Chapter 6: The First Billion Dollar Signal Corps (January–July 1942)
The Headquarters Supply Organization Losses overseas in men and materiel, in bases and prestige, brought Americans the realization that defense preparations during recent years had fallen far short of what was now needed. The country now understood that modern wars could be won only by men using modern machines, however complex and costly. And even as the Signal Corps shared in the military losses of early 1942, it also shared in the vast outpouring of military appropriations to replenish and augment the supply of men and equipment.
When a man has been poverty-stricken all his life and unexpectedly has a million dollars dropped in his lap, he is likely to be overwhelmed not only by his affluence but also by the sudden demands, influences, and pressures that he encounters. As with men, so it is with organizations. The Signal Corps was confronted in 1942 with the sobering yet exhilarating realization that it was the supplier of communication equipment for an Army expected ultimately to comprise 8,000,000 men. The very task of expanding Signal Corps production on a gigantic scale on the foundation of the small peacetime industrial capacity was staggering. Testifying before a House of Representatives subcommittee, the Chief Signal Officer said, “I never dreamed we would have to deal with such sums, but I know you have to do the job through organization.”1
The Soaring Signal Corps Budget
The appropriation for the fiscal year 1941 established the pattern for the war period. It reflected the greatest increase over any previous year yet made. The budget had been planned in 1939, starting out with a modest $9,447,439. After five supplemental appropriations the sum of $256,652,964 was placed at the Signal Corps’ disposal. Since the computation of requirements was inextricably involved with budget estimates, each time a change occurred in one,
corresponding changes were necessary in the other. In addition, computation and budget might be submitted to the various War Department budget and fiscal agencies only to be rejected in whole or in part. When that happened, the budget estimates and computation of requirements had to be refigured and resubmitted. During the fiscal year 1941 thirty different budgets had been submitted. They reflected the rapid acceleration of prewar planning, with funds for radar, airplane communication, aircraft warning service, and troop equipment for the expanding Army looming large. For the fiscal year 1942 Signal Corps fiscal experts had started working in early February 1941, and the budget had been sent to Congress in May. The original budget contained twenty-seven projects, and totaled $103,577,000. Before it was passed by Congress and signed by the President, three additions had been made which amounted to twice as much as the whole of the original budget. In the succeeding months of 1941, while world events moved rapidly, the public funds that had been so lacking in the lean years just past poured into the War Department in greater and greater amounts. Before war struck, the Signal Corps had benefited by two supplemental appropriations. Now, in the closing months of fiscal year 1942, all budget estimates prepared for use “in case of war” had been swallowed up by the enormous demands of war itself. In a single supplemental appropriation in March, the Signal Corps passed a historic milestone when it received its first billion-dollar grant of funds. Before the fiscal year ended it would have for expenditure several times that sum.2
What would it get for its money? For one thing, it hoped to get communications equipment for 33,233 airplanes: radio compasses, command sets, search sets, frequency meters, receivers for marker beacons, interphone equipment, and all the other complicated and expensive radio and radar items that go to make up the eyes and ears and nervous systems of airplanes. For another, it would spend an enormous sum for aircraft warning service to buy the radars to ring the shores of the nation and its territorial possessions, and to train the men to operate the radars. It would buy radios for tanks; it would build handie-talkies for foot soldiers; it would pay salaries for the thousands of civilian workers thronging into its offices and depots and warehouses. It would get millions of miles of wire, hundreds of thousands of batteries, and thousands of cameras.3
Throughout the period June 1940 to 7 December 1941, the Army had computed its requirements according to the exigencies of the moment and to the limit of funds that could be secured from Congress. Within the Office of the Chief Signal Officer the representatives of the using arms prepared lists of signal supplies and equipment to meet their own needs and forwarded these lists to the Supply Division. The Procurement Planning Section of the division had been busy with almost completely theoretical computations, arising from troop basis tables as they varied from year to year, and with studies looking toward the most effective use of industry in an emergency.4 The birth of the Army Supply Program in February 1942 heralded a new kind of computation, based upon the
requirements for a three-year period, 1942-1944, and expressed in the broadest terms, with no attention given to the problems of delivery, and no differentiation between types of equipment within a larger group. On that basis, the Signal Corps job looked even bigger than it had a few weeks before.
Basic Organization and Policies
As responsibilities and activities increased, the staff to handle them began to materialize. By March more and more reserve officers were reporting for duty, and on-the-job training together with intensified recruiting efforts was providing engineers, technicians, and clerical workers to augment the civilian staff. Within the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, the framework of the Supply Service embraced the two divisions, Radar and Materiel, responsible for the Siamese-twin nature of procurement and research and development. General Olmstead had sought to trim the fat from the procurement function, and to leave it as lean and fit as possible. That it could not run as fast as the research and development function to which it was shackled was largely due to the fact that procurement was inextricably bound to the communications industry, which for the greater part meant five large companies.
Olmstead had invited the presidents of the Big Five (General Electric, Western Electric, the Radio Corporation of America, Westinghouse, and Bendix), as well as Maj. Gen. Richard C. Moore, Deputy Chief of Staff, James L. Fly, chairman of the Defense Communications Commission, Ray C. Ellis of the Office of Production Management, and Wallace Clark, who headed his firm of administrative consultants, to meet with him on 17 January.5 He asked the Under Secretary of War to address the meeting, and suggested that he mention “the necessity of bettering ... stated delivery dates; the importance of blasting out bottlenecks in production; the advantages of ... sending representatives to accomplish the same results with sub-contractors,” and asked him to bring up the subject of further curtailment of the manufacture of radio sets for civilian use.6
The Big Five held more than 80 percent of all Signal Corps contracts. As of March 1942 the Signal Corps estimated that the military services would have $4,350,000,000 available for contract awards in the fields of radio and radar. Yet the total industrial output of the industry was only $250,000,000.7 What was the best way to solve the problems of plant expansion, scarcity of machine tools, shortage of labor supply, inspection, spare parts, stock control, packaging, financing, critical materials, and a thousand other factors? Olmstead said that he expected the large industries to cooperate and to make their own plans for a solution of the problems; if they did not, the government would take whatever action was necessary.
The policy of the Signal Corps, he said to Lt. Gen. William S. Knudsen at about the same time, was to spread the work and
money throughout big and little companies. Olmstead wanted “no monopolistic aspect whatever.” Knudsen replied: “If you keep on giving them more and more you will be nearly monopolistic before you get through.” Olmstead explained that Signal Corps contracts provided that 30 to 40 percent must be subcontracted. That put the burden on the big companies to develop their own sources of supply.8
This was more easily said than done. While accepting the idea of subcontracting and building up new sources of supply, the big companies were at the same time opposing undue regimentation within the war-economy framework made necessary by the exigencies of the conflict.9 Meanwhile, the smaller companies, freed from the competition of the Big Five, which had theretofore controlled the market, were harvesting the windfall created by civilian demands. The component situation became tighter, and threatened shortages of critical materials developed into a grim reality, while production of radios, phonographs, and musical instruments ate up the same critical materials that signal equipment required.
Nevertheless, it was impractical if not impossible to stop all production of civilian radios and related equipment at once upon the outbreak of war. It took time to place contracts, to educate smaller companies for war work, and to bring about conversion to wartime manufacturing in an orderly manner. Any drastic order immediately forbidding the manufacture of civilian radio equipment would merely have forced manufacturers out of business or into some other line of work, with a consequent loss of facilities and trained workers to the industry.10 Even had it been considered wise in the light of these considerations to forbid the manufacture of civilian items of electronic equipment, the Chief Signal Officer lacked authority, as did the Secretary of War, to force any manufacturer to produce only military equipment. On 16 January 1942 the President created the War Production Board and centralized control of procurement and production in its chairman, Donald Nelson. The chief of WPB’s Radio Division, Ray Ellis, was also a member of Brig. Gen. Roger B. Colton’s Signal Corps procurement committee. As soon as Ellis and Colton deemed it advisable, the WPB began issuing a series of limitation orders to the radio industry. On 23 January 1942 it issued Limitation Order L-44, which cut radio manufacturers to 55 percent of their 1941 volume of commercial production. In March the War Production Board amended the order, prohibiting all production of commercial radios and phonographs. In May it went still further, issuing Order L-37-A, which stopped manufacture of practically all musical instruments.11
The limitation orders in effect constituted an ultimatum to the electronics industry to turn to military production or face the possibility of closing its factories. Of necessity the industry began converting to military production. Yet the elimination of commercial production of items which consumed critical materials, though helpful, was a palliative rather than a curative measure, of value chiefly in that it granted the government and industry a little time to get at the
root of the problem. The root was a dual shortage: of essential raw materials, and of manufacturing facilities for converting the raw materials into electronic equipment.
Solution depended upon careful coordination of the requirements of the various contractors and scrupulous allocation of scarce materials and the components made from them, as well as upon assistance to potential manufacturers in establishing themselves. The big companies and the Signal Corps tackled the problems together. Although eventually many smaller concerns developed into valuable sources of supply, throughout the war the ultimate responsibility for supplying electronic equipment remained with the giants of the industry. The policy enunciated by General Olmstead in June 1942 remained the official policy. He stated:
The Signal Corps has placed the bulk of its business with a small number of large companies. At the beginning of the present emergency the large companies were “going concerns” with large resources in engineering ability, plant equipment, and skill in producing communication and radar equipment. Other firms were not able to take large orders, and required time and assistance in expanding engineering staffs and training them in the type of production required. It has been the policy of my office to place large contracts with the large firms and [to] require them to subcontract approximately 40 percent to the smaller firms. This permitted the utilization of the resources of the large firms in training the smaller firms. This policy was approved by the Under Secretary of War and the Office of Production Management.12
Within the Signal Corps supply headquarters a great deal more work devolved upon the Facilities and Materials Branch, which absorbed some of the functions of the old Procurement Planning Section and began reorganizing all its special studies in an intensive effort to establish maximum capacities in existing facilities, to discover new sources of supply, and to unearth substitutes for materials no longer available. Throughout the spring of 1942, the Signal Corps and industry attacked bottlenecks, reducing them at least, and sometimes eliminating them entirely.13
Facilities Expansion and the Problem of Components
At first, the subcontracting programs of the big companies usually involved major components, the subcontractors supplying the constituent parts of radio sets and other signal assemblies, and the prime contractors performing the assembly and shipping the items of equipment from their own plants. At a later period the work was spread still further by subcontracting for complete assemblies.14 But in the spring of 1942, most of the subcontracting was for components, and the supply situation for these parts was unequivocally bad.
