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“This is London.” With those words, CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow began his reports from the British capital in 1940 and 1941. London was under the aerial siege, known simply as “the Blitz.” Determined to batter England’s defenses prior to launching a cross-Channel invasion, Adolf Hitler’s Luftwaffe massed as many as 1,000 aircraft on a single raid over London and other cities. The Blitz resulted in approximately 43,000 British civilians killed and another 139,000 wounded.

Beginning in September 1940, the relentlessness of the Blitz accentuated its impact – attacks night after night for two months. Afterward, there was more bombing, less predictable in its timing but no less ferocious, that continued until May 1941. Later in the war, there would be still more attacks on London, including by the Germans’ devastating V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets in 1944 and early 1945.

But the Blitz during the early years of the war was the real test of Britain’s ability to survive. The breadth of the devastation was stunning. During the first six weeks of the Blitz, 16,000 London houses were destroyed, 60,000 were seriously damaged, and 300,000 people needed temporary housing. One Londoner in six was homeless at some point during the nine months of the Blitz.⁵ The world had never seen anything like this massive use of air power against civilians.

For many Americans, “It has nothing to do with us” was a prevailing sentiment as the Blitz began. The United States had bailed out European allies during the Great War less than 30 years earlier and most Americans had little interest in again sending their soldiers across the ocean. Let the Europeans clean up their own mess. Many Americans were merely spectators, intent on keeping their distance.

Radio, however, narrowed that distance. Murrow was determined that his countrymen must not ignore battered Britain, because if Britain fell, the United States would inevitably have to face Hitler on its own. He brought the war into their living-rooms with vivid and sometimes poetic descriptions of what was going on around him. He reflected Londoners’ scorn for the enemy; the bombing, he said, “makes headlines, kills people, and smashes property, but it doesn’t win wars … . Things will have to get much worse before anyone here is likely to consider it too much to bear.”⁶ Londoners’ toughness was a theme that ran through many of Murrow’s broadcasts. He said: “I’ve seen some horrible sights in this city during these days and nights, but not once have I heard man, woman, or child suggest that Britain should throw in her hand. These people are angry.”⁷

Virtually all of Murrow’s reports gave his listeners a sense of what it was like to be in the midst of the Blitz. In one broadcast, he spoke of what he had seen during “several hours of observation from a rooftop” while the bombing was under way, and in another he said: “The air raid is still on. I shall speak rather softly, because three or four people are sleeping on mattresses on the floor of this studio.” He told of the resolve of firefighters, police officers, railroad workers, and others who combed rubble for the dead and the still-living, and dealt with unexploded bombs. “Military medals,” said Murrow, “are getting rather meaningless in this war. So many acts of heroism are being performed by men who were just doing their daily job.”⁸

He also noted little things. He described the “rainbow bending over the battered and smoking East End just when the ‘all-clear’ sounded.” He told of standing in front of a smashed grocery store and hearing a dripping inside. He investigated and found that “two cans of peaches had been drilled clean through by flying glass and the juice was dripping down onto the floor.” And in the background, there were symbols of resilience and continuity: “The tolling of Big Ben can be heard in the intervals of the gunfire.” He was trying, he said, to give a sense of “the life in London these days – the courage of the people; the flash and roar of the guns rolling down streets where much of the history of the English-speaking world has been made.” But, he added, “These things must be experienced to be understood.”⁹

For those not physically present during the attacks, receiving information was a way to “experience” the Blitz. Connecting information and experience can be done through vivid storytelling. Murrow convinced British authorities to allow him to broadcast live while the bombing was going on. He painted word pictures while the war provided the background soundtrack: “Four searchlights reach up, disappear in the light of a three-quarter moon … . Just overhead now the burst of the anti-aircraft fire … The searchlights now are feeling almost directly overhead. Now you’ll hear two bursts a little nearer in a moment. There they are! That hard stony sound.” The next night: “I’m standing again tonight on a rooftop looking out over London, feeling rather large and lonesome … . As I look out across the miles and miles of rooftops and chimney pots, some of those dirty-gray fronts of the buildings look almost snow white in the moonlight here tonight.” He saw a rooftop spotter and said, “There are hundreds and hundreds of men like that standing on rooftops in London tonight watching for fire bombs, waiting to see what comes out of this steel-blue sky.”¹⁰

That kind of reporting underscored a difference between broadcast and print. Although a newspaper or magazine reporter could eloquently write about this same scene, there was special dramatic power about the mix of voice and background sounds – sirens, explosions – arriving in faraway homes. The impact of this was heightened by its novelty; the world had not yet become accustomed to real-time news delivering the sounds of major stories as a matter of course. (Not many years later, video would be wedded to these sounds, enhancing impact even more.) For the American audience, secure in its isolated cocoon, these reports stirred imagination and, perhaps, conscience.

