Albania emerged from the Second World War with a communist government led by Enver Hoxha striving to free itself from the clutches of Yugoslavia whose leader Tito was intent on making its smaller neighbour part of the Yugoslav federation, a particularly tricky scenario as Albania, economically stricken after the war, was dependant on Yugoslav for urgently needed aid.
𝒮𝓉𝓇𝒶𝒾𝓉𝓈𝑜𝒻𝒞𝑜𝓇𝒻𝓊
Into this already tense situation in the first half of 1946, a rift developed in UK/Albanian relations. First, in March-April London refused to exchange diplomats with Tirana, citing the latter’s unfriendly and “uncooperative attitude” towards British personnel🅰. In May two Royal Navy cruisers Orion and Superb were navigating through the Corfu Straits (a narrow passageway separating that Greek island from Albania) when fired at by an Albanian land gunnery. The British warships sustained no damage but matters escalating from there…two British destroyers entered the straits in October and hit hitherto undetected land mines, HMS Saumarez in particular was badly damaged and later written off. More importantly there were British crew casualties (44 dead and a similar number injured). The following month the Royal Navy undertook a sweeping operation of the straits and found 22 mines {’Albanian-American Relations in the Fall of 1946: A Stormy End’, (Edward J. Sheehy), Tirana Observatory, 9-Apr-2009, www.tiranaobservatory.com}.
𝐻𝑀𝒮𝒮𝒶𝓊𝓂𝒶𝓇𝑒𝓏𝐼𝒞𝒥𝑒𝓂𝒷𝓁𝑒𝓂
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland v. the People’s Republic of Albania
The UK’s response to the incident was to take Albania to the International Court of Justice in The Hague (the inaugural case brought before the new Court). The protracted case, not concluded until 1949, was a landmark case for the inter-country disputation, helping to lay the foundations for the development of what would eventually become the UN International Law of the Sea (ratified in 1982) {‘Summary of Relevant Aspects of the Corfu Channel Case (Merits)’, www.iilj.org}. The eventual judgements handed down were mixed, the Court found that Great Britain (GB) in entering Albania’s territorial waters did not violate its sovereignty (having a right of “innocent passage”), however it adjudged that GB’s mine-sweeping operation (codenamed “Operation Retail”) was a sovereign violation of Albanian waters, nor did it have permission from the international mining clearance organisations to conduct the operation. Lawyers for the British had argued that it took the action to secure evidence of the minefield’s existence, but the Court threw out GB’s argument of acting in self-protection or self-help {‘The Corfu Channel Case, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland v. the People’s Republic of Albania‘, UN Environment Program, www.leap.unep.org}.
𝐿𝑒𝑔𝒶𝓁𝒯𝑒𝒶𝓂𝒢𝐵𝒶𝓉𝒯𝒽𝑒𝐻𝒶𝑔𝓊𝑒𝒸𝒶𝓈𝑒
The British legal argument that the mines had been laid by Yugoslavia, acting on a request from Tirana, was denied by Hoxha’s government which blamed Greece for the mines – at the time Albania had involved itself in the civil war in Greece on the side of the Greek communists. The Court determined that collusion between Albania and Yugoslavia in mining the straits could not be proven (www.iilj.org). In a subsequent judgement The Hague ruled that Albania had failed in its responsibility to warn GB of the minefield danger, consequently Albania was ordered to pay GB damages of £843,947 for the material loses of the warships (equivalent to £24.4 million in 2019){‘Corfu Channel Case’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org}. Hoxha rejected the verdict—though in 1950 the regime offered GB a token amount of £40,000 as payment for compensation—making no serious effort to meet its liability.
Monetary gold stolen from Rome
In 1946 the victorious allies (GB, US and France) established the “Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold” to recover gold stolen by Nazi Germany and return it to the rightful owners. Included in the Nazi loot was 2,338 kg of gold seized in 1943 from the Bank of Rome by the Nazis, a treasure claimed by both Italy and Albania (and indirectly and partly by GB who identified in this a remedy for its still outstanding damages verdict). The Commission was unable to resolve the monetary gold issue so an independent arbiter appointed by The Hague determined that the gold belonged to Albania. Italy contested the matter—it’s claim resting largely on Italians having been the majority shareholders in the National Bank of Albania (which had been seized by fascist Italy)—taking the dispute to the ICJ, Italy v France, United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and United States of America (1954). The ICJ however held that it had no jurisdiction to adjudicate the case.
𝒩𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃𝒶𝓁𝐵𝒶𝓃𝓀𝑜𝒻𝒜𝓁𝒷𝒶𝓃𝒾𝒶𝐻𝒬
A post-Hoxharesolution
Albania refusal to accept the compensation judgement against it and GB’s blocking the transfer of the gold to Albania occurred as Albania entered a long phase of self-isolation🅱. The recovered Nazi gold sat in the vaults of the Bank of England for over four decades and the diplomatic impasse between London and Tirana was not broken until the eclipse of the communism in Albania. When democracy was established in 1991, diplomatic negotiations began and a deal was done, the new government in Albania agreed to pay GB’s compensation bill from the Corfu episode and in return the British agreed to release 1674 kg, providing the funds that economically weak post-communist Albania needed before it could pay GB the amount owing.
𝑀𝒶𝑜𝒶𝓃𝒹𝐻𝑜𝓍𝒽𝒶
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Footnote: The Tripartite Gold Commission did not deliver the gold to Albania until 1996 (the lengthy process required the cooperation of the GB, US and French governments) and the amount ultimately paid by the Albanian government to GB in “full and final settlement” was US$2,000,000.
