Radio Belgique

In the autumn of 1940 the BBC in London began broadcasting, as part of its European services, Radio Belgique and Radio België: short programmes in French and Dutch intended for Belgians living under German occupation. Under this name Belgians who had found themselves in Britain after the defeat of May 1940 spoke daily to their compatriots at home. They were led by two liberals: the former Minister of Justice Victor de Laveleye in the French-language section and Jan Moedwil in the Flemish section. Throughout the four years of occupation these broadcasts were the main source of news about the war for most Belgians, and one of them, on 14 January 1941, launched the “V” sign campaign, which spread across the whole of occupied Europe.

Some chronologies date the start of Radio Belgique’s broadcasts to 18 September 1940. Belgian studies – among them the Belgium WWII portal run by CegeSoma, the Brussels research centre for the history of the war, the history of Belgian broadcasting and Céline Rase’s work on radio propaganda in occupied Belgium – agree in dating the first broadcast to 28 September 1940. They offer no confirmation of the 18 September date.

Radio in occupied Belgium

In 1939 about 1.15 million wireless sets were registered in Belgium, and the real number of listeners was far higher, since people listened as families and in cafés. The public broadcaster, the National Broadcasting Institute (INR/NIR), had operated in two languages since 1930. When Germany invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940, its management, loyal to the government and to the policy of neutrality, resolved not to hand the microphone over to the occupier. The transmitters were dismantled or destroyed, and some of the staff followed the government to France, from where Belgian programmes were broadcast for a few more weeks, among other places from Poitiers. Around 14 June, as France collapsed, they fell silent.

After the capitulation of the Belgian army on 28 May the Germans occupied the INR building on the Place Flagey in Brussels and began broadcasting from a mobile military transmitter. An ordinance of the German military administration under General Alexander von Falkenhausen of 31 July 1940 (some sources give 6 August) formally created two stations: the French-language Radio Bruxelles and the Flemish Zender Brussel. The Germans kept away from the microphone; the programmes, based on the services of the German agency Deutsche Europa Sender, were read by Belgians, many of them former INR staff. Attractive music and announcements about food rations meant that people listened to the stations, if reluctantly.

Belgians at home could pick up the BBC’s French and Dutch programmes, intended for the French and the Dutch. London was already broadcasting General de Gaulle’s appeal and the Free French programmes, and from July the Dutch Radio Oranje. What was missing was a voice that addressed Belgians as Belgians. On 23 June the minister Marcel-Henri Jaspar spoke to his compatriots over the BBC, but he did so without the consent of the government, which was still in France, and lost his portfolio as a result. His Belgian National Committee was not recognised by the British.

A Belgian quarter-hour on the BBC

Radio Belgique was not an independent station. It was airtime that the BBC allotted to the Belgians within its European services and over which it retained full editorial control. A Belgian government-in-exile in its later form did not yet exist: only two ministers, Camille Gutt and Albert de Vleeschauwer, were in London, while Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot and Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak were still making their way through Spain. According to the Belgium WWII portal, the broadcasts remained independent of the Belgian government throughout the war.

Victor de Laveleye (1894–1945) was a Brussels lawyer and Liberal Party politician, the party’s president in 1936 and for a few months in 1937 Minister of Justice in Paul van Zeeland’s government. Before the 1936 election he had been one of the chief opponents of the Rexist leader Léon Degrelle. In the 1920s he had represented Belgium at tennis in the Olympic Games. He reached England on 24 June 1940 and, through Cecil de Sausmarez of the BBC, became head of the Belgian broadcasts. His Flemish counterpart was Jan Moedwil, the pseudonym of Fernand Geersens (1895–1959), an Antwerp liberal, lecturer and, from 1936, an employee of the INR. Théo Fleischman, one of the pioneers of the Belgian radio news bulletin, also spoke at the microphone.

According to some sources the broadcasts initially went out from 9 to 9.15 p.m., in French one evening and in Dutch the next. The Belgium WWII portal speaks of a quarter-hour at 8.15 p.m., with even days for the French programmes and odd days for the Flemish. The programme consisted of news and commentary on the events of the war. In the spring of 1941 morning and afternoon broadcasts were added, and from March 1943 the BBC broadcast a French programme daily at 7.15 p.m. and a Flemish one at 8.30 p.m. The broadcasts had their own catchphrases. De Laveleye borrowed the slogan of the defenders of Verdun in 1916: “Courage, on les aura, les Boches!” (“Courage, we’ll get them, the Boches!”). Moedwil ended every broadcast with the rhyme “Wij doen ons best, zonder er op te boffen, toch krijgen we ze wel, de moffen!” (“We do our best without boasting, and we’ll get the Jerries all the same!”), which Flemings still remembered decades later.

Listening despite the ban

From the outset the occupier regarded the broadcasts from London as a threat. German ordinances listed the stations that could be listened to – German ones and those subject to German censorship – and banned listening to Allied stations on pain of severe penalties, including hard labour. According to some studies a formal ban on listening to Radio Belgique was issued in December 1940. The Germans also began jamming, and in time Radio Bruxelles ran separate items ridiculing the BBC’s “tall tales” and “canards”. Anyone caught or denounced lost his set and was punished.

Even so, Belgians listened to London en masse. The Catholic lawyer Paul Struye, a founder of the clandestine La Libre Belgique, wrote in his analyses of public mood that the English and Swiss broadcasts remained the main source of information for the entire population. The journalists Alphonse Ooms and Paul Delandsheere noted in their chronicle of the occupation that there was not a Belgian who did not spend at least an hour a day listening to what was “being said on the other side of the barricade”. Radio Belgique sought to unite the nation across the language divide, to denounce collaborators, to sustain faith in Britain and to undermine the morale of the occupier. The best proof of its effectiveness was the German counter-propaganda itself.

Significance

Radio Belgique gave Belgians at home a voice from the free world at a time when their king was a prisoner at Laeken and the legitimate government had not yet reached London. Leopold III was silent, and the ministers did not assemble in London until October 1940. The BBC broadcasts, presented by people known in Belgium from pre-war public life, filled that void. They also helped to keep alive the conviction that Belgium was still at war.

On 14 January 1941 de Laveleye proposed a common sign of recognition to his listeners: the letter “V”, the first letter of the French word victoire (victory) and the Flemish vrijheid (freedom). He urged them to paint it everywhere, so that patriots would see how many of them there were and the occupier would feel surrounded. “V”s appeared on the walls of Belgium and soon all over occupied Europe. In the summer of 1941 the BBC extended the campaign to its broadcasts for all the occupied countries: its signal became the letter “V” in Morse code (three dots and a dash) and the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and Winston Churchill made the “V” gesture his trademark.

Pierlot’s government considered the BBC’s Belgian broadcasts too modest and too independent of itself. On 13 October 1942 it set up its own broadcaster, Radiodiffusion Nationale Belge (RNB), which from February 1943 broadcast in airtime allotted by the BBC and from May 1943 also from a short-wave transmitter in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the Belgian Congo. Radio Bruxelles fell silent on 3 September 1944, on the eve of the liberation of Brussels. De Laveleye returned home, served as Minister of Education in Pierlot’s first post-war government, took part in the San Francisco conference at which the Charter of the United Nations was drawn up, and died in December 1945. The war on the airwaves that he waged from London was part of the BBC’s wider struggle for listeners in occupied Europe, in which radio, alongside the clandestine press, became the most important instrument for sustaining resistance.