Corsica is best known of course as the birthplace of France’s most famous general/ emperor/dictator/ego, the one and only Napoleon Bonaparte. However the rocky island of Corsica is deserving of greater recognition for the novelty of its 1750s experiment with democracy and universal suffrage. Prior to 1755 Corsica was a colonial outpost of the Republic of Genoa. Corsicans under the nationalist, resistance leader Pasquale Paoli rebelled against Genoa’s rule in that year[❂] and drove the Genoese off the island (except for a few coastal towns where they were still in occupancy).
Having declared the neophyte entity a sovereign state and a republic, Paoli drafted a revolutionary constitution which predated the more celebrated written constitution of the United States of America by three decades. It provided for universal suffrage for islanders over the age of 25…the inclusion of women in the Corsican franchise was a world first[§], building on the island’s earlier precedent of traditional female participation in the podesta (analogous to mayoral elections)[●̲̅̅] [‘The Real First Written Constitution’, Matthew Wills, JSTOR Daily Newsletters, 03-Aug-2018, www.daily.jstor.org].
Inspiring the Corsican constitution were the deeply pervasive ideas of the Enlightenment, thinkers such as Rousseau and Voltaire and the ideals of independence, democracy, progress and liberty. Corsica became a constitutional democracy with a Cunsulta (diet or legislative assembly). Enlightened or not, the new republic went unrecognised internationally with the singular exception of the Bey of Tunis [‘Corsican Republic, the small and ephemeral independent state that held the first modern Constitution Jorge Álvarez, LBV, 30 June 2020, www.labrujulaverda.com].
Alas, both Corsican sovereign independence and universal suffrage did not sustain for long. The Genoese, unable to supplant Pasquale Paoli’s hold on Corsica by themselves, “horse-traded” Corsica to France, precipitating a French invasion of the island in 1768. The Corsicans fought a guerrilla war against the invaders but were always at astronomically long odds of succeeding. After the decisive Battle of Ponte Novu in 1769[✜] the overpowered Corsican republic’s fate was sealed and Paoli was forced into exile in Britain.
Postscript: “The Anglo-Corsican Kingdom”
At the time of France’s conquest of Corsica the British debated intervening to restore Corsican rule but rejected it at the time. The state of war between Britain and France from 1793 following the French Revolution prompted Britain to reverse the earlier decision. ‘Invited’ by the Anglophile Paoli (now back in Corsica) to intervene, the upshot was the creation of a unique if ephemeral union between Britain and Corsica. Although there was some flowery talk about common political values and “sister nationhood”, British motives were primarily military and strategic – with its preeminent naval power, control of Corsica gave it a vital Mediterranean base vis-á-vis revolutionary France (especially important after the British fleet’s 1793 expulsion from Toulon by Napoleon). The outcome of the brief experiment of the union (1794-96) with Corsica as a client of imperial Britain was disillusionment on both sides. Aggravating the situation was the relationship between the London-appointed viceroy Sir Gilbert Elliot and the representatives of the Corsican people, especially Paoli – one of mutual distrust. After 1796 Corsica realigned its future to association with France, a province of which it remains to this day [Carrillo, Elisa A. “The Corsican Kingdom of George III.” The Journal of Modern History 34, no. 3 (1962): 254–74.http://www.jstor.org/stable/1874355.; ‘Britain and Corsica 1728-1796: political intervention and the myth of Liberty’, Luke Paul Long, PhD thesis, University of St Andrews (2018), http://DHL.handle.net/10023/13232].
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[❂] following an earlier uprising by the Corsicans in 1729
[§] Sweden in the early 17th century granted women a limited franchise but only for those holding land and property
[●̲̅̅] Paoli introduced other reforms, a University was established at Corte, the Corsican language was fostered, Corsica minted its own coinage
❝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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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)).
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The fake news network Soddatensender 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).
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).
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⦑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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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).
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 Toguri/“Orphan Ann”, the ‘real’ Rose? American opinion hit on a surprising candidate for the real identity of Tokyo Rose, Iva Ikuko Toguri (D’Aquino). Toguri was one of its own, a US citizen of Japanese descent born in Los Angeles who found herself stuck in Japan as hostilities broke out between the two countries. Coerced into broadcasting on Japan’s ‘Radio Zero’ shortwave station as a disc jockey, Toguri played records and performed comedy sketches. She did appeal in her friendly American voice to lonely GIs to return to their loved ones in the US but her propaganda value to the Japanese was considered limited(ɖ). Returning to the US after the war Toguri, labelled by the press as “the one and only Tokyo Rose”, was eventually tried in 1949. Toguri’s conviction for treason was dubiously arrived at and it was widely felt she was made a scapegoat (‘Tokyo Rose’, Upd. 6-Oct-2020, www.biography.com). The supposed “Tokyo Rose” was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000, serving six years and two months. On release she spent overs 20 years living in Chicago ‘stateless’ before a fresh investigation of the case discovered two of the prosecution witnesses had been coerced by the Justice authorities into perjuring themselves…consequently President Ford pardoned her in 1977 (‘Iva Toguri Patriot’, American Veterans Center, (YouTube video, 2021)
Endnote: Mitsu Yashima, Tokyo Rose in reverse
A parallel but very different story to Tokyo Rose is that of Mitsu Yashima. In the 1930s Mitsu (born Tomoe Sasako), a Japanese artist, was pro-peace, anti-military and anti-imperialist in an increasingly militaristic right wing Japan. After imprisonment and torture for her left-leaning views she and her husband escaped to the US in 1939. Once America committed to the World War Mitsu joined the war effort – working for the Office of Strategic Services, she used her language skills to broadcast anti-Japanese propaganda through the airwaves. On radio she made a particular pitch to the women of Japan, urging them to commit acts of sabotage aimed at helping to bring the Japanese military machine to a halt (‘Mitsu Yashima’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org ; ‘The Epic Lives of Taro and Mitsu Yashima’, Greg Robinson, Valerie Matsumoto, Discover Nikkei, 11-Sep-2018, www.discovernikkei.org).
Postscript: Hollywoodised Tokyo Rose As the war in the Pacific was reaching its climax the US made its own propaganda capital out of Tokyo Rose with a 1946 potboiler of a movie of the same name. Tokyo Rose exploited and sensationalised the story, The feature was “not merely a fiction, but a dangerous distortion of the truth”…according to Greg Robinson, it depicts the title character‘s radio propaganda as being “directly responsible for the death of demoralised American soldiers” and thus contributed to the jaundiced atmosphere that pervaded the subsequent trial of Iva Toguri (‘Tokyo Rose: The Making of a Hollywood Myth’, Greg Robinson, Discover Nikkei, 01-Nov-2021, www.discovernikkei.org).
▓ See earlier blogs on Lord Haw-Haw and Axis Sally in this series of war radio propaganda broadcasters, WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves, Part 1 and Part 2
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(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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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