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🅰 in relation to war graves identification and limitations on movement with the country, a charge denied by Tirana
🅱 Albania severed its relationships not just with the UK and US (Sheehy), but even within the socialist Second World. Stalinist ideologue Hoxha broke off ties with both USSR (1961) and China (1978) for being too ‘revisionist’
❝History stopped in 1936 – after that, there was only propaganda❞
~ George Orwell
❝We want to spread disruptive and disturbing news among the Germans which will induce them to distrust their government and disobey it❞
~ Sefton Delmer
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Previous blogs on this site talked about how the Nazis used expat Britons and Americans to launch a blast of psychological warfare against the Allies with the objective of undermining their forces’ morale in WWII, the means utilised, the ‘weapon’ of powerful radio transmission (voiced by role-playing figureheads, in particular the so-called “Lord Haw-Haw” and “Axis Sally”). It wasn’t long into the World War before Britain decided it too would infiltrate the enemy airwaves in a counter-attempt to try to mess with German military minds.
𝔓𝔯𝔬𝔭𝔞𝔤𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔞𝔴𝔞𝔯–𝔣𝔦𝔢𝔩𝔡, 𝔚𝔚ℑℑ (ℭ𝔯𝔢𝔡𝔦𝔱: 𝔉𝔩𝔦𝔠𝔨𝔯)
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Es spricht der Chef To undertake the task the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) was formed with the brief of disseminating ”black propaganda”⦑a⦒ against the enemy.The idea involved setting up a number of fake German radio stations—the first called Gustav Siegfried Eins (shortened to GS1) using shortwave frequency, harder for the Nazis to jam—as the propaganda vehicle for deceiving the Fatherland. From May 1941⦑b⦒ every day at 1648 hours a broadcaster purporting to be an old school Prussian officer known as der Chef would come on the air on German radio and, predictably, denounce the enemy, the ‘Brits’, the ‘Ruskies’ and the Jews, but then launch into a full-blown rant castigating Nazi officialdom too…in “profanity-laced tirades” the Chief would lambast Nazi officials’ “buffoonery, sexual perversity and malfeasance…condemning their incompetence and their indifference to the deprivations” suffered by the German volk⦑c⦒. Because he sounded ‘legit’ the impression many listeners got from the disillusioned Chief’s on-air ‘sprays’ was that there must be a rift within the German high command (‘The Fake British Radio Show That Helped Defeat the Nazis’, Marc Wortman, Smithsonian Magazine,28-Feb-2017, www.smithsonianmag.com).
𝔓𝔥𝔬𝔱𝔬: 𝔞𝔪𝔞𝔷𝔬𝔫.𝔠𝔬𝔪
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Other little parcels of poison delivered by “the Chief” via the radio waves included insinuations that the supposedly ‘Ayran’ army of the Third Reich was being contaminated by the influx of foreign troops in its ranks. He also alleged that injured German soldiers were receiving infusions of “syphilis-tainted blood” of captured Slavs. Another unsubtle avenue pursued by the Chief was to play on German officers’ fears of spouse infidelity at home.
In truth, the voice they heard belonged not to a disaffected Prussian army veteran but to Peter Seckelmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany acting out the role of der Chef. The panicked Nazi commanders combed the Reich to try to locate what they thought must be a maverick German general on the loose, all the time Seckelmann was secretly housed in England, in a small radio studio tucked away in quiet Bedfordshire.
Sefton Delmer at the helm The mastermind behind Britain’s black propaganda campaign was Denis Sefton Delmer, born in Berlin of Australian parents. Recruited by PWE in 1940 because of his fluency in German and familiarity with the Nazi leaders⦑d⦒, Delmer had a thing for colourful descriptions of what his black propaganda unit did…”psychological judo” and “propaganda by pornography”⦑e⦒. The former German-based Daily Express journalist moulded PWE “special operations” into a “veritable fake news mill”, assembling an efficient team of artists, writers and printers who worked tirelessly to create thousands of phoney German newspapers and leaflets (not to neglect the role of American bombers who dropped two million units of the bogus literature every day over enemy territory)⦑f⦒. Gathering information from various sources (British intelligence, German POW interrogations, resistance operatives, bomber debriefings), PWE deceived and bewildered the Axis enemy through a carefully measured mix of lies and fact (Wortman). The tactics of ‘black’ radio were “short-term, rumour-filled⦑g⦒ and deceptive” (Nicholas Rankin, Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception 1914-1945 (2008)).
The fake news networkSoddatensender Calais (G9) was another, British-run, faux Nazi radio station. ‘Aspidistra’, a medium wave radio transmitter located in Crowborough, East Sussex, conveyed the Sefton Delmer blend of music, innocuous information (appealing to German servicemen) together with the manipulated, ‘black’ kind of information (‘Fake News is Nothing New: 5 ‘Black Propaganda’ Operations From the 1930s and 1940s’, Jeanette Lamb, History Collection, 24-Mar-2017, www.historycollection.com).
𝔅𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔞𝔦𝔫’𝔰𝔭𝔰𝔢𝔲𝔡𝔬–𝔊𝔢𝔯𝔪𝔞𝔫𝔫𝔢𝔴𝔰𝔭𝔞𝔭𝔢𝔯∘
Getting back to “the Chief”, Seckelmann under the direction of Sefton Delmer made in all 700 broadcasts to the German population. The Nazis tried to jam the broadcasts coming through the GS1 station but to no avail. Delmer, having decided to close down GS1, orchestrated a dramatic denouement for der Chef charade, having him ‘assassinated’ on-air in the final episode in 1943 (transforming “the Chief” into a kind of martyred loyalist to the Führer⦑h⦒).
