A Message From France

In May 2024 I got a message on LinkedIn from a man in France. He was polite and a little apologetic about asking a stranger for help. His late grandmother, Monique Thevenin, had worked at AFN Verdun, and he wanted to know if I knew anyone who could help him find out more.

According to him, she started on October 16, 1959, as a French civilian secretary and stayed until 1967. At some point she moved from behind the desk to behind the microphone and became a woman announcer on the air. He had spent years looking for articles, photographs, military notes or local records. What he hoped, quietly, was to someday see her in a photo or hear her voice.

Where, exactly?

AFN is the American Forces Network, the radio service for U.S. troops stationed overseas. AFN Verdun is the part I couldn't find much about. Verdun sits in the Meuse department of northeastern France and is best known for the 1916 battle. The station wasn't in the town itself. It was in the Maginot barracks in Thierville-sur-Meuse (sur is French for "on," so literally "Thierville-on-the-Meuse"), just west of Verdun.

A caserne is a barracks. The word is usually traced back to an old Provençal term for a group of four soldiers, so in a way every barracks is just a quartet with a bigger budget. This one was named for André Maginot, the Minister of War behind the Maginot Line, who had served as an enlisted man at Verdun in World War I. Not long after World War II it became the headquarters of ADSEC, the Advance Section of the U.S. Army's Communications Zone. In 1967, after France withdrew from NATO's integrated military command, it went back to French control.

Verdun also has a UNESCO connection. Since 2023, sites around the battlefield, including Fort Douaumont and the Douaumont Ossuary, have been part of the World Heritage listing "Funerary and memory sites of the First World War (Western Front)." That is a lot of weight for one small corner of France to carry, and it is where a radio station was quietly broadcasting to American soldiers a generation later.

Calling a historian

I was the station manager of AFN Wiesbaden in Germany, which is how I know Dr. Provan. He is a historian whose side hobby is AFN history, especially AFN Europe, and he is well known and respected in the AFN and history community in Germany and across Europe. I told the man in France I would ask him, and that I would start digging into the area and the units stationed there at the time.

That is how this project started: one request, one grandmother, and a radio station that left almost nothing behind. Next up: where do you even look for a station nobody photographed?