Radio: Fourth Front

In modern war there are four main fronts—military, diplomatic, economic, propagandist. To get a line on the patter and pattern of propaganda from its talkiest medium, CBS has had a staff of reporter-linguists listening day & night to Europe’s radio since the first days of World War II. Main idea has been to enable CBS’s home commentators to sort news from propaganda for radio listeners. But the by-product has been an increasing sheaf of notes, observations, comparisons, verbatim broadcasts which, by themselves, constitute a fairly complete documentation of the technique of war propaganda, as practiced by World War II’s experts.

Germany is the loudest, longest-winded propagandist on the Fourth Front, carrying out the Hitler-inspired rule: “Make it simple, tell them often, make it burn.” London is next, then Paris. U. S. S. R.’s mighty Radio Moscow is hard to hear in the U. S.

The German theme is the familiar one that Britain is an imperialistic aggressor, but the favorite targets have been Britain’s inept Ministry of Information (see p. jp) and Winston Churchill. Berlin last week caught Britain red-handed in a BBC report of the torpedoing of the freighter Royal Sceptre (see p. 34), in which it was said that, according to a message, all hands had drowned. Who then, Berlin asked, survived to send the message? After the BBC had fumbled with that for a time, Berlin sent its version: that another British ship, the Browning, had been spared by the U-boat commander to care for the Royal Sceptre’s crew. Later, the Royal Sceptre crew turned up safe in Bahia, Brazil. Other Berlin hotfoots: reports that “fat City men” hustle through London’s financial district with steel helmets concealed under toppers; that English women are adopting a new helmet hairdo.

One BBC report that made Berlin burn was based on the H. R. Knickerbocker (Hearst) report that the German high command had salted huge fortunes away in foreign lands against the day of defeat (TIME, Oct. 2). The announcer called Knickerbocker direct (“Do you hear us, Mr. Knickerbocker?”), offered him, on behalf of Goebbels, a tenth of all the cached wealth he could locate. When he failed to reply in 36 hours, a sizzling Berlin announcer blurted: “The British Ministry of Lies has bought the well-known American journalist, Knickerbocker . . . the louse.”

France has a technique logical, whimsical, Gallic. When the Germans called France Britain’s Rin-Tin-Tin, the French lost little time getting out a story that France’s real Rin-Tin-Tin, a trained police dog, had indeed enlisted with his master in the French Army. Paris-Mondial spent much air time twitting Germany on the Moscow deal, hinting at a sort of diplomatic cuckoldry with the Soviets reaping the joys of Germany’s conquest.

Great Britain. The BBC, to the much-enduring Britishers, has been a wishy-washy washout, broadcasting mainly late news, and such humdrum as the state of the wallabies at Whipsnade Zoo, the views of ruddy British workmen that things at home are not so bad. But in German, to Germany, the BBC is anything but wishy-washy. Nightly, the BBC exhorts Germans to rise, overthrow their leaders, bring peace to the world.

“You are given a full ration of lies,” the BBC’s German announcer says, “but only a half ration of bread.” Then he puts on the air recordings of Hitler’s pledges of peace, his disclaimers of territorial ambitions. “And that is the man,” the announcer told Germans in one broadcast, “who at this moment is with his troops in Poland. . . . His words are not worth … the air into which they are shouted.”

Other Fourth Front jousts:

¶ When the BBC broadcast that the retreating Poles had flooded mines in Upper Silesia, putting them out of commission for possibly a year, DJB in Berlin staged a rebuttal, apparently straight from the mines, interviewing miners and a manager, who said that no mines had been flooded, promised for the Fuhrer next year, “under German management,” a 125% step-up over 1938’s 28,000,000 tons.

¶To the BBC broadcast of the seizure of two tons of Arabian coffee consigned to Hitler, Berlin replied: “Everyone but the BBC knows that Adolf Hitler does not drink coffee.”