I’ve been engaged in my occasional search around the byways of the internet and am amazed at the prices being asked for some CDs.  The one that really bemuses me is the Collector’s Choice issue of 4 CDs from 1997 entitled 'V Disc –A Musical Contribution By America’s Best'. 

This is currently listed on Amazon US with one ‘partner’ asking 239 dollars, and I have seen asking prices higher than that.  Whether anyone actually pays such figures,  who knows?  I bought my copy shortly after issue  and I suspect that it was less than 50 dollars or the then UK equivalent. 

But in part it is an issue sailing under deceptive colours.  I wonder if the vendors and prospective purchasers realise this.  The extremely meagre and uninformative notes state ‘Approval has been granted to E.P.’Digi’ DiGiannantonio,  the Navy lieutenant who was in charge of the Navy’s V Disc program, to publically (sic) release the V Disc recordings in celebration of the 50th anniversary of World War II.  For more than four decades, Digi has housed the original V Discs in his record library awaiting the appropriate time to share these historic recordings with the public.  The sound heard on the V Disc is the unaltered recording of the 78RPM masters’.

The problem is that this is incorrect.  The recordings are NOT all from the original V Discs and therefore can hardly have come from ‘Digi’s’ private hoard.  He obviously lacked some of them and has made up for the shortfall by making use of other recordings of the same titles and in one case even identifying the wrong title! (‘A Yank In A Tank’ which was on a V Disc is replaced by a radio performance of ‘A Cranky Old Yank In A Clanky Old Tank’, a different song, an easy mistake but a dead giveaway). 

Wayne Martin has done much in depth research on the issue and his findings are on the ‘Bing’ Magazine website (just click on ‘V’-Discs on the brown strip at the head of these pages).

Apart from using the wrong recordings for some tracks, the collection is not complete either, as might reasonably be assumed from the notes. The notes in any event cover the background to the issues but fail to cover any facts of interest to collectors, such as the issue numbers of the original V Disc, the dates of recording and issue, the accompanists and so on, all of which are pretty basic and should have been within the competence of the man in charge of  the Navy’s V Disc program.

There is in fact a startling and considerable contrast between the excellence of the presentation of the recent issues from Collector’s Choice and the V Disc issue of 13 years ago. I wonder if a reissue covering all of the tracks, taken from the correct sources and accompanied by correct, comprehensive and informative notes would now be timely.

There were a number of other issues under a similar banner featuring other artists at the time. I do not have any of them but assume that E.P.’Digi’ DiGiannantonio may also have been responsible.  I wonder if they also suffer from such a misleading approach.  A charitable interpretation for the missing titles is that as ‘Digi’ was in charge of the NAVY program and as the Navy’s issues were not as numerous as that of the Army, he might not have copies of the discs released solely by the Army, but even if this is the case, more explanation might surely have been expected. No satisfactory excuse can surely be presented for producing the wrong recordings.
   
Something like 12 items are not included (more or less if you count song titles or tracks as some were  medleys and presented as multiples on sides of the original discs) and ten use the incorrect originals.