The Axis had several famous radio propagandists dedicated to undermining the morale of Allied soldiers- Axis Sally, Lord Haw haw and Tokyo Rose among them.
But while I assume the Allies must have had their own radio propagandists trying to spread (dis)information behind enemy lines, I’ve never heard anything about them.
Did German or Japanese soldiers listen to any British or American radio shows aimed at undermining them?
I know that leaflets were dropped by aircraft behind enemy lines to encourage combatants to surrender and for locals to cooperate with the allies… not quite the same thing.
There were counter-intelligence efforts in Europe to send bogus messages to the military.
Marlene Dietrich? I don’t think she was a shill, but some Germans seemed to hate her.
There was certainly Allied propaganda, but I don’t think there was an individual broadcaster of anywhere near the level of prominence as Axis Sally, Lord Haw-Haw or Tokyo Rose.
Wait. People are unhappy that Dietrich opposed the Nazis?
The old Nazis were unhappy with Dietrich…
Mostly them, probably, but perhaps also some Germans with a “my country, right or wrong” outlook.
The British produced Soldatensender Calais, but this was black propaganda that was intended to trick German listeners into believing that it was an actual German military radio station.
It didn’t involve radio broadcasting, but the O.S.S.'s “Operation Sauerkraut” involved sending German prisoners behind enemy lines to spread propaganda.
The linked article describes a tactic similar to what Tokyo Rose used - playing on the fears of soldiers that their girlfriends/wives were carrying on with other men at home.
Gustav Siefried Eins and Soldatensender Calais both purported to be anti-Nazi German military stations, as did Kurzwellensender Atlantik, although any soldier with access to direction-finding equipment could easily conclude that the broadcasts were coming from England. PoWs volunteered to make the broadcasts.
A number of ‘gray’ stations broadcast a mix of music and soft-pedalled propaganda intended to appeal to German soldiers with access to military communications equipment. Glenn Miller’s AAF band made a number of German-language recordings for these broadcasts, which have become available to buy in recent years.
For the British Sefton Delmer orchestrated a lot of Black Ops on the radio, often using German exiles. Such as the gruff no-nonsense ‘Old German Soldier’ who critiqued Hitler’s military efforts. The Axis and Allies were pretty much at par when it came to this sort of thing.
Oddly, although not of German blood himself, he was born in Berlin.
Yes, Delmer grew up in Berlin, where his father was posted, and he was a correspondent there for the Daily Express before the war. Der Chef [The Boss] on GS1 was his idea; he had observed Hitler’s entourage referring to him as this before the war.
And yet the thesis of his Black Boomerang, that West Germany was seething with Nazi revanchists waiting to seize the reins of government again, seems with the perspective of fifty years grotesquely wide of the mark, and it seems odd that one who knew the Germans so well got them so wrong.
The BBC broadcast to Germany and German-occupied countries throughout the war. You can listen to some of the people involved in the German Service in this item, broadcast on the BBC Home Service in 1943. The “Frau Wernicke” character they mention was apparently created by Bruno Adler, a German Jew in exile in the UK who also co-created the characters of “Kurt und Willi”.
Both of these broadcast extensively in German to Germany, and I think both also in Japanese to Japan, during WWII.
Just a note – I’ve heard and read this many times over the years, but I recently saw an exhibit at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC on the topic.
There was no single “Tokyo Rose”. In fact, as far as I can tell, there never was a person oficially called “Tokyo Rose”. there certainly were anti-Allied propaganda broadcasts in the Pacidic, but they were made by several women (none of them called “Tokyo Rose” by the Japanese). The name “Tokyo Rose” and legends of her incredible knowledge of troop movements seem to be Allied invention. Wikipedia and other articles seem to say that much of the broadcast was actually not-very-hard propaganda, and that Iva Toguri’s post-war trial for treason was outrageous. Gerald Ford pardoned her.