The Voice of Treason: British Misfit to Nazi Mouthpiece
BOOK REVIEW: RADIO TREASON: The Trials of Lord Haw-Haw, the British Voice of Nazi Germany
By Rebecca West/ McNally Editions
Reviewed by: Nicholas E. Reynolds
The Reviewer — Nicholas Reynolds, served in the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantry officer and historian and later had a career with the Central Intelligence Agency as an operations officer and historian for the CIA Museum. He has a PhD from Oxford University and is the author of Need to Know, World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence (Mariner, 2022), a New Yorker “Best of 2022” selection. More detail on his writing and background can be found on his website.
REVIEW — This slim volume, Radio Treason, based on the work of renowned British writer, the late Rebecca West, covers the life and trial of William Joyce, infamous for broadcasting Nazi propaganda in English to Britain during World War II. West delved into his unusual background: American-born to an Irish father, then raised and educated in England, where he received first class honors from Birkbeck, University of London. In the 1930s he became a leading member of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, displaying considerable skills as an orator and organizer.
Though as violently anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik as any other British fascist, Joyce eventually fell out with Mosley. He fled to Germany just ahead of a wartime detention order. Berlin offered him work as a broadcaster. Six days a week for most of the war, he devoted his energies to retailing Nazi lies and plugging for a German-British front against Bolshevism. His last “Germany Calling” broadcast was on April 30, 1945, the day Hitler committed suicide. He was easily caught by the advancing Allies; a British officer recognized his voice, jeering and posh at the same time. Taken back to London, he was tried and hanged for treason.
West covered the trial as a journalist for The New Yorker, which published her dispatches in 1949. The present volume is essentially an expanded reprint of the dispatches with an introduction by American journalist Katie Roiphe that likens Joyce to latter-day extremists.
Why would a modern intelligence officer care about this book? Arguably because West set out to tell the reader why a person would betray his country. Pursued here and in her later books, especially The Meaning of Treason (1947), her basic argument is that Joyce was alienated from British society; being an outcast fueled his treachery. Unlike the aristocrat Mosley, who always remained a part of the political and social fabric of Britain, Joyce never did fit in, in the UK or anywhere else. If you want to understand treason, West seems to be saying, you need to understand class structure.
That traitors are people who don’t fit in — is a conclusion that will not surprise many. Instead, this book is interesting as a document about a particular case at a particular time, a footnote to World War II history and a reflection of Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. While her writing, celebrated during her lifetime, will strike many American readers as long-winded and old-fashioned, West’s courtroom scenes are powerful, as are some of her word portraits. She allows Joyce to speak for himself. We see for ourselves just how good a communicator the man was. Still, few of the many Britons who listened to him during the war were swayed by his message. Even the fellow convicts in the prison at Wormwood Scrubs objected so strongly to his presence that he had to be moved, rejected once again by society, only this time by the bottom rung.
Radio Treason earns a solid 3 out of 4 trench coats
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