To begin with, components were of infinite variety. Such commonplace items as screws and bolts were components. So were dynamotors, essential to vehicular radios. So were the slivers of quartz crystal used to control frequencies and the steatite ceramic coils vital to high frequency sets. So too were vacuum tubes, dry cell batteries, ball
bearings, telephone cords. These added up to just a few of the items that were actually holding back or threatening to hold back production of Signal Corps equipment either because ingredients were scarce or because manufacture was difficult and on an inadequate scale.15
The procurement staff, in somewhat belated recognition of the seriousness of the shortages, was taking action, but for some time made slow headway. Until production schedules suddenly began to be held up because of shortages of such items as fixed capacitors, ceramic coils, dynamotors, meters, batteries, and even certain types of cord, the Signal Corps, relying upon performance specifications and the opinion of its prime contractors, had assumed that the components industry would be equal to any emergency. Even as late as 13 January 1942 prime contractors for radio, meeting with representatives of the supply arms, had agreed that, with the possible exception of the variable capacitor industry, component producers could meet wartime demands with their existing plant capacity. This conference had scarcely adjourned before military radios began to stall on the assembly line for lack of components.16
One approach to the problem of securing more was to increase plant facilities producing them. Even before Pearl Harbor more than $15,000,000 in plant expansions had been sponsored by the Signal Corps through Defense Plant Corporation funds, although only one plant, producing steatite, had made much headway. By Tune 1942 45 government-financed expansions involving 35 companies and the sum of $45,000,000 were under way,17 and in addition the electronics industry itself was expending sizable amounts of money to enlarge its factories. Of the plant expansions that the Signal Corps initiated during the entire war, 80 out of a total of 106 were for components. In the early months of 1942 the items for which plant expansions were recommended included tubes, stop nuts, dynamotors, steatite, quartz crystals, conductors, coils, capacitors, cordage, and transformers.
As a matter of fact, a Signal Corps supply officer stated at a later date that in the early months of the war, the Signal Corps had tended to rush into expansion at every report of an existing shortage, without much understanding of the relationship between requirements and capacity.18 In any event, lack of plant capacity was only one part of the problem. Another part of it concerned the lack of coordinated procurement among the supplying arms and services. By February it had become apparent that mass production of many radio and other electronic components required by the Signal Corps, the Air Corps, and the Navy was impossible if each of the organizations persisted in procuring these items under its own specifications. All government specifications required optimum performance in components, a considerably higher standard than that ordinarily required for commercial production. In addition, there was enough variation in the specifications of the
three military agencies to limit sources of manufacture. For instance, a manufacturer able to make satisfactory resistors for the Signal Corps might be unable to make them for the Navy. As is the case in most other classes of industries, one or two firms known for the high quality of their products soon became overloaded with orders, while other companies were soliciting business to keep their organizations intact.19
To simplify specifications and make them uniform throughout the procuring services, the War Production Board asked the American Standards Association, a federation of some eighty national technical societies, trade associations, and government agencies, to work with the services to achieve standardizations. In response, the American Standards Association organized the War Committee on Radio in early March, with Maj. William M. Perkins representing the Signal Corps, and the committee began its important work of developing war standards for the critical components, observing the following priority: fixed capacitors, fixed resistors, variable resistors, connectors, dynamotors, tube sockets, crystals and holders, vibrators, and dry batteries.20
In some cases competition among the Navy, the Air Forces, and the Signal Corps for scarce facilities held back deliveries of components. An early case developed around the procurement of meters. The Signal Corps suggested that representatives of the three services get together and compare requirements and work out a solution. They did so, and discovered that the Signal Corps needed meters at the rate of 40,000 a month, the Air Forces at 4,500 a month, and the Navy at only 10,000 a year. The representatives were able to work out an equitable allocation of existing facilities, and thereafter each service got what it needed without difficulty.21
Still another basic element in the complex problem of providing enough components (and therefore enough signal assemblies) was the lack of detailed knowledge on the part of both the Signal Corps and the principal contractors as to what raw materials would be required, and in what quantities. It was necessary to learn precisely what components comprised each assembled unit of equipment, what the ingredients of each component were, and how much of each ingredient every type of component required. Then, given the over-all equipment requirements as estimated from troop tables and tables of basic allowances, statisticians could compute the amount of raw material which industry needed to meet the requirements of the armed forces.
The previous year a group of six engineers and a number of clerks in the New York Procurement District had begun the work of making material breakdowns of all components of Signal Corps equipment and compiling lists that showed not only the quantity of raw materials per item, but also size, shape, quality, and grade of materials. This group had transferred to Philadelphia shortly before the United States entered the war, and in early 1942, when the component shortages developed, it acquired four more engineers and additional clerical help. It was slow work, exacting work, and the engineers who pioneered it had to get their information for the breakdowns as best they
could and in a variety of ways: from specifications and drawings, by examining and taking apart the equipment itself, by checking with cooperative manufacturers, and by going directly to the factories. They developed detailed notes on their findings and compiled these carefully, gradually amassing an enormous bulk of exceedingly valuable information.
While the group in Philadelphia compiled statistics about the components, procurement officers in all the districts were surveying the factories that produced them, building a substantial library of factual information about the financial status, machinery, labor, quality of work, and capacity of existing plants. Until it had acquired this information, the Signal Corps had no sound basis for determining which plants merited government-financed expansion or which could convert from civilian to military production after only minor changes. Once it had this basis, its interest and sponsorship began to reach behind the subcontractor and his plant to plants where raw materials were processed, and behind those to the mining companies. If the Signal Corps happened to be the principal consumer of a scarce raw material, it sponsored the necessary expansion of mining and processing facilities, as in the case of quartz crystal, steatite, and tantalum. In the case of materials which the Signal Corps had to have but used in smaller quantities than some other service, the Signal Corps presented its requirements to higher authority and let the procurement agency that was the heaviest consumer assume responsibility for the necessary expansion.
Material Shortages
When the United States entered the war, scarcities of raw materials had already begun to vex all government procurement agencies and producers of war materiel.22 Whether shortages were “strategic,” or “critical,” the result was the same: choking of production because the material to make equipment was not at hand.23 In either case, one of two things could be done: endeavor to do away with use of the material, or failing in that, find or develop substitutes for it. This was the story in the case of copper, mica, rubber, cadmium, aluminum, and many other raw materials.24
The problem of the Signal Corps with respect to material shortages was in some instances no more and no less than that of the other supply services; in other cases, because of the peculiar nature of communication equipment, and the vital part communications play in modern warfare, the shortages represented a deadly threat to the whole procurement program, and through it to the security of the nation. Throughout the war, material shortages plagued the Signal Corps procurement program. Eventually, through simplification, standardization of components, redesigning of equipment, downgrading, substitution, and the use of synthetic materials, the Signal Corps overcame its material shortages. But the going was neither smooth nor easy, and in early 1942 the Signal Corps was not yet sure where the path led.
Tantalum
One of the more discouraging problems concerned the tantalum shortage. The first
substantial requirements for tantalum had developed in the fall of 1941 with the increasing production of radar. Oscillator, keyer, and rectifier tubes of the SCR-268 all required tantalum sheet or wire, and the short life of the tubes created a heavy demand for spares. Early versions of the SCR-299 and SCR-399 used tantalum plates and grids in their power-amplifiers and modulator tubes, and each new development created new demands. A survey of the industry conducted by the Planning Section had revealed that there were only two producers of tantalum in the world. One of them, Siemens-Halske, was in Berlin; the other, Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation, was in North Chicago. Fansteel agreed to expand, but was very slow to act. It was not until the last day of January 1942 that arrangements were concluded for the establishment of a new unit adjacent to the existing Fansteel plant in North Chicago; the lease agreement, signed by the Defense Plant Corporation, set the total project cost at $4,170,000. The expansion provided a capacity of about 100,000 pounds of tantalum metal per year, the maximum permitted by the available quantity of ore.25
This quantity appeared to be enough, although the very best estimates of requirements were likely to be inaccurate because there were no material breakdowns on electron tubes available, and in addition no one could say just how many tubes or what types would be needed. The Facilities and Materials Division of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer and the War Production Board were constantly engaged in computations and recomputations of tantalum requirements. In March, just as the planners were breathing more easily, another crisis loomed. The Joint Army and Navy Munitions Board announced that a considerable quantity of potassium tantalum fluoride, an intermediate material between the ore and the pure metal, would be required as a catalyst in the production of butadiene, the synthetic rubber.
As in most war shortages, there was no single easy and dramatic solution but a combination of several: plant expansion; strict allocation of tantalum and tantalum fluoride; substitution of less critical materials; and, to a lesser degree, salvage of tantalum in unserviceable tubes. A year later, in 1943, another crucial shortage occurred, when in the midst of peak production the ore supply sank to dangerously low levels. Then came a call upon the Air Transport Command and the Naval Air Transport Service to fly shipments of ore from South Africa and the Belgian Congo to meet the situation. But in the first half of 1942 that problem was still in the future and the ones at hand were enough to wrestle with.26
Rubber
The rubber situation was a major source of worry to the military organization. There were too many questions that only time could answer. Japanese successes had cut off the principal supply of natural rubber. Wild rubber trees in South and Central America constituted a sure but very limited source. The United States was beginning to get plantation rubber from Liberia, but shipping lanes to that country were subject to attack by German submarines. Large-scale production of synthetics was supposed
to begin in early 1943, but if there were delays or unforeseen difficulties in manufacture, synthetics could not meet the enormous demand. In the meantime conservation was the only solution.
In January, a month before the fall of Singapore, General Olmstead had been requested by Under Secretary of War Patterson to review again Signal Corps requirements for rubber “with a view to elimination or reduction of its use wherever possible to do so without adversely affecting the functioning of equipment,” and to submit the report by 20 January.27
Because of the complexity and delicacy of its equipment, the Signal Corps was probably faced with a knottier problem than were other services in attempting to change the amount of rubber it used, or in shifting from natural rubber to synthetics. Manufacturers were experimenting with insulation and jackets made of various elastomers that were beginning to be available, but, it was pointed out, “... No synthetic ... possesses as desirable ... characteristics ... as rubber. Synthetic insulated wires usually have been designed to excel for a special application [only]. ... “ Lowering the rubber content of insulation for W-110-B would conserve rubber and result in a better product than any synthetic yet tried could yield. Technicians of the Signal Corps Laboratories had pointed out that vinyl or other suitable thermoplastics would probably be satisfactory for telephone communication over distances required for assault wire W-130, but added that there was no known substitute for rubber for twisted pair over distances required for wire W-110-B. The research and development men also made flat pronouncement that they could not at that time eliminate latex from meteorological balloons because use of a substitute demanded a complete revision of the existing ascension-rate tables used in meteorological work.28
Nevertheless, substitutions must be made and conservation practised. According to the soberest estimates of the military supply organization and of the Office of Production Management, the nation was going to run short of rubber and rubber substitutes to the amount of 266,000 long tons within the next two years. Other services were able to substitute less critical materials in many instances: for example, steel wheels for rubber on certain engineering equipment, such as concrete mixers and portable air compressors, and plastics for rubber in enlisted men’s combs. Rubber boots could serve their purpose if made with 47 percent rather than 62 percent rubber; it was possible that tank tracks could be made of metal instead of rubber.29
But the Signal Corps was left with the fact that its most important field wire required rubber, that no known synthetic could substitute, and that the new lightweight assault wire W-130 offered almost as troubling a problem. Laboratory tests with insulation made of plasticized vinylite resin or a latex made from neoprene or
buna gave satisfactory results on W-130, but these substitutes could not be applied with the same machinery that produced natural latex coating. Government-financed units for applying liquid latex had barely come into production, and any change to substitutes which had to be applied by the extrusion process would mean different machinery. In view of the existing machine tools shortage, such a change would create a delay of from six months to a year in the delivery of the wire.30
Finding rubber substitutes for cable insulation also presented difficulties. In 1941 when radar production began to mount, the Signal Corps had begun what was to be a protracted search for a suitable dielectric for insulation of the ultrahigh-frequency cable required in great quantities for aircraft radar installations. There was not enough rubber to permit its use, and both the Navy and Signal Corps were trying to find a satisfactory synthetic that would be available in sufficient quantity.
