US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0084/00843.txt

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$Unique_ID{USH00843}
$Pretitle{79}
$Title{The Signal Corps:  The Emergency
Chapter IX-B  Working for the Ground Forces}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Terrett, Dulany}
$Affiliation{US Army}
$Subject{signal
corps
army
radio
officer
telephone
wire
field
new
maneuvers}
$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 IX-B  Working for the Ground Forces

Tactical and Administrative Service

     That this program was to cost more than $430,000 was one sign that
starvation rations were a thing of the past.  As had not been true for many
years, money was coming in plentifully.  During the fiscal year 1941 the
Signal Corps Laboratories, for example, were able to grow five times as big as
they had been in 1940.  In April the Signal Corps submitted its contribution
to the general augmentation of the Mobilization Plan, in which the basic
assumptions now were that the mythical M Day would occur somewhere during the
last three months of 1941 and that everyone in the Army as of that date would
stay in.  The Signal Corps School and Replacement Training Center, steadily
preparing the communications technicians for the growing forces, estimated
that they would be coming out of the thirteen-week and sixteen-week hoppers
at a rate well over 500 every Monday.  Two summer months alone were expected
to turn out nearly 6,000.

     Expansion was of course too recent to make its effect felt immediately.
There was a lag in the developmental field, and an even longer one in
procurement, which nothing could reduce.  Planners in the Office of the Chief
Signal Officer asked for a month's warning on the mobilization of division
signal companies, knowing it to be very likely that ostensible "refresher"
time would have to be devoted to giving many of the men their first
acquaintance with communications work.  And until the Laboratories could
perfect replacements and the factories produce them, the equipment and the
trickle of procurement of the years just past had to suffice.  Such items as
were on hand were parceled out among all of the branches calling for them;
many became controlled items and were distributed only under a system of
priorities, although they might go back in date almost to World War I.  All of
the new items were on the way, some so far from development that their
ultimate manufacture was barely discernible, others slipping so easily from
one stage to the next that there was even a chance that they might be ready by
the time that World War II drew America in.  Despite the sudden flush of
relative wealth, the Signal Corps could not at once heap its partners-at-arms
with abundance; but their needs were uppermost, development having advanced or
started in a hundred directions, and procurement in a dozen.

     In October and November of the preceding fall, the Cavalry and the Signal
Corps had agreed upon a short-range radio to be constructed, with its antenna,
around a golden staff; the trooper would hold it upright with the lower end of
the staff resting in a saddle boot.  This golden radio, the SCR-511; was to
become one of the best of the walkie-talkie types although not much used by
men on horseback.  Rather, it proved out as a set for cavalrymen and
infantrymen alike and engineers as well, all of whom used it in vehicles if
they could, as a pack set otherwise.  But at the same time that cavalrymen
approached the Signal Corps for this portable golden set, infantrymen had
asked for an even more portable and compact, equivalently short-range radio
for paratroopers to use.  On this, the development was phenomenally rapid.  By
mid february the Galvin Corporation demonstrated equipment which filled the
bill.  Weighing only five pounds, and promptly accepted in substantially its
original form, it became the SCR-536 and probably the best-known equip-item of
all Signal Corps treatment in the war:  the handie-talkie.  The initial order
to Galvin, later that year, was 3,500 of them.

     The Laboratories were also progressing with the Armored Force "500" sets.
The first models of the SCR-509 and 510 had arrived at Fort Knox, and the
Armored Force gave them a thorough drubbing to make sure that they were
sturdy.  A motorcyclist with a 510 on his machine ended a two-hour ride in a
severe spill which injured the man, damaged the motorcycle, and left the radio
unaffected.  This was proof not so much of the set as of the mounting by which
it was held to the luggage carrier, for a second SCR-510 attached without the
special mounting was all but shattered.  Yet a third, similarly without
shockproofing, survived being thrown to the ground from a scout car by a very
heavy jolt and, reinstalled in the car, worked perfectly.

