Myths & Legends of the Second World War

by James Hayward

  The Fifth Column really does exist; every night blue, green and red lights appear everywhere. A regiment cannot remain two hours in a tiny spot without being invariably bombed with enormous bombs … Dispenser Charbonnier, at our hospital, had five persons shot, one a beautiful young girl; by showing lights and curtains of different colours, they had guided German aircraft, signalling to them and thereby causing fires in the neighbouring chemical factory.

  Six months after France had fallen, André Morize, who worked at the Ministry of Information before fleeing the country, did much to spread the fifth column myth abroad in America. In a much remarked article published in the Sunday Star, Morize described ‘entire regiments’ of German sleepers in Holland, and reported that spies had bribed French communists to sabotage war production. Some in the US military establishment took these claims seriously, with Major-General Robert Richardson warning the War Department that he had it ‘on good authority’ that ‘the typewriter industry is riddled with Fifth Columnists’. Indeed in February 1942 no fewer than 30 citizens of Japanese extraction were arrested for signalling during the celebrated phantom air raid on Los Angeles, examined in Chapter 12.

  What motive underpinned these outlandish falsehoods? Clearly, many on the Allied side had a vested interest in ascribing the German victories to an underhand secret weapon, rather than poor leadership and military incompetence. Yet as we have seen, many in the British military and political establishment, including Churchill, Ramsay and Ironside, gave these myths full credit, Churchill even offering that there were 20,000 organised Nazis in Britain. Indeed the sinking of the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow in October 1939, and a series of mysterious explosions at the gunpowder factory at Waltham Abbey two months later, convinced many of the reality of a dangerous fifth column in Britain. According to R.V. Jones, both MI5 and the RAF continued to chase shadows long into the Battle of Britain:

  Great zeal was expended by security officers in chasing reports of fireworks being let off while German aircraft were overhead. Our countryside was scanned by aircraft of the RAF looking for suspicious patterns laid out on the ground which might serve as landmarks to aid the navigation of German bombers. More than one farmer was surprised by a call from security officers to explain why he had mown his hay in such a manner as to leave a striking pattern which could be see from the air. One chapel, whose gardener had unconsciously laid out paths in the pattern of an enormous arrow as seen from the air, and which did indeed point roughly in the direction of an ammunition dump ten miles away, was raided as a suspected Fifth Column Headquarters.

  A similar account was given by a 21 Squadron officer stationed at RAF Watton in Norfolk, Wing Commander P. Meston:

  My best friend, Flight Lieutenant David Watson, one day asked me if I had noticed anything unusual about the countryside. I authorised a flight and we took off to investigate. After about 20 minutes David asked if I could see anything abnormal. I replied that I couldn’t. I still remember his reply ‘Look at the bloody lime heaps’ and then it came into focus. The heaps were in straight lines across the country, complete with arrows. We followed the lines but couldn’t make sense of them. We reported this to our squadron CO and eventually it reached the station commander, Group Captain Vincent, who chided the CO for listening to two young pilots who had let their imagination run riot. Nevertheless he took a look himself and informed higher authority. Next day the place was swarming with MI5 and we were told to shut up and not mention this to anyone. About a year later we learned, quite by accident, that the lime heaps were markers for the German airborne invasion of the UK, and that in addition there were prepared airfields with filled-in ditches and fold-down hedges.

  As might be expected, actual prosecutions for fifth column activity were few and far between. A former Mosleyite named Saxon-Steer received seven years for pasting up a flyer for the New British Broadcasting Service in a telephone kiosk, while in December 1940 a landlady named Dorothy O’Grady was sentenced to death for cutting telephone wires on the Isle of Wight, although later it emerged that her confession was false. The only remotely serious case was that of Marie Ingram, a German-born woman married to an RAF sergeant, who conspired with a number of former BUF members in the Southsea area to wheedle military information from serving soldiers, and infiltrate the local Home Guard to obtain arms and ammunition. On her conviction in July 1940 Ingram was jailed for ten years, and an accomplice named Swift for fourteen.

