Chapter 2: The Call for Troops (January–February 1942)
The Source of the Demand By the beginning of 1942 the shock of Pearl Harbor had given way to planning for a long war, but expansion plans for the Army were still very narrow. The thinking on which the plans were based, particularly with respect to the probable magnitude of an all-out war effort, was still to a large extent based on World War I experience. At all levels, efforts were organized with a view toward peacetime economy rather than wartime effectiveness. When war came, there was no recourse but to make day-by-day decisions and to dole out the Army’s manpower, a few men here and a few there. All had to be soldiers, and some had to be made into technicians as rapidly as possible.
To the Signal Corps that meant signal specialists, and men trained in even the prosaic communications skills were too few to supply the needs. An Infantry division alone included 1,500 communications men, who represented about one-tenth of the division strength.1 Although not all of these would be Signal Corps men, all had to be given communications training. Moreover, it was becoming apparent that the Signal Corps would be required to function not only as a military communications operating agency spread out over the earth, with auxiliary duties involving tremendous intelligence, photographic, and training responsibilities, but also as a large business establishment.
When the new year began, the military strength of the Signal Corps—3,119 officers (256 officers in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer) and 48,344 enlisted men—was scattered throughout the continental United States; in the Caribbean Defense Command, where about one third of the overseas units had been sent to strengthen the Panama Canal defenses; in Greenland; Iceland; Newfoundland; Bermuda; in the Hawaiian and Philippine Departments; and in Alaska. The civilian strength was 13,504, including 1,694 overseas and 1,886 in the office of the Chief Signal Officer.2 The Alaska Communication System (ACS), which began the year with a military strength of 428 and a civilian strength of 171, probably enjoyed a higher proportion of thoroughly competent enlisted technicians than did any other Signal Corps activity. Since October 1941, when the War Department had authorized the 1st Signal Service
Company to increase its strength, ACS had been carefully selecting the additional men; about half were fully or partially qualified radio operators, the remainder touch typists who had satisfactorily passed the radio operators’ aptitude test.3 The mainstays of the company were men with long experience and excellent records of service in Alaska.
With this nucleus and in this geographical pattern, the Signal Corps now had to fill out vastly in numbers and spread out vastly in place. Some of the expansion necessary had already occurred, as these numbers and locations showed. The very opening hours of war, however, had created vacuums all over the world, which sucked in troops the instant they could be dispatched from the United States. American soldiers went out eastward to Iceland and westward to Australia. The Signal Corps units with these early task forces were hurried to overseas bases and combat zones, where the generally inexperienced men who comprised the units came up against unusual demands for individual skill and stamina. And nowhere, as judged by war standards, was there more than a token signal force.
The Limitations Imposed by Tables of Organization
The tools with which an arm or service shapes its units and fits them into the Army’s structure are (1) its troop program, that is, the troop basis, which forecasts the number and kind of units to be in active service within a general time limitation; and (2) its tables of organization, T/O’s, which ordain the composition of the units. The T/O signal units were as standardized as the multiplication table and pyramided up to the top echelon of the troop basis structure with little variation in size or composition.
The outbreak of war had found the planning divisions in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer trying vigorously to disrupt the neat structure. Not rigidity but flexibility and elasticity in organization and strength were essential to economy in the use of manpower, and never had there been a time when the Signal Corps had not had to economize in men. The war had already thrown a spotlight upon new military conditions and methods which differed greatly from those known earlier. Further, climate and terrain were obviously going to affect operations a great deal. In a place where good radio transmission could be attained only through the use of a rhombic antenna array, five men would be needed to install the equipment. If the situation were such that a wire strung between two trees would suffice, it could be set up by one man, who might be, as well as not, the driver of one of the unit’s trucks. In some areas, a unit might have all the advantages of modern communications systems in the vicinity. In others, it might find it necessary to transport a 2,000-pound transmitter in pieces, back-packed over miles of rough terrain, to set up the only communications station for hundreds of miles around. Uniform, inelastic T/O units could not be expected to function equally well in all such widely varying situations.
Obviously it was desirable to tailor units to fit the situation. But the process of setting up tables of organization or of changing those already in effect was laborious and protracted. First, the Signal Corps made a
detailed breakdown of the duties of each man in the proposed unit and determined the grades and ratings it considered applicable. Then, by way of The Adjutant General, the proposed table went to the War Department General Staff—to G-1, to G-3, and to the War Plans Division (after 9 March 1942, to comparable divisions of the Services of Supply before it reached the General Staff). There the requirements unit studied the table under the guidance of Signal Corps officers, who had direct knowledge of the equipment the unit would use; the training unit scanned the table from its own viewpoint; then the operations unit considered it. If all went well, approval was forthcoming. But at any stage in its progress, the proposed table might be sent back to the Signal Corps for revision, after which it would have to start all over again.4
Finally fixed, the table of organization was likely to become a white elephant, ponderous and sacred. Newer equipment might change the basic duties of at least some members of the team, or changed tactics might make more or fewer men desirable. But the table of organization remained fixed. Therefore, the Signal Corps often resorted to organization charts or special tables as it set up new units which necessarily would be more or less experimental.5 Yet these had no standing in troop bases, the determinants of training capacity.
The 1941 Troop Basis in effect at the outbreak of war embodied a troop program which accorded with the prevailing defense plan for mobilizing only the four field armies. It authorized the Signal Corps 1 signal service regiment; 5 aircraft warning regiments; 19 battalions (2 armored, 4 aircraft warning, and 1 for each army and corps) ; a headquarters and headquarters company for each of the 4 interceptor commands; 2 signal troops, 29 platoons, air base; 32 division signal companies, 5 of them armored; and 79 other companies of various sorts, of which 48 pertained directly to the air arm and the remainder were depot, repair, operations, photographic, pigeon, construction, radio intelligence, and service companies.6
The 1942 troop unit basis for mobilization and training, issued in January, embodied the 1941 faults of rigidity and meagerness.7 For the ground forces, it did include more of the needed non-divisional units than had the 1941 basis; yet it remained very weak, particularly in construction units. Reports from the field following the 1941 maneuvers had consistently urged that the number of construction units in a battalion be doubled or tripled. General Olmstead had held out strongly for two companies, with additional construction units in the General Headquarters U. S. Army reserve, where they would be available to reinforce corps and army units as required. As issued, however, the 1942 Troop Basis included neither.8 But the most astonishing deficiency of the program
was its failure to include any troops at all for the air arm. Toward the augmentation of Signal Corps overhead (i.e., the administrative positions in the War Department, in field offices, and in other installations exempt from corps area control), this 1942 Troop Basis also reckoned on the scheduled expansion of the ground forces alone, taking no account of the work which the Signal Corps would perform for the Army Air Forces (AAF).9
There were other weaknesses in the 1942 mobilization plan. From the time of its publication, revisions were frequent. It ceased to be a forecast; in fact, it fell behind. Activation schedules out-distanced the parent plan, which served only weakly as a training objective, being no better than any other plan of that time. In some ways its existence actually was a drawback, because the General Staff adhered to it in limiting training capacity, yet often had to ignore it when compelled to activate new units. Therefore, commitments for signal units exceeded the troop basis, were out of step, irregular, and uncoordinated. Men in training, expecting to be assigned months hence to units allowed under the troop basis, had to be assigned hurriedly, their training cut short, to meet task force activations or other urgent calls.
