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BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told?
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Subject: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Steve Parkes Date: 10 Nov 00 - 03:48 AM I heard today on the news that the wife/mistress of William Joyce -- better known as "Lord Haw-haw" -- was released without trial by order of the government, against the wishes of MI5, who wanted to hang her. Secret government papers from the period after WWII have just come off the secret list. For younger 'Catters: William Joyce was an Irishman with US citizenship living in England in the 30s. He supported the Fascists, and at the outbreak of war fled to Germany with his wife, where they made propaganda broadcasts to Britain. He becae known over here as Lord Haw-haw because of his drawling voice. His broadcasts generally generated much more amusement than disaffection, I'm told. After the war, he was tried as a traitor and hanged, despite his non-British nationality, which was generally thought to have served him right What I want to know is this: how long before the Americans make a movie telling how he was captured by them at the fall of Berlin and shipped back to the States and sent to the chair? Steve |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: CarolC Date: 10 Nov 00 - 04:13 AM I'm not sure I understand the question, or your point, exactly. Carol |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Jock Morris Date: 10 Nov 00 - 04:27 AM Steve's commenting on the recent film about the capturing of the Enigma machine, which distorts history by claiming the Americans captured it. A lot of Brits are decidedly pissed off that Hollywood have 'stolen' the glory from the British servicemen who actually made the capture and helped turn around the war. Scott |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: CarolC Date: 10 Nov 00 - 04:36 AM I can certainly understand how the British servicemen would feel the way they do. However, they should never think of Hollywood as actually being the United States. Hollywood is an entity unto itself, and it is accountable to no one. Best wishes, Carol |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Gervase Date: 10 Nov 00 - 06:49 AM Er, it was the Poles who got their hands on the first Enigma machine. Somehow that seems to have been overlooked by we Brits... What was that line from JC about casting the first stone? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: annamill Date: 10 Nov 00 - 07:36 AM Boy, do I feel dumb! See, this is what I mean when I say I learn so much from Mudcat. What is an Enigma machine? ...and I ain't young either. Thank you in advance! love, annamill (feelingverysheepish) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Wolfgang Date: 10 Nov 00 - 07:51 AM The enigma machine (with picture) Wolfgang |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: BanjoRay Date: 10 Nov 00 - 08:07 AM The Enigma was a German coding machine. The British decoding staff at Bletchley Park during WWII cracked the codes and probably shortened the war by a couple of years. There's a good description of how it worked at This site> Cheers Ray |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: L R Mole Date: 10 Nov 00 - 08:15 AM I think it'd be a helluva movie. No question that Hollywood ain't history, but sometimes it can serve as an effective way in, for thoughtful folk. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Steve Parkes Date: 10 Nov 00 - 08:32 AM Never mind about the bloody enigma machine!! For previous Meanwhile, back in the Thread ... Steve |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Wolfgang Date: 10 Nov 00 - 09:10 AM Joyce's trial must have been a quite interesting case. Here's what I found about it: Berkeley Professor of History and Law Thomas G. Barnes states: The only real question that arose about Joyce's treason was, could a man who was an American citizen commit treason against the King of the United Kingdom outside of the United Kingdom by virtue of an allegiance owed the King in having the King's passport which he had used to leave the United Kingdom before the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and Germany? On that question R. v. Joyce turned. Because no case of treason involving temporary allegiance had yet been tried during the comparatively recent period when passports, in their modern sense, had been in use, a new ruling was necessary. After hearing arguments for and against the broadening of the law by inclusion of this modern circumstance, the trial judge, Sir Frederic James Tucker, ruled that on 24th August, 1939, when the passport was applied for, the prisoner, beyond a shadow of a doubt, owed allegiance to the Crown of this country, and... nothing happened at the material time thereafter to put an end to the allegiance that he then owed. This ruling made it quite certain that Joyce would be sentenced to death. He was hanged at Wandsworth Gaol on 3 January 1946. Wolfgang |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Peter K (Fionn) Date: 10 Nov 00 - 09:10 AM Hanging Joyce was arguably illegal, but the arguments were