Five Brothers and a War

“V” for Victory

In Morse Code, “V” is “dot dot dot dash (dit dit dit dah), and this pattern came into great use. Not only did the Dutch use chalk to write “V”s on as many building walls as they could, but they also used the pattern in everyday life, such as summoning a waiter in a restaurant. At some point, someone noticed that Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 starts with the equivalent of two sets of three dots and a dash.

This in turn led to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) using that piece of music to begin its wartime news programs, which in turn led to Beethoven’s Fifth being the musical

symbol for resistance against the Nazis. (It should be noted that Beethoven wrote the music between 1804 and 1808, whereas Samuel Morse, along with others, did not develop the Morse Code until decades later.) The use of resistance symbols by the Dutch became a thorn in the side of the German occupiers of Holland. The color orange, the daisy variant Margriet, and Beethoven’s Fifth were means of communicating resistance. On July 18, 1941 Joseph Goebbels, the Chief

Nazi Propagandist, made efforts to repurpose the “V for Victory” mantra to represent a German victory, rather than an Allied one. Den Haag got a prominent sign that read, “V = Duitschland [the old Dutch word now modernized “Duitsland”] wint voor Europa op alle fronten”, which could be translated as, “Germany wins for Europe on all fronts.”

history

Thousands of signs were distributed, which combined the “V” with orange.

Five Brothers and a War

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