  Even if the Ingram case convinced some of the reality of the fifth column threat, belief in the myth went deeper still. Some historians have concluded that the fifth column menace was deliberately fabricated to support mass internment in Britain, and in this there is a great deal of truth. Between January and April 1940 several British papers, including the Sunday Dispatch and the Daily Mail, attempted to whip up a storm about the ‘enemy alien menace’, which comprised ‘fascists, communists, peace fanatics and alien refugees in league with Berlin and Moscow’, as well as the IRA. In February, the Evening Standard even claimed that the Gestapo was busy ‘employing Jews to spy in England’. However, such reports made little headway, and other papers were more cautious. The Times warned against the ‘hysterics’ of the last war, pointing out that most aliens had come to Britain as bona fide refugees from Nazi persecution, and had already passed through several vetting procedures. The Daily Express took a similar view, concluding that ‘all liberal-minded persons, all who value freedom and liberty in life, should stand against every recrudescence of the witch-hunt, no matter what form it should take’.

  Even after the invasion of Norway and Denmark, it seems that the majority of the British public refused to take the fifth column seriously. Naomi Royde-Smith, whose book Outside Information (1941) takes the form of ‘a diary of rumours’ heard around Winchester, recorded the following:

  After the withdrawal from Norway, Quisling rumours ran like wildfire. My early tea was brought up one Sunday morning with the announcement that the Town Clerk had been arrested as a spy. Sleepy though I was I refused to believe this news. It was entirely untrue. There is, however, a circumstantial tale of a local clergyman’s daughter who was able to denounce as a spy a British officer quartered on the vicarage. She heard him going late at night to the lavatory – but he never pulled the plug! This un-English behaviour excited her suspicion, she reported it, and her guest was discovered to be signalling with a flashlight from the window of the retreat.

  During the last week in April, Mass Observation conducted an extensive enquiry into attitudes towards the fifth column. The result was revealing:

  We found that the majority of people hardly realised what the phrase meant. We also found that the level of ordinary people’s feelings was much less intense than that expressed in some papers. Detailed interviewing in several areas in London and Western Scotland produced less than one person in a hundred who spontaneously suggested that the refugees ought to be interned en masse.

  There can be little doubt that the fantastical reports concocted by Bland and Department EH were prepared with this end in mind, and passed on to the Ministry of Information as the basis for articles offered to British newspapers. The same disinformation was also circulated in America, notably in a series of four articles written by Colonel William Donovan published by the New York Times in August, clearly based on information supplied during his celebrated intelligence mission to Britain between 14 July and 4 August. By December 1941, and the attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor, these same stock signalling and alien myths were being reported in America as fact, as we shall see in Chapter Twelve. Whether this concerted campaign to convince the British public of the reality of the fifth column menace bore fruit is doubtful, for in July a Gallup Poll revealed that a mere 43 per cent of the general public wanted all aliens interned. And on at least one occasion, magistrates dismissed a case against a German-born woman who was prosecuted for allegedly flashing signals to enemy aircraft with a torch.

  There was however another pressing reason to keep the popul
ation alarmed by fifth column fantasy. On 10 May, the day that Holland, Belgium and France were attacked, Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister, and the great invasion scare began in earnest. The diary of his private secretary, John Colville, records a revealing conversation with Churchill at Chequers on 12 July:

  He emphasised that the great invasion scare (which we only ceased to deride six weeks ago) is serving a most useful purpose: it is well on the way to providing us with the finest offensive army we have ever possessed, and it is keeping every man and woman tuned to a high pitch of readiness. He does not wish the scare to abate therefore, and although personally he doubts whether invasion is a serious menace he intends to give that impression, and to talk about long and dangerous vigils, etc, when he broadcasts on Sunday.

  The italics are mine, and serve to emphasise a tried and trusted method which was employed time and again during the Second World War. In May 1941, when German airborne troops captured the island of Crete, word was spread that parachutists had descended disguised as Greeks and New Zealanders. And on 2 March 1942, in announcing that Japanese troops were attacking Java, the BBC reported that the enemy had approached an Allied post disguised as British soldiers. In reality, race alone would have sufficed to betray such a ruse. But reality seldom extinguishes myth.

