Propaganda Against The Enemy
They played a few American records first. I don't remember everything she said. She said, "Your wives and girlfriends are probably home in a nice warm building, dancing with some other men. You're over here in the cold." It was cold and it was snowing. Dent Wheeler on Axis Sally during the battle of the Bulge
"There is no 'Tokyo Rose'; the name is strictly a GI invention. The name has been applied to at least two lilting Japanese voices on the Japanese radio. ... Government monitors listening in 24 hours a day have never heard the words 'Tokyo Rose' over a Japanese-controlled Far Eastern radio."
During World War II often cut off troops or isolated outposts found themselves exposed in the radio range of the enemy, which used popular music as a means to attract listeners and then provide propaganda messages.
This type of propaganda was performed by both sides and is some of the earliest mass psych-ops. Often the propagandist became popular with the other sides, and there is little evidence that these had any impact, except that the Axis participants were often detained and if originally from allied countries prosecuted, while Allied broadcasters were seen as legitimate. Again it shows the way music is understood in the context of World War II is from the winners point of view, whereas Tokyo Rose (Iva Ikuko Toguri D'Aquino) and Axis Sally (Mildred Gillars) faced years of persecution after the war. England executed Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce) for treason, in 1946. Again there can really be little in the way of an objective history of music in World War II. The historical context since the war, the revelations of the evils of the Axis regimes, and the ultimate victory of the consumer society foretold in the songs of the allies impose a context upon the events like viewing a star through the lens of a telescope.
Read more about this topic: Role Of Music In World War II
Famous quotes containing the words propaganda and/or enemy:
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Powerful, yes, that is the word that I constantly rolled on my tongue; I dreamed of absolute power, the kind that forces to kneel, that forces the enemy to capitulate, finally converting him, and the more the enemy is blind, cruel, sure of himself, buried in his conviction, the more his admission proclaims the royalty of he who has brought on his defeat.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)