Edward R. Murrow: Inventing Broadcast Journalism

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In eight hours, and on a Sunday, Murrow and Shirer lined up newsmen to make reports, found the needed shortwave facilities and went on the air — live. The broadcast, a great success, soon became a standard feature. Shortly thereafter, Shirer recorded in his diary: The [Austrian] crisis has done one thing for us. Birth of the ‘radio foreign correspondent’ so to speak.

The basic forms were set early. Correspondents would write their stories, clear them through censorship, then go to a government-operated shortwave facility to transmit them live back to CBS in New York. The programs sounded more organized than they were. In New York, announcer Robert Trout might say, We take you now to William Shirer in Berlin. In Berlin, Shirer could not hear Trout’s voice; rather, he simply started speaking live into a microphone at an assigned time.

The seizure of Austria was bad news; worse news followed. The Western democracies deserted Czechoslovakia at Munich. Murrow had a world scoop on the settlement, but took little consolation in it. He was not so much a newsman as a citizen of the world. The rise of Hitler was, to him, less a story to be covered than an unraveling catastrophe he could do little to stem. Post-Munich, Murrow met up with Shirer in Paris, where the pair tried without success to drink themselves into a better frame of mind.

America seemed largely indifferent. To Murrow, it was as though the greatest drama in history was playing to an empty and deserted theater. In July 1939, Shirer was briefly back in New York. His wife, Tess, told him he was making [him]self most unpopular by taking such a pessimistic view [of Europe]. They know there will be no war. And Americans clearly wanted none. At year’s end, more than 95 percent of Americans polled were against war with Germany. By then Poland had fallen. In April 1940, Denmark and Norway followed. In May, German tanks rolled into the Netherlands, Belgium and France, with resistance quickly subdued. On June 22, the French surrendered at Compiègne, an event for which Shirer again gained a world scoop. With the French surrender, England stood alone.

England’s future was never more in doubt than in the summer and fall of 1940 when Hitler, master of the Continent, unleashed his Luftwaffe on Great Britain, his sole opponent still standing. For Murrow, nothing less than the future of civilization was at stake in that battle. For millions in America, news of that conflict came each evening in a report that began with Murrow’s signature phrase, This…is London.

England’s south coast awaited invasion. In Berlin two Nazi officials placed bets with Shirer: The first wagered that the German swastika would be flying over Trafalgar Square by August 15; the second said by September 7. Along the French and Belgian coasts, the Germans concentrated the small craft — 1,700 by mid-August — with which they planned to transport the initial invasion wave of 90,000 soldiers and 650 tanks. In London a newspaper vendor posted a placard that typified English resolve: We’re in the final. And it’s on the home pitch.

The German attack had two phases. In the first — lasting from mid-August to early September 1940 — the Luftwaffe sought to destroy the Royal Air Force. If the RAF was defeated, it could not provide air cover for the British navy, which would then be forced to withdraw from the English Channel. A German crossing would follow. In Germany, invasion planning proceeded. On September 2, Shirer noted that German press officers had removed a gigantic illuminated map of France that had been used to help reporters track the invasion of that country. That map has been taken down, Shirer reported, and an equally large one substituted. It was a map of England.

From opposite sides of the Channel, Murrow in London — assisted by his colleague, Larry LeSueur, another of Murrow’s young hires — and Shirer in Berlin tracked the first battle in history to be fought solely in the air. Or at least they tried. All acknowledged that with aircraft so small flying so high, it was all but impossible to tell what was happening. Though many current military historians believe the Luftwaffe was gaining an edge, Hitler was impatient; he wanted the invasion to be accomplished by late September, before the October fogs cut visibility in the Channel. He decided that bombing civilian London would quickly cow the British.

On September 7, wave after wave of German bombers struck London in a 12-hour attack. Murrow was southeast of the city, trying to get a bead on the action. He interviewed Englishmen in a variety of places, including spending part of the day near an RAF air base. After writing his script, the following day he broadcast live from the studio: On the airdrome ground crews swarmed over those British fighters, fitting ammunition belts and pouring in gasoline. As soon as one fighter was ready, it took to the air, and there was no waiting for flight leaders or formation. The Germans were already coming back, down the river, heading for France. He spoke of the hollow grunt of the bombs, [the] huge pear-shaped bursts of flame. He talked to a pub owner who told us these raids were bad for the chickens, the dogs and the horses. And for a time, he simply took cover, hunkering down with Vincent Sheean, an American writer whom Murrow pressed into service from time to time, and Ben Robertson of the short-lived New York newspaper PM. As Murrow described it: Vincent Sheean lay on one side of me and cursed in five languages….Ben Robertson…lay on the other side and kept saying in that slow South Carolina drawl, ‘London is burning, London is burning.’ London, indeed, was burning. Four hundred were dead, triple that many injured, and fires blazed throughout the city.

London’s stand against the bombing became the focus of world attention; eventually, 120 reporters — a huge number at the time — came to the British capital to report it. Murrow stood out as unmatched. This was so, first, because of the manner in which he portrayed the English — not as heroes but as human: unflappable, dogged, quirky. He reported how life among the many citizens continued after the bombing of residential London began: Walking down the street a few minutes ago, shrapnel stuttered and stammered on the rooftops and from underground came the sound of singing, and the song was ‘My Blue Heaven.’

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