The Day We Went to War

by Terry Charman

  In November, the first British ‘war’ film was released. It was Korda’s The Lion Has Wings, starring Ralph Richardson and Merle Oberon, and it had as its centrepiece the Kiel Raid of 4 September. The Nazis got hold of a print and showed it to foreign correspondents in Berlin. William Shirer noted in his diary: ‘at the Propaganda Ministry we were shown the English propaganda film “The Lion Has Wings”. Even making allowances for the fact that it was turned out last fall, I thought it very bad. Supercilious. Silly.’

  Gracie Fields’s Shipyard Sally, which featured her huge hit ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’, had come out the month before, and so had the First World War espionage drama The Spy in Black, starring the German émigré Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson. October also saw a less-than-successful film version of Lupino Lane’s smash stage hit Me And My Girl, that included ‘The Lambeth Walk’. But it still enjoyed huge audiences as did most other films that autumn and early winter.

  Venturing out to ‘the pictures’ in the blackout was fraught with many hazards: ‘cinemas were swallowed up in the prevailing blackness, and even regular patrons, who had navigated unconsciously twice a week for years . . . found that going to the cinema was now something of an adventure’. But masses of cinemagoers in the first four months of the war still went, reflecting the craving for ‘entertainment for entertainment’s sake. People were jumpy; they sought emotional release and did not care whether they laughed or cried.’

  For those not wishing to brave the blackout there was always the wireless. On 1 September, the BBC had merged the National Programme with its eight regional programmes to form the Home Service. The broadcasting day now began at 7.00am and continued right through until midnight. Before the war, and by agreement with the newspapers, the first news bulletin would not have been broadcast until 6.00pm. Now there were frequent news bulletins, but, in most British homes, it was the nine o’clock news that became the focal point of the broadcasting day. During the war’s first week, the BBC regarded itself as principally a news and information service, with bulletins every hour, on the hour. In between, it broadcast a succession of official Government announcements punctuated by gramophone records and ‘for some mysterious patriotic reason endless programmes of “Sandy Macpherson at the Organ”’. An irate listener-in wrote to the BBC: ‘I could be reconciled to an air raid, if in the course of it a bomb would fall on Sandy Macpherson and his ever-lasting organ, preferably while he was playing his signature tune.’

  Apart from Chamberlain’s and the King’s broadcasts, the radio highlight on 3 September itself was the first instalment of J.B. Priestley’s Let The People Sing. Read by the author, it was the first novel to be written specifically for radio, and its title provided Evelyn ‘Boo’ Laye with a hit song that winter.

  In expectation of massive air raids on London, the BBC had dispersed its various departments around the country to safe areas. The Drama Department was evacuated to Wood Norton Hall, near Evesham, while the Variety Department went to Bristol. Here, the Clifton Parish Hall became the BBC’s ‘Garrison Theatre’, broadcasts from which starred Jack ‘Mind-My-Bike’ Warner.

  The BBC’s Television Service, which had been operating from the Alexandra Palace since November 1936, went off the air at midday on 1 September in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon being transmitted from Radiolympia. There were several reasons offered for the shutdown. The official one was that it freed skilled technicians to work on sound radio. It was also said that the cost of operating the service in relation to the number of television-set owners (20,000, and almost all in the London area) was too high to justify keeping the service going in wartime. And it was claimed that television’s short-range transmissions could help guide German bombers to their targets. The BBC was fairly unapologetic about closing the service down:

  ‘It has been pointed out to us that nobody said a word in the Radio Times about the passing of television. That is quite true, but so many things were passing, too, on that ominous week-end at the beginning of September, that television was at least not singled out for neglect. As a matter of fact we ourselves as viewers miss television as much as anyone could.’

  This gave scant comfort to television owners, some of whom had paid as much as £40 for their twelve-inch screen sets. Nor to the sixteen firms manufacturing television sets, 15,000 of which now had to be scrapped. In Germany, the television service, transmitting programmes from studios under the Berlin Olympic Stadium, continued until 1944.

