The War of Words The BBC at War

BRASS BAND PLAYS

SLOW MARCHING, ORDERS ARE SHOUTED

On the 8th of May 1945,

the Allies formally declared that the war in Europe was over.

It was VE Day. Nazi Germany was in ruins.

In the German capital, there was a ceremony

to mark the raising of the Union Jack by British soldiers.

For the BBC, as for the nation,

it was the summit of a quite extraordinary journey.

My father, Richard Dimbleby, was there.

'All around us are signs of battle and of bombing.

'The very trees themselves are broken and stripped of their bark.

'Many of the British troops, who are here unofficially as spectators,

'are standing on piles of rubble.' VOICE FADES

The devastation of the Third Reich and the destruction of Nazism

was the 20th century's greatest triumph.

For the BBC, it was a broadcasting pinnacle

that no-one had imagined or foreseen.

'That is the end of the formal ceremony...'

OFFICER SHOUTS ORDERS '..and the beginning

'of the symbolic occupation of this city

'by the troops of the British Army and their Canadian colleagues.'

This is the story of how it happened,

of how the BBC emerged from uncertain and insecure beginnings

to become a national institution and a global force.

It's about those who made it happen,

and those who tried to stop it happening.

It's about battles at the front and behind the scenes.

It's about generals and politicians,

entertainers and comedians, musicians and singers.

It's about those millions upon millions of people

who tuned in from all over the world -

from Canada, the United States,

Australia, Asia, India and occupied Europe.

And it's about the British people,

who themselves helped shape the story of the BBC at war.

'This is the BBC Home Service.

'Here is the news, read by Frederick...'

The BBC began the war with virtually no idea

of what its role could, would or should be.

Some insiders thought it might be closed down for the duration.

Others that the government would take it over.

In fact, the politicians and the broadcasters alighted

on a very British solution -

the BBC would remain independent,

but would have to live by a set of imprecise rules of engagement.

It was a recipe for confusion and conflict.

On one thing only was everyone agreed -

the famed motto of the BBC, "Nation shall speak peace unto nation",

was emphatically unsuited for the challenges that lay ahead.

CLOCK STRIKES

The BBC had listeners - nine million licence holders at the latest count.

But the broadcaster had precious little idea

about what they wanted, needed or would be allowed to hear.

Its founding father, John Reith,

had defined its mission as "to inform, educate and entertain".

But that was in peace. This was war.

'This is the national programme from London.

'Please stand by for a very important announcement.'

On the morning of September the 3rd, 1939,

the BBC was due to broadcast the first of six programmes

on the subject of death.

That was hastily substituted by an item on how to make the best

of a meal consisting entirely of tinned food.

Aside from that, there were gramophone records

and, every 15 minutes, an announcement that, at 11:15am,

the Prime Minister, Mr Neville Chamberlain,

would broadcast to the nation.

'This morning, the British Ambassador

'in Berlin handed the German government

'a final note, stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock,

'that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,

'a state of war would exist between us.

'I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received...

'..and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.'

It was, of course, an awesome moment for the nation.

But it was also a remarkable day for the BBC.

For the first time, a British Prime Minister had been able to use radio

in Number 10 Downing Street, at the heart of government,

to make a critical announcement -

a declaration of war.

Afterwards, the BBC played the national anthem

and that was followed by a long peal of church bells.

BELLS PEAL

That evening, the King also made a speech,

which the government had originally planned

to post out to every household in the land.

But this proved unnecessary.

George VI had chosen the instant medium of radio to rally the nation,

and the newspapers would report what he said the following day.

'For the second time in the lives of most of us,

'we are...at war.

'Over and over again,

'we have tried to find a peaceful way out

'of the differences between ourselves

'and those who are now our...enemies.'

Such official duties were, of course, no-brainers for the BBC.

Far more testing was how otherwise to fill the airtime.

At the start of the war, on the orders of the government,

the BBC's fledgling television service was closed down.

The nation would rely on radio.

The BBC's immediate response to the outbreak of war

was to cancel all programmes,

except for official announcements interspersed by music,

and, ten times a day, a news bulletin,

which contained only the information

that the government thought fit to broadcast.

AUDIO HISSES

'All cinemas, theatres and other places of entertainment

'are to be closed immediately, until further notice.'

With all public places of entertainment -

cinemas, theatres, concert halls -

closed down for fear of mass casualties,

the BBC clearly failed to rise to the challenge.

One commentator was moved to write, "Your wireless seems to have changed

"from an agreeable companion to an official bully."

SLOW ORGAN PLAYING

As well as relentless and repetitious announcements,

the BBC subjected the nation to an orgy of organ music.