The domestic political backdrop of Murrow’s reports was a contest between strong isolationist sentiment and President Franklin Roosevelt’s recognition that Britain would not survive without American help. But FDR’s primary concern as the Blitz began was his own reelection in November 1940. He was seeking an unprecedented third term and faced an unconventional Republican opponent in Wendell Willkie, a one-time Democrat who was not wholly persuaded by the isolationist mantra of the Republican leadership. Robert Sherwood observed that Willkie’s relatively moderate foreign policy stance “tended to remove the isolationist–interventionist issue from the campaign (at least until the final days).”¹¹ In those final days, opinion polls showed that Willkie – increasingly aggressive in labeling Roosevelt a warmonger – had cut into the president’s lead in the race. Several days before the election, Roosevelt tried to put the issue to rest in a Boston speech: “I shall say it again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” (This pledge included a typical FDR sleight of hand. As he told his aide Sam Rosenman, “If somebody attacks us, then it isn’t a foreign war, is it?”¹²)

While the nominees for president mostly avoided debating the case for providing substantial aid to Britain, Murrow continued to deliver the war to American living-rooms. So did his CBS colleagues in London. Eric Sevareid observed in one of his reports: “London fights down her fears every night, takes her blows and gets up again every morning. You feel yourself an embattled member of this embattled corps. The attraction of courage is irresistible.”¹³

These were the mixed messages Americans were receiving. From the presidential candidates, rhetoric about how much more committed to peace each was; while from Murrow and his colleagues more dramatic – and perhaps more believable – reports that clearly, if implicitly, endorsed the British cause.

On Election Day, Roosevelt won 449 electoral votes to Willkie’s 82, although the popular vote margin of just 5 million votes was FDR’s smallest in his three presidential campaigns. Post-election opinion analysis, however, bolstered Roosevelt’s foreign policy position. A survey found that 11 percent of Roosevelt voters backed him because of the international situation, while only 2 percent of Willkie’s supporters backed him because of his promise to keep America out of the war.¹⁴

Freed from campaign pressures, Roosevelt no longer had as much need to zig-zag in foreign affairs. American public opinion was steadily coming more into line with the president’s pro-British views. A Gallup survey in May 1941 asked if the United States should continue to aid Britain even at the risk of being drawn into the war, and 77 percent said yes. By a slight but consistent majority, Americans also approved using the US Navy to guard convoys sailing to Britain.¹⁵

Roosevelt’s actions reflected his precise sense of what was politically possible – how far and how fast the public and Congress would allow him to go. Beginning in May 1941, the Gallup Poll asked, “So far as you personally are concerned, do you think President Roosevelt has gone too far in his policies of helping Britain, not far enough, or about right?” Commenting on the responses to that question, polling expert Hadley Cantril cited “the almost uncanny way in which the president was able to balance public opinion around his policies.” Despite the steady increase in US aid to Britain after May 1941, said Cantril, “the proportion of people who thought the President had gone too far, about right, and not far enough remained fairly constant.” (“Too far” and “not enough” each had held at about 20 percent, and “about right” at around 50 percent.)¹⁶

Americans also increasingly believed that Britain was holding its own against Germany. Cantril noted the close relationship between the willingness to help Britain and the expectation of an eventual British victory. “We do not like to bet on a loser,” wrote Cantril, “even if he is a friend.” He also observed that, although isolationism was far from extinct, it was on the wane. Public figures such as Charles Lindbergh and Joseph P. Kennedy who had said that Britain was doomed to defeat saw support for their position begin to wither. By mid-1941, the interventionists had become more fervent than the isolationists. Cantril observed that interventionism had grown stronger because “most of us were simply convinced that it was to our own self-interest to defeat the Nazis … Our extensive news services and mass media of communication won our confidence and kept us so well informed that we became increasingly alert to the implications events and courses of action had for our self-interest.”¹⁷

By November 1941, belief in the inevitability of the United States going to war seemed to have taken hold. Among the public, the dominant question was “When will we fight?” Polls found that more than 80 percent of Americans expected war with Germany, and close to 70 percent anticipated war with Japan. About 70 percent said that it was more important to see Germany defeated than to stay out of the war, and approximately the same number said that if America’s political and military leaders thought the only way to stop Germany was to go to war, then it should be done.¹⁸

How much of the shift in US public opinion was attributable to Roosevelt, Murrow, or any information in particular is difficult to know; survey research at the time was not as detailed as it later became. For that matter, the importance of any one type of information delivery was also difficult to measure consistently. But, as A. M. Sperber observed, Murrow’s broadcasts “were becoming a national listening habit, as essential, in millions of homes, as the evening meal.”¹⁹

Radio delivered the messages of Murrow, Roosevelt, and many others – journalists, politicians, entertainers, and more – into America’s living-rooms. Hearing these voices, rather than reading their words or learning about them second-hand, increased their impact and credibility.

