Churchill's Wizards (39 page)

While American entertainers cheered the British in radio shows like
Hi
Gang!
, the BBC set up its own North American radio service in July 1940, staffed by Canadians. Its half-hour
Radio Newsreel
mixed actuality, eyewitness reports and short talks by members of the armed forces or civilian services. Charles Gardner's lively description of a German air attack on a British convoy passing through the Straits of Dover on 14 July 1940, deplored by some in England for its resemblance to a sports commentary on men in mortal danger, was liked in North America because its disjointed spontaneity felt authentic. In 1940–1, the correspondents were still called ‘BBC observers', but by 1944 they were no longer coolly detached but warmly embedded. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, the programme
War Report
first went on air, and vivid front-line pieces from the BBC War Reporting Unit became the norm.

By the time the Blitz started in September 1940, the BBC was making much more of its non-British human resources and broadcasting in seventeen European languages. Sir Stephen Tallents was controller (Overseas) with John Salt as the director of European Services. Salt came from the BBC Overseas Intelligence Department, where one of his colleagues, Emile Delavenay (father of the biographer Claire Tomalin), had written an incisive study of how the German propaganda campaign sapped French morale in the first half of 1940. Another colleague, the future poet and translator Jonathan Griffin, wrote in the
Monthly Intelligence Report, Europe
that a campaign was needed ‘to lead people to desire an anti-Nazi revolution', using ‘concrete facts, slogans, symbols, allusions, martyrs'. Their ideas had a strong impact on Victor de Laveleye, the programme organiser of the BBC Belgian Service, which first went on air on 28 September. On 14
January 1941, de Laveleye proposed the letter ‘V' as an emblem to rally his listeners against the Nazis. V had universal appeal because it was the first letter of Victory in English,
Victoire
in French and
Vrijheid
(Freedom) in Flemish. Within weeks, chalked V's were appearing on walls in Belgium, Holland and northern France. But Delavenay wanted more.

On 22 March, the lively French Service dedicated a special edition of their popular show
Les
Français
parlent
aux
Français
to the V. The Dutch Service did the same on 9 April. The BBC's Assistant News Editor, Douglas Ritchie, wrote a paper on 4 May, ‘Broadcasting as a New Weapon of War', which asserted baldly that ‘When the British Government gives the word, the BBC will cause riots and destruction in every city in Europe'. On 26 May, Ritchie chaired the first meeting of the V Committee. He knew nothing of the work of SOE, but he was running with a good idea, backed by his boss, Noel Newsome, another former
Daily Telegraph
colleague, now the BBC European News Editor. Other countries were picking it up: V stood for
vitezstvi
(victory) in Czechoslovakia,
vitestvo
(heroism) in Serbia, and
ve vil
vinne
in Norway. Even in faraway Bolivia, whose Andean Indian army had been trained by Germans, defiant V's appeared overnight on pro-Nazi buildings in La Paz.

On 6 June 1941, ‘Colonel Britton' made his first broadcast on the English network in
London Calling Europe
. This was in fact Ritchie, speaking in the quiet, conspiratorial tones of an urbane agitator, encouraging disruption in occupied Europe. This smooth, mysterious figure (who got lots of fan-mail) also spoke in polished French, German, Dutch, Polish, Czech and Norwegian. Colonel Britton said there were countless small ways of making things difficult for the Germans. You could spit in their beer or put sand in their gearboxes. You could switch labels on trains or go slow in factories.

According to one account, at the third meeting of the V Committee in June 1941 the ingenious Oxford classicist Tom Stevens remarked that the letter V in Morse code was three dots and a dash. When he rapped it on the table, Jonathan Griffin recognised the rhythm of the opening motif of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Whoever had the idea, the morse and the music were first broadcast together on 27 June 1941. From the next day onwards, the same four notes, throbbed on an African membrane drum by the percussionist James Blades in a
lower-ground-floor studio in Bush House, became the BBC station identifier in Europe, beating out the pulse of resistance. The Allies were knocking at the German door.

