Sunday Graphic dated Sunday June 17th 1945
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William Joyce was born in America of Irish-American parents but the family moved to Ireland when he was an infant, and they stayed there until he was about 15 when they moved to England. In 1932 Joyce joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and went on to become Deputy leader of the Party. In 1937 Mosley and Joyce fell out and Joyce left to form the National Socialist League.
Just before the War he was tipped off that he was about to be detained as an ‘undesirable’, so he and his wife fled to Germany where they became naturalised German citizens. During the War Joyce, among others, made English language propaganda broadcasts for the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. His became the most familiar of the voices and a Daily Express journalist christened him Lord Haw Haw. The name stuck.
At the end of the War Joyce was arrested, brought back to England and, on the basis that he had an English passport, charged with high treason. Even though the passport was obtained under false pretences and he was born in America and was at the time of the broadcasts a German, he was found guilty and hanged on 3rd January 1946.
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The period between VE (Victory in Europe) Day in May 1945 and VJ (Victory over Japan) Day in August 1945 was a kind of false Peace. The papers were full of up-beat stories of soldiers coming home and ‘building a better Britain’ but almost ignored the on-going conflict in the Pacific. In this paper for instance the only reference to the Far East is this single column 3” piece on the back page.
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The first General Election since 1935 was due on 5th July 1945 and Winston Churchill (Conservative) was standing against Clement Attlee (Labour). That the Sunday Graphic supported the Conservatives is pretty obvious when you read the above article.
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Quoting the other side ‘out of context’ seems to have been fair game in the Election run-up.
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It was just this sort of propaganda that probably lost Churchill the Election. The general public (i.e. the voters) were fed up with the War and just wanted to get it over and done with and then forgotten.
‘The only picture of Churchill in an air-raid shelter. He seldom took cover’ – he just spent a lot of time in the well-protected and fortified War Rooms under Whitehall. Not that I blame him.
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Not exactly a great review for what is now regarded as a ‘classic’.
The phrase that jumped out for me, though, was ‘On the way home in the bus having seen…’ Leaving aside the surprise that the film reviewer of a leading Sunday paper went home on the bus, these words triggered many memories of going to and from local, and not so local, cinemas by good old-fashioned red London double-deckers.
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And we won the War!
Seriously, the last paragraph is misleading. There may have been no queues in Berlin but that was because there was nothing to queue for. German civilians in Berlin were starving.
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More nostalgia! Dripping sandwiches…Mmmmm!
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Britain had been running Palestine since 1922 and by 1945 was anxious to pull out due to the increasing violence between Jewish and Arabic communities, so in 1947 it handed the problem over to the United Nations who decided to partition the country into Israel and the Palestine Territories.
So the lucky recruit who joined the British Section of the Palestine Police Force in 1945 would have been in the middle, hated by Jew and Arab alike.
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The War in the Far East, Palestine troubles and the General Election - forget them all – we have cute kittens!!
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