Tag: World War II

War

By

On 16 December 1947

In World War II

War

Queen's Hall wreckage

Royal Albert Hall

IN SEPTEMBER, 1939, the BBC went to battle stations. Broadcasting must continue even if the country were dislocated by bombing or invasion. BBC units were therefore scattered. No guidance must be given to enemy aircraft. The transmission system was consequently reorganized overnight, a remarkable technical feat. For months it seemed as if these precautions were unnecessary. But the slow, menacing rhythm of the war mounted. France fell. The bombs came. Queen’s Hall, historic home of the ‘Proms’, was gutted. But the Prom went on, from the Albert Hall, with Sir Henry Wood, undaunted veteran, still on the rostrum (see pictures, above). Broadcasting House, no longer white and gleaming, but battle grey, was thrice hit and the studios in the central tower were wrecked (see photograph of the sixth floor, below). But broadcasting in the thick of the dust and danger, or from remote evacuation points, went on.

Wreckage of Broadcasting House sixth floor

Into every hearth and home…

By

On 15 December 1947

In World War II

Into every hearth and home…

NEWS was what listeners of all types and in all countries wanted from the BBC during the war, and never more eagerly than in the early, dark days. At home the nine o’clock bulletin became a ritual. In the Commonwealth they waited for the notes of Big Ben to ring out. News observers, donning khaki, went down to the beaches to interview the mine-disposal squads at their dangerous task (1) or visited the anti-aircraft batteries at their lonely vigil (3). When Rooney Pelletier interviewed young Londoners sheltering in the crypt of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields (4), audiences abroad heard the sounds of actual sirens and of real bombs, the ‘live’ broadcast raised to its peak. Then the U.S.A. became our ally, and the G.I. himself had an opportunity to stand in the shadow of St Paul’s and record his impression of the waste and desolation created by the Luftwaffe (2). Meanwhile Empire troops were pouring into Britain, and cheerful programmes compounded of entertainment and personal messages, such as ‘Song Time in the Laager’ (5), were broadcast from the underground theatre in Piccadilly Circus back to their homelands.

 

…their unhindered message’

By

On 14 December 1947

In World War II

…their unhindered message’



 

AS THE battlefronts spread across the world, BBC correspondents travelled with the armies, and the opportunities for broadcasting grew. Across the deserts of North Africa, where the tide of success ebbed and flowed, down the Greek defiles, under dive-bombers, over the mountains of Abyssinia, first of the liberated countries, went the man with the microphone, not to give official statements, nor even accounts of strategical situations, but to tell, in his own voice, what he saw, to set the scene of a battle, to catch the mood of the troops, to retail small incidents that brought the war home to the listener. Their vivid accounts were valuable in themselves, and for the experience gained in preparation for sterner tasks to come. On this page a miscellany of pictures recalls those far-flung campaigns on sea, land, and air.

 

‘The Allies are closing in…’

By

On 13 December 1947

In World War II

‘The Allies are closing in…’

ON D-DAY, 6 June, 1944, War Report was broadcast for the first time in the Home Service after the nine o’clock news. When, eleven months later, the final Report was put out at the moment of final victory in the West, its daily audience had reached a total of between ten and fifteen million listeners. As a programme, it cut across departmental boundaries, involving the close collaboration, both in the field and at Broadcasting House, of newsmen, outside broadcasters, feature writers, and engineers. It was a blend of different skills, combining the situation report, the descriptive despatch, the running commentary, the recording of scenes in sound, and the dramatized documentary. The men who made up the team went through an intensive military training. They were equipped with mobile transmitters for direct speech links. These, as conditions became stabilized, were increased in power, advancing in the wake of the armies. There were mobile recording trucks and vans, such as had been used on other fronts. In addition, BBC engineers had designed portable midget recorders, weighing only forty lb., whose delicate machinery stood up splendidly to the use made of them by correspondents under enemy fire. From the first dramatic moment when London announced ‘And now — over to Normandy’, until the words, ‘It’s just the job’ were spoken by the sergeant who signalled Field-Marshal Montgomery’s orders to the surrendering Germans, War Report, in the Field-Marshal’s own words, ‘made no mean contribution to final victory’.

 



Leaders in exile

By

On 12 December 1947

In World War II

Leaders in exile

 

WITH the coming of war the national broadcasting system which hitherto had addressed for the most part an English-speaking audience at home and in the Empire, developed into a huge, complex, multilingual instrument. That was perhaps the main impact of the war upon the BBC which, at the height of the conflict, was sending out the equivalent of six days’ broadcasting every day, carrying programmes in forty-eight languages and using more than eighty wavelengths for the purpose. Not least among its responsibilities so far as the over-run countries of Europe were concerned, was that of putting the leaders of resistance, whose headquarters was London, in touch with their enslaved peoples in whom a faith in freedom had not died. The heads of Allied Governments established in London made personal contact with the prison house of Europe.