Probably the most important foreign visitor to American living-rooms during this time was Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill. The rumbling rhetoric of his broadcast speeches captured the attention of even those Americans not ready to commit to his cause. Eleanor Roosevelt later said his speeches “were a tonic for us here in the United States as well as to his own people.”²⁰ Churchill understood how dependent Britain was on American help and thus on Franklin Roosevelt’s goodwill, which was in turn dependent on the political temperature of the American voter. Churchill’s recognition of this was a factor in his appointing his close aide, Brendan Bracken, in July 1941 to run Britain’s Ministry of Information. Bracken was knowledgeable about US politics and American journalism. He well understood the reason for Churchill putting him in this post; he promptly told the Ministry’s American Division that its job was to “draw the Americans into the war.”²¹ When prominent American journalists and news executives such as Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer came to London, they were assiduously courted by Bracken and often invited to 10 Downing Street for a drink with Churchill.²²

At this time, radio was still something of a novelty; in the United States it was just in its second decade as a mass medium, but its reach was growing rapidly. In 1921, 60,000 American homes had radios and there were 30 radio stations in the country. By 1940, there would be radios in more than 29 million US homes (out of a total 35 million households) tuned in to 814 stations.²³ Perhaps most important, it was a national venue. Across the country, radio networks’ listeners could hear the same news bulletin at the same time, which was unprecedented. Today, the entire nation (and much of the rest of the world) can tune in to broadcasts that are “going live.” This is now the standard, not the exception, and it changes how we regard events ranging from a football game to a battlefield firefight.²⁴

The novelty of a particular technology should not, however, overshadow the importance of the content it delivers. Staying with Murrow and Roosevelt as examples, their presentations of information were anything but prosaic. The power was in the words, not solely the medium. Consider these excerpts from FDR’s fireside chat of December 29, 1940:

If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Austral-Asia, and the high seas. And they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us in all the Americas would be living at the point of a gun – a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military. We should enter upon a new and terrible era in which the whole world, our hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force … The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically, we must get these weapons to them, get them to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure … We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.²⁵

When reading this on a page today, Roosevelt’s words still have power, but not as much as when they came directly from the White House into living-rooms, forging a connection between the country’s president and its citizens.

For his part, Murrow was working toward the same end: to present the view from Britain and push Americans toward realizing the importance of providing the British with the tools they needed to continue the fight. His colleague Eric Sevareid later wrote: “Murrow was not trying to ‘sell’ the British cause to America; he was trying to explain the universal human cause of men who were showing a noble face to the world. In so doing he made the British and their behavior human and thus compelling to his countrymen at home.”²⁶ Excerpts from Murrow’s broadcasts illustrate this:

[After visiting an air raid shelter at 3:30 a.m.] How long these people will stand up to this sort of thing I don’t know, but tonight they’re magnificent. I’ve seen them, talked with them, and I know.

[About Londoners] They’ve become more human, less reserved; more talkative and less formal. There’s almost a small-town atmosphere about the place … There’s been a drawing together.

[Watching a German air attack] The fires up the river had turned the moon blood red. The smoke had drifted down until it formed a canopy over the Thames; the guns were working all around us, the bursts looking like fireflies in a southern summer night … Huge pear-shaped bursts of flame would rise up into the smoke and disappear. The world was upside down.²⁷

Murrow knew that the most effective way to present news is by wrapping issues into stories of people with whom the audience could empathize. When his sonorous voice came into American living-rooms from London’s streets or the CBS studio there, the information he provided – forceful, but not overtly political – was about the British people and how they managed in their transformed world. Murrow later reflected on the challenges he and his colleagues faced: “In reporting this new kind of warfare we have tried to prevent our own prejudices and loyalties from coming between you and the information which it was our duty to impart. We may not always have succeeded. An individual who can entirely avoid being influenced by the atmosphere in which he works might not even be a good reporter.”²⁸

As Murrow’s observation indicates, he and other pro-interventionist journalists had to walk an ethical tightrope: reporting in a straightforward way about a topic that stirred mixed feelings within the news audience, while still recognizing that they were being “influenced by the atmosphere” in which they worked. Being physically distant from his audience may have limited Murrow’s understanding of the power of his broadcasts, but those watching the trends in American public opinion recognized the effect of his words.

Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, speaking at a New York dinner in Murrow’s honor just a few days before the Pearl Harbor attack, addressed the historic significance of Murrow’s voice spanning an ocean:

You destroyed the superstition of distance and time … You destroyed in the minds of many men and women in this country the superstition that what is done beyond three thousand miles of water is not really done at all; the ignorant superstition that violence and lies and murder on another continent are not violence and lies and murder here … It was not in London really that you spoke. It was in the back kitchens and the front living-rooms and the moving automobiles and the hotdog stands and the observation cars of another country that your voice was truly speaking. And what you did was this: You made real and urgent and present to the men and women of those comfortable rooms, those safe enclosures, what these men and women had not known was present there or real. You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew the dead were our dead – were all men’s dead – were mankind’s dead – and ours.²⁹

Such was – and is – the power of information. A new technology – radio – had enhanced information’s effects, just as television would do when it arrived some years later. This occurred most strikingly during the Vietnam War (or, as it is known by many Vietnamese, “the American War”).