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 ofInvasion) 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 ofInvasion. 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 (elProceso) 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)
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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
Mention “The Ten Commandments” to cinephiles and almost invariably they’ll think of the 1956 epic with Chuck Heston as the resolute Moses. But that was Cecil B DeMille’s second attempt at filming the Old Testament story, or his (Cold War-inspired) interpretation of it at least. Back when Hollywood was still in it’s adolescence, 1923, DeMille made a silent version of The Ten Commandments, in black and white with some sequences in Technicolor.
(Image: www.bestplaces.com)
The location chosen by DeMille for his first go at shooting the biblical epic was a barren 18-mile stretch of sand some 170 miles north of LA, at Guadalupe on California’s central coast. Today, the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, as they are called, are a protected sea coast and wildlife refuge (eg, for the endangered western snowy plover) and largely unchanged, but for three months in 1923 it was a hive of mega-budget movie-making activity as DeMille transformed the empty dunes into a reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian city. DeMille chose the Guadalupe dunes for the movie set because he thought it might pass for the Egyptian desert (or at least the Sahara Desert) [‘Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes’, Atlas Obscura, www.altasobscura.com].
𐅉 ‘10 Commandments’ of California in glorious “techni-tint”
Hollywood scale extravaganza
The set was massive scale, destined to become the director’s trademark – 120 foot high by 720 feet wide, erected by 1,500 construction workers, a twelve-story tall “Egyptian city” of plaster, wood and straw. The city’s human population comprised a further 3,500 actors✖and technicians plus 125 cooks to feed the assembled masses. Add to these impressive numbers some 5,000 animals, 300 chariots and 21 plaster sphinxes. Statues of Pharaoh Rameses were eleven metres tall and the facade had a 110-foot high gate enclosure✧[‘The Ten Commandments, (1923 film)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Bob Brier, Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs, (2013); www.lostcitydemille.com].
(Source: G-N Dune Center)
A Virtuous Camp DeMille?
DeMille had a huge makeshift tent city erected (nicknamed “Camp DeMille”) to house all of the personnel on the set. Perhaps, in keeping with the overtly religious theme of the film⊡, DeMille laid down strict rules of non-engagement for everyone involved on the production…men and women were billeted separately with no fraternisation allowed, no gambling, no alcohol and no coarse language [‘The Ten Commandments of 1923: The Exodus, Take One’, Patheos, 20-Apr-2012, www.patheos.com]. The alcohol ban adhered to the Prohibition rules in place in America at the time, but subsequent generations of beach-combing visitors to Guadalupe’s dunes have discovered evidence that participants on the movie set found a way round that…the debris of empty bottles of alcohol-laced cough syrup strewn all over the dunes [PJ Grisar, ‘How DeMille made his ‘Ten Commandments’ Jewish again’, Forward, 08-Apr-2020, www.forward.com].
A vanishing “Egyptian metropolis”
After filming of The Ten Commandments on the Central Coast finished in August 1923✥, what DeMille did next astounds. Instead of dismantling and hauling the costly set (the overall budget for the movie was a staggering $1.5M or more) back to Hollywood, DeMille had it bulldozed and buried in the Guadalupe dunes. The film-maker just didn’t want to be bothered with the logistics or expense of an enormous removal task and/or he didn’t want rival Hollywood film-makers or studios to get their hands on the set.
(Photo:www.fws.gov)
Unearthing cinematic artefacts
And there it sat—or shifted around in the constantly swirling winds of the dunes—for sixty years, one of Hollywood’s most expensive-ever film sets. Then in 1983 film-maker Peter Brosnan became intrigued after a chance encounter with the story, got hooked on it and spent the next 30 years searching for the site, finding it and trying (frustratingly) to excavate it. The project is ongoing, and has taken this length of time due to a combination of factors – local “red tape” (jurisdiction of the dunes falls under two separate counties); the site is a bird-life sanctuary with limited, seasonal access; plus there’s the extremely high cost of funding excavations. Over the years, archaeologists, both professional and amateur, have joined the quest to dig up DeMille’s treasure-trove. Buried replicas from DeMille’s Lost City have been unearthed including a 300-pound plaster sphinx which now resides in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center [‘There’s a Fake Egyptian City Buried in California’, (Marissa Fessenden), Smithsonian Magazine, 15-Oct-2015, www.smithsonianmag.com]. Brosnan compiled his years of research, including interviews with surviving actors, extras and other crew members, into a documentary film, The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille, screened in 2016.
