Chapter 7: Signal Schooling (January–July 1942)
The Training Structure
The Chief Signal Officer’s responsibility for the technical military training of Signal Corps enlisted men and officers was exercised, after 9 March 1942, under the delegated authority and the nominal supervision of the Commanding General, Services of Supply. From General Olmstead the line of authority descended through the chief of the Signal Corps Field Services, General Milliken, and through him to Col. J. D. B. Lattin, at the head of the Military Training Division.1
Although the Signal Corps was bound by the manpower allotments and the training policies of the War Department General Staff and the Services of Supply, the Chief Signal Officer had direct jurisdiction over the operation of Signal Corps replacement training centers and schools, which were exempt from corps area control, and over the technical aspects of the training of Signal Corps military and civilian personnel in civilian institutions. In technical communications training, the Chief Signal Officer called the plays provided he could get the practice field and the players.2
The scope of technical signal training was broader than ever before. It had penetrated a field of study hitherto occupied only by scientists and confined to highly scientific institutions such as research laboratories. The Signal Corps student body was made up of officers, enlisted men, enlisted reservists, and civilians, and it ranged from men with doctorates in engineering or philosophy to illiterates. Geographically, training extended from the single prewar training facility at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, to Signal Corps training centers newly established in Florida, Missouri, and California; to civilian institutions throughout the land; and to the British military schools in the United Kingdom. The Chief Signal Officer and his staff viewed the burgeoning training centers with pride, encouraged by the advances they represented. Nevertheless, six months of war had sent signal training requirements far beyond the expanded military facilities and the increased capacities which, indeed, had seemed to the Signal Corps to be cramped even in the planning stage.
As yet the calls for men had been confined to activation needs except for the tragic loss requirements of the forces in the Philippines, and even these had been erased with the fall of Bataan in April. Training demands were arising, however, from factors quite apart from activation needs. For example, new types of equipment under production and about to come into use necessitated the enrollment of more officers and men in advanced electronics courses. General Colton had urged the Coast Artillery Corps to send men to be trained in the use of the new radar developments and, upon finding that the Coast Artillery planned to send only six, had said: “I think you had better make arrangements on the basis of the number being increased, because of course they will want more than six, but they don’t know it yet.”3 Upkeep and maintenance of equipment in the hands of troops posed additional training problems. General Olmstead sought to learn whether using arms were making satisfactory progress in first echelon repair; whether the Signal Corps should provide repair units in division signal companies; and what should be done about training depot troops in repair, especially of airborne equipment in the hands of troops.4 Paradoxically, the shortening of technical courses also created a demand for more training facilities. By this time all courses had been abbreviated to the point where they produced soldiers skilled in only a segment of a subject. Thus several men might be required to perform a job which could have been done by a single soldier thoroughly trained in all aspects of the work. The time saved by shortening the training period was offset by the uneconomical use of manpower.
Factors which made it difficult for the Signal Corps to reach its self-set training objective were no less compelling because some applied alike to all other services. Training capacity allotments were based on the assumption that troop basis units would be furnished only trained cadres of Signal Corps specialists and technicians who would, in turn, teach the new men received directly from reception centers.5 Before the end of July, however, Signal Corps training centers had supplied entire complements of Signal Corps men—618 officers, 24 warrant officers, and 11,120 enlisted men in all—for units hurriedly added to the 1942 troop basis or activated outside its provisions for immediate dispatch overseas with task forces.6
A survey of twenty-eight units organized in the early summer showed the average time between activation and alert for movement to be less than a month. In one extraordinary case, movement orders for the 811th Signal Port Service Company were issued four days ahead of its activation orders.7 Obviously, this did not permit units
to draw men from reception centers and train them to be even simple signal technicians. The burden of supplying trained men therefore devolved more heavily upon the Signal Corps replacement training centers and schools than General Staff or even Signal Corps planning had contemplated. With little coordination of the outside elements affecting training, it was scarcely to be expected that the training program would mesh smoothly with troop activations. Yet commanders who were already carrying heavy combat responsibilities saw no reason why they should be expected to train their communications specialists, whatever the regulations said. Commenting on the training of Signal Corps men received in the European theater in the summer, Lt. Col. Francis E. Kidwell, at Allied Force Headquarters, said that as far as he could judge “there was nothing wrong with communications training, except that the men in the signal aviation units in Europe had had none of it.”8
The most pressing training project, and one of the most vexing, was that of preparing men to serve with the Army Air Forces. It was still difficult to get information as to the specialists the AAF would need because many air units had not yet settled into standard types, and there was little coordination within the Air Forces of its requirements for communications men. Instead, there was a disposition to operate independently of the Signal Corps. For example in July, upon receiving informal notice that it would be required to train 45,000 radio operators for the Army Air Forces, the Signal Corps immediately initiated a wide survey to determine the extent of facilities available for the purpose, only to be told later that the AAF would do its own training.9
Where Tables of Organization existed at all, they were unrealistic for both air and ground units.10 Several new tables, ready for issue at the beginning of June, indicated strengths greater than those authorized for such units at that time, but the War Department had announced no policy for bringing existing units to the new strength. It was small comfort to a unit commander to be told that his efficiency might be measured by the manner in which he employed the personnel in a table of organization when he had been unable to get the men.11 There was little more comfort in the knowledge that when such units were alerted for overseas movement, commanders would expect the specialists allowed in the tables even though Signal Corps training capacity had not been authorized with the new strength in mind. Tables covering schools and replacement training centers had been rescinded before Pearl Harbor and the Signal Corps
therefore had to defend each need for instructors, and usually got fewer than it had asked for. Then the only men available were likely to be recent graduates of the courses they were called upon to teach. Moreover, men capable of teaching were the sort in demand everywhere. Filling one gap created another.
There was also the difficulty of getting the training equipment needed when there was not enough coming off the production lines to supply combat requirements.12 The lack of training equipment plagued all communications instructors for many months.
It was difficulties of this sort which beset the military training program. The faults and the failures lay not so much in the classroom as at planning levels, in the element of time, and in the general unreadiness of the nation for war. In the summer of 1942, with plans in the making for a large offensive operation in North Africa, the immediate concern of the Signal Corps was the technical training of the thousands of recruits pouring into its replacement training centers at Fort Monmouth, at Camp Crowder, and soon at Camp Kohler; the development of qualities of leadership in the candidates enrolled in the Signal Corps Officer Candidate School at Fort Monmouth; and the technical training of officers and enlisted men for the Aircraft Warning Service at Camp Murphy.
