William Joyce
was not a pretty sight. In the dock of the Old Bailey he cut a pitiful
figure, stoop-shouldered and ferret-faced, with thinning hair, a twisted
nose and a small, thin-lipped mouth. His eyes were cold and bitter,
the right side of his face puckered by a scar, the souvenir of a 1920s
brawl with left-wing hoodlums.
An Overdue Bill
It was September 1945, and Joyce, charged with treason, was on trial
for his life. Throughout World War II he had broadcast from Nazi Germany,
beaming a stream of propaganda and abuse toward Great Britain. He
had spent the war trying his best to aid a Nazi victory by destroying
British morale. He had failed miserably, and now, in Number One Court
at the Old Bailey, his bill had come due.
The presiding judge placed the little square of black silk upon
his white wig and announced, "William Joyce, the sentence of the court
upon you is that you be taken from this place...to a place of execution,
and that you be there hanged by the neck until you be dead....And
may the Lord have mercy on your soul."
A Traitor's Fate
And so "Lord Haw Haw" heard his fate. Joyce had earned his nickname
early in World War II. His pompous, unctuous radio voice, a burlesque
of British upper-class accents, was familiar to every Briton old enough
to hear his regular broadcasts. He had seemed almost larger than life
on the air. Now observers saw him for what he was, a bitter little
man, pallid and twisted, a traitor at the end of his rope.
His wartime broadcasts had created a sensation, at least for a time.
They were certainly treasonous by any standard. And they were ugly
as well. For Joyce positively groveled in his admiration for Adolf
Hitler, regaling anybody who would listen with the sort of vicious
claptrap that journalist William L. Shirer heard Joyce spouting to
SS guards at the broadcast studio, offensive Nazi jargon about "the
necessity of liquidating all Jews everywhere."
Titanic Hatreds
For among his many nasty attributes, Joyce was also an antisemite,
a rabid hater of everything Jewish. He regularly spouted his poison
on the air, and it pervaded Twilight Over England, a book he
wrote in Germany in early 1940. The book was slim, no more than 50,000
words, for which the German foreign office paid Joyce 10,000 Reichmarks.
When he was not fawning over Hitler, cursing the Jews or damning
the English establishment, Joyce spent his time attacking the hearts
and minds of the British public. He gloated over reports of merchant
ship sinkings and the drownings of English seamen, and gleefully warned
of further raids by German aircraft. Sometimes he also announced the
names of English towns destroyed by the Luftwaffe--a ploy that
lost much of its effectiveness when it developed that some of the
"destroyed" towns had not been attacked at all.
Shirer remarked on Joyce's "titanic hatred of Jews and an equally
titanic one for the capitalists." Joyce lectured Shirer on the Nazi
movement, which he said would liberate mankind from the domination
of what he called the "plutocratic capitalists." He considered himself,
Shirer remembered, a "liberator of the working class."
A Nasty National Joke
Through all his broadcasts the same message was repeated. The British
people were being deceived, he said, misled into war and bloodshed
by their leaders. Hitler meant Britain no harm, of course, only a
place in the new world, peace, order and pride. If only the British
knew, Joyce ranted, "The people of England will curse themselves for
having preferred ruin from [Winston] Churchill to peace with Hitler."
In England, Joyce's audience was seldom impressed but often amused.
The more people laughed at Joyce's diatribes, the more his marginal
effectiveness declined. His dignity received its coup de grâce
when Jonah Barrington, of London's Daily Express, began
to call Joyce "Lord Haw Haw." The name caught on with the press across
England, and before long, few English people called Joyce anything
else. Joyce became a joke even on the Continent, where, in 1939, Paris-Midi
somewhat fuzzily reported on a traitor called "Lord Ah! Oh!" who
was really--Paris-Midi said--one Jonah Barrington.
Joyce's smarmy, insulting voice got him lampooned in the music halls
as well. "Lord Haw Haw the Humbug of Hamburg" was only one of the
songs that ridiculed Joyce's sinister posturings.
Signing His Own Death Warrant
In September 1940, Joyce became a German citizen. Now nothing he
did in Germany could be treasonous to the country of his birth--the
United States--because America and Germany were still at peace. He
may well have thought that his new citizenship removed any responsibility
to the British government. But it did not. As early as the summer
of 1940, his own bitter, angry words had already signed his death
warrant.
Joyce was captured outside Flensburg, Germany, on May 28, 1945.
