by A. N. Wilson
In Germany, open defiance of authority such as this would have been punished by instant arrest. But as in England, the bombing strengthened the desire to carry on as normal. ‘Noble, patient, deep pious and solid Germany’, as Thomas Carlyle had called it,24 continued in its virtue and piety. For example, when the RAF bombers destroyed the Treasury in Berlin, and with it every Berliner’s tax documents, they continued to pay their taxes.25
On the night of Harris’s thousand-bomber onslaught on Cologne, the morale of the people was terribly shaken. A hospital doctor recalled: ‘We were all shaking with fear, many of the patients were crying, many people actually caught fire and were running round like live torches.’ Amazingly, however, the survivors doggedly went on with life, just as Londoners did. The summer raid over Hamburg in July 1943, conducted in extreme heat, led in effect to a tornado of fire which took possession of the whole city. Ben Witter, a Hamburg journalist who witnessed the raid, recollected: ‘The water by the docks was on fire. It is difficult to explain why the water was burning, there were many ships more in the canals. They had exploded; burning oil was on the water and the people who were themselves on fire jumped into it; they burned and swam, burnt and went under.’ A Hamburg fire officer, Hans Brunswig, said: ‘Most people were killed by the fierce heat: the temperature in some places reached 1,000 degrees centigrade.’26 Over a million and a quarter people fled from Hamburg. On 20 August 1943 Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, the Man in Despair, saw a group of such refugees trying to force their way on to a train in Upper Bavaria. As they do so a cardboard suitcase bursts open ‘and spills its contents. Toys, a manicure case, singed underwear. And last of all, the roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still intact a few days ago.’27
Thirty thousand people died during that raid in Hamburg. Albert Speer believed at the time that six more such raids would finish the war. But there were many more such raids across Germany, and Germany did not cave in, even after American bombers joined the RAF, and, in the words of one US pilot, ‘England was just an airport really.’28 Only when the Red Army reached Berlin was it actually defeated.
By March 1945, when the beautiful city of Dresden had been destroyed by Harris with the scarcely calculated loss of between 30,000 and 100,000 human lives, many of them refugees, even Churchill was concluding: ‘The moment has come when the question of the bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror … should be revised … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.’ Harris remained impertinent and uncomprehending. ‘In Bomber Command we have always worked on the assumption that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing nothing.’29
How could such a lunatic idea have been allowed to prevail? Given that this was Harris’s viewpoint, how come he was not arrested as a murderer? One reason was that he was personally a frightening man. In January 1945, when told to abandon ‘area bombing’ and concentrate his attacks on oil targets, he simply refused, challenging Portal to dismiss him. Portal did not dare.
The second reason is that the bombing of Germany has to be understood in the general context of the war campaign. Germany had been set on a course of outright victory and conquest until Dowding in the summer of 1940 held off the fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe, and granted Britain a stay of execution. No invasion of Britain could take place until the spring of 1941, and by then Hitler had conceived his plan, executed on 22 June, of invading Russia.
The British options, when it came to fighting Germany in the years following Dunkirk, were distinctly limited. Even after the United States entered the war, even after Stalin’s Russia joined the Alliance, the invasion of France, or other territories occupied by Hitler, on a Second Front (i.e. second to the Eastern Front where the Wehrmacht and the Red Army fought it out) was not deemed by Churchill to be a practical possibility. Hence his doggedly wise refusal to open up a Second Front until the summer of 1944 and his insistence that the war be pursued first in North Africa, then in the Mediterranean and then, with painful slowness, in Italy. The German army, on the traditional battlefields of Northern Europe, could not be reached by British troops since they had been sent home in fishing skips and pleasure steamers from Dunkirk. This frustrating fact is part of the reason for the decision to attack the comparatively easy targets of German cities by air. One says ‘comparatively’ since, as has already been emphasized, the men of Bomber Command were required to take terrible risks. Their losses, out of the 125,000 who served, were 59,423 killed and missing, a mortality rate of 47.5 per cent. The strategic air offensive of 1940–41 killed many members of the RAF, and in 1941 the RAF lost a bomber for every 25 tons of bombs dropped.
