What happens
In the months after Pearl Harbor, correspondent Clark Lee sits with Japanese-American Sergeant Jimmy Ajimimatsui in a Shanghai tea room, where Jimmy delivers a warning from a Japanese colonel: Lee should leave China before war breaks out. Lee then moves through Shanghai and on to Manila, where he meets his friend Melville Jacoby, Jacoby's wife Anna Lee, and Argentine diplomat Roberto Lanes. Over drinks they discuss American defenses in the Philippines with confidence that proves misplaced. The episode is an adaptation from Clark Lee's book They Call It Pacific, presented on the NBC series Words at War, original air date July 10, 1943, with Les Damon as Lee.
Shanghai, China, late 1941, and then Manila in the Philippines in the days after the attack on Pearl Harbor
Characters: Clark Lee, Sergeant Jimmy Ajimimatsui, Melville Jacoby, Anna Lee Jacoby, Roberto Lanes, Elario Francisco
Listen for: The contrast between the confident talk in Manila about the American plan to defend the islands and the news that arrives as the war begins
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.