A British firm had been making a satisfactory material, known as polythene or telcothene, but there were no existing facilities for its manufacture in the United States, and the British were not making enough for even their own needs. Since the Du Pont Company had been licensed to manufacture polythene under the British patents and had some knowledge of the processes involved, it offered to send some of its engineers to England to study the British method of production. Even if Du Pont succeeded in making polythene, it would be at least a year before there would be enough of it, particularly since cables insulated with the material had to be replaced every six months. So while the Du Pont engineers went to England, the Signal Corps searched for a substitute for polythene.31
The most promising appeared to be a material called Vistanex, a rubberlike product made entirely from petroleum. During the winter, five wire and cable companies had produced samples of cables insulated with Standard Oil Company’s Vistanex compounded with filling ingredients. The Naval Research Laboratory, to which the samples had been submitted for testing, had found that three of the companies, American Phenolic Corporation, General Electric, and Simplex Wire and Cable Company, had developed a Vistanex base compound which met the Navy’s tentative specifications for ultrahigh-frequency cable. Other American manufacturers experimented with other cable insulating materials. In February, when the Du Pont engineers returned to the United States with their report, officers and civilian engineers from the Office of the Chief Signal Officer and from the Bureau of Ships and Office of the Chief of Naval Operations met with representatives of the War Production Board to decide which type of insulation to use on cable. The Du Pont engineers’ report on polythene was discouraging. That the British would produce their own quota of 700 tons in 1942 was highly problematical. Serious difficulties of manufacturing technique showed that it would be impractical to attempt quantity production of polythene in the United States by the English process in any reasonable
time. Du Pont hoped to be able to work out a better method of manufacture in time, but it was clear that this source of insulation for ultrahigh-frequency cables could not be depended upon for the immediate future.
That left the Vistanex compounds. Standard Oil Company’s Bayway Plant, the only producer of the material in the country, was turning out no more than 45 tons a month. A new plant under construction would not be in production until early 1943. The War Production Board had already allocated the current production, keeping 30 of the 45 tons for domestic consumption; the remaining 15 tons were allocated to the British and Russians by executive order to provide a fractional part of what they needed. The Signal Corps had an allocation of only five tons monthly for wire and cable, and this calculation had not provided for ultrahigh-frequency cable since the supply organization had counted rather heavily on the ability of Du Pont to produce polythene.
The conferees thus reached the sticking point of the meeting: how were the Army and the Navy to get the 500 tons of suitable synthetic for the 1942 production of ultrahigh-frequency cable? Before the close of the conference everyone agreed that the cable should have first priority on Vistanex; that the Joint Army and Navy Munitions Board should ask the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to acquire a 500-ton stockpile of Vistanex and reallocate it to the wire and cable companies for manufacture of the ultrahigh-frequency cable; and that Du Pont’s neoprene, a special-purpose rubber, should be used as a substitute for the items on the original allocation schedule.32
The difficulties of the Signal Corps in its attempt to bring field wire and cable into the rubber conservation program brought about an important conference in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer on 11 February 1942. The chairman was Col. Byron A. Falk, a Signal Corps representative in the Office of the Under Secretary of War. Officers and engineers from the Procurement and Research and Development Divisions of the Signal Corps, and from the Monmouth laboratories met with the principal manufacturers of wire, cable, rubber goods, and synthetic rubbers to attempt to find a solution. How could the Signal Corps conserve rubber in wire insulation without worsening the performance of the wire? The conferees agreed that for immediate conservation, the best plan was to reduce the percentage of new rubber used in W-110-B insulation, and substitute reclaimed rubber. For the long-range program, they discussed ways of eliminating rubber entirely and substituting synthetic compounds. It was obvious that more experimental work in the use of synthetics was in order. The most recent field tests with assault wire insulated with vinyl resin plastic had been unsatisfactory: the wire had been difficult to handle, would not lie flat on the ground, and was hard to splice. Most of the suggestions for varying the amount of rubber used also involved some change in manufacturing methods which would slow down production.
Nearly all of the wire and cable manufacturers thought they could use reclaimed stock to replace a part of the new rubber, and calculated the quantities of natural rubber used by their firms per mile of W-110-B, ranging from 18 to 22 pounds. A questionnaire sent out to the companies after the meeting brought more detailed statements and disclosed the fact that none of the companies had used any synthetic rubber at all, that only one had used any “reclaim,” and that the variation in amount of crude rubber used (from 14.75 to 22 pounds) suggested that some manufacturers were trying harder than others to conserve the material. Western Electric, the most economical user of new rubber in the manufacture of cable, had offered to share its compounding information with its rivals.
Uneasily, the Signal Corps considered limiting the amount of rubber per twisted-pair mile. It had already revised specifications to permit 30 percent depreciation of physical properties of the insulation through aging; the standard had been 25 percent. A field engineer thought that the consumption of crude rubber could be reduced considerably by proper compounding, but warned that until the Signal Corps established a maximum weight of rubber per mile, most of the manufacturers would continue in the old pattern. He recommended immediate limitation of the amount to 18 pounds of crude rubber per mile, and in sixty days a further reduction to 15 pounds, about what Western Electric was using.33 The general development engineers favored the proposal, but the facilities and materials men feared that some of the manufacturers lacked the technical ability as well as the necessary equipment to operate under the 18-pound limitation.34
Although wire and cable did not yield easily to conservation requirements, there were other types of Signal Corps equipment that proved more amenable to change. Parking wheels on trailers did not need rubber tires, and neither did reel cart wheels. Engineers estimated that nearly 5,000 pounds of rubber could be saved on these two pieces of equipment alone during the fiscal year 1943. Because radar equipment was delicate and extremely intricate, and because the vehicles on which the sets were mounted were expected to maintain the speed of antiaircraft guns on the move, both laboratory and staff specialists recommended against trying anything other than rubber tires for these vehicles. By various means the Signal Corps conserved 255 tons of crude rubber in 1942. These savings multiplied in 1943, reaching 3,500 tons.35
Crystal Quartz
The basic decision to adopt crystal control for vehicular radio had been firmly established late in 1940.36 The program for
increasing the number of crystals by a more economical use of the insufficient supply of raw quartz immediately became inadequate, once war was declared. The Signal Corps had to act swiftly and effectively. An enormous increase in production had to come about and before that could be realized, the crystal-cutting handicraft had to be transformed into an industry; a manufacturing art had to shift from laboratory to mass production. Prospective manufacturers of oscillator plates had been hard to find prior to 7 December 1941, but by the turn of the year they were presenting themselves at district offices and in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer in large numbers. It was clear that many new factories would have to be established to provide for the wartime needs of the armed forces, but it was equally clear that any new manufacturer of crystal plates was going to have a hard time finding skilled workers and tools for his plant.
On the recommendation of the Army Communications and Equipment Coordination Board and the Civilian Advisory Board, following a February survey of the crystal situation, the Chief Signal Officer established a Quartz Crystal Coordination Section in the Materiel Division under the direction of Lt. Col. James D. O’Connell to get “the rapid disorderly growth of the industry under control” and to clear the way for mass production of crystal units.37 The new section had its own problem of personnel shortage, but beginning with 2 officers and 11 civilians, it developed a nucleus of highly qualified engineers, physicists, and crystallographers. By June, the staff had grown to 40, but the work load increased far more rapidly.
To realize the primary objective, which was to help the manufacturers build up their facilities to the point where production could meet requirements, the section devised an extensive technical program, dividing it into three phases. First, the technical staff visited the old-line crystal manufacturers, observed their techniques, obtained full descriptions of methods, processes, and equipment used, including blueprints, diagrams, instruction booklets, and photographs, and with this material established an information pool to provide the latest technical information. Thus the newcomer to the field and the small manufacturer of longer standing could profit by the most up-to-date developments worked out within the shops of Western Electric, Bendix, and other large companies. Second, this section established an equipment pool, with the Defense Supplies Corporation providing $1,500,000 in contracts for mass production of the equipment. As long as machine tools remained critical, the section allocated them from the pool. Third, staff members made field trips to the factories to help the manufacturers not only with technical information and equipment from the pools, but also with financial and priority problems. Basic to this educational program for the industry was a handbook issued by the section, which established a standard terminology so that for the first time a given term had the same meaning throughout the industry.
The Signal Corps selected prospective manufacturers on the basis of demonstrated ability to produce acceptable crystals at the minimum rate of 500 per week. To encourage promising applicants, there were educational orders and development contracts. At the same time the Signal Corps urged firms with prewar experience in crystal fabrication to expand and to develop
Hand-finishing a crystal. Crystals so finished were then checked electronically by the beat frequency method for accuracy
subcontractors, making government funds available to those who were unable to finance their own expansions. Gradually the number of facilities increased. At the outbreak of war there had been only twenty-nine; by the end of the fiscal year there were thirty-five, and most of the original number had effected expansions. To combat the shortage of skilled workers, the Signal Corps carried on a training program for engineers at Camp Coles during this period and then sent the graduates to the plants to conduct training programs among workers.
While the Signal Corps was getting the situation in hand with respect to facilities, techniques, tools, and skilled workers, another problem arose in the form of a price dispute that for some months interrupted the flow of raw quartz from Brazil to the United States. Despite the precariousness of basic supply, some good came of it. The shortage of raw quartz made the manufacturers more willing to accede to the Signal Corps’ proposals for smaller, thinner crystals for economy’s sake.38 Until the wartime shortage confronted them, crystal manufacturers had made oscillator plates with a surface measurement of about a square inch and a thickness of about a sixteenth of an inch. There had been no insistent reason for this practice; it was merely that the manufacturers always had made plates that
size. Now, by a process of predimensioning, they were able to reduce the size till the plates averaged less than 3/10 of a square inch in area, with a thickness of 15/1000 to 18/1000 of an inch.
