US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0083/00831.txt

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$Unique_ID{USH00831}
$Pretitle{79}
$Title{The Signal Corps:  The Emergency
Chapter III-B The Scope of the Signal Corps}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Terrett, Dulany}
$Affiliation{US Army}
$Subject{corps
signal
air
radio
development
aircraft
army
equipment
communications
service}
$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

Chapter III-B The Scope of the Signal Corps

Communications Contradictions

     The concealed nature of major areas of Signal Corps work, notably in
research and development, prevented them from being fully weighed and
estimated, and rendered the whole scope somewhat indistinct.  A diffused
impression also arose from the addition of apparently unrelated assignments
which blurred the outline of the main mission.  There was indeed a lack of
cohesiveness in a mixture which tumbled photographs and pigeons, secret
airplanes and weather balloons in with communications, and advocates of neat
spheres of administration could object that a Chief Signal Officer's
responsibilities were too diverse.  The administrators themselves however,
found that the most burdensome anomaly of all still derived from this paradox:
that while the past war posed the problems the next held the answers.  The
fact that their fellow chiefs of other arms and services labored under the
same uncertainty made it no easier to solidify.  World War I lived on, World
War II was yet inscrutable.

     Thus at the same time that the Signal Corps was supposed to be
modernizing itself to serve the new mechanized Army, it was also supposed to
maintain an Army Pigeon Service.  To think simultaneously in terms of
vehicular radio and a formula for mash required more flexibility than the
average administrator was willing to attempt.  Yet both were a part of a Chief
Signal Officer's domain; and who was to say either that vehicular radio would
be possible or that birds would be outmoded in the communications of a war to
come?  Homing pigeons belonged to an earlier tradition as much as the Army
mule and, in a small way, were as persistently laughed at, yet made a very
good agent of communication, as reliable as many and more discreet than most.
The Army mule was not to be wholly displaced by mechanization; nor was the
pigeon.

     The basic contradiction was to be observed in other areas.  In radio
intelligence, for instance, a table-of-organization unit was at last
authorized in 1937, but was unprovided with modern equipment and therefore
limited to much that was obsolete.  Again, although an Aircraft Warning System
represented a firm look into a risky future, and radar, which would give it
substance, was already at hand, so long as aircraft warning was conceived in
terms of fixed continental positions it was also characterized, so far as the
Signal Corps was concerned, by conventional fixed wire.  This persisting
paradox deserves closer illustration.

     After the Armistice in 1918, 35 of 110 Signal Corps pigeon lofts remained
in operation.  General Squier authorized the expenditure of five thousand
dollars to replenish and improve the stock, and the Pigeon Breeding and
Training Center at Fort Monmouth bought, through the chief of the British
pigeon service, 150 pairs of the best European strains and bred them with 200
good specimens retained from the war.  Five thousand dollars was a
considerable sum to spend all at once upon any form of communication, and if
pigeons were to go out of date the expenditure would be hard to justify.  If
they were not to be any more out of date than the bayonet or the steel helmet,
a communications chief would be rash not to keep them in force.  In any case,
pigeon communication remained a part of the Signal Corps charge, and in the
next two decades the quality of the birds improved steadily.  Such money to
spend on them, though, was not available again.  The number of lofts dwindled
to sixteen in 1928 and to eight in 1938.  The entire Army Pigeon Service
consisted of a dozen enlisted men, who were stationed at Forts Monmouth,
Benning, and Sam Houston, and in the Canal Zone, Hawaii, and the Philippines.
Fanciers and racing enthusiasts made a very large civilian public, but for
military communication "pigeoneering" lapsed into obscurity. The airplane as
well as the radio made pigeons look ill suited to the era.

