Chapter 10: Accumulating Strength Over the World June–October 1942)
Bolstering the Army Airways Communications System
Increasingly as 1942 progressed, Signal Corps men were moving out over all the world to assist the global expansion of the Army Air Forces. Early in the 1940’s the Air Corps had begun expanding its airways and extending its Army Airways Communications System stations far beyond the continental boundaries of the United States, gradually at first, to Hawaii and Panama and to the outlying bases leased from the British in 1940, then with terrific acceleration in 1942 to such distant lands as Africa, Australia, and Asia. United States Army airplanes were pioneering military airlines, air ferries they were called, to move planes, men, and equipment to combat areas. American bombers and fighters were engaging the enemy in the theaters of war. Toward both missions, air ferrying and air combat, the Signal Corps contributed heavily.
Assisting the Installation and Operation of Airways Stations
A major Air Forces undertaking early in 1942 was the build-up of the North Atlantic ferry route, via airfields in New England, Newfoundland, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, and Scotland. The airfield control centers had to be joined in a dependable communications chain, by links of radio only. Some of the radio stations along the route dispatched flight messages and provided essential navigational aids. Others were meteorological stations, spotted in remote northern wastes, such as Baffin Island, far distant from the route, in order to collect and disseminate advance weather information, vitally needed if the control stations were to direct flights safely over the notoriously treacherous North Atlantic sky routes. Airways, especially in such remote and violently dangerous climates, demanded abundant and reliable facilities, facilities of two sorts: communicational and navigational. Communications called for dependable long-range radio to work with ground stations and with aircraft in flight. Navigational facilities included radio guide beams and blind-landing electronic aids.1
All this spelled out work for the Signal Corps serving the AACS, operated by the Army Air Forces.
At first the work was not always efficiently or very effectively done. According to the Army regulations, it was the Signal Corps’ job to install and maintain the equipment; it was Air Forces’ job to provide the men, specifically units of the AACS, to operate the equipment. In actual operations, however, during the first months of the war, neither did the Signal Corps have the organization and facilities to meet completely its share of the joint obligation nor did the AAF have enough men in the AACS to man all its stations. Airway stations sprang up by the score, nonetheless, along routes which encompassed the globe. The AAF men often installed the equipment themselves as best they could, for want of skilled Signal Corps crews. Conversely, Signal Corps men often served on AACS jobs, plugging holes in the undermanned AACS until the Air Forces got more men, as often as not by raiding the Signal Corps for technicians to transfer directly into the AAF.
Although along the North Atlantic ferry route the airmen had put in much of their AACS equipment, the Signal Corps had established installations at Gander and Stephenville in Newfoundland, before the AACS took them over.2 At Gander a Signal Corps detachment continued to handle all cryptographic work for the AACS until nearly a year after the airmen had taken control of the station from the 1001st Signal Service Company. It was March 1942 when the AACS acquired from the Signal Corps the station at Stephenville. Previously both there and at a station in St. John’s Signal Corps men had handled all the AACS traffic.3
Not only did the Signal Corps thus operate some of the northern route stations for the AACS, but it sometimes operated them in the southern areas also. For example, two enlisted men from the 860th Signal Company had established in February 1942 a tiny communications station, RCZ, serving an Army airfield at San Jose, Costa Rica. Later, the station acquired two more men from the 860th; and, although commanded by Air Force officers, the four Signal Corps men continued to man the radio station and message center, operating one Hallicrafters
receiver and two BC-191 transmitters under a second set of call letters, WSJC.4
Examples of this same sort of intertwined relationship, illustrating how Signal Corps men at first assisted the AACS, then were either replaced or absorbed, occurred abundantly along American airways in Central and South America. Here, as the Air Forces flung bastions around the Panama Canal and developed a southern route to Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, Signal Corps administrative stations and the AACS worked side by side, often pooling their facilities. At Albrook Field in the Canal Zone, the AACS moved Station WZA into the central radio building which the Signal Corps maintained there. In it the airmen installed and operated their radios and even utilized the Signal Corps personnel in the building to handle their message center and cryptographic work. The situation was duplicated in the AACS Stations WYRF and WYYT, the former at Guatemala City, the latter at Rio Hato, Panama. At Rio Hato, the AACS, unable to replace Signal Corps cryptographers with men of its own, first retained and then absorbed them.