Also, the sudden need for crystal units by the millions stimulated some major developments in manufacturing techniques. First in order of importance was the adoption of X-ray diffraction equipment for control of cutting angles, the first instance of using X-ray diffraction in a production line as part of a manufacturing procedure in this country, and the key to mass production of crystal units. Bell Telephone Laboratories had pioneered this work before the war. In the first spring of the war, the Signal Corps encouraged the work and spread the technical information throughout the industry. North American Phillips X-Ray Company and the General Electric X-Ray Corporation designed and manufactured the equipment. Another Bell Telephone contribution was the process of etching to frequency as a means of retarding deterioration of the oscillator plate. Working with the Signal Corps Laboratories, Bendix developed improved cutting techniques and contributed to the design of crystal lapping equipment. G. C. Hunt and P. R. Hoffman Companies developed the precision planetary lap. Galvin Manufacturing Company perfected the milling method of finishing crystals. Reeves Sound Laboratories applied X-ray irradiation procedures to adjusting crystal frequency and developed safe etching compounds.39
Steatite
As in the case of quartz crystal, the shortage of steatite threatened to upset Signal Corps wartime procurement. Just as high frequency radio and radar performance depended on the piezoelectric property of crystal wafers for holding a desired frequency, it depended upon the dielectric property of fired steatite parts for providing the means of high frequency operation. Fired shapes of steatite with their remarkable imperviousness to extremes of temperature, moisture, dryness, and acids, were used for insulators, such as grid spacers in high frequency transmitter tubes, and for cores, bushings, and resistors in radio, radar, and other electronic equipment. Steatite was critical throughout the war, but it was especially precarious during the first year and a half.
The Army could thank its Signal Corps procurement planners that the situation was not even more desperate. For more than a year, the Signal Corps had done what it could to increase steatite production despite industrial indifference, special problems of manufacture, and distance between the source of supply of raw material and the manufacturing plants. It had sparked the industrial expansions in six companies that were expected to increase dollar value of production by about $9,000,000 by the end of the year. Now, with armament estimates rising relentlessly, and with hundreds of steatite parts required for every airplane, every tank, every aircraft warning
installation, it seemed likely that the best it could do was not going to be good enough.
The Joint Army and Navy Munitions Board took official cognizance of the seriousness of the problem in February by creating a special steatite committee. Thereafter all military needs could be figured and dealt with through cooperative effort. The first estimates of the committee in February showed that Army and Navy requirements for steatite would reach a value of $27,000,000 during the year; corresponding estimates of possible production, taking into account all known plant expansions to be made, stopped short of $20,000,000, and it was expected that the year 1943 would bring a 100-percent rise in requirements.40
With the declaration of war, the manufacturers lost much of their fear of large-scale expansion, but the existing plants could not be expanded much further because of the critical shortage of machinery and machine tools and the difficulty of getting additional supplies of them manufactured. The established manufacturers began to cooperate much more closely with the Signal Corps. For instance, they volunteered to survey tile and porcelain manufacturing plants to see whether any could convert to steatite manufacture.41 They also undertook research to develop substitutes of plastic or glass, though neither proved satisfactory. A valuable contribution by the industry was its experimentation with substitutes for steatite talc, which demonstrated that other materials or the lower grades of talc could be used for a number of commodities needed by the military organization thus releasing some of the steatite grade talc for electronic purposes. No substitute for steatite talc could be found for insulators.42
Disturbed by the Army and Navy Munitions Board Steatite Committee figures, the director of the Signal Supply Service, General Colton, asked Col. Louis B. Bender to make a special study of Signal Corps steatite requirements. The steatite crisis delayed Signal Corps equipment deliveries during April and May, even though total steatite production in those months was 15 percent and 19 percent greater than the combined requirements of all users. Behind this seeming anomaly lay a notable lack of systematic scheduling of production on the manufacturers’ part to obtain a proper balance between the hundreds of types of parts needed. Signal Corps contractors were provided with enough of the simple, easily produced parts to last for months, but had none at all of other types needed for current production. The steatite manufacturers, faced with schedules they considered impossible to meet anyway, often chose to neglect certain items ordered and kept on making large quantities of others, particularly the simple parts on which newly hired employees could be trained. Buyers had to share the blame because they often neglected to place their orders early enough. They ordered other components as soon as they got their contracts, but steatite parts seemed so simple, so innocuous, that they neglected them, then were distressed when they could not get delivery within two to four weeks.
Bender pointed out these things in his report of 1 July. He also estimated that the Signal Corps would not require as much steatite as the Army and Navy Munitions Board report had indicated. But he warned that the crisis would come in July, when steatite production would be only 87 percent of the amount required, with the next two months too close for comfort. He cited what could be done: redouble efforts to complete expansions, particularly in the matter of providing machine tools; make more use of substitutes; institute a less rigid inspection of steatite parts, accepting parts with chips, bubbles, discolored spots, ridges, and warpage so long as the defects did not affect the performance, reliability, or life of the part; and last, institute closer control over steatite production schedules and distribution to assure that only essential products were made, and that they went where they were needed most.43
Shortly after the opening of hostilities, the Signal Corps enlisted the aid of the Bureau of Mines and the Geological Survey to locate new sources of steatite talc. The search was to continue throughout the year, but already there were indications of new sources in California, Georgia, New York, Maryland, Montana, New Mexico, and North Carolina.44 Altogether, General Olmstead was not entirely whistling in the dark when he reported at a conference on supply problems on 18 June: “The steatite problem looks brighter for the future. ...”45
Aluminum
Aluminum was one of the materials that procurement planners had known to be critical well before the opening of hostilities. It was not that deposits of bauxite, from which aluminum is extracted, were scant, for the United States is rich in bauxite; but as soon as the President launched the 50,000-airplane construction program in May 1940 the sudden demand for the enormous quantities of aluminum that would be needed taxed productive capacity. In spite of great expansion on the part of the Aluminum Company of America, the only major manufacturer of the metal either before or during the war, it took several years of production of aluminum to catch up with the vast requirements of global warfare. In February 1942 Maj. Norris G. Kenny, in opening a meeting in the Office of the Under Secretary of War to consider aluminum in relation to Signal Corps requirements, stated that although production of aluminum was doubling and redoubling (60,000,000 pounds a month in 1941, 120,000,000 pounds a month in 1942, and an expected 250,000,000 a month in 1943) there still would not be enough to meet the requirements of the war. At this time the Air Corps was using two thirds of the Army’s entire allocation; of the remaining third, the Signal Corps received 10 percent.46
The Signal Corps, as a substantial user of primary grade aluminum, had lost no time in developing a conservation program. Its development engineers made a thorough study of all signal items that contained
aluminum, experimented with them, tested them, recommended savings in quantity or quality, and in many cases substituted steel, bakelite, paper, plastics, zinc, or brass for aluminum parts. They had to advance cautiously; the substitutions could not be allowed to interfere with the performance of the equipment or to require such excessive redesign of the equipment as would call for retooling and so result in delayed production.
Redesigning the SCR-245 radio offered an opportunity to substitute steel for 12 percent of the aluminum needed for the set, which was being adapted for use in tanks, where lightness was not an essential characteristic. Revising the specifications for the ML-510 timing device used with the ML-47 theodolite permitted a saving of three and a half pounds of aluminum for each timer; on the order for 500 placed in February this change represented a saving of 1,750 pounds of aluminum. Substituting steel for aluminum in the mast of the medium-range ground radio SCR-177-B saved 30 pounds a set. In certain items, such as the paratroop set SCR-536, the handie-talkie of a later period, where lightness was imperative, it was impracticable to use heavier substitutes, but in many of the lightweight items it was possible to substitute a cheaper or more easily obtainable aluminum alloy for a scarcer one.47
These and other substitutions saved 1,500 tons of aluminum in the fiscal years 1942 and 1943. By the end of 1943, aluminum was in plentiful supply.
Production Expediting
It was inevitable that the effort to expand production so rapidly in the face of new war-born restrictions and controls, the shortage of materials, and the lack of experienced suppliers, should call for a corps of industrial trouble shooters from the military agencies. Within the Signal Corps, this duty fell to the Production Expediting Section of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer. Probably no other section was more immediately affected by the enormous expansion of the production effort. The section had been organized in August 1941, one of the first of such units to be established in the War Department although big business employed expediters regularly.48
Foreseeing two months before Pearl Harbor that office administration might become chaotic, General Olmstead had called in a firm of consulting management engineers, Wallace Clark and Company, to assist the Signal Corps in setting up administrative procedures to keep pace with the military preparations. He hoped that their services would compensate in part for the lack of a tightly knit, experienced management organization of adequate size, and for the newness and greenness of administrative units which overnight had expanded from a handful of workers experienced in Army ways to hundreds and thousands who were inexperienced. It was an innovation in management practice, and the Services of Supply had scarcely been established when General Somervell was called upon to explain why the Signal Corps could not run its own business. Why, asked Congressman
it necessary for the Signal Corps to hire Wallace Clark and Company to manage it at the rate of $53,000 a year? Somervell, who had known the company for “many years,” replied that he thought it “excellent” and was confident that it could perform management services “in a much more economical manner” than the Army could.49
The management engineers served as fact-finders and advisers only. Many of the Clark studies were directed toward simplifying the flow of work through the supply organization with a view to expediting industrial production. They noted a number of obstacles in the way but admitted there was little the Signal Corps could do about some of them. They pointed to the yearly basis of the Army Supply Program, to the quarterly basis of the Training and Mobilization Plan, which in turn was predicated on a different troop basis from that used for the Supply Program, and to the Expenditure Programs which matched neither. Here was confusion, but confusion that was the order laid down by the War Department for the Signal Corps to follow.