The arrival of Harris as C-in-C boosted morale not only in Bomber Command in 1942 but in a Britain where, after three years of fighting, disaster had followed disaster. The church bells rang in England on 15 November 1942 to celebrate the victory of General Sir Bernard Montgomery and the Eighth Army at El Alamein. It was a victory born of the patient accumulation of huge superiority in the numbers of British troops, tanks and guns. Up to that moment in the desert, the brilliant Rommel, the Desert Fox, had reversed all the earlier victories over the Italians. Tobruk had fallen on 20 June – 33,000 British troops surrendered. The Germans had conquered Greece in early April 1941. On 27 May, after some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, Crete was lost.
Against this background, the attempts of Bomber Command to subdue Nazi Germany could be seen as welcome. English cinema audiences cheered the bombing of Cologne, just as Irish cinema audiences had cheered the bombing of Coventry. Such was the frenzied and desperate condition into which the war had excited the human race, that bombing was seen by some as liberation. The Man in Despair, Reck-Malleczewen, said to his diary: ‘Is it not the absolute height of tragedy, simply inconceivable shame, that just those Germans who are left of the best of them, who have been prisoners of this herd of evil-tempered apes for twelve years, should wish and pray for the defeat of their own country, for the sake of that same country?’30
And Joe Horn, once a concentration-camp prisoner, later a businessman in New Jersey, recalled: ‘The first time I saw bombers in the sky, I was a kid in Buchenwald, dressed in a striped suit and completely demoralized. The bombers gave us hope and led to the realization that this unrelenting nightmare could end sometime.’31
30
In the Broadcast
On 18 August 1976, the tarmac was removed from the prison yard in Wandsworth Prison in London, and the remains of a hanged corpse exhumed from plot number 87 at the dead of night. The remains were transported to an Aer Lingus plane and flown to Galway. On a dazzlingly warm August day, the coffin was laid to rest in the Protestant section of the Bohermore cemetery, for this was a man who, despite pleadings from the prison chaplain in London, had chosen to die in his mother’s faith – that of the Anglican Church of Ireland. His name was William Joyce. Ludovic Kennedy summed up the strangeness of his life and fate by saying: ‘The man who was born an American, lived a German, and died a British traitor will at the end become what he really was all along – an Irishman from Connemara.’1 His family had some difficulty in persuading the local authorities in Galway to rebury this man in Irish soil. Finton Coogan, a member of the Dail, pointed out that as a young man, William Joyce had associated with British soldiers in Galway during the Troubles. He had been opposed to Irish Republicanism, on the grounds that it was Bolshevik. But charity prevailed and the mayor of Galway, Mary Byrne, believed that since Joyce’s daughter Heather wanted her father to be given a decent burial, it was only right that she should be allowed to do so. Heather remembered her father as a good man, a fine Latinist, and a good teacher. Once his very brief phase of collaboration with the British had been overlooked, Joyce could be reburied with full Irish honours which included, in spite of his specific wish to die an Anglican, a full Tridentine Latin mass, celebrated by Father
Padraic O’Laoi. (Heather thought her father would at least have enjoyed the Latin, though if he was as keen a classicist as his biographer suggests, he might have winced a little at the ‘dog Latin’ of the Mass.)
Thus was laid to rest the man who in his lifetime became one of the most notorious broadcasters in history: Lord Haw-Haw. It did not appear to worry the Galway council that the man to whom they accorded such funerary pomp was an eloquent exponent of National Socialism and a propagandist for German victory in the Second World War. The only blot on his escutcheon was his willingness to offer succour to the enemy, that is the British, during the Troubles.
As Mary Kenny shows in her truly remarkable reconstruction of William Joyce’s life, such attitudes might be offensive to some English people, but they should be understandable, given the strange and troubled history of Anglo-Irish and indeed of German–Irish relations. Sir Roger Casement was reburied with a state funeral, so why not a ceremonial burial for Lord Haw-Haw?
