With Words As Well As With Guns

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 180, 4 December 1942, Page 3

With Words As Well As With Guns

T is announced from London, and is very good news if it is true, that Sir Stafford Cripps will in future "concentrate on the all-out development of radio as an offensive weapon for submarine and air warfare." Sir Stafford did notable work during last war in the development of Britain’s industrial and scientific offensives, and it is encouraging to think that his great powers will be used in the same way again to-day. However, few laymen know the possibilities of radio in sea and air warfare, and we are only beginning to realise how effectively it can be used on the propaganda front. Until the other day we probably thought that our enemies were well ahead of us in this field, as in most respects they so far have been. But we suggest to-day on Page 8 that this lead has been overtaken, and those who were listening on Sunday night will know why we have been so bold. The radio feature This Is War, which began over all the main stations on Sunday and for the next three months will be heard on Sundays at 8 p.m. from Commercial stations and from the National stations at 6.30 p.m. on Mondays, is radio warfare of an intensity not hitherto experienced in New Zealand. It is in fact the kind of thing that most of us will hope we shall never experience again once the present war ends; but in the meantime the war goes on, and it is a tribute to the realism of our American allies that they have decided to fight as relentlessly with words as with bayonets, guns, and bombs. This Is War is bold, harsh, and often brutal; crudely emotional, fearlessly sarcastic and hostile. It speaks to Americans, and for Americans, with all the raw bitterness of outraged youth and the menace of insulted power. It is a terrifying, almost a horrible, expression of the wrath of a mighty nation challenged to mortal combat; but war is both terrible and horrible, and we have been too soft so far in our own counsels, and too restrained in our reactions. We are fighting for our lives, and these broadcasts, with all their shocks to taste and manners, will help us to bring the fight to an end in the shottest possible time. In — they are Wat.