December 30, 2016

Finest Hour 174, Autumn 2016

Page 48

Colin Holmes, Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce, Routledge, 2016, 494 pages, $24.95/£14.98. ISBN 978-1138888869

Review by Mark Klobas

Mark Klobas teaches history at Scottsdale College in Arizona and hosts a podcast for the New Books Network.


Searching for Lord Haw-HawDuring the Second World War, millions of Britons tuned in regularly to the radio broadcasts from Reichssender Hamburg, the English-language propaganda station operated by Nazi Germany. The network’s leading broadcaster was “Lord Haw-Haw,” who nightly rattled listeners with his seeming omniscience about events in Britain and his confident predictions of German victory. Though the sobriquet was applied to nearly all of the British broadcasters working for the Germans, it was most frequently associated with William Joyce, who for his activities on behalf of the Nazis was arrested after the war, tried for treason, and executed by the British—the last person in British history to be put to death for that crime.

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Joyce’s life was layered throughout with conflict and mystery, much of it generated by Joyce himself. One of the achievements of Colin Holmes’s new book is in the extent to which he unravels many of these mysteries using the available sources. To that end, the author engaged in years of research, interviewing many of the people who knew Joyce and researching recently declassified documents in archives throughout Britain as well as abroad. The result is a book that offers us our best understanding yet of the circumstances of Joyce’s life and the factors that led him to become both a fascist and a servant of the Third Reich.

Joyce was the son of an Irish businessman; his birth is usually traced to Brooklyn in 1906, though he often gave different ages and locations when it suited him. The family returned to Ireland in 1907, though their Unionist beliefs and young Joyce’s work as an informer for military intelligence forced him to abandon Ireland for England after the Irish War of Independence. Settling in London, Joyce quickly gravitated towards the budding fascist movement in the country. As a young man of considerable self-regard, he increasingly came into conflict with Oswald Mosley in the mid-1930s and was purged from the British Union of Fascists in 1937.

What proved the turning point of Joyce’s life was his decision on the eve of the Second World War to travel to Germany with his second wife Margaret and offer his services to the Nazi regime. Joyce soon established himself as their foremost English-language broadcaster—“the best horse in our stable,” in Joseph Goebbels’ judgment. Though never enjoying the listenership possessed by Winston Churchill—whom Joyce described in one broadcast as a “whisky-guzzling, cigar-chomping, bovine decadent liar”—he nonetheless waged a war of words against the prime minister throughout the conflict, right up to a final, drunkenly defiant screed recorded on the day Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Given the contentious and convoluted nature of Joyce’s life, Holmes’s book is an admirable and mostly successful effort to clarify our understanding of it. More than just an analysis of Joyce’s political career, it is also a study of the milieu of British fascist politics in which it took place, as well as Joyce’s own efforts to present key details so as to affirm his views of the world. Anyone seeking to understand the life and career of one of Churchill’s most prominent wartime adversaries would do well to start with this book, thanks to its measured judgments that are well supported by Holmes’s diligent research.

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