64th Issue: Radio Broadcasters of World War II Propaganda

Today’s topic is various radio broadcasters who went on the radio to deliver anti-American propaganda in English. There were quite a few people who did this, and I started out looking into the examples from World War II.

Tokyo Rose was the most famous one, the name given to various female broadcasters from Japan who went on the radio to give English broadcasts to Allied troops. They emphasized the problems and military losses to try to demoralize the soldiers. The Japanese broadcasts didn’t really work. Studies conducted later on men who listened to the programs said that they mostly knew it was propaganda and just listened because they liked the music.

 

 

One of the more famous voices of Tokyo Rose was Iva Ikuko Toguri. She was born in LA, and got a degree in zoology from UCLA. In 1941, she visited a sick relative in Japan, and was not allowed to return home after the attack on Pearl Harbor that December. When she refused to renounce her American citizenship, she was chosen by the Japanese government along with Allied prisoners of war to broadcast propaganda on a show called The Zero Hour. Iva already knew some of the prisoners because she had been smuggling them food. She refused to broadcast anti-American propaganda, and instead did comedy sketches and introduced music, not participating in the newscasts. She earned very little, but used some of her money to continue smuggling the POWs food. Iva hosted over three hundred broadcasts of The Zero Hour, and went by the name Ann for Announcer. She ended up marrying Felipe D’Aquino, a Portuguese Japanese man who also worked at the station, and changed her name to Iva Toguri D’Aquino.

When the war ended, several news reporters offered a lot of money for an interview with “Tokyo Rose”. Iva needed money and wanted to go home anyway so she stepped forward, but was arrested and then released after a year in prison when no evidence of any treason was found. She asked to go home so that her child could be born in the United States, but her request was declined. Her baby died soon after it was born. Iva was then arrested again and taken to San Francisco to be charged with treason. She was found guilty and sent to prison for six years, moving to Chicago upon her release in 1956.  In 1977, Iva was granted a full pardon by President Gerald Ford due to issues with her trial. She got her US citizenship back, but she had to divorce her husband Felipe in 1980 because he kept being denied admission into the United States. In 2006, Iva was awarded a Citizenship Award from the World War II Veterans Committee for her actions, and she passed away nine months later at the age of 90.

The story of Lord Haw-Haw, a name given to British broadcasters of German propaganda during World War II, is very different. The program called Germany Calling was broadcast to the United Kingdom and United States all during World War II. The goal again was to discourage and demoralize Allied troops through reporting on their losses and casualties. Even though most people knew that this was propaganda, they still listened because it was the only clear information they had on how their loved ones were doing. Once the British figured that out, they became more transparent on giving that information out themselves.

Lord Haw-Haw was William Joyce. He was born in the United States, but grew up in Ireland and England, where he fought against the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In 1932, soon after graduating from university, William joined the British Union of Fascists and became a leading spokesperson for them. He became the Director of Propaganda and was known for physically fighting anti-fascists violently. In 1934 he changed the focus of the group from economic related to antisemitism specifically. He also ran a radio shop on the side while he was doing all this.

Right before World War II started, William and his wife went to Germany. He became a German citizen in 1940. He began working for the radio station in Berlin, broadcasting in English. He wrote his own material and stayed at that position for the rest of the war. He also wrote propaganda that was distributed to British POWs who he tried to lure over to the German side. He was drunk and rambling during his final broadcast, and was captured soon after, in 1945. He was handed over to British military police, tried for treason, and executed about a year later, unrepentant to the end.

 

 

The final two people I found that broadcast English propaganda for Nazi Germany were both called “Axis Sally”. They were Mildred Gillars, and Rita Zucca. Mildred was born in Maine, but lived in Ohio before moving to New York City to study drama. She moved around a lot, from Paris to Algiers and then to Dresden and Berlin where she worked teaching English. She got a job as a radio announcer, and in 1941, when American citizens were told to leave Germany, she stayed because her fiancé was a German and she wanted to marry him. He was killed in action during the war at the Eastern Front.

Mildred’s broadcasts became propaganda when she was cast in a show called Home Sweet Home. The goal of the show was to make the American soldiers feel homesick. She also talked about how their wives and girlfriends back home would not stay faithful to demoralize them. Mildred also played American songs along with antisemitic propaganda and attacks on the Allies as well as FDR. She also interviewed American POWs and edited them to make it sound like they were sympathetic to the Nazis.

Mildred broadcast till the end of the war, when she was hunted down and found, arrested in 1946. She was flown to the United States and found guilty of treason. She served her sentence and was released in 1961. She converted to Catholicism in jail, and went to live in a convent, teaching German, French and music. Mildred died in 1988.

The final broadcaster from World War II, also known as Axis Sally, was Rita Zucca, who broadcast propaganda from Italy. Rita’s father owned a restaurant in New York City, and Rita spent her time as a teen split between working at the family restaurant and studying in a convent school in Florence. In 1938 Rita went to Italy and renounced her American citizenship so that she could take ownership of her family’s property there.

Rita began working for the Italian propaganda radio, referred to as Axis Sally. Apparently Mildred, in Germany, did not like that. She would sign off with “a sweet kiss from Sally”. She attempted to confuse Allied troops with intelligence that she was provided by the Axis powers. She moved around within Italy as the war went on, continuing to broadcast. She took a month and a half off when her son was born, in 1944. Her final broadcast was in 1945, and she was arrested a few months later.

Arresting her and putting on her trial did not work so well since she renounced her American citizenship long before she started broadcasting. She was tried by an Italian military tribunal instead, and went to jail for nine months. She was banned from ever returning to the United States. Rita died in 1988.

In my research of these World War II radio broadcasters, I also found Anna Wallis Suh, a North Korean propaganda radio announcer during the Korean War, known as Seoul City Sue, as well as Trinh Thi Ngo, known as Hanoi Hannah, a North Vietnam propaganda radio announcer during the Vietnam War. After the Vietnam War, I don’t think any war that the United States was involved in relied so much on radio anymore. 

Thank you for reading! I appreciate you.