Marathon sessions of uplifting performances

that made Sandy MacPherson, who played for up to 12 hours a day,

a famous name, and one that was not always appreciated.

One listener wrote in to say he'd rather face the German guns.

FASTER ORGAN PLAYING

Such dreariness could not long survive the outbreak of hostilities.

The public wanted to know what was happening, and where.

But the BBC was woefully ill-equipped to tell them.

In large measure, this was because the broadcaster hitherto

had carefully avoided reporting the news, let alone breaking it.

Until this point, the BBC had been unable to broadcast any news

until after six o'clock in the evening -

a watershed that had been agreed by the fledgling broadcaster

with the almighty press barons,

who were determined to preserve their monopoly.

And even the bulletins that WERE broadcast

were culled almost entirely from the wire services like Reuters.

And that's all there was.

In Berlin, the leaders of the Third Reich were in no doubt

about how to exploit the power of the wireless

as a means of mass communication.

They had a propaganda ministry. Its boss was Josef Goebbels.

TRANSLATION:

No-one understood radio better than Goebbels.

Soon after the Nazis came to power in 1933,

he said that the new medium was, "The most modern, the most powerful,

"and the most revolutionary weapon that we possess."

For that reason, the Nazis wanted to make sure

that radios were dirt cheap.

Well before the war, some seven million of these

so-called "people's radios" were sold at prices

that virtually any family could afford.

And Goebbels was smart enough to realise that

you couldn't ram Nazi propaganda down the German throat.

You had to sweeten the pill

with popular music and light entertainment.

GERMAN SONG PLAYS

Realising more clearly than anyone else

that the struggle between Britain and Germany would be a war of words,

as well as a fight to the finish on the battlefield,

Goebbels did not shrink from telling any lie, however implausible.

This war of words began on the very first day of the war.

'It is not yet known how many lives were lost

'when the British liner Athenia

'was torpedoed today without warning in the Atlantic.'

The Athenia was sunk by a German U-boat,

200 miles off the British coast as it steamed towards Montreal.

117 men, women and children were drowned,

including 28 of the 300 US citizens who had been on board,

hoping to escape a European war in which they had no involvement.

The survivors were brought ashore at the port of Greenock on the Clyde.

The BBC sent a recording car to hear their accounts of the tragedy.

RADIO IS TUNED

'I was in the third-class dining room on Sunday night,

'when the loud crash of the explosion came

'and the support in the dining room,

'which was practically beside me, came crashing down.

-'Dishes went flying...

-..two detonations almost simultaneously.

'I found my way out of my cabin and started the struggle to get on deck.

'I have in mind a general impression

-'of wrecked and distorted steelwork...

-..terrible.

'Everyone was crying, "Oh, my God!"

'and we never really expected to see daylight.'

Hitler was aghast. The rules of engagement at sea

expressly forbade any attack on passenger ships.

By sinking a liner carrying US citizens, he feared that America

would be sucked into Britain's war against the Third Reich.

He ordered his Propaganda Ministry

to deny any responsibility for the disaster.

This was a task for which

Dr Josef Goebbels was well suited and well prepared.

He instructed Berlin radio to announce to the world

not only that the Germans were innocent,

but that the Athenia had been sunk by the British.

And the voice of Nazi Germany went further.

"We believe", it said,

"that the present Chief of the Royal Navy, Churchill,"

who was then First Lord of the Admiralty,

"capable of even such a crime,"

adding, "It was an abominable lie to suggest the Germans had done it."

Such doublespeak was not without effect,

because, elsewhere, many people, including Americans,

were as prone to believe Berlin as London.

The war of words really mattered.

The BBC had a very different approach to the facts,

but this caused the broadcaster as many problems as it solved.

And these were to surface very soon.

At the start of the war, the BBC undertook to tell the truth,

however disconcerting or painful that might be,

and the Ministry of Information, which held the whip hand,

appeared to concur.

But what WAS the truth? Who should decide?

How much should be told? And how swiftly?

To those questions, there were no simple answers.

With one recording car on the home front,

the BBC's only other one was in France.

On the outbreak of war,

the British Army was hurriedly despatched across the Channel

to help the French protect their border from any German invasion.

The headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force,

as it was known, was in the town of Arras, at the Hotel l'Univers.

The BBC had sent my father to join them.

'Coming down the road towards us

'is a battalion that I know to be of a famous Irish regiment.

PIPES ARE PLAYED 'They're marching in threes,

'and, in their full battle dress and kit, they blend with the dripping

'green grass of the roadside and the brown of the haystacks.

'As they passed us on that road,

'I thought how similar this must be to pictures of the last war.

The road, the trees, the rain and the everlasting beat of feet.'

MARCHING FEET

So, Dimbleby was here in Arras.

