Chapter Ten

Frascati's WAS my favourite restaurant in war-time London. Its gilded Edwardian cherubs, its plush chairs and elderly waiters held a nostalgic echo of my Paris eating places. I could be sure of meeting no one there who knew me, and there was ample space between the tables so that my guests and I could talk without being overheard. But the most compelling attraction of all was that the bins in Frascati's cellars held a collection of clarets and champagnes which was unrivalled in the London of 1942- Many of my most successful `black' ventures were born there under the inspiration of a Moet Chandon 1819- (I have an almost necrolatrous passion for old champagne)-and a superb Ausone 1923.

No suggestion, however, was more fruitful or more important than that which Donald McLachlan put to me at a Frascati lunch just before Christmas 1942. For that meal with Donald saw the conception of the counterfeit radios Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik and Soldatensender Calais.* Camille, our Ni~ois waiter, had just made his customary promise of gastronomic prestidigitation: " I have sornetings upper ma sleeve for you, gentlemenmoshroomps on toast." Donald had politely savoured the aged Moet Chandon, as though he shared my admiration for it. And now we were ready for business.

" I have a very important proposal for you from the Admiralty," Donald began in his methodical way. "You know we are now conducting a knockout offensive against the Uboats. We have a whole arsenal of new weapons for detecting and destroying them, which will make going to sea in a U-boat `German Shortwave Radio Atlantic' and `Soldiers Radio Calais'. about as attractive as a cruise in a coffin. It may well be that we shall cause the first real crack in the morale of a German fighting service. And if the U-boatmen crack it is bound to spread to other arms. Do you agree?"

Donald had a trick of asking people whether they agreed, when he knew they most certainly did. I remembered only too well the Kiel mutiny of the Germany Navy in the previous war, and how it spread its infection all over the country.

" Well, in view of all this, the Admiralty planners are anxious to step up our Psychological Warfare attack on the German navy and the U-boat crews in particular. The main instrument of that attack should, in their view, be not the B.B.C. but `Black'. What do you think of reinforcing Gustav Siegfried with a new station specially beamed at the U-boats? How about a `black' news bulletin?"

Donald, of course, knew that a `black' news bulletin mixing truth and calculated fiction had for long been my dream-if only to try out my ideas for a new and livelier style of news writing and news selection. I longed to show the B.B.C. the difference between the stodgy news presentation of the oldfashioned journalism to which the B.B.C. bowed down, and the sharp and vivid style of my side of Fleet Street which I hoped to adapt to radio. I wanted to demonstrate the mass appeal of the significant `human story', until now absent from the air, the technique of `personalising' the news. But how could it be done?

I reminded Donald how I had tried to launch a `black' news bulletin with a station called `Wehrmachtsender Nord'. It was a short lived venture. Very soon I had come to the conclusion that it did not sound right, because, like all `black' transmissions at that time, it had to be pre-recorded. Radio news to be news, and sound like news, I had discovered then, must be broadcast live. It must be up to the minute, changing from bulletin to bulletin.

But unfortunately our `black' studios could not handle live broadcasts. And after a few weeks of experimentation I had abandoned the recorded `Wehrmachtsender Nord'. " If we could get facilities for a live broadcast then I am all for it," I said. "We could have a counterfeit Forces Programme ostensibly for the benefit of U-boat crews and the troops in France. It could model itself on those Forces Stations the Germans have set up in Belgrade and Lvov. But how on earth are we to get the facilities for live transmissions ? Besides they'll turn live broadcasts down on security grounds."

" Don't forget you have the Admiralty behind you," said Donald. "A word from Charles Lambe to Dallas Brooks* will work wonders. And as for security, surely all you need is a switch censor ?"* * I was still unconvinced because of the lack of a studio. And then I suddenly had an idea. My department had recently put up a huge 600 kilowatt medium wave transmitter at Crowborough, and had built studios for it at Milton Bryan near Woburn.

The transmitter had been designed and built for the purposes of intruding on enemy frequencies. It was intended to drown the voice of the enemy station, and impose its own voice on it by superior strength. But for the time being it had been lent to reinforce the B. B.C. No one was using the studios at Milton Bryan, why should we not be allowed to use them? The other regions would be sure to protest, but with the help of the Admiralty, who knows, maybe we might be awarded the necessary priority. Donald and I left Frascati's in a state of high elation-not exclusively due to the Moet Chandon-determined to fight for the right to broadcast live, an unheard of innovation for `Black'.

The first line of the new U-boat version went: "Ich war in St. Nazaire in einem Puff . . ." which means, "I was in a brothel in St. Nazaire . . ." Fortunately the bandmaster colonel conducting the Marines did not ask me to translate the rest of the words.

My most important source of staff for our operations was the German Wehrmacht itself. From U-boats sunk in the Atlantic, from Rommel's harried armies in North Africa, from the German aircraft shot down over Britain and over Libya an ever increasing stream of prisoners were now pouring into the interrogation cages run by my Intelligence friends in London and nearby.

These prisoners provided a prolific flow of intelligence useful to our campaigns. They also provided me with a new reservoir of talent. For among the new intake of prisoners were a number of Germans so antagonised by Hitler and the moral and physical destruction he was imposing on their country, that they wanted to seize the first opportunity to hasten his end. From the ranks of these men I selected some of my ablest fellow workers. Several have remained trusted friends of mine to this day.

