The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

not have been better. Murrow needed an experienced journalist on the
Continent and offered Shirer a job on the spot, subject to approval of a trial
broadcast for the CBS directors back in the States.
CBS duly hired him, despite his flat, slightly reedy voice – albeit largely
at Murrow’s insistence, who knew that Shirer’s fluency in languages,
contacts and sources would be invaluable. And so they proved when Shirer,
the only American journalist in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss in
March 1938, secured a major scoop. The late thirties were still early days
for radio news, however, and Shirer’s regular broadcasts did not begin until
shortly after, when, following the Anschluss, CBS asked him and Murrow
to produce a European Roundup programme of news. From then on,
Americans would regularly hear Shirer’s distinctive timbre from all over
Germany, but particularly Berlin, where he was based. ‘Hello, America,’ he
would usually begin. ‘Hello, CBS. This is Berlin.’
By May 1940, Shirer was thirty-six, balding, with a round, genial face,
spectacles and a trim gingery moustache. Although married, he and his wife
Tess agreed that after the birth of their daughter it would be safer for her to
move with baby Inga to Switzerland, from where she could run the Geneva
office of CBS. Although Shirer lived in some comfort in the Hotel Adlon
next to the Brandenburg Gate at the heart of the city, he had a deep dislike
of the Nazis and felt keenly the sense of menace that pervaded the capital.
His room was bugged, while he suspected staff at the Adlon of being
Gestapo informers. ‘The shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution,
regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparation for
war,’ he jotted in his diary soon after getting the CBS job in September
1937, ‘has hung over all our lives, like a dark, brooding cloud that never
clears.’
Although the Nazis allowed print journalists to cable their pieces
uncensored, that was not the case for broadcast journalists. Each piece had
to be submitted not only to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry but also to the
Foreign Office and OKW, a routine annoyance that never ceased to rankle
with him. In his broadcast on 10 May, he was allowed to announce that the
offensive had begun, and to express the surprise of most Berliners, who had
not been expecting it at all. ‘The people in Berlin, I must say,’ he added,
‘took the news of the beginning of this decisive phase of the struggle with
great calm. Before the Chancellery an hour ago, I noticed that no crowd had