Guy Woodward finds echoes of PWE campaigns in a classic sitcom After two years researching the Political Warfare Executive, I am beginning to find echoes of the agency and its work in all sorts of unexpected places. Watching some episodes of the venerable BBC sitcom Allo, Allo! the other day, for instance, I noticed a subplot involving the […]
Beatriz Lopez explores Spark’s wartime use of a secure telephone and considers the device’s later disturbing reappearance in her novel The Hothouse by the East River (1973) Successful wartime propaganda depended on a constant supply of reliable and up-to-date intelligence, information which – to guarantee security – British propagandists often received via a scrambler telephone. The Political Warfare […]
James Smith finds disturbing echoes of a British wartime disinformation campaign in recent White House press conferences In August 1941, British propagandists devised a sequence of disinformation rumours (known as ‘sibs’) for dissemination in Germany, with the aim of spreading “the fear of disease coming from the east, with the threefold intention of upsetting morale, of […]
Document of the Month: FO 898/330 James Smith and Guy Woodward on the PWE’s re-education of POWs “The Italian prisoners are gratified at the part played by the Partisans in the liberation of Northern Italy and derive from it hopes of a rebirth of Italian prestige. Many co-operators, who apparently failed to appreciate that their presence among crowds […]
Document of the month: FO 898/123 Guy Woodward finds echoes of PWE campaigns in Hans Fallada’s novel Alone in Berlin One of the most ingenious and darkly humorous items I have found in the PWE papers is this postcard designed for distribution in Hungary in 1944. Circulating Allied propaganda was of course prohibited in Axis states, and […]
Document of the month: FO 898/484 Guy Woodward finds an invasion manual disguised as a novel A few months ago I wrote about a miniature edition of John Steinbeck’s novel The Moon is Down (1942) produced for distribution in occupied France. The copy which I found in the PWE papers at the National Archives does not credit Steinbeck as author […]
Document of the month: FO 898/28 Guy Woodward investigates a fictional Balkan resistance movement, and ponders the parallels between propaganda work and writing fiction There’s an intriguing paragraph in Bickham Sweet-Escott’s SOE memoir Baker Street Irregular (1965) in which he recalls that around 1942 ‘though no resistance movement existed in Rumania, we and P.W.E. […] invented a Rumanian […]
Beatriz Lopez finds traces of wartime moral dilemmas in Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Following the closure of the PWE radio station Soldatensender in April 1945, Director of Special Operations Sefton Delmer retreated to his bathroom and performed a purification ritual to mark the end of black propaganda: I removed my beard. […] After my razor shaved […]
Document of the month: FO 898/507 Guy Woodward investigates the involvement of Daily Express cartoonist Osbert Lancaster in wartime propaganda This booklet entitled Moffes-Spiegel measures 10.5 x 13 cm and appears in file 898/507 ‘Dutch Leaflets and Booklets’. Produced for the Netherlands, it contains a series of cartoons ridiculing the Nazi high command and other German officials, all of which […]
Document of the month: FO 898/323 Guy Woodward on PWE plans for a Christmas radio broadcast featuring Italian POWs This time last year I examined at a plan developed in the run up to Christmas 1940, to use the festive season as a means of fomenting discord in Germany between civilians and officials. A memorandum written at […]
Document of the month: FO 898/523 Guy Woodward finds a miniature novel in the PWE papers This tiny book appears in file 898/523 of the PWE collection in the National Archives, which bears the unpromising title ‘Various French Pamphlets’. It measures 10.5 x 6.5 cm. The cover and title page feature no reference to any author; […]
Document of the month: FO 898/478 Guy Woodward on the PWE’s pocket guides for service personnel This small 64-page booklet measures 10.5 x 13.5 cm. Its blue and white cover features a picture of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and the single word title ‘France’. On first glance it appears to be a tourist guide, […]
Reading Peter Pomerantsev’s new book This is Not Propaganda, Guy Woodward finds echoes of PWE’s wartime activities in contemporary disinformation campaigns Having spent nearly a decade working as a producer in the super-charged dystopian world of Russian television, by 2010 Peter Pomerantsev was exhausted. He left a country ‘where spectacle had pushed out sense, which left gut feeling as the only means […]
Document of the month: FO 898/128 Guy Woodward on Kem’s cartoons for North Africa ‘Adolf and His Donkey Benito’ is an Arabic-language cartoon booklet produced by PWE for distribution in North Africa in 1942 – it appears in file FO 898/128, ‘Propaganda Activities, Leaflet Translations (Arabic)’. Satirising the relationship between the German and Italian dictators, the […]
