SOMEWHAT SURPRISINGLY THE WESTERN ALLIES had no set plan of action to follow the invasion of Sicily. At a meeting in Washington during May 1943, Churchill urged the Americans to agree to an attack on Italy. Having been pressganged into Torch and Husky the US Chiefs of Staff were less than enthused about the prospect of more operations in the Mediterranean. However, with the sudden collapse of Italian forces after Husky and the fall of Mussolini on 24 July, Eisenhower began planning a dash into southern Italy. It was hoped this would knock Italy out of the war altogether.
A two-pronged attack was planned. In Operation Baytown the British would cross the Straits of Messina on 3 September and pin down Axis troops in Calabria. Six days later, Operation Avalanche would see US troops land at Salerno with the objective of capturing the port of Naples. To cover these operations A Force developed Plan Boardman. This aimed at weakening German forces in the south and centre of the Italian peninsula while pinning down Axis reserves in the Balkans and mainland Greece.
Essentially this was an extension of the objective set out by Barclay. The British were said to be planning to take Sardinia while a Franco-American force was heading for Corsica. From these locations the Allies would be in a position to strike against either the south of France or the north-west Italian coastline between Genoa and Livorno. At the same time the British Twelfth Army in Egypt was to be portrayed as preparing for an operation against the Peloponnese. The only real additions to earlier deceptions included an attack on Apulia on the heel of Italy by the British III Corps. Codenamed Boothby, this operation also included feints against Gofore on the south Italian peninsula using the full range of signals and sonic deception, plants, decoy bombing and naval activity.
Plan Boardman also saw the arrival of another double agent channel in the Mediterranean. Based in Tangiers for a number of years, James Ponsonby was an English commercial attache and member of SOE. He had a bad reputation and most believed he was a hopeless, washed-up, miserly drunk whose finances were in a precarious state. Despite, or rather because of this reputation, in July 1943 A Force recruited Ponsonby as a channel for passing deception, codenaming him Guinea after the British coin.
Tangiers was one of those exotic neutral backyards stalked by secret services of all nations. It was assumed that the Germans already knew Guinea had money problems; all A Force had to do was provide him with a plausible source of military information. Over the coming weeks Guinea became friendly with the British military attache. The two men started going out together and drinking immoderately. In fact both men could hold their drink quite well, and so they play-acted as a pair of drunks. After a suitable interval Guinea approached a member of the German consulate in Tangiers named Goeritz. Pleading poverty, Guinea told the German that he was willing to betray his country in order to pay off his debts. Goeritz told the Englishman that he would pay hard cash for military secrets. Thus another channel for deception was born.
Their first meeting was in the hinterland of Tangiers. Guinea drove his motor car in one direction, Goeritz the other. When the two cars met, the windows were wound down and documents passed from Guinea to the German, who then sped off. The arrangement remained the same for future exchanges, of which there were many. Later on, Goeritz admitted to Guinea that on their first rendezvous there was a German armed guard hiding in the luggage compartment of his car. Guinea did not reveal that he had taken a similar precaution at the meeting. As he drove to the rendezvous he had an armed guard hiding in the back of his car too.1
At the beginning of September A Force gave Guinea a set of false invasion plans. These revealed that the Allies had abandoned the idea of attacking Greece for the time being and that the invasion of Italy would begin on 12 September with landings in the Pisa—Livorno area. These landings would be preceded by landings in other parts of the country, which were designed to draw German forces from the true objectives. Goeritz was impressed and paid Guinea 2.5 million francs for his services before sending the message high priority to Berlin. There is an interesting sequel to this episode. ISOS proved that Guinea had succeeded and it is recorded that he was awarded the MBE in recognition. However, after his work covering Salerno he was sent to Lisbon on a mission for SOE, where he went off the rails. When told to return to London, he had a breakdown, threatened to kill himself and claimed he would be shot on his return. He demanded ?110,000 in compensation, otherwise he would make certain ‘disclosures’ to the Germans. Eventually he agreed to go back, whereupon Johnny Bevan informed Guy Liddell there might be a case for locking him up. Liddell was more cautious and pointed out that if he was locked up, he would have to be released again at the end of the war. After meeting Guinea, Liddell concluded he was ‘quite mad’.2
Another key performer in the deception plan was the French Forty Committee agent Gilbert. With the Allied invasion of Italy under way Gilbert reported to the Abwehr that there was an opportunity to get his sub-agent Le Duc posted to Sicily as part of the commission for repatriating Italians. The way the system now worked was that A Force fed material to Le Duc on Sicily and he copied the information in secret ink and posted it back to Gilbert. The Frenchman then dutifully encoded the material and passed it to his distrusted radio operator, who was still unaware of the part Gilbert played for the Allies.3
On 15 August Le Duc reported information he had picked up from members of Montgomery’s staff. Apparently the British were looking to land at Crotone on the south-west corner of the Gulf of Taranto. He repeated this warning on 20 August, adding that the troops earmarked for the operation were assembling near Siracusa. The idea was to draw two German divisions away from the Straits of Messina and north out of Calabria. When Montgomery landed in Calabria on 3 September, A Force used its channels to indicate this was only a feint and the real attack would be made against the Gulf ofTaranto. The idea of this was to draw German divisions south away from Naples and Salerno before the American Avalanche landings, which were scheduled for 9 September.
