In response to:

Un-English Activities from the May 6, 1965 issue

To the Editors:

It occurs to me after reading John Gross’s remarks about J.A. Cole’s Lord Haw-Haw and The New Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West that you and your readers might possibly be interested in another sidelight on William Joyce. I remember having read (some few years ago) a magazine article by Rebecca West which stated that she had been present at his trial. I also retain the impression that she stated that she was certain that joyce had been executed…

I still have many doubts that Joyce has ever been executed, or indeed, that he was the traitor the world believes him to have been.

Sometime before Pearl Harbor, perhaps a year or so, a high ranking British officer, in “Blighty” from battle fatigue, visited a week with me in Boston. At the time I was conducting laboratories in Boston with the aim of modernizing concealment and camouflage techniques for military services which were reluctant to accept change. The British, less hide-bound, were eager to accept our findings and to put them into use…

The high ranking officer mentioned above had spent his last three days in Boston in heavy rain, but on the morning of his departure for Washington the sun was shining. He doffed his light-weight slicker, folded it and inserted it in his attaché case. In this case my eye was drawn to a book entitled Twilight Over England. Noticing my curiosity the officer handed the book to me and asked whether I knew of the author, William Joyce. Opening to the fly leaf I read a personal, handwritten dedication by Joyce to my officer friend. It was dated as recently as a month or two before this time.

There is not the slightest doubt of my visitor having been a brave, loyal, able and highly trusted British officer. How could he have come into possession of a book by “Lord Haw-Haw” who was supposedly hidden away in Berlin?

When it comes to espionage and counter-espionage no people can match the British. Who is to say what Joyce’s job really was? Or for that matter, who knows whether all of the much-publicized defectors of recent years, were so, in actual fact?

Richard Morrison

Manhattan, Kansas

This Issue

June 3, 1965