     When early Kelly Field pilots had taken them into the cockpit on training
flights from San Antonio to Austin, the birds could deliver messages calling
for relief, the relief could arrive and the airplanes be repaired and on their
way by the time that word could get through by telephone or telegraph.  In the
later years, when cockpits had closed against the winds of high speeds, when
concrete had replaced grass airfields and beacons and directional radio guided
a pilot, the pigeon seemed to have no service to perform for him.  Nor for
many others.

     A dozen years after the war, the pigeons at Fort Sam Houston, Texas,
having rendered their wartime quarters unhabitable, the building was razed,
and in this case the birds were moved to empty barracks which were no newer,
but were cleaner.  This transfer was an exception.  Ordinarily, as the lofts
fell into disrepair they were not replaced, until necessity developed a mobile
loft - a Chevrolet station wagon somewhat remodeled, screened, and
accommodating fifty pigeons in baskets which the 11th Signal Company at
Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, tried out and approved in joint Army-Navy
maneuvers in February 1932.  At that time the cost to the Army of a Chevrolet
station wagon was $569.92, and the materials to convert it at the Signal
Section of the New York General Depot amounted to $130 more.  After several
months of planning and some transferring of funds, the Office of the Chief
cleared the way for the expenditure and procured two more vehicular lofts, one
for Fort Sam and the other for Quarry Heights in the Canal Zone.  With this
development, the Army Pigeon Service reached a peacetime limit, except for an
unpublicized experiment at Monmouth in breeding birds to fly at night.  The
status of pigeon communication could not advance much further.

     With radio the opposite held true.  Little used in the 1917-18 war, radio
might be the principal means for communication in another.  Informed Signal
Corps opinion did not really think so, hut the change of doctrine which
brought about the mobile army created the demand to find out.  Certainly
communications would have to keep up with the troops, no matter how or how
fast they moved.  The initial test came in Texas, in the fall of 1937, when
the entire Military Establishment focused its regard upon experimental
maneuvers there of the new infantry division.  Called triangular - because it
assembled a division out of three regiments, without brigades, rather than out
of four, paired off in brigades, this organization of a combat division had
been in the mill for many years.  General Pershing had recommended it.  The
talk of mobility and the need to streamline the fighting machine had at last
brought it forward.  Staff officers were hoping to reduce to 13,500 a combat
organization which in 1918 had numbered more than 28,000.  The signal
complement would be halved from 40 to 20 officers and from 1,000 to 500 men. A
great challenge would lie in assembling replacements months in advance of any
emergency call for them, because the reduction was what looked then like an
absolute minimum."

     With some anxiety, in view of the importance of the tests, the Signal
Corps began to ready its only full-strength battalion.  Typical of the
battalion's circumstances was the fact that not a model of any new radio
development, especially in the short-range, high-frequency, lightweight
versions, was available.  The best that could be done was to convert SCR-
194's into SCR-195's and to assemble some SCR-209's from components in stock,
a process which yielded seven sets.  In a convoy of fifty-five vehicles, the
51st Signal Battalion left Fort Monmouth on 21 July 1937, and reached San
Antonio on 2 August.  Maj. Stephen H. Sherrill commanded the 51st, and Maj.
Harry E. Storms, Maj. Garland C. Black, Capt. Elton F. Hammond, Capt. Gilbert
Hayden, and Capt. Robert W. Raynsford were among other Signal Corps officers
on hand.

     The tests were scheduled in three stages.  The first emphasis, through
August and September, fell upon the separate units, specifically the signal
platoons; hut most of the two months passed in close order drill, parades,
inspections, and athletic contests.  Training was scarcely more specific in
the second stage, which continued for two weeks and was devoted to combat
teams, the men being urged to find "points of cooperation" with each other.
Only in the third period, which occupied a month's time, did the new
triangular division emerge for trial.  Accordingly, the Signal Corps got few
answers to the question of the proportionate importance of tactical wire and
tactical wireless.

