10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lor d Haw Haw, July 2, 2003
This review is from: Lord Haw Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germany (Hardcover)
In Lord Haw-Haw, Dr Peter Martland, an accomplished historian of the modern period, packs in a swift, erudite and highly engaging account of the most reviled of wartime turncoats. Piecing together the William Joyce story from Public Record office archives an absorbing melange is created of a man drawn to violence, spirited to treason, and gifted with a perverse talent behind the radio microphone.
Fascinatingly, Martland spends a time describing the problems the British faced in bringing Joyce to the gallows for treason after the war. Did a born American-born man owe allegiance to the Crown in the first place? The tortured legal arguments on whether an alien could owe the King a loyal duty and the weight the security services placed on these worries is brought to the fore in Martland's writings. Without giving the game away, the shear effort a bankrupt British state made in gathering the necessary evidence in order to swat this ultimately pathetic figure strikes the reader.
And of Joyce's early life, the roots of Joyce's fascism beam through. Intellectually formidable, attracted by Mosley's shameless rhetoric, Joyce saw in Nazism an apt refuge for his anti-Semitic beliefs, and the institutionalization of the pub violence that permeated his life. Shunted from New York, to Ireland, to England, this is the tale of a wanderer whose Road to Damascus became a short stroll to a Berlin radio studio.
There are glimpses into the anxiety of the British government during the first couple of years of Joyce's broadcasts. To be sure, many saw him, with that odd, clipped, parvenu accent, as more of a comic than a Josef Goebbels, but nonetheless this was a radioman heard widely over the whole of England ; akin to today, any media coverage was good media coverage.
As the Nazi state crumbled, the sad last months of Joyce's employment in Germany are recorded in detail by Martland. Ever the Hitler believer, a rambling, drunken fool, gabbing into the microphone was what the end of the Reich did to Joyce. I like this part of the narrative, Joyce and precocious wife running from radio studio to radio studio always the transmitting sheep for the fast decaying Germany.
This new series from the National Archives, as the dusty Public Record Office has been rechristened, is formidable in that each title has half a book full of documents from the actual files kept. In Joyce's case the lame points of appeal in his trial for treason are printed ; so too is a spurious note by
some soldiers in liberated Europe on how Joyce accidentally happened to be shot when fleeing after the war.
Odious characters always excite. More so when they are dangerously formidable speakers, even if their crackpot ideas are laughable. More so when as intellectuals they leave democratic nations to find a hoped for comfort in the Berlin of 1939. I left this book with a fecund pity for William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw. The Irish immigrant attempting to be a patrician ; the self-taught masterly student attracted by the Mosley din ; the sneering womanizer charming in person, plain nasty in the airwaves.
Lord Haw-Haw is fantastic reading for those with an interest in betrayers, in espionage, and for those who want a distilled, non-pretentious, crystallized narrative of this complex figure. Refreshing in its clear style, accommodating to the plain curious, as I was, Martland in this project has done a fine job.
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