In the afternoon in Manhattan a man sits at a microphone watching a clock. As minute and second hand cut the hour he speaks. The vibration which is the "sound" of his voice becomes an electrical vibration. It speeds along a wire to a building in a scrub-pine clearing 40 miles away. There with the aid of a wafer of quartz crystal vibrating at a constant frequency of perhaps 11,830,000 cycles per second, and boosted by thousands of watts of electric power, the vibrations ripple from a great antenna outward in waves 26 meters long. In no time at all (for their speed is that of light], they reach a point in the darkness 3,000 miles away. A man there has a receiving set in his cellar tuned to the right wave length. He is risking prison or maybe death to hear the voice of the distant man at the microphone. To him it means Liberty and Truth.
This autumn, amid the happy local noise of a new U.S. radio season, the man at the other end of U.S. short-wave transmission was much on the minds of U.S. broadcasters. He had a place, too, in the thoughts of a U.S. Government pledged to combat his oppressors. Last month, after a great deal of bucking and yawing, the two interested parties in shortwave affairs got in harness together on a working program. The net of it: henceforth the Truth sent to short-wave listeners by the U.S. would not be sent at random, but would hit at Nazi propaganda as purposefully and quickly as an antidote hits at a poison.
The first step was taken last spring, after the U.S. State Department had called in short-wave broadcasters to arrange maximum world reception for a speech by President Roosevelt (TIME, May 26). The industry saw the drift, hired a liaison man in the person of Stanley P. Richardson, old A.P. correspondent, onetime secretary to Ambassador Joseph E. Davies in Russia and Belgium. Through Stan Richardson the broadcasters learned what the Government wanted, and vice versa. What the Government wanted, it soon moved to get.
Wild Bill Takes a Hand. When Colonel William Joseph ("Wild Bill") Donovan was appointed Coordinator of Information last July, he made it clear at once that his would be no trifling job. So sweeping were the Colonel's plans reputed to be that the intelligence services of the Army, Navy, FBI and State Department took unnecessary alarm lest the Donovan digests of information for the President supplant their own.
Radiomen also needed reassurance. Viewing the formidable staff of scholars, geographers and analysts swiftly collected by the Colonel, they gathered that a propaganda bureau was being prepared, and that short-wave broadcasters would be required to take dictation, or else. Enough young men around Washington talked like fools to give point to this suspicion. Already stirred up (for other reasons) against FCC, the industry felt that any plan to flim-flam its short-wave audience —built up by years of honest news reporting—should be fought at a hat's drop.
Last month Wild Bill called the heads of the six U.S. short-wave organizations to Washington. "Look," said he in effect, "let's clear this thing up. My people are doing a job to help you, Messrs. Paley, Trammell, et al. We get daily records of the line that Axis propaganda is taking.