     The Texas tests would have been significant, however, if they had done
nothing else than to hint the possibility that the conduct of communications
in another war might bog down in dormancy and complaisance.  Signal Corps
feelings had been roughened by an Associated Press statement to the effect
that motorization of the Army had made the existing military communications
equipment obsolete."  The official release from which the story had been
written had already stated much the same thing.  Many of the lessons which
Signal Corps officers said they had learned in Texas were so trivial as hardly
to he lessons at all.  Some officers saw nevertheless that wire, the queen of
World War I combat communications, was going to have to take a consort for
World War II.  Both in front-line and in mobile communications, where wire
would be left behind and where its security systems were slow and cumbrous,
there was a new field for radio.  Even beyond combat communications and into
the need for long-range, secure, and generally fixed administrative
communications, radio would have a large place.  But how large?

     Generally speaking, wire was too well established for radio to have much
opportunity to compete.  Ready at hand - a prime element in the national
defense was the great commercial wire system, long range, apparently secure,
and fixed.  The defense of the United States was the principal mission charged
to the Army, on a directed assumption that the nation would be defended on its
own soil rather than across oceans and continents.  Aerial assault, for
example, would be intercepted at home, with home-based airplanes, civilian
home guards, troops on home ground.  Accordingly a vast communications system
already in existence was an integral part of defense and basic to the Signal
Corps calculations.  In these estimates, warning against the approach of an
enemy would require no special communications equipment which could not be
improvised or provided locally."

     Plans called for a series of observation posts and information centers
along the national frontiers.  Each frontier had been marked off into sectors,
and each of these was to have its own Aircraft Warning Service.  A sector AWS,
in turn, was divided into zones containing an information center and ten or
twenty observation posts.  Except that the alarm would be broadcast over
commercial radio, the commercial wire system would serve as the whole
communications net, with regular telephone service to and from the observation
posts and with leased telephone and teletypewriter circuits, including
teletypewriter exchange service, everywhere else.  The networks of the state
police, the Forestry Service, and the Coast Guard, as well as facilities of
railroads, oil companies, and public utilities might be auxiliary; for the
most part, however, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company would provide
communications for the entire national system.

     The earliest organized Aircraft Warning Service exercises occurred under
these proposals at Muroc Lake, California.  Civilian observers spaced about
eight miles apart reported plane sightings to the information center, which
sent out orders to military commanders and air raid warnings to civilian
defense agencies.  Although successful in demonstrating the participation of
civilians as observers, an aspect of aircraft warning which lost importance in
later astonishing developments, the Muroc Lake tests faltered as arguments for
the use of existing commercial lines.  The average time required for
transmitting a report that a plane had been sighted was five minutes, far too
slow to be of any tactical value in sending up interceptors.

     In antiaircraft defense outside the country, radio developments had a
somewhat better opportunity.  Panama had chief importance, and the Signal
Corps was asked to engineer a system there of 20 searchlight command posts, 24
antiaircraft batteries, 36 automatic weapons positions, 8 automatic weapons
command posts, and 7 group command posts.  Hard upon new developments,
however, a War-Department board studying the Canal Zone defenses proposed a
five-year program for a unified signal communication system "whenever the
proper equipment was perfected."  The equipment was of course the new pulsed
detector which the Signal Corps Laboratories were just then designing,
primarily for antiaircraft searchlight control.  Despite this promise, the
conception of the use of radio, even in radio communications only, was still
limited.  With a scheme of fixed defenses in mind, radio's mobility appeared
to be an attribute of no consequence, and objections to it arose from a
supposedly fundamental lack of security, the necessity for electrical plants
at every station, arid the requirement for specially trained operators.  At
various stages in the ensuing war, swift ground or air action disposed of the
first objection by rendering it unimportant.  Vehicular radios and handie- and
walkie-talkies eliminated much of the second by making the generators as
movable as the sets.  The degree to which voice in-placed continuous wave went
far to solve the third.