✖DeMille also bused in some 250 Orthodox Jews as extras to give the movie a more authentic Hebrew look
✧ Rameses’ ‘temple’ contained recreations of hieroglyphics copied from the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922
⊡ certainly in keeping with the sternly moralising tone of DeMille’s film
✥ only part of the film was made on the Guadalupe dunes, the wonky parting of the Red Sea scene was shot at Seal Beach in Orange County, and a modern-day morality tale DeMille tacked on to the film was shot back at the studios
When we think of the chariot and it’s association with antiquity, those of us weened on a cultural diet of Hollywood epic cinema might think about Ancient Rome and chariot racing in the Circus Maximus (such as famously featured in Ben Hur) or Ancient Egypt (imperial chariots ostentatiously ferrying proud pharaohs to some battle or conquestin The Ten Commandments). However, those that bought the Hollywood spin on ancient history might be surprised to learn that the chariot as a vehicle for hunting, racing or war in the ancient world did not have its genesis with either Rome or Egypt❋.
Traditionally, most historians of the ancient world have traced the chariot’s origins to Mesopotamia and the Near East (roughly dated as somewhere around 3,000 to 2,000 BC). More recent archaeological findings have however thrown up a rival candidate, the steppes of Russia and Kazakhstan. In the 1970s archaeologists unearthed the remains of chariots in the Ural Mountains of Central Russia which are thought to be as old as 4,000 years (there has some some conjecture as to whether these were chariots or carts and wagons) [‘Secrets of the Chinese Chariot’, Documentary, UK 2016, (aired SBS 15-Nov-2019)].
The horse’s domestication in the great steppes of Asia and evidence of early chariot-making in Russia/Central Asia are clear indicators of the pathway by which the chariot arrived in China. The oldest surviving remnants of the chariot in China dates its appearance to around 1,200 BC, coinciding with the Shang period of rule (found at Anyang in Henan Province). Other items excavated at Chinese sites reinforce the early existence of chariots in Ancient Chinese society, such as the characters inscribed on oracle bones—on some of these the image of chariots can be detected (‘Secrets of the Chinese Chariot’).
Oracle bone from Shang dynasty⇓
Chariots of a different hue
The chariot in China reached its peak in the Western Zhou (1,046-771 BC) and the succeeding Eastern Zhou periods (771-226 BC), with chariots numbering in the thousands [Mark Cartwright, ‘Chariots in Ancient Chinese Warfare’, Ancient History Encyclopedia, (13-Jul-2017), www.ancient.edu]. One of the most interesting features of the Chinese chariot is it’s distinct differences from the chariots used by the earlier Sumerian, Hittite and Egyptian civilisations. Chinese chariots tended to be plus-sized compared to those from the Near East, the Caucasus, etc. The carriages were rectangular and large, with the vehicle’s axle located at the central point of the platform, giving the vehicles better balance (Near Eastern and Egyptian chariots typically positioned the axle at the end of the chariot).
But even of more striking difference was the Chinese wheels, they were huge and of a multi-stoked variety (usually comprising between 18 and 26 stokes on each wheel). The Western Asian/Near Eastern chariot wheels of antiquity by contrast were small and compact, usually with only six stokes per wheel (even earlier ones were made of heavy solid wood). The Chinese “super-size me” wheels were designed with local conditions in mind. The lighter, more flexible wheels were better suited to China’s rough terrain, accordingly they also made the horses’ task of pulling the chariot easier too [‘Secrets of the Chinese Chariot’; Andrew Knighton, ‘ The Rise and Fall of the Chariot – It Changed History, But Eventually Was a Victim Of Its Own Success’, War History Online, 04-Nov-2016, www.warhistoryonline.com].
