1949. Tensions Grow as the Berlin Blockade Continues

A Decisive Spring Approaches

Edward R. Murrow (left) and Bill Downs (center) with an unidentified man in Berlin in 1953 (source)

Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

February 16, 1949

We are approaching the season here in Central Europe when international rumors begin to bud and unconfirmed reports start to sprout and stir under the agitation of the struggle between the East and the West.

The first of this springtime crop of rumor came the other day in the American licensed newspaper Neue Zeitung. The Zeitung reports Soviet troop movements along the Baltic coast of Germany towards the border of the British zone. The newspaper, quoting refugees and fishermen, says that approximately 5,000 Russian Marines are in the northern German province of Mecklenburg; that new military bases are being established in the Baltic countries; and that submarine maneuvers are being conducted by the Russians in the Baltic sea.

It is impossible to check these reports, and Western intelligence authorities refused to comment.

But the rumors are worth noting. Officials here agree that this spring, now only a month away, will be a decisive season for the peace of Europe.

A C-54 cracked near Celle last night, but no one was badly injured. The Anglo-American airlift has been plagued by bad weather this week, but despite sleet and rain and fog, the planes have managed to average more than 5,000 tons a day into Berlin.

But it isn't easy. The other day I tried to get on an airlift plane to Frankfurt. The weather cleared for about an hour. I rushed to Tempelhof, was shoved onto a plane, and we waited in line to take off for more than an hour. The crew had not had any sleep for more than twenty-six hours. They had missed a blind landing at the Rhine Maine airport and been sent back; been shunted to the Celle airport; loaded again for Berlin; and were trying to get back to their billets in Frankfurt for rest and clean clothing.

We were just preparing to take off when the Tempelhof control tower closed down the field. The bad weather had moved in again.

The pilot heaved a sigh of relief. "We can't sleep here," he said. "I didn't want to try another soupy approach."

It is not particularly dramatic, but it happens every day on the airlift—an operation which even we here in Berlin are beginning to take for granted.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

1944. CBS News on D-Day

The Columbia Broadcasting System on D-Day

Members of Edward R. Murrow's team of war correspondents, London 1944. From left to right: Richard C. Hottelet, Gene Ryder, Bill Downs, Charles Collingwood, Charles Shaw

From a CBS advertisement in The New Yorker, June 17, 1944, p. 40:

LISTEN: June 17, 1944

100 hours before the dawn of D-Day, Edward R. Murrow flew over the Calais beach and made the first broadcast from a bomber over Festung Europa.

Then came midnight June 5 in New York, 6 a.m., June 6 in London. Charles Collingwood was carrying a wire recorder to an LST bound across the Channel. Richard Hottelet was in a Marauder in the first air wave. Larry LeSueur and Bill Downs were marching with the Allied ground forces.

In the CBS world-news room in New York and at 12:37 a.m. Ned Calmer broadcast an AP eavesdrop from Germany that the Allies were on the move, repeated it every half hour until 3, warning listeners to doubt the Krauts bearing news. At 3:17 Bob Trout unlocked a new secret cupboard in Studio 9, yanked down a hand-microphone with a long tail of wire, flipped a switch that put him on the air to the whole U.S., and moved into the news-ticker with the mike, reading aloud swiftly and steadily from the rapid fire of ticker-news pouring in. Paul White, CBS news chief, warned Trout to expect an important announcement at 3:30. At 3:32 Eisenhower's first communiqué broke directly into the network by short wave from London. The invasion was on.

Major George Fielding Eliot took over to analyze the communiqué. At 3:39 Murrow spoke from London; at 4, CBS broadcast General Eisenhower's recorded alarm to the invaded peoples—followed by the King of Norway's speech to his people underground—then the Prime Minister of the Netherlands; then the Prime Minister of Belgium. Back and forth over the Atlantic the broadcasts erupted; at 5:14 CBS' Richard Hottelet, now back on the ground after his Marauder flight, told his story from London. The 4 major networks were pooling their English broadcasts to America, so the CBS frontliners were augmented by such competent colleagues as Bryan, Vandercook, Anderson, Mann, and the top BBC men. At 5:45 CBS switched to the seething Pentagon in Washington, then back to Supreme Headquarters in London, back to New York for Trout and Eliot once more, back to London for Charles Shaw, to Washington again . . .