It was well into January before Major Maude, in the Signal Corps’ Air Communications Division, succeeded in getting from G-3 a list of Signal Corps units authorized for the Aircraft Warning Service, which would serve as a troop basis of sorts for that service. The list included 7 signal headquarters and headquarters companies for AWS interceptor commands; 23 signal aircraft warning regiments; 19 signal aircraft warning battalions, separate; 19 signal aircraft warning reporting companies, frontier; 69 signal platoons, air base; 80 signal platoons, air depot group; 7 signal companies, depot, aviation.10 This belated AWS troop basis added enormously to the technical manpower requirements of the 1942 mobilization plan; and yet there remained, still unknown, the requirements for technicians and specialists to man Signal Corps units serving the AAF as well as the AWS. Such additional Signal Corps units—and they numbered scores—grew without a broad plan.11 Tentative authorizations in effect immediately after Pearl Harbor had called for 67,000 officers and enlisted men to be procured and trained by the Signal Corps within a year for the Air Forces as a whole.12 The lack of a firm troop basis for the air arm and the inadequacy of tables of organization for the ground forces handicapped orderly planning. But even had satisfactory tables of organization covering all units been in effect, there would still have been the enormous task of converting civilian recruits into military technicians within a compressed length of time.
The Protective Mobilization Plan had called for one million men by M Day plus 120, all from the Regular Army, the National Guard, and the Reserve, and all with some measure of military training. Actually, Army strength, including Selective Service men who had expected to return to civilian pursuits at the end of one year of service, had passed the million mark in March 1941,
nine months before the declaration of war. It continued steadily to increase. Augmentations of the Protective Mobilization Plan were to have brought the Signal Corps to a strength of 62,500 by M Day plus 360. Signal Corps strength passed that mark and rose to 75,391 during February 1942.13
Plans for Getting Enlisted Men
“Good radio men are more precious than nuggets in this Army. They are diamonds, rated No. 1 on the list of 181 shortages.”14 The process of sorting out such treasures or of polishing potential gems remained one of the most baffling of the Signal Corps’ many problems. There were only two ways to get skilled signal soldiers. Either the Signal Corps had to find men already trained in communication techniques and put them into uniform, or, failing that, it had to take soldiers potentially capable of absorbing such training and teach them what they needed to know.
The first possibility offered little hope. In October 1941 the War Department had directed the reception centers to send to the Signal Corps any draftees who had formerly been employed in the engineering and plant departments of commercial telephone and telegraph companies. On 8 December the order had been repeated. But these men were few, and the Signal Corps actually received no more than about one out of each six inducted.15
In another effort to get men already trained in communications duties, the War Department had directed reception centers to allocate all branch immaterial recruits who were radio engineers, electrical engineers, or geophysicists, in the proportion of 65 percent to the Signal Corps, 25 percent to the Coast Artillery Corps, and 10 percent to the Army Air Forces. Few men of this caliber were reaching the reception centers because before they were drafted as enlisted men they were offered commissions or were snapped up by essential industry.16 If they were about to be drafted, they could take advantage of the voluntary enlistments still being offered by the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Army Air Forces. Thus, many men whose abilities were in demand could choose the branch of the armed forces in which they wanted to serve. Even the Signal Corps’ own civilian employees often found other fields greener. In consequence, the Signal Corps’ Army Command and Administrative Network (ACAN) system suffered when many of its civilian operators and maintenance men, whose skills were vital, volunteered for other services or transferred into industry. In an attempt to hold them ACAN obtained 400 specialist grades to offer in exchange for enlistment in the Signal Corps. But even this inducement was to have little effect. By 10 April 1942, the limit set for enlistment under the authority, fewer than 70 had taken advantage of the offer.17
Not even the members of the Army Amateur Radio System (AARS), established by the Signal Corps in the 1920s to supplement its own operating strength in an emergency, could be counted on. The amateurs were also excellent operators and maintenance men; most of them built their own sets. But they, too, were in high demand and unfortunately no provision had been made for channeling into the Signal Corps such members as might be subject to military service. When the government closed all amateur stations on 8 December 1941, the Signal Corps lost touch with the group which it had organized and trained in military communications procedures. Of those who entered the Army not all served in the Signal Corps, and there was no way of counting the number who did. Thus the AARS plan, which had served adequately in peacetime emergencies, such as floods and tornadoes, fell short of its full purpose in war.18
The Signal Corps had another prewar design for obtaining experienced technicians, the Affiliated Plan, wherein the telephone and motion picture industries and the pigeon fanciers’ associations had cooperated toward putting skilled men into Signal Corps units. But the Affiliated Plan was not broad enough. Although it drew directly upon the main sources of wire and photographic specialists and pigeon experts, it included no sources of radio skills. Also, by its nature it could not be expected to meet heavy current demands for very large numbers of technicians. It did not provide for the organization of entire troop units from the personnel of the sponsoring agencies, as had been done in World War I under a similar plan. The World War I plan had provided badly needed telegraph battalions. But the concentration of many skilled men in them reduced the number of specialists available to other Signal Corps units. Moreover, the sudden withdrawal of large blocks of men from the private companies had tended to disrupt civilian communications. More wisely, the new Affiliated Plan now gradually withdrew individual officers and enlisted specialists from sponsoring civilian concerns in order to form cadres for a large number of units, which filled up their ranks from reception and replacement training centers. At the time of Pearl Harbor, a ground force signal battalion of 20 officers and 542 enlisted men was entitled to an affiliated cadre of 11 officers and 13 noncommissioned officers and technicians of the fourth and fifth grades, if the unit had been sponsored as an affiliated organization. The strength of cadres varied with the types of units and, indeed, between units of the same type.19
The 1942 requirements under the Affiliated Plan called for 189 officers and 1,314 enlisted men to fill positions both in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer and in troop units. This number the Bell System signified its willingness to provide. In addition to the units which the original plan listed, the Secretary of War had authorized the affiliation of eighteen more, for ten of which commercial sponsors had yet to be
found.20 In February the War Department authorized the affiliation of still more units, such, for example, as the first affiliated Signal Photographic Companies, the 164th and 165th, which the Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sponsored.21 The first affiliated cadre called to active duty as a unit was that for the 99th Signal Battalion. The men reported at Fort Monmouth on 28 February, and within three weeks were on their way to the west coast where the 99th would be activated.22
Thus, though nearly one third of all the Signal Corps troop units to be activated during the war would be known as affiliated units, the affiliated leaven within them would represent only 1.7 percent of Signal Corps peak strength. Over nine tenths of this small percentage of affiliated officers and men would be wire specialists; fewer than one tenth would be photographic technicians; and scarcely one out of each hundred would be a pigeon specialist.23
Since all these plans proved ineffective toward recruiting ready-made specialists in large numbers, a second possibility had to be explored. If the Signal Corps could not get specialists ready to hand, it would have to take untrained men and make them specialists. That meant, first of all, getting men capable of absorbing the technical training the Signal Corps would give them, then months of preparation before they could become effective signal soldiers.
