PWE (Political Warfare Executive)

Britain’s World War II propaganda and subversion agency, the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) was established in 1941, with former journalist Robert Bruce Lockhart (1887-1970) in charge as of 1942. The PWE was the third attempt to organize British psychological warfare against the enemy (its predecessors were a secret Foreign Office unit called Electra House, established in the immediate prewar period, which in 1940 became “SO1,” the propaganda branch of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). PWE activities ranged from supplying staff and propaganda material to the clandestine press operating in occupied Europe and shaping BBC broadcasts beamed into enemy and occupied Europe to battlefield loudspeaker operations to encourage desertion. The PWE’s best-known operation was its bid to undermine Nazi Germany through the use of black radio propaganda, specifically a PWE radio station called Gustav Siegfried Eins that claimed to be run by an anti-Nazi general but in reality was manned by former Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer (1904-1979). More troubling to Delmer was the PWE’s practice of sending food parcels via Switzerland to the family of dead German soldiers with a note saying that their loved one, realizing that the Nazi cause was lost, had deserted and wanted his family to have the food. Later Delmer would explain that although the hope was false, the ham was genuine.