Hi, Gang!

Last week in London the U.S. Army Air Forces commissioned Major Benjamin Lyon, 41, of Baltimore, Hollywood and British Broadcasting Corp. The Army also qualified him for active service, presumably as an earth-bound intelligence officer (despite his 1,100 pre-war flying hours, his transport pilot's ticket).

To Ben Lyon, hell-flying hero of the epic Hell's Angels and many another derring-do flicker, the event was a victory over brass-hat morale builders who had wanted him to be a tidily uniformed entertainer. But to the soldiers, sailors and airmen who, since November 1939, have listened in weekly to an Empire broadcast titled Hi, Gang!, the U.S.A.A.F.'s gain was a loss felt from Iceland to New Guinea. For unnumbered U.S. servicemen have also been eager tuners-in to the show which Ben Lyon, his wife Bebe Daniels, and Vic Oliver have put on the air from London.

Lyon, Daniels and Oliver--Vienna-born, American-naturalized husband of Winston Churchill's daughter Sarah--were the first to create a regular radio show for services, the first to carry a stage-&-radio show to the camps and navy bases of Britain, the innovators of the now standard practice of inviting servicemen to step up from the audience and broadcast "Hello, Mums!" In the opinion of many an American in Britain, they were also the first to liven up BBC.

Bebe Daniels, De Mille-made star of nearly 50 pictures, is now ill in her Bayswater house, where she and Lyon put up song writers, gag writers, secretaries, itinerant fellow-players, men on leave. Soon she and Oliver may commence a new weekly radio show which will enlist other American showfolk justly beloved of Britons : Frances Day, top-money musicomedy star who graduated from the Texas Guinan night club chorus; Ziegfeld Follies alumna Dorothy Dickson, Actress Claire (Gay Divorce) Luce, Greta Nissen, gargantuan Xylophonist Teddy Brown, and freckle-spattered dramatic Comedienne Constance Cummings.

British newspapers report from time to time that some Britons in the U.S. theater and on the U.S. radio are doing more for their pockets than for the war. Britons in Britain prefer the way of Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels.

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