The Nazi Menace by Benjamin Carter Hett

Author:Benjamin Carter Hett
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

10

“Living at the Point of a Gun”

Radio listeners hear a weather report followed by an announcement: “We now take you to the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramón Raquello and His Orchestra.”

The Spanish-flavored dance music plays for a few moments. But soon the broadcast is interrupted for a bulletin from “Intercontinental Radio News.” An observatory reports strange gas explosions on the surface of Mars. With this, the listeners are returned to Ramón Raquello’s orchestra. Soon, however, the radio station is bringing its listeners an interview with “Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer,” from the “Princeton Observatory.” Pierson tells the interviewer—an intrepid reporter named Carl Phillips—that he can’t explain the explosions.

The bulletins keep coming. The “National History Museum” in New York reports a shock “of almost earthquake intensity” near Princeton. There are reports of a “huge, flaming object” hitting the ground near Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Carl Phillips makes his way there from Princeton with remarkable speed, and tries to “paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes.” What he sees is not a meteorite, but a large metal cylinder. He interviews a farmer who has seen the object crash in his fields. The situation grows steadily more alarming. A bizarre creature crawls out of the cylinder. As Phillips describes the scene, the creature uses a kind of flame thrower to kill the police and bystanders that surround it. Finally, there is a dull thud as Phillips’s microphone hits the ground. Then, only silence.

After that, the crisis spreads rapidly. New Jersey is placed under martial law and troops are mobilized, only to be slaughtered by the mysterious creature. The “Secretary of the Interior” speaks from Washington—not identified by name and sounding remarkably like President Roosevelt. He assures the nation that while the threat is grave, Americans will contain it “with a nation united, courageous and consecrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this earth.” But artillery and bombers can’t stop the aliens. The attackers use heat and poison gas. Soon they have reached New York City, as millions of people stream out to Long Island or Westchester, trying to escape. Reports come in of Martian landings across the country.

The panic across the United States—real panic, not part of the broadcast—is extraordinary. Perhaps six million people are listening as the Columbia Broadcasting System sends these reports into the ether. More than a million people do not notice or hear the introduction announcing that this is a production by the young Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. They don’t ponder all the terms and descriptions that are slightly off—the “Hotel Park Plaza” located “downtown,” the “Intercontinental News Service,” the “National History Museum.” They do not seem skeptical about the Martians’ ability to travel from Mars to Earth, land in New Jersey, destroy several army units, and lay waste to New York City inside forty-five minutes. People rush into the streets. If they have cars, they race out of town; if they have children, they frantically try to find them.

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