Communication Spheres of Interest

     Provision for radar was probably the most important part of the Panama
aircraft warning plan.  In terms of the era, however, there was significance
in the Signal Corps Board's recommendation that the Corps install and maintain
the equipment hut that the Air Corps operate it.  For the discrepancy in the
scope of the Signal Corps was measured more uncomfortably in relations with
the Air Corps than at any other point.  Love and friction made a prevailing
climate for Signal Corps-Air Corps liaisons almost all through the period of
the two world wars.  It is a major theme.  The ties were close but strained.
Army aviation had been the Signal Corps offspring, and now hid fair to be its
arbiter, having grown to a height which dwarfed that of all other components
of the service but the Infantry.

     The initial estrangement of divorce was receding far into the past when
another contention arose to replace it, derived from the sense of the future
which simultaneously separated and united the Signal Corps and the Air Corps.
Each had in its possession one of the new wonders of the age:  the Air Corps
the means of flight and the Signal Corps the means of communication through
space.  From the inevitable time when the airplane arid radio came together,
skirmishes set in anew.  To the Air Corps, the Signal Corps was slow and
unimaginative in adapting radio to aviation, particularly to air navigation.
To the Signal Corps, the Air Corps restiveness on the subject appeared
grounded upon a desire to take over a province of great prestige.  General
Gibbs was leaving office at just about the time when the aircraft radio
controversy commenced, in 1931; Maj. Gen. Irving J. Carr departed in 1934 with
it still going on; Maj. Gen. James B. Allison forced it to a top-echelon
decision before he left in 1937; and Maj. Gen. Joseph O. Mauborgne, who had
been on the scene as the commanding colonel of the Aircraft Radio Laboratory,
became Chief in a succeeding false calm.

     As might be supposed, the scene of the controversy was a Signal Corps
installation on an Air Corps base.  Up to 1931, the small Aircraft Radio
Laboratory staff at Wright Field was devoting its effort largely to aircraft
communication, as distinct from navigational radio.  The laboratory was a
potential site for advances in both fields, and important work on radio
beacons had already come from it; but navigationally it was behindhand.  At
Wright Field then was Lieutenant Hegenberger, one of the pair of Army pilots
who had made the pioneer flight from California to Hawaii four years earlier.
Navigational radio aids specially rigged for that flight had been so helpful
that Hegenberger was a determined spokesman for equipping all Army airplanes
with radio, at least to the degree of enabling them to tune in on the beacons
and ranges then multiplying along the nation's airways.  "In the first and
last analysis," it seemed to Hegenberger, the matter "concerns the
effectiveness of the Air Corps to carry out its mission as an arm of the
National Defense.  Aviation is a paramount problem in carrying out all phases
of this mission.  Upon this conviction, in the summer of 1931 the Air Corps
organized a Navigational Instrument Section in its Equipment Branch at Wright
Field, located it in the same building with the Aircraft Radio Laboratory, and
placed Lieutenant Hegenberger in charge.

     The Signal Corps assumed that the section was only intended to supervise
the service testing of navigational instruments after the Aircraft Radio
Laboratory had developed them.  Under this impression, Captain Rives, the head
of the laboratory, lent the Air Corps section a civilian Signal Corps employee
who had begun to work on a radio compass.  But the cooperative relationship
altered and darkened.  It began to appear that the new section was undertaking
the actual development of the compass.  The employee lent to the Air Corps was
not coming back.  The Aircraft Radio Laboratory went ahead with one form of
radio compass, the Navigational Instrument Section with another.  Very soon "a
deadly serious" fight was going on.  Lieutenant Hegenberger locked up his part
of the building, his engineers charging that Signal Corps technicians were
appropriating their circuits; the ARL officers and civilians, in turn, felt
that the compass being developed under Lieutenant Hegenberger was actually
their own, and that Army regulations clearly gave the Signal Corps sole
responsibility for such development.  They pointed to AR 850-25.  "While the
Air Corps officers appear to be conversant with the provisions of AR 850-25,"
Rives remarked, "they seem either hesitant as to how to proceed under them or
else they do not desire to comply . . ."