Camp Crowder
The largest concentration of Signal Corps recruits was at the Camp Crowder Replacement Training Center in Missouri, although it had been in operation less than four months. By the middle of June 1942 the whole area of Camp Crowder, overrun by men in khaki, hummed with activity; 352 new buildings stood on the post, but that was not enough and more wartime construction was going up. Already the Signal Corps, not the sole occupant of the camp, needed elbow room. The Army Ground Forces still retained housing for 4,300 Engineer troops. In April General Milliken had pointed out that joint use of the facilities by the Signal Corps and the four Engineer regiments to be activated in early summer would not serve the training purposes of either service. But Col. Walter L. Weible, Deputy Director of Training of the Services of Supply, had declined to reserve the area exclusively for the Signal Corps and had insisted upon “equitable use” of certain of its facilities by both services. On 10 June General Olmstead again opened the subject, asking that when the Engineer regiments should have completed their training cycle, Camp Crowder be assigned wholly to the Signal Corps for use as a “large Signal Corps training center.” It was already that.13
By the end of June over 10,000 technicians had gone out from Crowder to troop units; more than 12,000 were still studying in the replacement training center; about 2,000 men had been sent to
civilian schools and another 2,000 to the Signal Corps School at Fort Monmouth for specialist instruction. The aircraft warning course alone had turned out 1,548 plotters. By mid-July more than 32,400 recruits had been received.14 The RTC had passed through its shakedown period and was on a firm footing when, on 1 July 1942, General Rumbough, who had been in command since its beginning, left and turned the command over to Col. Robert A. Willard, another Regular Army Signal Corps officer. Willard had served as executive officer of the RTC since his arrival from Fort Monmouth in the preceding December and was well acquainted with the problems. Rumbough soon became the signal officer of the great force building up in the United Kingdom, intended to take a million men across the Atlantic in the next six months.15
Camp Crowder was a veritable boom town sprung out of the wilderness in Newton County, Missouri. Its area was computed in miles, not acres—seventy-five square miles in traditional guerrilla country, the scene of some of the raids of the desperado Jesse James and his gang. The commander, Maj. Gen. Walter E. Prosser, called it the layout of his dreams. The reservation did, indeed, provide a wide variety of facilities for simulating battle conditions, even deserted farm buildings which were utilized as command posts and signal centers in real combat fashion. Wide, rolling fields, green with grass until the heat seared them brown, steep cliffs, rivers, and dense woods constituted the theater for combat training. Recruits who had come with the first contingents in February had floundered in mud or slipped about on the ice, but in these summer days “Red Hot and Dusty” was the name they gave the camp.
The recruits streaming into Camp Crowder to be converted into signalmen found few distractions. The nearest town, Neosho, had a population of only 5,000. It had been the Confederate capital of Missouri and now it was a strict Mennonite community. Many of the houses had two doors, side by side—one for weekdays and the other for Sundays. It was a dry town to the extent that liquor could be purchased only in packages, and drier than that in attitude. But this caused little dissatisfaction. Although camp punishment for drunkenness was severe, commanders had need to mete out little of it. “No nonsense in Neosho” was the soldiers’ slogan for the town.
What the nearby community offered the recruit was not important, for what Crowder demanded left him little time to enjoy outside distractions. The three weeks of basic training in Signal Corps’ replacement training centers was much the same as that given recruits at any post. It was the course prescribed by the War Department to effect a man’s transition from civilian life to military routine; much of it was strenuous physical conditioning. On his arrival, the recruit was given a few tests and orientation lectures and this curriculum: drill; equipment, clothing, and tent pitching; first aid; defense against chemical attack; articles of war; basic signal communication; interior guard duty; military discipline; and rifle marksmanship. No effort was made in the early summer to qualify men in marksmanship at either Camp Crowder or Fort Monmouth. Each post had only 400 rifles, all of the period of World War I, and neither had any carbines, the approved
Signal Corps weapon. Toward the end of the year, however, and with no increase in arms, over 80 percent of the men in the RTC had qualified in marksmanship and the percentage was almost as high at Fort Monmouth.16
The recruit found that to be a lineman he had to be six feet tall, and that if he lost his grip and slid down the pole, he picked up splinters all the way. He discovered that no man with a marked accent was eligible for switchboard duty, no matter how apt he might be at operating the contraption. Probably the most demanding thing he learned was to live peacefully with his fellowmen. Army training was the welding together of men from every walk of life into a common pattern of behavior which bore little resemblance to most peacetime experience.
Unlike basic military training, more or less uniform throughout the Army, the technical courses at Camp Crowder were related closely to the communications duties of the Signal Corps. The curriculum was substantially the same as at Fort Monmouth. The manuals and textbooks used were those prepared at the eastern school and at least a nucleus of the training staff had come from Fort Monmouth. Camp Crowder was the heir to Fort Monmouth’s training experience, although far from an identical copy of the eastern post.
The schedule in effect at the Camp Crowder Replacement Training Center on 1 July provided for the concurrent training of between 13,000 and 14,000 men in 6- to 13-week cycles, which included the time devoted to basic military instruction and processing. The 6-week cycle had a capacity of 800 men, but there was no stress on filling this course because most of the men assigned would be recruits without the mental ability or aptitude for signal training, who would be shipped out as basics at its end. In the 8-week aircraft warning plotter course, with a capacity of 400 per cycle, the primary phase emphasized map-reading, aircraft identification, organization, and information center personnel matters. The combined phase taught discipline in all message center functions; and in the final phase the student practiced on real field sets, rotating from position to position. The 9-week courses were for personnel and supply clerks, truck drivers, and typists, with the allotment of men totaling 2,300. A man acquiring a speed of 30 words per minute in 30 hours of instruction in the typing course was eligible for teletypewriter instruction. The 11-week cycle included courses for message center clerks, linemen, messengers, telegraph printer operators, and local battery telephone switchboard operators, and could accommodate 1,705 students. The 13-week courses, with 5,395 men assigned, were for automobile mechanics, cooks, pole linemen, common-battery switchboard operators, pigeoneers, and slow-speed radio operators.
Thus, almost half of the total enrollment at Crowder was in the 13-week courses. And of that group 3,000 were in the course for radio operators. Some of these would later receive additional instruction in high-speed or fixed-station operating. The first weeks of the radio operator course were devoted to sending and receiving International Morse code, and to studying radio procedure and radio circuits. After that the students worked a month in the field with simulated tactical nets, and climaxed their
Training at Camp Crowder. Basic infantry instruction (exemplified above) and field radio operation (below)
Training at Camp Crowder. Cable splicing (above) and message center operation (below)
training with a week of operating vehicular radio sets in the Ozark Mountains.17
About 2,600 of the better qualified basics were assigned to a Signal Corps school or a civilian institution for specialist training of a higher order. Until 1 July Camp Crowder had not been able to give advanced specialist instruction, but on that date the Midwestern Signal Corps School, an institution similar to the original Signal Corps School at Fort Monmouth, opened its doors to the first 400 students from the RTC. Thereafter the only students the RTC sent regularly to Fort Monmouth were those for the cable splicer and telegraph printer maintenance courses for which Crowder as yet had no training equipment.
