We often have heard of Tokyo Rose but almost never hear of Axis Sally. Oddly enough, it appears that Axis Sally was probably far more of a willing collaborator with Nazi Germany than Tokyo Rose was with Japan. But it’s never Axis Sally who gets mentioned. Why is that?
My guess would be that Axis Sally was an embarrassment, being an American-born person who was working for the Enemy, and people preferred to forget that an American Girl could do something so heinous.
Maybe, but Tokyo Rose was an American-born person working for the Enemy too. Maybe it was because she had Japanese parents, though, and wasn’t seen as the “all American Girl”.
I think Tokyo Rose had a greater influence in pop culture of the era. It’s interesting to note that she is even more notorious an Axis broadcaster than the great American poet Ezra Pound.
It’s also interesting to note that of all of them, she probably was the closest to innocent of any actual treason.
IIRC, “Tokyo Rose” was also pardoned.
From the Staff Report on Tokyo Rose:
The Staff Report neglects some juicy details.
The “Tokyo Rose” trial is not exactly a shinning moment for America, consisting as it did mostly of the U.S. knowingly arranging perjured testimony by threatening the lives and livihoods of people in U.S. occupied controlled Japan, shipping them to the U.S., and then spending hours every day having them memorize the stories they were to tell on the stand (stories that, it turned out, were fabrications). During the trial, judge excluded virtually every possible line of argument that could have been used in her defense, and the jury foreman was, after the trial, quoted as saying that if it had been possible, under the judge’s instructions, to acquit her, they would have.
It gets worse though. The only reason Toguri was ever accused of being “the” Tokyo Rose in the first place is that American reporters tracked her down and offered her 2,000 dollars (a huge sum in Japan at the time) to say that she was the “original” Tokyo Rose. When she first met with them she told them (correctly) that she was just one of many girls the Japanese employed on broadcast radio, but if the name Tokyo Rose applied to them, then it applied to her too, and she would take the money. Stupid and greedy indeed, but she had no idea, at the time, that Tokyo Rose was thought to be a traitor. When she returned to the states she found Walter Winchell, himself a radio star in the U.S., condeming her and demanding that she be arrested and tried for treason. The Truman administration, frightened about its election prospects, decided that it couldn’t appear too soft on traiters and decided to indict, even though its own internal reports concluded that there were no legitimate grounds to do so.
In contrast the the Tokyo Roses who mostly broadcast entainment and even read secretly comforting messages written by Australian POWs, Axis Sally was the real deal: ranting on and on about the Jews and all Roosavelt’s “kike boyfriends.”
Of course, IMHO treason as a separate crime is a neanderthal throwback to a sort of grunting tribal nationalism, but that’s neither here nor there.
“Traiters, precious, what’s traiters?” -Gollum
And yet even though Axis Sally was the real deal and Ms. Toguri was just a patsy, we never hear about Axis Sally. I still wonder why.
Axis Sally used to teach piano in Illionois for nigh on to thirty years after the war ended. :eek:
“But MOM! She really is a nazi!”