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
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
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.
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<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 lands The 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 security Traditionally, 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 fast From 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 Ostrogoths Visigoths 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)
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).
