Disney & War

Hello and welcome to my blog! To receive these deals daily, sign up for my **FREE** e-mail newsletter or subscribe to my automatic RSS feed. If you'd like a printable copy of this post, please see the link below. Thank you for stopping by!

The following article was posted on Michael Barrier's site today.  Thank you, Michael, for sharing this with us:

"Mickey Mouse" and D-Day

I recently read (on microfilm) an interview with Walt Disney in the New York Post for June 30, 1944. That piece, by Mary Braggiotti, begins as follows:

"Dear Mickey Mouse:

"How are you, old boy? How I'd like to see you again!"

"That's all the letter said," concluded Walt Disney, "just that. It was from an American prisoner in Germany."

To Mr. Disney, sipping a scotch-and-soda at "21" before his departure for Hollywood the other day, this letter in a recent batch of Mickey's fan mail seemed to mean more than the news item that, on June 6, naval officers gathering for an invasion briefing at a port in southern England had to whisper "Mickey Mouse!" into the ear of the sentry before they could receive their orders.

That last sentence made me sit up, because it promised a solution to one of the more curious little mysteries associated with Disney animation—or maybe I should say, one of the more persistent Disney urban legends.

The notion has long been widespread that "Mickey Mouse" was the code name for the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. For instance, Neal Gabler writes in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination that "at Allied headquarters the code name for the operation was 'Mickey Mouse.'"

Gabler cites no source for that statement, and although many other books and Web sites say essentially the same thing, all of them are obviously peddling secondhand information.

David Lesjak, proprietor of the Toons at War blog, who almost certainly knows more about the Disney studio's history in World War II than anyone else, told me some time ago: "Disney staff did a search of the Archives and of all internal Disney Company computer databases and found no reference anywhere to Mickey Mouse being the codeword for the D-Day Normandy landings. The Pentagon and the Eisenhower Presidential Library were also consulted and the results at both institutions were also negative. There is speculation that 'Mickey Mouse' may possibly have been used at the lower unit level as a codeword, but even then there is no supporting documentation."

"Supporting documentation" has finally turned up, but what it supports is another matter. I haven't yet checked the Post microfilm for the "news item" that Braggiotti mentions, but a quick on-line check of other newspapers turned up three that published a very brief United Press item, datelined London, on June 8, 1944. Here's that item as it appeared in the Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail:

Mickey Mouse played a part in the invasion of northern France, it was revealed today.

Naval officers gathering for invasion briefing at a southern port approached the sentry at the door and furtively whispered into his ear the password of admission: "Mickey Mouse."

That surely is the tiny incident that was ultimately inflated, by Neal Gabler among many others, into something much grander, so that "Mickey Mouse" became the password not just for one meeting, but for the entire Allied invasion.

I've updated my page devoted to errors in Gabler's book to take this new information into account; the D-Day entry is for page 411.

This particular legend will no doubt continue to thrive, even though it's false. It's strange how many such falsehoods have attached themselves to Walt Disney and his creations, even though Walt himself was exceptionally accurate and straightforward in responding to interviewers' questions.