We take you now, to Washington!

April 3, 2008 3:03 PM

This is a recording of the CBS radio announcement of the Pearl Harbor bombings. I remember having a longer version of this exact clip, and right where this one ends an announcer with a classic American radio accent says "We take you now, to Washington". Where could I find that again? (I've googled, and all I can find is the abridged version).

Perhaps some government archive? Part of the CBS website? I originally found it by googling, maybe 3 years ago.

posted by phrontist to media & arts (4 comments total)

Museum of Broadcast Communications Archives, perhaps?
posted by dhartung at 4:29 PM on April 3

I'm not sure, but there seems to be conflicting accounts of what was actually said and broadcasted. This page from the Authentic History Centre has two available recordings, the second of which has a portion which sounds exactly like the clip you provide. The first, longer recording (29 minutes) has a clip which I suspect might be what you're looking for - from 0:21 to 5:51 on the clip.

A 1999 interview with one of the broadcasters at the time, John Trout, is summarised on this page, and is available on the NPR website.

Incidentally, the broadcaster was John Charles Daly.

IANA Historian, but checking this stuff out was fascinating. I don't have a firm answer but it was fun anyway. Thanks for the question. Hope you find what you're looking for.
posted by WalterMitty at 4:51 PM on April 3

here's the one you're after...
posted by russm at 10:53 PM on April 3 [1 favorite]

The Wikipedia article on Daly suggests that record producers spliced more than one broadcast together (much as TV news magazines might do today with video), and I have to say that the MP3 russm linked to sounds that way to me. The first bit reads like an immediate this just in announcement, but the piece it leads into describes political events moving along quite rapidly, with Congressional reaction and the first bulletins of the attack on Manila.

This shows that unless the US news media waited all day on a lazy Sunday to announce the "Ohau" attack, we have two broadcasts several hours apart being run together as one:

News of Pearl Harbor reached U.S. forces in the Philippine Islands less than half an hour after the attack (about 2:30 A.M., December 8, in the Philippines, corresponding to 8:00 A.M., December 7, in Hawaii).[1] Nine hours later, unopposed Japanese attacks caught U.S. bombers and pursuits sitting on the ground.

In fact, that article goes on to discuss how Army staff in the Philippines was getting most of their information about the attack through the early morning (it was not yet light in Manila, where it was already Dec. 8) via commercial broadcasts.
posted by dhartung at 11:26 PM on April 3