August 9 CBS Our Secret Weapon debuts

In 1942, CBS radio debuted "Our Secret Weapon". It was a program that featured Rex Stout, who countered lies being broadcast by the Axis powers through shortwave radio.

On August 9, 1942, Rex Stout conducted the first of 62 wartime broadcasts of Our Secret Weapon—the truth—on CBS. The idea for the series had been that of Sue Taylor White, wife of Paul White, the first director of CBS News. Research was done under White's direction. "Hundreds of Axis propaganda broadcasts, beamed not merely to the Allied countries but to neutrals, were sifted weekly," Stout's biographer John McAleer wrote. "Rex himself, for an average of twenty hours a week, pored over the typewritten yellow sheets of accumulated data ... Then, using a dialogue format—Axis commentators making their assertions, and Rex Stout, the lie detective, offering his refutations—he dictated to his secretary the script of the fifteen-minute broadcast." By November 1942 Berlin Radio was reporting that "Rex Stout himself has cut his own production in detective stories from four to one a year and is devoting the entire balance of his time to writing official war propaganda." Newsweek described Stout as "stripping Axis short-wave propaganda down to the barest nonsensicals ... There's no doubt of its success." Sunday-night broadcasts of Our Secret Weapon continued through October 8, 1943. (Wikipedia)

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