The Prime Minister gave the BBC campaign his stamp of approval by starting to give the ‘V for Victory' sign with two fingers. It had to be explained to the aristocratic Churchill that it very much mattered which way his knuckles faced, to avoid giving the UK's most vulgar gesture.
*

On 19 July 1941, Churchill broadcast a message to Europe: ‘The V sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the people of the occupied territories and a portent of the fate awaiting the Nazi tyranny.' Goebbels reacted swiftly and ingeniously by trying to co-opt the symbol. The V was claimed as the German sign for ‘
Viktoria
', and German stations started playing Beethoven's Fifth. (Actually the German for ‘victory' was
Sieg
– hence the salute
Sieg heil!
) The Germans hung a huge V from the Eiffel Tower. In occupied Holland, the German-controlled Radio Hilversum broadcast a Morse V, but on the Dutch streets pro-British groups wore a white V, and pro-German groups an orange one. Chalkers on walls clarified their loyalty by added RAF to the V, or in Norway H7 for King Haakon VII.

The tide began to turn against the V campaign after Brendan Bracken replaced Duff Cooper as Minister of Information in July 1941. There were worries that the BBC campaign might be doing more harm than good. The ‘professionals' of the PWE, which came into being that August, did not like the ‘amateur' V campaign because despite its popular appeal it was not coordinated with real political and military objectives. It was all mouth and trousers, impotent to deliver real resistance and sabotage at the local level as SOE was beginning to do. The last V committee met in October and the valiant V campaign was finally quashed in 1942. But it must be credited as an imaginative triumph, uplifting hearts and giving hope to the occupied.

TIME
magazine called it ‘the first antidote prescribed for the apathy of Europe'. Colonel Britton told his many listeners that ‘the V is your sign, the night is your friend'. The V army was invisible, but powerfully symbolic. ‘It is a strange army, but one to which it is an honour to belong. It is an army which the Germans fear.'

The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had begun to use wireless effectively in 1938 when ‘C', Admiral Sinclair, hired Richard Gambier-Parry to organise a secret two-way radio communications network, independent of the Foreign Office's existing system. (The two were eventually combined into the Diplomatic Wireless Service in 1946.) Gambier-Parry had been a public relations officer of the BBC and the UK general sales manager of the American radio manufacturer Philco. He poached the best technical people from among his old wireless contacts and from the Royal Navy to set up Special Communication Units (SCUs) whose job was to handle the traffic to and from embassies and officers abroad, and also to pass on information from the GC&CS at Bletchley Park to military commanders. Eventually, in 1941, Gambier-Parry's unit, Section VIII, took over the Radio Security Service. They were quite distinct from the Royal Corps of Signals who usually did military ‘sparks', and for additional mobility they put two-way wireless sets into Packard cars and converted Dodge ambulances.

During the war, Gambier-Parry's section also installed and operated the first covert short-wave radio stations in Britain. In all, there were forty-eight of these clandestine stations, broadcasting in fourteen foreign languages The radio stations were officially referred to as RUs, or ‘Research Units', and sometimes as ‘freedom' stations. The first of these, code-named G1, went on air in May 1940 just before British troops began to be evacuated from Dunkirk harbour. G1 was a rather desperate response to the secret stations or
Geheimsender
run by Goebbels's ‘Büro Concordia' in Berlin. These German outfits included the
New British Broadcasting Station
which first began hectoring Britain in February 1940, to be followed in June and July by other ersatz German stations,
Radio Caledonia, Workers' Challenge,
Christian Peace Movement and Welsh National Radio
.

The German broadcaster on the British-run secret ‘freedom' station
Das
wahre
Deutschland
– on air from 26 May 1940 until 15 March 1941 – was Dr Carl Spiecker. Spiecker had a history in subversive
radio, having run a secret
Freiheitsender
from the outskirts of Paris, broadcasting an essentially conservative appeal to the opposition in Nazi Germany on behalf of the anti-Nazi social democratic
Deutsche
Freiheitspartei
. Spiecker's British programmes were now recorded at Wavendon, one of several large country houses on the borders of Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire that had been taken over by government agencies. All were within a ten-mile radius of Bletchley Park where the Government Code and Cipher School was now based. Sir Campbell Stuart's enemy propaganda organisation, EH, had moved to the riding stables at Woburn Abbey, and after the death of the Duke of Bedford in 1940 took over the whole house as its Country Headquarters (CHQ). The huge grounds, the menagerie of animals, and the gallons of cheap drink available for the isolated staff added what David Garnett called ‘more than a touch of madness' to the atmosphere.