The Camp Crowder school was the outgrowth of plans laid months before the RTC had opened.18 It had been obvious even then that the single Signal Corps School at Fort Monmouth could not long provide specialist training for the increased intake of recruits. On the last day of December 1941 the Signal Corps had laid a concrete plan for the school, with a capacity of 2,500 (1,450 had originally been contemplated), before the G-3 Section of the War Department General Staff. A month later the War Department had authorized its establishment. Before the school opened, its capacity had been raised to 6,000 and the additional construction entailed had been authorized, although the buildings had yet to be put up.19
With his executive, Lt. Col. Edward A. Allen, General Prosser had devoted much time and energy to planning. Lt. Col. Paul L. Neal could not be relieved of his duties as director of the Officers’ Department of the Monmouth school until June, in order to become assistant commandant. Until that time Maj. R. G. Swift, who had come from the Wire Division of the Enlisted Men’s Department at Monmouth, acted in his stead.20 The order activating the school had failed to exempt it from corps area control, and although General Prosser had been designated to command the institution, it was officially under the jurisdiction of the post commander, an Infantry colonel. The lines of authority were untangled late in May when the school and the 800th Signal Service Regiment, activated to administer the instructors and students of the school, were declared exempt units under the control of the Chief Signal Officer.21
On the opening of the school, the scarcity of instructors was the number one problem, and in mid-July a recruiting party, including a Civil Service representative from St. Louis, started out to find 142 civilians capable of teaching communications subjects. The National Education Association lent its assistance while the press and radio broadcasters gave publicity to the need.22
Although the new school drew heavily on the experience of the older institution at Fort Monmouth, it was not restricted to the training patterns established there. An early innovation was the Common Subjects Division, in which all new students except radio operators were instructed in basic shop work and the principles of electricity before undertaking the specialist courses.23 When facilities should be available to accommodate the full number authorized, it was planned to divide student strength between the school’s three departments: 2,705 to the 13-week wire courses; 2,625 to the 17-week radio courses; and 670 to the 20-week aircraft warning courses. Meanwhile, two shifts were employed in order to utilize fully the scarce training equipment and the limited classroom space.24
The combined output of Camp Crowder and Fort Monmouth was still not enough to meet the requirements for skilled communications men. There was a critical scarcity of radio and radar repairmen, high-speed radio operators, and telegraph printer installer-repairmen, to name but a few of the categories in short supply. The Chief Signal Officer directed that these critical courses be filled; if men meeting the standards for this type of training were not available, then those who showed any promise of making acceptable students would be enrolled.25
The RTC, main source of students for the school, was still receiving many men not qualified for signal training. The Inspector General’s Department, following an inspection of Camp Crowder, had supported the Chief Signal Officer in his efforts to get men of higher intelligence. But the Commanding General, Services of Supply, had rejected all proposals to this end because Signal Corps replacement training centers were then already receiving a higher average of Grade I, II, and III recruits by 4.15, 4.66, and .56 percent, respectively, than were the other technical services.26
G-1 of the General Staff had informally promised that men for the Signal Corps’ replacement training centers would be drawn, as far as possible, from the northeast, north central, and Pacific coast reception centers, in areas where the general level of education was higher. But an examination of the records of 338 recruits received at Camp Crowder on two days in midsummer revealed that they had come from Fort Bliss, Texas, and that fewer than one percent were college men; about 17 percent were high school graduates; 45 percent had completed grade school or had had “some schooling.” Over 36 percent were illiterates. Most of the last were of Mexican descent and were unable to speak English.27
Despite the dearth of qualified students, before the school had been in operation a full month the commandant had received orders to activate the second priority elements of the 850th Signal Service Battalion, the 209th Signal Depot Company, and the 183rd Signal Repair Company for duty with
the North African Service Command. Thus at Camp Crowder, as at Fort Monmouth, calls for technicians and specialists would not await their production, and the men would lack instruction and practice in teamwork. And signal training, unless it developed teamwork as well as individual skill, would be effort wasted on the forging of strong links for a chain which, unlinked, would be no chain at all.
More and more signalmen were working in small units on highly specialized projects where the success of their operations depended upon their ability to work successfully together. Too often the new soldier was catapulted into combat without any experience in the duties which he would perform as a member of such a group, because early in the war emphasis was on the training of the individual soldier. At Camp Crowder there were sixteen tactical units, Signal Corps troops administered by the Second Army all badly in need of technical instruction in teamwork, which the replacement training center and school were not set up to give. To meet the needs of these and other units at a similar stage of training, General Prosser proposed to establish a unit training center at Camp Crowder, and General Olmstead heartily indorsed his proposal.28 Not waiting for War Department approval, Prosser straightway organized the new activity as a subsidiary of the Midwestern Signal Corps School, placing Col. James Lawrence in command. He then sought recognition of it as an organization separate from the school.
With Camp Crowder now comprising three practically independent projects, General Prosser saw the need for a single supervisory staff agency which would represent the Chief Signal Officer in administering and coordinating all training activities. Accordingly he sent a second recommendation to Washington on 30 June, proposing the establishment of such an agency, the Midwestern Signal Corps Training Center.29 In the meantime, types of organizations to carry out the missions of these already active but as yet unauthorized agencies evolved through trial and error, and Camp Crowder, like Fort Monmouth, began to feel the pinch of crowding as it reached the limits of its training capacity.
Camp Kohler
In June 1942 the Signal Corps had a training capacity for about 20,000 men at its two replacement training centers—14,000 at Crowder and 6,000 at Fort Monmouth. Allowing for differences in the 6- to 13-week training cycles of the various courses, the Signal Corps estimated that it could produce some 58,000 technicians in the two centers by the end of the year. But that figure still fell 12,000 short of meeting the Army’s already computed requirements for 70,000 signalmen.30 There was no room for further expansion of the Fort Monmouth center, and any expansion at Camp Crowder would first necessitate additional construction. A third replacement training center, Camp Kohler, near Sacramento, California, was therefore created.31
The Walerga Collection Center, about twelve miles northeast of Sacramento, appeared to be the most appropriate site available. It had space for 5,000 men and it could be made available quickly, having been vacated recently by the transfer inland of the Japanese-Americans concentrated there on the outbreak of war. It seemingly met General Olmstead’s specifications for an existing facility on the west coast which could be in readiness to receive recruits within a month. On 2 July the War Department authorized its acquisition, cautioning the Signal Corps at the same time that the proposed center would be only a temporary expedient. Either it must be discontinued by 31 December or the capacity of the other replacement training centers must be reduced accordingly.32
The Signal Corps took possession on 8 July, but the plan for quickly getting 5,000 men under training at Camp Kohler did not work out as contemplated. It soon became apparent that although there was housing for that number, the sanitary and hospital facilities were adequate for no more than 2,000. The initial capacity was therefore set at that figure, pending the additional construction which would be required here as at other training centers. It was decided to limit training to the basic courses and to send the qualified men on to Camp Crowder for technical instruction. As yet there was no provision at Camp Kohler for a target range, obstacle course, parade ground, or gas chamber to give reality to basic training, and like Fort Monmouth, the new camp was located in a populous area.33
Fort Monmouth
The newer training centers at Camp Crowder, at Camp Kohler, and at still another new project, Camp Murphy, had each been organized for a specific type of training, but Fort Monmouth remained many-sided. It had been the Signal Corps’ proving ground for both officer and enlisted schooling. Until the newer training centers were ready to accept students, Fort Monmouth had to carry the burden of a wide variety of courses. By the summer of 1942 Monmouth was reverting to its original mission of producing wire and radio specialists. Radar training was being established at Camp Murphy. Photographic training had been concentrated at the Signal Corps Photographic Center at Astoria, Long Island.34
The exodus of the RTC from the New Jersey post was well under way. Basic military training was concentrated at Camp Edison, where the recruit found no open countryside such as greeted men sent to Camp Crowder. On the contrary, the New Jersey community teemed with civilian workers and with the families of men in the nearby camps. The technician classes of the RTC also had begun to move away from the post proper to Camp Charles Wood, at nearby Eatontown, New Jersey.35
Monmouth developed most of the
training procedures and training doctrine used throughout the Signal Corps’ training institutions. The methods of teaching in the Signal Corps School and in the RTC were similar; the curriculum of the RTC was limited to the simpler technical subjects, while the school conducted the more difficult courses. To a great extent the students were self-taught. They studied and took quizzes on mimeographed information sheets. Periodic examinations made sure that students did not lag behind the steady pace required.
