During World War II American radio made three key contributions to the war effort: news broadcasts supporting U.S. involvement in the war, propaganda beamed at Nazi-occupied Europe, and entertainment and news broadcasts to American troops around the world via the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS). Since 1930, the airwaves had been dominated by the entertainment-oriented programming of the three major American networks, CBS, ABC, and NBC. With the AFRS a new type of network emerged, one historian Erik Barnouw describes as "global and without precedent."

In the pre-television era radio was considered such an integral part of American life that a concentrated effort was made to continue providing it to American troops in both the European and the Pacific theatres. Thus the Armed Forces Radio Service was born and commenced broadcasting in the first years of America's intervention in World War II...