THIS IS LONDON

At no time have I made a deliberate decision to collect writings about the Second World War, but it does seem that over the years, and quite randomly, an unusual number of titles have somehow gravitated towards my shelves.
HE Bates (particularly his short stories written under the name of Flying Officer X) I have mentioned before. And probably Ernest Hemingway, too, who honed his journalistic (and novel writing) skills during the earlier Spanish Civil War. So, too, Martha Gellhorn, a very fine writer and, of course, still involved with Hemingway in the late 1930s. And John Steinbeck. They all described and interpreted those years of blackouts, bombings and blitzes in their own individualistic way.
Gellhorn's writing I have always liked, while Hemingway could become a mite overbearing. Steinbeck, on the other hand, was mostly thoughtful and observant. Well, now another such book has managed to propel itself from the shelves of a local charity shop and land safely among my other volumes.
This one is a little bit different because it deals with the wireless and a broadcaster, rather than the written word, though I have to say it scans and reads almost as well because the man himself wrote the text to be spoken out aloud. In Search of Light, it is called, but it is the secondary title, The Broadcasts of Ed Murrow, 1938-61, that gives the game away.
Ed Murrow - he of the wry grin, furrowed brow and laconic voice - made more than 5,000 broadcasts, beginning with an eye-witness report on Hitler's seizure of Austria and ending, nearly a quarter of a century later, with observations on the inaugural address of John F Kennedy. Between times, he did enough to earn himself the title of unofficial American ambassador to Britain during its finest hour.
One story about him says a lot. In December, 1941, when he was on leave from London, Ed was invited to the White House to talk to the president, Franklin D Roosevelt, about the morale of the British people after two years' of war. When the chat was concluded the off-guard president, relaxed and perhaps charmed by his guest, chattily informed Murrow of the true level of damage inflicted by the Japanese at Pearl Harbour.
It was a story Murrow considered privileged and there was, in consequence, no Murrow broadcast about Pearl Harbour.
However, it is likely he is best remembered in this country for his broadcast 'chats' from London during the worst days of the War. It was on September 22, 1938, that for the very first time he began his broadcast by saying, 'This is London . . . ' And on D-Day, June 6, 1944, he told his listeners, 'This is London. Early this morning we heard the bombers going out. It was the sound of a giant factory in the sky. It seemed to shake the old grey stone buildings in this bruised and battered city . . . '
Murrow lived through, and reported, so much more: the founding of the United Nations, the emergence of Africa, the Communist take-over in China, the Atomic Age, McCarthyism, and so on. And it caused him to comment afterwards, 'I have lived through it as a reporter and can scarcely credit it.'
His own place in history is secure, of course, and 'This is London' has become an emotive phrase as redolent of a particular time as the Warsaw Concerto, Vera Lynn, and the sound of air raid sirens.
(In Search of Light, by Ed Murrow. Macmillan, 1968)