  After two or three weeks, during which the expected German aerial onslaught failed to materialise, the BBC reverted to broadcasting entertainment programmes. One of the first to go back on the air at 8.15pm on Saturday, 16 September was Band Waggon starring Arthur ‘Big Hearted’ Askey and Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch. First broadcast in January 1938, Band Waggon, had been a huge success, turning Askey into a star almost overnight. The show’s catchphrases:

  ‘Hello playmates!’

  ‘You silly little man’

  ‘Ah, happy days’

  ‘It isn’t the people who make the most noise who do the most work’

  ‘Don’t be filthy’

  ‘Doesn’t it make you want to spit?’

  ‘What would you do, chums?’

  and particularly Askey’s ‘Aythangyow’, were heard everywhere. But by the time Band Waggon’s third and final series finished on 25 November, its popularity was already being overtaken by a new comedy programme.

  ITMA had first gone out on the air on 12 July 1939. The show’s title, It’s That Man Again, had originally been a newspaper headline referring to Hitler. It now referred to Tommy Handley, a variety comedian, who, like Askey, came from Liverpool. The first series, which ran until 30 August, was not a great success, partly because its format was too much like Band Waggon. Nevertheless, a second series was sanctioned by the BBC Variety Department and the first programme went out on 19 September. In a swipe at wartime restrictions and the much-abused Ministry of Information, Handley was cast as the Minister of Aggravation and Mysteries at the Office of the Twerps:

  ‘Good evening, Great Britain. As Minister of Aggravation it is my duty tonight on the umpteenth day of the war against depression to explain to you that I have 700 further restrictions to impose on you. Here in the heart of the country I have been able to think out some of the most irritating regulations you’ve ever heard of.’

  This poking fun at wartime bureaucracy and restrictions certainly touched a chord with the listening public, and very soon ITMA was attracting a huge audience. In the second programme, the German spy Funf appeared. Like all ITMA characters, he had his own catchphrase – ‘this is Funf speaking’. Funf was played by Jack Train, who produced the spy’s voice by speaking sideways into a glass. He also played the civil servant Fusspot, whose catchphrase, ‘Most irregular!’, was almost as much imitated. ITMA’s second series ran for twenty weeks with a Boxing Day special, ‘Funf and Games for Everyone’.

  But it was not just comedy programmes that attracted huge audiences that autumn and winter. An estimated one out of every three adults in Britain tuned into the fortnightly series on the history of the Nazi Party, The Shadow of the Swastika, ‘the biggest event of the winter’s broadcasting’. First broadcast on 9 November, the anniversary of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, the series featured actors Marius Goring as Hitler and Alan Wheatley as Dr Goebbels; Leo Genn was the narrator. The BBC assured its listeners ‘that every care has been taken to base the programmes on ascertained facts’, but it was noted, ‘some listeners, particularly older women, refuse to listen, saying that the programmes frighten them’.

  In Germany itself it was forbidden to listen to the BBC or indeed any foreign broadcasts. Explaining the reason why, Dr Goebbels said in an interview, ‘We don’t let our people listen to foreign broadcasts; the English do. Why should we permit our people to be disturbed by foreign propaganda? Of course we broadcast in English, and the English people are legally permitted to listen in. I understand lots of them do.’<
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  CHAPTER 14

  Lord Haw Haw

  On 14 September 1939, Jonah Barrington, radio critic of the Daily Express, wrote in his column: ‘A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen (the German radio station beaming overseas broadcasts). He speaks English of the haw-haw damit-get-out-of-my-way variety, and his strong suit is gentlemanly indignation.’

  Four days later, Barrington expanded on this: ‘Jonah Barrington listening at the “Daily Express” short wave station in Surrey to the war on radio, introduces “Lord Haw Haw” . . . from his accent and personality I imagine him with a receding chin, a questing nose, thin yellow hair brushed back, a vacant eye, a gardenia in his button hole. Rather like P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.’

  In Berlin on that same day, thirty-three-year-old William Joyce received a contract as a newsreader on the German Radio Corporation. Anybody less like Bertie Wooster would be hard to imagine, but in the weeks to come, by a ‘single-minded determination, ruthless ambition and sheer application’, Joyce became “Lord Haw Haw”: the English Voice of Germany’.

