World War 2’s Little League of the “Fourth Front”: Minor Propaganda Mouthpieces for the Axis Powers

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
International Relations, Media & Communications, Regional History

If “Lord Haw-Haw” (William Joyce), “Axis Sally” (Mildred Gillars) and the most significant of the “Tokyo Roses” (Iva Toguri) were the major leaguers of Axis radio propaganda promulgators in WW2, then there was certainly a minor league of active players as well. Most of these other wartime on-air advocates of Fascism and Nazism didn’t come close to achieving the profile of the “Big Three”…names like Paul Ferdonnet, Philippe Henriot(𝓪), John Amery, Frederick Wilhelm Kaltenbach, Edward Delaney, Douglas Chandler, Robert H Best, Donald S Day and Jane Anderson and are not exactly household names of the “Fourth Front” in wartime (although Ezra Pound certainly was) [‘Voices of the Axis: The Radio Personalities of the Fascist Propaganda’, Chuck Lyons, Warfare History Network, www.warfarehistorynetwork.com].

⍓ Goebbels & Hitler with the “People’s Receiver” (Source: badischezeitung.de)
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Home-grown Gallic Nazi mouthpieces
Vichy France had plenty of collaborators with the Nazi occupying forces of course, two who had roles in the propaganda airwaves war on France’s own citizenry and troops were Paul Ferdonnet and Philippe Henriot. Ferdonnet, a right wing anti-Semite, moved to Germany before the war to work for Radio Stuttgart as their French language broadcaster. Labelled le traître de Stuttgart by the French press, Ferdonnet focussed on undermining French faith in the alliance with Britain – a recurring refrain directed towards his French audience was “Britain would fight to the last Frenchman” or its variant, “Britain provides the machines and France provides the bodies” [Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944, (2003)]. Apprehended after the fall of the Nazis, he was executed for treason in 1945.

⍓ Henriot in full flight (Photo: Keystone/France/Gamma vis Getty Images)
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The “French Goebbels”
Philippe Henriot eagerly aligned himself with the collaborationist Vichy regime, rising to become the Vichy minister of information and propaganda in early 1944, waging a verbal and psychological war against the Free French. His 270 broadcasts on Radio Vichy played on the fears, anxieties and prejudices of the French people, like Ferdonnet urging them to break off their association with Britain. Henriot’s airwaves appeal was his “mesmerising rhetoric and delivery” which made him compulsory listening for many French men and women [‘Philippe Henriot and the Last Act of Vichy: Radio Broadcasts, January – June 1944’, (K Chadwick), University of Liverpool, www.gtr.ukri.org]. Assassinated by the French Resistance in 1944.

A son of the British establishment
John Amery, son of a British Conservative cabinet minister, is best known for proposing to Hitler the formation of an anti-Bolshevik league, British Free Corps, to fight against communism. Avery made propaganda appeals via radio from Berlin to try to recruit British and Dominion members to the force (he also targeted British POWs). Avery moved later to Italy to resume his stint at the Axis microphone spruiking Mussolini’s “last chance saloon” Republic of Sàlo. Captured in 1944 and transported to London, he was tried for high treason, convicted and hanged in 1945.

Tasked with keping America in isolation 
It’s interesting that quite a significant proportion of the foreign recruits voicing pro-Nazi propaganda at the mic on German radio were American(𝓫). As early as 1939 Hitler’s regime was actively recruiting expat Yank performers for short wave transmissions to America with the objective of persuading Americans to stay out of the world war, in synch with the mission of the “America First” movement on the home front. For a few of the expatriate American mouthpieces for Nazism like Donald S Day it was a highly lucrative vocation. Day was making $3,000 a month(𝓬) railing against Jews, Bolsheviks and the allegedly “Jew- loving” FDR(𝓭).

⍓ Douglas Chandler

It was a standard feature for the expat broadcasters to use (or to be assigned) nicknames. Robert H Best always signed on as “Mr Guess Who”; Jane Anderson was the “Georgia Peach”; Douglas Chandler styled himself as a pro-Nazi “Paul Revere” with galloping horse-hoof sound effects (‘The Nazi Who Infiltrated National Geographic’, Nina Strochlin, National Geographic, 28-Apr-2017, www.nationalgeographic.com). Fred Kaltenbach’s homespun style of commentary and similarity to William Joyce’s creation earned him the derisive nickname of “Lord Hee-Haw” (‘6 World War II Propaganda Broadcasters’, Evan Andrews, History, Upd. 29-Aug-2018, www.history.com). 

