Foreign News: Big Bertha

Like distant thunder but with the beat of a tune. Gargantuan sounds pealed across the western suburbs of Berlin last week. Twenty-five miles away at Siemens-stadt technicians of the German Siemens & Halske electric trust were testing the world’s loudest loudspeaker. Its powerful diaphragm can make as much music as a 2,000-piece symphony orchestra, as much noise as 500 lusty German kitchen wenches pounding with wooden spoons on tin dishpans.

“In a short time we shall attach this notable invention to a balloon.” said a Siemens & Halske spokesman. “We shall anchor the balloon above Berlin at an altitude of 3.000 feet. Think of it! An entire city of 4.000.000 souls will hear whatever is played or spoken with perfect distinctness!”

“Blah, Blah, Blah!” Already Berliners with radio sets can hear with perfect distinctness Communist propaganda broadcast in German from Moscow three times a week. The opening words of the Red announcer are: “Police and soldiers of Germany, remember you are proletarians in uniform! Remember that in Germany, too, the right way is the revolutionary way! Long live the German Soviet Republic!”

Next follows a thoroughgoing Communist “expose” of members of the present German Government, uniformly describing them from President von Hindenburg down as “Capitalist bloodsuckers, betrayers of the German proletariat.” .

This sort of thing has been going on for months. Up to last week the German Government and most non-Communist German newspapers continued to ignore the Red programs, fearing that any open protest would merely rouse the curiosity of German workmen, cause more of them to tune in pn Moscow. At the German Foreign Office it was learned last week, however, that diplomatic protests have been made to Moscow. In their reply the Soviet Foreign Office said:

“The programs to which exception is taken are not broadcast from Moscow for purposes of propaganda among the German people. They are broadcast in German for the benefit of German colonists in our own Volga basin.”

The Moscow station, with 100-kilowatt power, outranks in potency any in the U. S., broadcasts Communist propaganda in German, English, French, Swedish, Polish and Rumanian which can be heard in all those countries—though but faintly in England. Rumania alone, being in constant fear of a Soviet attack to recover Bessarabia (which Rumania seized from Russia after the War), has installed an anti-Red broadcasting station. Whenever watchful officials of this station hear Moscow broadcasting in Rumanian they turn loose their own station on the same wave length and go BLAH, BLAH, BLAH!

In time of war, when it might become necessary to blah-blah all enemy stations (with the enemy of course blah-blahing too), the balloon loudspeaker may prove to be of strategic value. With all radio broadcasting blocked, the President of Germany could still speak to all Berlin at once, and, by hooking up more balloon-speakers, to all Germany.

Also such super-speakers could be made to shout propaganda across No Man’s Land night and day, attacking the enemy’s morale, keeping him awake. In the laboratory, mice have been killed by a sound barrage. The German superspeaker tested last week may with development prove in the next war to be a sound Big Bertha.