Lord Haw-Haw
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Lord Haw-Haw was the nickname of an announcer on the English-language propaganda radio programme of World War II, Germany Calling. The programme was broadcast by Nazi Germany to audiences in Great Britain on the mediumwave station Radio Hamburg and by shortwave to the United States, starting on September 18, 1939 and continuing until April 30, 1945, when Hamburg was overrun by the British Army.
The name Lord Haw-Haw is most commonly associated with the Irish-American William Joyce, a former member of the British Union of Fascists, whose on-air style approximated to a sneering mockery of the British military effort against the Germans. More generally, however, the name Lord Haw-Haw applied to the various announcers who took part in the broadcasts, including Lieutenant Norman Baillie-Stewart (who would have had the proper upper-class accent for the part that the more plebeian Joyce lacked). The catchy pseudonym is variously attributed to a "Fleet Street cartoonist" [Propaganda, treason and plot], an August 2005 BBC News profile or a correspondent with the Daily Express Farndale, Nigel. Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce, 2005 (ISBN 0333989929). Joyce, in fact, had a singular Irish-American-English-German accent; his distinctive pronunciation of "Jairmany calling, Jairmany calling" was readily recognized by his listeners, who, in the early days of the war, attributed to him an intimate and sinister knowledge of everything going on in all the towns and villages of England.[The making of a traitor], from the Birkbeck, University of London website Perhaps because of the fear his alleged omniscience had inspired, Joyce was hanged for treason on January 3, 1946, after having been captured in northern Germany just as the war ended. As J.A. Cole has written, "The British public would not have been surprised if, in that Flensburg wood, Haw-Haw had carried in his pocket a secret weapon capable of annihilating an armoured brigade."
See also
References
- Cole, J.A. Lord Haw-Haw & William Joyce: The Full Story (New York, 1965)
External links
- [Summary] and [MP3 Audio] of an April 1945 broadcast excerpt by Lord Haw-Haw, from an Imperial War Museum website
- [Secret files released on Lord Haw Haw's wife], from a November 2000 CNN article
- [My father and Lord Haw Haw], a February 2005 story from The Guardian
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