⍓ Jane Anderson (Source: guerracivildia.blogspot.com)

After the war eleven of the expat Americans were prosecuted for treason, the great majority of them were not as lucky as Jane Anderson. Anderson who had ‘upgraded’ herself from being a Falangist mouthpiece for Franco during the Spanish Civil War to broadcasting for the Nazis’ RRG (Reich Broadcasting Corporation) was indicted in absentia for treason, however charges against the Nazi sympathiser were dropped for lack of evidence (the prevailing view seems to be that she was “not a very effective political commentator”) …the case against her further complicated by her being a Spanish citizen by marriage [‘The Propaganda Front’, William L. Shirer, The Washington Post,  14-Feb-1943, www.justice.com].

⍓ Ezra pounding out his Axis radio scripts (Photo: Carl Mydans/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

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Pound’s propaganda pieces
By far the most famous of the pro-Axis broadcasters was yet another expat American, the influential poet Ezra Pound. Pound’s disavowal of democracy and egalitarianism took him to Fascist Italy where his hero-worshipping of il Duce and the inducement of Italian Lire resulted in Pound becoming a broadcaster of anti-Allied, pro-Axis propaganda—first from Rome Radio for the Mussolini regime and later from Milan for the Nazi puppet state Republic of Sàlo—churned out in short wave transmissions to Britain and the US. (‘Empty Air: Ezra Pound’s World War Two Radio Broadcasts’, Gibran Van Ert, Past Imperfect, Vol. 3, 1994, pp.47-72, www.journals.libraryualberta.ca). Arraigned for treason after the war, Pound’s comeuppance for his sins was of a whole different kind to the other apprehended foreign broadcasters. Courtesy of his lawyers’ successful insanity plea, the Cantos poet/cum/propagandist avoided prison or worse and was instead committed to a Washington DC psychiatric hospital where he was incarcerated for 12 years, unrepentant and still sprouting extremist and anti-Semitic opinions (‘Ezra Pound: Modernist Politics and Fascist Propaganda’, Matthew Feldman, Fair Observer, 02-Nov-2013, www.fairobserver.com).    

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(𝓪) in Henriot’s case however, if only within occupied France, his profile was “movie star” huge

(𝓫) even the notorious Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce), more associated with Britain and Ireland, was American born

(𝓬) placing him the top half-dozen salary earners on RRG’s payroll (‘Donald Day Got $3000 a Month as Nazis Stooge’, Montréal Gazette, 9-July-1945). 

(𝓭) the Pro-Nazi radio broadcasters rarely ever deviated from the popular pet topics of their vitriol which were usually interlinked  –  Jews (associated with international finance),  communism (sometimes combined with Jews, ie, “Judeo-Bolshevism”), the “Jew-loving” American President Roosevelt, PM Churchill and ”his bondage to the plutocrats”, etc.

𝓮.𝓯𝓰n𝓱𝓲

 

WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves 3: DJ “Orphan Ann” and the Many Voices of Tokyo Rose

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Cinema, International Relations, Media & Communications, Military history, Society & Culture

 

”Greetings everybody, this is your number one enemy” (typical sign-on for “Tokyo Rose”)

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Image: National WWII Museum

In just about every movie and television series Hollywood has made involving Japan and WWII the name of “Tokyo Rose” invariably seems to pop up. Its a standard trope in American war dramas and TV comedies like McHale’s Navy. The San Francisco Chronicle called Tokyo Rose “the Mata Hari of radio”. However, unlike Mata Hari(ǟ), there was no actual “Tokyo Rose”. The name was generic, applied to some dozen or so English speaking Japanese women radio broadcasters who penetrated the airways of American, Australian and New Zealand servicemen in the Pacific theatre of war. Tokyo Rose wasn’t even confined to Tokyo, the female propagandists operated from several cities in the Japanese Empire including Manila, Shànghâi and Tokyo(ɮ).