  2

  The Royal Oak

  During the first few months of the war, two disastrous events did much to convince some in Britain that the fifth column posed a clear and present danger. One was a series of devastating explosions at the Royal Gunpowder factory at Waltham Abbey on 18 January 1940, the cause of which was never determined with certainty, and the other the sinking of the battleship Royal Oak while lying at anchor in Scapa Flow on 14 October 1939. The events of Black Saturday at Scapa, in which 833 officers and men lost their lives, have given rise to a whole raft of myths and legends, including sabotage, watchmaking spies and mutinous submarine crews. The loss of the Royal Oak makes for an interesting case study, not least because it demonstrates just how readily disaster is mythologised.

  The facts of Black Saturday can be covered briefly. At midnight on a clear moonless night Lieutenant Gunther Prien navigated his submarine U47 through Kirk Sound, the northernmost of the eastern entrances to the naval anchorage at Scapa Flow. Moving on the surface, the submarine slipped between blockships, taking advantage of slack, poorly maintained defences. Inside the Flow, Prien spotted a battleship, which he mistakenly identified as Repulse, and fired off a salvo of three torpedoes. Only one of these hit, striking right forward of the Royal Oak and inflicting little damage on the massive ship. Indeed officers who went to investigate the explosion concluded it had originated inside the ship, and raised no general alarm. Prien was therefore able to reload his tubes and loose off a second salvo, two of which hit home. Within thirteen minutes Royal Oak capsized with massive loss of life, since a power failure meant that no order was given to abandon ship. Prien withdrew, and returned safely to Germany, where he was decorated with the Iron Cross for his outstanding seamanship and courage. The attack was by any measure an admirable feat of arms, and an unmitigated disaster for the Royal Navy.

  Because the anchorage at Scapa Flow had long been considered impregnable, investigators initially guessed that the first explosion had been internal, and in turn ignited the ship’s Inflammable Store. Other possibilities tabled included mines dropped by aircraft, and sabotage – a belief which remained particularly strong among surviving members of the crew. In the days which followed rumours reached fever pitch, so much so that a possible author of the crime was identified in the form of the ‘Saboteur of Lyness’, a naval base on the island of Hoy. It was not until some time later that the BBC intercepted a German news item in which it was claimed that a lone German U-boat had been responsible for the sinking. Finally, on 18 October, Prien was introduced to a gathering of press correspondents in Berlin, as CBS newsman William Shirer recorded in his Berlin Diary:

  Prien is thirty, clean-cut, cocky, a fanatical Nazi, and obviously capable … He told us little of how he did it. He said he had no trouble getting past the boom protecting the bay. I got the impression, though he said nothing to justify it, that he must have followed a British craft, perhaps a minesweeper, into the base. British negligence must have been something terrific.

  It had indeed. The Admiralty Board of Inquiry established that at the material time there had been at least eleven significant flaws in the Flow’s defences, including gaps in the booms and inadequate lookouts and patrols. Whether or not the various investigators from MI5 and the Naval Intelligence Division were aware of these lapses at the time, it was noted that there had been no recent German aerial reconnaissance before U47 slipped in, and so it was widely believed that Prien must have been helped by a spy. Certainly it was a fair assumption that Prien had the benefit of inside information. For surely he would not have risked penetrating the Grand Fleet anchorage without being certain of finding a worthwhile target, and the operation required a detailed knowledge of the channels, block ships and defences. Indeed Scapa Flow frequently harboured no capital ships at all, and the Royal Oak had returned only two days previously.

