Radio: The U.S. Short Wave

In the afternoon in Manhattan a man sits at a microphone watching a clock. As minute and second hand cut the hour he speaks. The vibration which is the “sound” of his voice becomes an electrical vibration. It speeds along a wire to a building in a scrub-pine clearing 40 miles away. There with the aid of a wafer of quartz crystal vibrating at a constant frequency of perhaps 11,830,000 cycles per second, and boosted by thousands of watts of electric power, the vibrations ripple from a great antenna outward in waves 26 meters long. In no time at all (for their speed is that of light], they reach a point in the darkness 3,000 miles away. A man there has a receiving set in his cellar tuned to the right wave length. He is risking prison or maybe death to hear the voice of the distant man at the microphone. To him it means Liberty and Truth.

This autumn, amid the happy local noise of a new U.S. radio season, the man at the other end of U.S. short-wave transmission was much on the minds of U.S. broadcasters. He had a place, too, in the thoughts of a U.S. Government pledged to combat his oppressors. Last month, after a great deal of bucking and yawing, the two interested parties in shortwave affairs got in harness together on a working program. The net of it: henceforth the Truth sent to short-wave listeners by the U.S. would not be sent at random, but would hit at Nazi propaganda as purposefully and quickly as an antidote hits at a poison.

The first step was taken last spring, after the U.S. State Department had called in short-wave broadcasters to arrange maximum world reception for a speech by President Roosevelt (TIME, May 26). The industry saw the drift, hired a liaison man in the person of Stanley P. Richardson, old A.P. correspondent, onetime secretary to Ambassador Joseph E. Davies in Russia and Belgium. Through Stan Richardson the broadcasters learned what the Government wanted, and vice versa. What the Government wanted, it soon moved to get.

Wild Bill Takes a Hand. When Colonel William Joseph (“Wild Bill”) Donovan was appointed Coordinator of Information last July, he made it clear at once that his would be no trifling job. So sweeping were the Colonel’s plans reputed to be that the intelligence services of the Army, Navy, FBI and State Department took unnecessary alarm lest the Donovan digests of information for the President supplant their own.

Radiomen also needed reassurance. Viewing the formidable staff of scholars, geographers and analysts swiftly collected by the Colonel, they gathered that a propaganda bureau was being prepared, and that short-wave broadcasters would be required to take dictation, or else. Enough young men around Washington talked like fools to give point to this suspicion. Already stirred up (for other reasons) against FCC, the industry felt that any plan to flim-flam its short-wave audience —built up by years of honest news reporting—should be fought at a hat’s drop.

Last month Wild Bill called the heads of the six U.S. short-wave organizations to Washington. “Look,” said he in effect, “let’s clear this thing up. My people are doing a job to help you, Messrs. Paley, Trammell, et al. We get daily records of the line that Axis propaganda is taking.

We can get immediate statements from officials here to correct Axis innuendo.

We get and compile editorials from the U.S. press, useful to quote on the air when Goebbels is making the most of the Chicago Tribune. Our writers have the benefit of background experience and research. We propose only to hand you the stuff to use as you see fit.”

How this finally began to work could be seen last week in the Manhattan office of the Coordinator of Information, a new, orderly place on Madison Avenue with a bepistoled Federal guard in the anteroom. Inside was what amounted to an international city room, with ex-New York Herald Tribune Foreign News Editor Joseph Barnes at the desk. From the wire services—and from Washington’s suggestions—Editor Barnes picked items of interest, tossed them to six key writer-researchers of such caliber as Edmond Taylor (The Strategy of Terror). Pointed or amplified, the items went next door to Stan Richardson’s office. Richardson, checking for both State Department and industry, put them on a private teletype wire to receivers in each short-wave news room. Sample item:

THE FOLLOWING FROM THE COORDINATOR OF INFORMATION IS FOR YOUR USE IF DESIRED

A WAR DEPARTMENT STATEMENT ANNOUNCING TODAY THAT NEARLY 2,000,000 WOOLEN BLANKETS OF THE HIGHEST QUALITY ARE TO BE PURCHASED FROM AMERICAN MANUFACTURERS FOR THE USE OF AMERICAN DRAFTEES CAUSED WASHINGTON OBSERVERS TO COMMENT ON THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THIS ACTION AND RECENT NEWS OF THE SEIZURE BY GERMAN AUTHORITIES OF BLANKETS FROM NORWAY’S CIVILIAN POPULATION TO HELP PROTECT NAZI SOLDIERS FROM THE RUSSIAN WINTER.

STANLEY RICHARDSON

Propaganda? There is nothing devious in the procedure of thus pointing up a one-line War Department announcement destined for routine burial in the back pages of newspapers. U.S. short-wave men can and occasionally do demand from “the Donovan people” through Richardson a convincing check on the accuracy of any news passed to them. Yet they appreciate the help they get from a new service that saves them a lot of work.

This week NBC started a new series of short-wave broadcasts for Europe and South America entitled Hitler Betrayed by Himself. Worked up with the collaboration of Free Frenchman Raoul de Roussy de Sales, the program consists of quotations read by one voice from Hitler’s declarations on various topics, followed by another voice recalling what actually occurred. This is about as far as U.S.

short-wave newscasters go in the direction of “counter propaganda.” NBC’s staff of 65 smart writers, producers and linguists has been working for democracy long enough to feel with fervor that the blunt American truth is the best antidote to Goebbelsian innuendo. Of the latter, they know through their correspondence (e.g. 1,170 European, 4,524 South American,4,908 Central American letters so far this year) their listeners are sick & tired.

Boston’s short-wave WRUL observes the same moderation, but is more concerned with what President Walter Lemmon calls “morale relief” for Occupied Europe. A non-profit foundation that has as auxiliary staff the whole modern-language department at Harvard, WRUL has the blessing of the Donovan group for an extended cultural program which may cost about $500,000 this year—twice as much as NBC appropriates for short wave.

Last week in Manhattan a WRUL microphone was set up on the stage of Lillian Hellman’s anti-Nazi play Watch on the Rhine, and a half-hour condensation of the play in German was short-waved to Europe, with Vienna-born Mady Christians and German-born Smylla Brind reading their parts in their native tongue.

On the Air. Programs for Europe and Latin America have taken a terrific spurt during the last few months, are now going out twelve to 20 hours a day from the eleven U.S. short-wave stations. Fortnight ago NBC put a new directional antenna into operation at Bound Brook, N.J. centering its beam on Paris. CBS is rushing work on its new 50-kilowatt transmitters at Brentwood, L.I. For the Orient, hitherto served by only one transmitter, FCC last fortnight authorized a new 100-kilo-watt station at San Francisco.

Broadcasters know that the only programs Europeans care to take risks for are news and factual programs. These are now staggered, by common agreement with the Donovan office, so that from Europe’s early afternoon to early morning there is not a quarter hour when news is not being sent, in French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, Czech, Serbo-Croatian and other tongues up to and including Arabic.

Things the broadcasters hope for from the Donovan office: 1) frequent and up-to-date reports through the State Department on technical reception in the various beam areas abroad; 2) BBC transcripts of German Continental broadcasts; 3) complete reports from FCC monitors on German short-wave programs.

Proof that U.S. short-wave activity has begun to tell on the continent of Europe is seen by broadcasters in recent repeated attempts by the German radio to vilify U.S. stations. A perhaps grimmer proof could be found last week in the Pinkerton detectives who, at FCC’s suggestion, now guard NBC’s main control room; and in the guards with machine guns at NBC’s transmitters.