The V for Victory campaign

On 14 January 1941, in the Belgian broadcast of the BBC transmitted from London, Victor de Laveleye – a former minister of justice and the pre-war chairman of the Belgian Liberals – proposed a common sign of recognition to his compatriots in the occupied country: the letter V. It was the first letter of the French word victoire (victory) and of the Dutch vrijheid (freedom), and so a sign that both of Belgium’s language communities would understand. A simple idea put forward in a single short broadcast proved to be one of the most effective propaganda devices of the entire war. Within a few weeks the letter V covered walls across Belgium, the Netherlands and northern France; in the summer of 1941 the BBC turned it into a Europe-wide campaign, and Winston Churchill made it his personal gesture.

It is often said that the slogan “V for Victory” was first used in the BBC’s Belgian section. Strictly speaking, de Laveleye spoke in French of victoire and vrijheid. The English “V for Victory” was the slogan of the later, British phase of the campaign, although the same letter did, of course, also begin the English word victory.

A Belgian voice from London

The BBC’s Belgian broadcasts, known as Radio Belgique in French and Radio België in Dutch, had been on the air since the autumn of 1940. They were a short programme of news and commentary, usually fifteen minutes long, which the BBC had allotted to the Belgians as part of its European services. The French-language section was run by de Laveleye, a Brussels barrister who had played tennis at the Olympic Games of 1920 and 1924 and who in the 1930s had been one of the fiercest opponents of the Rexist leader Léon Degrelle. The Flemish section was presented by “Jan Moedwil”, in reality the Antwerp Liberal Fernand Geersens.

At the turn of 1940 and 1941 the mood in occupied Belgium was bleak. The army had capitulated on 28 May 1940, King Leopold III remained a prisoner in the palace at Laeken, and the lawful government of Hubert Pierlot had been working in London at full strength only since October; in November it had declared war on Italy from there. The occupiers banned listening to Allied stations and jammed them, yet Belgians listened to London in huge numbers. What they lacked was a way of showing one another, and the Germans, how many of them there were. For the time being opposition to the occupation found expression only in small gestures, and an organised resistance movement was only beginning to take shape.

The broadcast of 14 January 1941

The broadcast went out on Tuesday 14 January. De Laveleye proposed that listeners use the letter V as a rallying sign, “because V is the first letter of the word Victoire in French and Vrijheid (freedom) in Flemish, just as the Walloons and the Flemings are at this moment marching shoulder to shoulder; two things that follow one from the other: Victory, which will give you back your Freedom”. He urged them to paint it and chalk it wherever they could: on walls, doors, pavements and notice boards. He also explained the purpose of the action. Patriots would see how numerous they were, while the occupier, seeing this sign, “always the same, repeated endlessly”, would understand that he was surrounded by a vast crowd of citizens impatiently awaiting the first moment of his weakness and watching for his first failure.

The idea had several advantages. The letter V could be drawn in a few seconds, was hard to erase and required no organisation or clandestine contacts. It did not divide Walloons from Flemings, which mattered a great deal in a linguistically divided country, and at the same time it was aimed at the occupier rather than at fellow citizens. For the Germans every such letter was a small but endlessly repeated humiliation: proof that the population had not come to terms with the occupation.

A letter on the walls of Europe

The response exceeded all expectations. Accounts agree that within a few weeks the letter V had appeared on walls throughout Belgium, and soon afterwards in the Netherlands, where London’s broadcasts went out on Radio Oranje, and in northern France. It was painted on the walls of houses, churches and public offices, and on German posters and vehicles. As the sign reached one country after another, it acquired meanings of its own: the Czechs read it as vítězství, the Serbs as vitestvo, and the Norwegians attached to it the slogan “vi vil vinne” (“we shall win”). The occupiers responded with arrests, fines and orders to paint over the inscriptions, but an erased letter would reappear within days.

“V for Victory” and Colonel Britton’s army

The success of the Belgian idea prompted the BBC to take it up on a European scale. The campaign was directed by Douglas Ritchie, assistant news editor of the BBC’s European service, who from June 1941 addressed listeners on the Continent as the mysterious “Colonel Britton”. His real name was revealed only after the war. Ritchie called his listeners “the V army” and encouraged them to commit small, everyday acts of resistance.

The letter also needed a sound. In Morse code V is written as three short signals and one long: ···–. The same rhythm opens Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the famous motif of “fate knocking at the door”. From the summer of 1941 the sound of V, beaten out on a drum or played by an orchestra, introduced the BBC’s broadcasts to occupied Europe, and it remained their call sign until the end of the war. Listeners tapped out the rhythm with teaspoons on cups, knocked it on doors and whistled it in the street. The irony was that a propaganda weapon against the Germans had been forged from the work of the greatest German composer.

The climax was the “mobilisation of the V army” announced by Colonel Britton. At midnight on 19–20 July 1941 he read out a message from Churchill, who called the V sign the symbol of the unconquerable will of the occupied peoples and a portent of the fate awaiting the Nazi tyranny. From then on the British Prime Minister showed two fingers spread in a V in public. At first he sometimes did so with the back of his hand towards the onlooker, which in England is an offensive gesture, and his staff had to correct him. Churchill’s gesture became one of the most recognisable images of the war.

The Germans appropriate the V

The occupiers were unable to scrub the letters off the walls of the whole of Europe. In July 1941 German propaganda, directed by Joseph Goebbels, therefore took a different course: it announced that V stood for the Latin Viktoria, that is, for German victory. The Germans themselves began to paint the letter, often with a laurel wreath, on walls, vehicles and stamps, and a huge V hung on the Eiffel Tower in Paris with a banner reading “Deutschland siegt an allen Fronten” (“Germany is victorious on all fronts”). Commentators at the time noted that Goebbels had been forced to reach for a foreign word, since the German for victory is Sieg.

The manoeuvre had the opposite effect to the one intended. Once the sign was no longer forbidden, the occupation authorities lost any grounds for punishing people for it, while the population knew perfectly well what the letters painted by patriots at night meant. In the eyes of the inhabitants of the occupied countries, the attempt to take over the symbol became proof that the Germans could not cope with it.

Its place in the war

The V campaign did not change the military situation, but it mattered for morale. It was one of the first examples of how radio broadcasts from London could move millions of people in occupied Europe to act together, if only symbolically. For many it was the first step from passively listening to the BBC towards active resistance. The British soon realised, however, that encouraging mass actions before liberation came exposed the population to reprisals rather than bringing victory closer. In 1942 the BBC gradually wound down Colonel Britton’s campaign, although the sound of V remained the call sign of its broadcasts, and the letter remained a symbol of the war until victory in 1945.

The sign born in a Belgian broadcast outlived the war. After the United States entered the war in December 1941, “V for Victory” appeared on American posters, envelopes and stamps, and Churchill’s two-fingered gesture passed into common use, later also becoming a sign of peace. Victor de Laveleye returned to liberated Belgium in the autumn of 1944, served as minister of education in Pierlot’s government and died in December 1945. In Belgium he is remembered above all as the man who gave occupied Europe its simplest symbol.