Newspapers were dated 5 o'clock that morning—by 5 o'clock CBS had already issued 4 hours, 23 minutes of a constant stream of invasion news and analysis, as the 141 CBS stations across America "lighted up." The stream swelled. On came Ned Calmer again, Major Eliot, Charles Collingwood's wire-recording of his LST shoving off. Bill Henry, Col. Morrison, Quentin Reynolds—one after another—spelled it out until at 10:00—after more than 9 hours of steady news, the first regular program came on the CBS air. A few more followed, but were soon erased by more news. About 11 the CBS monitor heard BBC warn that General De Gaulle would speak at 11:30. America heard him over CBS only, with a running-translation interpolated. At 3, CBS brought King George's prayer. London had promised a second communiqué for the U.S. "pool" at 5:30, but an overseas mix-up had put the communiqué on the news-wires and the BBC air ahead of U.S. radio. So Quincy Howe analyzed it, ad lib, as the ticker version was torn off and handed to him at the microphone at 6:11.

You've now read a fraction of the salients of the most critical day in the history of the world, noted in the little room where history channels to our nation . . . The President prayed at 10 . . . Then Murrow's voice again, through heavy static ". . . the sound of a giant factory in the sky . . . 8,000 tons of bombs . . . people went about their business calmly." Other voices: ". . . the first wounded have come back, and they smiled . . ." John Daly's clipped summaries. William L. Shirer's soft, piercing observations. Then toward midnight Quentin Reynolds' moving personal sketch of Montgomery the man, and his new American uniform . . .

And on the window-sill a thick paper book, bearing the title "Liberating a Continent; Index to Invasion" published by the British Information Services. On the cover of the book there was an empty coffee-glass, and a good deal of dust. That acrid smell on the east wind was cordite.

This is CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System.

1949. The Kremlin's Realpolitik Directs East Germany

The Socialist Unity Party Convenes in Berlin

"The first Congress of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) is held in Berlin under the chairmanship of Walter Ulbricht," April 22, 1946 (source)

Bill Downs

CBS Frankfurt

January 24, 1949

German Communists want to hold hands with the Western Powers.

That has been my impression after a week of traveling in the Ruhr area of Germany and talking with political leaders and occupation authorities working in that vital industrial complex. There are some 19,000 Communist Party members in the Ruhr and hundreds of their sympathizers which could form a serious core of obstruction if it wanted to be one.

But the past week has seen the hearings of three of the Ruhr's leading Communists. Two were fined by a British military government court for holding a political meeting without permission. The hearing was so polite and the Communists so apologetic that it might have been only a misunderstanding between friends. The trial of Max Reimann, spiritual leader of the Ruhr Marxists, comes up next Wednesday. He announced last week—almost gleefully—that he expected to be fined, that all fines would be paid by the workers, and that he was most impressed by the fairness of the British court.

True, the Communists got many times more in propaganda than the eight hundred marks or so far assessed by the British in fines. But the great good humor of the situation is a far cry from the usual vilification that the comrades normally heap upon the Western capitalist fascist beasts, as they call them.

Another example of the new party line in Germany is the fact that the Communists have almost ignored the trial of seven Ruhr workmen who are charged with refusing to follow a British military order to dismantle the Bochum steel plant. Ordinarily, this would be raw meat for the Party. But outside of a few mentions in their press, the Communists are carefully looking the other way—for the present, at least.

All of this adds up to the shift in the Kremlin policy as evidenced in recent declarations of friendship out of Moscow, and by speeches of Communist leaders in Italy and France.

Whether this policy follows for the German Communists will be known in Berlin the day after tomorrow. The Socialist Unity Party of the Soviet zone holds its annual convention then, and if the German Communists have been ordered to follow along, it will become official.

This is Bill Downs in Frankfurt. Now back to CBS in New York.

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Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

January 25, 1949

At least eight people were killed and seventeen injured when an RAF Dakota plane crashed last night in the worst accident of the seven-month-old airlift. The plane was carrying twenty-five Germans out of Berlin in a relief project to move needy children, the sick, and the aged out of the blockade winter. Among the eight dead are a woman, two children, and one British crew member.