Films and film strips were used widely. Components of equipment were displayed on breadboards or were reproduced on a large scale.36 There were telephone circuits to be dismantled and rebuilt by students in the wire courses, Linemen learned trouble shooting from an ingenious device—a model city with complete dial telephone circuits and a central exchange. By throwing any one of a large number of switches, unseen by the student, the instructor could cause a breakdown for the student to locate and correct.37 A diorama for teaching blinker lights, accurately drawn to scale and taking into account the factor of distance, was the work of Maj. Reuben Abramowitz, who had been an enlisted instructor in the Signal Corps School before the war. Many other training aids used at Monmouth and elsewhere were the developments of instructors forced to improvise when equipment was unobtainable.
In the radio maintenance course a student was taught radio theory, then given a month’s training in testing and repairing field equipment of commercial design. In the fixed-station radio operator course, open only to those who had attained a receiving speed of 15 words per minute in International Morse code, students were taught high-speed Morse transmitting and how to read and transcribe messages from ink-recorded tape at a typing speed of 35 words per minute. Teletypewriter operators studied, among other things, the new Army-Navy Civil Aeronautics procedures which had been issued in May. There were a hundred things that could go wrong with a teletypewriter machine; a student in the maintenance course had to learn to break down, reassemble, and adjust its complicated mechanism.38
Monmouth’s training administrators endeavored to keep methods of instruction as up to date and training doctrine as progressive as the new developments in warfare. To this end, for the teaching of radio operators, the faculty introduced a code learning and touch typing system developed by Dr. Fred Keller, a Columbia University psychologist. It divided the alphabet and the ten cardinal numbers into five groups, according to their positions on the keyboard of a typewriter, and the student mastered the characters for each group before proceeding to the next. The use of phonograph records for the reproduction of the characters and their phonetic equivalents, which were played on turntables in a master control room and piped through switchboards to the headsets of the individual students, made it possible for 140 men to work simultaneously without mutual interference. It was too early to estimate the system’s value
as a training aid, but it showed promise.39 Monmouth’s instructors visited troops in maneuver areas, observing divisional training methods and needs.40 They studied the communications requirements of new types of units and of new commands to determine what should be added to technical courses: for example, the communications tactics and techniques to be applied in landing operations.
Training administrators in Washington cooperated to keep instructions up to date. They interviewed many observers returning from overseas, and when they learned of combat developments which might have a bearing on training doctrine or methods, they arranged for these officers to visit Fort Monmouth and acquaint the faculty with them.41
In the early summer of 1942 Washington and Monmouth considered the advisability of adding rapid-pole-line construction (RPL) to the curriculum of the RTC. While the Signal Corps weighed the merits of establishing such a course, the General Staff explored the pros and cons of making additional troops available to institute the new technique.42 Thus one action hinged on another. General Milliken urged that training emphasize the proper laying of field wire, because in maneuvers the criticism was heard frequently that signal troops did not keep field wire out of traffic lanes. New training films on laying field wire neglected to give this point any weight, nor did training literature stress it sufficiently.43
In July the Enlisted Men’s Department of the Signal Corps School added two new courses: repeater-carrier and very high frequency. The RTC inaugurated an instructors’ training course to replace the officer candidate preparatory and first sergeants’ courses, and established a Training Standards and Service Division to consider and recommend means for raising efficiency. Among the earliest achievements was the development of the text, “Training of the Army Instructor.” The instructors’ course consisted of about nine weeks of specialty training and four weeks of instruction in leadership and company administration.44
The most serious weakness in teaching was the inexperience of most of the instructors. Even the few experienced mentors lacked firsthand information of the unusual demands made on signal troops in theaters of war. All plans for returning officers or enlisted men from overseas in order to utilize their experience in training had failed
because commanders had too few specialists to release.45
There were formidable shortages in many categories of signal specialists. In June the RTC at Fort Monmouth was assigning 60 percent of the incoming recruits to courses in the school at the end of basic training, as compared with 40 percent in March, and was assigning another 6 percent to be trained as oscilloscope operators in the Aircraft Warning Department. This represented about 85 percent in the first three classification grades.46 Computations of requirements were increasingly calling for men possessing unusual skills, such, for example, as would be needed for the new radio intercept units and for the Enemy Equipment Identification Service (EEIS).47
By now even simple technicians were becoming scarce. It was estimated that the shortage of watchmen to guard valuable equipment would reach almost 2,000 by the end of 1942, and of field telephone operators, almost 1,000. Col. James S. Willis of the Military Training Branch felt that the Fort Monmouth RTC had been prone to put all of the men with low scores into the classes for linemen and truck drivers, and he insisted that both of the RTC’s give recruits in classification Grades IV and V a chance to learn a wide range of the simpler skills. On the other hand, Colonel Lattin, in the same office, cautioned that requirements for more than 13,000 drivers for light trucks alone indicated that more men, not fewer, should be trained as truck drivers. Word from Lt. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower added weight to this belief.48
At both Fort Monmouth and Camp Crowder, the RTC’s singled out promising recruits to be message center clerks and code clerks. Many were accepted for the Signal Corps Officer Candidate School (OCS), wherefore gaps in the enlisted ranks could be expected to continue until the requirements for Signal Corps officers had been met. The shortage of radio operators was acute. The ability to send and receive Morse code is a natural gift. It was a waste of time and manpower to attempt to make radio operators of men who, however intelligent, had no aptitude for the work. Men who attained Army General Classification Test scores of 90 to 109 were usually able to pass the code aptitude test with a score of 50 or better and to develop into good operators. To discover those talented in this speciality, the Signal Corps therefore urged that reception centers give the code aptitude test to all recruits intended for the Signal Corps replacement training centers. Reception centers were
supplied with commercial recorders which could play recordings of Signal Corps code aptitude tests to 250 men at a time. But it was a slow business getting the equipment into use.49
The caliber of men received from reception centers for signal training remained a cause for concern in the first half of 1942, although the situation had improved a little after Colonel King broadened the base for selection by lowering the requirements upon which the Signal Corps had previously insisted, and by directing that inept recruits be quickly reported and made available for reassignment. His aim was to accelerate the training of the best men obtainable in order “to provide the largest possible number of acceptably trained specialists ... not ... any smaller number of perfectly trained individuals.”50
It was necessary, however, that every man not entirely incapable of communications study be developed to the full of his ability to learn. To this end the Mental Hygiene Unit,51 organized as a part of the Fort Monmouth RTC and duplicated later at Crowder and Kohler, rendered valuable aid. Its primary function was to salvage the men received from reception centers who for some reason failed to fit into the life of the replacement training center. Attached to the headquarters of the RTC, the unit operated more or less independently, entirely separate from the so-called morale activities of the Special Services Division. It was composed of enlisted clinical teams, each made up of a psychiatrist, a psychiatric social worker, and a psychologist, who sought first to uncover the causes of inaptitude, unusual behavior, or mental stress in a recruit and then to correct the situation before it had become serious. Team workers also interviewed each man absent without leave for more than twenty-four hours upon his return to the post. Often it was possible to guide a man to an understanding of his abnormal actions or attitudes, so that he could work out a satisfactory adjustment for himself. Failing that, the unit initiated his reassignment or reclassification, or some other measure designed to utilize his skill and aptitude to better advantage. Many of those interviewed were assigned to the Special Training Section of the basic school, where the Mental Hygiene Unit continued to test their progress.52
There came under the ministrations of this unit men who were brilliant and valuable, but who nevertheless showed mental instability; men who were willing but slowwitted, physically strong but unlearned; men of low mentality; or men who were unable to speak or understand the English language. In short, the unit dealt with any man unable to fit into the training schedules in a normal way, and many of these it saved for the Army. When the Monmouth unit had been in operation for only six months, a Washington newspaper declared: “The success of the Fort Monmouth clinic has been so noteworthy that the War Department should establish similar clinics
Training at Fort Monmouth. Long lines of men marching to classes, like those above, were a common sight at Fort Monmouth. Below are signal trainees manning a mobile message center
Training at Fort Monmouth. Rifle marksmanship (above) was as much a part of signal training as was cryptography (below)
elsewhere.”53 The unit’s success in developing latent ability eventually led to the inauguration of similar procedures at all replacement training centers of the Army.
