Voice of America opened its first German broadcast with a promise to be honest
On 1 February 1942, weeks after Pearl Harbor, a shortwave programme aimed at Germany began with the Battle Hymn of the Republic and an unusual pledge for wartime radio: the news might be good or bad for America, but listeners would always hear the truth. Playwright Robert Sherwood coined the name Voice of America for it.
Before the war, American shortwave was entirely private. NBC ran an international network in six languages, CBS built a Latin American chain spanning 64 stations in 18 countries, and General Electric operated transmitters in Schenectady and San Francisco. Around 1940 Washington grew anxious about Nazi propaganda reaching Latin America, and a government information office began feeding war news to these commercial broadcasters, which could air it voluntarily.
Sherwood, who also wrote speeches for Franklin Roosevelt, headed that foreign information service. A week after the United States entered the war, it began direct programming, first to the Philippines in English from San Francisco. The German service followed from a studio on Madison Avenue in New York, with Roosevelt's approval. By mid-1942 the new Office of War Information had taken charge, sharing BBC medium-wave transmitters in Britain and adding stations in North Africa and Italy as Allied armies advanced.
At war's end the network had 39 transmitters and spoke 40 languages, though about half its services, Arabic among them, were cut in 1945 and the operation moved to the State Department. Cultural diplomacy ran alongside news: a CBS music show pairing North and South American performers reached 114 stations across 20 Latin American nations by 1945, in support of Roosevelt's Pan-American policy.
The Cold War gave it a new mission. Russian-language broadcasts began in 1947, and in April 1949 the Soviet Union started electronically jamming the signal. Foy Kohler, director from 1949 to 1952, read the interference as proof of effect. He pointed to 2.1 million regular listeners in France, 30,000 letters arriving every month, and defectors who credited the broadcasts with shaping their choice. A 1976 charter later required reporting that is accurate, objective and comprehensive.
Source: Voice of America