He had his recording car, two colleagues and, very important,

a formal letter from the War Office, stating to all and sundry

that the team should be allowed to pass without let or hindrance.

For the BBC and its correspondent,

it was the start of a very steep learning curve.

My father may have been dressed for the part, but he fooled no-one.

The military was deeply suspicious of reporters

and most of all of a young man from the BBC wielding a microphone.

He wasn't allowed to make phone calls,

not allowed to leave town,

and when he tried to report anything of interest,

he was stifled by the censors.

Even the word "Tommy gun" was red pencilled.

Eventually, the BBC team was given permission

to head for the Maginot Line -

a massive defensive barrier along the Franco-German border,

which had been constructed to be an impregnable obstacle

through which not even the mightiest army could penetrate.

'We've come a long way today through rain,

'through villages and meadows and up and down the hills that lie

'between us and the heart of France.'

But at this point, the Nazis were in any case content to bide their time.

Although France had joined Britain in declaring war on Germany,

the guns here were virtually silent.

It was The Phoney War.

Very frustrating for the young BBC correspondent.

So, for the first time, a radio reporter was at the front.

And it would be the first opportunity

in the history of warfare to hear the sounds of battle.

Dimbleby was well aware of that,

and also that the enemy was only a few kilometres away.

So he suggested to an artillery battery,

"Why not fire off a round or two?"

To which the retort was, "No. If we fire, they fire.

"Then what?"

But Dimbleby was allowed to describe the Maginot Line,

to see the vast underground complex beneath it.

He was permitted to use the railway

which linked one fortress to another.

'I'm standing on the threshold

'of a fort that's one of the greatest of the Maginot chain.

'Behind me in the sky,

'the noise of distant guns and, before me,

'and stretching into the hillside,

'electric lights and the sound of voices.'

Even in The Phoney War,

there were occasional skirmishes on this border.

In due course, the microphones did pick up the sound of gunfire.

It was not very much, but enough to excite the Radio Times,

which trumpeted the BBC's scoop

as an illustration of what would be possible in the months ahead.

But the BBC's broadcasting first did not meet with universal acclaim.

Far from it.

In fact, the press barons were outraged,

seeing this as a threat to their pre-eminence,

and they rose up as one to demand

that reports from the front by the BBC should only be transmitted

after the news had already appeared in their newspapers.

But the BBC was beginning to flex new muscles

and it retorted firmly and formally -

"A return to the pre-war arrangement in respect of news

"would seriously damage not only the reputation of the BBC,

"but..." - what was of far greater importance -

"..the prestige of the nation as a whole."

This time, the press backed off.

The BBC had also managed to offend some listeners

who found it impossible to understand why the broadcaster

should wish to report from the front line.

It was too immediate, too vivid and too intense.

Altogether very disconcerting.

The BBC was in uncharted territory,

on the cusp of awesome and terrible events

of a kind that had never before been recorded,

let alone broadcast into the nation's living rooms.

The broadcaster had to establish itself

in a role for which there had been no preparation and no rehearsal.

If the war on land had hardly begun,

the war at sea was already being fought with an intensity

that threatened the very survival of the United Kingdom.

Truth is not always the first casualty of war.

In the Second World War, it was the BBC weather forecast,

and for a very good reason.

Because it was not only heard here in the United Kingdom,

but in Germany as well, letting the Luftwaffe know

whether it was likely to be fine enough to launch a bombing raid.

A month after the opening of hostilities,

a German reconnaissance plane flew over Scapa Flow,

the British fleet's largest and most important anchorage.

AIRCRAFT ENGINE RUMBLES

A few days later, on the 13th of October,

a German U-boat crept into the harbour and sank the Royal Oak.

833 members of her crew died.

'There was a terrific explosion. I thought, "We've blown up.

'"We've hit a mine," and then I decided there had been an air raid.

'The ship began to list to starboard

'and there was a foul smell, as of cordite.

'I heard four more explosions - "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!" like that.

'And I watched the ship heel over and settle down like a upturned saucer.

'And I heard afterwards there's only two of us,

'myself and one other, saved from my mess.'

The BBC spared its listeners the full horror of the sinking,

or any speculation about how it had been allowed to happen.

Even so, it was impossible to disguise the fact

that the U-boat's success was a humiliation for the Royal Navy.

Six months later, on the 16th of March, 1940,

the enemy again managed to penetrate Scapa Flow,

but this time from above.

The raid lasted some 75 minutes

as they flew around Scapa Flow picking their targets.

They hit a battleship, the Iron Duke,

and a cruiser, the Norfolk, and then they flew off again.

There were casualties, but they hadn't inflicted that much damage.

However, the fact that they'd been able

to penetrate British defences so easily was a serious embarrassment.

