While most Americans hovered near their radios in anticipation of news from Europe or the Pacific during World War II, a few enterprising souls figured out a way to convert those radio waves into messages of comfort.

Using a relatively new technology called shortwave radio, they caught Axis broadcasts from Berlin and Tokyo about American prisoners of war. Then they mailed letters to the POWs' families, noting that their loved one was captured but OK. Sometimes the shortwave radio listeners were faster in getting word to families than the War Department.

Lisa Spahr of Churchill, speaking Tuesday to about 50 people at a seniors' program at Beinhauer Family Services in Peters, said she discovered the little known history of shortwave radio and the war by accident.

"I never knew that shortwave radio listeners helped families of our POWs," said Spahr.

This story started when she came upon a curious set of letters in her grandfather's attic trunk in 2006. There were about 70 of them, written by complete strangers from all over the country, telling the Spahr family that their son was captured but safe in Germany.

"These men and women wrote letters in their own way, in their own voice just to share and hopefully bring comfort to a woman waiting to hear about her son. ... But I felt so moved that they took their time that I could not have put these away and gone on with my life. I wanted to see if I could find anyone who wrote one of these letters," Spahr said.

She did, and wrote a book about it, "World War II Radio Heroes, Letters of Compassion," published in 2008.

Robert Spahr was captured in North Africa in 1943. He was held in Stalag 3B until the end of the war. He never spoke to his family about what happened there. He died in 1984.

Lisa Spahr met one of the shortwave monitors who sent her great-grandmother a letter. In 1943, the monitor was a 16-year-old boy who scraped nickels and dimes together and bought his first shortwave radio. When he met Spahr in 2006, he gave her the very radio he used to listen to Radio Berlin for news about American POWs.

Flavius Jankauskas today lives in Hatboro.

"When December 7, 1941, happened, all 'hamming' was banned for the duration. However, I continued to monitor and listen to shortwave stations, such as the BBC from London, Berlin Radio and programs from other capital cities, listening to reports of the war's progress from my home in Philadelphia," Jankauskas wrote to Spahr.

Jankauskas was a member of the Short-Wave Amateur Monitors club (SWAM), organized by Ruby Yant of Lima, Ohio.

Yant organized amateur radio operators and listeners to monitor the enemy broadcasts on specific nights of the week, to ensure that no POW's message would be missed, and that all POW families would receive word about their loved ones.

The program was a success, and the list of SWAM club members rose for the duration of the war.

"Things that had an effect on me when I finally got home in 1946 was that I was free again, the war was over," said Morton Parker of Whitehall, who listened to Spahr's program. "All the sacrifices that everyone made back home, it was a total effort and sometimes those people aren't always recognized."

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