Backlash to Delmer’s black propaganda approach Not everyone in Britain including those within government were on board with Delmer’s black radio activities. There were critics inside Churchill’s war cabinet, like Richard Stafford Cripps, who condemned PWE for taking the moral low ground … serving up a cocktail of outrageous lies and dirty tricks – from inventing military sex orgies to discredit the SS⦑i⦒ to fake news of American ‘miracle’ weapons like the new, non-existent ”phosphorus shells” to abrade the morale of German listeners [‘Black Propaganda in WW2’, The History Room, YouTube video, 2014). Delmer himself was a forthright, controversial and sometimes polarising figure, he had no compunction about exploiting sex in its most extreme manifestations including ”beastly pornography” and even pederasty, fabricating atrocities including the rape of German soldiers’ wives and sisters. Delmer was eyed with suspicion by both sides, some Germans thought he was a British spy and some Britons thought he was a Nazi spy (Rankin).
How effective were PWE’s black propaganda broadcasts?PWE’s sheer weight of rumours, lies, half-truths and disinformation from PWE certainly no doubt took some toll on a already sagging German morale in the latter stages of the conflict, but did Delmer’s ”psychological judo” “disrupt the enemy’s will and power to fight on”? (‘Propaganda – A Weapon of War’, NLS, www.digital.nls.uk). It is not possible to definitely answer this question in the affirmative or negative. At the end of the war PWE was disbanded and all its records and documents were shredded. The deficit of data precludes any firm idea of how big and widespread the Germany wartime audience for the phoney radio transmissions was. Praise for PWE’s work however came from on high in the enemy camp, Minister of Propaganda Goebbels no less who conceded that Britain’s black Soldatensender had accomplished a “very clever job of propaganda” (Goebbels’ 1943 diary entry).
Footnote: ‘Black’ v ‘white’ propaganda Black propaganda is distinguished from the more common type ‘white’ propaganda. The ’White’ kind is propaganda that does not hide its origins or nature, that emanates from bodies from government international information services (eg, BBC, The Voice of America). A third variant, ‘grey’ propaganda, straddles the other two – the origin of the information and messages is concealed so it can’t be discerned, eg, during the Cold War the CIA beamed grey propaganda into the Eastern Bloc through the intermediary of radio stations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (’Grey Propaganda’, www.powerbase.info).
ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–
⦑a⦒ a form of propaganda (used by both sides in the war) which “is presented by the propagandizer as coming from a source inside the propagandised” (Becker, H. (1949). ‘The Nature and Consequences of Black Propaganda.’ American Sociological Review, 14(2), 221–235. https://doi.org/10.2307/2086855) , ie, by those it is supposed to discredit (Wikipedia)
⦑b⦒ the onset of Der Chef’s broadcasts coincided with the defection of the Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess to Britain
⦑c⦒ the Chief’s main target for ”character assassination” were ”lower-level Nazi functionaries” and their presumed corruption, ‘His Majesty’s Director of Pornography’, Stephen Budiansky, HistoryNet, www.historynet.com)
⦑d⦒ Delmer met Hitler himself while inspecting the Reichstag fire in Berlin
⦑e⦒ he even referred to himself irreverently as “HMG’s Director of Pornography”
⦑f⦒ producing “agitprop masquerading as inside dirt” (‘Fighting the Nazis With Fake News’, Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com)
⦑g⦒ one baseless rumour spread by the bogus German stations that led the Gestapo on a wild goose chase concerned a resistance group of anti-Nazis supposedly inside the Reich called “Red Circle” ‘Undermining Hitler (Part One of Three)’, Providentia, 07-Feb-2016, http://drvitelli.typepad.com)
⦑h⦒Seckelmann‘s dissident officer in his radio diatribes had been careful to exclude Hitler himself from any blame, suggesting that it was the subordinates who had betrayed the Führer
⦑i⦒ the PWE artists’ role in the Brits’ deception was to skilfully forge documents which falsely incriminated Nazi personnel in the SS and other arms of the forces
”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. 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)
Endnote: Anti-RoseA 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 posts 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
Current Lord Chamberlain Andrew Parker (fmr MI5 head) (Source: The Times)
The Lord Chamberlain (LC) is the most senior member of Queen Elizabeth II’s Royal Household retinue. The office has been around in Britain for over 600 years, the incumbent is usually a peer and traditionally has always been male. Today, the LC handles the organisation for the Queen’s attendances at garden parties, state visits, looks after HM’s thoroughbred horses and he supervises the annual upping of the Royal swans. For much of its history though the LC had another, controversial role, censor of the British Theatre with virtual dictatorial powers — he “was answerable to no-one, not even parliament, and was not obliged to justify his decision to playwrights or theatre managers” [NICHOLSON, Steve. Theatre Censorship in Britain (1909-1968) In: Les censures dans le monde: xixe-xxie siècle[online]. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016 (generated 17 novembre 2021). Available on the Internet: . ISBN: 9782753555495. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pur.45008.] A much aggrieved George Bernard Shaw characterised the LC as the “Malvolio of St James’ Palace” [‘The Censorship of the Stage in England’, G. Bernard Shaw, North American Review, August 1899, Vol 69, No 513, pp.251-262, www.jstor.org/stable/25104865].
