He reported on Londoners’ solidarity in the shelters, but noted that even there, the rich fared better than the working classes. He spoke of a cluster of old dowagers and retired colonels who took refuge at the Mayfair Hotel. There, he remarked, the protection was not great, but you would at least be bombed with the right sort of people. He reported on casual courage. He described an official adding a name to a list of firefighters killed battling fires the bombing had caused. The list, Murrow noted, contained 100 names.

Added to Murrow’s empathy for the British people was his mastery of language. He was, his colleague Sevareid said, the first great literary artist of a new medium. Murrow, through reflection and intuition, had a keen appreciation of broadcasting’s power and nature. Radio, he said, was essentially intimate. It was not an announcer speaking to an audience, but Murrow as an individual speaking to fellow individuals who had gathered by their Philcos in living rooms in Kansas or New Hampshire. He believed that radio was visual, and he had a gift for the evocative phrase. When Winston Churchill was made prime minister, Murrow introduced him as Britain’s tired old man of the sea. Knowing that moonlight made London more visible to attacking aircraft, he referred to one night sky as being brightened by a bomber’s moon.And Murrow believed that radio’s task was not to bring the story to the listener, but to bring the listener to the story.

On August 24, two weeks before the On the airdrome program, he had made a remarkable nighttime broadcast from London’s Trafalgar Square, standing just outside the entrance to a bomb shelter. Live and unscripted, his words painted the scene: the searchlights splashing white on the bottom of clouds; a red double-decker bus — most of its lights extinguished in the blackout — passing like a ship at night; a driver calmly stopping for a red light on a totally deserted street. Murrow said he could see almost nothing in the blackout. But he could hear something. Bringing his listeners to the scene, he lowered the microphone to street level so that people in America could hear the footsteps of Londoners taking shelter from bombs.

Through it all, Murrow was battling on a second front. That August 24 coverage of the bombing had raised questions about the propriety of such live, on-the-scene reporting of the attacks. As bombing continued, Murrow pressed British officials hard for permission to do regular, unscripted, live, on-the-street broadcasts of the events. Initially, British officialdom was dismissive — Murrow was not even a citizen, and live broadcasts could give valuable information to an enemy that would presumably be listening in. Murrow pressed the matter, explaining that his broadcasts would be transmitted from his microphone through the BBC headquarters, where they would still be subject to censorship. More important, he gained an ally, Prime Minister Churchill. Forty years earlier Churchill had been a correspondent in the Boer War, and he had a newsman’s residual compassion for getting the story out. More to the point, he believed that anything done to dramatize London’s struggle would build American sympathy for England’s cause.

By mid-September, Murrow gained permission. With the live broadcasts, he became the star of his own drama, standing exposed on rooftops. The sounds of bombs exploding near him were clearly audible. In narrow terms, the work was quite remarkably dangerous. In broader terms, his accounts of a city under siege made compelling listening. Murrow’s reports from London helped make radio America’s dominant news media. In one 1940 survey, 65 percent of respondents said radio was their best source of news. His own audience grew to 22 million, reportedly including President Franklin Roosevelt and members of his cabinet. Many were swayed by what they heard. During September 1940, the bombing’s first month, the share of Americans telling Gallup pollsters that their nation should aid Britain increased from 16 to 52 percent. That month, President Roosevelt went to Congress to repeal the Neutrality Act that barred military support to the British.

Hitler had good reason to believe that the bombing of civilian London would soon break Britain’s will to resist. Prewar, most military experts held that aerial bombardment would quickly devastate any city. In 1932 British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had famously stated, The bomber will always get through — a remark that did little to bolster British self-assurance. As events in London and elsewhere were to prove, such bombing more generally strengthened than broke resolve. The London Blitz was, however, the first sustained bombing of a major city. And when, contrary to expectations, that city did not fall, respect for its stand grew. Murrow shared the sentiment, and he broadcast that admiration. From one bombed location, he reported: The girls in light, cheap dresses were strolling along the streets. There was no bravado, no loud voices, only a quiet acceptance of the situation. To me those people were incredibly brave and calm.

London sent its children to the countryside, ate powdered eggs rather than fresh ones and endured the nightly attacks, sleeping in bomb shelters. At year’s end, Londoners were underfed, under-rested and under bombardment. Murrow’s December 29 broadcast caught the grimness of the hour: No one expects the New Year to be happy. We shall live hard before it is ended. The immediate problems are many and varied: Something must be done about the night bombers and the submarines; improved facilities for life underground must be provided. He added: Probably the best summary — written by Wordsworth [when England was at war with Napoleon] in 1806: ‘Another year, another blow, another mighty empire, overthrown, and we are left, and shall be left, alone, the last that dared to struggle with the foe.’

The bombing affected people strangely, noted Sevareid, who joined Murrow in London after the fall of France. Those who were walking when the first bombs dropped would halt. Those who were standing would begin to walk. Murrow once awakened CBS correspondent LeSueur, who was bunking at the Murrow’s, with the news that the building was on fire. LeSueur picked up his clothes and walked into a closet to get dressed.

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