Any cryptologists want to try to crack this radio message code?

The British black radio station Gustav Siegfried Eins would include short coded messages in its broadcasts like this. 

The text will be in German and suspect either it will be quite easy to break or totally meaningless!

Sefton Delmer explained the code's purpose thusly:

"There followed a message in a number code. It was not a high grade cypher and when broken and decoded by the monitors of the Reich Central Security Office, as it was bound to be, I reckoned it would produce quite an acceptable flurry in the Gestapo's dove-cotes all over Germany. For the message said: "Willy meet Jochen Friday row five parquest stalls second performance Union Theatre". There were hundreds of Union Theatre cinemas all over Germany, and I fondly imagined leather-coated Gestapo thugs attending every one of them on the look-out for 'Willy' and 'Jochen'. The Gestapo with their radio detection instruments would be quick to fix our signal as coming from Britain. They could not ignore the possibility that Willy and Jochen were British agents, and that the message to them was genuine."

George Steer was a journalist for The Times and later the Daily Telegraph. He famously reported on the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 and the Spanish Civil war, particularly the bombing of Guernica on 26 April 1937.

During the Second World War Steer organised forward propaganda in Ethiopia and then worked for the Special Operations Executive in the Middle East. In 1943 he was transferred to India and working with Alec Peterson set up the Indian Forward Broadcasting Units (IFBU).

He and three others were killed in a vehicle accident on Christmas day 1944.

The following letter written by Alec Peterson puts on record his valuable contribution to the forming of the Indian Field Broadcasting Units.

Originally published in The Falling Leaf in October 2008, here is Lee Richards' detailed and illustrated catalogue of black propaganda material produced by Gerald M Mayer and Allen Dulles at the OWI/OSS Berne, Switzerland, outstation in World War II.

On the night of 25/26 April 1942, the Royal Air Force on a mission to Occupied France, dropped not just bombs but a rather more unusual package over Paris. The package contained 600 French Francs and the following message. Its intention was to publicise the radio propaganda broadcasts of Colonel Britton and his 'V' army.

Psywar.org is pleased and proud to announce a major new addition to the website: The Sefton Delmer Archive. Working with Delmer's family we reprint online all his books, Trail Sinister, Black Boomerang, Counterfeit Spy and Weimar Germany and many unpublished articles and documents including the first three chapters of the third instalment of his autobiography Tail of a Tale.

As foreign correspondent for the Daily Express in pre-war Germany, Delmer was on personal terms with Hitler and the Nazi major players. One of the highlights of the Archive is a previously unseen home movie shot personally by Delmer on board Hitler's 1932 electioneering aircraft tour. Here we see Hitler with cotton wool stuffed in his ears, Goebbels munching a hardboiled egg and Hitler's black uniformed SS bodyguards sharing private photographs.

During World War II Delmer was appointed Director of Special Operations to Enemy and Satellite countries for Britain's secret propaganda department, the Political Warfare Executive. Under his leadership and inspiration, his team produced the renowned clandestine radio stations Gustav Siegfried Eins, Soldatensender Calais and others, the daily newspaper for German troops Nachrichten für die Truppe, and over a thousand covert black propaganda leaflets.

Over the coming months www.psywar.org will expand the archive with much more material from Delmer’s pre-war, wartime and post-war career.

In almost all military conflicts, as well as a war of bombs and bullets there is a war of words. Words can be disseminated via a number of different media. They can be spoken, e.g. via radio, loudspeaker, or even by mouth-to-mouth communication as news and rumours, sometimes supplied by one's enemies as well as ones allies, are spread. Here in the 21st C the social media are coming to play a very important part in the spread of information. But in the 20th C the main medium was the printed word, and newspapers had a huge role to play. This article is perhaps overambitious in that it aims to provide both a short introduction to the role of airdropped leaflets in war and conflict and within that to focus on news and airdropped newspapers in WW2. For reasons of space its emphasis will be mainly upon Western Europe, but it should be realised that news-based leaflets featured hugely in all theatres of WW2, from Europe to North Africa and then Russia through to the Middle East and to Asian countries, especially the countries of East Asia such as China and Japan, and in Southeast Asia such as Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaya, Indonesia and Papua and New Guinea.