Conscription was bringing in a widening stream of recruits, but the upsurge in numbers was falsely encouraging. The Signal Corps was receiving too many men not qualified to pursue the courses it offered, too few who were. In normal times the Army had required a recruit to have at least a high school education before enlisting in the Signal Corps. But from the arrival of almost the first Selective Service increments, Signal Corps officers in the field had protested that many were below that standard. On the eve of war, five days before the Japanese attack, Col. Otis K. Sadtler, Chief of the Operations Branch, had pleaded with G-1 to instruct reception centers to send the Signal Corps only such men as were qualified to pursue technical study, contending that “given a man of adequate intelligence, the Signal Corps can train him.”24 But all the arms and services were screaming the same plea and Sadtler’s request fell on deafened ears. Moreover, requisitions called for radio technicians at the rate of three and four times the number contemplated in current training quotas. Of all the warborn demands upon the Signal Corps’ meager supply of manpower, none were more immediate and pressing than those of the Army Air Forces, particularly
for aircraft warning troops. Not only in the United States but in every other area of conflict there was a demand for radar men.
In February, the chief of the Military Personnel Division, Col. Henry L. Page King, repeated Sadtler’s December plea for better “basics.” The AAF had just indicated informally that it would need some 53,000 men for the Aircraft Warning Service alone, and King asked specifically for 2,000 enlisted men from the top intelligence group for aircraft warning duty. G-1, besieged on all sides by similar demands, again sought to give equal consideration to “the need for men of high intelligence in each branch of the service” and declined to limit Signal Corps assignments to even Class IV and better. Class IV stood just above the bottom of the five grades of military aptitude in which the Army classified its men according to the Army General Classification Test (AGCT).25 A grade of 100 was taken to be the median. Yet among the men arriving at replacement training centers were many whose AGCT scores fell far below 100, as well as some who had to be taught to read and write. It would take an inordinate amount of time to make even simple technicians of such men, if it could be done at all. Even then they might still lack resourcefulness and skill. Initiative and mental stamina were of prime importance to Signal Corps men and to the success of their missions, as units and small teams were frequently thrown on their own resources in areas remote from the main body of the troops they served.
The Signal Corps felt that because of these considerations and because of the general difficulty of the subject of electronics, it ought to get men whose education and aptitude placed them in Class I of the AGCT, or in the upper half of Class II. In arguing successfully for assignment of at least 75 percent of its recruits from among men rating 100 or more in the tests, the AAF had advanced as a reason its extensive use of radio.26 Yet the Signal Corps, engaged to a far greater extent in work on a wider variety of more complicated items of radio equipment, got men of lower ability.
The repeated rebuffs which the Signal Corps met as it sought to get better men to train brought forth one plan after another for General Staff consideration. Three days before the reorganization of 9 March 1942, while the technical services could still deal directly with the source of allotments of manpower and training capacity, Colonel King went to G-1 again with what was to be his most effective appeal. He had been impressed by the fact that although military training facilities could not be expanded fast enough, civilian institutions, which the war was emptying of students, did have space. He therefore requested authority to recruit men in the Enlisted Reserve Corps (ERC) for preservice training in the civilian schools. To his pleasure, G-1 approved his request and the War Department issued implementing orders.27
The approval of Colonel King’s plan enabled the Chief Signal Officer to change
requirements at his discretion, to set quotas for the various schools, to change them at need, and to establish new courses as he saw fit. The plan directed corps area recruiting offices to test all applicants and to send those qualified to the nearest civilian school. Tuition for a period not to exceed six months was payable either from funds allocated to the U. S. Office of Education or from money under the control of the Chief Signal Officer. If a student had enrolled in a course prior to enlistment and had paid all or part of his tuition, he was to be reimbursed upon enlistment in the ERC. He would be deferred from active duty until completion of the course. Then he would be called to active duty and sent to a Signal Corps replacement training center or assigned to a Signal Corps unit. In either event, these men selected to meet the Signal Corps’ specifications would possess not only the mental qualities the Signal Corps sought but a measure of communications skill as well.
The significance of King’s plan lay not only in the fact that it was bigger than it appeared to be but also in the fact that the Signal Corps would have unusual independence in administering it. Signal Corps personnel and training officials were jubilant; previously they had estimated a shortage of 7,200 technicians in eight vital categories by the end of June. Moreover, procurement schedules called for the delivery of 369,694 radio sets of various kinds by the same time—841,560 by the end of 1942. This created a need for almost 15,000 maintenance men by the end of June, and for more than 50,000 six months later. About half the maintenance men would have to be soldiers; half might be civilians.28 The enlisted reservists could be trained along with the civilian technicians under the preservice civilian training program. Also, the civilian recruiting publicity could now be focused on persuading men to enlist in the ERC for preinduction training.