     So two more 500's were on their way.  Others were already part of the
Armored Force organization.  As it was planned, each tank had both a radio and
an interphone system.  With headsets at their ears and microphones at their
throats, crewmen could intercommunicate and intracommunicate.  In a regiment
of 108 tanks, all would have interphone equipment, just as in a bombardment
airplane, and the company commanders would have SCR-508's (a transmitter and
two receivers), battalion and platoon commanders SCR-528's (a transmitter and
one receiver), and all the rest SCR-538's (receivers only).  A model of the
tank under procurement for this purpose, the new medium M3, went on display at
the Aberdeen Proving Ground in April for the scrutiny and comments of
representatives of the Air Corps, the Signal Corps, and the Ordnance
Department.

     W-130, the light assault wire, posed a problem if it were to be
manufactured in mass quantities.  It required a special latex insulation for
which a single manufacturer controlled the patent.  The answer was to spread
the patent.  This the owner agreed to do; under educational orders, two other
companies joined his in the W-130 manufacture; the Defense Plant Corporation
built the factories for all three; and the result was a ready potential of
6,300 miles of the wire a month.

     Introduction of the teletypewriter at field maneuvers had accented a
different side of the wire question.  The Army needed a cable which would
combine the long range of open wire, strung on poles, with the ease of field
wire, which did not possess the range but was speedily laid.  The need was
filled in time to meet the approaching demands of field teletype for just such
characteristics.  In this case, the solution came from the Germans,
unwillingly.  British Commandos had just captured some new cable and under the
agreement reached in the course of the Tizard Mission sent samples of it to
the Signal Corps Laboratories.  This became the renowned spiral four, a
superlative cable consisting of four insulated conductors wound spirally about
a central core.

     As for the instruments which the wire served - the telephones,
switchboards, and teletypewriters which the past year's maneuvers had thrown
into a sharp, clear light - they were the center of the stream of supply to
the ground forces, becoming so usual, so abundant, so effortless that they
would be more and more taken for granted the more they approached their goal,
imitation of the human voice and eye.  By this time the Signal Corps
Laboratories had largely completed work on the sort of switchboards which
Colton and Reeder had pointed out as the most urgent of tactical
communications needs in 1939 and 1940 maneuvers:  100-line BD-80's which could
handle heavy traffic and yet operate simply, from the modest power sources
likely to be available in the field.  These now began to reach the Infantry.
The new corps and division switchboards did not; and in the area where
Infantry communications were Infantry communications, the Laboratories
altogether forewent the development of new switchboards.

     Many things had to yield to the radio and radar developments, and the
small switchboards were among them.  Although the two decades in which BD-
71's and 72's had been in use had not wholly outmoded them by any means, the
Infantry Board was undeniably right in saying that they could both be
materially improved.  The chief disadvantage was their weight - 60 pounds for
one, seventy-nine for other.  There was too much else to do, however, and
supplies of the BD-71 and 72 ran into the thousands, and manufacturers long
used to making them could turn out thousands more upon demand.  Moreover,
having reached maturity long before, wire held its ground against change to an
extent which was out of the question for radio.  Major O'Connell demurred at
"burdening the fighting troops with at least twice the switchboard weight"
necessary, and protested that "repeatedly since 1920 the development of a
better switchboard unit has been put off"; but since the Field Artillery was
relatively satisfied and the several arms which used the boards were not
entirely agreed upon the characteristics of a replacement, the work continued
to be put off in favor of more vital research.

     In any event, by the onset of the maneuver season, it was evident that
field teletypewriters were on their way to becoming standard tools of military
communication; and though they did not take the place of a good telephone
switchboard system, they were superlatively welcome in their own right.  An
observer at the VII Corps maneuvers declared that "the telegraph printer is
beginning to get the distinction it deserves.  Seventh Army Corps kept the six
. . . machines in constant operation."  The old telegraph suddenly was
revitalized.  The new equipment made it possible once again to write over
wires at a speed equal to the demand of military operations, and without much
more inconvenience or loss of time than would be true of talking over a
telephone.  As usual, maneuvers were providing a good school for tactical
training and a good testing ground for tactical supply, research, and
development.  The longer the nation stood aside from actual war, the better
the opportunity for a Signal Corps to judge itself.  The first 1941 exercise
occurred off Puerto Rico between January 25 and February 14.  The Navy and
Army joined in a problem to test an assault upon an island; Culebra, which
lies just east of Puerto Rico, was chosen.  Maj. Francis H. Lanahan, Jr., the
Signal Corps observer at the exercise, noted that "it was immediately apparent
that the Army contingent had not brought sufficient radio personnel" or the
right kind of equipment, and laid the blame upon Admiral Ernest J. King for
having imposed his own plan without consulting or informing the Army in the
least.

