1938-10-30 War of the Worlds

.1938-10-30: The War of the Worlds radio play, Orson Welles → terror - HiPo > .

The Mercury Theatre on the Air was a series of weekly one-hour radio plays created by Welles and broadcast on the CBS Radio network. ‘The War of the Worlds’ was the seventeenth episode of the radio show, and was adapted by American playwright Howard E. Koch who is probably best known for later co-writing the film Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

For the radio play of ‘The War of the Worlds’ Koch took the general story arc from H. G. Wells’ original novel but substituted 19th Century Europe for 20th Century America by changing the names of locations and personalities to ones that were more familiar and contemporary. He was only asked to write the script a week before the broadcast and earned $50, but was permitted to keep the rights to the finished script.

Before the live broadcast had even finished on the night of 30 October, CBS began to receive telephone calls from concerned listeners. Announcements were made before, during and after the performance that the events were fictitious, but it was clear that these warnings went unheeded by many.

Although the listening figures were relatively small, news of the alien invasion spread through a country nervous about impending war. Within hours of the broadcast the billboards in New York’s Times Square flashed with reports of mass panic caused by the play, although most reports were based on anecdotal accounts from the Associated Press. Subsequent research suggests that the public response was nowhere near the scale claimed at the time.

38-3-12 Austrian Crisis

.Austrian Crisis - 1938, 12 March - BrMo > .

On this day in 1938, Austria was seized by Germany. Here is a British Movietone report on the events that led to this crisis.

●τ 1939

1939-5-22 Pact of Steel ..

1939-8-23 to 41-6-22 - Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ..

1939-8-23 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact = Hitler-Stalin Pact | Kotkin | Hoover > .

World in 1946

.World in 1946 - Cold War Documentary > .

skip intro > .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1946 .

1915-4-22 Chlorine gas, 2nd Battle of Ypres

.22nd April 1915: Chlorine gas marks the start of the Second Battle of Ypres > .

On 22 April 1915 poison gas was first used effectively in the First World War at the Second Battle of Ypres.

A form of tear gas had previously been used by the Germans fighting the Russians at the Battle of Bolimów in Poland at the end of January, but it had proved wholly unsuccessful. The freezing temperatures meant that a lot of the gas failed to vaporise, and that which was successfully released was blown back towards the German trenches due to a change in the direction of the wind.

At Ypres, near the small Belgian hamlet of Gravenstafel, the situation was dramatically different. 5,700 gas canisters weighing over 40kg each were released by hand over a 4 mile (6.5km) stretch of the front line. Every canister contained highly poisonous chlorine gas. Despite the improved organising, the rudimentary system of release still depended on the wind to blow the gas towards the enemy. Some Germans were killed or injured in the process of releasing the gas but the attack was terribly effective as the gas successfully vaporised and sank into the enemy trenches.

Over five thousand French Algerian, Moroccan and territorial troops died within ten minutes of the gas being released. A further five thousand were temporarily blinded, with nearly half of them becoming prisoners of war.

The Germans didn’t expect the gas to be as effective as it was, and so didn’t fully exploit their initial advantage. However, by the end of the battle on 25 May, the Germans had certainly scored a tactical victory. They had compressed the size of the Ypres salient and had demonstrated the effectiveness of chemical warfare. The Allies soon developed their own poison gas, making chemical warfare part of the offensive strategy for the rest of the war.