The Wallace Clark methods included the design of suitable flow charts and executive control charts and the planning of efficient techniques of management. The firm examined and synchronized delivery schedules and precedence lists, proposed new ways of doing things, and recommended procedures for carrying out the proposals. They suggested shifts in responsibility; in some cases decentralization of functions from the Office of the Chief Signal Officer to the field and the establishment of new field agencies. In some instances their recommendations seem to have stressed routine to the point of losing sight of purpose, that is, centralized control but decentralized operation. The Chief Signal Officer gave the firm complete freedom to peer into all functions and procedures, to work with employees and management at all levels, and to move its consultants about, within, and between installations, in order that they might get a complete picture of the interrelationships of Signal Corps agencies and in order that the entire Corps might benefit from the surveys. The Production Expediting Section was one of the first to come under the scrutiny of the Wallace Clark firm, whose experts felt that the unit was weak. They found that as many as six Signal Corps representatives from different units had upon occasion descended upon a factory with no agreement among them as to what expediting involved. The Signal Corps, lacking a united front, was fair game for the contractor who wanted to play off one expediter against another.50
The Wallace Clark production engineers set up a plan that divided the continental United States into 100 areas, each with an expediter attached to the Procurement District in which the area was located, but merely “for matters of discipline and for cooperation.” The expediters would be free to come and go and to use the facilities of the district offices, but they would be under the functional supervision of the Production Expediting Section of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer. The field expediter for an area would triumph over cross-purposes and duplication by making sure that he accompanied any officer or employee sent to a factory in his area. So argued the Wallace Clark experts, and the Chief Signal Officer
agreed. They accordingly set up a training program for the initial 100 expediters. It covered one week of indoctrination, a visit to Fort Monmouth, instruction in factory scheduling, and one week in actual field work. The Clark firm prepared a comprehensive manual covering the points to be considered by an expediter on visits to a contractor, such as checking his bills of material, raw materials, tools and fixtures, labor supply, plant load, production control methods, and factory organization.51
The Signal Corps expediters worked in a very broad field. They were concerned with production problems of the entire communications industry, not with those of just one company. Their duties took them into many plants; they had to have a working knowledge of the industry as a whole, and of many factors affecting production: facilities, materials, shortages, personnel, equipment types and standardization, packaging, sources of supply, transportation, storage, and others. Above all, they had to have constantly in mind the broad outlines of Signal Corps procurement policy and the production goals that were to be reached. In many ways, their duties touched and overlapped those of other sections, especially in the field of procurement planning, despite the fact that their concern was mainly with what happened each day, or the next day, or the next week, while the planning sections dealt with the projection of the large procurement plan into the months and years ahead. Yet at the same time, the expediters could not ignore the distant goal nor take actions that would seriously affect future programs. They had to be men of great versatility and expert knowledge, with a very sure touch. Such men were not easy to find.
Both the War Department and the Civil Service Commission had believed that the many applications on file with the commission would yield an ample supply of qualified engineers. But the application forms were out of date. Many of the men could not be located, and of those who could be, many were not qualified. No precise classification for the expediters existed in Civil Service records. Job descriptions were set up after numerous conferences and consultations between the Civil Service Commission and the Signal Corps. There remained the salary problem. Numerous men whose abilities were just what the Signal Corps wanted refused to work at the Civil Service salary levels. Eventually an agreement to base the annual salary offer on the average of the applicant’s preceding five-year period of earnings proved successful.52 Civil Service channels alone could not dredge up enough qualified men. Officers and civilians carried on their own recruiting campaigns. Letters went to likely candidates all over the country. Industry spread the news. Procurement district officials kept their eyes open for candidates. So did other Signal Corps agencies, the War Production Board, and the Office of the Under Secretary of War. One group of men came on duty because the motor industry was languishing under the shut down of the pleasure-car trade.53
By March 1942 the Expediting Section within the Office of the Chief Signal Officer had twenty-five men, including a group of engineers who worked with particular industrial materials such as ceramics,
quartz crystals, and tantalum. There was also a section handling machine tools, jigs, and equipment programs on new contracts. Assigned from the procurement districts to plants of the principal Signal Corps contractors and subcontractors were thirty engineers, with others being added at the rate of ten per week. Each of these men had to master an intensive training course in the Washington section before he moved out to a field location, taking with him the formidable 150-page Wallace Clark manual of instructions and information.54
The months from March to June 1942 were grueling for the men in Production Expediting. The urgency to get out equipment overwhelmed them; for each problem solved, a dozen rose to take its place. Time became the most precious commodity in the world. Every stenographer typed “Tomorrow Won’t Be Good Enough” onto letters. Letters were not good enough, as a matter of fact; the telephone and the wireless were the accepted tools of trade. Especially in the procurement districts, the men went into factories to see for themselves what was needed. Half their time was spent in field contacts, and, in many cases, an expediter was assigned to a single plant as a resident trouble shooter. Their activities touched upon many a sore spot in the procurement body. By following a field engineer or a staff expediter around for a couple of days, a man from Mars would have had a fairly comprehensive idea of where the chokepoints in the procurement program lay.
For example, smaller plants converting to war work needed help. The Fred M. Link Company was making tank radio sets SCR-293 and 294 for the Signal Corps. At the same time, peacetime orders for police and plant protection equipment clogged the company’s books. Expediters found companies that could not make Signal Corps equipment, but could turn out the civilian sets, and arranged to have these concerns subcontract them, leaving the Link Company free to get out the tank radios on schedule. Again, the Connecticut Telephone & Electric Company had a contract for 15,000 EE-8 telephones, and a very short time in which to produce them. At first it looked hopeless, but expediters helped out by getting materials, following up deliveries, and suggesting ways of speeding and smoothing the manufacturing processes. The telephones were delivered three days ahead of schedule.
Often the delivery of a small part or a piece of machinery used in a manufacturing process saved weeks or months of time. Expediters got air-blast cleaning equipment needed in the manufacture of radio receiver BC-312 on 1 April instead of 1 June. They saved six weeks on the delivery of five radio transmitters to the British. They provided four X-ray machines for Western Electric for crystal grinding test equipment a month ahead of time. They secured a small reserve of spring copper for a company that could not fabricate cutting blades for the quartz crystal trade without it. They saved three weeks’ time by speeding up the delivery of binding head screws which threatened to delay Gilfillan Brothers on the interphone RC-27. With their help, Hewlett-Packard saved four weeks’ time in delivering parts for filter equipment used by their prime contractor, Airadio, Incorporated. A speed-up of three weeks on delivery of brass shells from the Ramsdell Tool Company permitted the Lundquist Tool and
Manufacturing Company to deliver certain items to its contractor, A. J. Ulmer. Westinghouse was building switchboard BD-57, but a subcontractor delivered faulty commutators. Expediters arranged to have the commutators sent back and reworked, shipped to Westinghouse by air express, and assembled and inspected on Sunday in order not to stop the Westinghouse production line. Teletype Corporation needed small motors, but could not specify exactly how many, nor when it would need them. Expediters worked out an arrangement with General Electric to build up a bank of these motors so that they would be on hand when Teletype needed them. When Lapp Insulator was reduced to a three-day supply of mast subassemblies, secured from the American Phenolic Corporation, expediters had two hundred of them on hand within twenty-four hours, and a promise from American Phenolic to deliver future requirements on schedule.
The production expediters were not primarily concerned with the problems of substitution of materials, but their work brought them into contact with the matter, and they sometimes acted as liaison men between firms and the other offices of the Signal Corps. They succeeded in getting a satisfactory substitute for sheet aluminum that Crosley Radio Corporation needed for the 13,000 sets of radio SCR-284 it was building. They got a different type of 200-watt transmitter for a radio station, and saved a month’s time. They interceded to win permission for Bendix to replace steatite resistors and switch bodies with porcelain.
Sometimes it seemed that every firm in America wanted a higher priority rating, and wanted the Production Expediting Section’s help in getting it. Everybody needed nickel, mica, aluminum, steatite, tantalum, copper, or some other scarce material. Expediters often interceded with the War Production Board to get allocations of material. Quite naturally, every firm engaged in war work felt that the order it was fabricating was more important than any held by another firm. It was part of the expediters’ ticklish problem to know which actually did have precedence and to help those firms most critically in need of assistance. For example, the Murdock Manufacturing Company’s threatened shutdown in its production of headset HS-39 was averted when expediters obtained a release of 6,000 pounds of crude and 6,500 pounds of reclaimed rubber. Lapp Insulator Company could not get the cone-pointed machine screws it needed from Rochester Machine Screw Company because that company had a large bank of other orders, all carrying the same A-1-A priority rating. Stromberg-Carlson could make the screws but did not have the steel. Rochester turned over part of its steel to Stromberg-Carlson, and Lapp Insulator got the screws it needed on time.
Expediters got the consent of the Department of Interior to refine American crude oil into penetration asphalt for electrical cables to replace asphalt previously received from Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela. They got a WPB release for typewriters with special type and spacing, which Philco needed to type calibration charts for the SCR-211 frequency meter set, as well as 10,600 rubber bushings for aircraft shock absorbers. They found mycalex hub insulators required for assembling antenna reels and shipped them air express to Aircraft Accessories Corp. They arranged with the Air Corps to divert enough aluminum to Western Electric to finish up the command sets, SCR-274. Westinghouse got the steel tubing it needed
for SCR-270 towers, and saved a month’s time.
Crystals were in short supply everywhere. At Bendix, the resident expediter checking the crystal stock found it so low that inspection of SCR-211’s would soon have been stopped. He got enough crystals to keep the production and inspection lines going smoothly. Both Cardwell Manufacturing Company and Zenith Radio got their crystals from General Electric. Cardwell had enough; Zenith had almost none on hand. Expediters arranged to divert a Cardwell order to Zenith to keep both turning out SCR-211’s. A Signal Corps resident expediter at RCA earned a commendation for his assistance in expediting shipment of tubes and crystals for a radio transmitter at Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s headquarters in China. The Donald M. Murray Company, one of the principal suppliers of quartz crystal, chartered a freighter airplane to transport quartz from Rio de Janeiro to relieve the desperate shortage of quartz. Through coordination with the Air Priorities Section of the Department of Commerce, Signal Corps expediters arranged air freight to replace the ballast customarily used on the chartered plane, thus bringing the price of the quartz down from a dollar and a half to a dollar a pound. The White House signal detachment needed twelve special radio crystals. To get them, it looked as if production lines from regular crystal suppliers would have to be disrupted. Expediters found two sources of supply, which together could furnish the required crystals. They were shipped the same day the order was placed.
There were other problems that did not fall into any convenient category, but which were important in their effect on the war effort. Expediters developed a method for drying the generator cases of the SCR-284 in four hours instead of the original forty. On the west coast, they persuaded officials of the Southern Pacific Railroad to change train schedules so that a number of commuting employees of the Eitel-McCullough Company in San Bruno, California, could get to work on time. In the east, they arranged a meeting between executives of the Bliley Electric Company and the New York Central Railroad, and worked out an agreement for additional space from the railroad to house Bliley’s office and engineering department, for which Bliley had been negotiating unsuccessfully for months. At Erie, Pennsylvania, not only Bliley but also the Burke Electric Company had been trying to effect simple changes. For two years Burke had wanted a traffic light installed at a busy intersection. An expediter visited the mayor of Erie and worked out an arrangement whereby the city stationed a traffic policeman at the intersection during the rush hours.55
By April small business was beginning to get the hang of things. Production Expediting engineers felt proud of Consolidated Radio Products Company, in Chicago, a firm they had sponsored as a potential manufacturer of headsets. Consolidated went about the job energetically, asked for and got contracts from the procurement districts at both Wright Field and Philadelphia, tooled up, and was delivering sets within four weeks’ time. Consolidated also supplied headsets to Signal and Air Corps schools in emergencies when the schools found themselves without equipment because their routine requisitions had
been diverted to meet more urgent needs. Signal Corps inspectors at the Belmont Radio Company agreed that the BC-348’s which Belmont was building were of considerably better quality than the same sets being turned out by one of the Big Five concerns. They cited the Rauland Corporation as an example of active, progressive management. Rauland had gathered together a supply of most of the critical materials and items under its own roof or at nearby plants. Unable to get critically short variable air condensers for the SCR-211’s it was building, Rauland built its own condensers, and had enough to supply Zenith Radio Corporation as well, relieving the strain on the principal supplier.56
There were fumbles and failures as well as successes. Scheduling was not yet smooth enough for production lines to keep going without interruptions. For example, the Stromberg-Carlson Telephone Manufacturing Company, building BD-96 and BD-97 switchboards, got an additional order too late to prevent an interruption to the production line. Shutting down meant a two months’ delay. Crosley Corporation was slow in getting the SCR-284 into production. Five expediters stationed at the plant to assist on various components had not succeeded in prying a single set out of the plant by the middle of April. The increasingly tight supply of steatite meant slowing down or closing numerous plants.
