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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAM LAWRENCE, KANSAS
THURSDAY, MAY 9, 1940
How America got the news of Norway's Benedict Arnolds
... into Oslo led by a band
Radiophoto
Leland Stowe
ON MONDAY EVENING, April 8. Leland Stowe—correspondent for the Chicago Daily News and its syndicate—sat in Oslo's Grand Hotel talking idly about Europe's dormant war.
No guns rumbled nearer than the Sylt. The good burghers of Oslo were safe in their beds.
At half past midnight the city heard a noise like a thousand angry motorists stalled in a traffic jam—the raucous bellowing of air raid sirens.
At 7:45 the next morning, Stowe and his colleagues, Edmund Stevens of the Christian Science Monitor and Warren Irvin of N. B. C., watched Nazi bombers roar over the trim Norwegian housets—not in sky-darkening swarms, but by twos and threes. No bombs fell. Scarcely a shot was fired.
By 2 in the afternoon, the incredible had happened. The tramp of Nazi boots was echoing through Oslo streets. The conquerors, marching by threes, made the thin gray column look longer. People gaped like yokels on the Fourth of July at the spectacle of 1500 Germans taking possession of a city of 256,000—a handful of invaders so sure of easy conquest that they had a brass band!
Was this an instance of awesome Nazi might?...of a little neutral's pathetic unpreparedness? To the keen mind of Leland Stowe, sharpened by experience with European intrigue, familiar with Oslo's defenses, the thing didn't make sense.
▶ Stowe got busy, and began to pick up the pieces of the most fantastic story of
...the brass hats arrive
Chauffeured by a fair compatriot with a smiling comeback to German gallantries, Stowe escaped to Stockholm and gave the world the news of Norway's gigantic inside job. Another feather in the cap of the reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930...the 40-year-old man who was told by a New York newspaper last fall that he was "too old to cover a war."
the war. A story of a small but potent Norwegian war fleet in the harbor whose crews had been deliberately ordered ashore. A story of fortresses and anti-aircraft batteries that didn't fire, or fired startlingly wide of the mark. A story of mines whose electrical control system had been disconnected. A story of a free people infested through and through with spies, who could never have crept into key positions without the aid of traitors.
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Take a poll among newsmen for ace correspondent of World War II, and Leland Stowe's name would probably top the list. But there would be runners-up ...
Lochner of AP and Oechsher of UP, covering Berlin. Walter Kerr of the N. Y. Herald Tribune. Columbia Broadcasting's Ed Murrow in London. Otto Tolischus of the N. Y. Times. Frank R. Kent, Jr., of the Baltimore Sun. Young Bill White of Emporia, Kansas, doing the old man proud in Germany and Finland.
Yet no one man, not Richard Harding Davis himself, could cover the present war. For total war means total reporting—
and total reporting means manpower. All told, it takes 10,000 men to report the holocaust in Europe.
The economic front is everywhere and all newsmen help to cover it. The correspondent in the dugout, noticing how the men are fed and clothed. The man in the capital gathering facts on production. The traveling thinkman with eye peeled for slowdown or sabotage. The editors or bureau heads who fit the jigsaw puzzle together.
Then there is the diplomatic front, a labyrinth where only the most experienced can find their way around. And the propaganda front ...reactions of the people ...an area that takes the shrewdest kind of reporting.
The din of battle is just an incident in this war. It is the touch of red with which a painter brightens a somber canvas. It means something only when seen against the rest of the picture.
Just the same, we all love red, so the newsmen go through hell and high water to give it to us. And a whole long year ago, TIME, the Weekly Newsmagazine, began to paint the background that would give those flaming stories meaning—in Background for War, TIME's famous panorama of Europe on the brink.
In every new issue, TIME changes and illuminates the shadows behind the crackling, red-hot stories of the week. Stories from TIME's own big and growing foreign staff, from the Associated Press, of which TIME is a member, from the ace correspondents (with enthusiastic credit).
TIME gives the total coverage that total war demands. TIME unravels the economic and diplomatic snarl. TIME reconciles conflicting stories—weighs one against the other, knows the sources and the mental slant of each reporter, comes up with the composite, clarified answer.
No man knows where the next explosion will be and neither does TIME ... But TIME knows and tells where the TNT is stored.
It's pretty important to know where we are in this war. TIME shows you both the woods and the trees.
This is one of a series of advertisements in which the Editors of TIME hope to give College Students a clearer picture of the world of news-gathering, news-writing, and news-reading—and the part TIME plays in helping you to grasp, measure, and use the history of your lifetime as you live the story of your life.
TIME
-- THE WEEKLY NEWSMAGAZINE