The Royal Navy's self-esteem had been severely dented.

So much so that the Admiralty chose to conceal the facts from the media.

As a result, Broadcasting House only got wind of the raid

from a gloating account on Berlin radio.

The BBC at once got in touch with the Admiralty, saying,

"The Germans are broadcasting it, we must as well."

But the Admiralty was adamant - nothing should be said.

In fact, it wasn't until the following afternoon

that the BBC was finally allowed to say what had happened,

and that had the effect of turning the Luftwaffe's modest military coup

into a major victory for German propaganda.

This didn't stop the BBC coming under further fire,

albeit from a slightly different direction.

This time, it was the merchant fleet.

By reporting THEIR losses, the skippers complained,

the BBC was undermining crew morale to an alarming degree.

'The captain says too much about bombing convoys

'is broadcast by the BBC and is having a bad effect on the seamen.

'When the ship arrived in port, they are leaving wholesale

'and it leaves the owners a hard task to find crews,

'and the captain blames nothing but British broadcasts.'

This crystallised a very real dilemma -

to tell the truth risked undermining public morale

when Britain was still in mortal peril,

but not to tell the truth risked undermining

the credibility of the broadcaster on whom the nation depended.

The War Cabinet came up with a very British solution.

Instead of turning the BBC into an arm of government,

it put its own men into key positions within the Corporation,

hoping thereby to keep the broadcasters in line.

But that was very far from being the end of the matter.

The following month, 300 miles away across the North Sea,

British troops were facing another crisis.

GUNFIRE, EXPLOSIONS

'Attacks were being delivered from the sea

'on a number of Norway's biggest ports.

'Strong resistance is still going on.'

It wasn't.

British troops were in fact evacuating Norway,

following a foolhardy attempt to pre-empt a German invasion there.

It had been a military debacle.

It was a major reverse, a strategic setback so grave

that the government concealed it from the BBC,

which, as a result, continued to give an optimistic version

of what was by now a deeply pessimistic reality.

When the BBC found out it had been duped, it was aghast.

The editor of the broadcasters' European News, Noel Newsome,

complained bitterly that the Corporation

had been used merely to throw dust in the eyes of the enemy,

undermining the BBC's credibility across the Continent

as well as in Britain.

'Owing to the fact that our treatment of the campaign

'was based on the assumption that it would be carried on,

'a false picture of the true situation

'was inevitably created and inevitably has had

'a damaging effect on our reputation abroad for reliability.

'I cannot but resent most strongly that we were used as a blind tool.'

And then, there was the enemy,

discovering all manner of new tricks.

On the 26th of August, 1939,

a young couple had boarded the cross-Channel boat train.

The porter who had carried their luggage aboard

noted that it was tagged through to Berlin.

"Blimey!" he's reported to have said,

"That's a peculiar place to be going at a time like this."

To which the man replied airily,

"Oh, I expect it'll blow over pretty soon."

He showed no sign of pressure,

though, in fact, as a leading Fascist,

he was known to the police and was on the run to avoid internment.

Not surprisingly, he and his wife

stayed well out of the way on the Channel crossing,

they got to France and were soon on their way to the safety of Germany.

His name was William Joyce,

soon to be rather better known as Lord Haw Haw.

Within days, Joyce, somewhat to his surprise,

found himself entering the portals of Haus Des Rundfunks -

the headquarters of Berlin radio - from where the Nazis conducted

the war of words against Britain and the BBC.

William Joyce had expected to find refuge in Berlin.

In fact, he found celebrity,

recruited by Goebbels to become an international broadcaster.

And he was very good at it.

By turns sinister and seductive,

his eloquent and often very entertaining commentaries

soon made him better known in Britain

than any of his BBC contemporaries.

And with audiences that numbered around six million,

and often very much more than that,

Goebbels could hardly have been better pleased.

'Germany calling, Germany calling, Germany calling.

'You are about to hear our news in English.'

Joyce had a programme every Sunday evening,

which went out immediately after the BBC's own news bulletin.

In an attempt to belittle him,

British newspapers called Joyce Lord Haw Haw,

as though he were no more than an upper-class twit.

But this did little to diminish his growing impact.

RADIO IS TUNED

'There is still no indication that the British people

'are fully or even imperfectly informed

'as to the facts of the military situation.

'To judge by the BBC bulletins, they have no idea where the front is.

'Of course, we must not, on this occasion, be too hard on the BBC.'

Lord Haw Haw attracted not thousands,

but millions of British listeners.

Sometimes, up to half of them were tuned to his Sunday night show

and some of them believed what he was saying.

The BBC had to find an answer,

without compromising its own commitment to the truth,

and despite the censorship

by which, often for good reason, it was handcuffed.

