Промышленный стандарт США 140

What Shortwave Radio Operators Heard The Night WWII Started In the last week of August 1939, an American with a shortwave receiver in his living room could sit down after dinner and listen to four governments lie to him in his own language. Berlin was broadcasting to North America in English on a fixed schedule. So was London. So was Rome, and Moscow, and a station in Germany aimed at Britain that had appeared without announcement and had a presenter nobody could identify. None of it required a licence, a transmitter, or any skill beyond patience and a length of wire out the window. Several million Americans were doing exactly this, and almost none of them had ever been closer to Europe than the dial in front of them. On the night of the first of September, the ordinary schedule broke. Stations that had been on at the same hour for years were replaced by announcements read at a different speed. Others simply stopped transmitting mid-evening. New signals appeared in the gaps, in languages that had never been broadcast from those frequencies before, and within days the bands filled with material aimed squarely at anyone who happened to be listening — which was the point, because the audience being fought over was not military. It was the man in Ohio with a receiver and an opinion about whether America should get involved. Almost nobody had noticed what this equipment had quietly become. It was the only way information crossed the Atlantic that a government could not intercept at the border, and it was now the primary instrument of a propaganda war that would run for six years. Two nights later, a British Prime Minister read a statement into a microphone in Downing Street and a large part of the American public heard it live, by shortwave, at the moment it happened. That had never been possible before in human history, and it is worth understanding exactly what it sounded like.