One of them, a young artillery major, scion of an old Prussian family steeped in army traditions, had been the intelligence officer of his regiment in North Africa. Wolfgang von Virchow, as I called him, had an accurate and retentive mind. He became the Number One of the little team which, under the direction of Molly Fitzpatrick,* a witty young German-speaking Irishwoman, wrote the special `Army Programme'. Like its naval counterpart this consisted of bits of service gossip, news of the movements of units, criticism of weapons and other titbits likely to entertain, mislead, and subvert the German soldier. Virchow also advised the news writers on their interpretation of the military news, and he was invaluable in helping us to avoid solecisms of language, procedure, and the other pitfalls of the counterfeiter.

The German Air Force provided me with an entire three man crew who were testing a new German nightfighter-two officers and a sergeant. The three of them were determined anti-Nazis. They did not belong to any resistance group, but talking together, they had discovered that each one of them had the same idea-to get to Britain and there join up with other Germans fighting Hitler on the British side.

They were carrying out their test flights from a German airfield in Denmark when their great opportunity presented itself. To their base was sent the very latest and most up-to-date Messerschmitt nightfighter to leave the works. It carried the new electronic equipment which the German Air Force Command felt confident was at last going to put a stop to the British night-time bombing raids on Germany. Though they realised that they might be shot down and killed by the Germans or the British before ever they could land in Britain they decided to fly the plane over and present it to the R.A.F. as an earnest of their desire to fight Hitler. But they were not shot down. They managed to land their plane intact on an Essex airstrip. Of course, they should never have been made prisoners of war at all. But unfortunately their names were sent through to the International Red Cross before the British authorities realised the mistake they had made.

When Steiner, Wegely, and Obermeyer had given all their information to the R.A.F. interrogators, they were offered to me. Any Germans who listened to the Atlantiksender or the medium wave Soldatensender which was soon coupled to it, will remember the diatribes of the angry Bavarian voice in the Luftwaffe programme, denouncing the impossible conditions under which he and his comrades were expected to fight the enemy. That was Sergeant Sepp Obermeyer, a red haired, typically stocky Upper Bavarian with a face that was just like his voice. To begin with his talks had to be written for him. He also required endless coaching before he could speak naturally before the microphone. Then one day just like Corporal Paul Sanders when we were starting the Gustav Siegfried broadcasts-Obermeyer asked me whether he might alter the script to suit his own style of speaking. I was delighted, for I guessed what was coming. And sure enough soon this rustic Bavarian mechanic began writing his own talks. First class talks they were too, simple, salty and sincere. Steiner and Wegely, with Squadron Leader Norman Roffy from Air Intelligence 3 to supply them with technical intelligence, and one of my own old hands to coach them in the art of writing, between them put out a first rate programme of gossip, technical news, and grumbles for the Luftwaffe similar to that which Major von Virchow handled for the Army.

The German Navy and the U-boats, which were the first and original target of the Atlantiksender, were particularly well represented by recruits from the cages. Our ablest and most resourceful U-boat man was Eddy Mander, a bright little Hamburg guttersnipe who before the war had been a wireless operator and radio mechanic with the Debeg, the German equivalent of Marconi. Mander held the rank of a Flotillen Oberfunkmeister (Flotilla Chief Radio Petty Officer) which was about as high as an NCO could rise. But he was full of bitterness against his own officers and the Nazi leaders. From being a devout Nazi at the beginning of the war his personal experiences had gradually turned him into a gifted and resolute adversary of the Third Reich.

In 1939 Mander had been serving with the German Merchant Marine. He was the chief wireless officer on Altmark when Altmark, her holds crammed with captured British merchant seamen, was herself boarded off the Norwegian Coast by the British destroyer Cossack. Mander escaped becoming a British prisoner at that time by jumping overboard and running for the coast across the ice-flows. Even though he was hit in the right lung by a British machine-gun bullet, he managed to keep going until he reached land. As soon as he was well enough to go to sea again he was called up by the German Navy. Much to Mander's resentment the Navy insisted on ignoring his expert proficiency as a wireless operator. The naval radio men made him go through their radio training course from its most elementary beginnings. That soured him. Then he was caught out in a Black Market deal with coffee and was court-martialled. He was given a choice of death sentences, transfer to a penal battallion in the foremost line of the Russian front, or three more Atlantic cruises in a U-boat. Mander chose the U-boat death. But he was lucky. Though his submarine was sunk on the second night out of his first cruise, he himself was fished out and taken prisoner. With him into captivity he brought his U-boat code book containing all the latest cyphers and a great hate of Hitler's navy.

Over a British naval transmitter Mander then got his first revenge. With the British to help him he sent out a series of cypher signals which directed two German U-boats to a rendezvous. There they were pounced on by the waiting British. The boats were sunk, their crews joined Mander in captivity. What made Mander invaluable to my team at MB were his technical knowledge, particularly in matters of signals and radar, his wide range of acquaintances among U-boat crews, and his wonderful gift of racy German lower-deck slang. He was an adept at thinking up new grouses. And when it came to suggesting how U-boat men might delay the departure of their ship-and prolong their lives-by petty and unattributable acts of sabotage, not even our own naval experts were more fertile.

Mander was the mainstay of the team writing the naval programme. At the end of the war he was repatriated. But he died soon after his return. Of tuberculosis, it is stated. Needless to say there is another version that he met his death at the hands of former U-boat men.