Indeed, the recruiting campaign was also operating to bring men into the Army directly for Signal Corps duty. The communications industry had a personal stake in seeing that members of its craft subject to conscription were placed in appropriate Army positions. The industry therefore showed a keen interest in recruiting. Large communications companies, Westinghouse, Radio Corporation of America, and General Electric, searched their application files for prospects for the Signal Corps. The civilian communications profession understood, as the layman and many a nontechnical Army officer did not, the prodigious demands imposed by the Army’s modern signal systems. Engineering societies sought candidates within their membership. Radio studios made their facilities available for the Army to broadcast appeals. Prominent actors and others in the public eye placed before the people the urgent need for military and civilian communications men of all kinds, and for men qualified to study the specialized subjects, whether at secondary or college level. Newspapers and magazines devoted space to the Signal Corps, its functions, its manpower needs. The radio amateurs’ magazine, QST, appealed to licensed radio operators to join the Signal Corps, “the only branch of the Army in which by showing your amateur or commercial radio operator’s license you may be assured of assignment to radio work.” The editors added a timely caution, however, that not all recruiting officers understood this. An article in QST seeking civilian
mechanics for the Caribbean area told readers, “If you are looking for a late winter West Indies cruise, here it is.” The needs of the Aircraft Radio Laboratory for engineering and subprofessional skills received publicity. Radar service received attention in semi-technical articles, news items, and cartoons. “He’s a Radar Man” was the caption under a cartoon depicting an enlisted man strutting between two high-ranking officers. Manufacturing companies lent their advertisements to the enlistment needs of the Signal Corps. The civilian commercial schools which conducted preservice war training advertised their courses widely if not always wisely.29
It was bad enough, the Signal Corps felt, that so many of its plans to acquire suitable men went awry. It was worse to know that many of the technicians and specialists whom it had taught were sent out to be wasted on duties which demanded either more or less skill than they had acquired. The Signal Corps taught the men, but G-1, War Department General Staff, filled the requisitions for them. Therefore, many requisitions were badly met by the assignment of simple technicians, who had received only general instruction in the replacement training centers.
Hence, a company commander who had asked for highly trained radio repairmen and repeatermen might find he had received only linemen and truck drivers. Much less often, the reverse occurred, and a skilled radio operator arrived to fill an opening for an automobile mechanic.30 Either way, the commander was quite certain to consider the man poorly trained for the job he held. The heart of the trouble was the circumstance that many commanders were unfamiliar with the fact that signalmen came in many categories and that each was intended for a specific purpose. A commander might, for example, ask simply for a radio operator, when if what he wanted was a fixed station operator he ought to have a skilled man and not simply one who could send or receive only fifteen words a minute.
As a remedy, the Chief Signal Officer had initiated a campaign for educating commanders in the relationship between signal specialties and signal equipment. From time to time he had issued lists designed to aid them in requisitioning the specialist they wanted; and the Signal Corps also obtained permission from the War Department to substitute other men when those in the categories called for were not available. By the time the war was halfway over, these innovations were so well thought of that the Services of Supply introduced the same procedures into the Signal Corps’ sister services.31 But in the early months of 1942 the gap between the supply of enlisted technicians and the demand for them had not been bridged. In March G-1 was still assigning men—at times not even good substitutes—to apply on requisitions received a month before Pearl Harbor.
Plans for Getting Officers
The 3,000 officers whom the Signal Corps had on active duty when war struck included most of its reserve, 40 called to duty under the Affiliated Plan, 335 newly commissioned from its first officer candidate class, and some 300 Electronics Training Group (ETG) officers in schools in the United Kingdom.32
The officer corps was weak in leaders and woefully weak in technical leaders. Although the Reserve Corps lists still contained the names of some World War I officers, many would no longer be able to qualify physically for active duty, and only a few of those eligible remained in an inactive status. The Reserve Officers Training Corps would yield a few officers each year, but only a few until the ROTC program should be revised to war scale; the United States Military Academy, only a handful. The Affiliated Plan would provide some under the schedule for spaced withdrawal from industry. The Officer Candidate School (OCS), drawing its students from Army ranks (often taking badly needed Signal Corps enlisted technicians), would provide monthly increments of nontechnical officers under the existing capacity of 500 students. About 200 more second lieutenants would be commissioned from civil life for the Electronics Training Group under the standing authorization. From all sources within and without the Army, only 5,735 officers would become available to the Signal Corps by the end of 1942. This number, even when measured against the short yardstick of that day, fell 1,407 below estimated requirements, with the real needs of the future as yet to be revealed.
The Regular Army officers of the Signal Corps approximated only a cadre for an officer corps. The 225 on duty with troops filled only 4.34 percent of troop demands for Signal Corps officers, as compared to the 7.27 percent average for all ground arms less the Signal Corps. For all other purposes the Corps had only about 100 Regular Army officers. To obtain Regular Army parity with the other arms, the Signal Corps asked for 142 additional Regular Army officers. Instead of authorizing that number, the General Staff approved an increase of 50, of whom 25 were to be from the Infantry, 15 from the Cavalry, and 5 each from the Field Artillery and Coast Artillery Corps.33
Had all of these new officers been signal specialists, there would still have been a very thin line of Regular Army officers to lend their experience to the inexperienced new officers. Fortunately, the largest concentration of Signal Corps Regular Army officers was in the grade of lieutenant colonel. Ninety officers had attained this permanent rank. All had fairly broad experience, and would have from five to fifteen years to serve before reaching the normal retirement age. This one grade group therefore provided officers to fill some of the most important positions in the Signal Corps during the war. Among them were Crawford, Sadtler, Milliken, Ingles, Mitchell, Farmer, Code, Moran, Rumbough, Stoner, Rives, Arnold, Lawton, King, Gardner, Watson, Matejka, Reeder, Black, Back, and others who served in key field and administrative
assignments. These and the few other Regular Army and reserve officers of field grade carried the chief responsibility of placing the Signal Corps on a war footing. The machinery in motion to increase the Corps’ commissioned strength would, in the main, bring in only company grade officers, many of them on the bottom rung as second lieutenants.
To avoid the shortage which it was estimated would exist by the end of 1942, Colonel King asked the General Staff soon after Pearl Harbor for authority to commission 1,407 qualified men directly from civil life, as the quickest way to get officers technically qualified for Signal Corps duty. The War Department authorized the direct commissioning of another 500 only, all for the Electronics Training Group, but did raise the capacity of the Officer Candidate School from 500 to 2,000.34 By January 1942 requirements shot far ahead of the December estimates. Eight thousand company officers alone would be needed. According to G-3’s unofficial troop basis for the AAF, that arm would itself need 1,667 officers with an electronics education and would have to have them before the end of 1942. A month later this estimate was boosted to 2,400 and the deadline moved to the end of September.35 For many months to come the need for greater numbers of officers would persist and persist urgently.