The plane crashed just two miles inside the Russian zone near the northern German city of Lübeck. British investigators have not yet been allowed by Soviet authorities to go to the site of the crash. The injured have been taken to a German hospital.

Some six hundred delegates in to the Communist-dominated Socialist Unity Party opened their convention this morning in the Soviet sector of the city—a meeting that is expected to shed light on Russian plans for the future of East Germany and blockaded Berlin.

The meeting opened with the usual fanfare and greetings to foreign Communists who are guests of the meeting. The representative of the Soviet military government, Colonel Tiulpanov, struck the keynote, charging that "Western monopoly capital follows a policy which will lead to the final liquidation of the German state. The Soviet Union," the Russian spokesman declared, "will never recognize these measures." He added that "the German people can look with confidence into the future because the Soviet people will always support them."

Western political experts are predicting that this convention will result in the establishment of a separate East German government and formal incorporation of this state into the Russian political and economic orbit.

It is considered a certainty that East Germany will be included in the new Soviet-sponsored Eastern Economic Council announced last night. Thus Europe looks like it will be ending up with two Germanys with only a line separating a Marshall Plan economy in the West and a Stalin Plan economy in the East.

At a secret Communist high-command meeting in Berlin yesterday, the party leaders appointed themselves a seven-man politburo—smaller but similar to that in the Kremlin.

The new Communist party conciliatory line that appeared last week in Italy and France has not been stressed in the SED convention thus far. We'll have to wait and see.

Incidentally, today's meeting is closed to foreign correspondents—the German reporters who are members of the Socialist Unity Party are allowed in.

The convention will end on Friday.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

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Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

January 27, 1949

The Communist Party line for Germany is slowly being revealed in the full-dress convention of the Socialist Unity Party in East Berlin, but the expected pronouncement on foreign policy—the German Communist relationship with the West—still has not emerged.

The same old charges of "war instigators" and the rest are being repeated by the German party leaders. However, there is a large amount of mystery and confusion over the withdrawal of the speech of Colonel Sergei Tiulpanov, who keynoted the convention as a representative of the Soviet Union. Tiulpanov, who is the Russian political commissar for Berlin, made a vitriolic attack against America and other Western nations on Tuesday, but after the speech was widely reported on German radio stations, it suddenly was killed. No mention of the speech has been made in the Russian licensed newspapers.

The most significant utterances of the German Communists concern what they call the establishment of a political party of a new type. This followed the setting up of a German politburo for the direction of an East German government. But the so-called "new type" of political maneuver is considered here as a broad hint that the traditional Communist party line is going to shift.

Connected with the suppression of Tiulpanov's anti-American speech, American authorities expect that before the SED convention ends tomorrow there will be signs of what dialecticians call "realistic diplomacy." That, in order to reach their revolutionary goals, the Communist Party may be ready to make a deal with the West. But while this is in prospect, it is already being explained that such arrangements are temporary.

The past twenty-four hours of the convention has been taken up with economic conditions of the Soviet zone of Germany. There were calls for increase in the production of coal, transport, steel, and chemicals.

Walter Ulbricht, Deputy Chairman of the Communist Party, added one footnote in speaking of the excellent job being done by the intellectuals of the party. "Some workers point out," he said, "That some of the intellectuals and technicians were Nazis . . . we have not made it clear enough that these people are judged for their performances and attitude, not for their former party affiliations."

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

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Bill Downs

CBS Berlin

January 29, 1949

The German Communists have ended their four day Berlin convention with the publication of a manifesto. This is a document that is supposed to guide the thinking and actions of the faithful until the Kremlin hands down new directives.

There is nothing much new in it. The usual charges are expanded somewhat—the Anglo-American imperialists, it says, are committing new acts of brutal violence against the German people, such as the international control of the Ruhr, the industrial security measures, and the splitting of Germany. All of these things, according to the Communists, will deliver Germany for decades into the hands of American monopolists and military dictatorship.

The Communist manifesto for Germany demands the formation of a unified German state, agricultural reform, a peace treaty, and the withdrawal of all occupation troops.