Frank Lynder, the son of a Bremen bookseller and publisher, was the captain of the naval team, its Number One writer, intelligence researcher, and speaker. His Bremen accent had just the right nautical ring to it. Not that Frank was a German naval man. He was a coffee broker, and came to me from the same bomb disposal squad of the Pioneer Corps as Paul Sanders. Lynder had been its sergeant while Sanders was the corporal. Frank, who is today the London correspondent of Hamburg's Springer group of newspapers, joined my team never having read or written anything more literary than an invoice. But he soon showed a flair for searching out the unexpected, allrevealing detail and writing little items which had what my Classics Master at St. Paul's would have called a `charming Platonic simplicity'. On a blackboard in his office he chalked up the various campaigns which Donald McLachlan had laid down for him to follow. Every time an item went out in support of one of these campaigns Lynder marked it on his board as assiduously as a German student of philology counting up the accusatives-cum-infinitive in Otfried for his doctor's thesis. And if Frank Lynder found that any campaign was being neglected, he was like a terrier after a rat in seeing to it that this neglect was remedied at once.

It was Frank Lynder too, who, with his girl research assistant read the letters which the U-boat men in the P.o.W. camps in Britain and Canada were sending and receiving from home. He and his secretary noted down every bit of gossip and family news in a huge card file in which they also included the marriages, births, and deaths announced by U-boat families in German newspapers. On the basis of this file the Atlantiksender's `Sailors' Sweetheart'-Agnes Bernelle, a daughter of the Berlin playwright and theatre-owner Rudolf Bernauer, whom we called `Vicky'-was able to startle the German navy men by sending out birthday greetings not merely to the U-boat men themselves, but also to their families, congratulating them on the birth of a son or daughter and generally showing an intimate acquaintance with the private affairs of her `dear boys in blue'. Vicky was incredibly good at it. The treacle in her voice would never let you suspect that this Circe had lost half her family in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

No less a Nazi potentate than the dynamic little Doctor Goebbels himself provided the cover for the Atlantiksender's subversive broadcasts. He and his official news agency, the Deutsche Nachrichtenbiiro. For Goebbels, in order to assure to the DNB news a fast distribution over the whole of Hitler's far flung territories, had set up a wireless teleprinter service by means of a so-called Hell-schreiber. I managed to get hold of a Hell-schreiber receiving set which the DNB London correspondent had inadvertently left in his office, when he fled to Germany at the outbreak of war. Reuters now had it-the DNB office had been in the Reuters' Building-and Christopher Chancellor,* the head of Reuters, nobly yielded it up to me when I asked him for it. On this Hell-schreiber we now received Dr. Goebbels's news service in MB at the same time as the German newspapers and radio stations were receiving it. And being faster workers and less inhibited than the teams working for Goebbels we were able to put his news on the air before our Nazi competitors.

Some items we used as cover to give ourselves authenticity as a German station purveying official news. To others we gave a subversive twist so that when listeners heard them on the German radio later, they quite unconsciously read our tendentious distortion as the truth hidden `between the lines'. The Hell-schreiber gave us decorations and promotions in the Wehrmacht, it gave us the official communiques and the speeches of the Nazi Party orators proclaiming their unshakeable faith in the Fuhrer and final victory. From these we would give brief and damningly deadpan excerpts. From the DNB Hell-schreiber we also got our invaluable sports news which was magnificently edited for us by the veteran t'llstein Sports reporter Dr. Willy Meisl. In short, the Hell-schreiber was invaluable, and without it we would never have been able to follow the formula which enabled us to put over the poison in our news bulletins without it sounding like enemy propaganda.

" Cover, dirt, cover, cover, dirt, cover, dirt" was the approximate rhythm we followed-'dirt' being what we called the items which we hoped would make our listeners think and act on lines displeasing to their Fiihrer. The DNB, however, was not the only debt we owed the `Propaganda Dwarf'. He himself occasionally made a personal appearance on the Atlantiksender to give it additional authenticity as a German station. And so did the Fuhrer. For when Goebbels or Hitler delivered one of their speeches over the German radio, we picked it up from the German network and relayed it over the Atlantiksender. " The Deutsche Kurzwellensender Atlantik, in common with all other stations in the Reich network," said our announcer on these occasions, "now takes you over to the Sports Palace in Berlin, where you will hear the address of the Fuhrer, Wir schalten um. . ." As Harold Robin, the brilliant and ingenious chief technician of the radio unit switched over and Hitler took over from Sepp Obermeyer or Vicky, a roar of Homeric laughter echoed through MB. It was a trick that never lost its appeal. Many were those in the team who begged me to let them interrupt Goebbels or the Fuhrer with a rough comment or two. We could have done so very easily by switching in and out again. But I was firm. "One operation at a time, my children!" I said. "We are doing this for cover, cover, cover and nothing else. No dirt this time!"

Even in our subversive items we took care to keep to the Goebbels idiom. We talked of the allies as `the enemy' and adopted whatever pejorative epithets were current at the time. Raids by the bombers of the R.A.F. and the U.S. Air Force we referred to as `Terror Raids' and the raiding crews we called `Terror Flyers'. But despite all the cover and the blandly matter of fact authority of even our most outrageous news items I could not help feeling that our cannier listeners would soon come to suspect the unorthodox deviation of the Atlantiksender from the routine output of the other stations as being due to some-thing more than the remoteness of the radio's putative home in France from the dynamic doctor's central control. But even if they did, I calculated the station would still remain effective. Partly because it always spoke from a patriotic and `national' German viewpoint, and this was bound to be more insidious and psychologically effective than a straight enemy broadcast, partly because listeners caught tuning in to us would welcome the excuse that they had only listened in the belief that Atlantik was German.

It was amazing however, how many Germans were genuinely taken in, and did in fact believe the station to be a German Forces Radio. Quite early on we received indisputable evidence from a prisoner that for several days on end the sergeant at the Wehrmacht equivalent of a NAAFI station in Tunis had piped the Atlantiksender into the recreation huts `because the music was so marvellous-so fabelhaft'. Only when an officer reprimanded him did he realise he had been entertaining his comrades with a forbidden enemy station.

