$Unique_ID{USH00824}
$Pretitle{79}
$Title{The Signal Corps:  The Emergency
Front Matter}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Terrett, Dulany}
$Affiliation{US Army}
$Subject{corps
signal
history
war
army
communications
first
volume
radar
world}
$Volume{D114.7:SI/V.1}
$Date{1956}
$Log{}
Book:        The Signal Corps:  The Emergency
Author:      Terrett, Dulany
Affiliation: US Army
Volume:      D114.7:SI/V.1
Date:        1956

                 Overview of The Signal Corps:  The Emergency

As armed forces become more mobile, the importance of secure and effective
communications becomes critical.  This volume traces the course which the Army
Signal Corps followed between the first and second world wars.

Front Matter

Foreword

     The more mobile an armed force becomes, the more rugged the terrain it
encounters, or the more widely the force is deployed, the greater becomes the
difficulty of securing and maintaining rapid, completely linked
communications.

     In the U.S. Army the Signal Corps is the agency charged with developing,
procuring, and furnishing signal equipment to overcome the difficulties
mentioned above.  In an age of swift and startling progress in electronics,
this phase of its mission demands that it keep abreast of scientific advances
at home and abroad and maintain close ties with civilian laboratories and
industry in order to take advantage of their capabilities.

     This volume traces the course which the Signal Corps followed between the
first and second world wars, a period of planning and preparation.  Others to
follow will recount the testing of the Corps organization and equipment, and
the results achieved at home and overseas.  The author has dealt with the
subject on a chronological basis, instead of following the topical treatment
used in other technical service volumes.  This broad-front approach has
enabled him to weave into one pattern the many activities in which the Signal
Corps was simultaneously engaged.  The reader can here follow from birth the
history of Army radar and mobile radio, the first steps taken in the
conversion of the civilian communications industry to war production, the
expansion of training facilities, and the beginnings of the far-flung
communications network that eventually encircled the globe.  He will see the
uncertainties of planning and the difficulties of organization incident to
rapidly changing conditions, meager appropriations, and the clash of interest
within the military household.  These and many other matters showing human
beings and institutions under pressure are replete with significance to us who
must live in a turbulent world where revolution tends to have the upper hand
over evolution.

     ORLANDO WARD Maj. Gen., U.S.A. Chief of Military History Washington, D.C.
30 January 1953

The Author

     Dr. Dulany Terrett was born and reared in Montana and at present lives in
Washington, D. C.  He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago
and a Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University, where he served on the
faculty from 1936 to 1942.

     During World War II he was an Air Corps officer with the Flying Training
Command and the Air Transport Command.  In the latter capacity, he wrote the
history of the Air Transport Command in Brazil and Ascension Island.

     Upon his discharge in 1946, he became the Signal Corps chief historian,
first in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer and then in the Office of the
Chief of Military History.  In 1952 he resigned in order to become a
consultant.

Preface

     The prefacing of his book long after he has written it does not
ordinarily come a writer's way.  If the present volume be a case in point,
history is one form which permits it.  At least to the extent that it has
happened, history is unchangeable; and to the extent that it is unchangeable
it will stand and wait for the attention of those who sooner or later come to
it, or of those who, like the present author, return to it after having drawn
apart from its details.

     This view seems justified in retrospect as well, it appears to me.  The
history of the realizations, disappointments, mistakes, and successes of the
United States Army Signal Corps before and during the war which ended in 1945
was itself undertaken entirely after that period had passed into history, and
was planned and written with an eye to chronological and panoramic structure.
It was in an effort to capture perspective and proportion, those qualities of
necessary removal from the subject which every writer closely attached to his
subject will despair of along with me, that I decided to devote the first
volume of a history of the Signal Corps in World War II to a period beginning
a number of years earlier.  The massive gift which the Infantry makes to the
national interest is made mostly in the battle itself, wherefore infantry
history is combat history above all else.  Technical arms and services like
the Signal Corps, which must enter a war with technical gear ready to go,
exert a large share of their productive effort before it begins.  For this
reason, this volume surveys The Emergency and the years, half lassitude and
half desperation, just before the Emperor Hirohito's bombers came in over
Kahuku Point.

     Opening with the panorama of Signal Corps interests and distinguishing
each of the characteristic landmarks of the scene, it develops by moving
closer for repeated and prolonged views at most of these dominant features and
by returning to the whole view often enough to keep it in mind.  As the Signal
Corps is an agent of communications, the main theme is the snail-like,
lightning-like race toward radar, frequency modulation, and a multitude of
electronic devices.  Other parts of the narrative illustrate the lesson of the
extravagant and enervating results of interservice strife.  One can draw it
primarily from the long story of unequal rivalry between the Air Corps and the
Signal Corps.  Yet the alarms and excursions of this melodrama never drowned
out the quieter actions.  Of these, the quietest was the development of radar,
second only to nuclear fission as the greatest scientific advance of the war.
The Emergency makes modest but firm claims for the Signal Corps part in this
development, at the same time producing evidence against a common notion that
radar was the invention of a single scientist or of a single country; as was
true of the atomic bomb, its origins were so wide as to be nearly universal.
Next to radar and possibly of even greater significance to the average man was
the emergence of FM, the frequency modulation system of radio, which all but
revolutionized the use of tanks in the war, not to speak of its record
afterward.  The advance of crystal control, along with the ticklish triumph
over the presumed insufficiency of the crystal supply, makes an episode
interlinked with the FM story.  The influence of the communications industry
in the Signal Corps is an important element, showing the close relationship
between the two in the selection and manufacturing of equipment and in the
selection and training of officers and signalmen.  A wider but very much
weaker relationship described is that between ourselves and our allies,
especially the British.  One of the sections in this field recalls the
mutually fruitful mission of Sir Henry Tizard and other electronic scientists
and physicists to the United States in 1940. Finally, I trust that The
Emergency demonstrates a discrepancy which later years closed:  the gap
between the pygmy Army and the jumbo.  I hope, in sum, that the Signal Corps
history adds its part to the defining and emphasizing of the two broad
characteristics which have come to be so dominant in modern war that they will
increasingly make up the bulk of military histories: first, the long
preparations incident to a war or to any single day of it; and second, the
technological aspect which has so transformed conflict that either wars or the
men who fight them may consequently disappear.

     The writing of this book produced many pleasures, of which the most
frequent and most happily remembered were the acts of interest and assistance
very gratefully acknowledged here.  My colleagues in the writing of this
series, all of whom have shared with me the repeated profit of these acts,
have for their own part bulwarked me with them to a point I cannot begin to
acknowledge in full.  Suffice it to say that upon Miss Pauline M. Oakes, Mrs.
Dixie R. Harris, and Dr. George Raynor Thompson I urge my devoted thanks for
all their intelligent appraisals, unflagging perseverance, and liberal
contributions.  Miss Helen Kasenchak's expert typing deserves full
recognition, as does the research and writing, at an earlier stage, of Miss
Ruth E. McKee.  I should like to thank individually the hundreds of persons
who have found files for me between Washington and Alaska, smoothed my way to
interviews, notified me of opportunities I had overlooked, and in general
shown an abundance of cares and courtesies which one has no right to expect
but welcomes.  Since I must content myself with a mass acknowledgment, I want
it to be known that in my grateful mind the mass is made up of individuals.
Miss Ruth Stout, Mr. Joseph R. Friedman, and Mr. Arthur Henne have shepherded
the book editorially.  May its appearance in print be at least a token tribute
to them.  Dulany Terrett, Washington, D. C., May 1954