Meanwhile, the Signal Corps found it difficult to locate men in civil life who were qualified to meet its exacting standards for electronics officers. There were too few men of appropriate caliber engaged in communications pursuits to supervise civilian and military communications networks of the normal kind under the increased demands of war. Beyond these needs were the requirements in a little known and far more complex field where highly secret military developments had barely charted the course that the enormous aircraft warning operation would follow. The techniques involved, new to the Army, had no commercial application; the equipment no commercial counterpart. Consequently, no military or civilian sources of skill had been built up. Yet a degree in electrical engineering or physics was an essential preliminary for a potential Aircraft Warning Service officer. By this time, most of the students about to graduate in electrical engineering were already committed to industry or to one of the other services. The Signal Corps did, however, obtain permission to take students in either their junior or senior years into the ERC, and upon their graduation to commission them in the Army of the United States.36
Courses in very high frequency subjects (called Ultrahigh at that date) were essential as a foundation for advanced Army training in electronics. But such courses were being taught in only a few electrical engineering schools and in those schools they had been taught only in the past ten years
or less. Of the 21,000 men estimated to have graduated in electrical engineering in the decade preceding 1942, only a small proportion had taken the new courses. This unknown fraction constituted the nation’s main supply of manpower for the commercial and military research in electronics, for the production of equipment, and—this being the vital necessity to the Army—for the intelligent use of radar in the war.37
In selecting the first 500 officers for the Electronics Training Group, the Personnel Division reviewed and replied to an estimated 10,000 applications, coming in at the rate of about 50 a day, in order to find some 1,500 that warranted serious consideration. Of these, 600 applicants lacked an adequate technical education, 112 were physically disqualified, and 276 eventually declined the appointments tendered them.38 By January 1942, seven months after the War Department had authorized the first 500 appointments, the Signal Corps had been unable to commission the full number. In February the War Department was forced to relax the requirements, extending the original limitation (ages 21 to 36, unmarried, and without dependents) to ages 18 to 46, regardless of marital status or dependents.39 Even then many of the applicants accepted had to be given preliminary instruction before pursuing the advanced electronics courses.
While the Personnel Division struggled to bring in officer timber from the civilian forests without, the sources within the Army and the Signal Corps itself slowly yielded further numbers. On 13 January a call went out for the few Signal reserve officers remaining on an inactive status.40 The War Department released some officers from its Reserve pool, whence the Signal Corps obtained a number of very well qualified specialists.41 The 173 graduates of the second officer candidate class received commissions as second lieutenants in January. Later in the month the Secretary of War again raised the capacity of the school, this time to 3,000, and opened officer candidate schools of all arms to qualified soldiers who would be not under 18 nor over 45 years old upon graduation, and who would have had not less than three months of continuous service on beginning the course or six months of cumulative service within the year immediately preceding enrollment.42 This eased the situation slightly but the amount of technical training these officers would receive in OCS would not in itself qualify them as communications specialists. Therefore the shortage in this category persisted.
The Chief Signal Officer considered it essential that all Signal Corps officers assigned to tactical Signal Corps units be technically qualified signal communications specialists. Late in January he repeated a recommendation he had made before Pearl Harbor that educational standards for entering the Signal Corps Officer Candidate
School be revised to require an engineering degree or its equivalent in experience.43
Having exhausted every immediate source of officer material, the Signal Corps now urged the expansion of the existing ROTC units and the establishment of still others. When war began, 1,450 basic and 350 advanced students were enrolled in the 11 Signal Corps units at good engineering schools throughout the country.44 Although they constituted a deferred class under the Selective Service Act, the Signal Corps would not get all these officers. In 1941 only 147, fewer than half the students in the advanced units, had been commissioned or certified for commissioning.
King estimated that the Signal Corps would now need 800 second lieutenants yearly from the ROTC, not counting combat losses. To provide a margin for these, he added 25 percent and arrived at 1,000 as the goal. If the 1941 experience were typical, in order to get 1,000 he would have to assume a pool of twice as many. He therefore asked for an annual quota of 2,000 ROTC advanced students. Two thousand students in the senior year was a figure implying an equal number in each of the three preceding years, so that the ultimate quota arrived at was 6,000 basic students for Signal Corps ROTC training, as well as the 2,000 advanced. Four thousand of the 6,000 basic students and 1,500 of the 2,000 advanced would have to be trained in new ROTC units.45
The General Staff viewed the proposal with disfavor. The Signal Corps wanted ROTC officers because it saw in them a source of skilled technical officers, adequately trained in their specialities through good university courses. At the institutions having ROTC units, the courses in military science were an integral part of the educational program. The ROTC graduates were, in general, interested in things military. When commissioned, they were ready almost immediately to step into technical positions or to pursue advanced electronics study, as the average officer candidate was not. Yet G-1 opposed them on the ground that they were not sufficiently trained as leaders. The ground forces felt that three months of officer candidate school training turned out far superior officers. This concept imposed upon the Signal Corps the characteristics of the nontechnical bulk of the Army, wherein general leadership was of more value than specialization, which was the core of communications competence.46
Meanwhile, some minor concessions were granted during the first two months of 1942 to strengthen the intake from the ROTC. In order to keep the existing units effectively filled, the professors of military science and tactics at the various universities received authority to reject any student who could not pass the physical examination which the Officers’ Reserve Corps required.47 A few
weeks later the War Department approved with reservations a Signal Corps request that ROTC graduates completing ultrahigh frequency courses be given an opportunity to enter the Signal Corps even if the unit in which they had been trained was not a signal unit. But there remained in effect the prewar ruling that limited the Signal Corps to not more than 10 percent of all ROTC graduates and specifically prohibited to it any men trained in Ordnance, Engineer, Chemical Warfare, and Quartermaster Corps units.48
Yet another stubborn problem arose in the form of efficient assignment of officers, or something approaching appropriate placing of them. Although a board had been set up at Fort Monmouth in January 1942, both to observe the student officers there and to classify them carefully with a view to the best possible use of them, the effort was largely guesswork because there was no classification pattern to follow.49 Neither could unit commanders submit an intelligent request for an officer without going into considerable detail as to the work he would be expected to perform. The obvious solution was to develop and adopt a system for officers such as the one that already existed for enlisted specialists. It must be broad enough to take in officers for tactical units, for replacement training centers, for schools and laboratories, and for other Signal Corps activities like procurement and distribution.50 Some flexibility was achieved in February when the War Department increased the size of the Signal Corps’ officer pool. Hitherto, the figure had been set at 500 for the Signal Corps School and 150 for the replacement training centers at Fort Monmouth and at Camp Crowder. Now it rose to 1,650, without restriction as to grade, and permitted the assignment of pool officers of all arms, including the Signal Corps, to administrative positions as well as to troops.51
By the end of February 1942, Signal Corps officers on assignments (excluding those in schools) numbered 5,247. About one in five was on duty with the Air Corps. Of the remainder, 252 were overseas; 765 served with troop units within the continental United States; 355 were assigned to corps area commands; and 2,852 were in War Department overhead positions. Over half the Signal Corps’ officers were engaged in administrative duties.52 Every month’s total showed that the number of officers was increasing. There were far more each month than there had been the month before. Yet the war had so widened in area and so mounted in intensity that the calls from every quarter grew more numerous and more urgent than they had ever been. Thus, paradoxically, the shortage of officers remained acute, however fast the production lines turned them out.
