V Sign - The V For Victory Campaign and The Victory/freedom Sign

The V For Victory Campaign and The Victory/freedom Sign

On January 14, 1941, Victor de Laveleye, former Belgian Minister of Justice and director of the Belgian French-speaking broadcasts on the BBC (1940–1944), suggested in a broadcast that Belgians use a V for victoire (French: “victory”) and vrijheid (Dutch: "freedom") as a rallying emblem during World War II. In the BBC broadcast, de Laveleye said that "the occupier, by seeing this sign, always the same, infinitely repeated, understand that he is surrounded, encircled by an immense crowd of citizens eagerly awaiting his first moment of weakness, watching for his first failure." Indeed, within weeks chalked up Vs began appearing on walls throughout Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern France.

Buoyed by this success, the BBC set out a plan, the "V for Victory" campaign, for which they put in charge the assistant news editor Douglas Ritchie posing as “Colonel Britton”. Ritchie suggested an audible V using its Morse code rhythm (three dots and a dash). Having the same rhythm, the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was then used as the call-sign by the BBC in its foreign language programmes to occupied Europe for the rest of the war. The irony that they were composed by a German was not lost on many of the audience or for the more musically educated that it was "Fate knocking on the door" of the Third Reich. ( Listen to this call-sign.). The BBC also encouraged the use of the V gesture introduced by de Laveleye.

By July 1941, the emblematic use of the letter V had spread through occupied Europe, and on July 19, Winston Churchill put the British government’s stamp of approval on the V for Victory campaign in a speech, from which point he started using the V hand sign. Early on he used palm in (sometimes with a cigar between the fingers). Later in the war he used palm out. It is claimed that the aristocratic Churchill made the change after it was explained to him what it signified to the other classes in Britain. Other allied leaders used the sign as well; since 1942, Charles de Gaulle used the V sign in every speech until 1969.

British Occultist Aleister Crowley claimed to have invented the usage of a V-sign as a magical foil to the Nazis' use of the Swastika in February 1941. He maintained that he passed this to friends at the BBC, and to the British Naval Intelligence Division through his connections in MI5, eventually gaining the approval of Winston Churchill. Crowley pointed out that in his 1913 publication Magick a V-sign and a swastika appear on the same plate.