In at least two Pacific outposts in the southern area, Signal Corps men assisted the AACS—on the Galápagos Islands at Station WYRZ and on the coast of Ecuador opposite these islands, at Salinas, Station WYSX. When the AACS arrived at Salinas it found personnel from the Signal Corps and from the 25th Bombardment Squadron already in the station handling communications, and for a while they all shared the same room. Here, too, the Signal Corps unit continued to do the cryptographic work until eventually it was transferred into the AACS. It was the same way on the Galápagos, where the AACS operated its Station WYRZ in the building which housed the Signal Corps administrative station, telephone and message centers, and cryptographic rooms. Cryptography, here as elsewhere the very last Signal Corps service to be taken over, was ultimately absorbed when the AACS assumed full control of the message center and cryptographic section.5
Similarly, Signal Corps units that went to the China-Burma-India theater found themselves doing a great deal of AACS work because much of the military activity in primitive and remote areas was by air. The Tenth Air Force there had to rely upon Signal Corps units to pinch-hit for AACS. Consider, for example, the one officer and 18 enlisted men of Team E, who set up and operated an important station for the Air Forces in India.6 Arriving at Chakulia in Bihar Province, some 200 miles northwest of Calcutta, the team members at once converted their mobile 300-watt transmitter, conveyed in a K-18 truck, into a fixed station. Work assignments soared as an airfield took shape at Chakulia for the 2nd and the 490th Bombardment Squadrons, which were attacking enemy shipping in the Indian Ocean. After putting in wire lines and telephones, the men found that administrative traffic, the usual Signal Corps chore,
was not their only responsibility. They had to handle strictly tactical Air Forces traffic too, definitely not the usual task for Signal Corps men.
The field was ready when the first B-25 came over and signaled for a landing. ... There was a telephone net to all the airfields in the area, a net built through British switchboards, over Indian wire, and a poor one because of that, but the best the country could offer. There was a radio net to carry the load when the whoop-and-holler telephone system failed completely.
“We’ll take care of administrative traffic,” the 835th men remember saying, “but who’ll handle your tactical traffic, the weather, and the air-ground?”
“We’ll do the air-ground,” was the answer. “The rest is up to you.”
Thus, the 835th men were handed a job that was normally the full-time work of the AACS. Flight instructions ... targets for today ... rendezvous ... bomb-loads ... anticipated enemy action ... weather ... all this a steady stream of dits and dahs in the headphones of the radio operator. Result of mission, losses to enemy aircraft and antiaircraft fire, enemy planes destroyed—all pounded out on the brass key of a manual circuit.
These Signal Corps men took much satisfaction in their hard assignment, for the bombers based at Chakulia were carrying out successful offensive raids on Japanese targets at a time when generally the initiative was in the enemy’s hands. For eight months the men worked long hours (especially long because, lacking a cipher machine, they had to encipher messages the long arduous way, by hand on strip boards) until an AACS unit arrived to take over the tactical traffic. Even then, Team E continued to handle, in addition to administrative messages, all intrafield communications and weather reports. When the AACS was finally able to handle them and the station commander wanted to transfer these men of the 835th Signal Service Company into the Air Forces, Signal Corps tasks demanding experienced men in Bombay and Calcutta took precedence, rather exceptionally, over Air Forces desires, and the Signal Corps men departed to meet the demand.7
The story was the same at New Delhi where, in 1942, the Air Forces desperately needed radio operators, code clerks, and message center men. Another Signal Corps group of one officer and 18 men, Team H, could not itself do all the work and therefore set up a training program, assigning a detail of five enlisted men to establish a school. Their “first class consisted of 17 officers and 75 British enlisted personnel. These men were trained and placed on duty with the Army Airways Communications Service [i.e., System] until American personnel could be shipped in to replace them.”8
Similarly too at Jorhat, in Assam province, hard against the embattled Burma border, still another detachment from the 835th at first installed (with help from the 402nd Signal Service Company) equipment for the Air Forces and then worked the traffic until an AACS unit put in its appearance.9
Thus, at individual airway stations AACS men and Signal Corps men worked together in 1942 forging the air chains which linked North America, to the east, with England; to the south, with Central and South America (thence with Africa, thence northwards with England again, and eastward with the Middle East and India);
to the northwest, with Alaska and the Aleutians; to the west, with Hawaii, and on and on, linking with south and southwest Pacific islands, with Australia, and with China, Burma, and India again. Truly a breathtaking sweep, from the United States to the ends of the earth.
