[marcosdumay]

Depending on the intensity, an EMP can fry tubes quite well. And when weaker, bipolar transistors (the kind most people were using by then) have no problem surviving them.

There's a middle ground where an EMP would be strong enough to fry a bipolar transistor, but weak enough to fry a tube. I don't know how significative that is for military strategy, but the automatic answer of "transistors can't handle EMP" isn't completely right.