In the nine months that the Atlantiksender remained on its own, broadcasting exclusively on short waves, the team developed into a hard-working crew of perfectionists. Talks and news items would be rewritten again and again until we got them as I wanted them. Immense trouble was taken over small detail.

" Accuracy first," I used to tell the writers. "We must never lie by accident, or through slovenliness, only deliberately!" And as we put out news bulletin after news bulletin and service programme after service programme an entire system of subversive campaigns developed. It was based on the campaigns we had originally created in the Gustav Siegfried days. But now they had been elaborated, and perfected as a result of Clifton Child's research and ingenuity. In item after item we gave examples of the `inequality of sacrifice' between the common man and the `privileged' party functionaries. And there was enough truth to them and enough fact to back them up to give our allegations complete plausibility and make them stick in the minds of our listeners. Germans wanted to believe ill of their Nazi Party overseers and we gave them the `facts' with which to back up their suspicions. Party functionaries we showed were exempt from front-line service. (We could quote a genuine decree exempting officials of the Goebbels propaganda ministry from military service.) If they were sent to join the forces they did so only for a short token period, and then they returned to their posts on the `home front'. Regularly once a week we put out a list which was entirely factual and genuine, of Party officials who had left for their period of token service and others who had returned.

The wives and daughters of Party high-ups, we said, were exempt from the call-up of women. Their families were exempt from providing billets in their homes for evacuees or bombedout families, as ordinary Germans were compelled to do. (Quite true. Reasons of security and secrecy no doubt dictated this exemption. But why should we point that out?) Party high-ups were permitted to move their offices and homes away from the much bombed urban districts, while the ordinary worker had to stay put in the town to fight fires. We gave innumerable examples of the defeatism of the Party high-ups. They were selling the businesses they had acquired in occupied countries, knowing that they would soon be leaving. They were busily smuggling their money to safe accounts in Switzerland and South America.

We encouraged our listeners to defiance and disobedience not by appeals, but by news items showing that control had slipped from the hands of the German authorities. It was safe to defy them and their police. For such police as had not been called up for military service were old and decrepit. In our sports news 4Villy Meisl stressed the defeat of police teams. "They're such a lot of elderly crocks, they can hardly run, let alone kick a ball." In bulletin after bulletin we plugged the crime wave, the spate of unsolved murders. Air raids, we showed by innumerable examples, made police control impossible.

" The authorities do not know who is missing because he has been killed, and who is missing because he has deserted." The files and registers on which the police relied were being destroyed in the raids. Under cover of the bombing more and more prisoners were escaping from custody. The same enemy explosives which were sending the house walls crashing down, were destroying the whole edifice of Himmler's security system. In almost every bulletin we illustrated these themes with news items, some true, some invented, but all of them plausible.

The news of the day however was our main concern. When Goebbels announced that he was distributing a special `air raid bonus' of chocolate in the workshop canteens, in addition to other food-he did so in order to attract absentee workers back to their factories-we added in the blandest and most matter of fact style that this `bomb chocolate' had been spiked with drugs like Pervitin to stimulate the bomb-fatigued workers to extra energy and extra productivity.

When we learned that families bombed out during the `Terror Raids' on Hamburg were being evacuated to Eastern areas such as Poland, Slovakia and Ruthenia, we reported the epidemics of typhoid and cholera allegedly raging in those areas.

We did the same for the `Kinderlandverschickungslager', the short and snappy title under which the special camps were known to which evacuee children were being sent. We did not, of course, put out the news of these epidemics in the KLV camps as a straightforward announcement. We dressed it upoften something like this: " Dr. Gonti, the Reichsfiihrer for Physicians has congratulated the medical officers at the KLV camps in the Gau Wartheland for the selfless devotion with which they are fighting the diptheria epidemic among the children in their care. He has expressed his satisfaction at their success in overcoming the tragic lack of medicaments, and reducing deaths by an average of sixty a week."

We never gave up trying to make our Wehrmacht listeners worry about what was happening to their families at home. We even made them worry about what these evil men, the Party bosses, would do to their wives should they have the misfortune to lose their lives while fighting for Fiihrer and Fatherland. Hitler himself was of the greatest help to us in this campaign. For he had an impulsive way of rushing out decrees which were intended to sustain and comfort his men, but which when twisted a little by us had just the opposite effect. As, for instance, his decree about posthumous divorce. Hitler must have heard or read somewhere that it was a great scandalthat women against whom their soldier husbands had started divorce proceedings would be saved from the consequences of their adultery if the husband was killed before the hearing of the case was concluded. Forthwith he issued an order--on April the Ist, 1943-that not only should all such divorces be carried through to the bitter end just as though the soldier was still alive, but that divorce proceedings must also be instituted in those cases where a dead soldier would probably have started proceedings against his wife had he lived. The fact that he might not have known of his wife's infidelity before he was killed was immaterial. Henceforth it would be up to the State Prosecutor and the Party Authorities to sue in the dead man's name in order that no faithless wives of soldiers should bear their dead husband's name, inherit his worldly goods, and collect his pension.

It was a gift, and we went to town on it in a big way, not only on the Atlantiksender, but with printed leaflets as well. The Fiihrer's decree was of course an invitation to us to report, as we did in convincing detail, that party bosses were using it to frame and blackmail the widows of our comrades. To forestall such blackmail, said the Atlantiksender, many comrades were sending their wives legally certified letters of renunciation, duly witnessed by the C.O., in which the man stated expressly that he would not consent to a posthumous divorce, no matter what his wife might have done or be accused of having done.

