FOURTEEN AUGUST - or AUGUST FOURTEEN

[Obssessed_with_Orson]

has anyone heard the show. it was cbs presents corwin. or somethin' like that

it was about 15 minutes long. orson speaking about 8/14
with about 2 dozen bombs heard in the whole thing.

bye now!

[Le Chiffre]

Fourteen August was a condensed version of Norman Corwin's wartime piece, God and Uranium Were on Our Side, which Welles narrated with Olivia D'Havilland about 2 weeks after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had ended WWII. Listened to in this context, I find the show's reverent, quasi-biblical tone provokes a rather chilling ambivalence.

[Le Chiffre]

Actually, Norman Corwin, who Welles once said was possibly the best writer who ever worked in radio, can be considered an auxillery member of The Mercury Theatre, since he did write a couple of the Mercury Summer Theatre shows, including Jane Eyre and The Moat Farm Murder, which is probably the best of all the MST programs. I've made the change to my list of Mercury personell in the other thread.

Welles and Corwin were a good radio team. Some of the programs they collaborated on include:

Between Americans - A very good show, describing the American spirit in populist terms. Ironically, this show was delivered by Welles on Dec. 7th, the night of the Pearl Harbor bombing

The Plot to Overthrow Christmas - holiday show written, like The Night Before Christmas, entirely in verse, with Welles as Beelzebub and Ray Collins as Santa Claus.

New York - A Tapestry For Radio. A celebration of New York City's melting-pot qualities, in the days when - to paraphrase Welles - N.Y. was a genuine melting pot, not the TV-mixed cocktail it and other big cities are now. This show is on the new 6-CD set of old-time Welles radio, with excellent sound.

God and Uranium Were on Our Side

[Wellesnet]

70th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings:

From “On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio”
By John Dunning

On August 14th, with the dropping of an atomic bomb on Japan, (Norman) Corwin turned his (radio) slot into a quarter-hour statement called Fourteen August. Orson Welles gave the words a fiery reading (God and Uranium were on our side…the wrath of the atom fell like a commandment, and the very planet quivered with implications) and pronounced the occasion “the father of great anniversaries.” An expanded version, God and Uranium, was aired the following Sunday, with Olivia De Havilland joining Welles at the microphone.

2009 interview with Joseph McBride:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/06/mcb2-j17.html

WSWS: The most shameful aspect of his career is the connection with the Shah’s regime. Even if he needed money badly that shows a real demoralization.

JM: He even narrated a documentary about the Shah. You have to wonder why he did that. Also disgraceful was a 1945 radio program written by Norman Corwin, a left-wing radio writer, praising the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Welles is ranting and raving about how wonderful it is.

WSWS: That was the Communist Party line, super-patriotic and militaristic. We point that out in the review of Hollywood’s Blacklists.

JM: There are a few bad moments, but his record is better than most.

[Wich2]

>JM: Also disgraceful was a 1945 radio program written by Norman Corwin, a left-wing radio writer, praising the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Welles is ranting and raving about how wonderful it is.<

It was a little bit of hell - but it clearly prevented a much bigger chunk of hell.

Read of the Rape of Nanking (which killed numbers comparable to the bombs), the Bataan Death March, and the Mengele-style Japanese "tests," for a picture of the enemy the world was up against. Supplant this, with the conservative estimates of the several million casualties on both sides expected in a ground invasion of Japan. And top it all off, with the recent revelations about Japan's atomic program, which some even believe got as far as a small test, and which included concrete plans for the dirty-bombing of a California city.

>WSWS: That was the Communist Party line, super-patriotic and militaristic. We point that out in the review of Hollywood’s Blacklists.<

Ummm... I believe the greater part of the Right in America probably appreciated the defeat of the Rising Sun, too.

-Craig

[Wellesnet]

"God and Uranium Were On Our Side" (radio broadcast August 19th, 1945):
https://vimeo.com/136303587

"Fourteen August" can be heard at Archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/OrsonWelles ... Broadcasts

Digital Deli on Corwin:
http://www.digitaldeliftp.com/DigitalDe ... orwin.html

God and Uranium:
The Special program was aired over CBS nationally at both 7:00 p.m. and 10:30 p.m on President Truman's declared National Day of Prayer, 19 August 1945.

[Note: Following the quickly assembled Fourteen August program of August 14, 1945, CBS asked Corwin and Welles to assemble a full 30-minute presentation, which in addition to the original Fourteen August presentation included Olivia De Haviland and Orson Welles in another 15 minutes of programming.]

Corwin, aided by Orson Welles, rose to the occasion yet again, with even less preparation, as V.J. Day finally--and quite unexpectedly--arrived on 14 August 1945. L'Affaire Gumpert was the Columbia Presents Corwin program that had been scheduled for airing on August 14th. Never one to shirk a challenge, Norman Corwin, with less than eleven hours' notice, threw together the final epitaph on World War II, with a minimal sound track, a single sound effect and only Orson Welles' magnificent voice as his primary artistic tool. And yet, irrespective of the absurd limitations placed on this single, 15-minute program of the run, you see the effort of Radio's two giants, converging to produce a miraculous post-script to the most bloody, expensive, gut-wrenching five years our young Nation had ever experienced. And quite frankly who else could possibly have ever pulled it off but these two geniuses?

To this day, one needs to pinch oneself to be reminded of the extraordinary constraints imposed on both Welles and Corwin to pull off Fourteen August at all. And yet they did it. And they could only have done it over Radio. In the final analysis, they did what both their extraordinary backgrounds had prepared them to do--and at the time that their country needed their special individual talents the most. It's beyond prosaic. It was fated. It was beyond Kismet. It was their destiny from the moment each of them separately undertook their first independent Radio broadcasts, each in their own rendition of a mixed poetry/musicale format. The ironies and coincidences are beyond serendipity. They're cosmic.

As announced, L'Affaire Gumpert was indeed Corwin's last Columbia Presents Corwin. Anything else would have been post-climactic. What could possibly have topped Fourteen August? The entire nation was sharing a combination of mass delerium and a combined, cathartic sigh of immense relief. It was time to move on. The machinery of War was destined to be scrapped and fashioned back into the plowshares that many of those same machines of War had been manufactured from.

And so it was with the two giants of Radio. Each ultimately going their own way again. Each having shared a cosmic moment of catharsis with an entire Nation. What could possibly have topped the emotion of that singular moment of 14 August?