Many Tokyo Roses but one message
The Tokyo Rose broadcasts would follow a familiar pattern…in between spinning American pop records (to remind the GIs of home), the women in conversational manner would make jokes and taunt the servicemen in an attempt to sap their morale and blunt their appetite for war(ƈ). Paradoxically, for some of her American GI audience the Tokyo Rose radio broadcasts had an opposite effect, they were popular as entertainment and “a welcome distraction from the monotony of their duties” (‘How ‘Tokyo Rose’ Became WWII’s Most Notorious Propagandist’, Evan Andrews, Upd. History, 26-Nov-2019, www.history.com).

Listening to Tokyo Rose on Zero Hour (Source: psywarrior.com)

As stories of Tokyo Rose were spread between GIs, she took on a mythic element in American minds, it was said her snippets of information were “unnervingly accurate (about the Allies), naming units and even individual servicemen” (‘Tokyo Rose (1944)’, www.publicdomainreview.org). The ramifications of this belief were to prove momentous later on for one of the women identified as Tokyo Rose — see Note (ɖ).

Iva at the mike

Iva Toguri/“Orphan Ann”, the ‘real’ Rose?
American opinion hit on a surprising candidate for the real identity of Tokyo Rose, Iva Ikuko Toguri (D’Aquino). Toguri was one of its own, a US citizen of Japanese descent born in Los Angeles who found herself stuck in Japan as hostilities broke out between the two countries. Coerced into broadcasting on Japan’s ‘Radio Zero’ shortwave station as a disc jockey, Toguri played records and performed comedy sketches. She did appeal in her friendly American voice to lonely GIs to return to their loved ones in the US but her propaganda value to the Japanese was considered limited(ɖ). Returning to the US after the war Toguri, labelled by the press as “the one and only Tokyo Rose”, was eventually tried in 1949. Toguri’s conviction for treason was dubiously arrived at and it was widely felt she was made a scapegoat (‘Tokyo Rose’, Upd.  6-Oct-2020, www.biography.com). The supposed “Tokyo Rose” was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000, serving six years and two months. On release she spent overs 20 years living in Chicago ‘stateless’ before a fresh investigation of the case discovered two of the prosecution witnesses had been coerced by the Justice authorities into perjuring themselves…consequently President Ford pardoned her in 1977 (‘Iva Toguri Patriot’, American Veterans Center, (YouTube video, 2021)

Belated presidential pardon (Screenshot ‘Iva Toguri, Patriot’)

Endnote: Mitsu Yashima, Tokyo Rose in reverse

Mitsu Yashima (Source: Densho Encyclopedia)

A parallel but very different story to Tokyo Rose is that of Mitsu Yashima. In the 1930s Mitsu (born Tomoe Sasako), a Japanese artist, was pro-peace, anti-military and anti-imperialist in an increasingly militaristic right wing Japan. After imprisonment and torture for her left-leaning views she and her husband escaped to the US in 1939. Once America committed to the World War Mitsu joined the war effort – working for the Office of Strategic Services, she used her language skills to broadcast anti-Japanese propaganda through the airwaves. On radio she made a particular pitch to the women of Japan, urging them to commit acts of sabotage aimed at helping to bring the Japanese military machine to a halt (‘Mitsu Yashima’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org ; ‘The Epic Lives of Taro and Mitsu Yashima’, Greg Robinson, Valerie Matsumoto, Discover Nikkei, 11-Sep-2018, www.discovernikkei.org).

 

 

Credit: IMDb

Postscript: Hollywoodised Tokyo Rose
As the war in the Pacific was reaching its climax the US made its own propaganda capital out of Tokyo Rose with a 1946 potboiler of a movie of the same name. Tokyo Rose exploited and sensationalised the story, The feature was “not merely a fiction, but a dangerous distortion of the truth”…according to Greg Robinson, it depicts the title character‘s radio propaganda as being “directly responsible for the death of demoralised American soldiers” and thus contributed to the jaundiced atmosphere that pervaded the subsequent trial of Iva Toguri (‘Tokyo Rose: The Making of a Hollywood Myth’, Greg Robinson, Discover Nikkei, 01-Nov-2021, www.discovernikkei.org).

