What author was labeled a traitor for broadcasting from Germany to America in 1941?

By the end of World War II, Pelham Grenville (P.G.) Wodehouse was not so much an expat of Great Britain as he was an outcast. His books were removed from British libraries, his works banned by the BBC, and his name ranked alongside the nation’s most reviled traitors. Some people even wanted him dead.

The case against him rested largely on five 1941 broadcasts he made from Berlin over the Nazi radio network. He made them after a year of internment. Also, with the capture of Le Touquet, a commune near Boulogne-sur-Mer, in the Pas-de-Calais department in northern France, he spent several months in a lunatic asylum.

Wodehouse's comments were aimed primarily at the U.S., where his social satires, especially those featuring Bertie Wooster, the archetypal upper-class twit, and his artful butler Jeeves, had an enormous following. In Britain, the broadcasts caused outrage and hostility.

Revisited today, Wodehouse's broadcasts seem to make him appear totally naive. He did not realize that the Germans were manipulating him. Nowhere in any of his broadcasts did he support for the Germans, denigrate the Allies or express much interest in the war. He said after the war (which the U.S. had not entered when he spoke) that he was simply trying to let his fans know he that was alive. This did not matter. In London, the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, called him a German operative. In the newspapers and on the BBC, Wodehouse became a figure of hated comparable to Lord Haw-Haw.