HRNM School Programs Educator
“Command Performance–formerly shortwaved to American armed forces overseas–is presented to the domestic audience for the first time tonight in Christmas Eve broadcasts heard all over Pittsburgh stations,” reported Vincent Johnson on the radio page of the December 24, 1942, edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.[1]
Command Performance, a variety show, was the flagship program of the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS), a unique military unit established by the War Department on May 26, 1942. Based in Hollywood, AFRS existed, as Matthew Seelinger of the Army Historical Foundation notes, “to educate, entertain, and inform” servicemen and women and build their morale via radio during the Second World War.[2] According to radio, television, and film scholar Samuel Brylawski, the service was “to furnish overseas GIs with a sense of home, not only to dispel the feelings of loneliness or displacement, but to reinforce the values of the United States for which they were fighting.”[3]
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| Cast and band on stage for a Command Performance broadcast (Internet Archive) |
To do its part to overcome this distance from home, Command Performance featured, as each show’s opening trumpeted, “the greatest entertainers in America as requested by you, the fighting men of the United States Armed Forces throughout the world.” Sailors, Marines, soldiers, and airmen mailed requests for Hollywood’s biggest stars to perform songs and sketches and those stars obliged these requests as commands. First launched by the War Department in March 1942, the Armed Forces Radio Service started producing the program in December of that same year. One of AFRS’s first Command Performances was the special global Christmas Eve broadcast previewed in the Post-Gazette.[4]
On December 24, 1942, at 11 p.m. Eastern War Time[5], this unique Command Performance went on the air coast-to-coast and around the world. The show was heard live and simultaneously on CBS, NBC, the Mutual Broadcasting System, and the Blue Network. Ken Carpenter, a voice many Americans recognized as the announcer on the Kraft Music Hall, a popular weekly music and variety program starring Bing Crosby, gave a rousing opening to the special broadcast.
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| A couple listens to the radio in Royal Oak, Michigan, in December 1939. (Farm Security Admin/Office of War Information) |
Carpenter then handed off to Elmer Davis, director of the Office of War Information, the U.S. government’s wartime propaganda agency, for an introduction that summarized the ultimate message of the broadcast. It was the message of most AFRS programs and an ideal theme for a Christmas broadcast: home. Davis explained that American forces around the world had been listening to Command Performance for nearly a year but that “tonight, it serves as a link between them and us at home. We’re all hearing it, the whole American people, whether in the cities or on the farms or on ships at sea or in army camps or at the front.” Although 1942 was the second Christmas at war for the United States, for most of the millions of Americans fighting the war, it was the first holiday spent far from home. Davis acknowledged these separations and offered this solution, “Because it is Christmas Eve, and a Christmas Eve when a good many American families can’t be together as they used to be, tonight, the War Department has invited us to come together–all of us–as listeners to this program.” Davis imagined how American military men and women scattered across the globe were “thinking about home tonight . . . Home which they are not likely to see again until the war is won.”
After Davis set the show’s theme, master of ceremonies Bob Hope presented a monologue heavy with jokes about homefront rationing and social changes. One wonders if Hope’s material purposely focused on homefront topics since ‘mom and dad’ were listening. His monologues on other Command Performances and AFRS programs tended heavily toward jokes about military life. Regardless, Hope built upon home as the theme of the show.
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| Jane Russell, Bob Hope, and--in background--Major Meredith Willson conducting the AFRS band during a Command Performance broadcast (c. 1944) (AFRTS/Wikipedia) |
Most of the program was popular entertainment familiar to military and civilian listeners alike. The Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby, Ethel Waters, Ginny Simms, and Dinah Shore performed. Except for a performance of “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” by Kay Kyser and his band, there was little overt ‘war’ music. With a sketch and song, famed comedians Jack Benny and Fred Allen ended (temporarily) their long-running mock feud.
Interestingly, Christmas fare on the program was limited. The one holiday song performed was a wild version of “Jingle Bells” by novelty band Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Christmas-themed comedy sketches came from Red Skelton and Harriet Hilliard plus Charles Laughton with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.
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| Seabees of the 22nd Special Naval Construction Battalion listen to a radio broadcast during World War II (NHHC) |
The theme of home returned more overtly at the end of the broadcast in another monologue from Bob Hope, this one quite serious and rather moving despite its sentimentalism. With strains of “Auld Lang Syne” softly playing under his voice, Hope delivered what amounted to a peroration for the program that is worth quoting in full:
Well, men, this is Bob Hope, speaking from the U.S.A. You know, this is a land that not long ago had boundaries. An ocean on one side and an ocean on the other. Douglas firs and deep snow and good fishing to the north. Blue water and lilacs and hot weather and cotton fields to the south. You lived and worked inside those boundaries and thought it would always be that way. You worked at the shoe store in Peoria. Yet, tonight, you’re over there in England and North Africa. You fly hell out of your bomber and go through God-made storms of snow and rain and man-made storms of steel and fire and then you write home to this radio program and say, “Please do a song for me.” You were the clerk in the local grocery store, the young doctor starting out, the history teacher in Grand Rapids, the mechanic at the corner garage. Yet, tonight, you’re blacked out on a freighter or standing guard over your brother along a path in the jungle. You were the guy who’d never been outside Nevada. Yet, tonight, you’re at home in Fairbanks, New Delhi, and Chungking. But, well, that’s the way it goes these days. For the boundaries of land and water have vanished from all nations and in their place a single boundary of freedom is moving across the earth, as God meant it to be. But because of guys like you, when we think of America, we still think of Douglas firs. Because you guys are like those Douglas firs. And you’re like the good fishing in the lakes and Coney Island and the cornfields and smokestacks. And you’re like the little towns with the red water towers, like Mount Rainier, Yellowstone, and Highway 66. Because all those things are American. They were part of you when you left and they will still be part of you when you come back. The stuff that makes Americans and, brother, they don’t make better stuff anywhere in the world.
Throughout Bob Hope’s closing as well as the whole of this national Christmas Command Performance was an important message the U.S. government delivered to its citizens and its military as they listened at the same time to the same radio program. The message was that far away servicemen and women ought to feel at home in a world united in its fight for freedom while also feeling united with loved ones who were part of the same fight back home in America. Connected by radio, everyone listening, whether soldier or civilian, was fighting together for a home in a free America and a free world that was worth fighting for, whether fighting in Fairbanks, New Delhi, and Chungking or those little towns with the red water towers.
The message was emphasized one final time as announcer Ken Carpenter returned to ask “the entire cast, the studio audience, and the nation” to end this morale-boosting Christmas Eve broadcast by joining together for an anthem at home and a rarity on Command Performance, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Author's note: To listen to this recording of Command Performance in its entirety, visit here.
Notes:
[1] Vincent Johnson, “Command Performance is Given,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 24, 1942.
[2] Matthew Seelinger, “A Touch of Home: The Armed Forces Radio Service, 1942-1945,” On Point 19, no. 2 (2013): 39-40, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26363324 [accessed December 22, 2020].
[3] Samuel Brylawski, “Armed Forces Radio Service: The Invisible Highway Abroad,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 37, no. 3/4 (1980): 441-57, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29781871 [accessed December 22, 2020].
[4] Seelinger; Brylawski.
[5] On February 9, 1942, Congress instituted nationwide, year-round daylight saving time known as war time.