  Joyce had been born in New York on 24 April 1906 to naturalised American citizens. In 1909, the Joyce family returned to their native Ireland. As staunch supporters of the British cause, when Ireland was partitioned in 1922, the Joyces thought it prudent to move to England. It was not long before the ultra-patriotic William developed a taste for extreme right-wing politics, joining the British Fascists when only seventeen. Ten years later, Joyce joined Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and within a short time became Deputy Leader. In public Joyce called Sir Oswald ‘the greatest Englishman I have ever known’, but in private was scathing of him, ‘Mosley was hopeless. He was the worst leader of what should have been the best cause in the world.’ In 1937, matters came to a head, and Mosley dismissed his deputy. Joyce founded his own National Socialist League which, with its violently antisemitic and pro-Nazi programme, attracted only a tiny membership.

  On 24 August 1939, with war imminent, Joyce decided, ‘England was going to war. I felt that if, for perfect reasons of conscience, I could not fight for her, I must give her up forever.’ Accordingly, and with his second wife Margaret, he set out for Berlin. Anxious to play his own small part in Hitler’s ‘sacred struggle to free the world’, Joyce applied for a job at the German Radio Corporation. His initial voice test did not go well, but an engineer thought that Joyce’s voice had potential, and he first spoke over the air on 11 September, receiving a contract a week later.

  Obviously the Lord Haw Haw that Barrington heard that week could not have been Joyce. It was most probably Wolff Mittler, a German ‘playboy of the first order’, who used to sign off his broadcasts with ‘Hearty Cheerios!’ to his listeners. But it was Joyce who soon established his own claim on the title. In this he was aided by the British public’s enormous interest in the broadcasts. This was undoubtedly because ‘in no other war had the British enjoyed the novelty of being cajoled and hectored by renegades in their own sitting rooms’, but also by the relative lack of war news. And it was not long before Lord Haw Haw became the ‘Number One Radio Personality of the War’, and the major topic of conversation. In the press too, items about him filled the correspondence columns. There was endless speculation about Haw Haw’s social origins, education and accent. In Berlin, Dr Goebbels, gratified at the size of the British audience for Joyce’s broadcasts, told an American correspondent:

  ‘Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling.’ William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw, at the microphone. ‘I think that, secretly, we are rather terrified by the appalling things he says. The cool way he tells us of the decline of democracy and so on. I hate it; it frightens me. Am I alone in this? Nobody has confessed as much to me.’

  ‘Can you imagine what is one of the chief discussions about it across the Channel? It is, whether our German [sic] announcer has an Oxford or Cambridge accent! In my opinion, when a people in the midst of a life-and-death struggle indulge in such frivolous arguments, it doesn’t look well for them.’

  Many found the whole idea of treason by radio repugnant. ‘What can have induced an Englishman, if he is an Englishman, to behave in such a sickening renegade manner?’ asked Mr A.R. Thomas of Bournemouth in News Review on 19 October. But a Mr Heath, quoted in Illustrated of 4 November, thought that ‘Lord Haw Haw was funnier than anything that the BBC ever put on.’ This was a view shared by a Canadian listener whose letter appeared in London Calling three weeks later: ‘Whenever we are short of entertainment we tune in to that comedian. We often wonder whether he knows what a lot of laughter he causes.’

  But it was not always laughter that Joyce’s broadcasts engendered. That Christmas, a Mass Observation correspondent asked an aunt, ‘a very patriotic Conservative woman’, what she thought of Lord Haw Haw. He was surprised at her response: “Oh I don’t listen to him now. I am not going to be frightened by him. And it’s no use calling what he says rubbish, because there’s never smoke without fire!” And,’ he added, ‘she thinks that everything in Germany’s bad.’

  Another Mass Observation correspondent was of the opinion: ‘I think that, secretly, we are rather terrified by the appalling things he says. The cool way he tells of us of the decline of democracy and so on. I hate it; it frightens me. Am I alone in this? Nobody has confessed as much to me.’

