The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Meet Britain’s answer to Lord Haw-Haw
Sefton Delmer’s wartime broadcasts had Goebbels and co terrified – and his own BBC bosses on edge
HOW TO WIN AN INFORMATION WAR by Peter Pomerantsev
304pp, Faber, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£20, ebook £12.99
In the summer of 1941, Germans twiddling the dial of their state-issued radio sets heard an intriguing voice. Known only as “der Chef”, he was the star of a mysterious new station called GS1. He spoke with a Prussian accent and was as chauvinistic as they came. While he was an ardent supporter of the war, he was furious at how it was being waged. The regular armed forces were heroes – but they, and the German people, were being betrayed by the SS and Nazi apparatchiks. In salty barrack-room language, der Chef denounced the latter as sybarites and perverts, larding his denunciations with titillating descriptions of orgies and feasts.
Speculation raged about der Chef ’s identity, and the location of the GS1 transmitter. To his many listeners in the Reich, he sounded like an old-school military man, broadcasting perhaps from occupied France. In fact, the “outraged patriot” was a dissident Berliner called Peter Seckelmann, and the GS1 studios were to be found on the Woburn Abbey estate in Bedfordshire.
In total war, the radio waves were just another front in the struggle. The advent of mass communication encouraged all sides to believe they could get into the heads of the enemy population and seed them with morale-sapping misinformation. The hope was that, in time, this might induce at least apathy and cynicism, and perhaps outright opposition to the war effort. The British had noted the Germans’ susceptibility to Hitlerian hypnotism; and one man believed that he was uniquely placed to break the spell.
Denis (better known as “Tom”) Sefton Delmer was a journalistic star of the era. He was a 17-stone bon viveur who, when a row erupted over his expenses, explained that he could “only think clearly in a five-star hotel”. He appears, thinly disguised, as “Alistair Tudsbury” in Herman Wouk’s Second World War saga The Winds of War, a tweedenveloped English correspondent who knows everyone and pops up everywhere.
But Delmer was of Australian parentage and raised in Berlin; he only came to England when his academic father was kicked out during the First World War. As a boy, Delmer witnessed the Berliners’ hysterical joy upon the declaration of war, and although he was now classed as one of the enemy by his schoolmates, he tingled to the electricity of the crowds.
Later, he gained an unusual understanding of the Nazi psyche. Though he was an ardent anti-fascist, as the Berlin correspondent of Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express he charmed his way into the party hierarchy, befriending the Storm Trooper chief Ernst Röhm and travelling on Hitler’s aeroplane during the 1932 presidential election campaign.
Delmer began his wartime career with the BBC German Service, and soon alarmed his bosses by issuing an unauthorised and highly insulting rejection of Hitler’s public peace offer to Britain on July 19 1940. His talents were clearly better used elsewhere. He was recruited by the Political Warfare Executive, which was setting up multiple radio stations to subvert enemy listeners. But their broadcasts often took the form of pious appeals by exiled German progressives, urging their countrymen to return to democratic liberalism.
Delmer’s experiences taught him that the approach was futile. Instead, his mixture of righteous disgust and scandal, studded with enough verifiable fact to make it credible, won listeners. His relish in salacious detail was too much for the priggish socialist bigwig Stafford
Cripps, who denounced it as “the most foul and filthy pornography”, and tried to get him sacked. But dirty tricks were acceptable in a dirty war, and Delmer went on to oversee several other stations.
Peter Pomerantsev is a journalist, academic and human-rights activist with a particular interest in propaganda. He was born in Sovietera Ukraine, and his telling of Delmer’s story draws continuous parallels with the disinformation strategies currently pursued by Russia and China both at home and abroad. How To Win An Information War also seeks to learn lessons from Delmer’s tricks. Can an information war actually be won? Is it morally
acceptable to stoop to the same tactics as your opponents if your cause is just? Pomerantsev has more questions than answers: understandably so, given the confusion of the picture.