Wilhelm Pieck, head of the German Communists and member of the new politburo set up here, called for "strict collective and operational guidance" of the masses through intensified use of "people's police" and people's court.

In other words, one of the major achievements of the convention is to set up a more efficient police state in the Soviet zone.

American authorities here say that this spring may see another attempt by the Soviet government to bring about settlement of the German problem as a whole. They base this judgment on the fact that a strongly anti-Western speech by a Russian official was killed; that the renewed Communist call for a unified Germany reflects Soviet policy and some highly secret conferences now reported underway in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia, where Andre Vyshinsky is conferring with Eastern European political leaders.

But it also is believed that if there is no East-West settlement of the German stalemate, the Communists are timing their movements to set up a separate East German government in June or July to match a West German republic now being formed under the sponsorship of the Western Powers.

In other words, the Berlin Communist convention, despite all its bombast, was instructed to adopt a "wait and see" line.

It leaves the next five months to determine whether the East and West can settle their differences over Germany.

This is Bill Downs in Berlin. Now back to CBS in New York.

1953. CBS and NBC Race to Cover the Queen's Coronation

Televising the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II

"Queen Elizabeth II poses in her coronation attire in the throne room of Buckingham Palace in London, after her coronation, June 2, 1953" (source)

From The New Yorker, June 13, 1953, pp. 107-110:

Television: The Queen

By Philip Hamburger

A few minutes before 5:15 a.m. DST, on Coronation Day (10:15 a.m. British Summer Time), I rose, drank a toast of tomato juice and coffee to the Queen, and padded into the television room to light up the tiny screen. England was about to crown a new monarch, and two of the American networks, NBC and CBS, in a royal frenzy of competition, were about to joust one another to the death in an effort to crown her first.

CBS made the initial lunge at five-fifteen, when a British voice, speaking from London, said that the Queen would not leave the Palace to go to the Abbey for another eleven minutes. The voice was pictorially accompanied by still shots of public buildings in London. A moment later, an extremely wide-awake young man named Allen Jackson appeared before the cameras (he was in New York) and introduced an equally wide-awake young woman from the British Information Services (she was in New York, too). She was wearing a refined afternoon dress, and she expressed the opinion that we were in for a remarkable day.

At 5:26 a.m. DST (10:26 a.m. BST), the overseas British voice announced that the Queen was leaving the Palace and was on her way "to meet the world." I could hear the hoofs of the horses drawing the royal coach, and I could see a still picture of one of the coach's wheels. "She is serene and untroubled," the voice went on. "She is the symbol of all our hopes. The Queen is on her way, and so her journey begins."

At five-thirty, I switched to NBC. Dave Garroway was walking jauntily into the NBC newsroom at Radio City, wearing a bowler and carrying an umbrella, but somehow he didn't look very British. He put both the hat and the umbrella on a coat rack and expressed the opinion that we were in for a remarkable day. He said that NBC had a good many tricks up its sleeve, all right, and suggested that we listen to the BBC broadcast from London. This was promptly piped in, while we were allowed to look at Garroway. The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret were drawing up at the Abbey annex, the BBC man said, and then we heard a band playing the British national anthem.

At five-thirty-four, Mr. Garroway, wearing a what-hath-God-wrought expression, announced that, thanks to a facsimile receiver called Mufax, still pictures taken a mere nine minutes before in London would be upon us in a moment, having been miraculously transmitted by radiophoto across the broad stretches of the Atlantic. Sure enough, at 5:35 DST, nine minutes after the Queen had left the Palace at 10:26 BST, a barely distinguishable royal coach, the Queen, and the Duke of Edinburgh appeared before us. Garroway was beside himself, as well as he might have been, I guess. He established contact with a gentleman called Gibson Parker, who was at the transmitting point for the radiophotos, forty miles from London. Mr. Parker asked Mr. Garroway if we could see the Yeomen of the Guard. We could not. "You can see the magnificence of the coach," said Mr. Parker, across the ocean. At this point, someone placed a map of England and Wales before the cameras.

