By Ken Haley
HISTORY
How To Win an Information War
Peter Pomerantsev
Allen & Unwin, 34.99
Ever since they trundled that wooden horse up to the gates of Troy – a gift bearing Greeks – deception has been one of warfare’s indispensable arts, and demoralising the enemy’s loved ones as a means of sapping the will to risk his life for them (and for his land or creed) has been one of its objectives.
Seldom in the history of warfare can anyone have been more skilled in aligning the means and ends of deception than Sefton Delmer, the subject of this new study that convincingly proves why he deserves to be called “the nearly forgotten genius of propaganda”.
Sefton Delmer making a propaganda broadcast to Germany from the BBC in November 1941.Credit:
In Peter Pomerantsev, the timely topic of how “dark artists” manipulate mass emotions has found a consummate chronicler.
Delmer’s childhood was split between Australia and Germany (Pomerantsev, a 1980s émigré from the Soviet Union, was never accepted as “one of us” by his English schoolfellows). Forced into the role of outsider, Delmer lived on his sardonic wit and honed the precise skills that bring actors and social chameleons their successes.
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Weimar cabaret sharpened his thespian skills, while his serious self instantly recognised the Nazis’ potential for evil as well as the brittleness of their pretensions. Deploying his charm to get appointed aide-de-camp to SA head Ernst Röhm, soon Delmer had leveraged that contact to wangle a meeting with Hitler himself (neither came away impressed).
While some in the establishment would never be persuaded this uppity journalist was a “safe pair of hands”, Delmer’s unpredictability gave Britain a decisive edge as the tides of war ebbed and surged. Despite detractors’ doubts, his Voldemort, the German master propagandist Joseph Goebbels, knew the Nazis were vulnerable, telling his diary: “If the English were to make a difference between the German people and ourselves, they could undoubtedly gain more.”
Delmer broadcast from a grand Tudor mansion, Woburn Abbey, under the persona of “der Chef”, a supposedly pro-Nazi German who – fed by intelligence gained from combat theatres – conveyed truths his listeners would never obtain from German state transmitters. Seeding accurate data with fabrications and frankly admitting English losses made them even more trusting when he catalogued German defeats.
Even more daring was his Propagandatruppe’s next venture, Soldatensender Calais (Calais Soldier’s Station). The on-air presenter would “throw” to actual Nazi leaders’ speeches, before adding English-scripted lines delivered by troupe members doing pitch-perfect impersonations.
Reading certain exploits here you can really feel the thrill as high-stakes seriousness merges perfectly with a profound sense of fun.
A real-life Weimar cabaret illusionist performing as “Vicki” told German citizens ″to put their morning samples of urine into small bottles and post them to the Ministry of Health in Berlin. The German postal services was clogged for weeks.”
Perhaps Vicki’s greatest triumph came when she dedicated a German version of the song Yes Sir, That’s My Baby to a U-boat commander she then congratulated on the birth of a son. Underwater off the Scottish coast, he surfaced – surrendering himself and his crew. It was an act of rage-fuelled panic. As the commander told his British interrogators: “I hadn’t been home for more than two years.”
Usefully, Pomerantsev deconstructs how propaganda is used as “a cure for loneliness”, with its practitioners playing “on the same notes like well-worn scales” in the 2020s as in the 1940s, and providing “a sense of false community to those left feeling deracinated by rapid change”.
In his own orchestration, Pomerantsev occasionally hits a bum note. He records young expat Sefton, in 1914, watching a cinema newsreel of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. But the killing was not captured on film (only a failed attempt earlier that day was). Later he mentions twiddling the dial on “your shortwave transistor” in wartime, yet the transistor dates from 1947 and the transistor radio from 1954.
But no “accidentals” render this tale of intrigue any less fascinating. The scale of Delmer’s victory over his foe can be captured in the simple fact that 20 minutes before sunrise over the Atlantic coast on D-Day, while Goebbels’ station was off air, the news came ashore in German households by medium wave courtesy of his info-warriors, producing as great a shock to the civilian population as the landings themselves did among the troops dug in on the five beaches of Normandy.
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