The expediters, buzzing over the whole procurement clover patch, sometimes got in the way of other sections working on the same problems. The fault often lay with overbroad or ambiguously worded directives. In May both Production Expediting Section and Facilities and Materials Division men were going to the Joint Army and Navy Munitions Board and the War Production Board whenever additional allocations of raw materials were needed on contracts.57 Other sections were similarly confused. The Purchase Section made cross-country calls for information which it could have obtained by picking up an extension phone and dialing Production Expediting.58 The expediters’ field manual instructed the engineers to make plant surveys on their first visit to a plant. It appeared that much of this material was a duplication of information already on file or available to the procurement planners.59
Yet if the expediters were sometimes overeager, or trod on too-sensitive toes, or intruded in fields held sacred by other activities and organizations, they nonetheless had a very solid record of accomplishment behind them as the fiscal year drew to a close. When the section was organized in August 1941, out of 65 selected critical items, only 46 percent were on schedule or ahead of schedule and the rest lagged far behind. By the middle of May 1942, a survey of a similar selected group of critical items showed that 74 percent were on schedule or ahead of schedule. The remaining 26 percent were behind schedule by only a small amount of time. This very marked improvement had been made in the face of an eight-fold increase in contract awards: from $235,000,000, to $1,832,000,000. Not only that, but in August 1941 materials had been easy to get, and now manufacturers faced shortages on every hand. Yet production schedules had bettered materially in the face of all the
warborn problems that plagued the industry. That this was in great part a result of the efforts of the expediters can hardly be questioned.60
The centralized plan was not without its defects, however. The procurement districts were dissatisfied with the arrangement. Their most potent argument was the entirely logical view that since the district contracting officer made the contracts and was responsible for the manufacturers’ performance under them, his office and not Washington should have direct control over all matters affecting contractual arrangements. Expediting was supposed to be a tool by means of which the contracting officer met his obligation for keeping deliveries on schedule on contracts placed by him. Under the existing organization, direct control of this tool was denied the contracting officer. Furthermore, the procurement district felt that the “salesmen” employed by the Office of the Chief Signal Officer for the work were unsatisfactory. Expediting, they felt, was not sales work, but production engineering. They preferred the previous arrangement under which inspectors working out of the procurement districts’ contracting offices had handled expediting. The inspectors were engineers, competent to make decisions on technical questions, and to consult with manufacturers on engineering problems.61
A reorganization in June was intended to meet some of these objections. The area expediting offices were consolidated into ten regional offices set up in ten major cities, and the procurement districts established expediting sections to work through the geographically appropriate regional office. The Production Expediting Section in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer relinquished direct control except in the case of dispute.62 The effect was to give the procurement districts greater control over the expediting function as it concerned contracts, and at the same time to provide a separate agency to coordinate the expediting activities in manufacturers’ plants. By the end of the fiscal year, the staff totaled twelve officers and 385 civilians, including both field expediters and regional officers.63
In the meantime, the Navy was finding itself at a disadvantage when it sought to place communication equipment orders that were relatively small compared to those of the Signal Corps. A system of priorities intended to determine the needs of contractors for raw materials and component parts had been set up under the control of the Joint Army and Navy Munitions Board and operated among the Army, the Navy, and the War Production Board. The Navy had a force of about twenty-five expediters in the field and, in an effort to escape the overwhelming production requirements of the Signal Corps, had resorted to AA and later AAA blanket priority orders. This ruse had not proved altogether successful, and there was evidence that neither the Signal Corps nor the manufacturers liked it because quite often it forced manufacturers to interrupt their production lines on mass-produced Signal Corps items to take care of small quantities of Navy equipment of slightly different design.
Even the best efforts of the Munitions Board proved unable to effect equalization of production for the Army and the Navy.
A series of studies by General Code and General Colton for the Army and by representatives of the Navy and the War Production Board pointed the way for a closer union. On 21 July 1942 the Munitions Board issued a directive providing for a merger of the Army and Navy expediting procedure. The Production Expediting Section of the Signal Corps as such passed out of existence and, with the attachment of Navy officers to the headquarters and regional expediting offices, became the Army-Navy Communications Production Expediting Agency (ANCPEA). None of the functions of expediting were to be changed; the efforts of both the Army and Navy were merely combined in an attempt to eliminate the confusion and competition between the two. Col. George P. Bush was relieved from duty in the Materiel Division, and assigned as director of ANCPEA with Comdr. Mortimer R. Loewi, who had directed the Navy’s expediters, as alternate director. The Army and Navy Munitions Board would act as referee and arbiter in case the weather got rough.64
The Field Organization
By mid-spring of 1942, the field organization necessary to carry out the Signal Corps’ supply mission was evolving. Responsibility for placing the infinite variety and unprecedented number of war contracts rested with the Signal Corps’ procurement districts. Inspection was still regarded as a part of the procurement district functions, on the theory that the contracting officer who placed the contract for material was responsible for seeing that he got what he had ordered. The biggest supply job was to place orders, to start production lines rolling, to build up a mass of supplies to equip the expanding Army. As soon as the orders were translated into terms of wire, radios, or vehicles, the equipment had to be stored, classified, packaged, marked, and made ready for shipment. This was the function of the Signal Corps depots. Increasingly, as functions were decentralized to field organizations and new complexes of related field agencies came into being at locations remote from Washington, there had to be administrative headquarters to supervise them. All these agencies were rapidly assuming shape in the field organization by the spring of 1942.
The Procurement Districts
Prewar planning had assumed that the procurement districts would take over the handling of contracts almost entirely once war started, but it was not possible to free the districts completely until after the Army reorganization of March 1942 and the organization of the War Production Board.65 On 16 March the Under Secretary of War delegated to the chiefs of the operating services of SOS authority to approve contract awards in amounts up to $5,000,000 as well
as authority to redelegate this function to their contracting officers.66 Now the legal machinery was set up to permit the Signal Corps’ procurement districts to move ahead at a greatly accelerated pace.
The procurement districts were organized upon a horizontal structure. Each centralized its purchases to deal with the sort of equipment most needed in its field.67 The measures and directives which conferred more and more authority upon the districts brought about administrative reorganizations to handle new responsibilities. The district contracting officers enjoyed a new freedom both in signing and in amending contracts and in making advance payments without reference to higher authority, but the privilege of independent judgment carried with it heavy responsibilities. Increases in the price of labor and materials and delays in the delivery of essential raw products complicated the contractors’ problems and required legal counsel and auditing facilities to be close at hand. Orders multiplied dizzily, contracting officers placed them faster, deliveries arrived more quickly and in greater quantity, and depots overflowed their warehouses. All installations needed more workers than they could get and, except in Philadelphia, double or treble the office space on hand.
The new Wright Field Signal Corps Procurement District (soon to be renamed the Dayton Signal Corps Procurement District) had been in a whirl of activity from the very first and now, in addition to its great weight of new orders for aircraft radio equipment, was struggling with a backlog of contracts, requisitions, and orders pertaining to aircraft radio inherited from the Philadelphia district. The Chicago district bore the brunt of the requirements for wire and cable and in addition was responsible for the procurement of all dry batteries for the entire Army, estimates for which were leaping upward by the million. The San Francisco district was less affected than others simply because there was little manufacturing of Signal Corps items in its vicinity.
The busiest of the lot, the Philadelphia district, was new in name and in location but derived in fact from the transfer of people and functions from the oldest district, the New York office. It bought ground radio and radar equipment and all sorts of associated and miscellaneous items. Philadelphia was the approximate center of the area in which the radio and communications industry plants were located. And it was placed halfway between Washington, whence came the broad policy decisions, and New York, the major east coast shipping point for overseas operations.