Walpole, the first PM (Source: History Today)
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The politics of early Georgian drama
Theatre censorship had existed in England since the 16th century but institutionalising its practice as a function of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (LCO) was a political manoeuvre by the ”First Minster“ Robert Walpole in the 1730s to blunt the weapon of satire which was being effectively used theatrically against his government. The 1737 Licensing Act handed the LC the “power of god” over the English theatre, remarkably this legislative arrangement stayed in force until as recently as 1968. Hitherto to the crackdown critics🄰 of the ruling Whig Party were relatively free to make satirical attacks through the theatre of the day to expose the political corruption of Walpole’s government. The LC’s new carte blanche powers were designed to silence a theatre increasingly hostile to Walpole and the Whigs🄱 [‘The Licensing Act of 1737’, Eliza Hay, www.ericsimpson.sites.grinnell.edu].
1737 Licensing Act
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Examiner of Plays
The LC was provided with two officers to put the spadework, a Examiner of Plays🄲 and a Deputy Examiner of Plays (the offices remunerated by yearly stipends of £400 and £200 respectively). The examiners’ task, assisted by secretaries and other auxiliary staff, was to read the plays that came before them (the LC himself did precious little of the actual reading of the plays) and write “Reader’s Reports” for the LC. They were also required to visit theatres to check on their safety and comfort and to ensure that the LC’s licensing rules were being observed. Theatres without a licence were liable for prosecution and financial penalties [‘Licensing Act 1737’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Although the ultimate decision on a license rested with the LC, the recommendations to make or break a new play came from the examiners, little wonder then that Bernard Shaw called the examiner “the most powerful man in England or America”.
Above and beyond the spoken word and the text
Censorship was not confined to bowdlerising the texts and banning plays outright🄳, the scope of the Royal censors extended to the actors’ gestures, the costumes, the sound and lighting effects, the set and the stage directions (Nicholson).
Osborne’s 1965 play ‘A Patriot for Me’, the controversy of the dramatist’s refusal to make cuts helped end the LC’s censorship
The view from within the Lord Chamberlain’s Office bubble
The LCO saw themselves as licensors rather than censors. They never really grasped why any reasonable dramatist or manager could object to their control, concluding that playwrights who did so were just trying “to exploit an unsavoury incident or fact”. In the LCO’s Pollyanna-like world view authors of “ordinary decent plays” on the other hand had nothing to fear. The LCO took a disparaging and contemptuous view of the modern playwrights who would rail against their invervention (such as John Osborne and Edward Bond🄴). The LCO tended to justify its censoring role in patronising terms, seeing itself as a moral watchdog, protecting the average playgoer from unsavoury plays, custodians of good taste on the English stage (Nicholson).
Theatre Royal Drury Lane (Source: architectsjournal.co.uk)
Zero guidance for the artist
The Act’s vagueness placed playwrights in an additional dilemma, the office of the LC never really spelt out explicitly what constituted a play’s suitability or unsuitability for a licence, leaving dramatists and the actor-managers of theatres guessing as to the basis of the objection. Plays rejected for a licence or having their manuscripts blue-pencilled for wholesale cuts were usually generically herded under a non-specific catch-all of being either ”immoral or improper for the stage”.
St James’ Palace, home of the Lord Chamberlain (Source: Pinterest)
An effort at codifying
The 1843 Theatres Act made a partial effort at codifying and limiting the LC’s powers, stipulating that a play could only be prohibited if “it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace”. A joint select committee in 1909 advising the LC provided further clarification of the powers, the following were said to be “no-nos” in plays: indecent subject matter; (if a play contains) “offensive personalities”; (if it infers) “violence to sentiments of religious reverence”; “represents invidious manner of living persons”; “calculated to conduce crime and vice”; “impairs friendly relations with foreign powers”🄵 [‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Plays with British Library Curator Dr Alexander Lock’, People of Theatre, (Vlog, 2021), www.peopleoftheatre.com].
‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ (Photo: V & A Museum)
Plays that dealt seriously with contemporary issues especially sexuality were severely blue-pencilled, eg, prostitution in Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession. The continuing influence of religion saw the LC come down heavily on blasphemy, the portrayal of biblical figures were taboo (eg, Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Obscene language in plays was a serious infraction of the code. Into the 20th century the censorship of the LC maintained its prescriptive role, plays that earned the ire of the examiners included such classics of the modern theatre as Waiting for Godot (bodily functions or parts, even mere sexual suggestiveness) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (homosexuality) which had already had a successful run on Broadway in the US. Increasingly as a result the LC was seen to be out of touch with modern concerns and realities.
Source: WNYC
Self-censorship and censorship by proxy
The LC held such control over theatrical performances in Britain that it even prompted an element of censorship by proxy. Rudolf Weiss has noted that fear of the LC‘s wrath led some playwrights to self-censor their work to secure a license and thus a hearing in Britain. Some of the autocratic actor-managers—fearful of financial losses arising from an aborted production—have done the LC’s work for them [‘“Unsuitable for theatrical presentation”: Mechanisms of censorship in later Victorian and Edwardian London Theatre’, Rudolf Weiss, www.ler.letras.up.pt].
Lord Chamberlain in 1960s, Baron Cobbold, resisted calls to abolish censorship (Artist: George JD Bruce)
End of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship authority
Opposition to censorship was in the air in the 1960s with the emergence of a permissive society…a new generation of young playwrights like Osborne, Pinter and Bond were exploring increasingly polemical subjects in modern society. The Arts Council of Great Britain described the LC’s veto power as having “a contraceptive effect on the development of British drama” (Nicholson). The coup de grâce for theatre censorship came from the reformist Wilson Labour government🄶. The 1968 Theatres Act was part of a broad sweep of modernising legislation during the Sixties, along with the end of capital punishment, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the introduction of the pill and the legalisation of abortion [‘50 years after Theatres Act, censorship has evolved’, Sandra Osei-Frimpong, Index on Censorship, 14-Aug-2018, www.indexoncensorship.org]. The repeal of stage censorship opened the floodgates for creativity and bold innovation – just one day after the ban ended, the controversial US counterculture musical Hair (New Age nudity, drug-taking) opened on London’s West End.
