The Great Shitscape: 25 years after Piers Morgan's ugly 'Achtung! Surrender' headline, British hacks are still at it
They mentioned the war but they think they got away with it.
If 1966 is still a totem to a certain sort of English man and woman — and let’s be honest it’s almost always men who can’t let things go — 1996 represented something far bigger to German fans than an incidental win in a semi-final clash with England. Die Mannschaft’s Euro ‘96 triumph was their first international tournament win after reunification and the first achieved by a team made up of players from West and East.
In the Euro 2012 Preview Guide, Germany’s Euro ‘96 captain, Jurgen Klinsmann — who sat in the stands for the England game, kept off the pitch by injury — said he believed football helped bring Germany together in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall coming down:
Those new players joining the team had to adjust to a completely new mentality. This process was accelerated by football. Football helped to build the bridge between East and West Germany. And the fact that players like Matthias Sammer and others came to the national team helped a lot in this cultural change because they were idols for the East Germans.
But as the Germans were forming a new history, England — especially its press — was picking at the scab of the old one. The game against Germany was not simply a football game but the continuation of war by other means. The “thirty years of hurt” that Baddiel and Skinner honked on about in Three Lions was seen as the work of the German rather than indifferent England sides and the papers reached into a grab bag of war movie references to hype the game.
It was an attitude with a long precedent. On the day of the 1966 World Cup final when England met West Germany at Wembley, Vincent Mulchrone of the Daily Mail wrote in that paper:
If the Germans beat us at our national game today, we can always console ourselves with the fact that we have twice beaten them at theirs.
But while Mulchrone, who actually served during the Second World War, was at least slightly subtle in his xenophobia, Piers Morgan was not. Then 31-years-old and only recently installed as editor of The Daily Mirror, Morgan slapped the headline Achtung! Surrender on the paper’s front page with an equally incendiary deck (“For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over…”), pictures of Stuart Pearce and Gazza with army helmets crudely superimposed onto them, and an editor’s letter declaring “football war on Germany”.
In his analysis of the relationship between hooliganism and tabloid media in Britain — Hooligans and hacks, what’s the real story?1 — Martin Christopher Wakin’s wrote:
The Mirror's front page featured the headline, "ACHTUNG! SURRENDER." It also contained some pictures alongside the text that featured England team-mates Paul Gascoigne and Stuart Pearce in authentic Second World War soldier's helmets.
As if this article wasn't offensive enough, the tabloid continued in the same vein with its continuous use of war analogy on pages 2- 3 of the same day's publication. This time it exclaimed, "There is a strange smell in Berlin and it's not just their funny sausages, it's the smell of fear." The double page spread also contained photographs with patronising headings including "Zey Don't like it up zem", in reference to the hit sitcom of the 1970's Dad's Army.However, the Mirror's xenophobic war imagery became even more apparent when its editor wrote on page six of the same edition, "I am writing to you from the Editor's office at Canary Wharf, London. Last night the Daily Mirror's ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock, a state of soccer war would exist between us".
Gleefully recounting his decisions in a Daily Mail column for the 2010 World Cup (inevitably headlined Achtung, Franz! For you, ze World Cup is over... I hope) Morgan himself wrote:
I can remember now (as everyone else seems to have done last week) the Euro '96 tournament, when I was editor of the Daily Mirror, and we had the brilliant idea of clearing the front page for Gazza and 'Psycho' Pearce in tin hats under the headline 'ACHTUNG SURRENDER!'
The next morning, I approved plans for a Mirror-sponsored Spitfire to dive-bomb the German training ground and drop copies of that front page on Jurgen Klinsmann's head.
Oh, and for a Mirror-sponsored tank to invade the Berlin offices of our German tabloid rival, Bild newspaper.
Then all hell broke loose, as the nation suffered a catastrophic sense of humour failure.
I ended up aborting the Spitfire (on the tarmac) and the tank (in the high street), apologising to the German team - my grandfather, a former marine commando, phoned me in a fury: 'Why are you apologising to the Hun? They took half my bloody colon out!' - and winning an award for Least Constructive Contribution to Anglo- German Relations of the Year.
More recently Morgan has affected to regret the move…
… but in his ‘diaries’ of the time — actually, a retrospective recounting pulled together from notes and written it’s alleged with quite a lot of help from his then-close friend Marina Hyde — he was equally boastful, dragging in a few other bits of grim xenophobia he stuck on the front page earlier in the tournament:
Friday, 21 June 1996
… I am not a normal football fan. I am a national newspaper editor with a certain duty of responsibility. The Mirror’s coverage of England’s previous opponents in the tournament so far has grown increasingly hysterical and jingoistic. For Spain, we offered 10 things you didn’t know about the Spanish, the first being that they introduced syphilis to Britain. The Dutch game was celebrated with a big slab of Edam cheese and the headline GIVE THEM EDAM GOOD THRASHING BOYS. Which even my village pub mates groaned at — never a good sign.