To help our services listeners to visit their families and see for themselves what was going on at home, we reminded them that if their home had been bombed they were entitled to compassionate leave under an order-`OKW order 967/42g Of August 28, 1942'-which Clifton Child had discovered among the captured documents. To help them still more-service after all is one of the best ways of making friends and influencing people-we put out lists of the streets which had been bombed in German towns during the raids of the previous evening. These lists became a regular feature of our programmes and impressed the German listeners enormously. For our reports were fast and accurate. Indeed they were so fast and accurate that German intelligence men checking them, decided we must have agents in the bombed cities reporting to us on secret transmitters. The belief' has survived to this day. In that ridiculous German thriller film about the `Soldatensender Calais'-the medium wave extension of the Atlantiksender which followed later -agents of the big fat boss of MB pop up in the middle of an air raid on Essen to tap out their messages to him. "Bombs have fallen on the Kettwiger Strasse in Essen and destroyed houses Nos. seven to twenty-five," they flash, or "Incendiaries have struck the Administration Buildings of the Krupp Works in the Altendorfer Strasse. The entire complex is on fire."

Most certainly we put out reports like this, and often embroidered them with graphic detail as well. But we did not receive our intelligence from agents. Our reports were based on information given us by the raiders themselves. Within minutes of the bombers arriving back from Germany a squadron intelligence officer who had examined the pilots would be on the `scrambler' to me to tell me where the raiders had been, what they believed they had hit, whether they had dropped mainly incendiaries and caused big fires, or whether they had been dropping block-buster high explosives as well. And so on.

This information, however, useful as it was, would not by itself have enabled us to compile those detailed street by street reports which so impressed the Germans. The main source for these were the photographs brought back by the R.A.F. Mosquitoes which flew to the bombed areas immediately after every attack to check the damage. My friends in Air Intelligence rushed the pictures to MB by motor cycle dispatch riders as soon as they had been printed. A special section in Clifton Child's intelligence team then interpreted them with the aid of' stereoscopic viewers. To help them, they had a whole library of German town plans and Badekers. In charge of this work was a young German Rhodes scholar, whom the R.A.F. Intelligence men had specially trained for me in the art of reading their reconnaissance photographs. Peter von Schlabrenhorst took a justified pride in his work, and he not only compiled the lists of streets bombed in the latest raids, but insisted on going to the microphone and giving them out himself. They were remarkably accurate.

Those reports on the other hand, in which the Atlantiksender described a raid that was still in progress and gave precise details of what buildings and streets were on fire, or the harrowing eye witness accounts of men and women and children being caught up in the melting asphalt of the Cuxhavener Strasse, or of Local Groupleader Schickedanz ordering the Teno to blow up the crowded shelter in the Buxtehuder Platz while the folk-comrades were still inside it-these were all fiction and guess-work. From the bomber pilots we knew approximately when and where the bombs had fallen, where fires were raging. We filled in the rest with the picture we wanted to present. Our listeners accepted these reports as true because the rest of our damage and air raid reports had been so accurate.

Needless to say the Atlantiksender paid great attention in its output to news campaigns intended to stimulate surrender and desertion. Prisoners of war, we showed, were going to have an unfair advantage over the fighting men when `peace broke out'. For the enemy had laid on excellent training courses for them to learn trades and professions in the prison camps. Many of them too were working outside the camps and being paid well in pounds and dollars, money which would have a high value at the end of the war, compared with the useless German Mark.

Tucked away somewhere in most bulletins was an item about deserters. The International Red Cross was the favourite source for these. The Red Cross would report the increase in the number of German soldiers crossing into Sweden, Switzerland, or Spain, and the fact that while many had been interned, the majority were earning good money in good jobs. The German authorities, it would be repeated again and again, were not able to take the threatened reprisals against the families of deserters because-and here came our old tag line -`they do not know who is missing because he has been killed, and who is missing because he has deserted'. Not all the news broadcasts however of the Atlantiksender, and the medium wave station with which it was soon to be coupled, were directed at the enemy. One of the most interesting and successful of our operations had neutral listeners as its target-the neutral firms and business men who were breaking the allied blockade by trading with Hitler. Most of these firms were being punished effectively enough by the Ministry of Economic Warfare which put their names on a so-called `Statutory List'. This meant that they were under boycott and blockade. Any firm dealing with them would also find itself proscribed and commercially excommunicated. But there was a second list of firms who were only suspects. Their names were not published. British officials, however, had orders to put the evil eye on them, wherever and whenever they could.

`Tom Brown' Stevens got hold of this `Black List' of suspects from M.E.W. and the secret file which revealed both the reasons for suspicion and the personal background of the suspect firms' directors. The next thing was, that these neutral business men heard the secrets of their private and commercial lives being publicly exposed on our radio. Usually their reaction was to protest to the nearest British authorities who, of course, denied any connection with us.

We then waited to see whether they would mend their ways. If they did not, we followed up with further broadcasts about them. As a rule, however, one broadcast was enough. One typical case was that of a firm of Swedish exporters who were buying ball-bearings in Sweden, and smuggling them to Germany, thereby undoing the effects of our bombing. Our story about the firm was so accurate and so ribald that the Swedish authorities felt deeply hurt in their national pride. They made unofficial representations about it to the British ambassador Sir Victor Mallet.

" We had our eye on this firm," said the Swedes with injured dignity, "we were waiting to prosecute them, when we had enough evidence. Now your broadcast has warned them." Sir Victor replied that he had no knowledge of the Atlantiksender, and nothing to do with it. Then he sent me a rocket through the Foreign Office. M.E.W. however were pleased with us. For the Swedish newspapers had taken up the story we had put out, and the directors of the Swedish firm, fearing more Atlantiksender publicity, had cancelled all further deliveries to Germany.