     The Equipment Branch sought first to challenge this regulation with
another (Under AR 150-5, the Air Corps as the using arm is authorized to carry
on any purely experimental development which it sees fit to do then to change
or even to ignore it, holding that the thing to do was to get aircraft radio
and not allow regulations to stand in the way).  Matters grew so strained that
at one time Rives went to the commander of Wright Field, Brig. Gen. H. Conger
Pratt, and requested a court of inquiry into the charges being made against
him and the ARL.

     In the midst of all this, a recommendation that all Signal Corps
development work of whatever nature be consolidated at Fort Monmouth arrived
like a thunderbolt.  Col. Arthur S. Cowan, then commandant at Monmouth, and
Major Blair, the Laboratories chief urged that the ARL be returned to the
status of a liaison unit and that the whole research and development activity
for the Air Corps be centered upon Monmouth, where the Signal Corps did
research and development for all of the other arms.  The merging of the
scattered laboratories of the Signal Corps had been General Gibbs's policy,
and if unopposed would fill in one more major chink in the structure.  From
the standpoint of sound administration and with plenty of good precedent,
General Carr was inclined to favor the consolidation; but before ordering it
he sent Blair with 1st Lt. Gilbert Hayden (still another Signal Corps officer
who was to be identified with the Aircraft Radio Laboratory) to Wright Field,
"for a thorough investigation from all angles . . ."

     A major shift in the Signal Corps Laboratories research and development
activity underlay the proposed transfer.  Hitherto, the Signal Corps had given
out contracts for the design of separate pieces:  an antenna, a power
generator, a telephone.  Now the tendency was toward assemblies rather than
single items:  a whole field telephone system, a complete radio set.  Blair
and Cowan felt that the Laboratories could best pursue such a policy of system
design and standardization, keeping in close touch with university and
commercial laboratories, and purchasing commercial samples for study, but
avoiding contracting for the central research work.  The Signal Corps should
design more of the Army's electric equipment itself and depend less upon
industry.  Cowan in fact maintained that the Signal Corps Laboratories alone,
and no other organization, commercial or military, had any adequate conception
of the Army's entire communications system.

     At Wright Field Blair confirmed his opinion that the Air Corps relied too
much upon commercial development.  He thought this "the easier but less
effective procedure"; although it was possibly "entirely justified by the fact
that it is rendering essential assistance to the relatively new airplane
industry," it could not eliminate the necessity for just such a plant for
laboratory research, testing, and installation as the ARL represented.  He
felt sure that ARL could best function in close association with the other
Signal Corps research organizations, especially because at present it was
"neither adequate nor properly constituted to do development and design work.
It is primarily organized for the work of consultation, installation and
test."  At Fort Monmouth, it seemed to him, development for all arms could be
co-ordinated, items simplified and standardized, and economy and general
satisfaction be realized.

     The men most immediately concerned, the staff of the Aircraft Radio
Laboratory, did not at all agree with Major Blair's minimization of their
contribution.  That they were primarily organized for development and design
work was exactly what they wished to maintain.  Rives was convinced that the
move would be wrong.  Despite his current vexations, which might well have
prompted him to clutch at a way to break free of them, he argued that
development for the Air Corps had its first cause in service to the Air Corps,
and that such service could be rendered only in proximity to the Air Corps.
This was another proof that those who dealt with the Air Corps felt, almost as
much as did the Air Corps itself, that its problems were unique, that a
fundamental difference existed between it and the other arms.  The equipment
used by ground arms had an elemental first cousinship.  Equipment to be used
in the air invoked another element as well, and must not be contemplated apart
from the terms and conditions of the air.  An antenna array which might be a
comparatively simple development for ground use could become an extremely
difficult one when it had to be attached to the outside of an airplane.

