V for Victory

At midnight between Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 July 1941 a voice already familiar to listeners on the Continent, “Colonel Britton”, came on the air in the European services of the BBC. He announced the “mobilisation of the V Army” and read out a message from Winston Churchill addressed to the people of occupied Europe. In it the British Prime Minister called the letter V a symbol of the unconquerable will of the occupied nations. The sign that Victor de Laveleye had proposed to the Belgians six months earlier, and which since the spring had been covering walls from Flanders to Prague, received that night the blessing of the head of government of embattled Britain. From then on the letter V, its rhythm in Morse code – the same rhythm with which Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony opens – and Churchill’s two parted fingers were the common sign of the Allies and of everyone who refused to accept the German occupation.

Popular chronologies state that on 19 July the V sign and the motif from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony were “unofficially adopted” as an Allied signal. Strictly speaking, both were already in use: the letter since January, and the sound signal in BBC broadcasts since the end of June 1941. Churchill’s message, moreover, went out at the turn of the day, which is why some accounts date it to 20 July and a few to 18 July. What was new was that a sign invented by a Belgian émigré and spread by broadcasters had been adopted as his own by the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Colonel Britton’s army

In the spring of 1941 the BBC’s European service was looking for a way to break the isolation of its listeners. BBC at War, a pamphlet published during the war, described the problem plainly: people in the occupied countries saw German soldiers every day in the streets, in restaurants and in their own homes, read the German-controlled press and watched German newsreels, and lived in fear of the Gestapo and of informers. Listening to forbidden radio from London in a small, trusted circle was not enough. What was needed was a sign that could be seen or heard and that would remind people that millions of others thought the same. Since national emblems were banned, it had to be an international sign. The Belgian letter V, understood in many languages, was ideal for the purpose.

The campaign was run by two journalists of the BBC’s European service: Noel Newsome, who directed the European broadcasts, and Douglas Ritchie (1905–1967), the service’s assistant news editor. According to David Boyle, the author of a book on the campaign, Ritchie first spoke as “Colonel Britton” on 6 June 1941. He broadcast in English, and his words were repeated by the BBC’s language sections. He called his listeners the “V Army”, and their task was, for the time being, to be small everyday gestures: chalking the letter on walls, knocking its rhythm on doors, using it to summon a waiter in a café, sounding it on a car horn or whistling it in the street. The colonel’s identity was a closely guarded secret, and Ritchie’s name was revealed only in 1945, by which time he was in charge of the BBC’s European news department.

Three dots and a dash

Ritchie wanted the letter V to be heard as well. In Morse code it is written as three short signals and one long (···–), and that is exactly the rhythm of the opening of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the famous motif of fate “knocking at the door”. According to French studies, the sound V was introduced into BBC broadcasts on 27 June 1941. From then on it preceded programmes for occupied Europe, and its best-known version, beaten out on a drum, was recorded by the orchestral percussionist James Blades. The signal remained the hallmark of the BBC’s broadcasts to the Continent until the end of the war.

The rhythm proved even more effective than the letter, because it left no trace. The BBC pamphlet reported that car horns tapped it out, schoolchildren whistled it and audiences clapped it. The French cartoonist Maurice Van Moppes, who worked with the BBC’s French section in London, set those four notes to a “Song of the V” (La chanson des V), which RAF aircraft later dropped over France in booklets of BBC songs. The British pointed out with satisfaction that the “war of nerves” begun by the Germans had now been turned against them – and by means of the music of a German composer whom Nazi propaganda regarded as the very embodiment of the German spirit.

The Prime Minister’s message

The campaign was to culminate on the night of 19/20 July. Colonel Britton had announced it in advance as the day on which the “V Army” would be mobilised, and at midnight he read out Churchill’s short message: “The V sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the occupied territories, and a portent of the fate awaiting the Nazi tyranny.” As long as the peoples of Europe went on refusing all collaboration with the invader, the Prime Minister continued, it was certain that the invader’s cause would perish and that Europe would be liberated.

The message came at a significant moment. Four weeks had passed since the German attack on the USSR, and a week earlier Britain and the Soviet Union had signed an agreement in Moscow on joint action, in which they undertook not to conclude a separate peace. For the first time since the fall of France the British were not alone, but they did not yet have the strength to return to the Continent. Words and symbols were among the few weapons with which they could then reach occupied Europe. Churchill, a master of the radio speech, understood this perfectly.

From that summer the Prime Minister displayed two parted fingers at every opportunity, often with a cigar in his hand. At first he sometimes did so with the back of his hand towards the onlooker, which in Britain is an offensive gesture, and it was his aides who made him aware of the difference. The gesture quickly became his trademark, and photographs of a smiling Churchill making the V sign went round the press of the entire free world.

The German “Viktoria”

For a long time the occupiers tried to fight the sign with bans, punishments and painting over the slogans, but the letters appeared faster than the police could scrub them off. Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry therefore chose a different course: it decided to appropriate the sign. According to some accounts the order was issued as early as 7 July, and in the second half of the month the campaign got fully under way. The Germans proclaimed that V stood for the Latin Viktoria – the victory of the Reich on every front, the east included. They also argued that since the signal came from a symphony by a German composer, it heralded a German victory. Letters V, often within a laurel wreath, were painted on Wehrmacht vehicles, buildings and posters. In Paris a huge V with the slogan “Deutschland siegt an allen Fronten” (Germany is victorious on all fronts) was hung on the Eiffel Tower, and similar inscriptions appeared on the façade of the Palais Bourbon, the seat of the pre-war French Chamber of Deputies.

This made little impression on the people of the occupied countries. Everyone knew who painted the letters by night and who painted them by day, and in many people’s eyes the attempt to take over the sign looked like an admission that the Reich’s propaganda could not cope with a symbol it was unable to erase. French studies, too, judge that the Nazi V campaign did not have the intended effect.

Place in the war

The V campaign was the first attempt to direct, from London and by radio, a common action by people in many occupied countries at once. According to historians of the campaign, Ritchie dreamt of a “V Army” a million strong which, on a signal from the BBC, would move on from symbolic gestures to passive resistance and sabotage, and finally to an uprising. This vision, however, met with opposition from those responsible for the secret war. The Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was building clandestine networks in occupied Europe, feared that mass actions called for by radio long before any Allied landing would expose the population to reprisals and its own agents to discovery. From August 1941 propaganda directed at Europe was overseen by a new secret body, the Political Warfare Executive, answerable to the Foreign Office. In the following year the BBC gradually wound down Colonel Britton’s broadcasts.

Even so, the campaign achieved what had been expected of it: it gave the BBC’s listeners a sense of belonging to a community and showed that radio from London could move people to act. In September 1941, at the BBC’s call, the Czechs boycotted the German-controlled newspapers for a week, and, according to British figures, the circulation of the morning papers in the Protectorate fell by two-thirds. The sound V preceded broadcasts to occupied Europe right up to the liberation, and from 1942 Charles de Gaulle himself made the V sign in his public appearances. On 8 May 1945, VE Day, Churchill greeted the crowds in London with the same gesture that in July 1941 had been no more than a promise.