" It's blackmail by `black'," I said, congratulating `Tom Brown'. The `Navy Programme' was the first special programme for a fighting service which we launched. And in an astonishingly short time we had evidence that it was proving effective. My friends at the cages where German prisoners were interrogated told me that the Atlantiksender was helping them considerably. "You are doing all our preliminary softening up for us," laughed the R.N.V.R. Commander in charge of U-boat crews interrogation. "The men arriving now have all been told by their officers that the Atlanti,ksender is British. But they are so impressed by the universality of the Atlantiksender's intelligence service and the completeness of its information on everything to do with U-boats or themselves and their families, that they say: `The British know it all anyhow. So I may as well make things more comfortable for myself by answering their questions.' Before you started the Atlantiksender it took us weeks to get them to that stage. Now they're in the `ready to talk' condition before they even get here."

Having seen what we could do, the Admiralty Intelligence people helped us more and more. Donald McLachlan was even able to arrange that N.LD. agents in France should signal back such apparent trivia as the results of the football matches between U-boat crews. We were thus able to announce them within a few hours of the game being over.

" The Seventh U-Flotilla St. Nazaire," announced the Atlantiksender, "this afternoon beat the Second Flotilla by three goals to two in their football match at Lorient. The two teams are now celebrating at the Cafe Reunion. Congratulations on an excellent game. Goal scorers were . . ." As we gave their names Frankie Lynder attached to each one of them some little bit of gossip and badinage culled from his files. " Sometimes we would call up a U-boat, which the Admiralty experts told us was likely to have left on a cruise, and play it some `special request' music.

The Radio Petty Officer of U-Luther told me after he had been captured, how much this trick had scared him when we played it on his boat. " We had sailed under all the usual secrecy-strict radio silence and all that," he said, "but we had not been at sea for more than two days when Atlantik calls us up and plays some special music. It's a mighty unpleasant sensation, I can tell you, to feel that you're being watched like that. And that the enemy knows exactly where you are." Which, of course, the enemy did not.

Another little trick which impressed our German listeners was that we announced decorations and honours for U-boat men before the German authorities themselves had done so. How did we manage this? By careful study we had worked out the number of tons which a commander had to sink before Admiral Doenitz conferred on him the appropriate decoration. We knew what the various Commanders were managing to sink. Our files told us the rest. (Stevens successfully applied the same technique to German food rations. Again and again with the help of the experts at the Ministry of Economic Warfare he enabled us to announce a reduction or an increase in German rations before the news had been announced by the German Ministry of Food.) The result of all this was to raise the prestige of the Atlantiksender as a rapid all-seeing purveyor of news to such heights that we were given credit for scoops which we had never in fact brought off.

An illustration of this was the Luftwaffe officer commanding the German Air Force squadrons in the Bay of Biscay area. When he was shot down into the sea and made prisoner he said to his first interrogator-"no good my attempting to keep anything secret from you fellows. You know it all anyhow. The Atlantiksender the other day even broadcast a verbatim report of my top secret conference with the Navy on board a blockade breaker in the Gironde estuary. They told all about it within a few hours of the conference ending. Incredible!" It was incredible too, for it just was not true. What had really happened was that we had learned from the Admiralty that five armed merchant vessels were lying in the Gironde Estuary with steam up. There was a possibility, the Admiralty thought, that the ships would try to break through the British naval cordon and make for Japan. So just to play on the crews' nerves and show them that their secret was a secret no longer we decided to pay them the honour of a special musical serenade.

" And now," said Vicky at her most dulcet, "by special request of the comrade blockade-runners who are getting awfully bored down there in the Gironde Estuary while they await orders to sail, I am going to play a little selection of music from our brave allies in the East, a little foretaste for our comrades of many an Olarenschmaus (Ear feast) to come !"There followed the most cacophonous jumble ofJapanese and Chinese records to be found in the archives of His Master's Voice. A day later we followed this up with more Japanese music and a talk on the difficulties the Luftwaffe were raising about the navy's demands for air cover during the break-out. This was a very reasonable guess in view of what we knew from Air Commodore `Tubby' Grant and his colleagues in Air Intelligence 3 of the number of fighters and reconnaissance aircraft available in the Biscay area.

By one of those helpful coincidences the Luftwaffe commander had gone aboard one of the blockade-runners for a conference with the naval commander of the expedition a little earlier that very afternoon. He had been much irritated by the officious security precautions of the naval men. Sentries with fixed bayonets had been placed outside the wardroom and before the navy men would talk at all they made him read the German equivalent of our Official Secrets Act, sign it, and swear a solemn oath that he would talk with no one about what he learned from them.

As soon as he got back to his quarters at the air base, the Luftwaffe Commandant switched on the Atlantiksender. The first thing he heard was Vicky's Japanese concert, which was followed by the talk on the inability of the LuftwafFe to provide adequate air cover." I laughed and I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks," he told the British interrogating officer, "there was the Atlantiksender not only revealing Japan as the destination of the trip, but giving a sentence by sentence report of what had been said at this top secret conference behind the closed doors guarded by the sentries with fixed bayonets. It was kolossal. And what a showup for those stuck up navy fellows. But how on earth do you do it? I suppose you had the place miked by your agents."