With aircraft warning, photographic, and pigeon training centered elsewhere, Fort Monmouth soon discontinued those courses. In June 1942 it was agreed that a separate signal intelligence school would be established under the supervision of the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) at Washington. At that time the cryptographic courses also were discontinued at Monmouth.54 Fort Hunt, Virginia, virtually abandoned to the weeds after World War I, first received consideration as the site for the new school, but instead Arlington Hall, a girls’ school in Arlington County, Virginia, was eventually selected and the name remained as the unofficial designation for the new activity.
Following Pearl Harbor, students had been withdrawn one by one from the yearlong Cryptanalysis course at Fort Monmouth before they had gained even the meager knowledge of the highly specialized subject that could be acquired within that time. The length of the course had then been cut almost in half and the allotment of students almost doubled. Selected enlisted men and officers, including some Air Corps officers, were enrolled in the four-month Cryptanalyst or signal intelligence course, and the three-month course for Cryptanalyst clerks drew its students from the replacement training centers at Fort Monmouth and Camp Crowder. Handpicked at the end of basic training, those who demonstrated within the first six weeks of the elementary course that they possessed ability and aptitude for the work and who could meet other requirements approximating those for OCS were immediately enrolled in the signal intelligence course.55
The elementary course consisted of instruction in cryptographic security, army and staff organization from a signal intelligence viewpoint, elementary and advanced cryptography, IBM theory and operation,56 code compilation, and the preparation of cryptanalytic work sheets. The more advanced course also covered security, organization, and elementary and advanced cryptography, and in addition language instruction in Japanese, German, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese (limited to the ability to distinguish one tongue from another and to recognize the more common words), and military Cryptanalysis.57
The Cryptographic Division, like other specialist training activities, faced an alarming shortage of trainable men. Needless to say; the men assigned to the highly secret work had to be the sort whose background and character would indicate loyalty, integrity, and discretion. A convenient rule of thumb was that a man should be a native son of a native son—certainly not anyone
of known Axis association or even of extensive foreign acquaintance. Because of the nature of the work it was desirable that the man be at least a high school graduate, have some competence in mathematics, and possess reasonable speed in typing. His eyesight should be good. So should his rating at the bank or with the first sergeant, for a man whose credit standing was open to the slightest question was insecure, a man too vulnerable to be trusted with a secret. In every case, before a potential cryptographic student could be assigned, a Military Intelligence Division clearance was necessary.58 In July the Signal Corps School was having difficulty in filling its small quota of 125 for this training as well as the quotas for other critical courses.59 In the six months following Pearl Harbor the Signal Corps School had graduated 3,617 enlisted specialists, 1,293 officer candidates, 779 officers from the company officers’ and advanced officers’ courses, 1,287 officers and enlisted men from the aircraft warning courses, but none at all from the cryptographic courses.60
It was the demand for officers that caused the greatest expansion and drew the most attention at Monmouth in the summer of 1942.61 All officer candidate schools were under fire that summer, mainly because of the mediocrity of many candidates, and especially those accepted for the technical services. The War Department gave wide distribution to a circular which said flatly that “proper attention is not being given to the selection of highly qualified applicants for the technical services ...”62
In July the War Department again called attention to the poor selection of candidates, and urged a canvass of surplus applicants for the schools of nontechnical arms to determine their suitability for the technical services. Examining boards were directed to encourage qualified applicants to at least name a technical service as an alternate choice.63 The Signal Corps welcomed the action, for it had long felt that the selection practices in vogue drew too heavily from the small fraction of the Army which the Signal Corps represented, while many enlisted men who were qualified for Signal Corps commissions were left in the ranks of other arms. Drawing officer candidates from within the Signal Corps itself also impoverished the Corps in its enlisted specialists. For example, the 556th Signal Aircraft Warning Battalion in Iceland had sent 26 candidates, about 8 percent of its strength, to OCS by midsummer.64 Colonel Powell, in the Hawaiian Department, protested that OCS and enlisted pilot schools were getting his experienced teletype maintenance men in such numbers as to create a serious shortage there.65
In the spring of 1942 still another problem focused the attention of training officers on the Signal Corps Officer Candidate
School. The Chief of Staff had adopted the policy of greatly reducing the direct commissioning of civilians, relying instead on the various officer candidate schools to supply the necessary commissioned personnel. If the officer candidate schools were to be the only source of supply, it was important that there should be a low rate of failure. A rate of 20 percent could be considered normal, but at Fort Monmouth the rate was slightly more than 30 percent for the first four classes. Late in April Col. Reuben E. Jenkins of the G-1 staff and Brig. Gen. Clarence R. Huebner, Director of Training, SOS, had gone to Fort Monmouth to find out why such a high percentage of candidates had failed to receive commissions.66
The Chief Signal Officer had already taken action designed to reduce the failure rate.67 To keep the attrition down even to 30 percent, it had been necessary to restrict the scope of the course to the capabilities of the candidates. Field commanders had sent many applicants with ratings below the required AGCT score of 110. These men had little chance of success in the course. Yet the demand for electronics officers was growing. The percentage strength of the Signal Corps in relation to total Army strength was increasing; by the end of the year it would comprise 4 ½ percent instead of 3 percent of the Army.68 To give instruction in communications to the graduates of OCS and to other officers needing technical training, General Van Deusen, the commandant of the Eastern Signal Corps School at Fort Monmouth, estimated that enrollment in the Officers Department of the school should reach 1,930 by the end of the year. Enrollment stood then at only 520, and task forces would take most of these men before they completed the courses. But as officers became more plentiful, the Officers Department of the school could be expected to bulge for the first time since the emergency had made students scarce.69
The Services of Supply agreed that Fort Monmouth’s facilities must be increased before the Signal Corps could even begin to cope with the need for training officers. On their return to Washington from their inspection trip, Colonel Jenkins had promised additional instructors, and General Huebner that additional construction would be authorized.70 The Signal Corps began to compute its needs for both. The estimate called for fifty-six additional buildings, neither cold-proof nor soundproof, without plumbing and heated by stoves. These specifications were to cause criticism later. The
War Department authorized the construction, as General Huebner had promised, although not until after a decision had been rendered on a capacity increase for which King argued practically man by man.71
Getting more buildings, more instructors, and a larger authorized capacity were necessary steps toward producing more officers. Getting the men, and particularly qualified men, was another matter. By July 1942 the Signal Corps had 8,800 officers. It needed 13,400. Despite the expected output of the Officer Candidate School and procurement objectives already approved, the supply would still fall almost one-third short of the more than 30,000 who would be required for an Army of four and a half million men, which was in prospect. The Under Secretary of War had advocated bringing more officers into all the technical services by direct commissioning, through decentralized committees which were authorized to commission applicants without reference to the War Department. The Signal Corps agreed with the General Staff in rejecting this manner of commissioning, which it was thought would result in unsuitable officer material. Colonel King asked for authority to commission 1,100 men from civil life, under the provisions of AR 605-10. He also wanted a larger pool of officers to draw on rapidly to meet whatever needs might materialize. The War Department General Staff denied the request for direct commissioning, because it held the optimistic view, not shared either by the Signal Corps or by the Services of Supply, that with proper administration of the OCS and the utilization of Army Specialist Corps officers the Signal Corps could meet its requirements.72 The Services of Supply was able to increase its officer pool to 4,500, second only to that of the Infantry in size.