Signal Corps Supply and Maintenance for the AACS
Under Army Regulations 95-200 and 105-20 the AACS was to control and operate all the station links serving these airway chains. The same regulations charged the Signal Corps with a double obligation: first, the development, procurement, storage, and issue of AACS material; and second, the installation and all major alterations of this equipment.
According to the Air Forces, the Signal Corps could not at first supply equipment fast enough, and the airmen often took steps to obtain radios from whatever sources they could discover, from amateur radio operators and from commercial airline stocks.10 Yet in general the Signal Corps met its supply obligation for the AACS well enough so that it could rebut one of General Arnold’s chronic complaints about the Signal Corps with the statement that “the Army Air Forces has made no complaint about the equipment furnished by the Signal Corps for the Army Airways Communications System. ...” And if the AAF did get some of its equipment independently from radio amateur hams, the Signal Corps got much more, under a carefully developed plan, the Amateur Procurement Program, which brought in about 10,000 pieces of equipment purchased for some three million dollars. While some seventy tons of it went to the British to bolster their Libyan campaign, the bulk went into AACS stations—the Signal Corps Aircraft Radio Laboratory at Dayton, Ohio, converting scores of the radios it had acquired from hams into usable AACS sets.11
By the spring of 1942 the tempo of equipping the AACS had stepped up enormously. On 4 June Colonel Rives, Chief of the Radar and Aircraft Communications Branch in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, said that he “was procuring ... approximately $91,000,000 worth of radio equipment for use by Army Air Forces [and] Task Forces at airdromes and airways.”12 Additionally, the Signal Corps was accomplishing more than procurement alone to meet Air Forces blueprints. In fact, it had itself carried out some of the
preliminary work. In the absence of a comprehensive Air Forces plan toward providing AACS stations, the Signal Corps on its own had made provision for some 400 stations, in addition to about 50 which had been built or begun before Pearl Harbor. “On December 7, 1941, less than 50 stations were established in areas under the jurisdiction of the United States,” General Somervell, head of SOS, informed General Arnold late in 1942, adding that preliminary work had just started on fewer than ten stations in newly acquired foreign bases. “The AAF provided no plan for the creation of new stations,” Somervell asserted. “The Signal Corps,” he emphasized, “proceeded to obtain equipment and on its own plan has equipped some two hundred stations outside the continental limits of the United States, in addition to about as many more within the United States.”13
The supply of electronic equipment for the AACS was therefore relatively good, but not so the installing of it, not during 1942. Prior to Pearl Harbor the Signal Corps had properly installed the equipment it supplied both within the continental United States and in the foreign departments; it had also completed a number of installations for the AACS in the Caribbean area and in Bermuda.14 Thereafter, amid the rush of wartime demands, the Signal Corps endeavored, whenever it could, to meet its installation responsibilities either by contracting with civilian engineers or by assigning Signal Corps officers, if any were available, to supervise the work. In general, though, after the meteoric expansion of air stations all over the world, Signal Corps, in its AACS activity under the Plant Division of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, largely ceased to make arrangements for installing AACS equipment, finding that it could not readily contract with competent engineers to supervise the work where and when the AAF desired. Competent men were hard to come by anywhere, in the Army or out of it. Further, the Signal Corps simply lacked anything resembling an adequate world-wide organization specifically prepared to install AACS stations.
During 1942, therefore, Colonel Parker and his Plant Division in most cases merely procured the requested equipment and shipped it to the ports of embarkation. From there on, by a sort of informal understanding, the AAF took charge, moving and installing the stuff however it could, often with the aid of its own AACS operators. Often, too, the AAF made contracts with commercial companies, notably with Pan American Airways in South America and in Africa, to put in the radio aids. Indeed, the AAF was already doing so much of this installation work and the Signal Corps so little that General Olmstead in the early spring of 1942 transferred such AACS activity as remained to him, moving it from the Plant Division to the Radar Division under Colonel Rives. He did so at the Air Forces’ request, on the assumption, Rives said, that “radar would be the sole contact with the Army Air Forces.”15 Although Army regulations were still explicit, the Signal Corps was yielding under the pressure of workday necessities.