Admiral Godfrey tried to use the Atlantiksender for deception purposes as well, and many was the ingenious double bluff that was carried out at his suggestion. For it was a reasonable surmise that the German Naval Intelligence men devoted much close study to our broadcasts. For instance, when the Germans came up with a new anti-radar device called `Aphrodite'-a ludicrous-looking rubber balloon released from the U-boat and floated along above the waves with the intention of deflecting the R.A.F.'s electronic rays from the submarine John Godfrey asked us to run a special 'anti-Aphrodite' campaign. The Germans, he calculated, would deduce from this that the Admiralty was worried about `Aphrodite' and would hold on to the balloon device although it was, in fact, worse than useless.

His bluff worked. The Germans, despite the evidence they must have had of Aphrodite's failure, remained faithful to their toy balloon for an unbelievably long time. This technique of publicly discussing German technical devices which the German security officers had said were supersecret was so successful with our U-boat listeners that we started using it in our transmissions to the German Air Force and Army as well. But it was the Admiralty who set the example to the Air Ministry and War Office by releasing the secret technical material to us to make these talks possible. We indulged in learned discussions of `Miicke' and `tti'anze', the latest secret weapons against our Radar, and of `Zaunkonig', the new German torpedo with an automatic homing device.

But, of course, our main concern was with the crewsour constant object being to put them against their officers. We had plenty of opportunities for doing so. For, as the war went on, considerable feeling developed between the old petty officers, veterans of many dangerous cruises, and the young commanders who would be put in charge of a U-boat after having taken part in not more than two or three voyages as a First or Second Officer. It was easy for us to suggest that these young officers, with their hunger for decorations, were the natural enemies of their crews. And Eddy Mander saw to it that our grousing went straight to the petty officer's heart.

What with the appalling death rate among the U-boat crews and its exploitation by the subversive broadcasts of the Atlantiksender that crack in German naval morale which Donald had talked of during our lunch at Frascati's had, by the end of October 1943, become a wide and gaping fact. It was time for us to go a step further. It was time for us to start softening up the German forces in France in preparation for the invasion of Europe. Before we ever reached this stage however, an entirely new set of problems was dumped on my plate. For both Dick Crossman and I had been promoted. Dick was made `Director of Political Warfare against the Enemy and Satellites (white)', and I was appointed `Director of Special Operations against the Enemy and Satellites (`black')'. That meant that I now had overall charge of the `black' assault on Hitler's satellites in addition to that on Germany itself.

Into new barracks hastily erected in the compound of MB marched Intelligence teams, editorial writers, speakers and secretaries from Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, and even Rumania. Our canteen became a tower of Babel, as dark-eyed gypsy beauties from the Balkans flirted with my fair-haired German prisoners over toad-in-the-hole, powdered egg omelettes, spam fritters, soya bean sausages, and the other irresistible delicacies from the repertory of war-time cooks.

The arrival of the Italian and Balkan teams in our midst certainly sharpened up the attack against the German forces. For I was now able to see that our campaigns against the morale of the German occupiers received support from these regions. We, in our turn, were able to pick up some of their campaigns. Fortunately for me, the Englishmen directing the `black' stations of Italy, Hungary and the Balkan countries were all skilled at their job. I knew only very little Italian, and no Hungarian, Bulgarian, or Rumanian. So I would not have been able to give them the kind of editorial help I did with our German output, had it been needed.

The Italians were my first concern. As Mussolini's regime staggered and reeled under demoralising defeats, first in Africa, then in Italy itself, we launched fresh stations and fresh campaigns to hasten its end. The two most important of these were ( I ) `Radio Livorno', an operation designed to help bring about the surrender of the Italian navy, and (2) a counterfeit of the German-sponsored `Radio of the Italian Fascist Republic'. `Radio Livorno' was the name we gave to a station which pretended to be operating on behalf of the Italian `Resistance' from the radio cabin of an Italian warship, lying in the Livorno base. Night after night `Livorno' called the Italian ships at Spezia, Genoa and other North Italian naval stations. In eloquent anti-German invective our speaker-a Maltese officer of the British army-warned his comrades of the Italian navy to be on guard against the Germans. Particularly against German attempts to board and seize their ships. Night after night too, `Livorno' ordered the Italian patriots of the navy to make no move without orders from itself. I waited anxiously for the Germans to launch a counterfeit of our tricky operation. To my relief they failed to do so. The minds of the Abwehr apparently did not work along those lines.

Then, as the time for action approached, we began to let it become clearer and clearer that `Livorno' was negotiating with the allies for the `liberation' of the Italian navy from the Germans. When, at last the great day came and `Livorno' on September the I oth, 1943, gave the order to sail, the Italian ships obediently upped anchor and sailed for Malta, the rendezvous `Livorno' had given them. There they surrendered to Admiral Cunningham and General Eisenhower.

The whole `Livorno' operation had been run in the closest contact with the Admiralty, who told us day by day the rough gist of the messages they would like `Livorno' to put out. It all went off so smoothly and successfully, that I was convinced that the Italian navy chiefs guessed `Livorno' was the voice of Cunningham, and obeyed it as such. But there was one man who did not suspect it. This was our Maltese speaker. Randolph Imozzi was convinced that by his vocal efforts in front of the microphone he and he alone had brought about the surrender of the Italian Navy.

When the surrender was announced, he put on his best uniform and paraded before me in my office, fully expecting me to pin a decoration on his chest. Alas, I had no medals to bestow, only compliments. Of these I gave him a feast. And he deserved it. For never did a man work harder and more enthusiastically. Our counterfeit of the `Radio of the Italian Fascist Republic' required much technical skill. And though its results were nothing like as dramatic and spectacular as those of `Radio Livorno' I reckon we received fair dividends for the effort invested. But even if this counterfeit had been completely without effect, it would still have been worth the work we put into it. For it gave us experience with a new technique which was to prove invaluable when later we came to mount a similar operation against the Germans.

