‘Lord Haw-Haw’ (William Joyce) was Hitler’s secret weapon of the airwaves. Nightly through the Second World War Joyce’s nasal tones were transmitted to a delighted if sceptical audience. He had a large and enthusiastic following, who looked upon his catchphrase ‘Jairmany calling’ as the promise of comic relief as sure as that provided by Tommy Handley and the much-loved radio programme It’s That Man Again (ITMA).
Joyce, of course, was not a figure of fun; nor was he regarded as one by the British government which twisted and adjusted the law to bring him to a traitor’s death in 1946. Originally published in 1987, in this new approach to the case of William Joyce, Francis Selwyn looks both at the career of Joyce, the Irish-American-cum-Fascist bully-boy, and the changing nature of treason, altered by the events of the Second World War.
Was Joyce a traitor? Or was he sent to the scaffold as a necessary sacrifice? Behind the voice of the decadent aristocrat lurked the real William Joyce, a street-corner fanatic of the Fascist movement. Who was he? Hitler’s Englishman follows the path to Nazi treason and the final reckoning on the gallows of Wandsworth Prison.
Treason, as Francis Selwyn shows, is a crime which has been adapted to circumstances. After the Second Word War it was reshaped to embrace ‘new’ traitors, who had committed different kinds of treason. For Joyce, his loyalty to the ideals of Nazism transcended territory and nationality: he had no regrets about what he had done. His story, and the story of treason in the days of victory over Fascism, still have a powerful message for us today.