Remembered Broadcasts

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 311, 8 June 1945, Page 8

Remembered Broadcasts

NOTICE that one of my colleagues has opened the season for reminiscences of various broadcasts heard during the course of the late war. I should like to get in early with my own prize specimens, which very few will have heard. The time was late May, 1940, and the station an American one-I don’t remember which. John Gunther was speaking and trying to give sorhe sort of bird’s-eye view of the military situation in Flanders; but he was no more able to take a clear view of things than his listeners were, and further messages of disasternot all true — were apparently being handed to him every moment. So he was entirely incapable, as we all were, of stopping still and saying in cold words what the situation amounted to; his sen-tences-he was speaking very fast-kept rushing up to the edge of an announcement that the world had come to an end; then he would stop and ride off on some indirect and evasive statément, but come back almost at once, as if fascinated, towards saying something irrevocable, which he could not bring himself to articulate. Then there was a

sudden halt; and he anounced, in the routine dramatic voice of the American broadcaster, that the Belgian Army had capitulated. That was the first we had heard of it. Apart from the immediate implications of the news, this was an extraordinary glimpse. of the Great American Alarm that was going on behind our own, and governed all their subsequent thoughts and actions until Pearl Harbour superseded it.