William Joyce was born in New York. (In 1933, applying for a British passport under false pretences, he claimed to have been born in Galway, and it was this little lie which led to his being hanged twelve years later.) His father had been born on a farm in the west of Ireland, and emigrated to the United States in 1888. By this date, 40 per cent of New Yorkers were of Irish extraction. Michael Joyce became an American citizen, worked as a builder, and acquired an American accent. He married an Englishwoman. Their son William was born at 1377 Herkeimer Street, Brooklyn, on 24 April 1906. They left America in 1909, and ran a pub in Westport, County Mayo. William was educated by the Jesuits in Galway. He joined the Royal Worcester Regiment in 1921; when it was discovered that he had lied about his age, he was discharged. By then he was living with relations in the North of England, where he was able to witness the effects of Indian nationalism on the Lancashire cotton trade; then he moved to London, where he continued his studies at the Battersea Polytechnic. The speeches of the Communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala (see chapter 24) only exacerbated Joyce’s feeling that the British Empire was finished. He began to dabble with the politics of the extreme Right, and became associated with the group known as the English Fascisti, founded by the feminist Rotha Linton-Orman, daughter of a military family, who looked a little like Radclyffe Hall. In 1922 he campaigned against Saklatvala on behalf of the Conservative party, and it was during the fisticuffs of an election meeting that he received the livid scar which stretched across his face from ear to mouth.
In 1923 he enrolled at Birkbeck College, of the university of London, which catered for mature students. In fact he was only seventeen, and was not good at mixing with his contemporaries who were all much older. He worked very hard, and got a First Class degree. He married a dentist’s daughter called Hazel Barr. When a child was on the way, William tried to get a regular job, working at the Foreign Office. He had good languages, and a good degree, but his reference from the Principal of Battersea Polytechnic damned his chances, with its revelation that he held ‘extreme views and upheld the use of violence in political action’.
Joyce joined Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1933, while working on a PhD on educational psychology at King’s College in the Strand. He knew he had it in him to be a good speaker, and he soon came to be known as the Mighty Atom – short and thickset, with a dramatic platform presence which rivalled that of the leader, Sir Oswald himself. (Joyce disliked Mosley personally and nicknamed him The Bleeder.) Mosley hired Joyce as his propaganda director with the salary of £300 a year, at a time when MPs received £400 and an office clerk around £77. The writer Cecil Roberts described the effect of hearing Joyce speak in 1936:
Never in any country, had I met a personality so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic. The words poured forth from him in a corrosive spate. He ridiculed our political system. He scarified our leading politicians, seizing upon their vulnerable points with a destructive analysis that left them bereft of merit or morality. We listened in a kind of frozen hypnotism … when he invoked the rising wrath of his colleagues against the festering scum that by cowardice and sloth had reduced the British Empire to a moribund thing, in peril of annihilation.2
Mosley sacked Joyce, largely because the BUF, despite receiving funds from Mussolini, was running out of money, and losing followers by 1937. Only a small section of the public had been attracted to Fascism. In spite of the huge crowds who came to hear Mosley and a few of the star turns speak, no Fascist candidate in a British election ever came anywhere near winning a parliamentary seat. There was more than a suggestion that Mosley felt that Joyce was a little bit too eloquent; but also a liability, with his nakedly anti-Semitic views. Joyce became involved with the setting up of a rival organization called the National Socialist League, with headquarters in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, but his heart was already in the land he had come to refer to habitually as the Heimat. Like Hitler, Joyce believed that Germany should rule Europe, while Britain revived its Empire and ruled the rest of the world. His first marriage had broken down and he had married a fellow fascist and fellow boozer called Margaret Collins, who worked on Mosley’s Blackshirt newspaper Action!. They emigrated to Germany in 1939.
It was the wireless critic of the Daily Express, Cyril Carr Dalmaine, who wrote under the name ‘Jonah Barrington’, who first identified and nicknamed Haw-Haw. His proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, set particular store by the wireless as a means of propaganda, and so he got his critic, ‘Barrington’, to analyse the various propaganda broadcasts coming down the airwaves from Berlin. There was ‘Winnie the Whopper’ and ‘Ursula the Pooh’ and ‘Auntie Gush’, but the most interesting, speaking as early as 14 September 1939, was ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. ‘A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen. He speaks English of the haw-haw, damn-it-get-out-of-my-way variety, and his strong suit is gentlemanly indignation.’ There followed a frenzy of speculation about ‘Haw-Haw’s’ identity. Such questions were discussed as whether Haw-Haw’s aristocratic drawl was truly upper-class, or whether behind it could be detected a hint of Irish. As early as December 1939, in an interview with the Sunday Pictorial, Joyce’s first wife Hazel identified the voice, though it was not until 1941 that the authorities officially recognized this.