Getting Civilians
With the onset of war, the Signal Corps for the first time in a quarter of a century had enough money to hire all of the civilian workers it wanted, together with blanket authority from the War Department to employ them without prior approval.53 In common with other branches of the armed forces, with the rest of the government, and with the great hives of industry which were being federally subsidized, the Signal Corps began to hire multitudes of men and women, not solely to cope with multiplying work loads but also to attempt to compensate for downward trends in office skills. Roughly guessing that it would take two unskilled employees to do the work of one who was experienced, and taking into account the time lag between a requisition and its approval, Signal Corps administrators gave free rein to imagination; and personnel estimates zoomed.
The Military Personnel Division presented a more or less typical picture. When Colonel King had left it in 1938, there had been a staff of 1 officer and 3 civilians. Returning in October 1941, he had found 8 officers and 31 civilians. A tenfold expansion seemed enormous, but it was not enough after Pearl Harbor. In January 1942 King asked for 191 more civilians, ranging in grade from CAF-2 to a hitherto unthought-of CAF-12. Because the Civil Service Commission endeavored to control the overgrading of positions, he had to justify the higher grades by increasing the number of office units and thereby indicating the need for greater numbers of supervisors. Even before he got the additional 191, he had to follow that request with another for 564, and then still another for 661, so fast were things growing.54
In the rest of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer and in every field installation, stenographers, clerks, and specialists of various sorts were being similarly employed—often in greater numbers than could be assimilated. Interviews were perfunctory, assignment was undiscriminating, and supervisors were not always competent to set tasks and to measure performance. Efficient workers tired of mediocre jobs. Less efficient workers held on to jobs too big for them. To provide an agency to take a personal interest in newcomers, particularly the hundreds of young women who were away from their homes for the first time, a Counseling and Recreation Section was added to the Civilian Personnel Branch.55
Malassignment was sometimes ludicrous. A clerk, for example, charged with the task of passing upon applicants for the Electronics Training Group did not know enough about college courses to identify those leading to degrees in electrical engineering and consequently accepted veterinary and law students along with the prospective engineers.56 The promotion of clerks to minor supervisory positions caused dissatisfaction. Today’s new employee became tomorrow’s supervisor, sometimes when his lack of training or experience for the job was all too obvious to those working under him.
Proselytizing between divisions and supervisors was common. Within the next year, the turnover reached 60, 70, 80, and sometimes 100 percent.57
Like the Regular Army, the permanent civilian force was very small, even in the early months of 1942, and in comparative size it continued to dwindle until almost submerged under the influx. Thus the administrative complex turned topsy-turvy, with many a greenhorn directing employees who had been trained for years in Signal Corps procedures. In February, with experienced supervisors scarce, organizational changes common, and office procedures a mystery to the newly arriving personnel, Col. Charles E. Saltzman of the Executive Control Division suggested—without much effect—a redistribution so that each division might have knowledgeable persons in at least a few key positions. He also proposed the assignment of a civilian assistant to each major subdivision of the Chief’s Office, to follow administrative problems through, “wherever the ramifications of their investigation take them, until a satisfactory solution to the assigned task has been arrived at.”58 Such a force of trouble shooters, disengaged from the paper work under which most administrators were buried, might have accomplished a great saving.
Daily it was becoming more apparent that quality and not quantity was the key to efficiency, and the civilian as well as military personnel would have to be trained for the tasks awaiting them. This fact was notably clear in the hiring of civilian technicians. The understanding of radar equipment, to cite but a single example, certainly required specific knowledge which was not possessed by most men, nor even by some radio engineers.59 In the case of skilled workers, it was certainly not true that bucketfuls of money would solve the hiring problem.
At the beginning of 1942, the Signal Corps had 966 engineers and 690 subprofessional employees. The estimated need by the end of the year was for 4,580 engineers and 1,866 subprofessional workers, with an additional 20,000 enrolled in radio repair and other subprofessional courses in civilian institutions.60 Milliken, Lattin, Heath, Lanahan, Rooks, and Maude, when considering the specific problem of how many to hire for maintaining radar detector equipment, compromised at one technician for each 50 sets, which would require the employment of 5,000 civilian maintenance men by the end of June and 5,740 within the next fiscal year. This was all a guess, of course, because radar maintenance had never been required before. But the Western Defense Command, with 88 sets, had only one maintenance man, and the repair work was not getting done. Obviously more men were needed. As for the overseas demand, all that the Signal Corps could do was to delegate authority to department signal officers to employ as many maintenance men as they wanted—if they could find them.61
Shaping the Response: Wide-Scale Training
At the turn of the year, the Signal Corps’ military training facilities were still concentrated at Fort Monmouth. Its commander, Brig. Gen. George L. Van Deusen, was also the commandant of the Signal Corps School, which was under the immediate supervision of the assistant commandant, Col. William O. Reeder.62 A second Monmouth training activity much larger than the school was the replacement training center, commanded briefly at the outset of the war by Col. Charles M. Milliken. When Colonel Milliken left for Washington to become chief of the Operations Branch in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, Col. Frank E. Stoner replaced him, only to follow him to Washington a few weeks later to head the Army Communications Branch. Col. Edgar L. Clewell took command of the Replacement Training Center on 27 February 1942.63
During this period few changes were made in the conduct of either activity or in training doctrine. Both had been geared to war needs before December and the onset of war had not necessitated any perceptible alterations. Fort Monmouth fitted the men into bulging barracks and overflowing classrooms, and searched for instructors.
By the beginning of 1942 Signal Corps training institutions had been authorized large capacities, in comparison with prewar figures—larger on paper than the realities and circumstances of the day could immediately permit, but not large enough to meet all the demands for signal technicians. For the Signal Corps School the paper figures first ran up to nearly 3,000 (420 officers, 500 officer candidates, and 1,975 enlisted men). Before January had passed, the Secretary of War authorized doubling the school to 800 officers, 2,000 and then 3,000 officer candidates, and 3,724 enlisted men.64 For the replacement training center, the capacity at the beginning of the year was set at 6,007: double that of the school. But the replacement training center capacity for the Signal Corps as a whole (in the pattern for the Army as a whole) was limited to 8 percent of the Signal Corps’ strength, whereas about 68 percent of its table of organization strength was in technical positions.