The AAF in fact hoped to confirm the temporary control which it now enjoyed over the engineering, installation, and maintenance of its AACS equipment by accomplishing a change in Army regulations. However, these ambitions were to be frustrated. The AACS was overreaching itself. Many of the installations put in overseas functioned poorly, for their personnel had not been trained for this sort of work. They were not engineers. AACS men were intended to be operators only; Army regulations so specified. As Colonel Conrad in the Executive Office of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer wrote on 17 July: “It has become evident that Air Force personnel are not achieving the maximum possible operational efficiency. This last is mainly due to poorly trained personnel, lack of experienced installation crews and some negligence on the operators’ part.”16
BOLERO, Mishaps in June; Impact on Signal Corps-A ACS Relations
Troubles harassed the North Atlantic ferry route especially, the air link so essential to BOLERO, at stations where the difficulties arising from the inexperience and ignorance of the men were compounded by trials peculiar to the far north, such as poor electrical grounding in permanently frozen sandy or marshy terrain, and in particular the transmission fade-outs caused by the aurora borealis.17
The North Atlantic ferry route was double-tracked: one airway, for four-engined planes, proceeding directly from Gander Lake to Prestwick; and the other, for twin-engined aircraft, reaching Scotland by a series of shorter flights, by way of Labrador, Greenland, and Iceland. The AACS had either completed or was completing the majority of stations serving these routes when, early in the spring of 1942, AAF commanders, dismayed by AACS difficulties along the skyway, asked the Signal Corps for technical assistance. But Colonel Rives and the Airways and Airdromes Section of his Radar Division could spare no one to render the help the Air Forces desired. The Signal Corps, therefore, made a contract, the AAF consenting, with the Raymond Wilmotte Engineering Company of Washington, D. C., to lend aid. As Rives explained on 31 July, “trouble was first encountered in the northeast route and later in the Caribbean area. The Signal Corps was still doing very little of the installation work. ... The Air Corps,” Rives said, “asked for technical service and in view of the fact that Radar Division had no personnel to furnish such service, the services of the Raymond Wilmotte Engineering Company were employed to do the job on the northeast route.”18
Things had gone badly. In February 1st Lt. Crocker Snow, commanding the North Atlantic Sector of the Air Corps Ferrying Command, had reported that communications northeast of Presque Isle, Maine, were a “mess.” In March he had made an analysis of what he felt to be the main difficulties besetting the route: poor communications, a serious shortage of weather personnel and of weather facilities, poorly
performing radio and range stations, insufficient maintenance and operations personnel, inadequate airdrome facilities, and all but primitive messing and housing arrangements. Through April both personnel and radio navigational aids had remained inadequate. Then on 18 June, only a few days before the first BOLERO flight was scheduled, an inspection of the route indicated that delays in receipt of weather information and in its dissemination arose mainly because inexperienced communicators, and cryptographic and weather officers failed to coordinate their work well.19 On 19 June the signal officer in the First Corps Area, Col. James H. Van Horn, reported that he had found the facilities at Goose Bay, Labrador, and the morale of the men equally bad.20 Subsequently, General McClelland in Air Forces Headquarters summed up the BOLERO mess, saying “probably due to the exigencies of the situation at the time, the communications system, if it could be called a system, on the North Atlantic airway was not ‘engineered’ but was a loosely coordinated effort to get something ready in time for projected movements.”21
Such halfway measures may suffice in many hectic wartime situations, but in airway communications they will not do. The late spring of 1942 meanwhile heard the voices of high ranking Air Forces officers swelling the chorus of complaints. In May General Arnold fumed at the communicational and meteorological inadequacies along the route. He was, in brief, “dissatisfied.” General Spaatz, commanding the Eighth Air Force in England, had occasion for similar feelings after he had taken off early in June from the Presque Isle Army airfield on two attempts to fly to Goose Bay and had to turn back each time, not because of weather, though it was adverse, but because ground communications had been impossible. Static, he recorded, was bad, but equally bad operating procedure on the part of ground communicators had stymied communications. And without communications there could be no air ferrying. Spaatz urged that the best airlines communications expert in America be sent with authority to reorganize the communications links.22
But before anything either specific or general could be done, the first BOLERO flight ended in disaster. Eighteen B-17’s took off from Presque Isle for Goose Bay on 23 June. All arrived safely. So far so good, but on the second leg of the flight three days later, only half arrived at their destination, Narsarssuak, Greenland, six having to turn back to Goose Bay while the remaining three crash-landed. Undoubtedly, communications failure contributed largely—as Tom Rives put it in a nutshell: “... when they cracked up the 3 B-24’s [they were B-17’s]—these ships cleared from Goose Bay to Greenland. After they had cleared the weather turned bad on them. There was a number of ships involved in the flight and they called and told them to go back. Part of the flight got