  MI5, NID and Special Branch personnel descended on Orkney en masse in an attempt to trace the agent who had made Prien’s exploit possible. They failed, and instead managed only to turn up a suspicious Italian photographer who ran a camera shop in Inverness, and was promptly interned. This marked a serious defeat for British intelligence, and in particular for Major-General Sir Vernon Kell, the head of MI5, whose confidence that all German agents in Britain had been rounded up at the outbreak of war was critically undermined. Kell seems to have been held responsible for this apparent lapse in security, and following the explosions at Waltham Abbey two months later was removed from his post.

  Remarkably, two years later an American journalist succeeded where the combined might of various British intelligence agencies had failed. On 16 May 1942 the Saturday Evening Post carried an article on ‘U-Boat Espionage’ written by Curt Reiss, himself a political exile from Austria. According to Reiss, the submarine which sank Royal Oak had been guided through the anchorage by a German spy who, prior to the outbreak of war, had posed as a Swiss watchmaker in Kirkwall, the nearest town to Scapa Flow. Reiss claimed the spy had established on 11 October that two entrances to the Flow were not closed by anti-submarine nets, and after sending back a coded message rendezvoused with a German submarine on the 13th:

  The man, whose last name begins with a W, was neither a Swiss or a watchmaker, but a German lieutenant commander working for the German U-boat Espionage … The naval inquiry board in London had little difficulty in finding out that watchmaker W had disappeared. His deserted car was found in the morning after the sinking in the vicinity of Scapa Flow.

  In fact no such information had been uncovered by the Admiralty Board of Inquiry, and the story written by Reiss was a fabrication. According to a later investigation by the author Ladislas Ferago, Reiss had been duped by an unnamed, impoverished fellow journalist:

  The spy was dreamed up and the entire story of his exploit fabricated by a Central European newspaperman living as a refugee in New York. He had been prominent in his profession in Europe, but had fallen on hard times in the United States … He was respected and trusted as a reputable journalist on the strength of his past record. He found it relatively easy, therefore, to merchandise his sensationalistic confections to American news associations, magazines, and fellow writers, including Reiss, who were looking for dramatic material about the European scene for articles which were then in great demand in the literary market … And it was on this grapevine that the British authorities picked it up. They checked it out by the simple process of an MI5 agent in New York interviewing the inventor, and accepting his veracity at face value.

  It is unclear whether or not some in the British intelligence community accepted the spy story as true, although no doubt the NID would have been happy to do so. Three years later, the fictive t
ale of the Swiss watchmaker was revived and expanded by another journalist in the United States, this time Kurt Singer. Like Reiss, Singer had been born in Austria, and had published well-received biographies of Hermann Göring and Pastor Niemoller. In 1945 he published a lesser work titled Spies and Traitors in World War II, which included a chapter on ‘The Man Who Really Sank the Royal Oak’. By this account, the spy was a German named Alfred Wehring, who arrived in Kirkwall in 1927 having assumed the identity of Albert Oertel, a Swiss watchmaker. Singer was a prolific author of books on crime, espionage, movies and the occult, and also produced a large quantity of pulp cowboy fiction. Between 1945 and 1959 he reworked his account of the phantom of Scapa Flow several times, including chapters in More Spy Stories (1955) and Spy Omnibus (1959). Bearing in mind that British intelligence had drawn nothing but blanks when chasing the phantom spy in 1939, the level of detail provided by Singer in 1959 clearly betrays its basis as fiction:

  In 1927, twelve years before Hitler launched his attempt at world domination, there came to Britain from Switzerland a somewhat retiring and bespectacled little man answering to the name of Albert Oertel. He told the immigration authorities that he was a watchmaker and would very much like to carry on his trade in the United Kingdom … In truth Switzerland was not his native land. Nor was his real name Albert Oertel, though that was certainly the name on his passport. The watchmaker from Switzerland was in reality Alfred Wehring, an ex-German naval officer who had served the Kaiser with distinction in World War 1. After the 1918 surrender, Germany had little to offer its former officers. Wehring spent the next four years in restless idleness. Then, in 1923, Admiral Canaris, then quietly reconstructing Germany’s spy system and who held a high opinion of the young naval officer, offered him a post in the organisation. It was a new line of work for Wehring, but he was thankful to become active again.