 

▓ See earlier blogs on Lord Haw-Haw and Axis Sally in this series of war radio propaganda broadcasters, WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves, Part 1 and Part 2

︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻︻

(ǟ) ”Mata Hari”, the nom de plume of a Dutch exotic dancer executed by the French for allegedly spying for Germany during WWI

(ɮ) none of the female radio hosts ever referred to themselves as “Tokyo Rose” on air (it was purely an American invention”)

(ƈ) and as with her Axis counterpart in Europe, Axis Sally, the Tokyo Roses would try to sow little seeds of doubt in GI minds about the fidelity of their wives and girlfriends in America

(ɖ)

 

ɛʄɢɦɨʝӄ

WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves 2: The “Axis Sallys”, Disinforming the Allies

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Archaeology, International Relations, Media & Communications, Regional History
1940s radio in the home (Source: Pinterest)

After the early prominence of “Lord Haw-Haw” in World War II (see previous blog ‘WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves I: Lord Haw-Haw’s Career in Radio Propaganda’), the Nazis obviously thought the idea of employing native English speakers to undermine the British enemy through radio propagandising was one worth replicating against the Americans when they too entered the global conflict. For this special communications role the Germans choose a woman, moreover an expatriate American woman living in the Third Reich. 

Fräulein Gillars (Source: Alamy Stock Photo)

Mildred Gillars
Maine-born Mildred Gillars had demonstrated her loyalty to the Fatherland by staying in Germany after war broke out (not wanting to part from her German fiancé). Recruited by program director Max Otto Koischewitz for the  German State Radio (Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft), Gillars, dubbed “Axis Sally” by US GIsa̳, had a DJ segment on Radio Berlin which was beamed over the American airwaves. Her messages to America followed predictable themes, eg, “Damn all Jews who made this war popular. I love America, but I do not love Roosevelt and all his kike boyfriends”b̳. Gillars had visited American POWs in German camps while posing as a Red Cross worker, collected their messages for home and then after giving them a pro-Germany tweak, broadcast them on the airwaves (‘Axis Sally. World War II Propagandist/The Bride of Lord Haw-Haw!’, Rob Weisburg, Lives of the Great DJs, www.wfmu.org).

Max Koischewitz (Image: www.popularbio.com)

Berlin calling  
Gillars’s on air style was diametrically the opposite of Joyce’s hectoring tone, she used a pleasant, conversational approach which sought to sow the seeds of doubt, posing the question whether the wives and girlfriends of the serving soldiers, sailors and airmen would remain faithful during their absence. However, as with Lord Haw-Haw, many of the GIs only listened because they found Axis Sally’s shows humorous (‘6 World War II Propaganda Broadcasters’, Evan Andrews, History, Upd. 29-Aug-2018, www.history.com). 


Gillars’ greatest notoriety lies with the radio play (Vision of Invasion) she broadcast to American soldiers in England a month prior to D-Day, forecasting doom and devastation awaiting the Allies if they were to invade occupied France. After the war Gillars was apprehended and eventually returned to the US in 1948 to stand trial on 10 counts of treason. The ”voice of Axis Sally” was acquitted on nine of the counts but was convicted on the 10th count, the broadcast of Vision of Invasion. Gillars was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in a West Virginian prison and ultimately served 12 years (released in 1961).

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The strabismic but sexy sounding Rita

Axis Sally, Italian style  
 In 1943 the Fascist Regime in Italy sought to capitalise on Nazi Germany’s success with the Axis Sally broadcasts by coming up with an Axis Sally of their own. Actually this Axis Sally, Rita Zucca, was born in New York of Italian parents. Rita Zucca with her sweet and seductive voice was teamed up with a German broadcaster in a radio program entitled “Jerry’s Front Calling”, spewing out defeatist propaganda from Rome to Allied troops in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. When the original ’Sally’, Midge Gillars, heard that someone else had appropriated her moniker, she was ropeable (‘Rita Zucca’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org). 

One of Signorina Zucca’s ploys was using intelligence provided by the Nazis to try to deceive and confuse the Allied forces. In 1944 when the enemy advanced on Rome, Zucca fled north with the retreating Germans to Milan where she resumed her radio communication with American soldiers. After the war the victorious Allies caught up with Zucca in Turin, any plans the Americans to try the Italian-American broadcaster as a traitor were quickly squashed however after it became known that Rita had renounced her American citizenship in 1941 (before taking up her propaganda broadcasting role)c̳. Instead, Zucca was tried by an Italian military tribunal on charges of collaboration and sentenced to four years and five months. She only served nine months of her term but was barred from ever returning to the US (‘“Axis Sally” Mildred Gillars and Rita Luisa Zucca’, www.psywarrior.com) .