For all the ingenuity and resources that went into British black propaganda, the measurable returns were meagre. Delmer’s efforts alarmed his arch-rival Joseph Goebbels, but there’s no evidence that a single platoon downed rifles after hearing one of Delmer’s shows. One case that’s often cited is of a U-boat captain surrendering when he heard “Vicki”, one of Delmer’s characters, reading out congratulations to the wife whom he hadn’t seen for two years on her giving birth to twins. Yet the story sounds apocryphal, and Pomerantsev can find no corroboration for it.
In any case, judged by the evidence of the present, der Chef’s mutinous rantings stood little chance of subverting anyone. Delmer’s creation bears a striking resemblance to the real-life Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, who in 2023 bombarded social media with foul-mouthed attacks on the ineptitude and corruption of the Russian Ministry of Defence. The posts were enjoyed by millions around the world. But when he launched a mutiny last summer, his fan base stood by and watched. The putsch collapsed almost instantly. Not long afterwards, Prigozhin was dead.
Delmer was an ardent anti-fascist, but he charmed his way into the Nazi hierarchy
Patrick Bishop’s Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory will be published in July
remorseless in their eradication. Gow’s story starts well before the Normans and comes up to the present day: wolves are speared, poisoned, trapped, hunted with dogs, tricked into pits and tortured. A particularly unappealing method currently used in north America involves fitting a wolf with a radio collar, tracking it to its pack and then shooting them all. In one famous incident, a woman bashes in a wolf ’s skull with a skillet.
Yet, as Gow shows, we created a threatening and rapacious “shadow wolf”, brutally caricaturing and persecuting the real creature. He points out that dogs attack hundreds of people and thousands of sheep across Europe every year – man’s best friends slew 13,000 sheep in the Netherlands in 2018 – while wolves harmed no humans and, in the same year, just 138 sheep in Holland.
For all the sincerity and cogency of his argument that we have ruthlessly misunderstood wolves, and that place, people and planet all benefit from a sympathetic reassessment of them, and their reintroduction, Gow is never dull or worthy. Reading this book is like being in the company of a rambunctious descendant of Gerald Durrell, whose writings inspired Gow when he was young. Working in a Kent zoo with wolves rescued from a Romanian fur farm, Gow attempts to separate two cubs from their mother. If you can get hold of the chocolatey young before their eyes open you can tame them, he explains. Despite wielding a shield and a broom, Gow is expertly ambushed by two female wolves who snap the head off the broom and “strip it ragingly bare of bristles with great bites”. Beasts and man emerge with equal credit from the scrap; the cubs, Nadia and Mishka, become his friends.
The actual savagery in this story snarls in the shadows of the human imagination. The Saxon name for January was “Wulf monat”, possibly “a time when the starving packs were at their most dangerous”, he concedes, “but it may have been the fear of diminishing winter provisions which really bit deep.” Throughout, he aims to overpower the manhunter of folktale with fact: “A person in wolf country has a greater chance of being killed by a dog, lightning, bee sting or a car collision with a deer than being injured by a wolf,” states the International Wolf Centre in Minnesota. Wolf-watching in Yellowstone National Park generates $35million dollars a year. The empty quarters of the Scottish Highlands could support dozens of packs. But you sense that despite the immense potential value of the creatures, Gow suspects that our fear of the shadow wolf is ingrained.
Nevertheless, in place names, medieval sculpture, literature, weapons, art and artefacts, Hunt for the Shadow Wolf shows how painstakingly we commemorated our exterminated wolves. There is respect, even love, in the ways we regard them. And Gow’s book’s final paragraph, in which he describes a now-aged Nadia and her kind, “in pattern and in spirit... forever impressed in the landscape of Britain” offers a truly beautiful, and truly moving, conclusion.
‘A person in wolf country,’ we’re told, ‘is more likely to be killed by a bee sting’