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
Last year the US cable channel Comedy Central cancelled its totally left-field “educational comedy” program Drunk History after six seasons. On the surface it might seem improbable that a program with such a flimsy premise would have had such a good run in the cut-throat world of American TV. When the show started in 2013 I wouldn’t have put the ancestral home, or even the rustic “lean-to”, on its chances of surviving into a second season. My initial impressions—apparently mistaken (see below)—were that the actors were pretending, not very convincingly and in fact somewhat ham-fistedly, to be drunk.
ˢᵏᵉʷᵉᵈ ﹠ ⁱⁿᵉᵇʳⁱᵃᵗᵉᵈ ᵒᶻ ʰⁱˢᵗᵒʳʸ
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It’s relative longevity aside, another thing that surprises me about Drunk History was that the show didn’t really attract much knee-jerk flak from the Temperance Society, AA, fundamentalists of the Religious Right, the Puritan elders or other moral crusaders for its portrayal of people in states of intoxication bordering on the point of being ‘legless’. In the Australian version of ‘Drunk History’ there were some mild rebukes in the media, mostly a bit of tut-tutting from viewers about the dangers of “glamorising excessive binge drinking” in a country with an extensive history of problems with the Demon drink§(David Knox, TV Tonight, 2019).
ᵈᵉʳᵉᵏ ʷᵃᵗᵉʳˢ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ᶜˢᵗ ᵒⁿˡⁱⁿᵉ⁾
The germ of the idea for Drunk History came from, of all things, a late night drinking session its co-creator Derek Waters had with a fellow actor (who’d have guessed!) It premiered under the name Funny or Die as a web series in 2008, the debut webisode featured a liberty-taking retelling of the famous Hamilton-Burr duel in 1804. From an unorthodox educational point of view Drunk History is a kind of adult version soulmate of the British children’s comedy series Horrible Histories, a similar serving of factually-based, humorously told anecdotes for junior viewers, which itself is a quantum leap forward pedagogically from 1950s children television fare of this ilk, eg, Peabody’s Improbable History, which consisted of an anthropomorphic cartoon dog who time travels with a naive and extremely annoying boy companion to earlier epochs to do a bit of history mangling.
The format’s opening gambit presents Waters in relaxed drinking mode with guest storyteller…with very little coaxing from Waters the narrator in no time descends into a boozy state and starts to unfurl a rambling, episodic, partially incoherent account of some historical event (the majority but not all from the pages of American history)…then it segues into a scene where actors in appropriate period costume act out the story while lip-synching the narrator‘s words with hilarious results. The narrators are usually stand-up comedians…possessors of the right skillsets for rambunctious story telling of course! Who better to do it than the dudes for whom off-the-lease manic ranting in booze-soaked establishments is second nature?
¹⁸⁰⁰ ᵖʳᵉᶻ ᵉˡᵉᶜᵗⁱᵒⁿ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ᵖⁱⁿᵗᵉʳᵉˢᵗ⁾
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Given the cavalier narration and fabricated and anachronistic dialogue littered with liberal snatches of “hipster-speak” and “dude-speak”, you might suspect Drunk History to be sloppy as to historical accuracy. The producers however went to some pains to be accurate with dates and names and what actually happened in the stories. This can be put down to the efforts of hired UCLA PhD students who did the research heavy lifting to keep the history on the tracks. Special care was also taken with the narrators, tasked with getting sufficiently inebriated to capture the desired mood. As host Waters plies them with drink medics are on hand during the shooting—which took place within the familiar and safe milieu of the narrators’ own homes—just in case the alcohol was getting the upper hand over the comics (apparently this was the case on more than one occasion!) (Justin Monroe, ‘The Sober Reality of Drunk History’, Complex, 01-Sep-2015, www.complex.com).
ⁱⁿᵛᵉⁿᵗⁱⁿᵍ ᶜᵒᶜᵃ⁻ᶜᵒˡᵃ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ⁱᵐᵈᵇ⁾
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But from being initially sceptical about Drunk History, my opinion mellowed (perhaps helped by imbibing a snifter or two myself during viewing) and I slowly warmed to the series. Ultimately I came to appreciate the novel things it brought… introducing me to hitherto low-profile, perhaps minor historical figures and little known events from the past, eg, invention of Coca-Cola, the birth of Hip Hop, Nikola Tesla’s breakthroughs, Tunnel 57 (1964 Berlin Wall incident), “Dr Feelgood”, Lawnchair Larry flight, Typhoid Mary, “Night Witches” (German WWII military aviatrixes)✪. The storytellers raise a glass or three to forgotten women chauvinistically airbrushed from history, one such ‘minor’ figure unearthed in an episode was 16-year-old Sybil Ludington who made an heroic night-time dash by horse to alert New York citizens of the impending threat from the British forces during the American War of Independence (sound familiar?), and alerting us to the fact of how very differently history remembers Sybil and other females (or doesn’t remember!), compared to the immortal glory and reverence heaped on Paul Revere for his famous ride. Another female heroine getting her due recognition in history from Drunk History is Rose Valland, a Parisian art curator in WWII who thwarted the occupying Nazis’ heist of a huge haul of priceless first rank artworks.
