AFN records were intended only to be played at AFN radio stations. Nobody
could play them anywhere else anyway because nobody else had a 16-inch
turntable. Meanwhile the Department of War issued another kind of record
between 1943 and 1949 called the Vdisc (Victory Disk), for use only in US
military barracks, service clubs, ships at sea, etc. Shown above is
V Disc number 317, November 1944:
Prisoner of Love by Teddy
Wilson and his Orchestra with vocalist Lena Horne. A couple novelty songs
are on the other side.
Like this one, all Vdisc labels say "This record is the property of the War
Department of the United States and use for radio or commercial purposes is
prohibited." These are 78rpm records, but unlike the commercial 10-inch
ones, these are 12 inches in diameter and could hold up to six minutes of
music on each side; 125,000 special spring-wound 12-inch Vdisk players were
built to play them and shipped out to the troops. Over 900 V-Disc record
titles were issued, and over 8 million discs were produced.
You can read about Vdiscs in
this Wikipedia page,
in
this
page at SaveTheVinyl.org, and in
this long article for as
long as the link lasts (scroll down past the ads on top).
