BW - EP148—002: February 1944 With Bob Hope—Early February World War II News

Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

As February 1944 got underway the Soviet Leningrad Front was fighting a heavy ground war against the German eighteenth army in Estonia. The battle would last the entire month with the Soviet’s eventually winning. French Resistance unified under the French Forces of the Interior. The Germans won the Battle of Cisterna in Italy against the Allied army, but at that point, four months before the Normandy invasion, the Allies kept pushing into Italy. Meanwhile, the Battle of the Admin Box began in the Burma campaign with Japanese forces attempting to counter-attack an Allied offensive, trying to draw Allied reserves from the Central Front in Assam, where the Japanese were preparing their own major offense. On the morning of Saturday February 5th, 1944 at 7AM eastern war time, the NBC World News Roundup signed on from WEAF in New York. On the date of this broadcast, Allied powers were slowly inching into western Europe with the body count mounting, while Soviet forces captured cities in Ukraine. Overnight on February 6th into the 7th Soviet bombers attacked Helsinki, the heaviest bombing of the Finnish capital since the war began. Meanwhile, a growing border issue between Poland and Russia caused President Roosevelt to step in, Asking Stalin not to allow it to undermine future international co-operation. Roosevelt proposed that the Polish Prime Minister accept the desired territorial changes and then be allowed to alter the makeup of his government without any evidence of foreign pressure. Wartime needs stretched agricultural production. The U.S. not only had to feed its own civilian and military population, but many of the Allies relied on America’s bread basket. In addition, German U-boats sank hundreds of food-laden ships bound for Britain. Canned fruits and vegetables were rationed starting March 1st, 1943. Less canned goods meant less civilian tin use and less strain on the heavily taxed rail and road systems. Even as early as 1941, civilians were encouraged to grow their own produce to supplement their food. These were referred to as Victory Gardens. The Department of Agriculture produced pamphlets to guide urban and suburban gardeners. Magazines and newspapers published helpful articles, and patriotic posters urged participation. In the Pacific northwest state of Oregon, wartime farm labor shortages led to the creation of the U.S. Crop Corps in 1943. It umbrellaed labor services like the Women's Land Army and the Victory Farm Volunteers. The latter was a group that got parental consent to employ youths aged eleven to seventeen. Migrant workers from Mexico also helped, made possible thanks to the joint U.S./Mexican "Bracero Program." By 1944 farmers could request help from POW laborers held at Oregon Army camps. More than thirty-five-hundred prisoners, mostly Germans, worked in Oregon fields.