The BBC gradually stumbled on a novel solution.

It needed a first-class speaker,

whose style was informal and personal,

and who knew how to use words

that would warm the hearts of his listeners,

as well as instructing their minds.

The man they chose to go head-to-head

against Lord Haw Haw on Sunday nights

was a renowned author and playwright called JB Priestley.

His Postscripts were an immediate hit.

'But here at Dunkirk is another English epic,

'and, to my mind, what was most characteristically English about it,

-'so typical of us, so absolutely...'

-By a remarkable accident of timing,

Priestley's first Postscript

was broadcast in the final hours of the evacuation from Dunkirk.

His way with words meant that he was somehow able to convey

the individual gallantry of men who were nonetheless,

in strategic terms, executing a humiliating retreat.

It was a consummate piece of broadcasting.

'So absurd and yet so grand and gallant

'that you hardly know whether to laugh or to cry

'when you read about them was the part played

'in the difficult and dangerous embarkation,

'not by the warships, magnificent though they were,

'but by the little pleasure steamers.

'We've known them and laughed at them,

'these fussy little steamers, all our lives.

'These Brighton Belles and Brighton Queens

'left that innocent, foolish world of theirs to sail into the inferno,

'to defy bombs, shells, magnetic mines, torpedoes, machinegun fire,

'to rescue our soldiers.

'Some of them, alas, will never return.'

In part, the key to Priestley was his voice.

He clearly wasn't a toff. It seemed to say,

"I'm one of you, not one of THEM."

But he was also a character larger than life,

and this posed something of a dilemma for the BBC.

He was clearly going to be a star that could outshine Lord Haw Haw.

But what if he shone too brightly?

Got too big for his broadcasting boots?

Until now, the BBC had carefully avoided

promoting any of its broadcasters as "personalities",

for fear their very celebrity might diminish the reputation

for authority for which the Corporation had long striven.

'A night or two ago, I had my first spell

'with our Local Defence Volunteers

'and, indeed, there was something in the preliminary talk,

'before the sentries were posted for the night,

'that gave this whole horrible business of air raids

'and threatened invasion a rustic, homely,

'almost comfortable atmosphere,

'and really made a man feel more cheerful about it.'

In his inimitable fashion,

Priestley had not only seduced the British public,

but had become a star, a personality, a celebrity.

He was also what some regarded as a leftie.

Among the many transcripts of his programmes, there was this.

'We are at present floundering between two stools. One of them

'is our old acquaintance labelled

'"every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost".

'The other stool, on which millions are already perched

'without knowing it, has some lettering around it

'that hints that free men could combine,

'without losing what's essential to their free development,

'to see that each man gives according to his ability

'and receives according to his need.'

In one broadcast, he took a sideswipe

at those who were rich enough to get out of London to escape the bombing.

More generally, he was arguing for a fairer and more equal society

that he thought would better unite the nation.

His listeners lapped it up.

But to a powerful few, he sounded like a Marxist.

In fact, he seriously got up the noses

of some backbench Conservative MPs

and, before long, the chorus was joined

by the Minister of Information, Duff Cooper,

who described him as "a second-rate novelist

"who had grown conceited on the back of his broadcasting success",

and then, to the BBC's dismay,

ordered that his Postscripts be taken off air,

which prompted Priestley to say

that the BBC was controlled by the Ministry of Information,

which in turn was controlled by the War Cabinet.

And that, of course, meant Churchill.

Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister

just under a year earlier,

a few weeks before Priestley's initial Postscript,

when the fall of Dunkirk was imminent.

A few days later,

he gave the first of his many famous broadcasts in his new role.

'I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister,

'in a solemn hour for the life of our country, of our Empire,

'of our allies and, above all, of the cause of freedom.

'Now one bond unites us all -

'to wage war until victory is won

'and never to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame,

'whatever the cost and the agony may be.'

Of course, Churchill was a master of rhetoric.

He knew how to spellbind an audience,

but he was born into another age of communications

and he'd always distrusted the BBC,

once describing it as "the enemy within the gates".

But he knew that radio was a crucial means

of uniting all those who were fighting against the Nazi tyranny.

That battle was now being fought in the skies as well as at sea.

The Battle of Britain was just that -

a battle to save the nation from Nazi invasion.

As yet, the BBC had only a handful of reporters to cover the drama.

One of them was Charles Gardner.

Like Dimbleby, still learning his craft

as a radio correspondent in time of war.

He was deputed to cover the struggle for mastery of the skies.

One day in July 1940, Gardner found himself here,

on the White Cliffs of Dover, at a good moment in a good place.

A merchant convoy was steaming up the Channel

when the Luftwaffe roared in

and started to dive-bomb the ships below.