     This was irksome but not conclusive, for it was still possible to
distinguish the terms in which the Signal Corps ought to be thinking.  The
signal teams, with which the Army element, the 1st Division Task Force, was
provided, might better be replaced by a regimental headquarters company,
Lanahan felt.  These teams had signal flags, panels, tactical wire, and radio.
The semaphore flags would have helped to dispel the initial confusion on the
landing beach had the men been practiced in them; their usefulness in the
ensuing war developed in just that way.  Panels did not prove out, although
the slow airplanes of the day made them look feasible at this time, as did the
accustomed use of aviation as a sort of sky cavalry.  Wire equipment,
including the new W-130 assault wire, was satisfactory.  Radio SCR-131's and
the preliminary walkietalkies, the SCR-195's was less so, but without any
basic fault attributable to radio itself.  The 131's were out of date by many
years, and porcelain antenna insulators in the 194's and 195's were easily
broken.  Modernization amended one and phenolic insulators the other.  The
uninterrupted trend toward radio left no doubt that it was welcome everywhere;
in all of the maneuvers of 1941, it came into far more use than in 1940.

     The war in Europe and the 1940 maneuvers, particularly the one which had
involved the First Army and the IV Corps in November, prompted Lt. Gen. Walter
Krueger to wish plenty of radio on hand for the maneuvers of his Third Army in
Texas, where he took command in the spring.  He wanted to blanket every part
of his force with radio communications the advanced reconnoitering elements,
the reconnaissance airplanes, the command posts, and also that he might move
freely without losing touch with any unit of his command.  In order to bring
this about, his signal officer, Col. Spencer B. Akin, went so far as to write
out of channels for three SCR-193's, which neither the Third Army nor the 52nd
Signal Battalion had been authorized to have.  The SCR-193 was a controlled
item, short in supply; so that the best General Mauborgne could give him was
advice to make sure that the next table-of-basic-allowance rests included
them.  Working for the ground forces was a two-way business.  The employer had
to make his needs clear.  "Without exception," according to two Field
Artillery officers at the Second Army maneuvers the next month, there was an
undeniable shortage of radio sets.  (Without exception, it would continue,
until production caught up with demand halfway through the war, and despite
strenuous efforts to overcome the deficiency sooner.)  There was also a want
of spare parts, but piecemeal issue contrarily encumbered some units although
in the case of a regiment which had thirty-two SCR-194's, all incomplete,
excess was no boon.

     Lt. Col. Fred G. Miller, commander of the 50th Signal Battalion, brought
thirty years of experience to bear when he declared that the tables of
allowance and organization were both meager, both "too superficial to perform
the . . . mission of "the signal battalion with the modern army."  There were
not enough enlisted men or officers for a peacetime organization, let alone
for war, Miller thought.  Grades were too few and too low for a technical
service; and not a day passed that a technician was not taken off to do
Kitchen police duty.  Miller believed that the tables provided for too many
general cargo vehicles and too few of specialized value.  To give a battalion
only 2 radio and 12 wire vehicles while allowing 55 for cargo purposes was
"all out of proportion as to numbers and types, and based on no sound
fundamental plan."  Furthermore to put all of them, plus the drivers and the
mechanics, in the headquarters and headquarters company of the battalion was
comparable to putting all the guns of an artillery battalion in the
headquarters and none in the gun batteries.  The tables omitted teletype,
repeaters, and power units essential for a higher headquarters and certainly
for the self-contained unit he thought a signal battalion should be:  so
organized and equipped that it could load everything into its own vehicles and
be prepared to set up army or corps headquarters communications without delay.