G Bernard Shaw (Source: thefamouspeople.com)
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Footnote: Loophole in the system
The LCO’s net was wide but there were ways to get round the expurgator’s ban…when one Shaw play was banned in Britain for perceived profanity, the Irish playwright simply resorted to staging it in Liverpool and then Dublin. Later on some playwrights avoided the public theatre circuit altogether and put on their work exclusively at (private member) club theatres around the country. Even British drama institutions, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, frustrated by the LCO’s persistent interference, “threatened to turn themselves into private clubs for specific productions to evade the LC’s rulings” (Nicholson), which contributed to the groundswell of groups and individuals campaigning to end theatrical censorship.
Arts Theatre Club production, 1955 (Photo: V & A Museum)
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🄰 with dramatist Henry Fielding in the forefront along with the Jacobite opponents of the Whigs
🄱 in theory the LC’s authority was limited to Westminster but effectively its jurisdiction applied to all Theatre Royal playhouses [‘Theatrical Oligarchies: The Role of the Examiner of Plays’, Oxford Scholarship Online, www.oxford.universitypressscholarship.com]
🄲 sometimes called ‘Comptroller’, in the 20th century they have mainly been military men-turned courtiers
🄳 each year relative few plays actually got banned, expurgation was the common recourse
🄴 whose play Saved was one of the last to be banned
🄵 these grounds would prove very controversial in the 1930 when the LC Lord Cromer banned a number of English plays which were hostile towards Nazi Germany (a manifestation of London’s appeasement approach to relations with Berlin). Cromer even send some scripts to the German Embassy for their ‘approval’! [‘Theatre of War: how the monarchy suppressed anti-Nazi drama in the 1930s’, Steve Nicholson, The Guardian, 22-Jul-2015, www.theguardian.com]
🄶 the previous Labour (Attlee) government had unsuccessfully tried to pass an anti-censorship bill in 1949
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).
༄࿓ ༄࿓ ༄࿓
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)
➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿➿
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 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’ callingJoyce 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 kingRemarkably, 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 reasonTransported 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 GermanyWas 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-HawJoyce’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.
¤ 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
During the time of European settlement of North America there has been at least three attempts to invade Canada by Americans (or by British settlers in what was to become the United States of America). All three ended ignominiously. The first in 1690, part of the Anglo-French conflict known as King William’s War, was a naval expedition by the Massachusetts Bay Colony led by Sir William Phips with the objective of seizing Québec City, the capital of New France. The English bombardment of Québec was an abject failure and Phips’ expedition was forced to return to Boston in smallpox-infested ships on which hundreds perished on the journey [‘King William’s War 1688-1697’, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, www.colonialsociety.org]<ᵃ>.
1690 assault on Québec City from Massachusetts Bay colonists
The second invasion attempt was in 1775, during the early days of the American Revolutionary War. The idea to invade came from American army colonel (and later defector to the British side) Benedict Arnold, the rationale being to try to induce French Canadians to join the war for independence against their British rulers. The assault on Québec led by Arnold was easily repulsed by a reinforced British garrison and the American patriots reduced to 100 men were forced to retreat with their tails between their legs back to the American side [‘Battle of Québec: When Benedict Arnold Tried to Invade Canada’, Patrick J. Kiger, History, Upd. 29-Sep-2021, www.history.com].
1775 invasion of Québec, brainchild of Benedict Arnold.
The third occurrence was during the War of 1812, when the Americans invaded Canada, urged on by the “war hawks” in Congress who predicted it would an easy victory (in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “a mere matter of marching”)<ᵇ>.Despite making several invasion attempts, via both Upper and Lower Canada, the Americans again emerged empty-handed from their efforts (due to a combination of factors including inept US military leadership and woeful preparedness, and fierce resistance from the allied forces of British ‘Redcoats’ and First Nation warriors). In early 1813 the Vermont newspaper Green-Mountain Farmer lamented that the Canadian campaign had produced nothing but “disaster, defeat, disgrace, and ruin and death” [‘How U.S. Forces Failed to Conquer Canada 200 Years Ago’, Jesse Greenspan, History, Upd. 29-Aug-2018, www.history.com].
Guernsey Is stamp, commemoratingMaj-Gen Brock, War of 1812 (Source: rpsc.org)
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In addition there have been other unsanctioned invasions from the US, such as the Patriot War of 1837-38, a series of disjointed raids from the US borderlands in support of the Canadian rebels (Rebellions of 1837). The Americans who participated, many from the Hunters’ Lodges, were motivated both by antagonisms against what they saw as British tyranny and by a sense of adventurism (Washington under Van Buren maintained a policy of neutrality during this episode to safeguard its trade interests with Britain).
Map source: New York Almanack
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After the American Civil War Irish-American Republicans from the Fenian Brotherhood crossed the border, raiding British military strongholds in both the west and east of Canada as part of a stratagem to force the British into negotiation for Irish independence…the most notable of these engagements was the Battle of Ridgeway (1866) in which the Fenians were victorious over inexperienced Canadian volunteers. For the Fenian militia it was a pyrrhic victory, serving only to a spur for the realisation of Canadian confederation rather than to advance the cause of Irish independence<ᶜ> . [‘An Irishman’s Diary on the Battle of Ridgeway, the Fenian Invasion of Canada in 1866’, Brendan Ô Cathaoir, The Irish Times, 01-Jun-2016, www.irishtimes.com].
