Songs That Won The War: The Soundtrack of a Generation Returns for Veterans Day 11 November 2026 by Don Lichterman with no comment Songs That Won WarSSM Edit VETERANS DAY SUNSET SPECIAL MARKETS PRESENTS SONGS THAT WON THE WAR ★ TEN VOLUMES, 134 RECORDINGS FROM THE BIG BAND ERA ★ GLENN MILLER, FRANK SINATRA, THE ANDREWS SISTERS, BING CROSBY, VERA LYNN, JO STAFFORD, ELLA FITZGERALD AND MORE ★ HONORING EVERY AMERICAN WHO HAS SERVED ★ MUSIC DESK ★★★ SSM FEATURE | VETERANS DAY SALUTE Songs That Won The War: The Soundtrack of a Generation Returns for Veterans Day Sunset Special Markets honors America’s veterans with a sweeping ten volume collection of the Big Band anthems, canteen ballads and home front hits that carried a nation through World War II, from Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra to The Andrews Sisters, Vera Lynn and Bing Crosby. EXPLORENEWJERSEY MUSIC | VETERANS DAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2026 PRESENTED BY SUNSET SPECIAL MARKETS 10 VOLUMES 134 RECORDINGS 1940s BIG BAND ERA 1 GRATEFUL NATION Every November 11, the country pauses to thank the men and women who have worn its uniform, and few things carry that gratitude across the generations quite like music. On this Veterans Day, Sunset Special Markets is inviting listeners to step back into the dance halls, radio parlors, servicemen’s canteens and factory floors of the 1940s with Songs That Won The War, a ten volume collection that gathers 134 recordings from the era when swing bands, crooners and close harmony trios became as essential to the war effort as ration books and bond drives. It is a monumental listening experience, and it arrives on the one day of the year when its songs mean the most. The series, part of the Sunset Classics & Jazz catalog and released under the Sunset Special Markets banner, was first assembled in 1995 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end and was reintroduced to the digital age in 2014. Each volume is built around a theme drawn directly from wartime life, whether the glamour of the celebrity canteens, the steady courage of the home front, the irresistible pull of the dance floor or the aching hope of a sweetheart waiting by the window. Taken together, the ten discs form something closer to a living history than a simple compilation, a chronicle of how Americans and their allies sang their way through the most consequential conflict of the twentieth century. Why the Music of World War II Still Matters It is difficult to overstate the role popular music played between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day. Radio was the nation’s shared living room, and the hit parade was its common language. A soldier in the Pacific, a riveter in a California shipyard and a mother in a Hoboken walk-up could all hear the same song on the same night and feel, for three minutes, that the distance between them had shrunk. Bandleaders became morale officers without rank, singers became the voices of entire armies, and songwriters on Tin Pan Alley found themselves writing the emotional dispatches of a nation at war. The government understood this power and put it to work. The Treasury Department leaned on the biggest names in show business to sell war bonds, the armed forces pressed special recordings known as V-Discs and shipped them to troops around the world, and entertainers crossed oceans to perform in hangars, mess halls and makeshift stages near the front lines. Songs That Won The War captures all of it, the patriotic rallying cries, the sentimental ballads that kept families connected and the joyous swing numbers that reminded everyone what they were fighting to come home to.
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