What happens
A Chinese scholar sits in a dugout in Chongqing, the wartime capital of China, calculating the cost to the Japanese of bombing a city that keeps rebuilding. The story follows a visitor crossing the river and climbing into the city, which has swelled from a quiet river town into a crowded capital after the government moved there in 1937. Shopkeepers, officials, merchants and families are shown adapting their daily lives to repeated air raids, as residents dig shelters into the rock and watch for the signal balls that warn of approaching bombers. The narration describes the bombings and the work of rebuilding that follows them. The program was broadcast on The Pacific Story, a National Broadcasting Company series, on June 11, 1944.
Chongqing (Chung-king), China, during the Japanese bombing campaign of the Second Sino-Japanese War, from 1937 through the early 1940s
Characters: Chinese scholar, Chinese shopkeeper, boatman, telephone engineer Mr. Dugraff, scorekeeper, doctor, narrator Gene Whitman
Listen for: The scholar's running arithmetic of the bombing costs, and the warning system of colored balls raised over the city
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.