But the RAF was on the scene almost immediately,

and Gardner seized the moment

to give a blow-by-blow account of the dogfight in the skies above.

'Well, now the Germans are dive-bombing a convoy out at sea.

'There are one, two, three, four, five, six,

'seven German dive-bombers, Junkers 87s.

'There's one going down on its target now.

'Bomb... No, missed the ships. He hasn't hit a single ship.

'There are about ten ships in the convoy.'

GUNFIRE

'There you can hear anti-aircraft going at them now.

'Now the British fighters are coming up.

'You can hear our own guns going like anything now.

'There's one coming down in flames.

'Somebody's hit a German and he's coming down. There's a long streak!

'He's coming down completely out of control. A long streak of smoke.

'He's... Oh, ah, the man's bailed out by parachute!

'The pilot's bailed out by parachute. He's a Junkers 87

'and he's going slap into the sea, and there he goes, smash!'

Gardner was wrong about the plane.

It was an RAF fighter.

Though that wasn't the cause of the controversy

which his report, a broadcasting first, immediately provoked.

Gardner's commentary was too racy for some listeners, who complained

that he was trivialising a life-and-death struggle,

and one general, retired, thundered that

"the broadcast was revolting to all decent citizens".

But the BBC stood by its man.

The Director General, Frederick Ogilvie, retorting that he

"would not be browbeaten into a retreat

"to the safe regions of the colourless."

Had it been Number 10 that was complaining,

he might've been a touch less robust.

As it was, it was a small but significant sign

that the BBC was starting to find its journalistic feet.

The Battle of Britain demonstrated the nation's resolve

that the war could not be won by standing alone.

The new Prime Minister knew that, without the United States,

the British could not possibly prevail.

However, the American people were strongly averse

to getting involved in a faraway, European war.

The government decided that the BBC could help.

A collaboration which suited the broadcaster

as well as the men from the ministry.

Their weapon was a renowned American reporter, based in London,

whose broadcasts were not only carried

by one of the famous US stations, but by the BBC.

'This is London calling in the Overseas Service of the BBC.

'And so to Trafalgar Square.

'Waiting there is Edward Murrow,

'known to you as Columbia's European Director.'

On the 24th of August 1940, in the height of The Blitz,

an American correspondent for CBS, Edward R Murrow,

was standing in Trafalgar Square,

waiting to present a new programme, London After Dark.

As he started the broadcast, the air-raid sirens began to wail.

SIRENS WAIL 'This is Trafalgar Square.

'The noise that you hear at the moment

'is the sound of the air-raid sirens.

'I'm standing here, just on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

SIRENS CONTINUE

'A searchlight just burst into action off in the distance.

'One single beam, sweeping the sky above me now.

'People are walking along quite quietly.

'We're just at the entrance of an air-raid shelter here,

'and I must move this cable over just a bit, so people can walk in.'

Murrow's report seized the imagination of his listeners.

For the first time, they had been able

to hear something of the reality of war,

and it kindled a certain sympathy for the predicament of Britain.

In Washington, the British Ambassador was

in no doubt about the importance of such broadcasts.

TYPEWRITER CLATTERS

'If America ever comes into a European war,

'it will be some violent, emotional impulse which will provide

'the last decisive thrust.

'Nothing can be so effective as the bombing of London

'translated into the homes of America.'

Murrow had captured the start of an air raid by chance.

He now wanted to go further

and record The Blitz in all its ferocity.

The BBC was only too eager to help.

Others weren't so happy.

At first, the military censors

banned any attempt to record the sound of the bombing.

Apparently, because they feared it might help German intelligence

discover where the bombs were falling.

But Murrow refused to take no for an answer.

For six nights in a row,

he stood here on the roof of Broadcasting House

with his microphone, describing what he could see and what he could hear,

and then handing over the dummy reports to the censors.

His ploy worked. On the seventh night, he got the go-ahead.

EXPLOSIONS

'I'm standing on a rooftop, looking out over London.

'For reasons of national as well as personal security,

'I am unable to tell you the exact location from which I'm speaking.

'Four searchlights reach up...

'disappear in the light of a three-quarter moon.

'I should say, at the moment,

'there are probably three aircraft in the general vicinity of London.

EXPLOSION 'There they are.

'That hard, stony sound.'

Murrow's report brought the bombing and Britain's plight

into the homes of millions of American citizens

and made a powerful impact.

Not surprisingly, the government was more than happy

to give the go-ahead for the BBC

to set up a North America Service, which rapidly expanded

to reach a growing audience in the United States.

In military terms, America was still on the sidelines,

when, on Sunday the 22nd of June 1941,

the British people woke to discover that another great nation

was fighting against what had suddenly become their common enemy.

The Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union.

Churchill loathed the Soviet Union,

he abhorred Bolshevism,

and he tended to regard the Russian nation as peopled by barbarians.

But now, the unholy alliance between Stalin and Hitler was over.

They were at war with each other.

Yesterday's enemy was now our ally.

This was a dramatic sea change for Britain, and for Churchill.

That evening, he took to the airwaves.

'At four o'clock this morning,

'Hitler attacked and invaded Russia.

'This was no surprise to me.

'Hitler is a monster of wickedness,

'insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder.

'So now, this bloodthirsty guttersnipe

'must launch his mechanised armies

'upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation.

'Poor as are the Russian peasants, workmen and soldiers,

'he must steal from them their daily bread.

'He must devour their harvests.

'He must rob them of the oil which drives their ploughs,

'and thus produce a famine without example in human history.'

Churchill's homely focus

on the people of Russia fighting for their lives,

rather than on the regime which ruled over them,

was carefully calibrated to establish a distinction

in the British mind between a popular fight for survival

and a deplorable political system.

And the government, through the Ministry of Information,

expected the BBC to promote that distinction.

But this created a dilemma for the broadcaster.

For millions of British workers,

the Soviet Union had become a beacon of light, even a promised land.

If Stalin had made errors or even committed crimes,

he was essentially on the side of the common man against the fat cats.

They were therefore appalled

when the BBC appeared, deliberately, to belittle our new ally.

With the Russians fighting and dying on the battlefield

against a common enemy,

the British public expected the BBC to play The Internationale

on a weekly programme called The National Anthems Of The Allies.

But The Internationale was a Soviet call to arms,

urging the workers to rise up against their capitalist masters.

And the BBC, sensing that the government

might not altogether appreciate this subversion on the airwaves,

declined to put it out.

This ban provoked such an outcry that the BBC was minded to relent,

but, at that point, Churchill himself intervened,

instructing that, under no circumstances,

should the Communist anthem be broadcast.

The BBC knuckled under.

The heavy hand of the Ministry of Information

was felt in all parts of the BBC,

as the broadcaster wrestled with its Russian dilemma.

TYPEWRITER CLATTERS

'Can I have a directive about Russia?

'Not in political terms, but whether reference to comrade

'and topical gags about Russia generally are permitted?'

The reply was terse.

'Please stop jokes about Russia for the time being.'

Whatever Churchill's feelings about Communism,

the British government was bound by common interest

to assist the Russians in their titanic struggle

against the Nazi invader.

'We are breaking programmes to announce the signing

'of an agreement between Britain and the Soviet Union,

'for joint action in the war against Germany.'

With supplies now starting to flow into Russia

from America and Britain, it no longer made sense

to ban the BBC from broadcasting The Internationale.

And in January 1942,

the Corporation was released from Churchill's ban on that music.

MUSIC: The Internationale

'The Internationale may now be played in programmes.

'We're asked not to overdo it,

'and only to play it when the occasion really does call for it.'

The BBC was now encouraged by the government

to promote the Russian cause,

and the broadcaster responded with features about Russian people

and the Red Army's exploits on the battlefield.

Coverage which made a significant impact on public opinion.

One evening in the summer of 1942,

a capacity audience filed into the Albert Hall

for a remarkable promenade concert that was broadcast by the BBC.

The audience were here to listen to the BBC Symphony Orchestra

under the baton of Sir Henry Wood, the founder of the Proms.

They were giving the first performance in Britain

of a new work by the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

The score had been flown across in the Diplomatic Bag,

900 pages on microfilm.

ORCHESTRA TUNES UP

The symphony was known as the Leningrad

and it was written by Shostakovich

to honour the resilience of his birthplace,

whose citizens were by now starving to death in a city

which had already been under siege for more than nine months.

APPLAUSE

Nothing could have been better calculated

to stir the hearts of those who heard it,

and hearts WERE stirred.

MUSIC: Symphony Number 7 (Leningrad) by Dmitri Shostakovich

Despite the new alliance,

the government's relationship with Moscow was fraught

by mutual suspicion and misunderstanding. But none of this,

let alone any rumour of Stalin's truculence or brutality,

was to surface on the airwaves.

So delicate was the crucial relationship

between London and Moscow that the Ministry of Information

enjoined the BBC not to broadcast anything

that could be construed as hostile, negative or critical.

And, under those circumstances, the BBC readily complied.

ORCHESTRA CONTINUES

By now, the BBC was rapidly developing into a global service

and in a growing number of languages,

targeting especially the people of occupied Europe.

TRANSMISSION IN SPANISH

TRANSMISSIONS OVERLAP

CLOCK STRIKES, TRANSMISSION IN FRENCH

The Prime Minister decided to make use of the BBC's French service

to speak directly to the French people.