It was Goebbels himself who presented us with the opportunity for a try-out against the Italians. Otto Skorzeny and his SS commandos had recently rescued Mussolini from his Italian anti-Fascist captors and enabled him to set up a Fascist Republican Government in North Italy. Goebbels immediately provided him with a radio station so that he could continue to inspire the Italian public with his `dynamism'.

This `Fascist Republican Radio' was a short wave affair, transmitted from Munich on two frequencies simultaneously, and broadcasting not continuously, but for half-hour periods. I decided that the doctor was not being sufficiently generous to the Duce and that we should remedy his niggardliness by giving Mussolini a third station with a short wave frequency right alongside the other two.

I suggested to John Skeaping, my British colleague in charge of the Italians, that all we had to do was to pick up the beginning of the Munich-Italians broadcast and relay it over our transmitter; then, at the right moment, to break off the relay and come up with our own announcers and our own stuff; finally when we had said our say, to pick up our Munich friends again and allow them to finish their broadcast over our transmitter.

" How do you think you're going to be able to find the opening for the change-over, and how are you going to be able to blend the two programmes without the fake being obvious to all?" John objected.

But as it turned out the operation did not prove as difficult as all that. For the Munich-Italians played right into our hands. They had divided their speaking programme into three sections, each carefully separated from the other by intermissions of military and patriotic music. All we had to do therefore was to relay the first leg of their programme, then come in with our own music and news when they began the second. The trick was to make sure that the last items of our news and announcements were so worded that we could cut off in mid-paragraph and switch back to the relay when Munich's music introduced the third leg of their programme. Does it sound complicated? It was. But after a fortnight's assiduous rehearsing our Italians were ready to go. And we could not have had better speakers. They were two prisoners of war who, before being called up for the Italian army, had been professional announcers for Radio Italia.

What I hoped to achieve with this operation was that Italian listeners searching for the Duce's station on their dials would tune in to us by mistake as often as they tuned in to the genuine Fascist Republican station. And much to the satisfaction of John and myself, and the Italian announcers and script writer, that was how it did indeed work out.

After only a few days of the operation the Duce's Munich men were indignantly and vehemently denying that they had said the appalling things which monitors all over the world reported them as saying. We got them so tangled up in denials and counter-denials that in the end, Dr. Goebbels decided he must shut down their short wave broadcasts altogether. He gave them time instead on Munich's medium wave radio, to the great indignation of the Bavarians who were furious at losing their own radio entertainment-a fury which we were to exploit to our profit only too soon.*

I am ashamed to say that one of the `mistakeetwhich the Fascist Republican Radio (our edition) perpetrated was to be inexcusably rude and hostile to His Holiness the Pope. The Vatican's protests were carried by Italian newspapers everywhere. Another silly thing the Fascist Republican Radio (our edition) did was to give advance news of the Government's intention to devalue the Lira. This produced a most satisfactory run on that currency. We also publicised an alleged arrangement by which the allies were supposed to have declared a `Mercy Zone' which they had promised not to bomb in order that the inhabitants of the industrial cities of the Italian North could take refuge there and stay alive. We-did so by broadcasting Mussolini's indignant denunciation of unpatriotic Italians who were leaving their work in the cities to take refuge in the `Mercy Zone'.

Of the Balkan operations, there were two that stand out in my memory. One was designed to sabotage the supply of Rumanian oil to Germany. Under the motto `Keep the oil underground, don't let the Germans play havoc with Rumania's one great capital asset' we transmitted week in week out a course of fourteen simple lessons in oil-well sabotage, prepared for me by one of the British oil engineers I had met out in Rumania at the beginning of the war. When the fourteen records had been transmitted, we started them all over again from the beginning.

The simplest of the lessons was-"If you see a valve or a stopcock in the oil fields just give it a turn as you pass." I thought this such an attractive device that, without consulting my engineer friend again, I ran a similar campaign for the Austrian oil fields under the slogan `Gehn ma drahn !'-roughly`Let's take a turn-let's have a dance!'

But when on a visit to Vienna after the war, I asked Mr. Van Sickel, the Canadian pioneer of the Austrian oil industry, whether our campaign had achieved any results in Austria, he hooted with derisive laughter." Give the valves a twist, my boy, is splendid advice for mucking up the Rumanian oil wells. But it won't work here. We have a different system for our oil wells, and there are no stopcocks and valves for you to turn!" The other Balkan operation was Bulgarian. Believe it or not, our Bulgarian team laid on a Freedom Station that was meant to sound like a Bulgarian Freedom Station run by the Germans! Roughly, its line was the same as if a Goebbels Freedom Station claiming to be British had broadcast in English -"Ve Prittischers must help ze Fuhrer lipperate our gountry . . ."

In order to put this one over convincingly, we had to find among the German refugees in Britain two who could speak Bulgarian with a strong German accent. We found them. They were excellent, and-for those who understood Bulgarian wonderfully funny.

I am told that this counterfeit of a counterfeit did a lot to make the Germans in Sofia look ridiculous. Everyone thought them responsible for a clumsy and insulting fake. And well may it have been so. For, as I used to tell my team, the simplest and most effective of all `black' operations is to spit in a man's soup and cry `Heil Hitler!'

Chapter's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Aspistdistra Photos - Milton Bryan Photos - Contents

The Soul of Hitler : Series of articles published in July 1939 in the Daily Express "H.M.G.'s secret pornographer" : Article by Sefton Delmer Ian Fleming : Secret Memo Sefton Delmer Attack on Morale of German Forces in Norway : Article by Sefton Delmer on Lord Haw Haw