Wartime book-dramatization anthology · NBC
Words at War
June 24, 1943 – June 5, 1945 · 99 broadcasts
Words at War took the country's most urgent new books about the Second World War and put them on the air, one a week, for two years on NBC (1943-1945). Produced with the Council on Books in Wartime -- whose motto held that books were "weapons in the war of ideas" -- and endorsed by the Office of War Information, it dramatized front-line reportage, resistance memoirs, and hard looks at fascism and the home front, performed by NBC's finest New York radio actors over Frank Black's orchestral scores. The young Joseph Losey -- later a major, blacklisted film director -- staged the first two dozen installments; Anton Leader and others followed. Ernie Pyle, Wendell Willkie, Jan Karski and dozens more reached listeners here, and the series never flinched from turning its lens on America itself. Sober, ambitious, and largely sustaining, Words at War stands as a high-water mark of wartime radio -- and, through Howard Blue's history of the same name, a touchstone for the blacklist that followed.
Collection status:
90 of 99 held (91% complete)
◆ ◆ ◆
Episode Spine
Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.
1943
The premiere traces how the British Commandos came to be and the raids leading to their 1942 assault on the great dry dock at St. Nazaire, from the official account of the raiders.
July 1, 1943
One World
An adaptation of Wendell Willkie's global-unity bestseller; the 1940 presidential candidate narrated three passages himself, with Thomas Chalmers playing the role of Willkie in the drama.
War correspondent Clark Lee's first-hand account of the early Pacific war, from the fall of the Philippines to the fighting island by island.
A stark account of the eight-month Nazi siege and destruction of the Crimean seaport, defended to the last by the Soviets amid heavy civilian loss, told through a Pravda reporter determined to get the story out.
C. S. Forester's novel following a single Royal Navy light cruiser and its crew through a decisive Mediterranean convoy action.
Correspondent Robert St. John's memoir of reporting from the Balkans and his harrowing escape ahead of the German advance through Yugoslavia and Greece.
Journalist Gwen Dew's account of being captured at Hong Kong and held as a civilian prisoner of the Japanese before repatriation.
A lighter, comic look at U.S. Navy flight training, following raw cadets through the trials of learning to fly for the war.
A repeat of the Sevastopol siege drama, chosen to open the new Thursday fall series as it overlapped the end of the summer run.
The story of Canadian fighter ace George Beurling and the Spitfire pilots who defended the besieged island of Malta against relentless Axis air attack.
August 28, 1943
Burma Surgeon
The work of missionary surgeon Dr. Gordon Seagrave, who ran field hospitals along the Burma front and retreated with Stilwell's forces into India.
Fred Herman's true account of an American torpedoed in Arctic waters, pulled aboard a British warship, then crowded into its darkened hold with other survivors as German planes press the attack overhead.
September 9, 1943
Falange
Alan Chase's expose of the Spanish Falange and Axis efforts to spread fascist influence and intrigue through Latin America.
A home-front portrait in letters, following an American family coping with absence, rationing and worry while their men are away at war.
Artist Jean Helion's account of his capture as a French soldier and his escape from a German prison camp.
Agnes Smedley's eyewitness chronicle of China's long resistance to Japanese invasion and the people and armies carrying the fight.
The endurance tale of a merchant seaman adrift for eighty-three days after his ship was sunk, clinging to a raft until rescue.
American Etta Shiber's own account of hiding downed Allied fliers in occupied Paris and running them toward freedom under the eyes of the Gestapo; she steps to the microphone herself to close the story.
A dramatization arguing the strategic case for the Aleutian route to Japan, built around the northern Pacific campaign.
A dramatization of the narrative war poem by Frederick Watt, a lieutenant commander in the Royal Canadian Navy, on men facing death at sea.
Ernie Pyle's dispatches from the North African campaign, told from the mud and foxholes of the ordinary GI; Santos Ortega narrated the correspondent's words.
Lt. John Mason Brown's account of the invasion of Sicily as seen from a Navy command ship, dramatized with the author taking part.
November 16, 1943
Skyways to Berlin
The operations of the American Eighth Air Force flying from bases in Britain against targets in occupied Europe.
Correspondent Michael Padev's flight out of the Balkans as the Axis closed in on the region.
A portrait of Mussolini's rise and fall, drawn together from three best-selling books on the Italian dictator.
A Pearl Harbor Day program built from soldiers' and families' wartime letters, giving voice to the war in the words of those living it.
Col. Carlos Romulo of the Philippine army makes the case for the bond between the Philippines and the United States and the fight to reclaim the islands.
