Catching Up With American Forces Radio & Television in Korea

I really like Thomas Whetson’s great website AFRTS Archive, all about the history of the American Forces Radio & Television Service all over the world. However, life gets busy, one gets distracted, and somehow a long time passed without my checking in on his website. Apparently a lot of Korea-related stuff has been posted in the interim.

Here is a post about the first American radio broadcasts in Korea, before AFRTS started. Back then it was called the Far East Network, and started with WVTP in Seoul in 1945 (broadcasting out of the old Bando Hotel), before adding Jeonju and Busan at least by 1947; Jeonju and Busan would close in 1948, and Seoul in 1950. But I loved this scan from Whetson’s site, of the FEN Seoul inaugural broadcast:

Here are a couple more posts I liked:
– A Camp Casey broadcast in 1977 by Thom, just months after the infamous North Korean axe murder of two US Army officers in the JSA. US forces in the area were moving south to Uijeongbu, but they wanted the local radio station to broadcast as if nothing was out of the ordinary, so Whetson did a show for an empty camp.
– A practical joke at the AFKN that caused a nation-wide freakout that North Korea was doing something very bad.