Except for the Electronics Training Group, the Signal Corps had practically reached its authorized strength in officers by July 1942. Further action would have to wait on new authorizations, and Colonel King relaxed his efforts to obtain more officers from civil life. He did not yet know what a deep disappointment the Army Specialist Corps would prove to be, nor that the Signal Corps therefore would have to depend upon the nontechnical output of second lieutenants from the Officer Candidate School.
Meanwhile the percentage of candidate failures at OCS continued to be high. The fifth class, which graduated in June, was the first to have studied under the revised, simpler curriculum instituted in March. Entrance requirements had been so relaxed that only an estimated 2 percent of the candidates possessed engineering degrees or even a working knowledge of communications subjects. The course covered subjects common to officers’ candidate training for all branches of the Army, with only 48 hours’ instruction in signal subjects in the basic, 33 hours in the intermediate, and 21 hours in the advanced phase. In these brief periods devoted to strictly Signal Corps subjects, the candidates got a smattering of the elements of electricity, radio code and
procedure, basic signal communication and signal supply matters—not enough to fit a graduate for technical duty. The communications instruction of the fifth class was so elementary that the 27 percent of failures could not be attributed to it.73
The sixth class, which graduated in July, did better, with a failure rate of only 16 percent.74 The next two classes did still better, with failures of only 13 and 15 percent respectively, the lowest percentage the Officer Candidate School ever attained. It was achieved during the school’s most crowded period. Expecting 1,100 men for the eighth class, Monmouth received well over 1,500. Somewhere there had been a failure to coordinate; the quotas set for the June class were confused with the capacity authorized for the period later in the summer when the additional buildings would be ready. As many as 75 men crowded into barracks designed for 63, every tent Monmouth possessed was set up and occupied, and mess halls operated on two shifts.
The lower rate of failures may have resulted in part because of a change in administration and teaching methods. Many theories had been advanced to explain the previous high rate of failures. Colonel King had been particularly disturbed about a heavily weighted final quiz. To save potential officers who had otherwise completed the courses satisfactorily, he urged Milliken to omit this “embroidery,” and he carried his point despite Lattin’s advocacy of the practice.75 Other officers noted that candidates sent by the Air Forces had not understood that the purpose of the school was to provide leadership training, and had expected that they would receive training in communications subjects. Lacking interest, they proved to be poor students.76
Many officers and students alike denounced the demerit system as tending to perpetuate a schoolboy atmosphere not conducive to building up self-esteem and responsibility in prospective officers. General Van Deusen said that no candidate was ever relieved until the general had reviewed his record, and that he himself had never attached any special importance to demerits. But because the practice of giving demerits had been so misunderstood, he discontinued it. Colonel Guest deplored the directives “requiring numerous compulsory subjects,” which he believed had “hamstrung” the school in its teaching.77 Despite all the explanations, General Olmstead felt that the high rate of failure of officer candidates lay not in administration or in teaching methods, but stemmed straight from poor selection of candidates. The rate of failure in relation to the AGCT ratings of members of classes two through six bore him out in this:
| AGCT Score | Percentage of Failures |
| Below 110 | 60 |
| 110-119 | 53.3 |
| 120-129 | 26.6 |
| 130-139 | 14. |
| 140 and above | 13.2 |
Seeking to improve the methods of selection, he directed that class standing be determined as upper, middle, and lower third, hoping that thus a good formula might be established to guide the selection of the more apt candidates.78
No matter how competent the graduates or how excellent the instruction, the Officer Candidate School could not turn out officers able to perform the highly complex duties of a signal officer without at least a fair measure of technical training—training which they would get if there happened to be enough time to permit them to go on to the specialized work in the Signal Corps School. But the calls for officers were still too urgent to allow for that. As one of the officers who went directly from OCS said: “We could march, drill with precision, fire a rifle, and creep and crawl like veterans, but we were not able to operate a signal center until we got our training overseas the hard way.”79
One group of officers able to fill highly technical positions were those graduated from the Electronics Training Group. As one of its varied training services, Fort Monmouth accounted for these students, although most of them were enrolled in British schools and attended Monmouth only long enough to receive a short course in basic military subjects while on their way to or from England. These officers had been directly commissioned especially to fill technical positions in the Aircraft Warning Service. Like the authorizations for officer candidates, the authorization for ETG officers had been increased from time to time, and totaled 3,000 by June 1942. But as of 30 June, only 616 such officers were actually on duty, 151 at Fort Monmouth and 465 on detached service.80
Because the educational and personal requirements for appointment were exceptionally high, it was difficult to find men to meet them. An educational prerequisite was a background fitting the applicant for radar study. Since very high and Ultrahigh frequency subjects had as yet only been touched upon in electrical engineering courses, few college graduates could qualify and these few were in heavy demand in all the military services and in industry. Some appointees were electrical engineering graduates who had majored in power courses and who would have to be trained from scratch in very high frequency subjects. The type of loyalty investigation to which they were subjected also delayed appointments and eliminated some applicants.81
Although the bulk of the first ETG officers had been sent immediately to the United Kingdom, by June the Signal Corps received permission to divert 100 per month, up to 600 students at any one time, to take the Cruft Laboratory course at Harvard University. Those who completed that course and who were qualified for advanced work (about one half of them) might then be sent for another twelve weeks of
instruction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the training compared favorably with that received in the British military schools.82 Although it was the practice to cull out the better qualified for the overseas training, the British training officials found that some students were not ready for the advanced courses they offered, and had to be given ten to twelve weeks of fundamental instruction in electronics. Others were assigned to filter information center courses, and a few to very high frequency courses.
Of the students sent to the United Kingdom, about half were trained by the Royal Ordnance Corps and half by the Royal Air Force (RAF), none by the Royal Corps of Signals. Airborne training, as such, was limited to the 10 percent of the group that would be transferred to the Army Air Forces upon completion of the courses. But many more were enrolled in the RAF schools because in the British organization the RAF operated much of the ground equipment which in the United States Army was a responsibility of the Signal Corps.83
The British gave instruction in ground radar and related apparatus (MRU, CH, GCI, ACH, TRU, VHF, and filter equipment), in airborne radars AI and ASV, and in army sets GL and SLC.84 By the summer of 1942 the British schools were also teaching the American officers how to site the Signal Corps’ own radars, the SCR-270 and SCR-271 sets, according to texts revised by the Signal Corps as a result of experience with these sets.85 The British also eagerly opened their research establishments to growing numbers of ETG students who were assigned to work on every new type of pulse radar equipment under development.86
Ionospheric radio propagation was also studied. Most of the experimentation in that field had been done by the British, the reason assigned for the relatively laggard program in the United States being that commercial airlines, as well as the Navy and the Air Forces, depended upon short-distance communications, especially the systems of beacons and radio ranges which covered the continent. The British Commonwealth, needing to communicate at considerably longer range, 2,000 miles, for example, instead of 500 miles, had sought to send messages by sky waves, utilizing the reflecting properties of the ionosphere, which lies approximately 60 to 300 miles outward from the earth’s surface. Ionospheric data gathering stations were new and few. The principal emphasis, especially military, had been upon the development of radio transmitters and receivers which would operate in the high frequency band employing sky wave propagation. If the operation were not successful, one tended to assume that the fault was in the equipment. But it had become apparent that since so much activity in radio communication extended to, through, and beyond the ionosphere, radio engineers and scientists must well understand the nature of that layer. The British Admiralty and Air Ministry had set up the
Inter-Service Ionosphere Bureau (ISIB) at Great Baddow, near Chelmsford, Essex, in 1941. At the time of the arrival of the ETG officers the bureau was working day and night taking vertical incidence soundings of the ionosphere, measuring field intensities and monitoring the bearings and other characteristics of special enemy transmissions, some of which were located as far away as Berlin and northern Italy.87
In their training assignments the ETG officers became closely identified with their British comrades. Some took part in bombing missions over the Continent; a few would be on the Rock of Gibraltar before the invasion of Africa; others would be with the invasion parties at Casablanca. It became more and more difficult to keep track of them even though overseas they were charged to the headquarters of the Services of Supply in London and officially were restricted to service in the United Kingdom.
