[78-L] from PBS newsletter...Tokyo Rose

[Michael Biel]

joe at salerno.com wrote:
>> HISTORY DETECTIVES Monday, July 20, 2009 9 - 10:00 pm
>> Investigations include a a recording that may have played a
>> part in the World War II treason trial of Tokyo Rose

>> if you are not in the US, sorry

No, consider yourself very, very, very lucky that you are not subjected
to this (and a lot of other) crap.

>> Anybody seen this? Or is it new perhaps? I am totally unfamiliar
>> with the story of any recording of TR and her trail. If you know
>> something,  pls enlighten me....   joe salerno

First of all, there never was a "Tokyo Rose", and I hope the jerks at
History Detectives will tell that.  It is too bad the jerks at PBS
include this fairy tale in their program description.  The woman's radio
name was Orphan Ann, and none of the other women at the station ever
used the name Tokyo Rose.  

From: David Lennick <dlennick at sympatico.ca>
> I remember reading that there were 6 airchecks and someone broke
> one of the discs as it was about to be played at her trial.
> Radiola put out a Tokyo Rose LP in the 70s..it had some Lord Haw Haw
> and other treasonous types as well(plus Abe Burrows' Tokyo Rose song).dl

One day in the late 70s I walked into Les Waffen's outer office at the
National Archives and there was a multi-shelf cart with a hundred or so
tapes on it, all dubs of the WW II radio monitoring of enemy broadcasts
including many of Radio Tokyo's "Zero Hour".  Les had noticed that there
were only a very few recordings presented at Iva Toquari's trial--which
were the only ones available on playable formats--but there were many
more recordings they could have used, but that most of those would have
proved her to be innocent of treason.  He had them all transferred so
they could now be played.  Iva was only one of several women at Radio
Tokyo and perhaps the most pro-American in the station, but Walter
Winchell had repeatedly embarrassed the government prosecutors and they
had to reinstate their charges.  The trial was fixed.  When you hear all
of her recordings and those of the others at the station it would have
become obvious that she was not only playing the records that U.S.
soldiers and sailors would want to hear, any "subversive" news she was
including was so exaggerated as to be purposefully laughable.  I would
say that this is one of the more shameful abuses of our government, but
it now is joined by so much else from the past eight years that nothing
that we find that was done "in our name" is surprising any more.

Mike Biel   mbiel at mbiel.com