Delivering News of Peace in the Pacific
Bob Hansen • Sioux City
Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army
Don Doll, S.J. photo • Story by Tim Gallagher
A job paying 30 cents an hour was worth its weight in gold to Robert Hansen, a U.S. Army anti-aircraft radar operator in the Philippines during World War II.
"The anti-aircraft guns they found weren’t needed any longer because the Japanese air (forces) had been depleted," says Bob. "So all of us with radar were transferred."
Bob had worked as an announcer at WJAG Radio in Norfolk, Nebraska, while studying at Wayne State College. With that experience he earned a transfer to WVTI, an Armed Forces Radio station in Cebu City, Philippines.
Bob toiled as an announcer and then was promoted to program director, the position he held until Japan surrendered in August 1945.
"We got our news at the station via short-wave radio from San Francisco. I got the news that the war was over and I broke into our programming to tell listeners."
Ten minutes later a U.S. general stormed into the studio, demanding to know where the program director got his information. "I gave the general my headphones and told him to listen for himself," says Bob. "He listened and then slammed the headphones down and left."
Bob’s route to Cebu City was a curious one. The Emerson, Nebraska, native played football and acted and sang in school plays and musicals at Emerson High School. After graduating in 1940, he headed to Wayne State with plans to study music education. Eighteen months later he and buddy Jay Baumann enlisted. Baumann also worked as an announcer at the radio station in Norfolk.
"We went to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, together, then he went east and I went south. Baumann ended up going to Europe and was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. He was buried in Belgium." Bob was assigned to Headquarters Battery 555th Anti Aircraft at Basic Training. But he was quarantined when a fellow soldier contracted measles. Bob stayed behind when the 555th departed for Europe. "They were hit pretty hard in Europe," he says. Bob went from Texas to New Jersey for radio maintenance school and then to Florida for radar maintenance instruction. Following a stint at Fort Bliss in Texas, he was shipped to Fort Ord, California, and departed from San Francisco in February 1945, bound for New Guinea and then to the Philippines. After arriving at Cebu City, he learned his radar expertise wasn’t needed.
When they discovered Bob’s on-air experience, officers sent him to the radio station where he met another Sioux Cityan: Leo Kucinski, the long-time Sioux City Symphony Orchestra conductor. "Leo was with the Special Services and I ran into him one day when he came to the studio to practice his violin," says Bob. "He told me if I ever got back to Sioux City, he’d have me as a soloist."
Leo kept his word. Following his discharge in April 1946, Bob returned to Wayne State and earned his degree. He landed a job as a reporter at KTRI Radio in Sioux City.
For the next 50 years, Bob sang for summer Grandview Park concerts. He also sang at hundreds of events elsewhere in Sioux City and even sang "The National Anthem" before a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field in 1985.
Bob moved to print in 1958 and ended his career at The Sioux City Journal in 1988. He and wife Connie raised three children and now have three grandchildren. Bob keeps busy singing, acting, delivering Meals on Wheels, reading for the blind, and producing a newsletter for his retirement community. But his work never gets the reaction his announcement did in Cebu City, the day Japan surrendered and people celebrated by shooting off fireworks. Bob sailed home a month after that day, capping a 13-month tour overseas.
"I guess you could call it the fortunes of war. I never saw live combat, but I was ready for combat."
On the journey home, he left one item at sea. "They told us we could toss our M-1 rifles overboard. I wasn’t interested in it, so I did."