The net result of the deception plans was not what had been intended. A Force found it increasingly difficult to concentrate German minds on their deception targets. There were so many uncontrolled leaks and rumours doing the rounds in North Africa and the neutral countries that A Force messages were lost in the noise. From the German point of view everywhere appeared threatened at once, so their policy became one of holding back mobile reserves and waiting to see what the Allies actually did before committing to action. When Montgomery landed, the German commander in Italy, Field Marshal Kesselring, was not taken in by the ruse. Rather than move south to contest the landings, Kesselring ordered his troops in Calabria to fall back in front of Montgomery’s advance. Therefore, when Avalanche began, Kesselring counter-attacked on 12 September and very nearly succeeded in driving the Allies back into the sea.
One of the key Allied objectives during the invasion of Italy was to prevent the Germans from seizing the Italian fleet. There is some evidence that a curious deception ruse was used to ensure that this did not take place. On 10 September 1943 an announcement was broadcast that the Italian fleet should sail to Malta where it would be ‘liberated’ from the Germans. Under no circumstances, the announcer said, should patriotic Italians allow their ships
To fall into German hands, and any order to scuttle their ships was to be ignored as having come directly from Hitler. By all accounts, the Italian ships were said to have obliged, sailed out of Livorno and surrendered to Admiral Cunningham and General Eisenhower at the appointed rendezvous point.
The mysterious broadcasts came from a station calling itself Radio Livorno. On the air since 27 July 1943, it appeared as if the station was being run by members of a secret patriotic association within the Italian Navy opposed to Mussolini and Hitler. The mastermind of the operation was said to be an officer who passed messages to a loyal NCO who then broadcast them from a radio room in one of the Italian warships in the port of Livorno. Actually, Radio Livorno was a put-up job. It was the brainchild of British Naval Intelligence’s Admiral Godfrey.4 The scripts were passed to a top-secret propaganda organization and read by a Maltese officer named Randolph Imozzi. To what extent the Italian Navy suspected Radio Livorno was a front for the Allied leadership is unclear; in any case they were won over by it and denied Germany its ships.
Radio Livorno was one of a number of radio stations the Allies used for communicating with Axis servicemen and civilians. Unlike the obvious foreign service broadcasts of the BBC, these services actually pretended they were German stations emanating from within the Reich itself. Whereas the BBC took a humanist approach, appealing to the sense of reason of those sympathetic to or ruled by the Axis, the ‘Black’ stations appealed to baser human virtues: self-interest, vice and good entertainment.
Although the main aim of psychological warfare was to lessen the morale of the enemy and to promote anti-Nazi resistance, Black propaganda became a very useful channel for deception purposes, in particular as a channel for putting over rumours, or ‘sibs’ as they were known, from the Latin sibilare ‘to whisper’. The British organization primarily responsible for this was the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) and the leading exponent of counterfeit radio broadcasts was Denis Sefton Delmer, the journalist and broadcaster who had defied Hitler’s so-called ‘last peace offer’ to Britain in 1940.
When last mentioned, Delmer was working for the BBC German service, giving German soldiers English lessons as part of the ‘burning sea’ rumour campaign. Since then he had been recruited by PWE and given free rein to sow discontent among German listeners without scruple or regard to the moral constraints that had handcuffed him while working for the BBC.
