William Joyce, aka Lord Haw Haw, famous traitor of the second world war, was captured on this date in 1945. 10 facts about him.
He was born in America, in New York City on April 26th, 1906, but only lived there until he was three. His parents were of Irish origin and the family moved to Galway, where Joyce grew up.
He was almost assassinated by the IRA as a schoolboy. In 1921, during the Irish War of Independence, he was recruited by the British Army as a courier and an attempt was made on his life on his way home from school. This is how he ended up in England – the British army sent him to Worcestershire for his safety.
He became fascinated by fascism as a student, but the die was cast when he attended a political meeting and was attacked there by communists. The attack left a permanent scar from his earlobe to the corner of his mouth. This cemented his dedication to the right wing.
He joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1932 and did well there at first due to his skills at public speaking. Things went sour, though, and Mosley fired him. Furious, he split off from the BUF to found his own political party, the National Socialist League. Again, things went sour as he wanted to model the party on the German Nazi party which was too much even for the NSL. So Joyce disbanded the party and went to Germany in 1939. He’d obtained a British passport in 1938 by falsely claiming he was a British subject when he was actually an American citizen.
He was recruited by Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and given his own radio show, “Germany Calling.” Joyce was actually one of several English announcers on that show who were dubbed “Lord Haw Haw”.
At first, people in Britain found his broadcasts dissing the government quite entertaining in contrast to the rather dour programmes on the BBC. By 1940, it was estimated that “Germany Calling” had six million regular listeners and 18 million occasional listeners in the United Kingdom. A regular feature of his show was a segment called “Schmidt and Smith” in which he and a German colleague would engage in discussions about Britain, degrading and attacking the British government, people, and way of life.
Joyce was doing so well that he was given a pay raise and promoted to Chief Commentator of the English Language Service. However, when Nazi Germany invaded Denmark, Norway, and France in April and May of 1940, Joyce’s propaganda was notched up a gear. Now he was bigging up Germany, threatening Britain with invasion, and urged the country to surrender. He’d crossed a line, now, and the British public no longer saw his show as harmless satire but as an actual threat. Joyce’s constant contempt for and sarcasm about Britain no longer went down well and his efforts to undermine British morale were largely ineffective.
On 28 May 1945, Joyce was captured by British forces at Flensburg, the last capital of the Third Reich. Soldiers out gathering firewood spotted him, a dishevelled figure by now, and tried to start a conversation. They didn’t know who he was, at first, and attempted to communicate in French as well as English. When he spoke back, of course, they recognised his voice and asked if he was William Joyce. Joyce reached into his pocket for his fake British passport, which the soldiers interpreted as him reaching for a gun. One of them, Geoffrey Perry, reacted fast, and shot Joyce in the bum. Two intelligence officers then drove Joyce to a border post to hand him over to British military police.
He was found guilty of high treason at the Old Bailey and was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on 3 January 1946, aged 39. He was the penultimate person to be hanged in the UK for a crime other than murder. The last was Theodore Schurch, executed for treachery the following day at Pentonville.
Joyce was married twice. His first wife was called Hazel with whom he had a daughter, Heather. When that marriage ended, she re-married and her new husband was Oswald Mosley's bodyguard, Eric Piercey. His second wife was Margaret Cairns White. He married her in 1936 and she went with him to Germany. Joyce’s daughter, Heather, would as an adult speak about him and campaigned to get his body moved from an unmarked grave in Wandsworth to Galway. She condemned the work he did for Nazi Germany, but said that he was nevertheless a loving father to her.
No comments:
Post a Comment