KGEI: A forgotten WWII radio story

Among other accomplishments, the station broadcast Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s “I have returned” speech that fulfilled his promise to return with victorious American troops to the Philippines, occupied by Japanese forces since 1942.

Today, the building of about 7,000 square feet is owned by Silicon Valley Clean Water, the wastewater plant operated jointly by Redwood City, San Carlos and Belmont. The plant is adjacent to the KGEI building, which itself is right next to a much larger transmitter building used by KNBR. Ground was broken in late 1940 for the KGEI structure made of reinforced 3-foot thick concrete walls designed to withstand bombing.

“We are now using it for our construction management activities,” said Dan Child, the manager of Silicon Valley Clean Water, which bought the building from the Fully Alive Church. The church remodeled the structure to seat a congregation of up to 70 people. One report said a wooden plank was used to camouflage the original bas-relief KGEI, the call letters for General Electric International.

In 1942, The New York Times wrote a story headlined “KGEI Tells Them.” Nothing, the newspaper reported, stirs the hearts of soldiers and sailors as much as hearing the introduction to the station’s programs: “This is the United States of America.”

The listening soldiers included Army Capt. Steve Mellnik who was captured in the fall of Corregidor, an island fortress in Manila Bay. He recalled in his book, “Philippine Diary,” that he depended on KGEI for war news, learning with “dismay as Japanese forces spread across the Pacific.” Mellnik escaped and survived to become a general.

“News of friendly troop movement puzzled us,” Mellnik recalled in the book published in 1969. “A commentator boasted that hundreds of ships were en route to the Far East. We cheered. But almost casually the commentator added that the armada’s destination was Australia.” The cheers turned to groans.

Australia became MacArthur’s rallying point. He eventually made three speeches there in which he vowed to return. The general’s famous “I have returned” speech came in October of 1944 when he fulfilled his promise. The words were first broadcast from a Navy ship off the Philippines and later spread by KGEI throughout Asia.

After the war, General Electric sold the station to the Far East Broadcasting Company which then sold it to the church in 2001.

Former Far East Broadcasting Company president Jim Bowman said he often visited Manila and would come across Filipinos “who listened to KGEI to keep their hopes alive during the Japanese occupation.”

The building still stands, not far from a section of the Bay Trail used by hikers and bike riders who pass by an almost unknown part of the past. The transmitter, however, is no more. Far East Broadcasting gave the transmitter to a radio ministry in Liberia where it was destroyed by rebel forces in the late 1990s.

The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.