The World War 2 Radio Podcast · Brick Pickle Media LLC

1945 Year in Review

·1 hr 2 min·4 clips

Dave Driscoll blurts, 'The war is over. We are out.'

1. The World War II Radio Podcast presents Mutual Network's 1945 Year in Review, a late-December broadcast built from news, reenactments, and archival recordings. 2. The episode is anchored by the host of the World War II Radio Podcast and the Mutual voices of William Lang and Dave Driscoll, who narrate the year and explain why Mutual mattered. 3. The central question is what 1945 won, and what Americans would do with that victory after Germany and Japan surrendered. 4. The year opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt beginning his fourth term and warning that the United States cannot live alone at peace. 5. The program links the Pacific war to the Marines' field song 'Get Your Gear On,' which began as a sergeant's composition on an island. 6. A Pacific letter to Tokyo Rose and the advance through the Philippines show how the war moved toward Japanese defeat. 7. Roosevelt's meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta is used to frame the postwar idea of a 'universal organization' of peace-loving nations. 8. Roosevelt's death on April 12, Truman's oath, and the Hyde Park burial are presented as the year's most public political transition. 9. The San Francisco conference is dramatized through a New York neighborhood story about kids asking a policeman for a clubhouse to stop fights. 10. The European war ends with Germany's unconditional surrender, Hitler's death, and the capture of German field marshals. 11. One memorable sequence plays the only existing recording of the Empire State Building crash after a B-25 hit the tower's 78th and 79th floors. 12. Eisenhower's return and Churchill's election defeat show how quickly wartime leadership changed in 1945. 13. The atomic bomb section cites Truman's Potsdam announcement and says the weapon had 'two thousand times' the power of earlier bombs. 14. Lisa Meitner is introduced as a scientist forced out of Germany because she was Jewish, and the broadcast ties her story to atomic energy. 15. Japan's surrender is covered with an eyewitness account from the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay and the phrase 'The war is over. We are out.' 16. The episode ends with tension over the postwar world, including Soviet-American disputes, China, Greece, the Dardanelles, and fears of isolationism. 17. The style mixes solemn narration, clipped news bulletins, theatrical dialogue, and period music cues from Mutual's archive. 18. The energy shifts from elegiac mourning for Roosevelt to celebratory surrender coverage and then back to uneasy questions about peace. 19. Listeners interested in World War II radio, Truman, and 1945 diplomacy. 20. Listeners seeking a light, purely musical, or non-historical episode.

As heard by us

A year-end broadcast that captures surrender, victory, and the public mood at the close of 1945.

Mutual's 1945 Year in Review looks back at a wartime year with the steady authority of archive radio. It moves through surrender, VE Day, and the public celebrations that followed, mixing official language with street-level reaction. That mix gives the piece its best texture.

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Why you'd press play

Hear Mutual's 1945 Year in Review close out the war year with surrender news, jubilation, and vintage radio flair.

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