Axis audience.5This first radio station was GS1, or Gustav Siegfried Eins, to give it its full title. The initials ‘GS1’ were entirely meaningless, except that German listeners might read something into them. In German ‘GS1’ could stand for General Staff One (Generalstab Eins) or Secret Transmitter One (Geheimsender Eins). Although the broadcasts could be heard by German civilians, they did not address them directly. Delmer’s idea was that people would tune in to eavesdrop on what sounded like the transmission of a clandestine military organization with cells across occupied Europe. Furthermore, the station would be staunchly patriotic and not critical of Hitler. It would instead target local party officials who controlled Germany in Hitler’s name and who were becoming increasingly corrupt as the war went on. By adopting this approach, Delmer hoped to hint at a split between the upper echelons of the Army and the Nazi party organs, including the Gestapo. The Army, the broadcasts would demonstrate, was convinced that while it was out fighting the war, party villains were ruining the country behind its back. This had been the Army’s excuse in 1918 — that it had lost the war because it had been stabbed in the back by those at home. In that sense it played on some very real fears.
The front man for GS1 was a character Delmer called ‘Der Chef — the chief. From his pre-war days in Berlin, Delmer remembered how Hitler’s lackeys had referred to him in this way and so this was a private joke in homage to that memory. The ‘Der Chef character was played by a Berliner called Peter Seckelmann. A writer of detective stories before the war, Seckelmann had come to Britain in 1938 because of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. He enlisted in the Auxiliary Pioneer Corps under the name Paul Sanders and spent the early war years defusing German bombs with time fuses. As if bomb disposal was not hazardous enough, Seckelmann applied to join the SOE and volunteered to be parachuted behind German lines as a secret agent. Instead, he was introduced to Sefton Delmer and recruited as the voice of GS1.
Seckelmann had a noticeable Berlin drawl to his accent, making him perfect in Delmer’s mind for impersonating the type of German officer found in the old guard regiments in the German capital. The scripts provided for Seckelmann were littered with salty expletives and, to begin with at least, descriptions of acts that bordered on the pornographic. David Garnett’s official history of PWE explains the reason for this approach: ‘The method of imparting news items designed for this purpose was to be that of such newspapers as the Daily Mirror, which, by denouncing vice, secure a large circulation among those who wish to read about it.’6
Der Chef s first broadcast took place on the evening of 23 May 1941. Delmer and Seckelmann drove to a secret recording studio in a house in the village of Aspley Guise in Bedfordshire. The broadcast began with the repetitive announcement in German of the station’s call sign. ‘Here is Gustav Siegfried Eins... here is Gustav Siegfried Eins...’ After 45 seconds, Seckelmann announced that he had a message for ‘Gustav Siegfried 18’. The message was in an easily breakable code announcing that someone named Willy should meet Jochen in the Union theatre. Delmer hoped that this message would be intercepted by the Nazi Security Service (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RHSA, Main Security Office of the Reich) and would lead to chaos as Gestapo agents were despatched to every one of Germany’s many Union theatres looking for the two men.
With the preliminaries dispensed with, Der Chef began his broadcast in earnest. Twelve days before, Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, had landed in Scotland. Der Chefwas not pleased by this and launched a tirade against Hess and the other weak-kneed ‘parlour Bolsheviks’ posing as the Nazi leadership. In a line that was specifically designed to convince German listeners that the broadcast was not a piece of British propaganda, Der Chef described the British leader as ‘that flat-footed bastard of a drunken old Jew, Churchill’. He then predicted that Hess would be bled dry of information by the British, that Hitler had nothing to do with the Deputy Fuhrer’s decision to fly to Scotland and arrests of other traitors would no doubt follow soon. He ended the transmission with a promise that the broadcast would be repeated on the same wavelength hourly at seven minutes to the hour.
After recording the piece, one of the recording engineers asked Delmer if GS1 should have a signature tune played before the transmission. Delmer agreed and chose a suitable piece of pomp from the same German folk song used on the Nazi’s own Deutschlandsender radio station.
As Seckelmann grew in confidence and became more practised in the projection of his voice through a microphone, he took on more of the script-writing himself, introducing colloquial Berlin phrases to give the broadcasts more authenticity. One thing that worried Delmer about the broadcast was the lack of an aide-de-camp to Der Chef. A man of Der Chefs standing ought to be announced before speaking: such a formality would never have been overlooked by a real German officer. In later broadcasts this sidekick role was played by Johannes Reinholz, a German journalist who had fled Berlin with his Jewish wife on the eve of war in 1939. At the beginning of every broadcast Reinholz’s clipped, metallic baritone voice would make all the official announcements before announcing Seckelmann’s character with the catchphrase ‘Es spricht der Chef — ‘The Chief speaks’.
