Berlin Speaking
I
JUST two years ago this August, having learned that Hitler was about to ‘solve’ the Sudeten problem, I hopped a plane for Prague. But before leaving my headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, I cabled the New York office of the Columbia Broadcasting System, suggesting that I give a daily five-minute talk from the Czech capital.
My home office thought I was crazy. It was an unheard-of proposal. Perhaps five minutes once a week on Sunday afternoons — but every day!
Within the week, however, we were broadcasting daily not only from Prague, but also from London and Paris and Rome and Berlin and Godesberg and Munich. During those warm days of September 1938, when the issue of peace or war hung in the balance for a month (we know now it was merely being postponed for a year), a new technique in American broadcasting was established. Today, over the two major networks, you hear three daily roundups from the principal European capitals.
Probably few Americans appreciate that they alone of all the peoples in the world receive this particular service, which already seems commonplace to us. The only radio correspondents in Europe today are American. No other country receives regular broadcasts of its own from both sides in this war. That we do is a tribute to the enterprise and sense of responsibility of American broadcasting, and also a tribute to the American listener. If he did not want daily broadcasts from abroad, he probably would not get them, for they are costly affairs.
If it was the Czech crisis which provoked the frequent broadcasts from Europe we are now accustomed to, it was the Austrian Anschluss six months earlier which created this type of news coverage. Looking back at it now, I do not think we did very well on that event. But we learned a lot. We were working with a new medium and had but little past experience to go by.
The Anschluss took place late one spring afternoon in March 1938. I happened to be there. Vienna was my headquarters at that time; my wife was in the hospital there having a baby. On my way to see her about four o’clock that afternoon, I had paused for a minute to watch a single policeman disperse a mob of about a thousand Nazis. Perhaps, I thought, Schuschnigg will stop the Brown Shirts yet. That morning, I knew, he had been secretly arming the workers. I hurried along to the hospital.
About six o’clock I returned to the centre of town. In those two short hours while I had sat at the bedside of my wife, following an unexpectedly complicated childbirth, an era had ended in Vienna and a new one had begun. I found myself swept along in a shouting, hysterical Nazi mob, past the Opera, the Ring, up the Kärntnerstrasse to the offices of the German Tourist Bureau, which, with its immense portrait of Hitler, had been a National-Socialist shrine for weeks. From some of the less hysterical demonstrators I learned that Schuschnigg had called off his plebiscite and . . .
There was no need to learn any more. That was the end of Austria. It was impossible to get a taxi, so I sprinted to the American Legation. There I heard Schuschnigg’s farewell radio message, probably the most moving broadcast Europe has ever listened to. I compared notes with my friends at the Legation, and then went out to get the rest of the story. I caught a few members of the Schuschnigg Government before they fled to safety or were arrested. I watched the Nazis excitedly installing themselves in the Ballhausplatz, the seat of government. About 11 P.M. — 5P.M. New York time —I had my story and, fighting my way through the mob, got to the studios of the Austrian Broadcasting Company.
I had my story, and it was the biggest one I had had since I joined radio the year before. Here were a studio and a microphone. The telephone lines to the outside world were still open. In an hour or so I could be broadcasting the full story of the Anschluss over the Columbia network from coast to coast. And — luck! — I was the only broadcaster on the scene. I confess that I felt all right as I entered the premises of the Austrian Broadcasting Company and bullied my way past the Nazi guards — harmless, excited boys of seventeen or eighteen mostly, though fooling dangerously, I noted, with their rifles and revolvers.
But I did not broadcast that night from Vienna.
The Austrian radio officials with whom I had always dealt were there, but, as they remarked, they had lost their jobs. Youthful Nazis had taken over. I went to them. They listened, promised to telephone to Berlin for permission and technical facilities so that my talk could go over a Berlin transmitter, and asked me to be patient.
This was difficult enough, with the story itching to get out of my system into a microphone. It was not helped by the turmoil which reigned that night, in the studios. But I waited. I waited an hour. Then I spoke up. I waited another hour, and spoke up again. But they couldn’t get Berlin on the telephone — or said they couldn’t. The German army, then invading Austria, had taken over the telephone. About two in the morning it became evident that I was becoming a nuisance. I was a foreigner, unknown to the Nazis. Maybe I was a spy. Some youths with bayonets invited me to wait outside in the hall. I waited there. About 3 A.M. someone came out and told me it was no use waiting any longer. I was invited to leave. I have never been a man to argue with bayonets. I left. And I never have felt so licked in all my life.
Echvard R. Murrow, Columbia’s European manager, restored me. He was then on assignment in Warsaw, and a long-distance telephone call which I had put in for him early the previous afternoon came through about 5 A.M. He suggested that I fly to London and give an uncensored broadcast from there. He himself would fly to Vienna to keep us covered at that point. I phoned the airport at Aspern. Probably no planes would be allowed to leave, a voice said. And they were all booked up anyway. But at 7 A.M. I was at the airport. Someone failed to claim his place on the Berlin plane. I took it. By dark I was in London. Someone from our office rushed me by car to Broadcasting House. Fortunately I had scrawled out a script between Berlin and Amsterdam and within a few minutes the first uncensored eyewitness account of what had happened in Vienna the night before was on the air in America.
About five o’clock the next afternoon my telephone rang. Paul W. White, Columbia’s director of public affairs, was calling from New York. He said: ‘We want a European roundup tonight at midnight, your time. Get us London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and Vienna. A halfhour show, and I’ll telephone you the exact times for each capital in about an hour. Can you and Murrow do it?’
I said yes, and we hung up. But the truth was that I didn’t have the faintest idea how to do it — in seven hours, anyway. Until that day Murrow and I had been able to arrange only about two ‘European roundups’ a year. These consisted of pickups from half a dozen European capitals for a thirty-minute program. The speakers were distinguished Europeans, and it took us months of fussing before technical arrangements could be completed. And then, in the end, they usually broke down. Once, I remember, Budapest failed to come in at all, and on another occasion Berlin and Stockholm had talked simultaneously.
I put in a long-distance call for Murrow in Vienna. Meanwhile, as valuable minutes ticked away, I considered what to do. The more I thought about it, the simpler it became. Murrow and I had newspaper friends, American correspondents, in every capital in Europe. We also knew personally the directors and chief engineers of the various European broadcasting systems. I called in the office secretary: ‘Put long distances in for Edgar Mowrer in Paris, Frank Gervasi in Rome, Pierre Huss in Berlin, and also call the directors and chief engineers of the PTT in Paris, EIAR in Turin, and the RRG in Berlin.’
Murrow came through from Vienna; he undertook to arrange the Berlin as well as the Vienna end, and also gave me a badly needed technical lesson as to how the entire job could be done. For each capital we needed a powerful shortwave transmitter that would carry a voice clearly to New York. Rome had one, but its availability was doubtful. Paris had none. In that case we must order telephone lines to the nearest short-wave transmitting station.
Before long, my three telephones were buzzing, and in four languages: German, French, English, and Italian. The first three I know fairly well, but my Italian scarcely exists. Still, I understood enough from Turin to get the idea that no executives of the Italian Broadcasting Company could be reached at the moment. For, to make matters worse, the day happened to be Sunday. I still had Rome coming in. Perhaps I could arrange matters with the branch office there. Berlin came through. The ReichsRundfunk-Gesellschaft would do its best. Technically, I knew, the Germans were unexcelled. But the line to Vienna was in the hands of the army and therefore doubtful. We could depend on Murrow to arrange that, however.
As the evening wore on, the broadcast began to take shape. New York telephoned again with the exact times scheduled for each capital. They took it serenely for granted that the broadcast was coming off. For some reason, New York’s brazen assurance encouraged me. My newspaper friends started to come through. Edgar Mowrer, Paris correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, was spending Sunday in the country, and it took some urging to persuade him to return to town to broadcast, though no man felt more intensely than he the bitterness of what had happened. Gervasi in Rome and Huss in Berlin would broadcast if their New York offices agreed. Not much time to inquire around the New York newspaper offices, especially on Sunday afternoon. Another call to Columbia in New York: Get permission for Gervasi and Huss to talk. And by the way, New York added, what transmitters and wave lengths are Berlin and Rome using?
I had forgotten about that. Another call to Berlin. The station would be DJZ, 25.2 metres, 11,870 kilocycles. An urgent cable carried the information to the CBS control room in New York.
Time was getting short. I remembered that I must also write out a talk for the London end of the show. I telephoned around town for material. New York also wanted a Member of Parliament to discuss British official reaction to the Anschluss. I called two or three friends. They were all enjoying the English weekend. Finally I got Ellen Wilkinson, M. P. She too was out of town, but fortunately not far. ‘How long will it take you to drive to the BBC?’ I asked her. ‘About an hour,’ she said. We had two hours to go. She agreed to talk.
Gervasi’s voice from Rome was on the line. ‘The Italians can’t arrange it on such short notice,’ he said. ‘What shall I do?’ I wondered myself. ‘We’ll take you over Geneva, and if that’s impossible, phone me back in an hour with your story and I’ll read it from here.’
Sitting alone in a small studio in Broadcasting House in London, I had a final checkup with New York three minutes before midnight. We went over the exact timings of each talk and checked the cues which would be the signals for the speakers in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London to begin and the cues which would return the show to New York. Rome was out, I told our control room in New York, but Gervasi was on the telephone this minute, dictating his story to a stenographer. We agreed upon a second switchback to London from New York so that I could read it.
Midnight came, and through my earphones I could hear, on our transatlantic ‘feedback,’ the smooth voice of Bob Trout announcing the broadcast from our New York studio. It succeeded beyond our fondest expectations. We repeated it the next night and the night after, learning a great deal technically on each evening. And then the crisis died down. There would be no war. Britain and France had retreated one step more before the rising Nazi power.
But American radio had made a discovery. It had found a new job to perform. Through radio’s peculiar magic, men three thousand miles away on the scene of action could penetrate into American homes and relate, simply and sincerely, the first-hand story of Europe plunging inexorably towards war.
II
One did not have to be a profound prophet to realize that Czechoslovakia would be next on Hitler’s list — and therefore on ours, to cover. Returning to Vienna, I studied the communications map of Europe and found that, with the annexation of Austria, Germany now controlled all the landlines running from Central Europe to our short-wave transmission outlets in Switzerland and England. Neither Prague, Warsaw, nor Budapest had a short-wave transmitter of sufficient strength to reach New York direct. In case of war with Czechoslovakia, or even the threat of war, it would be natural for Germany to refuse transmission facilities across the Reich, in which case we could not broadcast the Czech side of the conflict — unless the Czechs would build a powerful transmitter of their own. Accordingly, I suggested the usefulness of this to the Czech Broadcasting System in Prague. Its very capable officials and engineers realized the situation fully. But they did not think the Nazi threat would come in the immediate future. In the meantime, they were slowly assembling equipment for a fairly powerful short-wave transmitter which would be ready in a year or two.
About a month after the Anschluss, we did a broadcast from Czechoslovakia, the speakers being President Boneš and Miss Alice Masaryk. The theme of their talks was the Red Cross, but I had expressed the hope in Prague that Dr. Beneš would also say something about the ‘German question’ which had already popped up. Dr. Beneš did, and in those measured terms which marked his utterances to the very night of Munich when his country was betrayed.
Our broadcast, through a technical mistake in New York, was being carried by landline to Berlin and transmitted to America by the German short-wave station at Zeesen, instead of from Geneva as I had planned. Now when Dr. Beneš came to speak briefly on the ‘German question,’there was so much ‘fading’ somewhere between Prague and Zeesen that this part of his talk was scarcely audible in the United States. Prague blamed Berlin. I complained to Berlin. The Germans blamed Prague, declaring rather indignantly that they fed the program to New York just as they received it from the Czechs. We never were able to find out who was at fault. But immediately afterward the Czechs hastened work on their own new shortwave transmitter.
By the end of June, as I remember, it was ready for tests, and all during July of 1938 we tested its reception in New York. It proved to be a much better transmitter than we had expected or the Czech engineers thought possible. Early in August we decided to use it for a real program, and I went to Czechoslovakia to broadcast the Czech army manœuvres. That broadcast sticks in my memory.
A few minutes before we went on the air, while the troops and air force were rehearsing our show, a Skoda fighter plane, diving 10,000 feet, failed to come fully out of its dive and crashed a few feet from my microphone. As soon as we had extracted the pilot and observer from the débris of their plane — they were still alive, though mortally injured — we began our broadcast.
CBS engineers reported that night that there had been a little too much gunfire for an ideal broadcast, but that the Czech transmitter had behaved beautifully. From then on we were sure of an independent outlet from Prague. And within a month, as the Sudeten crisis came to a head, that transmitter was the only means of communication for several days between Czechoslovakia and the outside world.
It was this Czech crisis which made daily, first-hand coverage a permanent thing in American radio. Reluctant at first to allot its correspondent in Prague so much as five minutes of time a day, Columbia within a week was carrying a dozen broadcasts a day from the European capitals. And so was NBC. During that bewildering month which ended at 2 A.M. on October 1, 1938, in the Führer House at Munich, the two American networks laid the foundations for the coverage they are now giving in this war.
During that month we worked hard, slept little, and ate almost nothing. We broadcast it all, as best we could, and we did, I think, succeed in giving American listeners an accurate picture of what was going on. The most important broadcast during this period was made by Dr. Max Jordan of the National Broadcasting Company. He was able to read to his listeners in America the text of the Munich agreement before it was known in official quarters in London, or Paris, or even in Berlin!
Curiously enough, the broadcast of the crisis that my New York office liked best was a purely impromptu one we did from the platform of the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof in Berlin on the eve of the Godesberg meeting. The correspondents were all leaving for Godesberg on the 10.30 train that evening. Godesberg, they thought, would decide whether it was to be war or peace. About 6 P.M. Paul White called me from New York and suggested that I get the Germans to install radio equipment on the train and interview the American newspaper men on the way to Godesberg.
That proved technically impossible, so we decided to have a microphone at the station and do our interview just before the train pulled out. There was little time, but the Germans are superb technicians. When I arrived at the station with my bags at five minutes before ten, when the broadcast was to begin, the microphone was there and working.
But there were no American correspondents! The platform was empty! And my listeners overseas waiting to hear about the chances for war and peace!
At ten o’clock I had to start the broadcast as scheduled. I began chatting away — ‘stuttering’ probably would be a better word. I looked down from the station and described the River Spree and the dome of the burnt-out Reichstag Building which loomed behind it. Then I gave my own uninspired ideas about the chances for war and peace. I looked around. Still no correspondents. Well, I hoped they would all miss the train. I wanted to ask the station master whether we were on the right platform, but thought that would not sound right in the broadcast, Fortunately I had the evening newspapers in my pocket. I plucked desperately at them and began translating clumsily from them.
Finally a correspondent showed up, and, carrying my portable mike towards him, I grabbed him by the coattails and before he knew it he was introduced and on the air. I left him there and ran down the platform to fetch some more speaking talent. The rest of the correspondents had arrived, but they were busy sorting out their baggage. I persuaded them to leave their luggage and sprint with me back to the microphone. My first speaker, perturbed at having been left alone, had nothing more to say, and was making frantic signs which meant evidently that he’d had enough.
I suppose the reason the broadcast was liked at home was because it was so natural and spontaneous. Moreover, what some of our veteran American newsmen said, despite the informality, was significant. Miss Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune addressed American women in particular, and I remember how moving her words were. An Italian correspondent motioned that he wanted to speak. His English accent has never been equaled on the stage. A Frenchman, the Havas correspondent, popped up. Before I could ask him how his English was, he was talking — in French. I started to translate what he had said, for it was worth translating, and then out of the corner of my eye I saw the train moving. I had not heard the ‘All Aboard!’ My finishing sentence was not smooth, but I made the train.
III
A few days after Czechoslovakia had been sold down the river, Murrow and I met in Paris to recuperate from the strain and to take stock of our job. We came to three conclusions: —
1. That after Munich a European war was now more probable than ever, and that it would very likely come after the next harvest — that is, about August 1939.
2. That Poland was obviously next on Hitler’s list, and that the Poles should therefore be encouraged to build a more powerful short-wave transmitter than they had, so that we could again furnish both sides of the story.
3. That if a radio network meant to cover both sides in the war, it must have a staff of its own, a staff consisting exclusively of Americans, speaking American.
Why our own staff? In the Czech muddle we had constantly used outstanding American newspaper correspondents and they had done a fine job of broadcasting. But we felt that if war really came the American newspapers might not permit their men to broadcast. For one thing, these men would be busy and could not be spared from their duties. That we were justified in this surmise was proved the very first week of the war, when all three American press agencies and every American newspaper except one put a ban on their correspondents’ speaking over the radio. Fortunately we were at least, fairly well prepared for this development, and, by last December, Columbia had its own staff correspondents broadcasting from London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Amsterdam, Helsinki, and the Balkans.
The regular daily talks — in my own case, two daily — absorb most of a staff man’s time and energy. The routine is similar to that of the news correspondent. We spend most of our time snooping around for news. We read fifteen or twenty newspapers a day. We attend press conferences. We try to sift out the truth from mountains of propaganda. We study the make-up of armies, navies, and air forces. And we pore over maps.
Occasionally we vary our talks by interviewing people, but in most cases the interviews are disappointing because the people can’t say very much. An exception was Germany’s ace submarine skipper, Captain Herbert Schultze, whom I interviewed early in the war.
I cornered him in the German Admiralty the afternoon he returned from his first ‘killing.’ He was a clean-cut fellow of about thirty, hard as nails, and full of that self-confidence which you get, I suppose, when you gamble daily with your own life and the lives of others.
The Admiralty had approved the interview, and Captain Schultze seemed quite willing to talk. Only he was afraid of his English, which, he said, he had not bothered about since his naval academy days, when he had nearly flunked it. After listening to a specimen, I was afraid, too. In fact, I couldn’t understand a word he said, and we had to converse in German. Someone suggested that his English would improve during the afternoon, that he was merely a little rusty. This offered hope, and I cabled New York that the interview was on for that night.
In the meantime, I put my questions and the Captain sat down to write out answers in German. When he had finished a page, I dictated an English translation, with the help of another officer, to an Admiralty secretary who wrote English almost faultlessly but who had difficulty understanding it when spoken. We sweated away for four hours and finally achieved a fifteenminute script.
There were two points in the script, the very ones which made it most interesting, which added to my own perspiration. The Captain told a story of how he had torpedoed the British ship Royal Sceptre, but, at the risk of his own skin, had arranged rescue of those aboard by another British vessel, the Browning. Now, a few days before, London had reported that the Royal Sceptre had been torpedoed without warning and that the crew and passengers, numbering sixty, had presumably perished. I wondered who was right.
Captain Schultze, as we worked out our interview, also mentioned that he was the U-boat commander who had sent a saucy radio message to Mr. Winston Churchill, advising him of the location of a British ship which he had sunk, so that the First Lord of the Admiralty might save the crew. But, only a day or two before, Mr. Churchill had told the House of Commons that the German submarine commander who had sent him that message had been captured and was now a prisoner of His Majesty’s Government.
I reminded the Captain of that, and asked him if he could give me the text of his message. His logbook was at Kiel, but he telephoned there and had his message read back to him. That made me feel a little better. Shortly before the broadcast, something else happened which made me feel better still. As we were leaving the Admiralty, an officer brought us a Reuter dispatch saying that the Browning had just landed at Bahia, Brazil, with the crew and passengers of the Royal Sceptre all safe.
One good break followed another. To my surprise, as our broadcast got under way, the Captain’s English did indeed improve, just as predicted. His accent was terrific, but in some way his words poured out very distinctly. You could understand every syllable. Moreover, though he was broadcasting for the first time in his life, he proved to be a natural speaker. Most men of his type, when put before a microphone, read their lines mechanically. He talked as though we had never written out a line. A bit of an argument had crept into the script. When we came to it, the Captain thundered away as though we were having a red-hot dispute.
Some American newspapers, in their accounts of this interview, expressed misgivings about the genuineness of Captain Schultze. What proof did I or CBS have that the man was really a German U-boat commander? Subsequently, I was informed that London itself agreed with his version on both the Royal Sceptre and the saucy message to Mr. Churchill, including the fact that he had not been captured. Today he stands at the top of Germany’s submarine skippers and is credited with having sunk more shipping than any other commander.
IV
Like every other broadcaster, I suppose, I like broadcasting from outside a studio if the job is merely to describe what I see. But if I have to sum up the events of the day, or speculate on world affairs, I prefer a studio. Last winter, for instance, I had to deliver some talks from the ice stadium at GarmischPartenkirchen. I was not covering winter sports, but the political situation in Europe, and I had gone to the Bavarian resort only for a few days of rest — rest, that is, except that I still had my scheduled twice-daily broadcasts. The only microphone in town was in the ice stadium, and as I began my first broadcast from Garmisch one afternoon I had not noticed that a hockey game was in progress before my eyes. Just as I started to delve deep into the possibilities that lay before the unhappy people of Europe, someone scored a goal, bedlam broke loose in the stadium, and it was difficult to keep my mind on Hitler’s next move.
The night broadcasts were even worse. True, the hockey games were over, for I did not go on the air until a quarter to one in the morning. That was the trouble. First I had to rouse the night watchman, and it was very cold waiting outside in the snow. Then, alone in the middle of the night in a tiny box at the top of the giant, darkened stadium, with the temperature below freezing both indoors and out, I tried to concentrate on the more serious aspects of the European scene. Luckily I wore rubbers and there was a carpet on the floor, so that I could not only blow as silently as possible on my fingers to keep them warm, but also stamp my feet to keep my toes from getting frostbitten. But it was impossible to put my heart in my job.
Even in Berlin, during that severe winter, I did not always arrive at the studio in the state of mind which helps one to chat easily about high politics and war. First there was the blackout. In order to reach the studio, I had to negotiate a long stretch down the Wilhelmstrasse in pitch-dark. I am not noted for my memory, and it took me three months to memorize the exact position of the numerous lamp posts, fire hydrants, traffic posts, and three sets of projecting stairways which lay along the sidewalk between my hotel and the subway station. It was a rare night when I did not collide with at least one obstacle or flop headlong into a snow pile. Because of the shortage of trucks and gasoline, the piles of snow were not removed from the sidewalks of Berlin as in other years. If I had been walking fast and had hit a lamp post, I would arrive at the studio with a lump on my forehead and a headache.
Another headache might ensue if I had forgotten my pass, for that meant delay until I could be identified as I passed through the gauntlet of steel-helmeted guards at the radio studio. Even searching for my pass, on a dark sub-zero night, with fingers stiff from the cold, was not an easy task. Once I emptied my pockets trying to find it, and, without noticing, at the same time I emptied the script for my talk into the snow.
No broadcaster can spare enough time to allow for all possible accidents which may prevent his reaching the microphone on the dot. Yet to be late is fatal. If he is broadcasting an event, it is even more difficult to ensure that it will synchronize with the radio program’s schedule. I remember the time I was in Rome on the night that Hitler arrived there for his state visit. I had timed our broadcast for the exact minute when the Führer was to be received by the King of Italy, and I had arranged my microphone on the roof of the royal stables overlooking the little square in front of the palace.
Unfortunately, the horses pulling Hitler’s carriage galloped faster than anyone anticipated. By the time I went on the air, he had arrived, had entered the palace, had come out and bowed to the populace, had disappeared, and as my microphone opened there was nothing left to describe. I had made notes of everything, however, and had received descriptive reports by radio of his dramatic ride through the streets of Rome, which I had noted down. I had also jotted down some ideas about the political significance of the visit.
But it was pitch-dark by the time I went on the air, and the electric light attached to the mike suddenly failed. I could not make out a word of my notes. The only thing was to speak from memory, but, after standing on the windswept roof for five hours, the light in my memory had gone out, too. I soon realized this. However, there was a row of torches burning near by on the roof in honor of Hitler, and I motioned to an Italian engineer to fetch one. It flickered badly, but gave just enough light to enable me to make out a few key points in my scribbled notes.
Timing an outside broadcast to stop on the second is sometimes as difficult as to start it correctly. I had an unusual experience of this last Christmas night, when I was broadcasting from a German warship at Kiel. A full moon illuminated the harbor that night, revealing that practically the entire German fleet was anchored there for the holiday. Owing to censorship, I naturally could not report that, but the sight so impressed me that I decided to begin the broadcast from the deck of the vessel, describing the beautiful moonlit harbor. Then, for the main part of the show, I would slide down a hatch with the microphone and take it into the crew quarters below, where about fifty members of a submarine crew just returned were having their Christmas celebration.
The first, part went off all right, and, after exhausting all my adjectives, I started to slide down the hatch, grasping my portable microphone. It happens that I am not a sailor accustomed to sliding down hatches. In the end I got down, but I ripped a sleeve and smashed the stop-watch strapped to my wrist. I discovered this only some minutes later when, feeling that our time was almost up, I glanced at my watch. The face had been completely annihilated. There was no way to tell what time it was, or howmuch time had passed. I motioned to the crew to sing a song, and then motioned for a watch, but no one understood my gesture. Actually, by pure guesswork, we finished the broadcast within ten seconds of the scheduled ending.
Sometimes an outside broadcast fails for lack of technical facilities. The only battle in Poland which any of us witnessed, aside from the terrible bombardment of Warsaw, was the fight for the Polish harbor of Gdynia. Because the Poles had no artillery, we were able to witness the battle from a hill only a mile and a half from the front line. Standing there on the hill, watching the killing and destruction, I yearned to describe it and to project all the horror, and all the bravery, too, as the scene unfolded before my eyes. Only, I could not get a microphone.
I dashed back twenty miles to Danzig, while it was still fresh in my mind and heart, and attempted to tell the story from the radio studio there. But contact with New York from Danzig was spotty. Three times that night, — at midnight, at 2 A.M., and at 5 A.M., — thinking each time that I was getting through to America, I tried to tell what I had seen. The next day I learned that New York had been unable to pick up a single word. It was an example of one of the more discouraging sides of broadcasting.
There have been many others. The deadliest enemy of transatlantic shortwave broadcasting is sun spots. When they occur, as they do three or four times a year, we give up. They simply annihilate the short-wave channels. For three days during the Czech crisis, sun spots completely obliterated our transmissions from Europe. I remember the sense of frustration I felt in Prague the week the sun spots came. We would make our daily drive of two hundred miles through the Sudetenland, stopping to watch the lighting, and at night return to Prague with a story we thought worth telling. We never knew when the sun spots might suddenly cease, so we always wrote our broadcasts, and about 3 A.M., Prague time, I would walk through the blackedout streets to the studio to make my talk. Last-minute bulletins would be inserted — and some of them made very exciting news — and I would walk back to my hotel after my broadcast just as dawn broke. When I awoke two or three hours later to begin a new day, there would be a cable from New York: ‘You unshowed tonight.’
People on both sides of the Atlantic often ask us why we don’t use cable when atmospherics or sun spots are bad. The explanation is that no transatlantic cable can carry voice or music. Its limit is the dot and dash.
Another question we are often asked is: How does a broadcast originating in Helsinki or Ankara or a mine sweeper in the North Sea reach America so that it can be heard as clearly in Cedar Rapids or Denver as if it were emanating from the studios in those places instead of five or six thousand miles away? The secret is the short wave. All broadcasts from Europe to America are carried by short wave. Sensitive listening centres near New York pick them off the short wave and rebroadcast them to you over the normal medium-wave stations in your district.
Broadcasting from London, Berlin, or Rome is a simple job, as all three capitals have powerful short-wave transmitters of their own. Broadcasts from Paris are usually carried by telephone line to Rugby in England, where the powerful short-wave transmitters of the British post office are located. Prague was ready with a strong short-wave station when the time came to tell of the end of Czechoslovakia, but Poland’s new transmitter was slow in being manufactured. Perhaps it did not matter, because German bombers practically destroyed Warsaw’s station the first week of the war.
Finland’s short-wave transmitters never at any time got through to America when the Russian attack struck there. We tried to pick up Helsinki’s 200-watt short-wave station through Geneva, but the Russians jammed it. We could hear nothing. Then Sweden came to our aid, lending us its 100,000-watt mediumwave transmitter. (Maximum power permitted in America, remember, is 50,000 watts.) At night, Sweden can be heard all over Europe, and we arranged for a certain European short-wave station to pick it up and retransmit the broadcast. This hookup then was as follows: by telephone from Helsinki to Stockholm, by medium-wave radio from Stockholm to a European short-wave station 800 miles away, and from this station to New York by short wave, where it was once again transformed to medium wave for broadcasting in the United States.