# A 1948 Universal newsreel title card on General Clay and the Berlin airlift

This is the opening title card of a Universal-International News story released on 21 October 1948 (Volume 21, Release 163). It reads "Gen. Clay / Reds Underestimate Our Airlift To Berlin," with Ed Herlihy credited as the voice. Universal was a private studio; the film is now held by the National Archives.

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      Universal-International News title card: 'Gen. Clay: Reds Underestimate Our Airlift to Berlin'

      A 1948 Universal newsreel title card on General Clay and the Berlin airlift
      Universal-International News title card, 21 October 1948: "Gen. Clay: Reds Underestimate Our Airlift To Berlin." A private newsreel now at NARA.

## Techniques named on the archive record

Name-calling
      DateOctober 21, 1948Made byUniversal Newsreel (Universal-International News), later donated to the U.S. National ArchivesMediumFilm stillsCountryUnited StatesRegimeTruman AdministrationSourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceInternet Archive item '1948-10-21_Clay_speaks_on_Berlin_Airlift' (copy of the U.S. National Archives Universal Newsreel Collection) , retrieved October 2, 2026SourceU.S. Government-held newsreel (copyright deeded to the U.S., 1974) Universal Newsreel Collection, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, via the Internet Archive (public-domain licence URL).
      Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

      Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  This is the opening title card of a Universal-International News story released on 21 October 1948 (Volume 21, Release 163). It reads "Gen. Clay / Reds Underestimate Our Airlift To Berlin," with Ed Herlihy credited as the voice. Universal was a private studio; the film is now held by the National Archives.

## What the card prints

The frame is a newsreel headline, three lines over the studio's name. The top and bottom edges are cut, so the studio header and the narrator credit are only partly visible.

GEN. CLAY

Reds Underestimate

Our Airlift To Berlin

UNIVERSAL-INTERNATIONAL NEWS

VOICE: ED HERLIHY

FRAME transcription; the studio line and the voice credit are cropped at the frame edges. Universal Newsreel, Volume 21, Release 163, 21 October 1948. Full record at propagandaarchive.org. The record gives no NARA identifier.

According to the archive, the story that follows shows General Lucius D. Clay, the U.S. military governor, stepping off a plane at night.

## Who made it

This is a commercial product, not a government one. Universal Newsreel was the newsreel arm of a private film studio, made for cinema audiences. The rights line explains why the government holds it now: the copyright in the Universal Newsreel collection was deeded to the United States in 1974, and the film sits in the National Archives, from which the Internet Archive copy was made. The archive classes the source as openly identified.

## How to read it

Two words carry the slant. "Reds" collapses a government, an army, and a population into one label; the archive tags it as name-calling. "Our" makes the airlift the audience's own. Neither word is false in the sense of a wrong fact. Together they tell the theater crowd which side it is on before Clay says anything.

The headline also does a quieter thing. It hands a judgment, that the other side has underestimated the airlift, to a general, and prints it as news. A private newsreel was free to take a side, and this one did. It is still worth noticing, because a free press is valuable to the degree that it keeps some distance from the officials it covers.

For a government film series of the war years, see the Why We Fight case study. For the federal side of wartime film review, see the OWI domestic branch.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, "Universal-International News title card: 'Gen. Clay: Reds Underestimate Our Airlift to Berlin'," 21 October 1948. Universal Newsreel (Universal-International News).

- Internet Archive, 1948-10-21_Clay_speaks_on_Berlin_Airlift, a copy of the National Archives Universal Newsreel Collection, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: U.S. government-held newsreel, copyright deeded to the United States in 1974.

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/universal-news-gen-clay-berlin-airlift-1948/