P.G. Wodehouse: World War II Broadcasts

A small error in judgment can haunt someone for the rest of their lives. Is it fair? No. But it happened to P.G. Wodehouse.

When World War II started, Wodehouse was living in Le Touquet, France, among a number of other British expats. He was almost 58 years old and as naïve as a schoolboy. His first mistake was his conviction that there would be no war. Then, as war raged nearby, he waited too long to leave France.

When the Germans occupied the area, they rounded up all of the British male expats under sixty, and the 58-year-old Wodehouse spent the next eleven months as a civilian prisoner. Conditions were bad, but Wodehouse’s sense of humor got him through.

Internees were rountinely released when they turned sixty, so Wodehouse wasn’t particularly surprised when they let him out three months before his birthday. He didn’t know that the Germans had a plan and that he was a pawn in it.

In the beginning, the plan may have been fairly benign. America was still neutral, and Wodehouse’s American fans were clamboring for new of him. So the German Foreign Office though that it could gain favor with America—and convince it to remain neutral—by having Wodehouse record a series of radio spots broadcast by German radio for an American audience. As part of the plan, they released him early and planted the idea in his mind to use the radio to reassure his American fans.

Wodehouse recorded five innocuous broadcasts about his incarceration, all told with his usual humor. The transcripts certainly don’t portray him as a German sympathiser. In fact, he took some mild shots at the Germans. So if it had ended, as originally planned, with the broadcasts to America, Wodehouse might have been able to return to his normal life after the war.

But it didn’t end there. The German Propaganda Ministry had its own plan, and it broadcast the spots in Britain about a month later. Since they were recorded rather than live, Wodehouse couldn’t stop it. And in the general hysteria surrounding the war, British journalists branded Wodehouse as a traitor.

Those broadcasts haunted Wodehouse for the rest of his life. He was afraid to return to England, where his grandchildren lived, for fear that he would be arrested and tried for treason. And although he was able to see the humor in every other episode in his life, including his time as a civilian prisoner, he never could find anything except sorrow in the events surrounding the broadcasts. He admitted that he had made a mistake broadcasting for German radio, but he died believing that the broadcasts were his idea and that his early release was unrelated to anything except his approaching birthday.

You can read the transcripts for yourself at this link: http://www.pgwodehousesociety.org.uk/wartime.html.

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The photo of Wodehouse was taken around 1904, long before his German radio broadcasts. However, photos from those years are not yet in the public domain.