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Some of the most spectacularly successful programming in CBC history was from its war correspondents. The nation sat by the radio night after night through World War II, hanging onto every word from the Voice of Doom, as Lorne Greene was called, and from Canadian war reporters on the battlefront who became household names. Correspondents Matthew Halton, Marcel Ouimet and others risked their lives to bring the Italian campaign into Canadian living rooms, seeking out the sounds of war – the booming barrages, whistling shells, and chattering machine guns mixed in with the talk of soldiers as they went into battle. CBC crews were often literally on the front line. Matthew Halton and Marcel Ouimet went ashore with Canadian troops one hour before D-day began. They made the first network broadcasts out of a liberated Paris, and nine months later, reported the liberation of Berlin, conjuring images over the airwaves in Canadian homes an ocean away. The war broadcasts gave broadcast news a credibility it had not previously had, and set both the stage and the standard for today’s CBC news service.
Listen to 2 complete radio correspondant recordings:
Holdings:
Clip thanks to Turner Thompson Entertainment, CBC Radio, the Department of National Defense and the Audio-Visual Archives, National Archives of Canada
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