U. S. Radio at War

In NBC's Manhattan news room only three men were on duty. WOR-Mutual was busy at the Polo Grounds: professional football, Dodgers v. Giants. CBS could not have been luckier: World News Today, its regular Sunday roundup from foreign points, went on the air at 2 :30 p.m.

At 2:25 the news tickers clanged, hammered out seven words: "White House says Japs attack Pearl Harbor." Within a few moments the networks crackled with the news. CBS picked up Honolulu short wave. By 2:30 World News Today, discarding Geneva and Cairo, was ready to bring in Washington, London and Manila.

By 3 p.m. all networks were in action--and in a turmoil. The news was beyond the grasp of some listeners. WOR, cutting into its football broadcast for a half minute, a minute at a time, got furious telephone calls from people too excited about the game to become excited about anything else. In Denver, when a religious hour was canceled, one man called station KFEL to ask if it considered the war news more important than the gospel. Nowhere did the straight radio reports of terrific bombing at Honolulu--of Jap pilots diving over the beautiful mountains to fire U.S. ships and kill U.S. men--create anything resembling the panic created three years ago by Orson Welles's famed faking of a Martian invasion.

Seasoned by many emergencies, the news staffs of the great networks were in top form by late afternoon. NBC scooped them all on Honolulu, bringing in at 4:06 an observer standing on the roof of the Honolulu Advertiser. His fervent assurance: "It is a real war; it is no joke." At 4:46 he gave the full story of what had happened at Hickam Field, Honolulu, Pearl Harbor.

Meanwhile CBS's Al Warner had read Secretary of State Cordell Hull's denunciatory response to the Japanese note. CBS's Major George Fielding Eliot, wits collected, aired the evidence (submarines in mid-Pacific) that Japan had planned the attack for at least two weeks, declared it a suicide squad assignment. NBC's Upton Close in San Francisco wondered over the air whether the Japanese Government had known its Navy was about to strike.

From Clare Boothe and Vincent Sheean over WOR-Mutual that evening came sober talk of the U.S. task. Said Sheean: "Shall we pretend, as I have heard so-called experts pretend today on the radio, that this thing is easy? . . . Let us get ready for a series of shocks."

On Monday NBC broadcast two recordings of previous programs--the third and fourth time it has ever done so. One was President Roosevelt's speech before Congress. The other was an eyewitness account of Manila under Japanese bombers by the moonlight of early morning. And on Monday, too, since radio is a two-way affair, the Office of the Coordinator of Information (Colonel Donovan) suggested to all U.S. short-wave stations that in reporting news to Europe they "make no attempt to gloss over the gravity of the first day's losses of the U.S. in the Pacific."

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