And when Americans weren’t engaged in the process of actually invading Canada, they were often scheming and planning to annex their northern neighbour. One of the more bizarre instances of this was “War Plan Red”, this 1930 US plan to invade Canada was, unlike earlier ones, supposedly a scheme to get in first! The US military’s predessors to the Pentagon feared that Britain in the years following WWI might launch an invasion of the US from Canada. Canadians in fact had already preempted the US with the military coming up with its own “Defender Scheme No. 1”, a five-pronged attack plan to invade the US (the idea was that Canada would make the initial (surprise) strike on key American cities and then rely on Britain and it’s other dominions to follow up the invasion). Fortunately, nothing came of either of these plans and they were quietly shelved by the time North Americans managed to crystallise in their minds who the real enemy was (Nazi Germany) [‘The Time the U.S. Almost Went to War With Canada’, Kevin Lippert, Politico Magazine, 21-Jun-2018, www.politico.com].
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Parliament ablaze in Montreal
Another odd manifestation of the tendency toward annexation came from north of the 49th Parallel in the 1840s. In 1846 Britain repealed the Corn Laws<ᵈ> ending preferential colonial trade which provoked a merchant revolt in Canada. Conservative Anglophone businessmen were fearful that without protection for their produce the Canadian economy might plummet into recession, some of them rioted, burning down the new parliament building in Montreal. 325 of the Tory businessmen, convinced that republican system of the United States would be more profitable to them, signed a document known as the Montreal Annexation Manifesto (1849), calling for the US to annex Canada. This of course never came to reality but the movement’s primary objective, reciprocal free trade with the US and access to its market, was ultimately realised with the Elgin-Marcy (Reciprocity) Treaty in 1854…by which Canadian lumber and wheat entered the US duty-free, in exchange the Americans were given fishing rights off Canada’s Atlantic coast.
✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠
<ᵃ> an unexpected consequence of Phips’ disastrous Québec adventure was Massachusetts’ introduction of the first government-backed paper currency in the American colonies, necessary to pay the near-mutinous troops, promised a share of the loot from Québec’s capture [Goldberg, Dror. “The Massachusetts Paper Money of 1690.” The Journal of Economic History 69, no. 4 (2009): 1092–1106. http://www.jstororg/stable/25654034.]
<ᵇ> once again the American invaders made the error of thinking they would be received as liberators in Canada
<ᶜ> curiously, in this same year (1866) a bill—designed to appeal to American Fenians—was introduced into the US Congress to formally annex “British North America”, but it never passed the House of Reps
<ᵈ> the ‘corn’ laws in the UK encompassed all cereal grain crops
2015 was an apogean year for international refugee influx into Europe, the dislocation of war and the fear of persecution in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea brought more asylum seekers to the continent than any time to that point since WWIIa.The sheer scale of the refugee movements, the tragedy of mass drownings, military interventions and border controls, the hostility of some governments towards the continuous tide of migration, the utter chaos and misery of the refugees’ plight, the whole humanitarian disaster all has echoes from distant history.
⍓ Clash between refugees and Hungarian police (Photo: www.rt.com)
The Huns, movers and shakers in the barbarian landsThe refugee crisis in Europe reminded some observers of a chapter in the declining days of imperial Rome. The catalyst for this Late Antiquity migration story was the emergence of the nomadic and war-like Huns. Leaving their homeland (not known for certain but possibly Kazakhstan in Central Asia) after AD 350, the Huns moved along the Black Sea, engaging and defeating the Vandals, the Alans, the Goths and other Germanic and Slavic peoples that they encountered on their path of destruction. By circa 370 the military success of the Hunnic hordes had forced many of the defeated peoples to migrate west toward the Roman Empire. As a consequence, in 376 a large group of Goths comprising perhaps 100,000 men, women and children from two tribes—the Thervingi and the Greuthungi—suddenly turned up on the banks of the lower Danube River, the boundary of Rome’s eastern imperial reach, fleeing from the Huns. The Goths pleaded with Valens, emperor of the east for sanctuary, pledging their allegiance to the empire. The absorption of ‘barbarians’ within the Empire was an established policy of assimilation practiced by Rome, an initial step on a process of transforming foreigners into Roman citizens, albeit with certain limitations on their rights [‘1,700 years ago, the mismanagement of a migrant crisis cost Rome its empire’, Annalisa Merelli, Quartz, Upd. 09-May-2016, www.qz.com].
⍓ Valens’ numismatic likeness
Receptiob or denego?
After lengthy deliberation Valens made a momentous decision…allowing the Thervingi into the imperial territory in return for loyalty to Constantinople and that they provide infantry for the emperor’s armies. At the same time Valens denied permission to the second group of Goths, the Greuthungi, to enter Roman territory. According to the main source we have for this period, historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Valens thought he had secured himself a great deal, a cheap supply of foreign labour and a boost to the empire’s tax revenue [Dan Jones, Power and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages (2021)].