the message and acknowledged. The rest didn’t get the message. The operator on the ground thought that all had gotten it. Some cracked up.”23
The first BOLERO flight precipitated a showdown on the question of who was responsible for AACS installation and maintenance. The matter came to a quick boil, both along the ferry route itself and in Washington headquarters. Along the route the airway stations fell under close scrutiny. In August Captain R. H. Freeman from Plant Division, accompanied by representatives from the Air Forces and from the Civil Aeronautics Administration, inspected AACS facilities at Presque Isle, Goose Bay, Sondrestromfjord, Narsarssuak, and Reykjavik. All the installations, Freeman wrote to Colonel Parker, showed obvious engineering defects. Antennas, both transmitting and receiving, had been put up without thought as to their directional characteristics. In some cases they presented the angle of minimum efficiency toward the distant stations with which they communed. The operators were crowded and used blaring loudspeakers which drowned one another out. In some cases, they worked in noisy aircraft hangars, where various electric motors injected strong interference into their communication circuits.24
At Washington headquarters a series of disputes beginning in July eventually led to the resuscitation of AACS installation activity in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer. Stoner, Meade, Conrad, and others speaking for the Signal Corps, and Marriner, DeArmond, and others for the Air Forces, agreed that at the moment neither was “properly equipped” to make quickly and efficiently all the installations of which the AACS had so desperate and immediate a need outside the continental United States. The conferees agreed that the Civil Aeronautics Administration was best supplied with the needed personnel qualified by long experience in the intricate ways of radio ranges, marker beacons, and the like. Installation crews composed of these men, together with some Signal Corps men, it was thought, could do the job. Direction of the work would be taken from the Radar Division and returned to its original place in the Plant Division.
Further conferences on 28 and 31 July sought to clarify just who would do what. Even within the Signal Corps it was not easy to separate intertwined equipment and functions—VHF radio, for instance, would remain a responsibility of the Radar Division, presumably because of its employment in the radar stations of the Aircraft Warning and Intercept Services.25
All this the Deputy Chief Signal Officer, General Code, summed up for General Arnold on 5 August, informing him that the Airways and Fixed Radio Branch, set up on 29 July in the Plant Division, “will, upon notification of requirements to be furnished by the Commanding General, Army Air Forces, engineer all installations, taking into account the operational requirements of the Army Air Forces and will procure, store, issue, install the equipment, and arrange for all maintenance other than First Echelon, and will utilize to the fullest the facilities of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, signal officers of the various Service Commands, and such other agencies, civil or military, as are available.”
At the same time responsibility for determining requirements was split between the two corps. The Commanding General, Army Air Forces, was made responsible for determining AACS requirements “for air-ground and flight dispatching circuits, weather circuits, and radio aids to navigation, specifically including marker beacon, direction finding and radio range equipment.” The Chief Signal Officer was made responsible “for determining the need for administrative radio stations.”26
Despite this agreement, the Army Air Forces remained dissatisfied. Hardly a month after the agreement, on 2 September, it developed, at a conference including Colonel Parker, head of Plant Division, and Col. Wallace G. Smith from the Air Forces, that the latter had in mind to submit a recommendation to the General Staff for transfer of responsibility for AACS installation and maintenance to the Air Forces. Meanwhile, pending a decision, the AAF said it would try its utmost to make the existing arrangement suffice and toward this end agreed to assign at once two liaison officers to Plant Division in order to coordinate matters pertaining to airways communications. Yet these liaison officers failed to appear promptly and a few days later Parker summed up his views of the situation in bald terms:27
... It would appear that no great effort is being made by the Air Corps to comply with the understanding reached in the above mentioned conference, and it is my belief that this action is being purposely delayed in order to provide time for them to present their case to the General Staff. I am, furthermore, of the opinion that we ... should take steps at the earliest practicable date to prepare reasons why such a move would not be desirable and that such advance action as is necessary and practicable be taken to acquaint the General Staff with the fact that the Signal Corps, if given the cooperation of the Air Corps, can do the job in a satisfactory manner.
