Radio MetaChat: Radio as conceptual art - World War II Radio Broadcast, Part One - 1939 to 1941. Starting at 10am Pacific.→[More:]

Background & Concept – There’s a PC game called Silent Hunter 3 in which you sail a u-boat around the Atlantic in WW2. One player made a mod to add radio broadcasts to the sub’s radio which were short 6-8 minute mp3’s of news, music and static. I think they’d done 1939, 40, and 41, and the immersive effect in the game was really interesting.
So why not, I thought, do a full two hours of it? I have about 2.8 gig of radio excerpts from WW2, and I’ve grabbed a bunch of songs from that time (and some modern ones that sound like they're from that era) and found and edited a heap of static (a thanks to the people at freesound for the files). Finally, some 10 hours later and I’ve managed to cut 1939 - 1941 down to 2 hours.
The concept I had was that the time period is set during WW2 and you’re listening to the shortwave and this is what you might’ve heard in between bursts of tuning static – especially if you were able to tune in across the years.

There are so many news files that I had to put a boundary on it to keep the show within a two hour time limit, so Part One starts shortly after 1939 beginning with the invasion of Poland on September 1, and Part Two will end just after the death of Hitler, as there are a few reports that I felt could not be left out. (Yes, Hitler dies. Sorry for the spoiler.) I’ve found that about two hours is about enough, as more and it starts to get to be a bit much, and less just isn’t enough time. Admittedly, a couple of speeches could've been edited, in the case of Winston Churchill's "We Shall Never Surrender" as an example, but who's heard the full speech? Not many, and it works better with the final "...we shall fight on the beaches..." in context, not to mention the words Churchill chose to use, and their timbre, make for a moving and powerful speech.

Anyway, this will be part one of two. Enjoy.

Note: this is a rebroadcast of the show I did about a year ago. Due to a harddrive crash, I lost all these files, playlists, edited and saved songs, everything... and had to find and recreate them all again. Fortunately, I posted the setlist to the original thread, so at least I have that to go off of. I've left out a bunch of static as it was getting annoying and I can't find a few songs, but it's pretty much the same. Sorry for the delay in casting, for those who were looking forward to it. I'm going to see about burning the shows to CD or DVD if anyone wants to have them, along with all the original radio files. Let me know if you're interested.

Part One is dedicated to my grandfather Thomas Williams, who worked on a lightship in the English Channel in WW2. He survived to tell me stories of it.