The Circus: The Men and Women Who Fought Nazi Germany Over the Airwaves

by David Hendy

In 1941, a secret radio station deep in the English countryside prepared its first broadcast to occupied Europe. What followed was an hour of misinformation and slander about Hitler and his cronies - all delivered in the earthy voice of a disgruntled Nazi officer. Shocked and thrilled, ordinary Germans were glued to their sets.

But this was just one front in Britain's extraordinary radio war. From clandestine stations to trusted BBC broadcasts, radio was used as a propaganda weapon that by turns informed and deceived, while also undermining enemy morale. Using declassified archive evidence and first-hand accounts, in The Circus David Hendy tells the story of this hidden campaign, revealing how Britain fought - and won - a war on the airwaves.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication June 3, 2027

About the author

I'm a writer, broadcaster and Emeritus Professor of Media and Cultural History at the University of Sussex, England.

I studied history at St Andrews and Oxford before joining the BBC in 1987 as a trainee reporter, later working as a producer on The World Tonight and Analysis. After leaving the BBC in 1993 I taught at the University of Westminster and the University of Sussex, and held visiting fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and Indiana-Bloomington.

'The BBC: A Century on Air' (published in the UK as 'The BBC: A People's History) is my latest book. My four previous publications include 'Life on Air: a History of Radio Four' (2007), which won the Longmans-History Today Book of the Year Award and was nominated for the Orwell Prize.

In 2010, I co-wrote with Adrian Bean 'Between Two Worlds', a Drama on 3 for the BBC based on the life of the Victorian scientist and spiritualist Oliver Lodge. Since then, I've appeared regularly on BBC Radio. For Radio 3 I wrote and presented the five-part series of essays, 'Rewiring the Mind', as well as 'The Power of Three', which featured seventy highlights from the Third Programme’s archives. And in 2013 I wrote and presented the thirty-part series 'Noise: A Human History' for Radio 4.