Episode 3: The Inner Front

During World War II, Nazi radio broadcast…

the voice of an American woman who came to be known as Axis Sally.  She spoke, via shortwave radio, to American women, attempting to turn them against their country and the American war effort. She was waging a battle on what came to be called the Inner Front, the war of public opinion. Propaganda by radio was new then; so was psychological warfare. Writers, poets, psychologists, propagandists, and broadcasters all took to the airwaves in the 1930s and 1940s in a pitched battle of words and sound. After the war, two American women who had broadcast for Axis powers, Germany and Japan, were prosecuted for treason. How did the courts measure the power of words, over radio, to change minds?

Image: National Archives at College Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Key Sources

Listen to Archibald MacLeish read his poems, “Words in Time,” “The Silent Slain,” and “Geography of This Time“

Read Arthur Ponsonby’s book, Falsehood in Wartime, on the rise of propaganda.

Read The Strategy of Terror on the risks of Axis propaganda.

Listen to a German propaganda broadcast by "Paul Revere."

Scan the Department of Justice Documentation of Mildred Elizabeth Gillars’ Treason April 25, 1948.

Watch the CBS News report on Iva Toguri.

Watch Iva Toguri’s recreations of Japanese wartime broadcasts.