page_title: V sign
section_title: Second World War: V for Victory campaign
hierarchical_section_title: V sign / Victory sign / Second World War: V for Victory campaign
caption_attribution_description: Winston Churchill in Downing Street giving his famous 'V' sign.
context_page_description: The V sign is a hand gesture in which the index and middle fingers are raised and parted to make a V shape while the other fingers are clenched. It has various meanings, depending on the circumstances and how it is presented.
  When displayed with the palm inward toward the signer, it can be an offensive gesture in some Commonwealth nations, dating back to at least 1900. The more widespread use as a victory sign, with the back of the hand toward the signer, was introduced in January 1941 as part of a campaign by the Allies of World War II. During the Vietnam War, in the 1960s, the "V sign" was widely adopted by the counterculture as a symbol of peace. Shortly thereafter, it also became a gesture associated with fun used in photographs, especially in East Asia, where the gesture is also associated with cuteness.
context_section_description: On 18 May 1939, the French daily, Le Monde Quotidien had a headline of, 'V pour victoire'.
  On 14 January 1941, Victor de Laveleye, former Belgian Minister of Justice and director of the Belgian French-language broadcasts on the BBC (1940–44), suggested in a broadcast that Belgians use a V for victoire (French: “victory”) and victorie / vrijheid (Dutch: "victory / freedom") as a rallying emblem during the Second World War. 
  In the BBC broadcast, de Laveleye said that "the occupier, by seeing this sign, always the same, infinitely repeated, [would] understand that he is surrounded, encircled by an immense crowd of citizens eagerly awaiting his first moment of weakness, watching for his first failure." Within weeks chalked up Vs began appearing on walls throughout Belgium, the Netherlands and Northern France.
  Buoyed by this success, the BBC started the "V for Victory" campaign, for which they put in charge the assistant news editor Douglas Ritchie posing as “Colonel Britton”. Ritchie suggested an audible V using its Morse code rhythm (three dots and a dash). As the rousing opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony had the same rhythm, the BBC used this as its call-sign in its foreign language programmes to occupied Europe for the rest of the war. The more musically educated also understood that it was the Fate motif "knocking on the door" of the Third Reich.
  (Listen to this call-sign. ). The BBC also encouraged the use of the V gesture introduced by de Laveleye.
  By July 1941, the emblematic use of the letter V had spread through occupied Europe. On 19 July, Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred approvingly to the V for Victory campaign in a speech, from which point he started using the V hand sign. Early on he sometimes gestured palm in (sometimes with a cigar between the fingers). Later in the war, he used palm out. After aides explained to the aristocratic Churchill what the palm in gesture meant to other classes, he made sure to use the appropriate sign. Yet the double-entendre of the gesture might have contributed to its popularity, "for a simple twist of hand would have presented the dorsal side in a mocking snub to the common enemy". Other allied leaders used the sign as well.
  The Germans could not remove all the signs, so they adopted the V Sign as a German symbol, sometimes adding laurel leaves under it, painting their own V's on walls, vehicles and adding a massive V on the Eiffel Tower.
  In 1942, Aleister Crowley, a British occultist, claimed to have invented the usage of a V-sign in February 1941 as a magical foil to the Nazis' use of the Swastika. He maintained that he passed this to friends at the BBC, and to the British Naval Intelligence Division through his connections in MI5, eventually gaining the approval of Winston Churchill. Crowley noted that his 1913 publication Magick (Book 4) featured a V-sign and a swastika on the same plate.
caption: Winston Churchill, British prime minister, giving a V sign in 1943.
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