⍓ Moesia/Danube border, Roman Empire
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Roman border securityTraditionally, the Romans were very efficient at managing the flow of migration within the empire. Rarely using walls, they relied on natural barriers in the landscape such as rivers and mountains. To defuse any potential threats, the foreign tribes were customarily relieved of their weapons, broken up into smaller groupings and sent off to underpopulated regions. Unfortunately for this project, the traditional practices were not implemented. The operation, delegated to two venal Roman officials to coordinate, was a disaster. The two, Lupicinus and his deputy (dux) Maximus, were incompetent, corrupt and exploitative in their duties. The Thervingi were not made to hand over their weapons, nor were they divided into smaller numbers and dispersed to different regions. In their greed the Roman officials allowed too many of the Thervingi to cross the Danube at the same time, with the result that many Goths perished in the river. When it came to settling the Goths, the two officials committed a series of abuses against the new settlers including selling them the desperately needed supplies at massively inflated pricesc . And to top off the snafu, Lupicinus and Maximus failed to prevent the barred Greuthungi from crossing the Danube illegally by their own means further downstream [‘Immigration: How ancient Rome dealt with the Barbarians at the gate’, Cavan W. Concannon, The Conversation, 13-Feb-2019, www.theconversation.com].
(Image: slidetodoc.com)
Spirally out of hand fastFrom there things went from bad to worst between the Romans and the ever more aggrieved Thervingi. Valens tried to eliminate the Thervingi leadership which backfired spectacularly…a riot ensued and their chieftain Fritigern reneged on his allegiance to the emperor, and most dangerously allied with the Greuthungi against the Romans. Valens was faced with “a unified, massive Gothic army, loose and armed in Roman territory” (Concannon). The increasingly formidable Goths launched a series of revolts and plundered wealthy Thracian villages and estates (Jones).
Blundering into a military catastrophe In 378 Emperor Valens, underestimating the strength of the enemy and imprudently declining to wait until reinforcements arrived from the western Roman emperor (his nephew Gratian), engaged a combined army of Goths and Alans (with cavalry) in the Battle of Adrianopled . The battle went badly for the Romans, Valens made tactical errors and the army was outnumbered and outmanoeuvred by the barbarians led by Fritigern, resulting in a crushing total defeate .This time Valens paid for his blunder with his life, along with that of roughly two-thirds of the Roman army. Reverberations from the debacle went deep, both Christian and pagan contemporaries saw it as the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. For St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, it signified “the end of all humanity, the end of the world” [Lenski, Noel. “Initium Mali Romano Imperio: Contemporary Reactions to the Battle of Adrianople.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 127 (1997): 129–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/284390.]
⍓ Solidus depicting Emperor Theodosius
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The new emperor, Theodosius I, brokered a peace with the Goths in 382, the circumstances after Adrianople compelling him to accept the settlement of the semi-autonomous group of the Thervingi between the Danube River and the Balkan mountains. Within the Roman Empire, the Goths and other barbarians were granted the status of foederati (a federation of client peoples allied by treaty to Rome – in return for certain subsidies and benefits the barbarians were required to provide manpower for military service, eg, as auxiliary mercenary forces to guard the Empire’s frontiers, AKA līmitāneī). At best Theodosius’s pax Gothica was a holding operation, buying the declining Empire time only. The barbarians once inside the imperial borders evolved swiftly into an entrenched force and a growing threat, as the rise of the Visigoths (see note below) and their king, Alaric I, was to demonstrate in the 390s.
⍓ Delacroix’s painting of Attila the Hun
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Postscript: The Huns’ invasions of the lands to the south and west, a decisive push to expand its empire, stimulated the “Great Migration” of peoples, successive waves of migration, raids and rebellions, which weakened the fabric of Roman civilisation, contributing to the eventual collapse of the Roman Empire (AD 410).The Hunnic empire reached its peak in the two decades from 434 when its most famous leader Attila attained power. Under Attila the Huns cut a swathe through Eastern Europe (even invading Gaul), forcing the eastern Roman emperor to agree to pay him an annual tribute of 2,100 pounds of gold in return for peace. Attila died in 453 and bereft of his cohesive and dynamic leadership the Hunnic empire collapsed within six years.
Note: Visigoths vs OstrogothsVisigoths was the name ascribed to the western tribes of Germanic Goths, who are thought to have descended from the Thervingi tribe. In the 5th century their sphere of influence extended as far west as the Iberian Peninsula. Ostrogoths is the corresponding name for the eastern tribes of Goths, their antecedents coming from the Greuthungi tribe. From their base north of the Black Sea the Ostrogoths in the 5th century extended their influence into Italy.
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a 1.3M, escalating rapidly thereafter, by the end of 2016 the numbers had reached 5.2M (‘Refugee crisis in Europe’, www.unrefugees.org
b receptio (Latin) was the Roman term for integrating external groups seeking asylum in the Empire
c even forcing the starving Goths to sell them their children for slavery in return for dog food!