     The Second Army commander threw his weight behind Colonel Miller. Office
of the Chief Signal Officer responses to him were reasonable; they represented
simply a difference in point of view.  Miller spoke as the man in the field
charged with a tactical mission.  Lawton, who answered him, did so from the
point of view of the headquarters man, not having to meet a tactical situation
firsthand as a division signal officer did, but required to cope with a
general situation broadly, as an officer in the field was not.  He called
attention to new tables which authorized a battalion twenty-four wire and
four radio vehicles.  Several other new types were on the way, all specialized
to haul poles, to accommodate cable reels and poles together, to serve cable
repair, and so on.  Everything else Miller had mentioned was assuredly either
under procurement or under study.  If it had not appeared in the field, the
reason was that the Signal Corps policy, learned by its own long experience,
was not to put any item into the tables of organization and allowances until a
unit which requisitioned it could be sure of getting it.  This left the
opposition unconvinced but the point had some validity all the same.

     The Office of the Chief Signal Officer did agree that far too little
equipment had been issued to battalions for training, but inasmuch as
henceforth all of the men for such units were to be learning their signaling
in the Signal Corps School and Replacement Training Center, that difficulty
was disposed of.  Training in the communications units beyond the point where
direct Signal Corps responsibility in the ground arms stopped was another
matter.  Certainly the Infantry, the Cavalry, the Armored Force, and the Field
Artillery would have to see to it that the draftees being poured in to fill up
their ranks learned on the job, with equipment on hand, the communications
tasks they were assigned to perform.  From the Signal Corps point of view,
observer after observer at the succeeding maneuvers noted a lag.  Training had
not caught up with manpower.  Their reports unconsciously confirmed the
impression of critics that the maneuvers were a dream play in which
lackadaisical recruits, drafted for a year, performed by rote motions which
had never been suitably justified to them or even explained; where "dead" men
sought the shade of a pine tree, to chew the needles while they awaited the
umpire; where crudely lettered fluttering cloths labeled a truck a tank, or a
World War I Springfield a
.30-caliber machine gun.

     In that summer, the Germans had just delivered another heavy blow and the
Japanese were getting set for one of their own.  The signal units at Tennessee
maneuvers could get no nails, screws, or plywood for their field message
centers, and chipped in to buy them.  Cord was a universal shortage.
Headquarters provided itself with 20 representative messages, which the
communications men had practiced often enough to memorize.  Some of the Morse
operators could send as many as 10 words a minute.  But not all.  The 33rd
Division had held a five and one-half weeks course which 178 men had
completed, but in which only 36 had attained a code speed of 15 words.  An
operator who could manage to take in only 15 words a minute at a code
classroom table could not do much better than 10 under field conditions. Panel
crews knew the technique of panel communication, but had never had any
practice with an authentic airplane.  The 33rd Signal Company and the 58th
Signal Battalion both failed in the reading of maps and aerial photographs.
Yet by specific statement, "the morale, enthusiasm, soldierly attitude,
willingness to learn, on the part of the enlisted men [were] highly
commendable."  Training had simply not got started.

     One device to stimulate it which occurred to signal officers was for each
corps and division to seek out commercial communications men who might be
serving in other duties.  Col. John C. Moore, First Army signal officer,
reiterated the concern of Miller, the Second; Akin, the Third; and Col. Joseph
J. Grace, the Fourth Army signal officer.  The Washington Post correspondent
at the First Army's Carolina maneuvers charged that "radio fell down
repeatedly, delaying messages which would have changed the course of battle."
This immediately alerted the Chief Signal Officer.  Was it true? It was, said
Moore.  "Our one great fault" - he was speaking of the First Army - "is lack
of training."  He described breaches of radio discipline and inspection, and
remarked, "I seldom see an officer standing by listening to radio transmission
to correct procedure."  He extended his remarks to take in wire:  "I am
appalled at the great percentage of wire failures due to lack of training in
its laying and maintenance . . . Some of our officers are seized by panic when
they are confronted with the need of wire from army to corps and corps to
division, thinking that the job is too big for us."  From the state of
Washington, and anent maneuvers there in August, Grace disclosed that the
202nd Signal Depot Company at Fort Lewis had handled nothing but paper signal
supplies, a training assignment which did not train.  He suggested
transferring the unit to special duty at the corps area depot in San
Francisco, where the men could work with real equipment.  Lt. Col. Raymond C.
Hildreth, in the Supply Division of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer,
disagreed.  "To load up one or two corps areas with a field army or more . . .
is not reasonable.  The armies should establish their own depots and necessary
repair shops."