a bit more complex than suggested above. (He had a British passsport for instance, and by his own account his family had lived as and been accepted as British.) Whatever his nationality/allegiance, it is shameful that he was hanged. One of the best and open-minded accounts of the saga is an essay by Rebecca West in he book The MEaning of Treason. There were at least three Enigma machines, Gervase. I don't think it has ever been claimed that the one smuggled across Europe by Polish allies was really a British achievement. Your comparison is facile. I have somewhere seen the Enigma story described as the best-kept secret of all time, so don't worry that you never heard of it annamill. It was a machine which together with paper-based instructions gave the German high command in WWII a fantastically complex coding system. Alan Turing, arguably the oustanding mathematician of his day, and a large support team at Bletchley, north of London,succeeded in breaking the codes (which were re-set daily). Although Turing was honoured for his work, this fact and his work itself remained a closely guarded secret until 1975 when it was revealed under the 30-year rule. The 26-part documentary The World at War was made in ignorance of the code-breaking advantage won for the allies. Churchill's 6-volume history of the war (which bizarrely won him a Nobel Prize for literature, because the Nobel committee was determined to give him a prize for something) made no mention of it. Turing died in disgrace - suicide, after being charged with homosexual indiscretions, then illegal - his pivotal role in the war still not known. Reason for the secrecy so long afterwards seems to have been because Churchill and others had some tough decisions to make. For instance one or two North Atlantic convoys were knowingly sacrificed, and disinformation was fed back to Germany that resulted in V2s hitting the populous south London rather than Westminster and Buckingham Palace. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Peter K (Fionn) Date: 10 Nov 00 - 09:16 AM Sorry folks, I was dragged away from the machine half-way through my last post. My reference to "the above" was really referring back to the top of the post, and certainly not to Wolfgang's post, which I had not seen. Also I posted before seeing that Steve has told us to stop talking about the Enigma. (But I would have anyway,Steve *BG*) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: AndyG Date: 10 Nov 00 - 09:46 AM Fionn, I feel that a more important reason for the maintenance of the thirty year rule on BP/Enigma was the existence of the British Typex (Type X) mechanical cypher machine, Typex was a developement of the enigma machine, was in use by both Britain and her "allies", and could be broken with equal facility by GCHQ.
SIS really wouldn't want our "friends" to know we were capable of (and were) reading their encyphered messages. (Assuming the sort of weak operator discipline that allowed Enigma to be broken was present.) When the story of BP was eventually released, Typex had gone out of use.
I don't think Churchill would have had a major problem justifying, and standing by, his decisions given his stances on other issues during his career.
AndyG |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Gervase Date: 10 Nov 00 - 10:03 AM Sorry Fionn, but the comparison isn't facile. Ask the average well-informed Brit about Enigma and they may mention Bletchley Park; they may even mention the dire film about the sub which was total crap, but I guarantee they won't know that the Enigma decrypt was thanks to the Poles, who had begun to decipher German transcriptions in the late 20s. It was in 1928 that decryption experts on the Polish General Staff realised that, almost overnight, the codes had become infinitely more complex. To quote from the official Polish history (sorry to grind axes here, but I have a number of very close Polish friends whose fathers and grandfathers were closely involved in this, and I feel I owe it to them to set the record straight): "Three cryptoanalysts, specialists on German military codes, employed by F.Pokorny (head of the Polish Army cipher bureau): Captain Maksymilian Ciezki, Lieutenant Wiktor Michalowski and a civilian Mr. Czajsner confirmed that the intercepted German cryptograms had been machine-enciphered. The machine was Enigma. "New methods of enciphering information posed new problems and created new challenges for cryptoanalysts. Cryptography was no longer linguistically based. Therefore, apart from linguistic skills cryptoanalysts needed mathematical and statistical knowledge and techniques. To solve the Enigma secrets, Pokorny employed three mathematicians, Poznan University graduates: Marian Rejewski and his two younger colleagues Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski. "Having started with reading simpler German Navy codes, then, supplied with a commercial version of the Enigma machine, Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski undertook efforts towards revealing the Enigma secrets. The whole process involved a combination of mathematics, statistics, computational skills and the indispensable element of every discovery process - intuition. Working in a small house in Kabacki wood near the village of Pyry, about 6 miles south of Warsaw the three Polish cryptoanalysts achieved spectacular results - they succeeded in breaking the sophisticated German machine cipher. After the Polish team had completed their task the results were handed over to the Allies (July 1939).The documentation and the replica of the Enigma reached Bletcheley Park, an intelligence centre located about 40 miles north of London where 10 000 cryptographers dealt with deciphering intercepted German cryptograms. The British kept Rejewski and his colleagues from any work on the Enigma." Sorry, end of rant.... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: sophocleese Date: 10 Nov 00 - 10:10 AM Well lets see...First of all Radio Broadcasts are visually unexciting so they'll change it to television or frontline footage. If they have to change the war to make it more believable they will. Instead of bringing him back to the States they'll take him to England and introduce a sub-plot with romantic theme that shows he only appears on records to have been hanged but in actual fact he was smuggled out of the country and is now living peacefully under a new name in Florida deliberately designing misleading ballots in order to comnfuse the voting populace. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Steve Parkes Date: 10 Nov 00 - 10:53 AM That has an unnerving ring of truth, Soph! I don't know about tv, though -- even though the world's first video phone was installed in Berlin in the thirties. I understand that local radio played a very major part in US culture before the general availability of public television, so I'd expect a lot of people over there to be able to identify with it. Of course, with his Irish origins, he could easily turn into a different kind of freedom fighter altogether ... By the way, speaking as an average well-informed Brit, I'm well aware of the Polish contribution, without which the whole BP thing would probably been impossible, or at least set back a few years. I watched not only Station X, but Secret War about fifteen or twenty years ago, when part of the story was made public. Steve |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: DougR Date: 10 Nov 00 - 11:16 AM Who executed Lord Haw-haw? The British, or the Americans? Also, Carol is absolutely correct. The movie industry is a private enterprise and they can make a film with any bent they want to. DougR |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Peter K (Fionn) Date: 10 Nov 00 - 05:25 PM We (the Brits), to our shame, executed Lord Haw-Haw. The case went through the whole legal process up to and including the highest court (House of Lords), with much of the argument turning on how British he was - on which depended, of course, whether he could be found guilty of treason. I don't quarrel with the finding that he did owe allegiance to Britain. I just think that hanging him for what had caused more amusement than despair was small-mindedness beyond belief. Thanks for posting more detail on the Polish part in Enigma Gervase. But in fairness this is well documented in several books, and no-one has tried to re-write it some other way. It still left a monumental challenge for the Brits, in which respect it would also be fair to mention a scientist at the Post Office's Dollis Hill research labs, Tommy Flowers, who was instrumental in constructing a number-crunching machine known as Colossus, which speeded decoding. If I rememberright, the Germans helped enormously on two counts: first their machines could not substituta a letter with itself, and second, the Brits were able to assume, correctly, that many messages ended with the words "Heil Hitler" ! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: DougR Date: 10 Nov 00 - 06:29 PM Thanks for that information, Fionn. DougR |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Abby Sale Date: 10 Nov 00 - 10:45 PM Fionn: was that "south London" area Coventry? Or is Coventry a place on its own? We had it that, like the convoys you mentioned, Coventry was allowed to be slaughtered rather than reveal the decoding. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Snuffy Date: 11 Nov 00 - 06:45 AM Coventry is a major industrial city (automotive etc) about 100 miles north of London. The centre was almost completely destroyed in November 1940 - the 60th anniversary is next week. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Peter K (Fionn) Date: 11 Nov 00 - 11:59 AM And "south London" more specifically was a district called Streatham (next to Brixton). |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: MarkS Date: 11 Nov 00 - 12:15 PM If our British friends want their history done correctly, let them come over here and refight the Revolution until they win. We are now setting that precident with our more recent politics, so there is no reason not to have another revolution just because a mere 220 years have past. And maybe Tony Blair will do a better job than the bunch we now have! MarkS |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Metchosin Date: 11 Nov 00 - 12:48 PM I too always thought that Coventry was allowed to be bombed rather than reveal that the code had been broken. As another aside, on government secrets in times of war, an old Scottish friend, who used to fly reconnaissance at the beginning of the Second World War, to check the effectiveness of the black outs, noted that they were totally useless. Covering windows and doors and tuning off lights did absolutely nothing to hide the presence of a city, the chimney pots glowed like beacons to light the way for any enemy bombing raid. However, his report was never revealed, in an attempt to make the people of Britiain feel a little more secure and give the citizenry the feeling that they were doing something towards the war effort. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Greyeyes Date: 11 Nov 00 - 06:07 PM Someone commented on British radio yesterday re the US election "it's been an interesting experiment,but welcome back to the commonwealth." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: GUEST Date: 11 Nov 00 - 09:26 PM Just a couple of points: 1) Joyce did not live in England, unless someone has moved Glasgow when I've been distracted, although Glasgow is part of Britain. 2) There is a clear statement in English law that anyone recognised as a British citizen is not allowed to claim alternate nationality where English law prevails (I'm not sure about Scottish law on this point - this may be where the legal problems arise). 3)Whether the man was officially English or American, my father (who was officially shot by a German, performing his national duty) thought that hanging him was the right thing to do. Since my father lived in the same street (Clarence Drive, Hyndland, Glasgow)I defer to his judgement. Whichever nationality you think he might have been, it is rather obvious that, in either case, he was on the wrong side. 4) Since my father's death was probably due to radiation from the American atom bombing of Japan, should the US government be hung? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: rangeroger Date: 12 Nov 00 - 01:56 AM Well, you'd have to hang Harry Truman, and since he's been dead awhile it might be a problem. But Hollywood could still make a movie of it. rr |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: sledge Date: 12 Nov 00 - 03:52 AM Even though the british were aware of an incomming raid on Coventry there was not a lot they could have done to stop the Luftwaffe from carrying out the raid anyway. The boffins were still some way from providing numerous and effective radar equiped night fighters, Anti aircraft fire was still largely ineffective and the use of specialist navigational equipment, the X and Y gerat, by the Germans was only just becomming apparent, countermeasures were still some way off. It was not just a case of "letting them bomb Coventry", there was little real defence then in place. Fion, you state that V2's were aimed at Streatham and Brixton (inadvertantly) V2's were lucky to hit London, a not inconsiderable target, let alone any Borough as they inherintly inaccurate as was the V1. Their main advantage was that once in flight they were unstoppable but suffered from from fuel flow problems, poor inertial guidence and bits falling of when in flight. The Documentary mentioned above "the secret war" give an excellent potted history of all the technical aspects mentioned in this thread including Polish input into the Enigma and the sheer luck that often went with several breakthroughs, worth seeing should you encounter it. Sledge |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: sledge Date: 12 Nov 00 - 04:13 AM Fion, The misdirection fed back to the Germans regarding the effectiveness of their V weapons causing them to point them in the wrong direction hinged on the use of turned German spies not Enigma. Cheers Sledge |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Fiolar Date: 12 Nov 00 - 05:22 AM To Rangeroger. I don't know. The English managed it with Oliver Cromwell at the restoration of Charles II in 1660. M |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Peter K (Fionn) Date: 12 Nov 00 - 12:34 PM Interesting points Guest. (I assume couple equals four, north of the border?!) If you come back to the thread, or Mudcat generally, remember to put something in the "from" line so we can distinguish you from any other guests. (Or you could even register as a member, which has no downside, as far as I can see.) Just a couple more points: first, passports were fairly new in those days, and the courts had had no reason before that to consider whether they determined nationality. *Joyce had an American passport.) Second, there is no such thing as English/Scottish nationality in international law. Both are embraced by the term "British" (Which really means "UK-ish.") Whatever he was, if you think it's OK to hang people for some nonsense they spout on the radio, I guess that's a point of view. But surely you'd have to hang Unity Mitford, Edward VIII and many other British people who gave Hitler much more meaningful support by their high-profile fraternizing with him. And what about those American (and other) business interests that did so much to fund the German war effort? I agree about the V2s Sledge - they were a hugely imperfect weapon, but they were still the biggest single threat to morale in London. When they were lucky enough to find targets, the effect was massive. And rightly or wrongly, the allied leadership did not want one hitting a high-profile target like Westminster. I'm sure you're right that disinformation was fed back by turned spies, but I think it was from reading the codes that the allies knew to do it. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: catspaw49 Date: 12 Nov 00 - 01:02 PM Considering the broadcasts actually had a bit of positive effect on Allied morale in that strange way that things often do, a more fitting "punishment" may have been to award him a medal for services rendered. We had long discussions linked above on the sub movie and Hollywood as history (linked above), and I think we can all agree on the fact that Hollywood isn't history. There were actually several incidents the movie was "based" on and none of them are portrayed accurately, but like several others have pointed out, as a catalyst to learning the real thing, its fine. The problem is obvious when some take the movies as fact. Spaw |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Susanne (skw) Date: 12 Nov 00 - 06:42 PM The difference between those people mentioned by Fionn is, I think, that Unity Mitford actually tried to shoot herself in desperation when war was declared, and even the Duke of Windsor wisely refrained from any further fraternization. William Joyce stayed in Germany and helped the German war effort throughout the war. He'd lived in Britain, regarded himself as British, and I think the British were abso.utely justified in regarding him as a traitor. Whether or not he should have been hanged is another question. I don't think anybody should be! I can't lay my hands on it just now, but there's a biography of Joyce by J. A. Cole, Lord Haw-Haw, The full story of William Joyce, Faber&Faber 1987 (first publ. 1964). It does not, unfortunately, mention the 'Aycliff Angels' anywhere. Does this term mean anything to anybody? Fionn? Or other British Mudcatters? A friend of mine is looking for material on them. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Gervase Date: 13 Nov 00 - 07:01 AM To risk slight thread creep, the V2 weapons were a major morale denter - far more so than the audible and visible V1 flying bombs which at least gave some indication of where they were headed. My father was in London for much of the war, and he remembers the V2s being nicknamed "flying gas mains", because the Government was reluctant to admit that London was under rocket attack at first, and some of the early attacks were attributed to gas explosions for fear of sparking panic among the civilian population over a weapon that could drop more than a tonne of high explosive from out of a clear blue sky without so much as a whoosh or a whistle. Later on, however, when the V2 become an unwelcome fact of life, most people adopted a fatalistic attitude - along the lines of "shit happens". The raids did prompt some people to evacuate their children, but on nothng like the scale of 1939/40. On the subject ofJoyce, his view as a wartime teenager was that the broadcasts were a "must hear" if only because the propaganda was so unsubtle as to be funny. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Steve Parkes Date: 13 Nov 00 - 10:39 AM And he wasn't always right! The day after Walsall gasworks was bombed (so my grandmother told me; she used to live nearby and saw the bombs drop), Lord H went on the air and claimed a successful raid on Birmingham gasworks! Bear in mind, you folks on the other side, that our view of things is coloured by the fact that we did get bombed in the War; it wasn't thousznds of miles away, it was on our doorsteps. (When I say "our", I'm being clever -- I wasn't born till six years afterwards.) Steve |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Snuffy Date: 13 Nov 00 - 06:49 PM Is there any truth to the apocryphal tale that the BBC news announced "The Luftwaffe were deterred by heavy air defences in London, so they dropped bombs at random in Berkshire", and an hour later Haw-Haw announced "The Berkshire town of Randham sustained heavy damage in tonight's raids"? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Steve Parkes Date: 14 Nov 00 - 03:25 AM Dunno Snuffy, but here's one that is true. Throughout the war the BBC broadcast a lot of variety programmes from big factories throughout the country. (Most fair-sized places had their own assembly room, which served as a works canteen in working hours, with a stage, so lunchtime concerts were easily put on.) Early in the war, but after it had hotted up, one such was introduced as coming from ... well, I forget the name of the place, but the name of the firm and the town went out on the air. That night the Luftwaffe bombed it deliberately, as a very effective way of lowering morale. You can imagine the kind of terror that would ensue if you were told "Workers' Playtime" was coming to you next week! After that the shows were introduced as coming "from a factory somewhere in England". And presumably Wales and Scotland. Steve |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: GUEST,Pete Peterson Date: 14 Nov 00 - 10:55 AM I've always had the feeling that Joyce was hanged for his prominence-- he was somebody you heard every night! So they ignored the fact that he was not a British citizen and hanged him on general principles. Interesting how quickly emotion dies down-- he was hanged (a previous post tells me) in early January 1946. At the Nurenberg trials one of the people in the dock was Hans Frietsche, second-in-command to Goebbels, who certainly broadcast at least as much propaganda as Joyce-- and Frietsche was acquitted of all charges! Moral: if you have committed war crimes,do it inconspicuously, and if your side loses, hide out somewhere till the initial furor dies down. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Steve Parkes Date: 15 Nov 00 - 03:46 AM "General principles"? Are you a Terry Pratchett fan by any chance, Pete? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: GUEST,Pete Peterson Date: 15 Nov 00 - 08:48 AM Discworld Terry Pratchett? No, not yet; sounds like I should be! (the name has come up in other areas of my life) I forget where I learned that phrase to justify an action . . . it ranks IMHO up there with "It seemed like a good idea at the time." |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Steve Parkes Date: 15 Nov 00 - 09:01 AM That's the man. I think "It seemed like a good idea at the time" (or maybe "It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time", with capitals) is a pretty good alternative to "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia" as an inscription on one's gravestone! I wonder what they'd have put on Joyce's stone if they hadn't planted him somewhere in the grounds of the gaol? Steve |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: GUEST,JTT Date: 15 Nov 00 - 09:09 AM There's an interesting book about cryptography by a guy called Singh, called The Code Book, which has the whole (and Pole) story of the Enigma machine. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: GUEST Date: 15 Nov 00 - 09:49 AM Hi Steve! Thanks for the update on the Haw-Haw situation. I had never heard of Lady H-H. Obviously, HMG did not feel this was a mire it wanted to wade into. When one applies for a passport, one asks for the protection of the government. That indicates to me, at least, that one would at the same time undertake responsibilities to that government. I did not realize that Joyce had a British passport. I guess he should have sent it back before he took to the airwaves! I hope that all in Britain and around the world who read this will understand that the Hollywood entertainment industry is no more representative of the USA as a whole than Oasis, for example, is of the typical Briton.
All the best, |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Kim C Date: 15 Nov 00 - 10:25 AM Hollywood has little respect for history. Look at Braveheart, The Patriot, Wild Bill (one of the most gawdawful movies I have EVER seen), the Untouchables... I have never understood why these people think that history itself is not interesting enough. Maybe I'm just biased because I'm a history nut, and being a Virgo, I want the facts, please, thankyouverymuch. One of the best historical movies I have ever seen is The Long Riders, about the Jameses and the Youngers and the Millers... the writers did an excellent job sticking to what really happened. I'm sure there was some fudging along the way, but the basic facts of the actual events are pretty much in place. (This is a great movie for anyone who likes Westerns or other historical flicks.) On another note, we watched Nova last night, about the discovery of U-869 off the coast of New Jersey. This U-boat was thought to have been lost off the coast of Gibraltar - not because the Germans were lying, but because nobody knew what happened to this craft. It just disappeared. Apparently it never received the orders to go to Gibraltar and kept heading for the US, where it was apparently sunk by one of its own torpedos. Anyway they talked about the Enigma machine and how the British cracked the code. Yee-haw! so, like, did Lord Haw-haw have a Southern accent or something? ;) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Lord Haw-haw: will the truth be told? From: Peter K (Fionn) Date: 16 Nov 00 - 07:44 PM Guest Dan, Joyce originally had an American passport, but in 1933 he applied for - and got - a British passport (incidentally on the grounds of having been born in Galway, Ireland). He had been passing himself off as English for many years. After two renewals, his British passport expired some time in 1940. In the meantime he had moved to Germany around the time that war was declared in September 1939. Aware of the passport situation, the British prosecutors made sure the charges included one of broadcasting propaganda on specified dates between the outbreak of war and the date his passport expired. If he had stayed with American citizenship he would probably have been OK - he had adopted German nationality by the time Hitler declared war on America, so would have been at no risk of committing treason against the USA. |