But Germany always brings out the worst xenophobic juices in tabloid editors, and I bounced in to work today full of alarming ideas on how best to set out our stall for the Hun in Monday’s paper if we win tomorrow. After much amusing debate, I opted for a war-flavoured ensemble of admittedly quite scary crassness, but of a humourous quality I’m sure will appeal to the nation…
… I have personally written a troop-rallying speech (borrowing freely from Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, full of such incisive wit as ‘we will fight them on the flanks, fight them in midfield’ — although someone stopped me from going the full hog and crying ‘and we must fight them on the terraces’. The inside pages are full of more Churchillian jingoism. We even had a reporter invading the swimming pool area of Germany’s training ground and slamming Mirror towels all over the loungers.
Monday, 24 June 1996
Hmmm. I turned the radio on at 8 am as I drove up from Sussex to work and there was some guy from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre condemning this outrageous piece of disgusting journalism… in the Mirror. What? Have I missed something here? Why wasn’t he laughing?
Morgan was forced to make a public apology that he didn’t remotely mean. The New York Times wrote beneath the headline Oh, Sorry: Tabloids Lose the Soccer War:
Remember when England's soccer stars were being passed off as drunken louts, a harmless embarrassment, more likely to be dribbling down the fronts of their shirts than toward goal?
That was three weeks ago.
Now they are national heroes, supported devoutly, and their accuser — the tabloid Daily Mirror — has apologized twice within a week. The first apology was expressed humorously to the players in reward for their 4-1 beating of the Netherlands. The second was offered, more sincerely, after the Mirror declared "football war" on Germany, England's semifinal opponent in the European Championship.
It also quoted Klinsmann, who’d most recently been playing for Spurs, calmly reflecting on his experience and knowledge of the British press…
I know what the English press can do and what the English press is prepared to do. For the team, it's easy for us to shrug it off. But I am afraid there will be some kind of knock-on effect to the German fans who will be in the stadium by the thousands. Hopefully, there won't be any trouble.
… and noted that The Mirror was not alone in its war-quoting, xenophobia-stoking trouble child approach to the game:
The tabloid Daily Star's front page declared, "Herr We Go, Bring on the Krauts" —alongside a revealing photograph of the German supermodel Claudia Schiffer headlined, "Ooh, ja Claudia." The Sun, the biggest seller in Britain, claimed good taste by relegating its headline of "Let's Blitz Fritz" to Page 4.
"The Sun has maintained a jingoistic approach, rather than a xenophobic one," said Stuart Higgins, its editor.
Well, that’s okay then.
Others also noticed The Sun’s complicity. In a Euro ‘96 diary for Soccer America, Duncan Irving wrote:
While we were expecting the jokes about stealing the best sunbeds, queue-jumping and toothbrush mustaches and "Don't mention the war," many people have had enough of the Little Englander posturing…
The Sun takes the moral high ground.
"[We've] maintained a jingoistic approach rather than a xenophobic one," says editor Stuart Higgins. Huh? The moral high ground in this instance simply means you don't run it on the front page: "Let's Blitz Fritz" appears on Page Four, after the topless Page Three models pose under the heading "Fritz out for the lads!"
This is the latest and gravest controversy surrounding the Mirror. Trailing the Sun in circulation, the paper has had a miserable tournament. It decided to publish an apology to Gascoigne on its front page after the Scotland game, then four days later a photographer was caught snapping Gascoigne on a private fishing trip. Gazza demanded the film be returned, but the snapper sped off, almost running over the playmaker's foot in the process. Now that would have been a story.
The heavies have taken the opposite tack. "It's time to say it -- we like the Germans!" says the leader in the Independent, which devotes a full page to German contributions to civilization — Beethoven, Battenburg cake, nudism and false teeth top the list.
The Independent’s boosterish enthusiasm was nearly as embarrassing as the tabloid cruelty (“We are properly, wholly, patriotic about Britain. But it is time to blow a final whistle on juvenile xenophobia. It is time to say - we like the Germans.”) Well, bully for you. But in Germany — outside of mild counter punches by its own tabloid papers — there was largely baffled disappointment.
The Suddeutsche Zeitung wrote a comprehensive account of British tabloids’ behaviour and turned to Yes, Minister for an explanation. The Sun it said — quoting Bernard Woolley’s words — was "read by people who don't give a toss about who runs the country, as long as she has big tits".
