Renegade Unmasked

One evening in April 1939 Britons fiddling with their radio dials were startled to hear an anonymous British voice speaking over German airwaves. Said he, in clipped Oxonian accents: "To some I may seem a traitor—but hear me out. . . ."

For a long time after that, old Michael Joyce of Dulwich Common, London refused to admit that Lord Haw-Haw was his son. He would not listen to Haw-Haw's voice on the air.

When two other sons, Quentin, a clerk in the Air Ministry, and Frank, a technician for the British Broadcasting Corp., were arrested and interned, their father shook his head helplessly. When the first big flight of Nazi bombers roared over London one night last September, a bomb crashed on Dulwich Common, blasted the home in which white-haired Michael Joyce lived with his wife and two youngest children. Ailing, he moved into another small, red-painted brick house in nearby East Dulwich. There, last fortnight, Michael Joyce died.

One night last week, almost two years to the minute since he made his radio debut, Lord Haw-Haw began his broadcast with the words: "I, William Joyce. . . ." If his father's death had anything to do with his decision to abandon his incognito, he did not say so. Instead, he explained that he had dropped it to answer a series of London newspaper stories calling him a common spy. Said his indignant Lordship: "All these imputations I disregard as garbage. . . ."