Axis Sally, “The Greatest Generation,” and Generation Y

More than sixty years after the end of World War II and decades since radio announcer Mildred Gillars’s treason made the news, the Axis Sally legend has a new lease on life. Sally plays a small but vivid role in Spike Lee’s “The Miracle at St. Anna.” She can also be seen on the small screen, hawking the most recent addition to the “Brothers in Arms” video game series.  In both cases, the actress playing Sally looks and sounds nothing like the actual announcer—despite the availability of a wide range of documentary sources. This disjuncture between representation and reality is nothing new; visual and aural representations of the legendary announcer have always verged on the fantastic.

The many misrepresentations of Mildred Gillars are, in part, a function of the medium of radio. Gillars’s audience of servicemen speculated about the unseen announcer’s appearance, most imagining a “gorgeous” body to match the “come-hither” voice. Indeed, during the invasion of, Ernie Pyle reported from the USS Biscayne that Gillars—known aboard ship as Sally or Olga—had become an object of servicemen’s hostility and desire. “[T]he most frequently expressed opinion aboard ship,” Pyle wrote, “was that if they ever got to Berlin they’d like first to sock Olga on the chin—and then to make love to her.” But Gillars was not simply a passive object. She also sought to shape and harness the legend to her own ends.

This presentation will examine how the Axis Sally legend emerged during World War II and explore why it persists in public memory. It will draw on documents gathered by the US Department of Justice and US Army Intelligence in preparation for Gillars’s 1949 treason trial: interviews with former servicemen, transcripts of wartime broadcasts, and interrogations of Gillars and her former colleagues.