In the sprawling quarters at 5000 Wissahickon Avenue, Col. Archie A. Farmer held sway as commanding officer of the Philadelphia Signal Depot, of which the procurement district was technically a division even though it functioned as a separate agency. Its chief and contracting officer was Lt. Col. G. L. Thompson, who had moved with the agency from New York. He had been with it since 1937, in the days when he had two civilian assistants, one for procurement operations and one for inspection functions. The number of civilian employees in that bygone period had fluctuated between 8 and 20. By late 1941 the staff had grown to 14 officers and 450 civilians. In mid-1942 Colonel Thompson’s force was multiplying so rapidly that it was
hard to quote exact figures for any given day.68
The district functions still divided roughly into the dual patterns of procurement and inspection. Obviously, if more equipment were purchased, more inspectors would be needed to check it before the Signal Corps accepted it. Each district hired and trained its own inspectors, and there were never enough of them. Philadelphia set up a training school and went aggressively about the business of hiring men. To recruit applicants for the nine months’ course at this school, it arranged for a civil service representative to be located at the depot so that applicants could be interviewed and examined on the spot.69
“Speed, not cost, is the dominant factor,” said the Under Secretary of War in his memorandum to the supply chiefs on 29 December 1941.70 Speed was the objective at Philadelphia. Try as a man might, there was more to placing a contract than a simple matter of offer and acceptance. In all conscience, the contracting officers had to assure themselves that prices were fair and reasonable and that contracts were in the best interests of the government. In case of doubt, they called for a cost analysis. For the benefit of smaller plants, they negotiated contracts at prices 15 percent above the lowest quotation received. They eliminated bid bonds and performance bonds, broke up large requirements in order to spread production, and gave great weight to earlier delivery dates in evaluating bids.71
Contracting officers had at hand booklets prepared by the district, containing contract and purchase request clauses, samples of contractual instruments, and other information useful so long as the contract fell within the usual legal framework. As often as not, though, the manufacturer raised special objections. Signal Corps letters of intent, for example, set a limit of 10 to 25 percent of the cost of the material on the amount of funds that could be spent before the formal contract was executed. Contractors felt that this was too severe. If the reason for making a letter of intent was to permit contractors to place orders and tool up to start work immediately, then there should be no restriction of funds, they argued. They cited the letters of intent issued by the Navy, which bore no such limitation.72
Especially in the early months of 1942, when industry was converting to war work, the contracting officers found firms bidding too optimistically. The Office of the Chief Signal Officer had a Facilities and Materials Branch formed from the remnants of the Procurement Planning Section; so did the Philadelphia district. These groups knew a great deal about the productive capacity and capabilities of various manufacturers and were constantly surveying plants, noting idle capacity, and assisting industry in various ways. Between them, they could usually supplement the contracting officers’ own information about any given firm. Another difficulty in making a contract centered in equipment specifications. Particularly for the newer equipment, there existed only rather sketchy performance specifications. Contractors found them ambiguous, or inadequate, or impossible to meet. In such cases, they either refused to bid, or bid with exceptions to the specifications, with
A section of the Philadelphia Signal Depot, August 1942
resulting long-drawn-out negotiations. Other contractors objected to subcontracting, accounting, renegotiation, or patent clauses. All these things drained off the time allowed for placing a contract: in an emergency it had to be placed immediately, on small items within 24 to 48 hours and on large procurements within 12 to 20 days.73
In spite of these confusions, by summer the Philadelphia district had tripled its procurements for the preceding year, and Chicago had placed five times and San Francisco nine times as many orders as in 1941. Wright Field, the youngest of the lot, grew the fastest. Its volume was nearly twenty times that of the previous year, and in dollar value surpassed that of Philadelphia.74 Late in June one last modification of the procurement organization took place. The geographical restrictions that had long ceased to have any practical significance were removed. The Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco districts were merged at Philadelphia.75
Difficulties Within the Signal Corps Inspection Service
By spring 1942 danger signals were flying above the Signal Corps inspection service. Peacetime planning had anticipated wartime recruiting and training of more inspectors, and setting up more inspection districts within the procurement districts, but had not provided any basic changes in the pattern of procedure. The first few months of war proved that changes would have to
be made. The volume of procurement, and particularly procurement of those items specially designed and therefore subject to inspection by laboratory personnel, exceeded all prewar estimates. Subcontracting, essential to conversion of industry to a wartime basis, meant spreading a contract over the country without regard to geographical boundaries. Yet, except for Wright Field, the procurement districts which handled all production inspection were supposed to keep their men within the geographical areas assigned to them.76
The problem could be met by transferring inspection responsibility from one district to another.77 This was satisfactory, provided that the district placing the contract informed the one in which the plant was located in time so that an inspector could be on hand, and provided that the inspecting district had enough men to do the job. The Philadelphia district awarded a contract to a small plant in Portland, Oregon, for 7,000 telephone crossarms to be delivered at the rate of 1,000 per week. The San Francisco district was short of men, and had no resident inspector at Portland. It had to send an inspector to Portland for seven weeks, with no other work to do except to inspect 1,000 crossarms per week. In another case, the San Francisco district was asked to send a man to Texas to inspect orders amounting to $425. In that instance, factory inspection was finally waived.78
In other cases the procurement district sent its men into the territory of another. Plans to lend inspectors from one district to another were discarded because of the difficulties of maintaining time and pay records. Besides, each district feared that if it lent its inspectors it would never get them back.79 The laboratory inspectors, operating without geographical restrictions, could go anywhere in the country, and laboratory inspection was growing phenomenally. By 15 June the General Development Laboratory had 105 inspectors, the Radar Laboratory 110, and the Aircraft Radio Laboratory 1,288.80
As a result of these operating differences, there were numerous instances of multiple inspection. In the Chicago Procurement District in June, resident inspectors included 433 from the Aircraft Radio Laboratory, 38 from the General Development Laboratory, 10 from the Radar Laboratory, 173 from the Chicago district itself, and 164 from the Philadelphia district. Twenty-five plants in the district had from two to four separate Signal Corps inspection organizations. If inspections performed by nonresident inspectors were added to these figures, the number of multiple inspections rose sharply.81 In April the Kearny plant of the Western Electric Company harbored more than 40 Signal Corps inspectors from the Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Wright Field districts, and from the Aircraft Radio Laboratory. Though they did not inspect the same equipment, or deal with the same contracts, the presence of so many separate inspectors caused confusion
and exasperated the manufacturer, who supplied office space for them. Such duplication also wasted critically short inspection manpower.
There were other cases of inefficiency. Distance between an inspection unit at a plant and the headquarters to which it was attached meant delays in handling papers and reports by mail, high costs for telephone and telegraph communication, and excessive travel time and cost. The differences in organizational structures between the laboratory and district inspection units, and between the districts themselves, provided a perfect breeding ground for variations in inspection policies and procedures. Inspection was a stepchild organizationally, since the agency to which it was attached had a primary function other than inspection. Inspectors complained that they had too little supervision and no close contact, and did not have a chance to present their side of arguments with the manufacturers. Both prestige and morale of the inspection forces were low.82
The Inspection Section within the Office of the Chief Signal Officer had to fight for its existence from the very moment of its inception in the closing days of 1941. Three months passed before its officer in charge was able to spend his full time on his assigned duties. It was another month before any engineers were assigned, and in April 1942 the section had only three at its peak strength. Only one of these had any extensive inspection experience. Its strength in May consisted of six officers, only two of whom had direct inspection experience.83
Although the section drew up an ambitious organization chart with places for sixty-three officers and produced a plan to transform the section into a division, with numerous sections and subsections, nothing came of it. The firm of Wallace Clark, industrial consultants to the Chief Signal Officer, confessed that it had no experts qualified to pass on the merits of the plan, and suggested that such an expert be employed. Again General Olmstead turned to business for help. He asked Western Electric to release George L. Schnable, who had been the assistant superintendent of inspection at Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant. On 4 May, Schnable and Stanley Woolman, an engineer from the Inspection Section, Office of the Chief Signal Officer, started on a tour of the country which would take them to plants, inspection units within districts and laboratories, and for talks with individual inspectors.84 Out of the mass of information which they expected to accumulate would come a plan for betterment of the inspection service. Their report would not be laid on General Olmstead’s desk for several months to come, but as the fiscal year drew to a close, preliminary information trickling back indicated that a general reorganization of the inspection structure could be expected. Inspection would be separated from the procurement districts and set up in housekeeping for itself as an independent agency with systematized procedures.
The Expansion of Signal Corps Depots
In the prewar period of emergency, the Signal Corps depot system consisted of only five signal sections in Army general depots, with warehouse space amounting to
approximately 350,000 square feet.85 By 7 December 1941 the distribution facilities of the Signal Corps in the United States had grown to seven signal depots with total floor space of 2,019,000 square feet, 1,500,000 of it actually used as storage.86 Six and a half months after Pearl Harbor, there were depots or depot space in 32 areas in the United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Panama, and Puerto Rico, with a total of 7,776,214 square feet of space available, or in the process of being made available.87
This increase in depot facilities had not come about easily or all at once. Neither did it all represent space administratively under Signal Corps control and devoted to the basic functions of a depot: receipt, storage, and issue. Part of it had to do with the repair, inspection, salvage, maintenance, procurement, training, defense aid storage, and manufacturing functions assigned to many of the depots as contributory duties. As a rule, the troops using the equipment would take care of first echelon maintenance; second echelon would be a function of maintenance platoons; signal depot companies would accomplish repair at the third stage; and beyond that, the equipment would be sent to the nearest depot. If even this failed to meet the need, fifth echelon maintenance might involve moving the equipment to a signal depot or signal section of a general depot where civilian technicians, trained in knowledge of the set, would take over.88 Within the continental United States in early spring 1942 the Signal Corps had only the depot at Philadelphia, with another under construction at Lexington, Kentucky. It had also signal sections within the Chicago Quartermaster Depot, and the general depots at New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, Atlanta, San Antonio, Ogden, and San Francisco.89
When unlimited emergency gave place to war, the supply section of Utah General Depot at Ogden was still in the throes of organization and hiring, and already outgrowing the 108,000 square feet of closed warehouse space and 3,600 square feet of closed shed space that had been assigned to it. It estimated future requirements at about 432,000 square feet of the former and 40,000 feet of the latter. In January, prior to removal of the signal section from the San Francisco General Depot in the Presidio to new quarters at the Oakland Army Air Base across the bay, 50 percent of all signal stocks in San Francisco were shipped to the signal supply section in Utah. At the same time, substantial deliveries of wire and cable were arriving. The warehouse and closed shed space was hopelessly inadequate and no additional shelter was available. More than 1,000,000 pounds of cable on reels lay out in the open; crating materials piled up in the yards. The labor shortage was acute and the depot had to compete with three major military installations for personnel: the Naval Supply Depot, the Ogden Arsenal, and the Ogden Air Technical Service Command. Early in the year the Utah General Depot began to transport several hundred high school and
college students from northern Utah and southern Idaho by train or bus to and from the depot on Saturdays and Sundays, distances of 74 to 160 miles the round trip. The students unloaded the accumulation of incoming carloads that the regular labor force had not been able to handle during the week.90
Storage and issue functions in the Dayton area had originally been performed by the Wright Field Signal Corps Procurement District in a building constructed for the purpose at Fairfield Air Depot. In addition, the Air Service Command had designated the signal section of the Fairfield Air Depot as a backup facility and storage reservoir for signal equipment already turned over to the Air Corps. This depot at the beginning of 1942 stocked some 6,000 items of airborne radio equipment. The need for more space became desperate when shipments of aircraft radio material began to arrive from the Philadelphia Signal Depot, which relinquished that class of equipment when it moved from New York late in 1941. The volume of work increased so rapidly, to an average of 50 shipments a day by early January, that Lt. Col. William J. Daw, officer in charge of the district, took steps to acquire space in the first of several buildings in downtown Dayton. But as quickly as he obtained more space, the multiplying functions of the organization outgrew it.91 On 5 June, the War Department approved the recommendation that the signal storage activity in Dayton be designated as the Dayton Signal Depot.92
The same month, the Chief Signal Officer ordered procurement, storage, and issue of meteorological equipment transferred from Philadelphia to Dayton. Its procurement would thereafter be carried on by the Wright Field Signal Corps Procurement District; its storage and issue by the Dayton Signal Depot.93 The new depot in its first month of operation stocked almost 16,000 different items of aircraft radio equipment, a figure that rose before the end of the year to just under 50,000 items. By the end of June, there was no empty space, nor was it expected that there would be any space at the end of December, although still more was being sought.94
As the pace of procurement quickened, the lines of authority had to be shortened, and then shortened again, especially at Wright and Patterson Fields. In dollar value, aircraft radio and radar equipment was rapidly approaching the point where it would exceed all other Signal Corps supply activities combined. The Aircraft Radio Laboratory was responsible for research, development, and inspection of this equipment. The Wright Field Signal Corps Procurement District bought, stored, and issued it. Yet these two agencies, located only a few miles apart, had to consult Washington for most major decisions regarding
their own activities, and had very limited fields of authority in making commitments to the Air Forces.95 Accordingly, in May 1942, with the concurrence of the Army Air Forces and the SOS, the Chief Signal Officer activated a Signal Corps Aircraft Signal Service (SCASS), and appointed Colonel Gardner director.
