Words at War — 1944
49 episodes broadcast in 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.
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