"[3] One reviewer wrote in a newspaper that the secretary of war had compared The Army Hour broadcasts to "full-scale military operations ... as far as communications are concerned," and the writer agreed.
In 1957, CBS executive Lou Cowan (who helped to develop The Army Hour while working with the Office of War Information) said that the program was "presented at an annual cost of a half-million dollars to the network [NBC] with no financial return.
Within its first year on the air, it had added "the only official 'communique' regularly announced by an officer of the General Staff Corps," as "Col. R. Ernest Dupuy, Chief of the News Division of the Bureau of Public Relations, War Department, now reports each week from Washington.
They pop up at morning mess with the parachute infantry; they ride the armored force's tanks; they sweat out an artillery problem with a jackass battery; not long ago one had to bail out of an airplane over a Mississippi swamp -- but he made his broadcast.
[21]William Burke Miller of NBC wrote in a trade publication, "The outstanding feature of the hour-long Sunday program is its elaborate use of remote broadcasts.
"[11] In the program's first nine months, international pickups had come from locations that include Chungking, Panama, New Delhi, Cairo, London, Leopoldville, Moscow, Melbourne, Algiers,[11] Ireland, Iceland, and the Caribbean.
"[22] An NBC executive wrote that each domestic remote broadcast "requires an announcer, a production director, one or two engineers, at least one microphone, a 'remote' outfit, a field phone direct to Radio City, Army passes for the proper people, plus all the advance arrangements so that the right soldiers and equipment will be at the right place.
A 1942 newspaper article reported that a Nazi radio station in Germany featuring "a pianist [who] played as loudly as he could" tried to jam a shortwave signal from Dutch Guiana.