The second German-speaking ‘Research Unit' or secret station started by the British, code-named G2, was
Sender der
Europäischen
Revolution
(Radio of the European Revolution), a left-wing intellectual station that broadcast from November 1940 to June 1942. It was soon followed by Rumanian, French, Italian, Norwegian, Danish and Czech clandestine stations. G2 was staffed by exiled German Marxist political scientists and took a revolutionary socialist, left-of-
New-Statesman
line: the workers should throw off the yoke of Nazidom in the spirit of European community good will, and so on. It was run by the clever socialist Richard Crossman, who, although brilliant and attractive (he married three times) was also a contumacious maverick. Even the bullying wartime Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, who first hired Crossman for propaganda work, was afraid of his capacity to quarrel. Sefton Delmer thought that
Sender der
Europäischen
Revolution
was poor radio, because Crossman did not exercise proper political and editorial control. In his genial way, however, Delmer never quarrelled with Crossman, but just made sure they kept to their different spheres. Crossman eventually rose to become director of Political Warfare against the Enemy and Satellites, while Delmer became director of Special Operations against the Enemy and Satellites. Crossman did ‘white' propaganda, and Delmer ‘black'.

It was Delmer, when setting up the eleventh secret station in April
1941, who first called the ‘Research Units' ‘black' stations. The simplest distinction between ‘white' and ‘black' propaganda is one of origin, between the labels on the tins, as it were, rather than between their contents. The BBC label is ‘white' and well known; its propaganda is clearly marked as ‘British Broadcasting'. The strategy of ‘white' propaganda is to tell the truth consistently over time. In the long run, if you are frank about reporting your defeats, your listeners are more likely to believe in your victories. The tactics of ‘black' radio, on the other hand, are short-term, rumour-filled, and deceptive. If you were to hear a station calling itself, let us say,
Gustav Siegfried Eins
, broadcasting in German, purportedly from German territory, and you were not sure of its origin, its agenda or the personnel behind it, you might well be listening to a ‘black' station, actually run by the British.

The distinction between ‘white' and ‘black' propaganda was not at first simply between truth and lies. On one of Delmer's German ‘black' stations,
Christus
der
König
(Christ the King), the Austrian Roman Catholic priest Father Andreas truthfully informed German listeners about what the Nazis were doing to the Jews and the Slavs in extermination camps like Auschwitz. It was factual and true, and only ‘black' because no one knew exactly where the broadcasts were coming from. To give
Christus
der
König
more force with the faithful, Delmer got SOE to spread the rumour in Europe that it was actually a ‘black' station of Vatican Radio.

But under the aegis of Sefton Delmer, the contents of the propaganda tins became very different indeed. ‘Black' broadcasting began to diverge sharply from ‘white' because the camouflage of secrecy gave ‘black' a licence to deceive that essentially truthful ‘white' did not have. (The deception could be a simple and confusing mixed message, said Delmer, like spitting in a German's soup before crying out ‘
Heil Hitler!
') Although they were driven by the same aim of defeating the enemy, ‘white' propaganda became the open right hand presenting whatever HM Government was prepared to acknowledge publicly, ‘black' the closed left fist concealing whatever it could disavow.

G3, the third German station, which began broadcasting on 23 May 1941, was Delmer's first ‘black' baby.
Gustav Siegfried Eins, or GS1
, was a right-wing station with freedom to use the same kind of bad language with which
Workers' Challenge
from Germany was turning the English airwaves blue.
GS1
was different from the other secret
stations because it pretended to be absolutely all for the Führer. It aimed ‘to get across subversive rumour stories under a cover of nationalist patriotic clichés'. Delmer's mentor, Leonard Ingrams, favoured ‘operational propaganda', or actually getting people to do things, and in a memo to Ingrams a fortnight after the secret station began broadcasting, Delmer said: ‘We want to spread disruptive and disturbing news among the Germans which will induce them to distrust their government and disobey it.' He added: ‘We are making no attempt to build up a political following in Germany. We are not catering for idealists. Our politics are a stunt …'