  There was no shortage of advice on how to combat the effectiveness of Lord Haw Haw’s broadcasts. In the 25 November issue of Picture Post, Mr A.E. Waugh of Sheffield offered his solution: ‘My part in the radio war. I put on the radio to listen to the Hamburg announcer, he is so amusing. When he has done, my daughter and I give him the Raspberry. Only sorry he can’t hear what we say.’ In the same magazine, Londoner Mr C.N. Edge suggested, ‘Could the BBC therefore be persuaded to give each night immediately after Haw-Haw’s talk, a ten minute “Spot The Errors” item on the “Inspector Hornleigh” principle, with a run through of Haw-Haw’s speech, and then STOP. The announcer pointing out the errors or mis-statement.’

  This suggestion had already been the subject of at least two memoranda at the BBC, where Sir Stephen Tallents had been told by the Countess of Harrowby: ‘My hostess’s servants listen in to Haw-Haw, and one of them remarked the other day there was probably something in what he said . . . thousands of people like those maids listen to him daily and find themselves influenced by his malicious lies.’

  Others when listening to Joyce took the view of an RAF airmen: ‘He talks a lot of cock and 75 per cent of his statements are either lies or propaganda, but occasionally he hits the nail on the head, it’s then that he makes you think. You wonder whether a lot of his statements are true.’ And a woman librarian said, ‘We nearly always turn him on at 9.15 to try and glean some news that the Ministry of Information withholds from us. It is interesting to get the BBC’s views and the German wireless’s accounts of the same aerial engagements. Between the frantic eulogies of the BBC and the sneers of the German wireless one achieves something like the truth.’

  As the year ended, the BBC and Ministry of Information were still agonising on how best to deal with Lord Haw Haw. One idea was to put leading show-business personalities like Arthur Askey, Gracie Fields or George Formby on the BBC at the same time that Lord Haw Haw was broadcasting from Hamburg. Like them, he was now a distinct personality in his own right, even featuring in advertisements like one for Smith’s Electric Clocks, ‘Don’t risk missing Haw-Haw. Get a clock that shows the right time always, unquestionably.’ At the Holborn Empire that month, impresario George Black put on a revue entitled Haw Haw, starring Max Miller. To Black, ‘the thought of Haw-Haw’s regimented voice having the slightest connection with the endearing, confidential vulgarities of Miller had a delicious fantasy about it.’ And two other music-hall comedians, the Western Brothers, had a hit with their song ‘Lord Haw Haw the Humbug of Hamburg’.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Winter War

  Russia Invades Finland: 30 November 1939

  Following
his occupation of eastern Poland, Stalin set about consolidating his sphere of influence in the Baltic, assigned to him under the terms of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The Soviet dictator was still deeply suspicious of his new ‘ally’, and wished to gain as much buffer territory between him and Hitler as possible. So-called mutual assistance pacts were signed with the small Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which were forced to agree to Soviet demands for military bases on their territory.

  From Finland, Stalin required a similar agreement, and the Finns sent veteran statesman J.K. Paasikivi to Moscow to negotiate the Soviet demands with the Kremlin. There, Paasikivi found that the Russians wanted a mutual assistance pact, the occupation of the southern part of the Karelian Isthmus, the leasing of the port of Hango as a naval and air base, the cession of islands in the Baltic, and the leasing of the Rybachi Peninsula on which was Petsamo, Finland’s only ice-free port. In return the Russians offered 2,134 square miles of Soviet Karelia, considered by the Finns as worthless.

  Negotiations between the two sides, in which Stalin himself played a considerable part, eventually broke down. The Finns mobilised their forces, under Field Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, along the frontier and waited for the inevitable.

  On 26 November, the Soviets fabricated a border incident, and four days later, after severing diplomatic relations but without a declaration of war, launched an all-out attack on Finland. Soviet bombers raided Helsinki, and the Finnish capital was soon experiencing what Warsaw had gone through in September. A British United Press correspondent graphically described it: