Air Alarums

Not in its 17-year professional career has U. S. radio broadcasting encountered such a story as the brewing of World War II, and the networks went after it with the enthusiastic bustle of a newspaper city room on election night. On this assignment, radio was no cub. Its coverage of the Munich crisis and the Nazi occupation of Czecho-Slovakia were invaluable experience. For the last, exciting fortnight, radio's plans were consequently well laid. Correspondents reported daily, sometimes hourly from the main European capitals direct to U. S. listeners by radio telephone or short-wave pickups. Busy interpreters sat day and night before "monitor" receivers, eavesdropping on foreign radio stations. By round-the-clock diligence of this sort, and with a ceaseless supply of news bulletins from the press associations ticking in to the studios, radio, with no presses to turn, was consistently first to the listening U. S. with every jot of news worth reporting (and much that was not). It even earned that highest honor of the news craft--by-lines in the press itself for radio gathered news that press correspondents missed or were unable to transmit because of commandeered cable & communication facilities.

At the headquarters of the three big networks in Manhattan, special news staffs worked 24-hour shifts. At CBS, news-nosy, UP-trained Paul White, radio's first full-time news chief (of CBS's pioneer radio news service in 1933), ran the show in a glisteningly efficient, Hollywood-style newscasting department (four contiguous glass-walled rooms) high above Manhattan's Madison Avenue.

CBS depended largely on its own, crisis-trained staff for foreign coverage--lean, precise Ed Murrow in London, little INS-Man Thomas Grandin (who looks like Goebbels) in Paris, dignified William L. Shirer (who looks like H. V. Kaltenborn) in Berlin. The indefatigable Kaltenborn himself, CBS's one-man backfield during the Czech crisis, was in Europe when the current mixup broke out broadcast from London at 1:30 p.m. there on Wednesday, jumped a Clipper, broadcast from Manhattan at 6:30 next night. To spell Kaltenborn, CBS fortnight ago hired grey, smart ex-Timesstar Elmer Davis.

All worked overtime. One super-diligent engineer stayed on the job for 48 hours straight following Hitler's epochal Reichstag speech. Someone finally made him go home. When he had been asleep only an hour, his telephone rang. "This," said a velvet voice, "is the Crossley radio survey. Will you tell me what program you have been listening to?"

Coordinator of NBC's system of full-time big-shot press correspondents in key capitals and comment from guest correspondents and political bigwigs is capable ex-Worldman Abe Schechter. Correspondent Max Jordan, who scored a notable beat for radio last September on the Munich pact, this time got NBC one of radio's press bylines with his short-waved transmission from Berlin of Hitler's 16 points at a time when transatlantic cables were temporarily shut down.

For home comment on the news, NBC picked big-name specialists General Hugh Johnson and Dorothy Thompson. In her broadcast of last Friday night, Miss Thompson sounded as if she were itching to get her fingers in Hitler's hair. When Commentator Thompson was just getting warmed up, the first important application of U. S. radio's self-imposed censorship code occurred. St. Louis' KWK cut Miss Thompson off the air. Said KWK's president, Robert Convey, as though he might have to give Hitler time to answer her: "It was our belief that Miss Thompson was expressing some personal opinions, and it does not seem . . . in view of the N. A. B. code, that anything but reportorial matter would be in the public interest." Next day the isolationist New York Daily News, while not contesting Miss Thompson's right to be heard on the radio, commented testily: "We cannot help wishing that Dorothy Thompson's son, now about 10, were about 19 instead. If that were the case [she] might perhaps be somewhat less hysterical in her public utterances."

MBS has a low cost setup, with Correspondent John Steele the only staff man abroad, Chicago Tribune's Sigrid Schultz on retainer in Berlin, Waverly Root in Paris, English Newsman Patrick Maitland on tap in Warsaw. At home plate virtually the whole team is clear and quick-thinking, war-trained Commentator Raymond Gram Swing, who has been eating, sleeping, reading, listening, broadcasting round the clock in a 24th floor office of WOR on Broadway.

To many listeners, the most flavorsome department of radio's war coverage has been MBS's "Propaganda Roundup," transcription of foreign broadcasts in English. From these and from foreign language broadcasts monitored and translated, the U. S. public has had an earful of typical atrocity stories, mainly from the German radio. Samples: "Today a highly pregnant German woman . . . was kicked in the abdomen by Polish beasts until she died at the wayside"; "a four-year-old boy was torn away from his mother . . . his hand was cut off and he was left to die in the ditch." Another atrocity charged to Poland was the murder of a girl in New Jersey, in connection with which her Polish father, a clergyman, is under arrest (see p. 16).

Less inventive, or perhaps higher principled, the Polish radio has contented itself with sardonic comment. Sample, referring to the new German short rations limiting food supplies and permitting one cake of soap a week: "Apparently Germans will not only have to be hungry from now on, but dirty."

Sirela

SIDOFADO RE FA SO SIDOMIFA SO

This week to a very few earnest people this cabala from the short-wave Voz de Guatemala meant: "War must be prevented. Do not let false reports inflame you. Relations can always be amicably settled. Unless a nation is really bloodthirsty, there is no reason for war. We must not let propaganda flood our brains and stop our reasoning. Stop and think! War is not necessary."

To derive this pacific outcry from the Voice of Guatemala, it was necessary to have at hand a dictionary of Sirela, an international radio language that for 25 unrewarding years has been the preoccupation of an ardent, peace-bent violinist named Carlo Spatari. Spatari brought his fiddle to the U. S. from Italy in 1905, when he was 17. Since he was 25 he has fiddled hard, taught, shot his hard-earned wad devising Sirela, based on the universally understood do, re, mi of the Guidonian musical scale. Today he is still a broke violinist, but his Sirela dictionaries in six languages have reached (at $2 to $5) 100,000 hands in a dozen or more countries, and his language is the subject of resolute or amused experiment by radio stations from Manhattan to Moscow.

Sirela is founded on the mathematical basis that the seven syllables of the scale, plus a Spatari-added Bo, may be arranged into no less than 1,000,000 pronounceable combinations. These combinations are used to express not only single words, but complete thoughts. To these combinations at present there is no rhyme nor clue. They stand for what Carlo Spatari believes they ought to stand for. Originally he had thought of making them up so they could be sung, but that idea proved unmelodious.

Since Carlo Spatari is an ardent pacifist, the cause of peace is well articulated in Sirela.

Some peace-packed symbols:

LASISIDO -- "Strict neutrality is essential. We do not want war. We do not need war. And as God is my witness, we will not have war if I can prevent it."

LASISIRE -- "There is no such thing as 'a war to end all. wars.' The last war has taught us that there can be no solution to warfare through bloodshed. Unselfishness is all that is necessary to maintain peace."

Sirela, however, is not all peace talk. The dictionary has a column of symbols each for murder (FAREBORE -- "The police are holding the victim's fiance for the murder") ; kidnapping (FAMIMIDO -- "The child was lured from its home while at play"); vital statistics (FASIDOFA -- "The birth of triplets was announced"). The language has other unusual features. The symbol for Reichsfuhrer Adolf Hitler, for example, is LADOSORE. But if Herr Hitler should suddenly be displaced by, say, Nazi-jailed Communist Ernst Thalmann, Sirela would serenely call the new Reichsfuhrer LADOSORE, too.

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