Thus some airmen did not accept either the requirements laid down by Army regulations or the Signal Corps’ efforts to comply with them. This intolerable situation soon exploded, sparked as usual by the Air Forces. On 12 September, Colonel Smith, speaking for Marriner, director of communications in AAF headquarters, told Colonel Meade: “We feel that we should be charged with all engineering, installation and maintenance of Army Airways and associated administrative and supply radio channels and are taking steps to prepare a
Staff Memorandum recommending we be charged with these duties and the Signal Corps relieved of them.”28
General Olmstead at once began to prepare a brief of the whole matter, pointing out that the Signal Corps had “in good faith” set up a supply and installation system, had already surveyed the North Atlantic ferry route to eliminate deficiencies there, had already turned over four major engineering jobs to the Civil Aeronautics Administration, and had contracted with a civilian agency to survey antenna installations with a view to improving the arrays. He intended to ask General Arnold “to stop all this petty bickering and let us both get on with the necessary work of providing these installations in accordance with the previous informally approved plan.”29 He never channeled his protest to Arnold, however, since an amicable settlement was reached without it. For the next two years the Signal Corps retained control.
Beginning late in September, the Plant Division entered upon an extensive program of reorganization and expansion under its chief, Colonel Parker. Still under General Stoner and the Army Communications Service, it became the Plant Engineering Agency (PEA) and moved to separate quarters in Philadelphia. Its Signal Airways Branch (SAB) and Signal Airways Service (SAS), when provided with installation crews serving in the four sectors into which the Air Forces divided the world, would grapple with the huge work load to come. Some notion of what AACS requirements entailed may be obtained by considering that radio communications, administrative and flight messages, constituted only one part of the whole. The airways and air stations had to be supplied with a huge net of hundreds of weather reporting stations bristling with meteorological equipment. The installation of the stations, their continued supply and maintenance, and the supply of balloons, radar, and theodolite tracking equipment, anemometers, barometers, ceiling lights, and so on and on ad infinitum, not to mention wire and radio nets—all constituted another part of the load on the SAS and the SAB.
Then there was the matter of sites: in Tibet, on the Greenland icecap, in the Sahara Desert, in the jungles of interior Brazil, some in places so remote that they could be supplied only by parachute drop. The problem presented by meteorological stations was but another elaboration of the Signal Corps’ responsibility to supply, install, and maintain AACS equipment. Still another was the matter of navigation stations which the Air Forces’ world-wide airways must have, especially over the oceans. There were locator stations employing directional finders. There were radar and radio beacon stations, loran stations, blind-landing aids at airfields, all entailing more and more equipment, often, too, in the most remote areas of the globe.30
Build-up for the Air Forces in the Northeast
Engineering assistance and technical aid toward the installation of all the varieties of AACS equipment—communicational, navigational, meteorological—were not the
only requests touching military airways which the Army Air Forces made of the Signal Corps during 1942. From the welter of demands which BOLERO laid upon the AACS, one in particular bore down upon the Signal Corps, the demand that the Corps handle administrative traffic along the ferry route to England. Mounting radio traffic along the North Atlantic airways in the spring of 1942 quickly overtaxed the Army Airways Communications System. The AAF wished to be relieved of administrative messages altogether in order to concentrate on tactical messages, such as those pertaining to weather and to aircraft flights. Early in June, therefore, Colonel Marriner asked that the Signal Corps establish and operate administrative circuits for the Air Forces between Presque Isle, Goose Bay, and Narsarssuak, “as soon as possible in view of the present acute situation.”31
Within a month of Marriner’s request, General Stoner was reporting rapid progress under Colonel Van Horn at Presque Isle and Goose Bay. Transmitters of three kilowatts’ output were already on hand at each location. As Stoner expected, Goose Bay went on the air by mid-July, working in one direction with an ACAN station at Narsarssuak, WVDB, and in the opposite direction with WVHP at Presque Isle, WVO in Boston, and WVP on Governors Island in New York Harbor.32
Colonel Marriner soon followed his first request for administrative stations with a second. It was a larger order than the first and asked that the Signal Corps “provide administrative channels [for the Army Air Forces] at The Pas, Churchill, Southampton Island, CRYSTAL 2, CRYSTAL 1, and BLUIE EAST 2.”33 The spots named by Colonel Marriner lay far to the north athwart Canada, Hudson Bay, and Greenland. They were sites of airfields and AACS stations under development according to plan CRIMSON. This plan the AAF Ferrying Command had evolved to bolster BOLERO and to provide an inland route through northern Canada in order to reduce the extent of Overwater flying to the United Kingdom.34
