Axis Sally - background

Earlier this week I wrote about Axis Sally and the comparison between that WWII traitor and the modern day traitors who hide behind the concept of "academic freedom". I wrote that there is very little difference between the actions of Axis Sally and those of numerous modern journalists and professors who seek to undermine our morale and promote obvious falsehoods. I pointed out that Axis Sally spent time in prison for her actions and that a broader understanding of Axis Sally would reduce the modern climate of tolerance for those who side with America's enemies:

If we can force a little history into the mainstream discussion and rescue the concept of "treason" from the memory hole, we won't have to stand by helplessly while taxpayer funded professors tell their audiences how to commit acts of terror.

Here are some additional examples of the conduct that resulted in treason charges being brought against Axis Sally:

Like her counterpart in the Pacific, Tokyo Rose, she liked to tease and taunt the soldiers about their wives and sweethearts back in the States. "Hi fellows," she would say. "I'm afraid you're yearning plenty for someone else. But I just wonder if she isn't running around with the 4-Fs way back home."

She would get the names, serial numbers and hometowns of captured and wounded GIs and voice concern about what would happen to them, in broadcasts that could be heard in the United States. "Well I suppose he'll get along all right," she would say. "The doctors don't seem... I don't know... only time will tell, you see."

Gillars [Axis Sally] had posed as a worker for the International Red Cross and persuaded captured American soldiers to record messages to their families and relatives in order to garner a large listening audience in the United States. By the time she finished weaving propaganda into the broadcasts, the POWs' messages to their loved ones were not exactly messages of comfort.

On February 19, Eugene McCarthy, a 25-year-old ex-GI from Chicago, was called to answer a single question. Defense attorney Laughlin asked him if Gillars had posed as a Red Cross worker when she came to make recorded interviews with American POWs at Stalag 2-B in Germany. The soldier stated that she did not. Then in a dramatic outburst, shouting over the defense counsel's angry protest, the witness told the jury: "She threatened us as she left--that American citizen, that woman right there. She told us we were the most ungrateful Americans she had ever met and that we would regret this."

There is much more to her story. I will post more on Axis Sally and her counterparts, Tokyo Rose, Lord Haw Haw and others. In the meantime, ask yourself what principled distinction there is between Sally, Jane Fonda, Michael Moore and others. How could we have prosecuted Sally, but not her modern day stepchildren?