Document of the month: FO 898/514/49-50 Guy Woodward on the deployment of the Durham miners in wartime propaganda – and the role of a Durham MP in the PWE This leaflet appears in a file of leaflets and booklets produced for distribution in France. It is dated 28 December 1940 and is addressed from ‘des mineurs […]
Beatriz Lopez explores how Muriel Spark’s foremost mythologizers employ WWII myth-making techniques to impose their delusional understandings of the world on reality. Sefton Delmer’s second volume of autobiography Black Boomerang (1962) begins in a Frankfurt cinema in 1960. Delmer is watching a wartime thriller which shows the German army arduously fighting both the Allies and the Nazi party, […]
Documents of the month: FO 898/521 / FO 898/522 Guy Woodward As many recollections aired this week have testified, the D-Day landings – which took place exactly seventy-five years ago today – required an enormously technically sophisticated military operation. Aside from the Mulberry Harbours and the Pluto Pipeline however, it is worth remembering that the […]
Document of the month: FO 898/514 Guy Woodward This leaflet appears in the file ‘PWE French leaflets and booklets’ – produced for occupied France in 1941, it is a striking and unusual example of three-dimensional printed propaganda. The leaflet is made of card and is small – 12 ½ by 10 cm – it is […]
Document of the month: FO 898/449/259 Guy Woodward on the reception of propaganda leaflets in enemy and occupied Europe Most of our research so far in this project has focused on the production of propaganda, and specifically on the writers and artists involved in the work of the Political Warfare Executive. Accounts of PWE service by Sefton […]
Document of the month: FO 898/413 Guy Woodward finds echoes of current political debates in the PWE archive Since the referendum of 2016, Britain’s reputation in European centres of power has undoubtedly suffered. The painful progress of Brexit negotiations and the inability of the British government to marshal support for the withdrawal agreement in the febrile […]
Document of the month: FO 898/114 Guy Woodward traces Freya Stark’s involvement in wartime propaganda This memorandum appears in file FO 898/114, Special Operations Executive Activities. It is dated 15 July 1940 and records a meeting in Cairo between Freya Stark, the Assistant Information Officer to the Governorate of Aden (today part of Yemen), and Colonel Cudbert […]
Beatriz Lopez introduces a new series exploring Muriel Spark’s fictions of deception Most critics have identified The Hothouse by the East River (1973) as the novel which most closely depicts Muriel Spark’s work for the Political Warfare Executive – its central character Elsa, like Spark, works for the organisation, transcribing military intelligence and taking Prisoners Of War for […]
Beatriz Lopez finds traces of Spark’s wartime service in the PWE in two novels deeply concerned with the appearance of truth Muriel Spark’s interest in plausible truths owes much to her experience of black propaganda work. In her autobiography Curriculum Vitae (1992), she describes her role in the Political Warfare Executive which involved writing down intelligence provided by […]
Document of the month: FO 898/6/64-5 Guy Woodward traces the involvement of the creator of 007 in covert wartime propaganda This is a memo dated 18 January 1940 – it reports on a recent meeting of the ‘Consultative Committee’ of the Department of Publicity in Enemy Countries. This department was part of Electra House, a secret […]
Document of the month: FO 898/311/330-1 Guy Woodward on propaganda and the festive season Supposedly a time of peace and goodwill, for the wartime propagandists Christmas was a time to exploit fears and encourage enemy divisions. A memorandum in the PWE archive, written in the run up to Christmas 1940, suggests that the festive season is […]
Document of the month: FO 898/70/475-6 Guy Woodward investigates poet John Betjeman’s role in spreading rumours in neutral Ireland during the Second World War. This comes from a short run of documents in the PWE archive, found in the innocuously-named file FO 898/70 ‘Procedure, General Correspondence And Reports’. It is a copy of a note intended […]
Guy Woodward on the PWE’s production of rumours during the Second World War Imagine the scene: a bar in neutral Lisbon, autumn 1941. A stranger approaches and asks for a light. You fall into conversation – he’s a business figure of some kind, engaged in import and export, won’t go into specifics though. You talk about […]
Principal Investigator James Smith on Whitehall secrecy and the names used to conceal PWE operations One of the initial issues that this project faces is that, while a range of authors and intellectuals had some sort of connection to the Political Warfare Executive during the war, you would be hard pressed to find direct mention of the […]