Although two out of three Signal Corps soldiers would occupy positions requiring technical competence of one sort or another, only one of the two would be a product of a Signal Corps replacement training center. The remainder, bypassing the replacement training centers, would reach the units directly from the reception centers, and would receive only troop instruction, a poor substitute for technical training in a Signal Corps institution. Given under a variety of field conditions, troop instruction did not provide uniformity in the practical application of communications techniques, nor did it stress communications theory. Thus units which should have been two thirds specialists, in reality had fewer than one third, plus
some poorly trained technicians and some often untrainable basics.
In order to raise the proportion of skilled men in signal units, the Signal Corps School had always set aside space for quotas of students to be selected by field commanders from men possessing aptitude and background for communications study, but after war made manpower scarce throughout the Army the policy failed for lack of students. Field commanders would release few men, even temporarily, to the Monmouth school. There was always the possibility, they reasoned optimistically, that when a unit was alerted for overseas movement, somehow the Signal Corps would supply the technicians. The Air Corps, whose requirements for specialists were heaviest, was the worst offender. In this situation, the Signal Corps now had no recourse but to fill its school to capacity from its own replacement training center intake, culling out the better qualified recruits at the end of basic training for enrollment in the longer school courses in the more critical specialties. Replacement training center courses were accordingly limited to the simpler technical subjects which could be taught in less time. Thus a greater number of recruits could be given a modicum of technical training.65
The January increase in school capacity carried with it an authorization for theater-type construction to house an additional 3,000 men. But Fort Monmouth, thickly dotted with temporary buildings, was hedged by populous New Jersey communities. There was no room to expand. The post already occupied two and a half times its peacetime area. Classrooms served their purpose continuously as the students came and went in shifts, day and night. But barracks space was the bottleneck and General Olmstead was unwilling to resort to bunking shifts. Additional students could be accommodated only by putting 70 men in each 63-man barracks. The War Department had authorized that, but had cautioned that should respiratory diseases become epidemic, the post would be required to return to normal housing.
The New Jersey National Guard encampment site at Sea Girt, only a few miles distant from Fort Monmouth, provided the space for expansion. In January 1942 the Signal Corps leased the site from the state of New Jersey at a cost of $125 a day—power, water, and gas included. Fortunately, the camp already had twenty-two mess halls in which 1,700 men could be seated, a small post exchange, a large headquarters building, three stables which could be made into classrooms, a motor shop, a fireproof warehouse, drill grounds, and so on. It also had an excellent target range. All of this admirably suited the needs of the replacement training center for receiving recruits and administering basic military training.66
With the transfer of this activity to Sea Girt (Camp Edison) space would be available on the Fort Monmouth reservation for the expansion of the school. The new facilities and the decision not to duplicate in the training center any course taught in the school would enable the former to turn out an estimated 26,502 simple technicians by the end of 1942.
Instructors accordingly rearranged schedules and accelerated the pace. The
replacement training center set up classes for Saturday mornings and reviews for Saturday afternoons. Courses for administrative personnel, supply and warehouse clerks, truck drivers, and aircraft warning plotters were reduced to nine weeks; for message center clerks, linemen, local battery switchboard operators, messengers, and telegraph printer operators to 11 weeks; for automobile mechanics, cooks, permanent linemen, advanced switchboard operators, code clerks, aircraft warning operators, photographers, pigeoneers, and field radio operators to 13 weeks. The field radio operators were supposed to get their training through troop instructions in the field.67 But so great was the shortage of radio equipment issued to troops that the replacement training center had to teach the subject in its classrooms. Selected recruits took only basic training and then went into the more specialized courses in the Signal Corps School; 16-week courses for cable splicers, framemen, insidemen, installer-repairmen, powermen, and cyptanalytic clerks; 20-week courses for radio electricians, switchboard installers, telegraph printer maintenance men, wire chiefs, and fixed station radio operators.68
Another even larger replacement training center was taking shape at Camp Crowder, Missouri, in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, under the supervision of Brig. Gen. William S. Rumbough, commander of the camp and the replacement training center, assisted by Lt. Col. Robert A. Willard, executive officer, Lt. Col. R. P. Lyman, plans and training officer, and Capt. J. A. Joseph, adjutant.69 The site of Camp Crowder, originally intended as a joint Infantry-Signal Corps training facility, had been turned over to the Signal Corps, except for space for four Engineer regiments to be trained there. The acquisition of the Infantry’s buildings necessitated rearrangements in the use of space and some structural alterations to make the buildings suitable for Signal Corps use as classrooms.
On 15 February 1942 the first troops arrived for training. Classes began four days later, conducted by instructors drawn for the most part from Fort Monmouth. The recruits were divided among the twenty-four courses which constituted the replacement training center’s training program. The largest class would be for truck drivers (1,619 students), the next largest for aircraft warning operators (1,319 students). Other large classes were for field linemen (1,099 students) and for field radio operators (1,022 students). The remaining classes averaged about 350 students each. The courses did not differ essentially from those at Fort Monmouth. At the end of basic training the recruit progressed to the specialist phase, in which he studied the subjects for which his civilian experience, education, and aptitude presumably best fitted him. Men qualified for study in advanced specialties were enrolled in the Signal Corps School at Fort Monmouth. As yet there was no advanced school at Camp Crowder, although one was in prospect.
The first recruits at Camp Crowder gave the Signal Corps little cause for enthusiasm, since the caliber of many of the men fell
below the standard for specialist training. They proved to be of only slightly higher aptitude than the men the War Department normally expected to receive at any of its reception centers, as well as below the already too low average which currently prevailed at Fort Monmouth.70 In some of the contingents that arrived at Camp Crowder before the Army had established effective criteria for selecting men for the Signal Corps, as many as 40 percent were scarcely capable of learning the skills and techniques which modern communications work involves.71 Some of these were trained as linemen and truck drivers, but most had to be shipped out as basics.