In a matter of minutes, the Mufax picture of the coach, Queen, and Duke was returned to the screen. Simultaneously, Garroway permitted us to listen again to the BBC broadcast. The Queen was passing through Trafalgar Square. Another BBC voice, evidently from within the Abbey, now spoke eloquently of "the stillness of expectancy, the loneliness of dedicated sovereignty." Several more Mufax pictures arrived—crowds outside the Palace, a mounted Guardsman, and so on.

When the Queen reached the Abbey (6 a.m. DST), NBC began, in a sense, to fall apart. It forgot that people might want to hear the ceremony of the Coronation, and concentrated on those Mufax pictures. "Gibson—can you hear me, Gibson?" said someone standing alongside Garroway. "We are looking at A-One—A for Adam—on the Mufax." A man called Romley Wheeler was piped in. He was at Blackbushe Airport and was witnessing the departure of a Canberra jet plane, under NBC charter, which he said would arrive at Boston in about six and a half hours. Garroway announced that NBC had scooped the world—it had laid its dark plans, unbeknownst to CBS, and was dispatching this special plane with the first motion pictures of the day's events. The Coronation itself, I suddenly realized, was proceeding. NBC miracle or no NBC miracle, I switched to CBS.

CBS didn't have Mufax but it did have old still pictures of Coronation scenes, presumably obtained from libraries and files. I could hear the BBC announcer describing the Coronation ceremony, and I could hear the glorious service, the great organ, the massed choir, the unbelievable trumpet flourishes, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Queen. Perhaps this was not precisely television coverage of the Coronation, but it was moving and impressive. From time to time, I switched back to Garroway. He was talking to H. V. (Dean) Kaltenborn, who allowed that the day was a remarkable one, or he was calling for a "recap" of the Mufax stills. For the remainder of the service, I stayed with CBS.

About 4 p.m., both NBC and CBS reached new heights of frenzy. The NBC Canberra jet had developed engine trouble over the Atlantic and had been forced to turn back, but Royal Air Force planes had brought pictures to Goose Bay, Labrador, from which point both CBS and NBC were flying them to Logan Airport, in Boston, in souped-up P-51 Mustangs. Both networks had set up shop at Logan Airport, and both networks expected their planes to arrive shortly.

"Joe DeBona in his souped-up CBS P-51 Mustang is now flying over Bangor at an altitude of twenty-two thousand feet and four hundred and twenty-five miles per hour," said Bill Downs of CBS. He was on a runway at Logan, scanning the sky. On NBC, Ben Grauer, also standing on a Logan runway, said that Stanley Reaver, in his souped-up NBC P-51 Mustang, would arrive in about forty-five minutes. CBS hung around the airport waiting for DeBona. NBC, happily, went up to Ottawa and looked in on a Dominion audience in front of the Canadian Houses of Parliament listening to the Queen's speech. It was followed by a call, from an elegant, bemedalled antique, for three cheers for the Queen. "Hip, Hip, Hip!" he cried.

At four-twelve, back on CBS, Joe DeBona zoomed over Logan, and at four-thirteen, he landed on the deck. "A clear victory for CBS!" cried Bill Downs, but at four-fourteen (this was a tense time), NBC, having decided that its pilot had lost the race, hooked its network into that of the American Broadcasting Company, which, having rather maturely made no promises and run no races, was transmitting films of the Coronation through an arrangement with the Canadian Broadcasting Company, in Montreal.

The Canadians had clearly won the race. Royal Air Force planes flying to Goose Bay and Royal Canadian Air Force planes flying from Goose Bay to Montreal had brought the first pictures from London. They were the BBC pictures the British had seen that morning on their television sets, and they were the real thing.

For several hours, I watched the ancient service, and my admiration for the cameraman and commentators of the BBC is unbounded. We have a great deal to learn from them, technically and aesthetically. The British had set up their cameras at strategic points along the procession route, and at strategic points in the Abbey. The commentary had dignity and beauty. Every step of the ceremony was explained, every picture was part of the drama, and the cumulative effect was wonderful. As far as I was concerned, this was the Coronation, and when, later in the evening, both CBS and NBC came along with their competitive souped-up versions, complete with exhausted commentators and rude and intrusive commercials, I soon switched them off, drank a Black Velvet to the Queen, and went to bed.