ˢʸᵇⁱˡ’ˢ ʳⁱᵈᵉ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ⁱᵐᵈᵇ⁾
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Giving an extra layer of lustre to the series are the various celebrities appearing in episodes of Drunk History – including “Weird Al” Yankovic as Adolf Hitler, Laura Dern as Nellie Bly, Jack Black as Elvis Presley, Will Ferrell as Abe Lincoln and Ben Folds as Nathan Cherry.
“ʷᵉⁱʳᵈ ᵃˡ ʰⁱᵗˡᵉʳ” ⁽ᵖʰᵒᵗᵒ﹕ ᶜᵒᵐᵉᵈʸ ᶜᵉⁿᵗʳᵃˡ⁾࿏࿏࿏
Postscript:Drunk History International The runaway success of the US prototype has spawned a number of international versions, at last count the franchise has extended to the UK, México, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Argentina and Australia.
When I first heard about the Limp Falling Club✪ and it’s fanatical penchant for bizarre, nonsensical public (and pub) antics, it sounded like the physical humour of a very silly Monty Python skit. It turns out I wasn’t the only person to make the association between the Limp Fallers’ shtick and the Surreal sketches of the legendary Monty Pythons. No less a practitioner of his own unique brand of cutting satire than John Clarke joined the dots between the Limp Falling Club and Monty Python … channeling John Cleese’s “Minister of Silly Walks” Clarke went on to advocate the formulation of a new ministerial office, an appropriately absurd (given the lunacy that is Canberra politics) “federal Minister of Limp Falling”.
The “spontaneous public theatre” of the LFC was the brainchild of Australian political cartoonist Paul Rigby, circa. late 1950s⍟. The ‘ritual’ proceeded like this, a group of neatly-dressed white collar workers (mainly journalist types) would convene, typically in a pub or a bar or perhaps a restaurant. After consuming copious quantities of beer, on a signal they would suddenly and ‘spontaneously’ drop to the floor singularly or holus-bolus in a collapsed heap, no doubt startling nearby onlookers. I found a slim handful of grainy You Tube videos on the internet demonstrating the technique (sic), including one which shows a score of Limp Fallers including Rigby tumbling haphazardly down a staircase with scant regard to their safety.
At the time Paul Rigby was living in Perth, WA, where the “art form” took off. The cartoonist’s favourite “watering hole”, the Palace Hotel in the Perth CBD became the epicentre of the performance art of limp falling, the epicentre of the activity in Australia at least. A 2013 article by Aleisha Orr suggested the spectacle of limp falling “swept across many parts of the world in the 1950s and 60s”. In the same article one of the few surviving, octogenarian members of the club had his own take on the mysterious origins of the art of limp falling, the result of a house party accident when one of the journos—well-lubricated at the time no doubt—fell through an asbestos wall❂
Palace Hotel, Perth
I don’t think that limp falling has ever quite reached the international heights of “fad-dom” of say the Rubik’s Cube or “Flash Mobbing”, but I can testify to the quirky practice having some degree of international currency. Going back some 30 years I remember seeing a story on the nightly news about the “All Fall Down Association”. A different moniker but dedicated to the same peculiar pastime – a group of respectable looking middle class ‘suits’ (all males again) from various parts of the compass coming together at London’s Heathrow Airport. On the intoning of a special code word, in synch all collapsed to the ground with dramatic effect.
‘President’ Rigby (Source: AMHF)
After Rigby’s death in 2006 the LFC’s presidency eventually passed to his son, although the Club (Perth chapter) appears to have been inactive for some years now.
⎯‒―⎯‒―⎯‒―⎯‒―⎯‒―⎯‒―
✪ AKA the Limp Falling Association
⍟ according to the Australia Media Hall of Fame, the concept of “limp falling” was the result of a collective meeting of minds of Rigby and Ron Saw and Steve Dunleavy, two of his journalist colleagues from Sydney’s Daily Mirror
❂ the other partygoers found the incident hilarious and a new fad was thus born
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).