The great need everywhere for electronics officers brought many requests for the ETG trainees. There was pressure from the United States Army and the British Army for their assignment in Europe; the Pacific wanted them; schools and other activities in the homeland needed them. So rapidly were the requirements of the Air Forces increasing that it was proposed to have the Royal Air Force train 75 percent of the second contingent of 500 instead of half as heretofore. The RAF was willing, provided it could retain the men on a training status for fourteen months instead of the eight agreed upon, in order that they might serve as officers of coastal and bomber commands, some in the Near East. Since this would not have permitted the Signal Corps to meet its commitments to the United States Army Air Forces,88 no change was made in the original arrangement. Practically all the officers were returned to the United States for assignment. An exception was a contingent of 50 held in England to join the 562nd Aircraft Warning Battalion with ROUNDUP under the plan for launching a cross-Channel offensive early in 1943.89 The British-trained ETG officers were ready almost immediately for operational employment. A week usually sufficed for study of the American equipment with which they were not familiar. On their return to the United States they paused at Fort Monmouth only long enough to receive their assignments, or to get a short period of basic military training in case they had missed it on the way overseas because of transportation schedules that hurried them across the Atlantic.
With the facilities existing earlier it had not been possible, in an equivalent length of time, to obtain results in the United States which equaled those of the established British aircraft warning schools.90 By the summer of 1942 the picture was changing. Aircraft warning training had been centered at Camp Murphy and civilian universities were participating in the electronics training program on a wider scale. Troopships crossing the Atlantic were now heavily laden and ETG officers had to be squeezed in wherever space could be found for a few at a time. Sometimes they arrived
late for the classes they had been scheduled to attend. Delays became more serious as the RAF schools, which now began to train the uniformed womanpower of Great Britain in aircraft warning duties, could no longer afford to set aside their training facilities for American officers who could not be depended upon to fill the spaces.91 Gradually the institutions in the United States absorbed the training of these officers. In late summer Fort Monmouth relinquished to Camp Murphy the responsibility for accounting for ETG students, along with its radar courses.
Camp Murphy
The bulldozers and construction crews had barely begun work on the site of the new Signal Corps Radar School at Camp Murphy, on Hobe Sound, Florida, when the whole matter of providing Signal Corps aircraft warning specialists for the Army Air Forces was thrown into question by a dispute growing out of the big 9 March reorganization of the Army. Two days earlier, Signal Corps and Air Forces representatives had met with General Somervell, then G-4 and soon to become the head of the new Services of Supply, and had discussed among other things their differing views of the responsibilities given the AAF for aircraft warning activities. The conference ended in numerous compromises. The Signal Corps yielded the preparation of tables of organization and tables of basic allowances for aircraft warning units to the AAF, along with personnel to perform the work.
On the other hand, the AAF contended that it should have complete control of training for aircraft warning personnel from the time the men left the reception centers. The decision went to the Signal Corps. The Chief Signal Officer would retain control of replacement training centers and technical schools which turned out aircraft warning specialists for both the AAF and the Army Ground Forces. It was recognized that the AAF must be able to modify from time to time the number and type of specialists being trained, and to change the amount of time devoted to training specific specialists, in order to meet changing requirements for aircraft warning activities for task forces, defense commands, and theaters. To serve this need, the Signal Corps, the Army Air Forces, and the Army Ground Forces agreed to review jointly the Signal Corps training programs at Signal Corps reception centers and technical schools in order to screen out all types of specialists who could be trained in units or in training establishments of lower classification, and in order to reduce to a minimum the time required to train each individual. The initial review would be followed by others, the Signal Corps schools to be thrown open to AAF and AGF inspection at any time.92
The decision to give only the minimum training to the largest number of men—as Somervell put it, the problem of numbers versus quality production—was one that gave many Signal Corps officers concern. Radar was new, and intricate. There were no precedents on which to base even a good guess as to the length of time it would take to train men how to use, maintain, and repair the equipment properly. Some officers not very familiar with the equipment thought three months would be enough. The
men who had worked most closely with it in the laboratories made the longest estimates; Colonel Conrad, for example, estimated that it would require from ten to twenty-two months to give a qualified student a thorough understanding of the technical performance of radar sets.93 Dr. William L. Everitt, who headed the Operational Research Group in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, thought radar equipment was still a laboratory instrument, and would remain so for some time to come. As such, he thought it should be in the hands of thoroughly qualified men, and deplored a tendency to consider the average American “so smart” that he could be trained for radar work in a few weeks.94 Colonel Gardner, the director of the Aircraft Radio Laboratory at Wright Field, thought it would take a long time to train men to maintain and repair the new devices. He thought that even a thorough understanding of them would be but “a prelude ... to further education in the field by the actual maintenance and use [of the equipment].”95 The Chief Signal Officer himself wrote that “no matter how efficiently constructed these technical sets may be, unless they are properly operated and maintained in the field the objective for which they were produced is lost.”96
However sound the arguments for thorough training of radar specialists might be, time pressed too heavily to permit such a luxury. Training administrators set the cycle for training enlisted men at seven months: four months for the radio course and three months for the radar maintenance course. The officers’ course they set at approximately five months.97
Though reverberations from the Army Air Forces-Signal Corps differences of opinion over aircraft warning training continued to resound for some time to come, they had little effect on local operations at Camp Murphy. Colonel Mitchell, the commandant, was assigned to the new school in March 1942. After a brief trip to look things over, he returned to Washington with plans to rush construction, and to start classes meanwhile in a leased warehouse in nearby Riviera, Florida, until Camp Murphy should be ready for occupancy.98
The new establishment was well situated for radar instruction. The climate made year-round training feasible, and much of the 11,500-acre tract stretching along Hobe Sound for about five miles was wild, inaccessible swampland covered thickly with palmetto, fern, and bamboo which would discourage prying observation of the secret radar operations practiced there.99 By summer more than 400 one-story paintless buildings had sprung up on the site. The foliage of the Everglades provided
camouflage for the green lumber structures and the crushed-shell roads which ribboned the post.