 


Britain the stronghold

By

On 11 December 1947

In World War II

Britain the stronghold

THE story of the BBC’s wartime broadcasts to Europe can be told in four chapters. There was, to begin with, the period when the European Service was groping for an audience, in the days when the remorseless Panzer divisions seemed to have set the seal on the establishment of German tyranny on the Continent. The second phase was the ‘V’ campaign, when, during the summer of 1941, the symbol spread from end to end of the occupied countries. It began simply; Victor Laveleye, Nant Geersens, and other members of the BBC Belgian section, were seeking a way to establish in this clandestine audience, a sign of recognition. They suggested the wearing of a ‘V’. Within a week the R.A.F. were greeted with the sign. It was chalked on walls and roads, tapped out in morse, flashed in lights, not only in Belgium but all over the Continent. ‘Colonel Britton’ became the voice of the ‘V’ sign. The third period was a ‘Go Slow’ campaign, in which, for the ‘V’, the tortoise sign was substituted, designed to keep production down in the mines and factories where workers were forced to labour for Germany. This emblem had great success. The secret newspapers reporting the BBC news grew in numbers and circulation. Arrests, tortures, concentration camps, the firing squad — none of these could stop the listening to London. The final phase came in 1944 when a spokesman (it was ‘Colonel Britton’) gave orders and advice to what were now well-organized resistance groups, whose part in the Allied invasion was a gallant and militarily important one. And when the armies penetrated Italy and Germany, it was discovered that there, too, the BBC had gained and kept large audiences for whom the attraction of knowing the truth had been too strong.

 

The home front

By

On 10 December 1947

In World War II

The Home Front

Voices of victory

By

On 9 December 1947

In World War II

Voices of victory

 

 

THROUGH the dark and dangerous days, in moods of intense anxiety which swept the whole country, over the weary building-up period, for six winters of blackout, and into the daylight of victory, the listener had at his side a magnificently stimulating companion in Winston Churchill. Never before had the personal magnetism of a wartime Prime Minister been exercised upon an entire democratic nation through the medium of the microphone. As the outstanding military leaders of the Allies emerged, they, too, used broadcasting, and the characteristic tones of Field-Marshal Montgomery in particular became familiar to those who stayed at home as to those who served under him. The BBC, during the war, became more closely linked with the daily lives and habits of the great majority of the British nation than ever before. It was used not only by the statesmen and generals but for a multitude of lesser exhortations, to save salvage, avoid careless talk, cook economically, and shop wisely, and in these campaigns the most popular figures in the world of entertainment were enlisted. Direct assistance to the industrial effort was afforded by the ‘Music while you work’ sessions, designed to lessen strain and relieve monotony in the factories, and entertainments such as ‘Workers’ Playtime’ and ‘Works Wonders’, by enlivening off-duty hours, encouraged work at war speed through the day and night shifts. The BBC Symphony Orchestra, visiting service camps, was greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by its uniformed audiences; from emergency headquarters at Bedford its broadcasts maintained its reputation as a premier instrument of European culture, and such modern and original works as Bartok’s Violin Concerto were performed for the first time.

OVER the whole programme field, the war years represented no standstill, but substantial progress. Special services, designed to meet the needs of the Forces, whose conditions of listening were largely communal, naturally concentrated on light entertainment, and much ingenuity was needed, and found, to keep this fresh and varied. But there were often demands as well for serious music, as already noted, for good drama, for intelligent documentary, and for the exchange of serious thought. The consistent presentation of Saturday Night Theatre at the same weekly time, lifted broadcast plays out of a minority appeal to one in which they rivalled ‘Music Hall’ in popularity, and it was, significantly enough, only a month or two after the war ended that the time was judged ripe to establish a regular series, known as ‘World Theatre’, of plays which had enriched the dramatic heritage of the civilized world. Broadcast ‘features’, attacking in the same spirit of enterprise the problem of telling the real life stories of men and occasions in friendly, dramatized form, also advanced in technique and in popular appeal. The ‘Brains Trust’ had an astonishing success and the original three members, Huxley, Joad and Campbell, with the Question-Master, Donald McCulloch, discovered themselves to be nationally popular personalities, while their example, of spontaneous answers to unseen questions, was followed everywhere, and set a new fashion, which persists to this day, in public meetings of all kinds. ITMA, which in typically British fashion and in a form which could belong only to the microphone, made light of every wartime inconvenience and hardship, established the genial figure of Tommy Handley as Britain’s premier radio comedian. The lights which went up on Broadcasting House on 8 May, 1945, celebrated a victory in which British broadcasting had played a strenuous and faithful part and won its honourable share.

 

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