Radio: War Babies

One day last week as the Germans marched on Paris, Paul Archinard, NBC's correspondent, sat down at a typewriter in his newly decorated apartment (also NBC Paris office), began to peck out his next scheduled broadcast. Suddenly an air-raid siren screamed, and Archinard, together with his two girl helpers, headed out of the apartment at the double quick. They were huddled in a hallway when several Nazi bombs whammed down upon adjoining buildings, exploded with a crash that blasted doors and windows out of Archinard's apartment, ruined 10,000 francs worth of fresh paint and plaster. White-lipped but determined, Archinard waited for quiet, then returned to his machine. Brushing aside bits of broken glass, he proceeded to bat out an eyewitness account of the bombing that added another feather to radio newscasting's well-feathered war bonnet. The German advance has closed one after another outlet to U. S. war broadcasters. But while they had spots to talk from, they have done their jobs well.

Recognized as the most ingenious, best-organized radio newsgathering agency in Europe, the CBS bureau, supervised by smart Paul White in New York, now employs eight full-time correspondents, has four stringmen on tap for special assignments. From London, the bureau's European chief, Edward Murrow, onetime president of the National Student Federation of America, wields an efficient baton over this radio symphony. Among stars that he commands are Thomas Grandin, who patrolled Columbia's Paris beat, and William L. Shirer, whose talks from Berlin have established him as the ablest newscaster of them all. Roving assistants to Grandin in Paris were Eric Sevareid, once editor of the Paris Herald, Larry Leseur, a U. P. man'until he joined Columbia, Mary Marvin Breckinridge, who graduated into radio newscasting via Vassar and photography. Edwin Har-trich, a onetime Herald Tribune man who covered for Columbia the invasions of

Holland and Belgium, helps Shirer in Berlin.

As opposite numbers for these CBS flashes, NBC has as its permanent staff a talented trio headed by tall, cadaverous Max Jordan, veteran London representative Fred Bate, and French-born, ex-poilu Paul Archinard. Number three U. S. network, MBS, is headed by John Steele in London, by Waverley Root in France, depends on space-rate orators like veteran Newshen Sigrid Schultz in Berlin and hard-working Arthur Mann, now covering the R. A. F. Both NBC and CBS have their European correspondents on the air regularly for two 15-minute periods daily.

Mutual broadcasts from its foreign headquarters five times a week, stresses more heavily its nightly talks by war experts in the U. S.

Most recent CBS scoop was the collapse of Belgium, tipped by one of their European representatives to CBS in New York four hours before it hit the press wires.

He cabled slyly: "There will be no more Brussels sprouts,"a phrase the censor freely passed. Such finagling is not often attempted. Radio newscasters usually talk straight, depend on inflection to convey shades of meaning.