To keep the feel of the broadcasts as contemporary as possible, Delmer used a wide range of news and intelligence sources on daily life in the Reich. Scripts were based on interviews and reports from refugees, German newspapers and magazines, censorship intercepts, captured mail, and letters and diaries found discarded on the bodies of dead German soldiers or taken from the wounded. Delmer was also provided information from the highly top-secret Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) reports on recently captured prisoners of war. This information was often obtained clandestinely by secret microphones concealed in the POW cages and even hidden in the gardens where the POWs would walk to talk in privacy. All these reports allowed Der Chef to talk about real people and real situations occurring behind enemy lines and to make use of the most up-to-date German service jargon and slang.
This accuracy convinced many of Der Chef’s growing German audience that he was broadcasting from inside the Reich, moving from hideout to hideout to avoid capture by the Gestapo. One theory even placed Der Chefs transmitter in a barge on the River Spree. Before the United States entered the war, the staff in the US embassy in Berlin were avid listeners to the show, believing that it indicated the existence of an opposition group within the heart of the Nazi empire. In a secret report to Washington on 8 September 1941, the Americans noted that the radio station had a large German audience and that the information given was in such detail that if false, it would be easily discredited. The station operated daily on the 31.5 metre band and took to the air seven minutes before the hour. The German authorities had tried to interfere with the signal, but during air raids (when German broadcasts went off air so that they could not be used by Allied bomber crews as beacons) GS1 would come across very clearly.
The embassy staff speculated that the station was worked automatically with records, and that when a transmitter was found, another was set up elsewhere to replace it. As for the content of the broadcasts, the report said:
Using violent and unbelievably obscene language, this station criticized the actions of the Party and certain party-favoured officers, especially the SS. Superficially it is violently patriotic and is supposed by many German officers to be supported by the German Wehrmacht in secret.7
Despite the fact that GS1’s lewd, guttural approach was judged highly entertaining by its German listeners, others were less impressed. Although the transmissions were intended for a German audience, some locals living
Close to the transmission sites occasionally picked up GS1 on their wireless sets. About a year after GS1 had been broadcasting, Der Chef was brought to the attention of the politician Sir Stafford Cripps, a popular ‘silver spoon’ Marxist whom Churchill found useful in negotiating with Stalin. A devout Christian, Cripps described PWE as ‘that beastly pornographic organization’ and complained this style of broadcasting would only appeal to the ‘thug section of the Nazi party’ and that, in his opinion, PWE should instead concentrate on broadcasts that gave hope and appealed to ‘good Germans’.8 After hearing about a particularly lewd GS1 script involving a German admiral, his mistress, five drunken German sailors and a lump of butter, Cripps complained to the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden: ‘If this is the sort of thing that is needed to win the war, why, I’d rather lose it.’9
Fortunately, common sense prevailed over Cripps’ prudishness and Delmer was allowed to carry on broadcasting. As Der Chef became better known, Delmer was able to drop some of the worst outrages in his scripts, but Seckelmann contained to use the coarse and abusive language that had become Der Chef’s trademark.
Some of the more juicy ‘sibs’ put over by Der Chef included one about Nazi blood transfusion units collecting blood from Polish and Russian POWs without giving the donors a Wassermann test for syphilis. As a result of this a number of German soldiers had contracted the disease, not to mention being ‘contaminated’ by Slav blood. Another ‘sib’ came after PWE learned that the Italian envoy to Berlin, Dino Alfieri, would soon be recalled to Rome to consult with Mussolini. Before this news was common knowledge in Germany, Der Chef broadcast that a German officer had come home from the front and found the Italian in bed with his wife. The German officer pulled his revolver to shoot Alfieri, at which the Italian went down on his knees and begged diplomatic immunity. Instead of shooting the ‘spineless creature’, the officer instead beat him black and blue until he was unable to stand and sent him back to the Italian embassy in a car. When it was later revealed on German radio that the Italian had returned to Rome, Der Chef s account appeared to have been true. Even Mussolini heard about the story, and thought it was hilarious.
Der Chef’s final broadcast on Gustav Siegfried Eins came on 18 November 1943. Delmer decided that his anti-hero would serve a better purpose as a martyr to the anti-Nazi cause. Delmer scripted a show in which the Gestapo burst into the studio mid-broadcast and machine-gunned down Der Chef live on the radio. Sure enough, in the middle of a broadcast, with special effects provided by a Tommy gun, Der Chef was heard to be killed. Unfortunately, this Ending was the only botched job of what had been a successful and long-running hoax. The recording was broadcast as planned, but then the engineer, not speaking German and not realizing what had occurred on the show, re-broadcast the recording an hour later. Der Chef was thus machine-gunned down a second time that day! Delmer quickly realized what had occurred and prevented the mistake from recurring. To his knowledge, nobody else noticed.
World History
