K/Ve AFN

French devotees of le jazz hot were as distressed as hepcats who have lost their piano player. Since Liberation, they had turned to a squad of American G.I.s for music and entertainment. But Yanks in France had dwindled to fewer than 30,000 ; now the American Forces Network --the best in U.S. radio -- was packing its tubes and preparing to pull the plug. To their French fans, it was a crisis of the first order.

AFN was formed (stations in Paris and Le Havre) to entertain occupation forces, not Frenchmen. But there was nothing to keep Parisians and others from tuning into the recorded programs from America --Bob Hope, Fibber McGee, Fred Allen, etc., into Beaucoup de Mtisique, an hour-long afternoon jive session, or Midnight in Paris, a two-hour nightly dance program. Unlike dull, politicky French radio, which suspended afternoon broadcasts four days a week to cut costs, AFN had become as staple a fare as red wine. Gaston Deferre, French Under Secretary of Information, asked formally that the U.S. Army keep the network going.

The U.S. Information Service, with an eye and an ear to bettering Franco-American relations, added its plea. At week's end, Brigadier General Paul W. Thompson, chief of the Army's Information and Education Division, granted a reprieve: AFN's staff of 28, which prepares 88 shows a week, would stand by for another fortnight. A way might be found, the General hinted, to keep the popular AFN network going. The French radio audience could still twist the dial to AFN, sit back and have a good time.

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