The intention of ‘Black’ Propaganda is to push its audience in a certain direction without them realising it. To do this, it mixes facts with liberal dollops of half-truths and lies. Often it gives the impression that it was created by those it aims to discredit.
The man in charge of British Black Propaganda in World War Two was Sefton Delmer. Delmer was very well known during the 1930s. He worked in Germany for the Daily Express, the newspaper which had, at that time, the biggest circulation in the world. He had been born in Germany, of Australian parents, and German was his first language. He reported on Hitler’s rise to power; meeting the Nazi leader on several occasions. Hitler, seeking to influence Britain, liked to deal with Delmer as he spoke native German, understanding every nuance. He used him to gauge popular feeling in Britain – asking him for example: “Does Britain want the German royal family (deposed after the First World War) restored?” Delmer even flew on Hitler’s private plane. He filmed one of the trips, from Tempelhoff Airport, in 1932. It’s on YouTube. Hitler is accompanied by his propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Sefton Delmer ('Tom to his many friends)
Delmer was, however, on the side of the angels. During the war, he used his considerable talents to broadcast from England against the Nazis.
Joseph Goebbels was the man Delmer was up against. It was he who had elevated Hitler to the status of a god dedicating ‘Party Days’ and shrines to him and much more. Goebbels, could fool most of the people some of the time; some of them all of the time. He reckoned that after an hour of speaking to an audience; “I can make them climb trees if I feel like it”.
Quite apart from which, Goebbels had direct control of every newspaper and radio station throughout occupied Europe. If anyone didn’t toe the party line, they went to a concentration camp for ‘re-education’ via starvation, the whip and often the bullet.
It is a sign of the desperate military state that the British were in that we had to explore all avenues to fight Germany; whose land army the country had no hope of defeating. So when he came to England, Sefton Delmer, under MI6, set up ‘black’ broadcasting. The headquarters of the operation was at Wavendon Towers, now in Milton Keynes (and where I come in, for this was where the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, for which I was the IT manager, had its first head office); from there, and the later recording facility at Milton Bryan, recordings were sent (on vinyl) to be broadcast from Potsgrove (near Watling Street) or Gawcott (near Buckingham). These sites were serious affairs. Gawcott had around 20 aerials, though all are long gone.
The shows they transmitted, purporting to be broadcast from Europe, provided first class light entertainment; featuring, for instance, the music of Glenn Miller - they even had a forces’ sweetheart. They had a huge following in the German armed forces; indeed they were the favourite radio stations of the German submarine (U-boat) crews. Many Germans recognised them for what they were - British propaganda - but listened to them anyway because they were so good. A spin-off was that they gave British intelligence an almost supernatural aura in the eyes of the German navy; for they would report, for example, the destinations of German naval patrols, the fact that so-and-so’s wife had just had a baby back in Germany (odd that, as her husband had been at sea for a year), even the scores of the latest inter-ship football match. (The recording and broadcasting of black propaganda was only part of the work of its parent organisation, the Political Warfare Executive – PWE. PWE also dealt with forgery and white propaganda. It’s headquarters was at Woburn Abbey.)
The recording studio at Milton Bryan, on the Woburn estate. Currently looking rather sorry for itself. It is of major historic importance – and should (and probably will) be restored.
Our answer to Goebbels …Gawcott broadcasting studios post-war. This building, although much modified, still exists. Thanks to Steve Morton, who worked there, for this photo.
But Sefton Delmer didn’t have an easy time in his fight against Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels even claimed that when the sun shone it was ‘Fuhrer weather’. If you can persuade your listeners that the sun shines out of your leader’s …eyes, you’re a good propagandist. And, of course, Goebbels was backed by naked force.
To try and make the followers of a deluded and brutal religion question their beliefs is not only virtually impossible but dangerous and mostly pointless: which is why most visitors to Germany raised their arm in the Hitler salute.
This part of the Whaddon Web was, perhaps, the least effective. Nor, I think, was that something for Delmer to be ashamed of. Racist evil was the very lifeblood of the Nazi regime. Forget reasoning, forget lying: only brute force could drive out these devils. Only then could their slaves be freed. The trick was not to become a devil oneself in the process. In this – and it was no small victory – Delmer, and the western powers, succeeded.
If they didn’t achieve a great deal in winning the war (although they did help in the surrender of the Italian navy), these transmitters came into their own towards the end of the conflict. American broadcasting technology was the best in the world and Whaddon set up the most powerful site of them all using American aerials. It gave this site the codename ‘Aspidistra’ (after a popular song ‘the biggest aspidistra in the world’). It was in Crowborough, in Sussex.
Originally Aspidistra was to have been built near Whaddon; but there wasn’t any space to be found; and anyway there was so many aerials locally that the authorities thought that adding new and even bigger ones were an open invitation to the German Air Force (the Luftwaffe) to take a (rather belated) interest in North Buckinghamshire. Erected at the second attempt (the original aerials went to the bottom to a German torpedo in their passage across the Atlantic), Aspidistra was used, among other things, to swamp the air waves over Germany with fake instructions. So powerful was this transmitter that German attempts to jam it didn’t work; they merely blocked out their own radio stations. German night–fighter controllers could only listen helplessly as their pilots were routed away from the Allied bomber swarms.
In my next article, I shall write about yet another of Whaddon’s responsibilities; perhaps the most chilling of them all. This was to provide radio communications to the men who would have been ‘fighting them in the fields’ should the Nazis have managed the invasion of Britain.
This article is an expanded extract from my book, The Intelligence Zone. If you enjoyed it, you may well enjoy the book, which is available from Amazon.
©Alan Biggins August 2023
Create Your Own Website With Webador