A symbol of one’s class
Chariot and chariot horse ownership, much like the most expensive luxury cars today, was the preserve of the very wealthy in society✪. The archaeological evidence found in tomb pits confirms this. Chariots were a sign of great status for the nobleman. Owners needed to be well cashed-up as the vehicles were expensive to make and to maintain. Accordingly, noblemen in China, Egypt and elsewhere, when they died, would have their chariots and their horses interred with them in their burial tombs. Chariot pits such as those discovered in 2015 at Zaoyang, Hubei Province (dating to ca. 700 BC), shed light on the chariot’s significance. An aristocrat’s power was measured in the number of chariots he owned. The aristocratic class was expected, as part of their leading military role, to have the personal skills to master the chariot in warfare [‘Pictures: Ancient Chariot Fleet, Horses Unearthed in China’, National Geographic, 28-Sep-2011, www.nationalgeographic.com].
Photo: Zhang Xiaoli, Xinhua via Fame/Barcroft
The Zaoyang pit has proved particular fertile ground for chariot exhumation. Comprising a massive area of 33m x 4m, archaeological field workers divested it of 28 chariots and 49 pairs (49 x 2 = 98) skeletons of horses neatly arranged side by side [‘Archaeologists in China find 2,800-year-old tombs surrounded by 28 chariots and 98 horses’, (April Holloway), Ancient Origins, 22-May-2018, www.ancient-origins.net].
Horses for courses
The unearthed skeletonsof the horses at Zaoyang and at numerous other burial sites reveal that the Chinese ‘chariotocracy’used a specific kind of horse for their chariots – stocky, strongly-built Mongolian horses, standing about 1.4m tall, were deemed most suitable to haul the large Chinese chariots around the countryside [‘Secrets of the Chinese Chariot’].
Chinese chariots had some features that was different from elsewhere in the ancient world. Normally, a chariot crew (ma) in action comprised two men, this was standard. Butcommonly in Chinese chariots there were three men on board. The driver or charioteer⌑ and the archer were accompanied on the chariot platform by a third man. Sometimes called a rongyou, his job was to protect the other two in combat armed with a kind of spear-axe or halberd (known in China as a Ji). There were also specialist war chariots in China with a “crow’s nest” (ch’ao-ch’e) attached, a tower on an elevated chassis mounted above the platform of the chariot. This permitted an army commander to observe the field of battle more easily and to communicate orders to the army’s flag wavers (Cartwright).
Another advance in weapon technology at the time, the supplanting of the all-wood bow by a new, shorter composite bow (made of wood, horn and sinew), made the mobile archer a more effective and more potent element in battles (Knighton). The streamlining of war chariots, making them lighter and more manoeuvrable, made it feasible for them to outrun light infantry and heavier chariots. These chariots were still not without their limitations or drawbacks, they required flat ground to be effectively mobile and were prone to breaking down (armies often brought chariot repair teams with them to the battlefield) [‘Chariot tactics’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘The Wheels of War’].
Role in unification of the Chinese states
The importance of chariots as a military weapon in China coincided with the period of Warring States (Zhànguó Shídài). The kings (gúowáng, 国王) of the two strongest states Qin and Chu each had about 1,000 chariots at their command, and the vehicle certainly played its part in the eventual unification of China under the Yins. But the decisive role of chariots in war, even then, was diminishing. A combination of several developments in the military sphere undercut the chariot’s effectiveness in battles—army reforms saw increased reliance on the mobility of massed infantry and cavalry (greatly diminishing the crucial role played by nobleman). Chariots could not compete with fast-moving, well-coordinated cavalry. These developments and the introduction of iron weapons, especially the lethal eight-picul crossbow (nu), blunted the effectiveness of chariot-led warfare⌻ [‘Warring States period’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
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❋ in fact, chariot racing, so synonymous with the Romans, was a sport they copied from the Ancient Greeks (Homer’s Iliad includes a description of chariot racing in Book XXIII, ‘Chariot racing’, Britannica, www.britannica.com). Chariots were also used for hunting and funeral processions
✪ the conspicuously affluent citizens of the day paraded their chariots around town as ceremonial vehicles in much the same way as Ferraris, Lamborghinis and other prestigious luxury vehicles are ostentatiously shown off today. The chariots were decorated colourfully and elaborately with cowrie shells and bronze fittings
⌑ the charioteers were the most costly, prestigious and influential section of the army (Knighton) with entry to its ranks very competitive. The Luiu-t’ao (Six Secret Teachings), (5th-3rd BC military treatise, describes the necessity for chariot warriors to be the best and fittest in the army (age, height and agility standards had to be met) (Cartwright)
⌻ crossbows proved the nemesis of the war chariot, and once humans were successful in bending horses to obey their will, fleet-of-foot cavalry units could inflict considerably more damage on the enemy line than chariots could (‘Secrets of the Chinese Chariot’)
The “Long Wall” – the world’s most famous, most myth-engendering bulwark
China’s most distinctive and enduring icon is the Great Wall of China, it is of course also sui generis as the world’s Great Wall. The Wall, Chángchéng長城 – or as sometimes described Wan-li Ch’ang-ch’eng 萬里長城 (10,000-mile Long Wall✱), is incontrovertibly one of the wonders of both the ancient and modern worlds. Starting in the west in Gansu Province at Jiayuguan Pass, the wall(s) meander east over mountains and through passes to they reach the sea in the country’s east (a journey of over 21 thousand km). The oldest sections of the Wall date from the Warring States era (circa 214 BCE).