     Col. William L. Bayer, who, like Rives, Murphy, 1st Lt. Francis L.
Ankenbrandt, and so many others, was a Signal Corps officer made familiar with
the problem by close assignment to the Air Corps, later explained:

     Airplanes are rather precisely engineered and anything which affects the
outside contours or weight distribution is frowned upon. [Consider] the
enormous vibration to which parts or accessories are subjected; and the
difficulty of high voltage apparatus at the low pressure of altitude.  These
are in addition to the normal space and weight limitations.  There is at least
three to four times as much engineering involved in the developing of
electronic equipment for air use as for the ground.

     Not only did Rives think that the Signal Corps and Air Corps should and
could be able to work out their disagreements and produce aircraft radio
equipment at Wright Field, but he anticipated that withdrawal of the Signal
Corps would leave the arena wholly in possession of the Air Corps, which would
very soon thereafter gain the entire responsibility for aviation radio. He and
his colleague, 1st Lt. Herbert G. Messer, who was the only other Signal Corps
officer on duty in the depressed and skeletonized Aircraft Radio Laboratory of
January 1932, accordingly concluded that the disadvantages of a consolidation
at Fort Monmouth would far outweigh any advantages.  They got telling support
from the Air Corps.  Upon inquiry from Washington, General Pratt's engineers
came up with the same argument:  that separating the research from the
aircraft themselves would present an impossible situation, because no airborne
device could be properly designed without constant flight experience and
testing; and in Washington itself Maj. Gen. Benjamin D. Foulois and Brig. Gen.
Oscar Westover, Chief and Assistant Chief of the Air Corps, expressed the
strongest opposition.  This was the view which won out. The move to Fort
Monmouth had no support at Wright Field, from either service's representatives
there, and could not take place without it.

     The Navigational Instrument Section continued with its development of the
radio compass, and bulwarked it with an entire blind-landing program which
included, by a strange irony, a project for using microwave gear to prevent
airplanes from colliding with each other or crashing into unseen obstacles.
The irony dwelt in the fact that the project" might have become airborne
radar, years before anything of the sort was developed, if the air and ground
radio work actually had been in the close contact which Blair had urged.  The
Monmouth laboratories went so far as to hint that they had microwave work in
progress which might "eventually be adapted as an aid for the prevention of
collisions," but the preradar experiments there remained isolated by secrecy,
and the collision-prevention project withered under low priority for several
years until the Air Corps Technical Committee discontinued it altogether.

     The quarrel over navigational equipment had blazed right through this,
and had become a conflagration.  Lieutenant Hegenberger's superior, Maj.
Edward L. Hoffman, had entered it, although Hegenberger was by no means
superseded.  Signal Corps and Air Corps were now being used generically, each
supposed to represent only one point of view.  The Signal Corps (to speak in
this mode) maintained that all devices employing vacuum tubes and radio
circuits fell within its domain.  The Air Corps insisted that the only concern
which the Signal Corps could have with Air Corps equipment was with
communications devices in the most direct and limited sense.

     "In the beginning, the Signal Corps, as its name implies, was charged
with communication," Hoffman said.  "They first had the wig wag, heliograph;
later the telegraph, telephone, and now, radio, [where] they should confine
their efforts to communicational radio.  He in no way considered that the Air
Corps should be obliged to follow the procurement procedures of the other
arms, seeking out the pertinent service, describing what was wanted, and
asking to have it developed.  "To go through military channels" would render
the Air Corps "powerless."  He emphasized this point, and broadened it to
include the Air Corps connection not only with the Signal Corps hut with all
other "auxiliary branches."