A producer, Michel Saint-Denis, was given the task

of translating his speech and introducing it on air.

Renowned as a theatre director who had escaped the Nazis,

Saint-Denis was taken aback when Churchill arrived demanding,

"Where's my frog speech?"

SIREN WAILS

With an air raid underway above them,

the two men made their way to the underground War Rooms in Whitehall.

The space for this very important broadcast was so small that,

apparently, Saint-Denis had to clamber onto Churchill's lap

to reach the microphone before he could announce

that the Prime Minister of Great Britain

was to make a very important announcement to the French people.

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:

Following Dunkirk, the only part of the world where the British Army was

in action against the Germans on the battlefield was the Western Desert,

fighting both to protect the Empire

and to defeat the Axis powers in North Africa.

For two years, Richard Dimbleby was the BBC's man on this front,

trying to make sense of a military campaign,

which ebbed and flowed inconclusively

across a vast ocean of sand.

'Confused and fluid doesn't mean necessarily that nobody knows

'what's happening, or that the situation has got out of control.'

Churchill wanted action, a victory in the desert,

and, to that end, he bullied his Middle East Commander-in-Chief,

General Auchinleck, unmercifully,

urging him to attack before he was ready.

But Auchinleck was his own man.

He would move in his own good time,

and he wanted to get that message across.

Who better to do this than Dimbleby?

'Not far from the particular spot in Libya,

'at which I'm recording this dispatch, there are two tents

'from which the whole of the battle is being directed.

'From those two tents today has come news that

'makes it clear that the tendency to stabilisation of the situation,

'that I reported from Cairo a few days ago,

'has developed into something approaching stabilisation itself.'

In London, the BBC came under fire from the government

for putting out news bulletins in which their correspondent,

my father, appeared to be siding with Auchinleck against Churchill.

'Stabilisation is the condition that the whole front must be in,

'before we can undertake our countermeasures

'against the German thrust eastwards.'

By the summer of 1942, the British were holding the line at El Alamein,

and Dimbleby was reporting accordingly.

Broadcasting House came under renewed pressure

from the government.

Dimbleby's boss, a senior BBC controller with close links

to the Ministry, called AP Ryan, felt bound to concede,

"There is no doubt that Dimbleby says what Auchinleck wants said."

But my father was not a willing mouthpiece.

The military censors in Cairo had red pencilled his copy so heavily

that he was incensed and he wrote in his diary,

"It really is disgraceful to deceive the public,

"to cover up failures,

"and I really believe that is what Cairo is doing."

Something had to give.

In August, Churchill got rid of his problem by sacking Auchinleck

and replacing him with Montgomery,

while the BBC summarily recalled Dimbleby

and, without explanation, placed him on other duties.

The episode could hardly have

exposed the BBC's predicament more clearly -

how to report a war honestly when the generals and the politicians

regarded radio as little more than a megaphone

for their own, often competing, purposes.

The British Army had been on a long and losing streak.

Norway, France, Greece, Crete,

Hong Kong, Singapore and then Tobruk.

For a while, it seemed that the Middle East might fall as well.

And much closer to home, just across the English Channel,

there was more to come.

In the early hours of the 19th of August 1942,

6,000 Allied troops, led by the Canadians,

launched an assault on the French coast at Dieppe.

The BBC was at the scene, in the person of Frank Gillard.

The BBC's correspondent watched from the deck of a British warship

as what turned into a nine-hour battle raged in front of him.

It ended in a military disaster

that cost more than 3,000 Allied casualties -

men who had fought with tenacity, but against impossible odds.

But you wouldn't have known it from Gillard's report.

It had been red pencilled so heavily by the censor

as virtually to obliterate the truth.

A cover-up in the name of national security and Allied morale.

The Dieppe raid was not only a tragedy, but a humiliation.

Gillard was appalled by what he witnessed.

"The sea red with blood," as he described it later.

But he was incensed by the fact that the military

had prevented him reporting the slaughter on the battlefield

and only allowed him to report the air war.

Even 40 years on, that fact still haunted him.

Nevertheless, no less than 16 million listeners

tuned into the BBC, thirsty for the truth about Dieppe

that they were not allowed to hear.

It was a grim period for the nation

and a challenging moment for the BBC.

If the authorities were to go on suppressing bad news,

it would be impossible for the broadcaster to establish

a reputation for telling the truth in a timely fashion, which,

among other things, was supposed to distinguish it from the enemy.

Perhaps, though, because it was such a blatant example

of unwarranted and self-destructive censorship,

Dieppe served to mark a turning point

that would transform the BBC's coverage of the war,

when that war itself was about to enter a new and decisive phase.