“Argentine Annie:” “Hello Tommy, I am Liberty” (Source: Infobae.com)

Postscript: Continuing Axis Sally’s legacy
The two Axis Sallys (and their pro-Japanese counterpart Tokyo Rose) were not to be the last we would see of female propaganda broadcasters in wartime. The Korean War produced its version in ”Seoul City Sue”, an American born missionary in Korea (Anna Wallis Suh) who defected to the North Korean side, joining “Radio Seoul” (when the city was occupied by the North) for a on air spot of undermining American troop morale in the war. The tradition continued in the Vietnam War with “Hanoi Hannah”, a North Vietnamese female broadcaster whose propaganda was directed at “war-weary” American GIs, trying to persuade them that their involvement in the Indochina war was unjust and immoral (“‘Smooth as Silk’ Vietnamese Propagandist ‘Hanoi Hannah’ Dies at 87”, Jeff Stein, Newsweek, 03-Oct-2016, www.newsweek.com). More recently, the Argentine military dictatorship (el Proceso) during the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982 employed the same tactic of a feminine radio announcer—known as “Argentine Annie” or to the Argentinian side, “Liberty”—as the sultry-voiced Anglophone bearer of bad (and fake) news for serving British combatants in the ward̳.

‘Argentine Annie’ (YouTube video)

➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿

a̳ Gillars in her radio show referred to herself as “Midge at the mike”

b̳ a common refrain from Nazis and other anti-Semitic fascist wannabes such as William Joyce and the BUF was that the world war was a war caused by Jews for the benefit of international Jewry which they tended to equate with capitalism

c̳ renounced to save her family’s property from being expropriated by the Mussolini regime

d̳ ’Liberty’ no doubt kept the British forces in the South Atlantic amused with her references to the Royal Marines counting sheep and bizarre diversions into the historic origins of the modern lavatory

ೄྀೃ ༘ೃ ೃ ೃ ೄྀ

WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves I: Lord Haw-Haw’s Career in Radio Propaganda

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
International Relations, Media & Communications, Military history, Regional History
WWII calling via the family wireless (Source: news.bbc.co.uk)

A novel feature of Axis and particularly German propaganda during World War II was the broadcasting of radio messages to the enemy, heaping scorn and invective on the Allies’ war efforts via the airwaves. The most famous/notorious of these broadcasters acquired the nickname of Lord Haw-Haw¤. There were in fact several “Lord Haw-Haws” broadcasting from Nazi Germany during the war, including Munich Anglophone journalist Wolf Mittler and a British spy for Germany, Norman Baillie-Stewart. But the person who came to personify Lord Haw-Haw for the British and American publics was William Joyce.

Mosley & his Blackshirts

A pathological anti-Semite and fascism fan boy from his teens, Joyce was drawn to Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the early 1930s, becoming the party’s director of propaganda and even rising eventually to deputy to leader Mosley. By 1937 Joyce’s violent rhetoric and frequent recourse to brawling with political foes led to a fallout with Mosley and Joyce’s ejection from BUF§.

‘Jairmany’ calling
Joyce tipped off that the British authorities were going to intern him defected to Hitler’s Germany a week before war broke out in 1939, finding work as a broadcaster for Reichsrundfunk (German Radio Corporation). Joyce would began his Radio Hamburg diatribes to the UK and the US with the words “Germany calling”, which in his strange, affected upper-class, nasal drawl sounded like “Jairmany calling”. “Haw-Haw” would bang on about how hopeless Britain’s cause was in the face of the unstoppable German Reich juggernaut, criticising the UK over the calibre of its politicians and soldiers, it’s rationing policy, inciting the Scots to rise up against their English overlords etc, saying anything he thought that might demoralise the Allied troops and their countries’ citizenry.

A dapper looking Wm Joyce in Berlin

Radio ratings king
Remarkably, considering his unrelenting message of doom and gloom and the awareness of Britons (soldiers and civilian) of the blatant propaganda of his unbridled rants, Joyce as Haw-Haw early in the war was pulling in an estimated six and nine million listeners a week (some weeks he scored over 50% of the UK radio audience).

