Big Band Times Glenn Miller On German Radio 1944

That's how the British often referred to the three million American GIs stationed in England before the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. But the British fell in love with Miller's band following its arrival a few weeks after D-Day. The band was renamed "the Band of the Allied Expeditionary Forces."  The AEF band immediately began a hectic schedule of concerts, dances, and radio broadcasts.

"We didn’t come here to set any fashions in music," Miller wrote from England in 1944 to George Simon (who 30 years later would write Miller’s biography). "We merely came to bring a much-needed touch of home to some lads who have been here a couple of years." On Aug. 14, 1944, Miller was promoted to major.

On Oct. 30, 1944, Miller and the entire AEF Band went to Studio 1 of HMV's (His Master's Voice) Abbey Road Studios in London (the same studios the Beatles would use some 20 years later) to record the first of six one-half hour radio programs to be beamed toward German troops. All announcements and most lyrics were transliterated into German.  The six-show series began airing on Nov. 8th. The recording equipment in these studios was state of the art for the 1940s.