     The Signal Corps had both sides to consider.  Making sure of field
communications was half of a mission whose other half was administrative. The
corps areas often carried out the administrative duty, especially at a stage
when the nation's military effort was almost entirely confined to home soil.
Over much of the face of the country, and possibly in the South more than
anywhere else, the region of the Fourth and Eighth Corps Areas, the defense
program was making quick, deep changes.  In the industrial East and Middle
West a general expansion of plants was beginning, in order to take care of the
production demands of war.  Civilian though they were, their purpose was
military and naturally tapped military services at many points.  Huge
reception or training areas like Fort Dix, New Jersey, or Camp Grant,
Illinois, were filling, expanding, filling to new limits, and expanding again,
at a rate which left them perpetually unfinished.  Raw settlements for
thousands were appearing everywhere, panoramas of newly sawn lumber and
bulldozed land; and in some localities the nearby towns, long saddened by
economic adversity, were at a loss to cope with them. Depots, arsenals, harbor
gun sites, and military hospitals made other parts of a scene of unlimited
emergency; and all bulwarked hundreds of existing posts and stations which, if
small, were growing large, and if large, enormous.  Where the region was
undeveloped, the Engineer, Quartermaster, and Signal Corps were challenged to
produce complete systems of roads, sewage disposal, electricity, and
telephones.  There was equivalent work of a different kind in commercial and
manufacturing areas; meagerness of facilities was not the problem, but defense
was expanding so many offices and factories that even the most extensive
systems were taxed.

     Funds for the new emergency construction went as a rule to the
Quartermaster General or Chief of Engineers, who in turn made suballotments to
the Chief Signal Officer, to cover the cost of the telephone part of the
construction plan.  This the Wire Section of the Plant and Traffic Division
prepared, and ordinarily delegated its execution to the signal officer of the
corps area concerned.  Telephonically, the term plant refers to the mechanical
apparatus, taken as an entity, which the process requires.  At times, signal
officers rented the plant for a defense project intact from the local
telephone company; at other times, Signal Corpsmen entirely installed and
maintained it.  The decision which to do was taken upon the basis of
long-standing practice.  Just as in Adolphus Greely's days in the frontier
West, the Signal Corps did not go where commercial systems were already
established and install competing systems, but rather went where they were
not:  a direction which implied commercially unrewarding or pioneer and rugged
circumstances, and a purpose for which the Plant Engineering Agency was
created later on, in the war.

     The expansion going on as of midspring of 1941 called for $5,594,150
worth of telephone plant, especially in the Fourth and Ninth Corps Areas.
Seventy-seven of 213 projects all told were for Air Corps installations. The
rest were all for the Ground Forces, in the various guises which defense
expansion took.  Mushrooming troop housing called for 59, almost evenly
divided among new posts, old posts, and replacement training centers.  A
program of 26 projects was scheduled to supply telephone service to Ordnance
and Chemical Warfare facilities.  For the Medical Department there was a list
of 10; these were to serve large hospitals, of a thousand-beds or more, which
it was agreed ought to have plants separate from the general post switchboard.
Storage depots, reception centers, special facilities of all kinds needed
consideration.  The cable plant for harbor defense, for example, amounted to
three or four times what was normal for the same number of telephones in a
different activity.  The conduct of fire, particularly of the great fixed
guns, necessitated constant communication between the gun crews and the
observers or spotters.  These were not the conditions which radar would bring
about, but radar was not yet established in most Coast Artillery stations.