In the first year of the war, the BBC was lacklustre. There was no television. Hardly anyone had a receiving set; but in any event, the television service closed during the showing of a Mickey Mouse film on 1 September 1939, and remained closed for the next seven years.3 It was to be a wireless war, with the wireless the sole means of spoken mass communication throughout the hostilities. In the opening months of the Phoney War, when the worst horrors had not yet been unleashed, Haw-Haw provided entertainment for many listeners. Entire satirical shows were invented around this unknown personality. There was a comedy review at the Holborn Empire music hall in London entitled simply Haw-Haw. Many other music halls had Haw-Haw turns. Arthur Askey did one. Formal banquets in the City of London were entertained by Haw-Haw impersonators, who would lisp out of loathing for the ‘spoilt darlings of Mayfair’.
The government and the military did not find him so funny. ‘The BBC news bulletins were extremely dull,’ said a secret military report to the BBC in 1940, ‘but when someone tunes in to Lord Haw-Haw the whole room gets up and gathers round the wireless.’
Lord Haw-Haw asked some awkward questions:
Where else in Europe will you find a privileged class comparable with the upper nation in England? Look around anywhere in Britain and you will understand what I mean. Go to the slums and there you will find the lowest stratum of the lower nation huddled together in indescribable filth and poverty. Here you will find the permanent underdogs of the capitalist system; recruits for Borstal, Barnardo’s hospitals, jails and brothels. Yet it is from the great majority of decent and honest slum-dwellers and the frugal, industrious working classes that the upper nation expects to draw recruits from the army to fight and die for King and country. For a country that has confined
them to the slums.
Or again:
It is an unforgettable experience to watch the entrance to a London theatre in the evening: pre-war of course. Limousine after limousine with extravagantly clad women and their male companions stepping out of cars like condescending gods and goddesses, whilst the dull and silent crowd composed of the members of the lower nation looks at this brazen display of wealth and leisure. The sight almost reminds one of the conditions in the declining Roman Empire, and one is at a loss to say whether the impudence of the upper classes or the meek tractability of the lower classes is the more astonishing. The upper nation of the Mayfair type of snob feeds on the lower nation whom it robs. How long is it going to last?4
Home intelligence agents circulated in pubs, offices and factories, picking up what people were saying in Britain in the early months and years of the war. These reports would suggest that much of what Haw-Haw had to say would be well received by the British public. Behind their humorous response, there was a belief in many quarters that the war was unnecessary, or that any form of government, even one led by one of Hitler’s quislings, could only be an improvement on what the British had endured in the last decade from Baldwin and Chamberlain. David Lloyd George, the ‘man who won the war’ last time round, was now leading a Peace Party, a group of thirty or more MPs calling for a negotiated settlement with Germany. Not all of these MPs shared Lloyd George’s belief that Hitler was ‘the German George Washington’. Nor would they, as late as autumn 1940, as Lloyd George did, number Hitler as ‘among the greatest leaders of men in history’. But they did believe that Churchill’s government might be a short-lived thing and many – including the military strategist Basil Liddell Hart, the future Tory Home Secretary and Master of Trinity, Rab Butler, and an unlikely alliance of pacifists, communists and fascists – were in favour of making peace. Home intelligence suggested that after the fall of France the mood in Britain was one of ‘gloomy apprehension’. In mid-June one report stated that ‘Many workers say about Hitler: he won’t hurt us; it’s the bosses he’s after: we’ll probably be better off when he comes.’5 These people might well have been tuned in to Lord Haw-Haw when he informed listeners that in Germany: ‘There are no unemployed outcasts as in England … I should like you to contrast the friendly and sympathetic attitude of the party members of the National Socialist welfare with the methods of public assistance offered in England. You would be very sorry you ever condemned National Socialism.’6 Unlike the politicians, Haw-Haw seemed to understand the plight of the workers, and of ordinary people; he knew the price of a loaf of bread; he knew about pensions. Many soldiers’ wives listened in to him because ‘he seemed to be the only person interested in them’.7