The new fiscal year had not yet begun before the new superagency added two more agencies to its domain. On 4 June the Chief Signal Officer established the Signal Maintenance Section, and on 5 June The Adjutant General designated the storage facilities of the Signal Corps in Dayton as the Dayton Signal Depot.96
Philadelphia in early 1942 was still having housekeeping troubles. The combined depot and procurement district created from the old signal section and procurement district of the Brooklyn Army Base at the New York Port of Embarkation was not yet comfortably settled in its new quarters, but it was making progress. One by one the frustrations and annoyances of the move were dissipated as the Signal Corps began to make the place more habitable, but building operations and office work had to proceed together and they did not mix well. Cables were strung over the heads of workers and fluorescent lights installed; radiators were suspended below the skylights around the walls of the offices; beaverboard partitions were set in place to provide a small measure of privacy for a few officials. While this was going on, steamfitters with their hammers, pipes, and welding torches, painters and carpenters with ladders and saws, all mingled with clerks and stenographers, who complained bitterly about their working conditions. Restrictions clamped down after the coming of war suspended the Saturday half holiday, added an hour to the work day, and spread the six-day week over weekends on a rotating basis; holidays were abandoned; leave curtailed.97 All depots had begun operating on a 24-hour a day basis late in December,98 and night shifts were not popular. All of these things added to employee dissatisfaction.
Only a part of the New York force had moved to Philadelphia with the depot and some of these only temporarily until their positions could be filled by new employees. These workers and others who had originally intended to stay returned to New York where they could live more comfortably at home and find other positions with industry as good if not better than the depot could offer, even taking into consideration the pay for overtime which became effective on 1 March.99 Some of the New Yorkers formed the nucleus of the new Lexington Signal Depot in Kentucky. The Philadelphia Depot suffered a heavy loss in experienced workers. Turnover was high, even among the newcomers. During the first four months of 1942 over 3,300 men and women were employed and almost one third as many were lost through resignations and military furloughs. The depot recruited local labor, but in this case an untrained Philadelphian could not immediately fill the shoes
of a trained Brooklynite. Meanwhile, the demands of the draft boards cut deeper every day into the supply of male labor. Women began to take over jobs heretofore reserved for men, serving as chauffeurs, welders, assemblers, laborers, fork-lift operators, tractor drivers, machinists, crystal grinders, and checkers. For these and other jobs, the depot launched extensive training programs.100
On jobs requiring precision and patience, such as picking items from bin stock for packing, assembly work, and crystal grinding, women performed excellently. Radio crystals, for example, had to be ground to extremely close tolerances for use in teletype machines and other fixed plant installations. Commercial concerns did not want to undertake the work, but the women depot workers handled it “beautifully.”101
Depot space had seemed limitless when the Atwater Kent plant had been acquired and the first items had arrived for storage: the trucks and trailers comprising ten SCR-197 radio sets.102 But by February the depot was filled to within 5 percent of capacity, and the space problem again loomed. To ease the strain, the maintenance and repair group had moved out into a new building acquired from the Frankford Arsenal. In April 1942 the Signal Corps leased the first of five annexes: two buildings owned by the Quaker Hosiery Company and to be known collectively as Annex No. 1, located about a mile from the main depot. One building contained three stories and a basement, and the other seven stories. Together they provided 354,000 square feet of space, to house some 8,000 items of photographic equipment and over 9,000 items of pigeon supplies.103 During the next month a small force of depot personnel moved in, but most of the building was still occupied, and would not be available for several months.
On 16 May the Signal Corps took over Annex No. II, a building to be shared by the Reading Railroad, and gained 333,183 square feet of space.104 The equipment bought on early orders was rolling in; later on, larger orders would mean a further straining of warehouse seams. Colonel Farmer had the uneasy feeling that if he did not keep constant vigil, the flood of equipment would engulf him. Incoming material rose from an estimated 10,757,747 pounds in January to 14,005,850 in April, and the outgoing from 7,015,062 to 9,295,406.105 To handle and process this amount, he had a labor and office force of 4,987 in April, compared to 3,520 in January. Tonnage figures alone did not reflect the infinite variety and complexity of depot operations at Philadelphia. Of the 100,000 items, some were so large it required a crane to move them. Others, such as hair springs for repairing meters, were so tiny that they would disappear with a gust of wind.106
Meanwhile, at Avon, Kentucky, the Lexington Signal Depot, destined to rival the Philadelphia Depot in size and volume of tonnage, was rising in record time. Begun in May 1941, it was handling shipments of radar equipment by fall and became deeply immersed in extensive training programs by winter and early spring. By May 1942 the second phase of the construction was complete. An administration building and guard
gate, three warehouses, service station, garage and motor repair shop, a paint and oil shop, central heating plant, fences, and utilities added a somewhat more finished look to the establishment. It was time for official recognition of the depot’s existence.
General Olmstead journeyed to Lexington to deliver the principal address at the formal dedication ceremonies before an open-air assemblage of over 3,000 persons on 29 May. He and the depot’s commanding officer, Col. Laurence Watts, had reason to welcome the new establishment. The reservation covered 785 acres of land; the buildings were expected to provide over 1,400,000 square feet of storage and office space. At the end of February the total of employees, not counting those in training, had been about 500. Before the end of June it was four times that number, a little over 2,000. In September 1941 the first 22 tons of equipment had been more than enough for the few workers then employed to handle. Now in May 8,262,000 pounds were processed with ease and dispatch.107
To some extent, the depots in this period specialized in the stock they carried. The Chicago depot housed large stocks of telephone, telegraph and teletype, and vehicular radio items. New Cumberland stored field wire and bulky machine items. Dayton catered to the Air Corps, with airborne radio and radar and meteorological equipment for its stock in trade. Lexington was the repository for ground radar, and the special vehicular equipment needed for transporting radars. All other signal items found a home at the Philadelphia depot.108 In June a new signal section was set up at Memphis. It was to act as a backup to the New Orleans Port of Embarkation, and would furnish emergency supplies to points in the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Corps Areas.109
Totting up the figures at the end of June 1942, the Signal Corps found itself in possession of 5,342,214 square feet of gross area space actually completed, 920,000 under construction, 625,000 authorized, and 889,000 requested. At second glance, however, the figures were not so impressive. Only 3,324,515 square feet of completed space was actually usable for storage, and about 60 percent of it, 2,071,283, was in the three big warehouses at Lexington, Dayton, and Philadelphia. The rest was in general depots, air depots, at ports of embarkation, and war aid depots.110 At the Dayton, Chicago, and Ogden depots and at the Middletown and San Antonio air depots, there was no vacant space at all. Col. Raymond C. Hildreth of the Storage and Issue Branch estimated that for the rest of the calendar year the average percentage of idle storage space in all signal depots would not exceed 15 percent at any time.111
Procurement Growth in the First Six Months of War
Thus in the field, and within the Washington headquarters, the Signal Corps laid the groundwork for the effort ahead. While the war in the Pacific went from bad to worse, the organization at home was steadily strengthened, weak spots explored, and solutions devised. This building of a strong supply organization was fundamental to the eventual solution of the supply problem, but to produce reserves took time, and to get the equipment to remote outposts took more.
Signal Corps business was now big business. Only a year before, procurement officers had been impressed when they could place an order for a million dollars’ worth of equipment. In the three months from 10 March till 2 June, by contrast, the Awards Committee, a part of the Legal Branch which reviewed certain contracts for legal sufficiency, approved 39 contracts, each in excess of a million dollars and totaling well over $410,000,000. This sum did not include the thousands of smaller contracts which were not required to go to the Awards Committee for review. Indeed, by midsummer the Committee would no longer concern itself with contracts involving a mere $ 1,000,000. From that time on, it reviewed only those in excess of $5,000,000.
The biggest orders naturally went to the biggest companies, which possessed the necessary organization and facilities to handle them. Western Electric’s bid of $49,000,000 to build 2,400 sets of the ASV radar, SCR-517, was approved 1 May. Its award for the command radio set, SCR-274 and SCR-274-N, came to almost twice as much, $97,000,000. Western Electric also contracted to build 10,053 FM sets for Field Artillery use (SCR-608’s and 628’s) for $40,000,000. Bendix Aviation had two awards totaling more than $16,000,000 to supply SCR-578’s, the Gibson Girl emergency air-sea rescue equipment; a $43,000,000 contract for radio compasses SCR-269; and $42,000,000 for VHF command sets SCR-522. General Electric was given the job of building liaison sets SCR-187 and SCR-287, by which aircraft could communicate with their bases, at a price exceeding $74,000,000.112
The names of the lesser companies were appearing on the more-than-a-million list, too. The Galvin Manufacturing Company was building small radios; it had contracts totaling more than $26,000,000 for the SCR-536 handie-talkie; the SCR-610 and 510, FM vehicular sets; and the SCR-511, a portable set. The Aircraft Accessories Corporation got a million and a half for building wire reels; Onan Brothers over a million to furnish the self-contained power units, PE-95; Gray Manufacturing Company for telegraph repeater equipment; and Klise Manufacturing Company, Kroehler Manufacturing Company, and Hubbard Spool for making drum cable. Anaconda Wire and Cable, Whitney-Blake, and Western Electric each had contracts for more than a million dollars’ worth of long range wire, W-110-B. Simplex and U. S. Rubber were building cable.113 In the four weeks between the middle of May and the middle of June, big and little contracts for Signal Corps equipment reached a billion dollars.114 And as the fiscal year drew to a close, the Signal Corps
saw its expenditures for equipment rise to a figure that would have been considered fantastic in the days of peacetime planning. More than $2,693,360,736 worth of contracts had been placed with American and Canadian manufacturers of Signal Corps equipment, and $3,000,000,000 more was soon to be available to the procurement division for additional equipment. Approximately 75 percent of this sum had been expended after the attack on Pearl Harbor.115 Deliveries were pouring into depots in ever increasing waves. By 30 June, 1942 deliveries of signal equipment, the larger part of which would have required months or even years to get into production under peacetime conditions, totaled more than $315,595,473, and the acceptance of completed items had reached a rate of more than $3,000,000 a day.116
Perhaps more than any other, this figure pointed up the growth of the Signal Corps procurement function and its importance to the new Army. For now, in June 1942, the Signal Corps was accepting every two weeks as much signal equipment as the amount procured during the entire course of World War I.117 This was an impressive and encouraging statistic. Still, procurement measured in terms of dollars did not by any means tell the whole story. The real measure of success or failure of Signal Corps supply lay in producing the right kinds of equipment, in sufficient quantity, and on time. By that standard, it still had a long way to go.118