A salute to the merchant marine through the log of British seaman Frank Laskier, who kept sailing the convoys after losing a leg to a German raider.
Historian Hendrik van Loon narrates his own book, framing the war as the newest chapter in humanity's long struggle against intolerance and the lie.
1944
A drama asking what the war is doing to the children of the world, and what kind of peace they will inherit.
A return to the survival-at-sea story of Seaman Izzi, adrift eighty-three days after his ship went down.
A novel of a Chinese family enduring the Japanese invasion, holding to their land and dignity through occupation.
Cmdr. Frederick Bell's destroyer-deck account of surface and air combat in the Pacific, told through the alarms of general quarters.
The Belgian resistance -- the clandestine 'White Brigade' -- and its sabotage and intelligence work against the German occupier.
The life of the Black scientist George Washington Carver, from slavery to world renown for his agricultural work, adapted from Rackham Holt's biography.
Japanese artist Taro Yashima's illustrated account of imprisonment and dissent under his own country's militarist regime.
Reporter Selden Menefee's 15,000-mile survey of the American home front, unflinching about racial prejudice, anti-Semitism and complacency; hailed by the New York Times as the year's boldest broadcast.
February 29, 1944
I Served on Bataan
Army nurse Juanita Redmond's account of tending the wounded through the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, starring Tallulah Bankhead.
Vicki Baum's sweeping novel that follows rubber -- the 'weeping wood' -- across centuries to its life-and-death role in the world war.
How American scientists and engineers were mobilized for war -- radar, medicine, materials -- turning the laboratory into a front.
Konrad Heiden's early, clear-eyed biography of Hitler, tracing how the failed agitator seized and held absolute power in Germany.
John Hersey's Pulitzer-winning novel of an Italian-American major who wins over a Sicilian town by finding it a new bell, and clashes with a martinet general.
A repeat of the acclaimed home-front expose, brought back in response to a strongly favorable Variety notice.
Anna Louise Strong's drama of the Dnieper dam and the Soviet workers who built and defended it, scored with Russian-American singers.
Vercors' resistance parable, written and printed clandestinely in occupied France, of a household that meets a cultured German officer with unbroken silence.
April 25, 1944
Tarawa
The costly Marine assault on the coral atoll of Tarawa, one of the Pacific war's bloodiest few days.
Correspondent Quentin Reynolds' front-line reporting as the Allies turned to the offensive in North Africa and Italy.
The story of a Navy gun crew and the aerial-gunnery war in the Pacific, told from the men who manned the guns.
A tribute to the merchant seamen of the Atlantic convoys -- the 'lifeline' that kept Britain and the war supplied under U-boat attack.
Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius explains Lend-Lease as an arsenal-of-democracy strategy; the author himself spoke at the close.
A small requisitioned yacht turned sub-chaser and its crew's duel with an enemy submarine off the American coast.
A special tied to the Fifth War Bond drive rather than a book adaptation.
An RAF crew forced down in occupied France is hidden by a farm family, in H. E. Bates' novel of danger and quiet courage; the first show of the Johnson's Wax summer season.
George Creel's argument, on Independence Day, for how the Axis leaders should be brought to justice after victory.
The comic tribulations of a middle-aged World War I veteran called back into uniform for a second war.
The loneliness and peril of the air war in the Arctic, from the airmen who flew the frozen North Atlantic ferry and rescue routes.
James Norman Hall's novel of an idyllic Pacific island and the way the war remakes and scars it.
AP correspondent Robert Parker's Balkans reporting, staged in an ambitious production that wraps his eyewitness account inside an odd musical-comedy vision of a third world war brewing in southeastern Europe.
Curt Riess's warning of how the Nazi party planned to survive defeat and perpetuate itself in secret after the war.
A double bill on the war in the Far East; the surviving recording carries only part one, 'Heaven Below.'
August 22, 1944
Pastoral
Nevil Shute's love story among an RAF bomber crew flying from an English airfield.
Lion Feuchtwanger's tale of a French girl's act of resistance and the betrayal that follows, a stark, intimate contrast to the series' larger canvases.
Sociologist Willard Waller's warning that the returning veteran will need real help to come home to civilian life, not just a parade.
The exploits of American fighter ace Don Gentile, whose tally over Europe briefly outpaced Rickenbacker's World War I record.
Two statesmen's blueprints for the postwar order -- Sumner Welles on the coming peace and Walter Lippmann on America's war aims -- argued side by side.
Agnes Meyer's reporting from America's war-boom towns, on the strain that mass migration and defense work put on ordinary communities.