British wartime satire depicted Lord Haw-Haw as a jackass

Why were his broadcasts so popular? One reason was their pure entertainment value, in the difficult days of world war many Brits found his fantastic claims a diversion and a fillip, not to mention wildly funny.  Listening to the ‘weirdo’ expat British Nazi mouthpiece was the done thing in UK homes. Being widely ridiculed didn’t stop Joyce from acquiring a kind of cult status among Allied audiences. The high level of war censorship imposed in home countries (eg, the BBC’s freedom was strictly curtailed) was another drawcard for many Brits and Yanks, regularly tuning in from home. Their reasoning was that, notwithstanding the propaganda, they might pick up some clues on the circumstance or whereabouts of family members engaged in the combat (‘The Rise and Fall of Lord Haw Haw During the Second World War’, Imperial War Museums,www.iwm.org.uk).

Long before the war began to turn pear-shaped for the Nazis Joyce’s popularity with enemy audiences ebbed. Nonetheless he continued peddling his defeatism theme in his broadcasts—imploring Britons to surrender—right up to the bitter end of the Third Reich. Joyce escaped after Hitler’s death and was captured in hiding in Flensburgϖ, near the Danish border.

Joyce, captured (Photo: IWM)

Stitched up, a quasi-show trial?: Treason for a reason
Transported back to London, Joyce was quickly put on trial for high treason, charged with having “given comfort and aid to the King’s enemies in wartime”. The problem about treason in this case was one of nationality. Joyce, born in the US and brought up in Ireland, had obtained a British passport by deception. As he was never a subject of Britain, therefore it was thought that he could not be expected to give allegiance to the king. However, the prosecution aided by a partisan judge successfully argued that as Joyce held a British passport in 1939-40 (prior to his becoming a naturalised German citizen) he did in fact (briefly) owe allegiance to the British crown. As historian AJP Taylor remarked of the episode: “technically, Joyce was hanged for making a false statement when applying for a passport, the usual penalty for which is a £2 fine” (‘When Speech Became Treason’, Mary Kenny, Index on Censorship, 1 2006, www.journals.sagepub.com).

Queue outside Old Bailey trial of Joyce (Source: thejc.com)

There was quite a lot of unease both within the British legal fraternity and in the public—notwithstanding the perceived abhorrence of his vile words and opinions—about the death penalty for Joyce, a sense that any conviction should have been for unlawful actions he may have committed, not for what he said. That Joyce’s sentence was commensurate with major war criminals who committed massacres in concentration camps, some Britons asserted, was a travesty (‘William Joyce’s Lord Haw-Haw Crime Files’, Crime + Investigation, www.crimeandinvestigation.co.uk; ‘When Speech Became Treason’).

Settling scores with the English voice of Nazi Germany
Was there an element of payback in Joyce’s draconian fate? A lot of Britons in their homes might not have taken Haw-Haw seriously but the authorities did, he caused the government a lot of grief…he mocked Britain and it’s leadership, he taunted it with his announcements of where Germany bombs would hit Britain next and (bogus but hurtful) reports of Allied loses. And as Mary Kenny notes, London “came within an ace of jamming the broadcasts and banning them” (‘When Speech Became Treason’). Quite simply, Joyce had been the wartime voice of Nazi Germany and the establishment was prepared to do whatever was necessary including resuscitating an archaic law, the 1351 Treason Act, to secure his execution.

 Postscript: Lady Haw-Haw
Joyce’s wife Margaret who accompanied him to Germany played her own supporting role in the wartime baiting of the Allies (she had her own propaganda radio air time spot). Ultimately though “Lady Haw-Haw” managed to avoid William’s fate at the gallows. No charges against Margaret Joyce were ever proceeded with. Nigel Farndale suggests that rather than an act of leniency, Margaret’s avoidance of punishment may have been due to a deal her husband did with the authorities not to reveal his MI5 links.

 

Ξ See elsewhere on this site for follow-up blogs on WWII female counterparts of Lord Haw-Haw  – Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally.

 

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¤ Britons tended to imagine “Lord Haw-Haw” as some kind of toffee-nosed aristocratic type 

§ Joyce was linked to a host of other extreme right organisations in Britain like the Nordic League and White Knights of Britain and ultimately started his own local Nazi-wannabe party, National Socialist League

ϖ Flensburg was the last capital of the Nazi empire