"This Is War!"

What we say tonight has to do with blood and with bone and with anger, and also with a big job in the making. Laughter can wait. Soft music can have the evening off. No one is invited to sit down and take it easy. . . .

With these words Radio cast aside its diversity for a half-hour last Saturday night to give Americans a dramatic meditation. It was prefaced with an introduction by President Roosevelt (read by Archibald MacLeish). The four major networks and many independent stations--some 700 stations in all--contributed the time. It was the first of 13 shows suggested by the Office of Facts and Figures, designed to instruct and confirm the American spirit, and entitled This Is War!

Writer of its angry opening lines and all the rest of it was Norman Corwin, who did the Bill of Rights anniversary program (TIME, Dec. 29). After working so hard on that show that he had a series of nosebleeds, Corwin was easing into a California holiday when OFF's Radio Boss Bill Lewis called him to Washington. Corwin brought to the job the best gifts to be found in radio--a spritely mixture of mockery and love for his medium. No radio writer has kidded it and used it so well at the same time. (Last month his best CBS scripts were collected in a book with a preface by Carl Van Doren.*)

When he went to work with OFF, Corwin was in sympathetic company. OFF's chief, Archibald MacLeish, has written radio plays himself. OFF's dark and glittering Bill Lewis was the CBS vice president who made a famous remark about radio's audience: "Even if it's good, they'll listen." With the desire these men have for excellence and truth in "propaganda" programs, Corwin devoutly agrees. Said he last week, "I have a terrific sense of the dignity of a half-hour of God's time. I feel that anything which smutches that time is inexcusable."

Corwin's show was no smutch. Because serious radio is a delicate matter, its flaws (occasionally uncontrolled acting, a few poor pomposities of style) were disproportionately jarring. But the script sang with the defiant tunes of people and machines, and the narrator, Navy's Lieut. Robert Montgomery, handled well the address at the end to the people of the United Nations:

"Take heart! Resist much! Fight how you can! We are building for you, we are on the move. . . ."

This message actually went out to the world. Played by separate casts in Spanish and Portuguese, the program was broadcast by short wave to South America that night. Done by other casts in other languages, it goes out this week to the peoples of the East and West.

* Thirteen by Corwin; Holt ($2.75).

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