d modern-day Edirne in Turkey
e Rome’s worst military reversal since Cannae and Hannibal (216 BC)
𝒮𝓉𝓇𝒶𝒾𝓉𝓈 𝑜𝒻 𝒞𝑜𝓇𝒻𝓊 
𝐻𝑀𝒮 𝒮𝒶𝓊𝓂𝒶𝓇𝑒𝓏
𝐼𝒞𝒥 𝑒𝓂𝒷𝓁𝑒𝓂 
𝐿𝑒𝑔𝒶𝓁 𝒯𝑒𝒶𝓂 𝒢𝐵 𝒶𝓉 𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝐻𝒶𝑔𝓊𝑒 𝒸𝒶𝓈𝑒 
𝒫𝓊𝓇𝓁𝑜𝒾𝓃𝑒𝒹 𝒩𝒶𝓏𝒾 𝑔𝑜𝓁𝒹 𝒾𝓃 𝑀𝑒𝓇𝓀𝑒𝓇𝓈 𝓈𝒶𝓁𝓉 𝓂𝒾𝓃𝑒 (𝒮𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒸𝑒: 𝓌𝒾𝒹𝒹𝑒𝓇𝓈𝒽𝒶𝓊𝓈𝑒𝓃.𝒹𝑒) 
𝒩𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃𝒶𝓁 𝐵𝒶𝓃𝓀 𝑜𝒻 𝒜𝓁𝒷𝒶𝓃𝒾𝒶 𝐻𝒬
𝑀𝒶𝑜 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝐻𝑜𝓍𝒽𝒶
𝔓𝔯𝔬𝔭𝔞𝔤𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔞 𝔴𝔞𝔯–𝔣𝔦𝔢𝔩𝔡, 𝔚𝔚ℑℑ (ℭ𝔯𝔢𝔡𝔦𝔱: 𝔉𝔩𝔦𝔠𝔨𝔯)
𝔓𝔥𝔬𝔱𝔬: 𝔞𝔪𝔞𝔷𝔬𝔫.𝔠𝔬𝔪
𝔊𝔖1 ℜ𝔞𝔡𝔦𝔬 𝔖𝔱𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔞𝔱 𝔐𝔦𝔩𝔱𝔬𝔫 𝔅𝔯𝔶𝔞𝔫 (𝔖𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔠𝔢: 𝔅𝔢𝔡𝔣𝔬𝔯𝔡 𝔅𝔬𝔯𝔬𝔲𝔤𝔥 ℭ𝔬𝔲𝔫𝔠𝔦𝔩)
ℭ𝔩𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔢 𝔄𝔰𝔭𝔦𝔡𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔯𝔞 𝔱𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔰𝔪𝔦𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯 𝔞𝔱 𝔚𝔞𝔳𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔫 𝔗𝔬𝔴𝔢𝔯 (𝔖𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔠𝔢: 𝔩𝔦𝔳𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔞𝔯𝔠𝔥𝔦𝔳𝔢.𝔬𝔯𝔤.𝔲𝔨)
𝔅𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔞𝔦𝔫’𝔰 𝔭𝔰𝔢𝔲𝔡𝔬–𝔊𝔢𝔯𝔪𝔞𝔫 𝔫𝔢𝔴𝔰𝔭𝔞𝔭𝔢𝔯
Image: National WWII Museum
Listening to Tokyo Rose on Zero Hour (Source: psywarrior.com)
Iva at the mike
Belated presidential pardon (Screenshot ‘Iva Toguri, Patriot’)
Mitsu Yashima (Source: Densho Encyclopedia)
Credit: IMDb 
Current Lord Chamberlain Andrew Parker (fmr MI5 head) (Source: The Times) 
Walpole, the first PM (Source: History Today) 
1737 Licensing Act 
Osborne’s 1965 play ‘A Patriot for Me’, the controversy of the dramatist’s refusal to make cuts helped end the LC’s censorship 
Theatre Royal Drury Lane (Source: architectsjournal.co.uk) 
St James’ Palace, home of the Lord Chamberlain (Source: Pinterest) 
‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ (Photo: V & A Museum) 
Source: WNYC 
Lord Chamberlain in 1960s, Baron Cobbold, resisted calls to abolish censorship (Artist: George JD Bruce) Arts Theatre Club production, 1955 (Photo: V & A Museum)
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).
Queue outside Old Bailey trial of Joyce (Source: thejc.com)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.
1690 assault on Québec City from Massachusetts Bay colonists
And when Americans weren’t engaged in the process of actually invading Canada, they were often scheming and planning to annex their northern neighbour. One of the more bizarre instances of this was “War Plan Red”, this 1930 US plan to invade Canada was, unlike earlier ones, supposedly a scheme to get in first! The US military’s predessors to the Pentagon feared that Britain in the years following WWI might launch an invasion of the US from Canada. Canadians in fact had already preempted the US with the military coming up with its own “Defender Scheme No. 1”, a five-pronged attack plan to invade the US (the idea was that Canada would make the initial (surprise) strike on key American cities and then rely on Britain and it’s other dominions to follow up the invasion). Fortunately, nothing came of either of these plans and they were quietly shelved by the time North Americans managed to crystallise in their minds who the real enemy was (Nazi Germany) [‘The Time the U.S. Almost Went to War With Canada’, Kevin Lippert, Politico Magazine, 21-Jun-2018, www.politico.com].
⍓ Clash between refugees and Hungarian police (Photo: www.rt.com)
⍓ Valens’ numismatic likeness
(Image: slidetodoc.com)
Blundering into a military catastrophe
In 378 Emperor Valens, underestimating the strength of the enemy and imprudently declining to wait until reinforcements arrived from the western Roman emperor (his nephew Gratian), engaged a combined army of Goths and Alans (with cavalry) in the Battle of Adrianopled . The battle went badly for the Romans, Valens made tactical errors and the army was outnumbered and outmanoeuvred by the barbarians led by Fritigern, resulting in a crushing total defeate .This time Valens paid for his blunder with his life, along with that of roughly two-thirds of the Roman army. Reverberations from the debacle went deep, both Christian and pagan contemporaries saw it as the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. For St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, it signified “the end of all humanity, the end of the world” [Lenski, Noel. “Initium Mali Romano Imperio: Contemporary Reactions to the Battle of Adrianople.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 127 (1997): 129–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/284390.]
⍓ Solidus depicting Emperor Theodosius
⍓ Delacroix’s painting of Attila the Hun
(Image: Historical Atlas of the Mediterranean)