UPDATED ENCORE PRESENTATION of original posted on May 31st, 2018
As noted, this is an Encore of a Musings posted on this page two years . . . yet with a couple of significant additions I think you’ll find of interest … so, read on!
If you had your sound turned up … the report highlighted above followed by this report from our Savoy Express newscaster Ed Baxter … is what was heard on XM Radio Channel 4 at 12:41 AM Eastern Daylight Time on June 6th, 2004 … exactly 60 years to the minute after that National Broadcasting Company (NBC) bulletin was broadcast to the nation.
This would be just the beginning of our on-going coverage of the massive landing of troops and equipment on the beaches of Normandy, France, to begin re-claiming western Europe from Nazi Germany. While the military’s official name for this undertaking of assembling and landing 160,000 Allied troops along a 50-mile stretch of Normandy coast line was Operation Overlord, it quickly took on the name of being the D-Day invasion … as the dictionary defines “D-Day” as “the day on which an important operation is to begin or a change to take effect.”
With the airing of that news bulletin, the Savoy Express would go into “special coverage” mode and devote the next 41 hours to providing updates on the invasion’s progress, as reported by the reporters and commentators of NBC Radio News…. finally returning to normal programming operations at 5:45 PM Eastern War Time on June 7th.
What you are seeing here is the actual documentation of what was broadcast on NBC’s flagship station in New York, WEAF, and being sent “down the line” to affiliate stations across the nation … as was typed by a clerk typist in the studio at the time of broadcast on June 6, 1944.
Note the 2:46 PM listing in the log above … all of these reports from Europe were coming via shortwave radio transmissions — even today, shortwave radio is not a very precise science and is greatly impacted by weather conditions, with frequencies needing to be switched regularly based on time of day and seasons of the year. For the technicians at NBC in New York, it was like tuning in a desired distant station on an old AM radio.
The Original Broadcast Recreation
Now, here’s an opportunity to hear an hour of our Savoy Express re-creation which includes the time period shown in the NBC log above. At this point, we’re about eight hours after the first troops landed and on the battlefield, nightfall is approaching. As you’ll soon hear, much of the hour is filled with the actual NBC audio which the nation heard 76 years ago, featuring several of the best newscasters and commentators of the era, perhaps in history! As discussed in my last Musings, radio broadcasting as an industry was still quite young, only in its 23rd year at the time of the Invasion. (As an aside related to this YouTube production, I must acknowledge the work of my devoted and skilled webmaster Trishah … without her, this would not exist.)
The concept for this “radio special” began to germinate in my mind a full two years earlier after reading that an organization based in Spokane, Washington, named Radio Archives had just released a set of CD’s containing digitally-restored audio of NBC’s reference transcriptions of what they broadcast through the first 40 hours following the airing of the first bulletin on that fateful morning.
The Radio Archives link above will take you to the page of their website which features this CD collection, where it’s still available for purchase. However, my main purpose in referencing is that on that page you can read an excellent listing of what all NBC actual broadcast hour-by-hour during the 40+ hours included on the discs, representing the first two days of this vast military operation known as the D-Day Invasion!
While the CD’s contained all of the NBC audio, there were questions about timing in some sections … I wanted to be sure that we were accurate time-wise down to the minute. So, a search began, where I quickly discovered that the repository for the NBC archives from the era was the Library of Congress in Washington, no more than 10 blocks from our XM Radio headquarters. It was there I would find the original paper logs shown above, which I was permitted to photocopy.
I now had all the components needed. First, begin by choosing the NBC news reports to include in our Savoy Express coverage and then create scripting which would include regular “timeline” announcements so those just tuning in would understand what we were airing. Here’s an example, as voiced by either our Savoy Express newscaster Ed Baxter or “staff announcer” George Taylor Morris (read about George on Page 194 of my memoir):
Between reports we aired our regular musical recordings, making sure that all selections broadcast during this period had been recorded and released prior to June 1944.
And, this is one more piece in the story of my early days at XM Satellite Radio, detailing one of the things we — Bob Moke and yours truly — did to make the Savoy Express one of the greatest audio documentations of the 1940’s and Big Band era to ever be created.
If you have any comments or questions, please write … I’d love to hear from you and promise to respond.
