A fifth column is any group of people who undermine a larger group—such as a nation
or a besieged city—from within.
The activities of a fifth column can be overt or clandestine.
Forces gathered in secret can mobilize openly to assist an external attack.
This term is also extended to organized actions by military personnel.
Clandestine fifth column activities can involve acts of sabotage, disinformation, or espionage
executed within defense lines by secret sympathizers with an external force.
Origin Emilio Mola, a Nationalist General during
the Spanish Civil War, told a journalist in 1936 that as his four columns of troops approached
Madrid, a "fifth column" of supporters inside the city would support him and undermine the
Republican government from within.
The term was then widely used in Spain.
Ernest Hemingway used it as the title of his only play, which he wrote in Madrid while
the city was being bombarded, and published in 1938 in his book The Fifth Column and the
First Forty-Nine Stories.
Some writers, mindful of the origin of the phrase, use it only in reference to military
operations rather than the broader and less well defined range of activities that sympathizers
might engage in to support an anticipated attack.
Madeleine Albright, for example, in a lengthy account of German sympathizers in Czechoslovakia
in the first years of World War II, reserves it for their possible response to a German
invasion: "Many, perhaps most, of the Sudetens would have provided the enemy with a fifth
column".
Contemporaneous usage In the United States at the end of the 1930s,
as involvement in the European war seemed ever more likely, those who feared the possibility
of betrayal from within used the newly coined term "fifth column" as a shorthand for sedition
and disloyalty.
The rapid fall of France in 1940 led many to blame a "fifth column" rather than German
military superiority.
Political factions in France blamed one another for the nation's defeat and military officials
blamed the civilian leadership, all helping feed American anxieties.
In June 1940, Life magazine ran a series of photos under the heading "Signs of Nazi Fifth
Column Everywhere".
In July 1940, Time magazine called fifth column talk a "national phenomenon".
In August 1940 the New York Times mentioned "the first spasm of fear engendered by the
success of fifth columns in less fortunate countries".
One report identified participants in Nazi "fifth columns" as "partisans of authoritarian
government everywhere", citing Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, and the Netherlands.
John Langdon-Davies, a British journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War, popularized
the term "fifth column" by publishing an account called The Fifth Column in 1940.
The New York Times published three editorial cartoons that used the term on August 11,
1940.
British reviewers of Agatha Christie's novel N or M? in 1941 used the term to describe
the struggle of two British partisans of the Nazi regime working on its behalf in England
during World War II.
Immediately following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. Secretary of the Navy
Frank Knox issued a statement that "the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire
war was done in Hawaii with the exception of Norway."
The widely-read columnist Walter Lippmann publicized similar accusations of sabotage
on the part of Japanese Americans in his syndicated column on February 12, 1942, titled "The Fifth
Column on the Coast."
The term was soon so widely known that it very quickly appeared in popular U.S. entertainment.
Introducing a 1941 newsreel, Meet John Doughboy, the animated character Porky Pig asked any
"fifth columnists" in the audience leave the theater immediately.
The next year in Looney Tunes' Foney Fables, the narrator of a comic fairy tale described
a wolf in sheep's clothing as a "fifth columnist".
In 1943, an animated cartoon in the Merrie Melodies series was called The Fifth-Column
Mouse.
Later usage
German minority organizations in Czechoslovakia formed the Sudeten German Free Corps, which
aided the Third Reich.
Some claimed they were "self-defense formations" created in the aftermath of World War I and
unrelated to the German invasion two decades later.
More often their origins were discounted and they were defined by the role they played
in 1938–39: "The same pattern was repeated in Czechoslovakia.
Henlein's Free Corps played in that country the part of fifth column".
Albright uses the term in this context only to describe what did not happen, in that the
German invasion met no Czech resistance, obviating the possibility of anyone playing the role
of fifth column in the military sense.
In 1945, a document produced by the U.S. Department of State compared the earlier efforts of Nazi
Germany to mobilize the support of sympathizers in foreign nations to the superior efforts
of the international communist movement at the end of World War II: "a communist party
was in fact a fifth column as much as any [German] Bund group, except that the latter
were crude and ineffective in comparison with the Communists".
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in 1949: "the special Soviet advantage—the warhead—lies
in the fifth column; and the fifth column is based on the local Communist parties".
North Koreans living in Japan, particularly those affiliated with the organization Chongryun
are sometimes seen as a "fifth column" by some Japanese, and have been the victims of
verbal and physical attacks.
These have occurred more frequently since the government of Kim Jong Il acknowledged
it had abducted people from Japan and tested ballistic missiles.
Some Israeli Jews, including politicians, rabbis, journalists, and historians, who believe
that Israeli Arabs identify more with the Palestinian cause than with the state of Israel
or Zionism have referred to them, who compose approximately 20% of Israel's population,
as a fifth column.
In popular culture Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel
Sixth Column describes the work of a "sixth column", a hidden resistance movement fighting
an oppressive occupying force of Asians on American soil.
The novel includes many references to the Spanish events in which the term originated
to contrast what the author considers the traitorous fifth column with the novel's patriotic
sixth.
In the 1983 television miniseries V and the 2009 version of the same material, those visitors
who actively side with Earth and undermine the activities of their comrades refer to
themselves as the "Fifth Column".
See also Demographic threat
False flag operation Front organization
Quisling Stay-behind
References
Further reading "The German Fifth Column in Poland" London:
Polish Ministry of Info, 1941 "Fifth Column at Work" by Bohumil Bilek, description
of German minority in Czechoslovakia, London, Trinity, 1945