Just as replacement training center activities had outgrown the parent post of Fort Monmouth, aircraft warning training could no longer be held within its borders. Plans for a joint Signal Corps-Coast Artillery Corps-Air Corps school in the south—where year-round training would be feasible and where military airplanes and surface craft plying their normal trade would provide live targets for radar detection practice—had been under consideration in the War Department since the preceding July,72 but up to the beginning of 1942 the General Staff had not authorized its establishment. A G-3 conference late in November 1941 had brought the proposal out of its pigeonhole and thrown it back to the Signal Corps for the preparation of a detailed plan for a joint Signal Corps-Coast Artillery School to be operated by the Signal Corps, apart from Air Corps radar training. On 19 January 1942 the Secretary of War approved the revised plan, and a month later the new establishment, Camp Murphy, was under construction at Hobe Sound, Florida.73
Pre-Pearl Harbor plans had also provided for an aircraft warning unit training center at Drew Field, Florida, under the III Interceptor Command, which would in effect be a finishing school for the students from Camp Murphy. Out of necessity, however, Radio “A” school at Drew Field had sprung into being soon after Pearl Harbor before the school at Hobe Sound had been authorized. It offered rather sketchy training to information center technicians, radio operators, and administrative clerks.74
On 15 January 1942 Lt. Col. Benjamin Stern, signal officer of the III Interceptor Command, went to Washington to attend an Air Corps conference on the training of radar specialists. Out of that conference grew the Radio “B” or radar department of the Drew Field school, which still had no official standing. The Army Air Forces considered it to be their school; the Chief Signal Officer thought of it as belonging to the Signal Corps. However that might be, the first radar class began its training on 2 February with 202 students and “three SCR-270-B units, three hospital ward tents, and a few pyramidal tents.” Training aids were blackboards, circuit diagrams provided by the aircraft warning units, instructors’ notebooks, and
some obsolete commercial communications items. That was all until late in February when six SCR-270-A’s were sent down from Fort Dix, New Jersey. These were not in working order but at least the students could study the parts. As instructors this group utilized six officers and thirty-six enlisted men who had had some experience with radar, either at Fort Monmouth or in the field.75
Until aircraft warning training should be firmly established on a large scale in Florida, the Aircraft Warning Department of the Signal Corps School at Monmouth was doing all it could to relieve the shortage of trained men. New classes were embarking each week upon radar maintenance courses but the students were too few.76 The number dropped from 318 in January and February to 100 in March.77 The Coast Artillery ceased altogether sending students after 21 February 1942, and the Air Forces Combat Command sent students to only one of six classes during the period 7 March-11 April.78
The Army Air Forces filled Signal Corps units assigned to it from allotments of untrained men granted by the General Staff, and organized and altered the units, sometimes without even consulting the Signal Corps. Few of these men reached the Signal Corps School, nor did they get any appreciable training as communications technicians in AAF schools. Consequently, many a Signal Corps unit with the AAF, which should have been filled with qualified technicians, was actually so top-heavy with nonspecialists that it was not competent to perform signal duties. By the end of March, the Signal Corps units serving with the air arm contained more than 19,000 nonspecialists above the number contemplated.79 It was obvious that task force commitments could be met only by the assignment of units containing a mere skeleton cadre of specialists—a minimum of men who had received barely enough instruction to enable them, once arrived in the theater of operations, to continue the training they would have to experience and would have to impart to others before their organizations could qualify as efficient operating units. This was a point on which Brig. Gen. Harry L. Twaddle, the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-3, the Air Forces, and the Signal Corps were in agreement.80
Thus many of the men who left the United States in the early winter months of 1942 to serve in Signal Corps units accompanying the first task forces could not be permitted the luxury of completing their training and of acquiring experience before they went into action. Unseasoned, half-trained or worse, they would have to learn as they worked.
The strain of life in advanced areas, with that of learning difficult communications skills while maintaining full schedules of the
usual military duties, was hard on the men. But the situation was even more cruelly disheartening to their officers. To wait anxiously for desperately needed technicians only to learn upon their arrival that they were not really trained at all was bitterly frustrating. Signal officers such as Maj. Gen. Spencer B. Akin of General MacArthur’s staff in Australia were providing communications with almost no equipment and practically no seasoned men. They needed every pair of skilled hands. To Akin, the arrival of untrained signal troops was an actual handicap because it meant that he would have to divert men from his inadequate supply of skilled specialists to train the newcomers.81
If the Army could not afford the luxury of fully training its enlisted communications specialists, obviously it could not afford to send its officers to school for full terms, either. The Secretary of War announced late in January 1942 a policy of sending younger officers to service schools before their assignment to field force units. He had previously, late in December, authorized the Chief Signal Officer to retain any graduates of the officer candidate school who lacked technical ability in order to give them eight weeks of specialty instruction in the Signal Corps School.82 But such schooling pronouncements were a bit unrealistic. The rapid activation of new units, the ballooning activity in every area of Signal Corps administration, the scarcity of officers everywhere—all these required that nearly every officer be put in a job, not in a school. Few could be spared from troop or administrative duties, and many who had been in the schools at the outbreak of war were now being withdrawn for urgent assignments before they had completed their courses. This situation was general; it had existed for months. For example, the Air Force Combat Command, although wanting Signal Corps-trained officers, had nevertheless warned, even before Pearl Harbor, that it could send no more officers to fill its quotas in the Signal Corps School.
Once its officers had been assigned to units, they could not be removed for schooling because this would hold up the field training of their units. It was hard to get officer students; still harder to keep them in school.83 The Electronics Training Group provided an example of very sharply abbreviated training. By the beginning of 1942, none of the officers had completed the courses in the British Isles. Yet they were already in demand within the first month of the war. They were needed as radar instructors for the Aircraft Warning Sendee, for duty in the continental United States and in the vicinity of the Panama Canal, and for overseas requirements as yet indistinct. Training in ground control of interception (GCI), at Army Air Forces project TRIGGER in Florida, awaited the arrival of a handful who were receiving special instruction in Britain to fit them to teach the subject.
Force schools on 5 January and left England with only a small part of their course completed.84
Curtailed as their training had been, there was no substitute for the knowledge which these young officers possessed. In all the United States there was no other reservoir of men trained in the new techniques of radar, because up to this time the knowledge had been confined to a few men in Army and Navy laboratories, in the Radiation Laboratory of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and in the firms which manufactured the equipment. The British cooperated by accelerating and abbreviating the training in order to speed the return of their American students to the United States. Eight, hastily trained in the very high frequency techniques of Chain Home Low (CHL) and Plan Position Indicator (PPI) radar equipment, returned in February. A larger group, who were receiving special instruction in siting, installation, and maintenance, followed early in March. Twenty-five officers who had begun training in the October class came back for assignment to the laboratories at Wright Field and at Fort Monmouth.85
Meanwhile, training which approximated that given the Electronics Training Group officers in British military schools was going forward at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and at a less advanced level at the Cruft Laboratory of Harvard University. Courses quickly undertaken in other civilian educational institutions of the country, under the U. S. Office of Education’s war training program, were fitting many other men for duty with the Aircraft Warning Service in one capacity or another. By the end of February, the scope of all training had broadened encouragingly. But it would be months before the products of the schools could assume the duties for which they were being trained, and no one could tell what demands for signal specialists the next few months would bring. Could unskilled men in the numbers authorized and of the caliber received be converted into specialists in time?86