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THE FIRST MAN TO PUT AN ACTUAL BATTLE ON THE AIR RETURNS WITH
for some day some of its aspects may face us in this country.
A year ago, Radio Mirror published a series of articles under the title, "Will War Guns Silence Radio?" Those articles, although they were based upon interviews with military and government experts, were frankly speculative. They were intended to show what changes radio might bring to modern warfare, and what other changes war might bring to radio.
Questions raised by those articles can be answered now. Some of the results forecast in them have happened. Others have not. But for the first time, it is now possible to see the actual effects of radio upon the people of a country at war.
In Spain, under the bloodiest and fiercest civil war the world has seen in this century, radio is at work tearing a nation apart. In other parts of Europe — Germany and Russia particularly — that same radio is drawing nations together, unifying them, preparing them for war. It is equally effective — and dangerous — in either work.
I talked to H. V. Kaltenborn, Columbia's dean of news commentators, after he had returned from six weeks in Spain, and he told me many things which revealed radio's new importance in Europe's game of life and death. We were sitting, on the day of his return to the United States, in his quiet Brooklyn study, so peaceful, so remote from the scenes of horror and bloodshed I had heard him describe on the air from Spain, that it was hard to realize they had really occurred. Yet, between us, on the table, lay three bullets, scarred and disfigured. Two of them had buried themselves three feet deep in a haystack behind which Kaltenborn had taken shelter during the battle of Irun. The
other had struck a wall, a few feet above his head, and dropped to the ground beside him.
If you heard Kaltenborn's broadcasts during the battle of Irun, you know that he was the first man to put an actual war on the air. Microphone in hand, he was no more than a few hundred yards from the fighting between Spanish Rebels and Loyalists. Perhaps you listened to other transAtlantic broadcasts he made while he was in the war area. Yet there were things he didn't tell you on the air, things the significance of which was perhaps not fully apparent at the time.
One incident stands out as particularly important. In Pamplona, one of the northern Spanish towns, he passed a building which was surrounded by cordons of armed guards. It was about twice as heavily guarded as any other building in the city. It was the Pamplona radio station. Kaltenborn was accredited by both factions in the war; most official doors were open to him; Rebel and Loyalist commanders both trusted in his good faith as a reporter. But here was one place their trust stopped short. He was not allowed to enter or go near that radio station, or any radio station in Spain.
"The radio is worth too much to us," was the answer they always gave him. "And one bomb could destroy a station."
To understand why the continued operation of their broadcasting facilities means so much to both sides, you must remember that Spain today is a country torn internally by two opposing political and social ideals.
The war is between two classes, each of which believes in its own Tightness with a belief that has passed beyond rea
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