When Vincent Mulchrone wrote his (in)famous line in The Daily Mail on the morning of the World Cup Final in 1966, it was 21 years since the end of the Second World War. Piers Morgan splashed the Achtung! Surrender headline 51 years after that war and 30 years after England’s World Cup win.
On 24th June, it was the 25th anniversary of the Mirror’s headline — we’re now further away from that phoney war than Mulchrone was from one he actually fought in — and parts of the British press have not learned Morgan’s lesson.
When England progressed got out of the group stage and it became clear that Germany would be their next opponents, The Sun splashed on the headline Herr We Go Again with the back page howling “ENGLAND face arch-enemy Germany in the Euros last 16 at Wembley on Tuesday.”
Whose arch-enemy? They’re not mine. Mine run British newspapers. And they’re certainly not the arch-enemies of the current England squad, 12 members of which weren’t even born when England lost that famous game in Euro ‘96 and whose oldest players were only six when it took place. Germany’s big footballing rivalries are with the Netherlands, Poland, and Argentina. The psycho-drama is one-sided and largely exists in the minds of tabloid writers.
Most normal England fans — as opposed to beetroot-faced ranters whose entire personalities come from reading the red tops — have similar views to one quoted in a Telegraph piece about millennials and football rivalries:
“One hundred per cent, it’s Portugal we all hate,” he says. “Actually, if I ever think of Germans, I think of decent players with decent attitudes who are just better than us. With Portugal, there’s a real sense of being robbed. It hurts. Actually, I’m getting quite worked up just thinking about Ronaldo winking at the camera when they knocked us out in 2006.”
Yet tabloid hacks like The Sun’s Phil Thomas — once its Merseyside football reporter — still write lines like “for once it will be the Germans who are shaking in their boots at the thought of facing their old football foe” in direct opposition to reality. His colleague Dave Kidd delivered similar guff — “Because it is Germany, we are gripped by a fear of history repeating itself…” — who is that ‘we’ he’s talking about? I’m fairly certain it doesn’t cover the young England players.
Maybe England teams would be able to surmount that “fear” more easily if it wasn’t surrounded by a media culture that can’t move on.
The Daily Mirror also picked at the memory of 1996 — though without any reference to that infamous headline — blubbing “ENGLAND will face Germany at Wembley — giving Gareth Southgate the chance to avenge 25 years of hurt.” When Southgate said in 2018 that his penalty miss “will never be off my back sadly. That’s something that will live with me forever,” this is probably the kind of thing he was thinking about; the British press won’t let him forget.
This time the most pathetic headline in the run-up to tonight’s match against German came from The Daily Telegraph, where Jim White wrote a piece under the line At last, one thing we can agree on - fearing and loathing the German football team. White, who should know better but clearly doesn’t, said:
It had to be Germany. Even as England supporters watched the fluctuating fortunes of Group F unwind on Wednesday night, the conclusion was inevitable. Whatever results were necessary to ensure Germany faced England in the next round would happen. The sweat pricking the palms was not at the possibility of the unexpected but at the certainty of the bulldozer heading in their direction.
… And for England fans the sense of foreboding was already growing. Every supporter of the Gareth Southgate’s side has a crushing internal certainty about what will happen next: defeat will follow. The Germans will mark the end of national hopes. Once Joachim Löw sniffs an opportunity, the end will come. The St George’s flags will go back into storage.
Hopes the pub trade might have of a post-pandemic renaissance in sales will be put back into cold storage. It may be glorious, it may be futile, but it will happen: England expects defeat.
That isn’t the analysis of an adult who has written about football for decades, it’s the hyperbolic and fatalistic burbling of a child. But that’s where we are — while many specialist sites like The Athletic offer excellent, even-handed, and smart coverage — the newspapers are still stuck mentioning the war, over and over and over again.
The tabloid (and broadsheet, for that matter) approach to covering England vs. Germany games is representative of a childish country obsessed with childish things, framing everything through toybox imaginings of plastic soldiers and wet afternoons watching the pumped up propaganda of war movies made soon after the real thing where the British are always goodies, the Americans are polished perfection, the Germans are forever evil, and the Soviets don’t appear at all.
As I’m writing this conclusion, the Today programme is playing Three Lions and talking about the ‘spectre’ of England’s previous losses to Germany.
In grown-up nations that can shake off both their successes and losses, football games are not psycho-dramas every single time. Sometimes a match is just a match, a tournament is just a tournament, and journalists can not mention the war and get away with it.
Sadly now disappeared from the internet but preserved in part on Martin Belam’s blog.