Robert Nathan's tender story of wartime refugees on the American coast, with Signe Hasso and Ralph Bellamy; the last Johnson's Wax-sponsored broadcast.
A repeat of the returning-veteran drama as the series resumed its late-night sustaining run.
October 17, 1944
War, Criminals and Punishment
A repeat of George Creel's case for postwar justice against the Axis leadership.
Correspondent Jack Belden's hard, unromantic reporting of combat from China to Italy, on how men actually die in war.
October 31, 1944
Return of the Traveler
Rex Warner's allegory in which a dead soldier returns to ask the living why he was killed, adapted for radio by Ben Kagan.
The wartime memoir of Los Angeles Times and NBC correspondent Tom Treanor -- killed in France that August -- broadcast as a tribute to the twenty-four American correspondents who died covering the war.
AP chief Kent Cooper's argument for worldwide freedom of the press as a foundation of a lasting peace; the author spoke at the close.
Barbara Klaw's account of life in the towns that sprang up around America's army camps, seen through an officer's wife.
Capt. Alfred Friendly's tribute to the unsung ground crews who kept the air forces flying.
A look at what the war revealed about American schooling, and the case for better education for the peace to come.
Albert Maltz's novel of a single German factory worker's act of defiance, arguing that not all Germans were the enemy.
A two-part study of prejudice as a tool of tyranny -- the scapegoat through history, and the record of bigotry in America's own past.
1945
Correspondent Robert St. John's reflections on the war and the peace still to be won.
A drama of resistance and survival through a single perilous night behind enemy lines.
Beverley Nichols' controversial survey of India under the Raj and the case for and against its independence.
Polish courier Jan Karski's first-hand account of the underground state and his eyewitness report of the Nazi extermination he carried to the West.
The daring escape of ten American and Filipino prisoners from a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines.
Louis Nizer's proposals for handling a defeated Germany, broadcast the day the Yalta Conference results were announced.
The Navy's own narrative of the first six months of the Pacific war, from the wreckage of Pearl Harbor to the turning tide at the Coral Sea.
A collection drawn from military chaplains on the faith that sustained servicemen in combat.
A wartime drama of hope and reconciliation carried by its symbol of the rainbow after the storm.
William Bradford Huie's story of the Navy's Seabees -- the construction battalions whose motto 'Can Do' built the bases that won the Pacific.
A forward-looking drama on the world the war's sacrifice was meant to build; cited by Variety as one of radio's most outstanding programs.
A drama drawn from the air war, its title evoking the keening of aircraft over their targets.
A dramatized brief for Lord Beveridge's plan of government-managed full employment after the war -- a limited-cast, organ-scored program that drew sponsor and industry complaints of one-sidedness.
Glenway Wescott's novel of a Greek family forced to billet a German officer in their Athens flat under occupation.
A drama on a gap in the Allied or enemy defenses -- the 'back door' left open -- and the campaign that exploited it.
A tribute to Ernie Pyle -- killed six days earlier -- through his 'Brave Men' dispatches from Italy and France, honoring the ordinary infantryman he wrote for.
A tense drama of a fugitive in hiding in occupied Europe and the family that shelters him at mortal risk.
A dramatized presentation of Friedrich Hayek's warning that central economic planning leads toward tyranny -- programmed as a free-market rebuttal to the earlier Beveridge broadcast.
An expose of the black markets and profiteers who cashed in on shortages while the country was at war.
A look ahead at the returning serviceman's hard passage back to civilian life and work.
The series signs off with Russell Davenport's book-length patriotic poem, a closing meditation on the nation's ideals as the war in Europe ended.
The Story
Words at War took the country's most urgent new books about the Second World War and put them on the air, one a week, for two years on NBC (1943-1945). Produced with the Council on Books in Wartime -- whose motto held that books were "weapons in the war of ideas" -- and endorsed by the Office of War Information, it dramatized front-line reportage, resistance memoirs, and hard looks at fascism and the home front, performed by NBC's finest New York radio actors over Frank Black's orchestral scores. The young Joseph Losey -- later a major, blacklisted film director -- staged the first two dozen installments; Anton Leader and others followed. Ernie Pyle, Wendell Willkie, Jan Karski and dozens more reached listeners here, and the series never flinched from turning its lens on America itself. Sober, ambitious, and largely sustaining, Words at War stands as a high-water mark of wartime radio -- and, through Howard Blue's history of the same name, a touchstone for the blacklist that followed.
Full story — coming soon while it's being curated.
Gallery
Art pending