researched account of the fifth column myth appeared in translation as early as 1956, the picturesque falsehood of nuns in hobnailed boots remained alive and well for decades to come, one American history offering as late as 1976:

  In Heugot’s, a bistro just behind the Place du Palais Bourbon, a startling transformation took place when a nun who for months had made regular collections among the political clients patronising the bistro appeared as a man – and a German. As Cocteau pointed out, there were ‘nuns’ everywhere, since penetrating the disguise was a delicate matter.

  Nuns aside, perhaps the most ridiculous fifth column rumour of all was exported from Luxembourg, which told of a false travelling circus which crossed the border from Germany, whose personnel comprised entirely military men. Acr
oss France various station masters were said to have been unmasked as spies, along with the usual stock reports of airborne saboteurs, suspicious lights, false orders, poisoned sweets and human shields. Arras was said to have been captured by parachutists, who jumped at night carrying flaming torches, while in Paris there were daily reports of paratroops descending on public parks. The idea that fifth columnists contrived to scare refugees onto the roads, and direct them so as to hamper troop movements, would also seem to be French in origin. Another French myth credited German motorised units with the fantastical ability to fuel their vehicles with water, to which a small but evidently miraculous pellet was added.

  The fifth column myth in France was boosted on 21 May when the Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, declared that the bridges over the Meuse had been betrayed, when in fact their loss was due to military incompetence. Suspected fifth column agents were treated in the same brutal way as in Poland, with French units ordered to shoot all strangers unable to account for their presence in any given district. In a single incident at Abbeville no fewer than 22 were shot out of hand, while probably thousands more were killed in woodlands or on roadsides. The summary execution of downed aircrew was also commonplace. The published diary of a French horse transport captain, Daniel Barlone, reveals something of the credulity which underpinned this orgy of violence in France: