OTW: Wodehouse's internment

I was indirectly led to the story of P. G. Wodehouse's internment and his subsequent ill-conceived radio broadcast from Berlin during World War II. Naturally wikipedia has the low-down.

Wodehouse attempted humor (could he help it?) during the broadcasts, but his deflation was clearly discernible halfway through.

• Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me 'How can I become an Internee?' Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest.
• the silly son of a bachelor
• In the end, we got quite sorry for the poor chaps, and relented to the extent of allowing them to lock us in for the night. It was pathetic to see how they brightened up at this concession. It paved the way to an understanding, and before we left the place we had come to be on quite friendly terms. One of them actually unbent to the extent of showing us the condemned cell - much as the host at a country house takes his guest round the stables.
• As a matter of fact, all through my period of internment I noticed this tendency on the part of the Germans to start our little expeditions off with a whoop and a rush and then sort of lose interest. It reminded me of Hollywood.
  
• Germany at that time was like the old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many adopted children that she didn't know what to do with them.
  
• The thing (the train ride to the next camp) was, therefore, practically a feast of reason and a flow of soul.
  

It is a good thing to have George Orwell in one's corner, at least.

• Flannery: "By this time the Wodehouse plot was evident. It was one of the best Nazi publicity stunts of the war,...Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster."
• Wodehouse's attitude towards the English social system is the same as his attitude towards the public-school moral code -- a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking acceptance.
• But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their own efforts.
  
• I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age -- became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment,
  

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