     When there was an occasion to join Army with non-Army areas, other
agencies of the government were involved and other considerations entered than
those of the Signal Corps, G-4, a corps area, and the Bell System. When
$868,250 for switchboard and telephone construction in defense-housing areas,
included in the Signal Corps 1941 supplemental estimates, was cut to $75,000
by the Budget Advisory Committee and restricted to guard and fire-alarm
telephones, straightening the matter out called in the Federal Works Agency
and the Public Buildings Administration.  This situation was usual, not
unique; and the increased intertwining of the national interest with the
military was to make it universal.  In the face of the demands of defense
housing, a working agreement and mutual understanding were highly important.
Many of the commissioned and noncommissioned officers of a rapidly growing
post had to live in a defense-housing development, whereupon the question
arose of connecting them by telephone with the post itself.  A commander could
think of many situations when it would be inefficient, and of some when it
would be serious, not to be able to get in touch with the post complement
during off-duty hours.  In all instances where the defense housing stood on a
military reservation the Signal Corps simply gave the Bell System blanket
permission to install home telephones and connect them, over Signal Corps
poles if necessary, with the nearest commercial exchange - not, of course,
with the post system, although in many cases the use made of the two was much
the same.

     At a camp or post it was also important to have adequate public telephone
service.  Off-duty use of the public telephone was especially high at
reception centers and training stations.  Men wanted to call their wives and
mothers, and, since most of them were on duty during the day, they needed to
have phones available to them between evening mess and tattoo. They preferred
booths, too, rather than the publicity of a telephone on an open wall.
Nevertheless, it was often impossible to be sure that morale was served as it
ought to be by plenty of booths and phones.  The Bell System estimated from
its reports of usage that three or four per thousand men would take care of
the demand, but long queues were a regular occurrence at the evening peak; and
when movement orders were out, the rush to the telephone became an elemental
force.  At most posts at 129, up to that time, the men also had access to the
public telegraph, Western Union or Postal or both, so that the strain was
partly shared by the older commercial facility.  Part of the task in analyzing
any request for a telephone project lay in discovering whether existing
equipment was actually being used to the maximum, as the circumstances
unquestionably required.  A post signal officer might unwittingly be allowing
inefficiencies because he was new to his job and unfamiliar with Army
procedure.  From time to time, he perhaps might send in requisitions in round
numbers, almost a sure indication that some of the order would be left over.
At some posts, the drive to expansion created temporary or deceptive demands
which soon evaporated but still withheld telephones from active use.  With the
adoption of new standards, there was always a tendency to get rid of
everything except the newest equipment, despite the fact that much which was
of substitute or recently obsolete quality was good enough.  Signal officers
turned in serviceable EE-5's and BD-9's and 11's even when depots were unable
to provide the models intended to replace them.  To all officers in this duty,
the Chief Signal Officer sent out word that they ought to check to see what
excess equipment there might be, to recondition it, put it on inventory, and
send it to other posts where there was a shortage.

     Most post telephone systems contained three parts, the main one being the
central administrative switchboard and the other two being comprised of a
target-range system and an emergency system for reporting fires and
explosions.  The fire department, the motor pool, the commanding officer, the
officer of the day, and the post physician could all be alerted from the alarm
system, which was essentially a conference circuit that the operator kept open
as long as was necessary.  A specific type, which became necessary with the
building of cantonments housing 50,000 men or more, reported all fires to the
central fire station and made it possible for remote guard posts to report in
to the main guardhouse.  Target-range systems varied from a modest support for
rifle practice to 100-line separate switchboards with telephones scattered
throughout the target area and connected by tie lines to the main system of
the post.  This central administrative post telephone system was itself either
small or large according to the size of the camp.  If it went above 500 lines,
every effort was made to install automatic, dial equipment.  Usually the
outside plant was lodged underground, although at any impermanent post the
wire was simply strung on poles shared with the electric lighting.  In the
spring of 1941 there were 189 administrative post telephone systems with
60,000 telephone connections, and by the time that all of the temporary
additions then in view were completed, there would be 274 systems and 125,000
telephones.