Laolongtou ⍗ Shanhaiguan and ‘Old Dragon’s Head’ If we follow the extravagating course of the wall east from the Badaling section (near Beijing) for about 300 kilometres, we’ll come to Shanhaiguan (literally “mountain – sea – pass”) in Liaoning Province, one of the Great Wall’s major passes (acclaimed as “the first pass under Heaven”). This section continues to Laolongtou (‘Old Dragon’s Head‘⊟), where the wall enters the sea (Gulf of Bohai) and spectacularly and abruptly terminates! The wall at Shanhaiguan and Laolongtou snaking as it does between mountains on one side and water on the other, has been strategically important to the Chinese Empire eastern defences since the 1600s.
Hushan Great Wall
The setting that greets visitors to Laolongtou Wall end-point (Estuary Stone) looks like a most appropriate setting for the eastern terminus of the Great Wall. The reality is however that the Great Wall/s are not a continuous linear structure, they are actually characterised by numerous gaps in the sections…and where the ‘Old Dragon’s Head’ ceases at the sea is one more break in the line, albeit a dramatically evocative one! Before 1989 the conventional wisdom was that Laolongtou was the most easterly point in the Walls, but in that year Chinese archaeologists excavated 600m of a hitherto undiscovered section of the Great Wall 540km east of Laolongtou. The Hushan Wall (extending over a mountain, Hushan or Tiger Mountain) lies just north of China’s eastern border city, Dandong (which eyeballs North Korea just across the Yalu River). In 2009 the Chinese government, based on Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) research, recognised the wall as the most eastern point of the Great Wall (and ie, the end-point). Beijing’s classifying of the wall (so close to the Korean border) as Chinese contradicted the North Korean view that the wall was originally Korean (the Bakjak Fortress) and provoked a hostile North Korean reaction. [‘Hushan Great Wall’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
PostScript: Dandong discovery reignites the Goguryeo controversy The Dandong wall conflict reignited the controversy over the Goguryeo Kingdom that previously had inflamed tensions between the two countries. Background: the historic Goguryeo Kingdom (1st century BC to 7th century AD) encompassed an area comprising all but the tip of the Korean peninsula and a portion of both Russian and Chinese Manchuria. Both Koreas view the historic Goguryeo Kingdom as having been the ‘proto-Korea’ state. The Chinese perspective (which the Koreas label as revisionism) is that Goguryeo was only ever a vassal state of the ‘Middle Kingdom’, moreover one occupied largely by Tungusic people, an ethnic minority of China. The wall kerfuffle fed into this controversy, stirring up feelings of nationalism on both sides, the fallout being that Sino-Korean relations took a nosedive. Mutual distrust lingers over the matter…fears of irredentist claims on each other’s territory, and for PRC the perennial bogeyman of the spectre of Korean reunification. [‘Goguryeo controversies’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
(Source: Man, ‘The Great Wall)
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✱chéng in Chinese can also mean city or city wall…or more aptly to describe China’s wonder building – walls in the plural, John Man, The Great Wall (2009)
⊟ so-called because the structure’s end part (above the sea) is thought to resemble a dragon (long) resting its head (tou) on the ground
❂ the Chinese media going so far as to tag the kingdom as ‘China’s Goguryeo’ (Zhongguo Gaogouli) [Korea and China’s Clashing Histories’, (Yong Kwon), The Diplomat, 11-Jul-2014, www.thediplomat.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).
A symbol of one’s class