     The Signal Corps did not think itself auxiliary, but rather as much a
part of the Military Establishment as any other arm or service.  Nor did Major
Hoffman's point of view, although it was destined to mature into official Air
Corps doctrine, have the solid home support which he counted upon.  At the
next level above him, Lt. Col. Robert E. M. Goolrick posted a dissent, coming
to the root of the matter by observing that navigational radio involves
sending and receiving radio waves, just as any other kind of radio does.
Goolrick said he believed it wrong in principle to charge two Army agencies
with the same thing, and saw no reason why, since the experience and competent
personnel for the work were to be found almost entirely with the Signal Corps,
the Air Corps should not permit its radio equipment to be developed as all the
other branches of the service did.  "It only requires a little cooperation on
the part of the Air Corps to make such a system work," Goolrick observed.
Which was much the opinion of the War Department, when the controversy flared
up that high.  Called upon to cite regulations, The Adjutant General pointed
to AR 850-25, and specifically to paragraph 10d on established procedures,
complaining as he did so that "the interests of the Government would be served
better if the Air Corps and Signal Corps would cooperate with each other."

     Allotment of Public Works Administration funds to the Air Corps to
finance the radio compass program increased the stake, and the travail when
the President called upon the Army to fly the air mail increased the
bitterness, for Air Corps spokesmen were inclined to charge the Signal Corps
with a part in the fiasco.  Conciliatory statements in the report of the
special War Department board of investigation headed by the World War I
Secretary, Newton D. Baker, made careful note of the fact that "the most
effective and efficient communication equipment should be provided for the
Army Air Corps," and balanced the account by observing that "the radio
equipment that has been provided by the Signal Corps has proved effective";
but these remarks had small opportunity to temper the disagreement."

     With continued angry interchange, the two sides charged bad faith.  "As a
result of the Signal Corps handling radio, we couldn't fly the Air Mail as
well as commercial lines and we still can't," Major Hoffman exclaimed.  "When
I hear Indianapolis talk to Dallas right now, I wonder if the Air Corps will
ever be able to do as well, with the Signal Corps handling the radio."
Hegenberger added other arguments and Rives and Messer jointly answered them,
protesting: "Other arms have accorded the Signal Corps their wholehearted
support in development work rather than setting up development establishments
of their own in the effort to be independent of all contact with other arms.
The Signal Corps and the Air Corps can also get the desired results if their
respective personnel have the will to work toward this end in full
cooperation."

     Matters had reached their worst by the turn of 1934 into 1935, as General
Allison succeeded General Carr.  Allison took direct action by proposing a
conference to General Foulois.  The Chief of the Air Corps agreed, and at the
conference surrendered the program, acknowledging that all radio development
at Wright Field should be centered in the Aircraft Radio Laboratory under
Signal Corps direction.  The Air Corps completed the contracts let with the
Public Works Administration money, but made no other arrangement to either
into either the development or the procurement of radio equipment.

     An insubstantial victory never looked more substantial.  The Air Corps
expansion undertaken in the ominous shadow of 1938 made inroads upon it which
all but reversed it.  At the time, though, regulations had been vindicated.
Behind that fact fell into place all other parts of the dispute:  whether the
Signal Corps had been so laggard in its duty as not to begin development of
airborne radio to any adequate degree until stirred up to do so; whether the
Air Corps had raided Signal Corps prerogatives and picked Signal Corps brains;
these and others receded behind the essential law and prophet.

     General Allison subsequently went out of office in the satisfying
persuasion that the problem had been resolved.  He complimented his successor,
Mauborgne, and told him: "I feel that we have accomplished a result that will
reflect with great credit upon the Signal Corps and the Army as a whole, and I
hope very much to the benefit of the Air Corps, whom we serve."  General
Mauborgne took office in the equally hopeful prospect of a return of good
feeling.  He was a new Chief Signal Officer, Maj Gen. Oscar Westover a new
Chief of the Air Corps, and Westover had praised his "spirit of cooperation"
as director of the Aircraft Radio Laboratory."  The clash of interest was
still there, however, muffled though it was by well wishing and good
intentions. The essential disharmony remained to grow clamorous again and to
renew a question of Signal Corps boundaries.