Even before the school was ready to accept its first students, the scheduled capacity of 1,605 students had been increased to 3,605, to be divided between the prerequisite radio repair course and the radar course. This output would fall short of the year’s requirements; by activation schedules, 1,754 short, or on the basis of equipment delivery schedules, 4,210 short. Acting on the March agreement with the AAF to put as much of the training as possible in schools of lower classification, the Signal Corps proposed to give the radio repair training in civilian schools, devoting Camp Murphy’s entire capacity to the radar courses, and the Services of Supply agreed.100
It was a decision that could not be adhered to. At first the school comprised three main departments: Pulse Goniometry, which had divisions devoted to airborne, gun-laying and searchlight, and reporting equipment: Engineering, which taught repair shop techniques; and Training Literature, which provided the lesson texts. As summer moved on, some students coming from the radio courses in civilian schools proved to be still not qualified to enter the radar courses, and about one third of the officer students needed preliminary instruction. New courses in the principles of electricity and the elements of radio, a radar survey course, and eventually a new department, General Radar, had to be added to the school to mend the deficiencies. The whole organization of the school was necessarily experimental.101
Obviously, a radar school had to have radar sets for its students to work on, not merely blueprints or textbooks to study. But from its beginning, the school was handicapped by a lack of training sets. Each one it got had to be diverted from operational use by the Army Air Forces or the Coast Artillery Corps, and the scheduled production of sets was not enough for operational requirements alone. Moreover, plans for the operational use of the Aircraft Warning Service were by no means fixed; the equipment changed repeatedly as experience in its use revealed new secrets, and this in turn changed personnel and training requirements. Thus, even had there been plenty of sets, the services would have had difficulty in fixing priority of importance to particular sets, and hence to the numbers of men to be trained in their use. Yet the amount of training equipment available to the Radar School would largely determine the size of the classes it could train.102 The whole situation resembled a jigsaw puzzle, identification of each piece depending on fitting another piece smoothly into place.
The Coast Artillery Corps had given first
priority to the provision of six SCR-268’s for use of the school’s Gunlaying Division. The first two sets arrived, minus oscilloscopes and receivers, without which they were practically useless even for training purposes. The Reporting Division’s first class had only two SCR-270’s and a single SCR-588 CHL set to study. The first students in the Airborne Equipment Division were taught on the SCR-521 airborne search set and on the Mark IV IFF radars, SCR-515, employed in aircraft, and the companion sets, SR-532 and 533, employed on the ground. Later the Mark IV IFF equipment, of American design, was withdrawn from use because of a Joint Radar Board decision to use the British Mark III instead. Thus 64 men trained on the American sets again became unskilled when they were confronted by the British equipment.103
To supplement the limited number of actual radar sets available for training, the Signal Corps Radar Laboratory, the Coast Artillery Corps, and the National Defense Research Committee engaged in a search for adequate training substitutes. The Coast Artillery Corps developed and built a breadboard model to teach azimuth and elevation tracking for the SCR-268, and was considering the purchase of another pilot model embodying the BC-412 oscilloscope. Various British trainers were being sought. The First Interceptor Command’s Aircraft Warning School at Fort Dix had prepared blueprints for an SCR-270 mock-up which although it would not give the student any operational experience, would give him preliminary training at the controls—that is, in starting the set or shutting it down, in learning the possible source of trouble by variations in the visible lights, switches, and meters. Philco was building SCR-270 trainers which would go a step farther, and provide operational experience without the necessity of using live aircraft for targets.104 But scarcely any of this equipment was on hand in the summer of 1942.
Not the least of the school’s problems was the familiar one, the quality of the students. Every applicant had first of all to survive a thoroughgoing loyalty investigation into his personal and family background. In addition, he was supposed to have a background knowledge of radio and an AGCT score of at least 110, equal to that for Officer Candidate School. The intake of students often brought candidates who failed to meet the educational and mental standards, and the percentage of failures was accordingly high.105 For example a survey of students enrolled in the principles of electricity subcourse in July revealed that only 10 percent could be expected to go through the Radar School without difficulty. About 40 percent might become apprentice repairmen within
the allotted time, and another 40 percent were obvious misfits unacquainted with electrical terms and unable to master the simplest forms of arithmetic without difficulty but possibly capable of becoming elementary radiomen. The last 10 percent seemed hopeless.106
Radar repairmen were the elite, the Phi Beta Kappas of the school. To earn a “superior” rating as a graduate radar repairman, a student had to be able to take over a type of radar he had not previously studied; to supervise the installation of radar equipment and diagnose trouble quickly; to analyze radar circuits, and make substitutions in an emergency. Less expert repairmen received ratings of “excellent,” “very satisfactory,” or “satisfactory” according to the degree of ability they displayed. Men who could not quite make the grade as repairmen could usually become operators.107 But not all of them wished to do so. Radar students worked to a great extent on their own initiative, and men capable of studying in that manner were scarce. Others qualified for radar study objected to assignment at the school because of grapevine rumors that work at the oscilloscope was injurious to an operator’s eyesight, and that radiations from a radar set were harmful and could possibly cause sterility. Radar was so new that not even the engineers who developed it could be absolutely certain of the effects. To find out, students at some military institutions and at Purdue University served as guinea pigs in a series of tests which exploded the rumors. They showed that long periods of continuous work at the oscilloscope caused ocular fatigue no greater than that which follows a long period of reading, or watching a double-feature movie. Tests of radiation intensities were no more alarming. Radar men faced no greater hazard than would be encountered in working with high-voltage equipment of any sort.108
Wearing two hats, as commandant of the Signal Corps Radar School and as post commander of Camp Murphy, Colonel Mitchell found his duties wide and often burdensome, with scarcely discernible lines of demarcation between his accountability to the service command and to the Chief Signal Officer. The new camp needed almost everything. Mitchell felt it needed protection for the costly and scarce radars on hand—for example, canvas covers for protection against hurricanes and a military police force or some combat troops to guard against hostile human intruders. For his men on the post, Mitchell wanted bus transportation, recreational facilities, a drill ground, a baseball field, a band.109 Although the camp stretched for miles along Hobe Sound, there was not even a bathing beach available until neighboring estate owners offered private beach, dock, and boat facilities to the men of Camp Murphy.110
On 15 June 1942 the first classes began studying at Camp Murphy proper, and all
training at Riviera came to an end. Of the students who had enrolled there in April, 208 officers and enlisted men were graduated on 9 June ahead of schedule, and 50 others received diplomas on 5 July. By the end of July, 305 officers and 2,142 enlisted men were enrolled at the school.111 Colonel Mitchell felt that Camp Murphy was by then well established and that radar training was on a firm footing, an opinion shared by a representative of the Army Air Forces who visited there in July: “Camp Murphy reflects very creditably upon the Signal Corps ... the high quality and competency of the instructor personnel impressed me favorably together with the associated good direction and supervision.”112 Mitchell agreed to accept all radar students completing courses in other schools for crew training and postgraduate work before their assignment to field units, and to take full responsibility for any failures attributable to lack of training of the men passing through the school. Camp Murphy, he thought, could grow to a population of 25,000 or 30,000 men under the existing organization.113
It began to look as though it would have to. The Services of Supply had just stated the minimum requirements for Signal Corps personnel for the Aircraft Warning Service: 70,000 men by the end of 1942, with an additional 37,000 on other duty with the Air Forces.114
The real participation of the United States Army in the war was just beginning. Across the Atlantic America’s allies still bore the brunt of the fighting. In the Pacific the United States forces still lacked the men and material to conduct a major offensive. Plans for the invasion of North Africa were just taking shape. But already nearly every training problem that would plague the Signal Corps during the entire period of the war had been encountered in some measure, and in achieving at least partial solutions the training structure was showing stability and strength.115