Content area
Full text
Fantasy and reality collided when Allied investigators hunted down the seductive Nazi broadcaster known to GIs as Axis Sally By Richard Lucas
"Well, kids, you know I'd like to say to you, 'Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,' but I know that that little old kit bag is much too small to hold all the trouble you kids have got. But maybe for the next half hour we've got some music that will help you forget them a little bit."
From the deserts of North Africa to the Normandy beaches, GIs listened to the sensual voice of an American woman broadcasting over the radio for Nazi Germany. The voice, alternately seductive and condemning, wondered aloud if their wives and girlfriends were "running around" with the 4-Fs back home, and gently pointed out the benefits of surrender. As the men tried to imagine the mysterious beauty behind the microphone, the swing music she played kept them tuning in. She cultivated a persona of worldly allure, ready to welcome the boys and understand their troubles.
The reality behind the voice was less glamorous. Two American women competed for the soldiers' fantasies: Mildred Gillars, a middle-aged former showgirl from Ohio, broadcast from Berlin; the other, a cross-eyed 30-year-old New Yorker with a honeyed voice named Rita Zucca, broadcast from Rome. One was the willing mouthpiece of her mentor and lover, while the other collaborated with the Nazis for financial gain. But both women became enmeshed in the collective memory of American soldiers and sailors as one indelible figure: Axis Sally.
They, like the women who broadcast for Japan under the name Tokyo Rose in the Pacific theater, entertained their audience despite ham-handed attempts to break the morale of Allied soldiers. As Air Corps corporal Edward Van Dyne said of Axis Sally in 1944, "Doctor Goebbels no doubt believes that Sally is rapidly undermining the morale of the American doughboy. I think the effect is directly opposite. We get an enormous bang out of her. We love her."
And indeed, both Sallys became women who were wanted and pursued by the end of the war, but in a way that ultimately had nothing to do with desire - and everything to do with treason.
The...