Throughout the course of the war in the Pacific, there were as many as twelve Japanese female radio commentators broadcasting assorted varieties of demoralizing radio programming to the American and Allied forces from Japan. However the Americans knew nothing of this collective and simply assumed that all the broadcasts were hosted by one woman, who they dubbed, "Tokyo Rose".
The story told in this article begins in the late summer of 1945 when:
"...one of the supreme objectives of American correspondents landing in Japan was Radio Tokyo. There they hoped to find someone to pass off as the one-and-only "Rose" and scoop their colleagues. When the information had been sifted a little, a girl named Iva Toguri (Iva Toguri D'Aquino: 1916 – 2006), emerged as the only candidate who came close to filling the bill. For three years she had played records, interspersed with snappy comments, beamed to Allied soldiers on the "Zero Hour"...Her own name for herself was "Orphan Ann."
Click here to read about the Nazis in Canada.
On July 26, 1943, in the same U.S. Federal Court that tried the American poet Ezra Pound (in absentia) for treason, Robert H. Best (1896 – 1952), formerly of the Associated Press, was also convicted on the same charges. What Iva Toguri (the alleged
Tokyo Rose) was believed to have done for Hirohito, and what Pound did for Mussolini is what Best did for Adolf Hitler: he had broadcast
Nazi radio propaganda.
You might also care to read about the American Bund.
Click Magazine's illustrated article about the sedition of American poet Ezra Pound is peppered throughout with assorted quotes that clearly indicate the man's guilt. The reporter, David Brown, went to some length in explaining what an odd life decision this was for a poet with such a celebrated past - a decisions that ultimately lead to his conviction in Federal Court, followed by his twelve year incarceration in a mad house.
In an effort to understand Pound's thinking, we have included excerpts from a Wall Street Journal book review of a 2016 Pound biography that presents the poets queer rationale.
How many times have we heard an actress or actor say, "What the Heck, it's work" - plenty (if I had a nickle for every time... etc.). No doubt, this was the thought that tarried through the airy head of Mildred Gillars (né Mildred Elizabeth Sisk) when she agreed to broadcast Nazi propaganda from the heart of Germany on a radio program titled, the Home Sweet Home Hour (1942 - 1945). However, due to the fact that two witnesses must testify in order to prove the charge of treason, she was convicted in Federal Court for having performed in a 1944 Berlin Radio broadcast called Vision of Invasion. The Federal jury found her "not guilty" of committing seven other treasonous acts. Gillars served 12 years in Federal prison and was released during the Summer of 1961.
Pencil-necked geek Frederick Kaltenbach was born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1895. A former school teacher, he left the U.S. to earn a Ph.D in Germany but somehow ended up translating German texts into English for the Nazi aviation magazine, ADLER. By-and-by this eventually lead to his own radio program, just like all translation jobs always do.
Douglas Chandler (1889 - ?) was one of several American expatriots to make radio broadcasts on behalf of Adolf Hitler and company. Believing that he was somehow providing a valuable service for the Free and the Brave, he smugly titled his radio program, 'Paul Revere'".
The hokum that Constance Drexel (1894 - 1856?) coughed-up over the airwaves on behalf of her Nazi paymasters was considered to have been so negligible in content by the U.S. Department of Justice that all charges against her were dropped.
Jane Anderson began broadcasting from Berlin on April 14, 1941. When Nazi Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941 American citizens were repatriated from Germany but Anderson chose to remain.
She broadcast Nazi propaganda by way of a short wave radio for the German State Radio's U.S.A. Zone, the Germans named her ‘The Georgia Peach’. Her programs regularly heaped high praise upon Adolf Hitler and ran 'exposés' of the 'communist domination' of the Roosevelt and Churchill administrations. She conducted numerous on-air interviews, the most famous among them was of her co-worker, the British traitor William Joyce. When Berlin fell she was on the run up until April of 1947, when she was caught in Salzburg, Austria and placed in the custody of the U.S. military.