Always clever, at war's end he had tried to disappear into civilian
society. He was recognized when he happened to pass two British officers
on the street and spoke to them in English. His famous voice gave
him away. One officer instantly identified him as William Joyce, wanted
throughout the British Occupation Zone. Joyce made a further mistake
by reaching into his pocket. One of the Englishman, uncertain of Joyce's
motive, promptly shot him through both legs. There was a sort of appropriateness
to the incident--the officer who shot him was Jewish. Wounded and
forlorn, Joyce passed into British captivity. Back in England, he
was charged with three counts of treason.
The first two counts alleged that Joyce, as a "British subject,"
adhered to the king's enemies outside of the realm, that is, in Germany.
The third count went to the heart of the matter, alleging that Joyce,
as a person owing allegiance to the crown, had adhered to the king's
enemies outside the realm by broadcasting between September 18, 1939,
and July 2, 1940 (the date on which his British passport expired).
Change Of Nationality
His defense was ingenious. Joyce's brilliant counsel, Gerald Slade,
argued persuasively that nobody who was not British could be guilty
of treason against the crown. With the prosecution's concurrence,
the trial was postponed from July to September so that the defense
could have proof of Joyce's American citizenship sent from the United
States.
Once the evidence was marshaled, it seemed that Joyce was in fact
an American. He had been born on Herkimer Street in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
in 1906, to an English mother. His father, Irish-born, had been naturalized
back in 1894, which made Joyce a citizen of the United States.
Proper British Upbringing
When Joyce was 3, his parents moved to Ireland and the family's
troubles began. They were loyalists, staunch supporters of the crown,
and in Galway and Mayo those sentiments aroused the hatred of much
of the population. Locals eventually burned the Joyce home and the
family was forced to move to England. Young William went to school
there, graduating from Birkbeck College. He did well in his studies,
joined the Conservative Society and even acted in amateur theatrics.
In 1922 he applied for admission to the London University Officers'
Training Corps, "with a view," Joyce wrote, "to being nominated...for
a commission in the Regular Army." As part of his application, he
asserted that he was British, denying any connection with the United
States. He also alleged--truthfully or not--that he had some military
experience against "the Irish guerrillas." This alleged martial experience,
however, did not get him into the army.
Conflict And Brawling
In 1923 Joyce joined a nascent political party called British Fascisti
Ltd., and was soon engaged in street fighting against Communists and
Socialists. Whatever else Joyce was, he was no coward, and he apparently
thrived on a fairly steady diet of conflict and brawling. He became
an organizer of some ability and a powerful street corner orator.
One Fascist sympathizer described him as a "Brilliant writer, speaker
and exponent of policy...[who] addressed hundreds of meetings, always
at his best, always revealing the iron spirit of fascism in his refusal
to be intimidated by violent opposition." He could move crowds, and
did, with what Dame Rebecca West called his "harsh, sneering, cajoling,
denatured, desperate voice."
For all his rabble-rousing, Joyce was an intelligent man of extensive
education who loved to show off his learning by peppering his writing
with references to British authors Thomas Carlyle or Thomas Macaulay.
Even so, he impressed one police officer who knew him as the "old
lag" convict type, the sort of man who "didn't fit in."
Brief Fascist Heyday
In 1933 Joyce switched his allegiance to the British Union of Fascists
(BUF), led by magnetic Sir Oswald Mosley. Joyce was useful to Mosley,
using his considerable skills in organization and oratory to gain
recruits and inflame the faithful. He became Mosley's chief of propaganda,
and even detractors described his harangues as filled with hatred
and violence but powerful and moving nonetheless. One wrote that he
was "Thin, pale, intense...never before, in any country, had I met
a personality so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative,
so vitriolic....We listened in a kind of frozen hypnotism to this
cold, stabbing voice...[his face] luminous with hate....I felt as
if I had seen something unclean."
And so, for a while at least, this bitter, angry little man was
in his glory. Until the heyday of the BUF began to wane late in the
'30s, the Union drew substantial audiences, and they listened to Joyce.
On one occasion in 1934, he addressed a rally of perhaps 12,000 people
in the Albert Hall. That day must have been food for Joyce's emaciated
ego: There was all the panoply of flags and bunting, even the Nazi
"Horst Wessel Lied" (with English words) thumped out by a brass
band.
Next: To The
Hilt
Copyright (c) 2000, PRIMEDIA Enthusiast Publications,
Inc.