Undertaking at once to install administrative radio stations at these six sites, the Signal Corps first drew up plans for the project. This administrative net was to extend from the northern United States to The Pas, thence northeast to Churchill, on across Hudson Bay to Southampton Island, thence east to the head of Frobisher Bay, across Davis Strait to Sondrestromfjord on the western side of Greenland, and finally across the icecap to Angmagssalik on Greenland’s east coast.35 The administrative radio at the head of Frobisher Bay, it was further planned, would establish a channel to Fort Chimo, Labrador, where the Signal Corps would set up administrative station WVMD, CHAPLET, alongside the existing AACS station CRYSTAL 1, WYTL. CHAPLET in turn would be linked with Signal Corps stations already operating at Goose Bay and at Narsarssuak. While a new Signal Service Company, the 841st, was being activated at Fort Meade, Maryland, to man the projected stations,36 the Plant Division hastily assembled equipment such as 300-watt transmitters BC-365 and BC-447. It planned to lease equipment in Chicago and in nearby St. John, Indiana, in order to anchor one corner of the net in the Chicago ACAN station WVT. By late October numbers of the CRIMSON stations were at work; at least two were already in the hands of operators from the 841st Signal Service Company.37
As the year drew to a close, then, the Signal Corps was operating, on a temporary basis at least, all of the administrative stations which the AAF had requested in order to assist its AACS along the North Atlantic airways. Since they soon lost their usefulness, some of the stations never received permanent fixed equipment. Radioteletype systems which the Signal Corps would install in AACS stations during 1943 eventually enabled the airmen to handle heavier traffic loads without assistance. And although four-engined planes continued to fly along the sea route to Scotland, the inland airways soon fell into disuse, both because of climatic exigencies and because the reduction of the submarine menace made it more advisable to carry small planes aboard
ships rather than to attempt to ferry them by air. The CRIMSON project was then abandoned altogether.
Radars for Aircraft Warning
Another demand which the Signal Corps was meeting for the Air Forces involved radars for aircraft warning. By mid-1942 numerous Signal Corps ground radars were standing vigil at scores of sites from Iceland to India. A tabulation made in July showed that the five corps areas which guarded the American coasts had over 250 radars in service: 2 SCR-271’s, 70 SCR-270’s, and 194 SCR-268’s. The Ninth Corps Area, facing the Pacific, enjoyed the lion’s share, having 31 SCR-270’s and 127 SCR-268’s. The remaining sets were scattered along the eastern coast in the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Corps Areas.38
Now, as theaters of war were opening up increasingly in the Pacific and were on the point of opening up in Africa also, the Signal Corps had to procure, install, and maintain more and more radars, both for increased defense of the homeland and for protection of American positions abroad. Already, many scores of American 268’s, 270’s, 271’s, and 516’s were serving the Army in an amazing variety of locations: to the eastward—in Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, Bermuda, Panama, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Ascension Island, and Liberia; to the westward—in Alaska, Ecuador, Galápagos Islands, Hawaii, Christmas Island, Canton Island, the Fijis, Aitutaki, Tongareva, Tongatabu, Bora Bora, New Caledonia, Australia, and India. Most numerous were the mobile 270’s and 268’s, the latter especially, 76 of which were in use by task forces at “locations unknown,” 69 of them out of San Francisco, 7 out of New Orleans. So Lt. Col. James R. Rearden, charged with the Installation and Maintenance Branch in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, informed Colonel Rives, Chief of the Radar Division, on 14 July.39
The mobility of the American sets was becoming an important factor as 1942 wore on and as Allied plans contemplated offensive movements. While British radars held the first place in the estimation of officers in the Air Forces Headquarters at the outset, the fact that the SCR-270 was relatively more mobile became a telling point. By the end of May the Signal Corps had been informed that “most of the SCR-270’s now being procured will be used to equip Task Forces.”40
As invasion deadlines approached, quite a rush developed for 270’s, and for the mobile short-range SCR-268’s also. The AAF was using all Signal Corps’ production of SCR-270 and 271, together with many SCR-268’s intended originally for use by the Coast Artillery Corps. For example, in July Signal Corps’ Installation and Maintenance Branch sought to provide the Air Forces, “for use in BOLERO,” with 48 SCR-268’s, together with a quantity of spare parts sufficient for one year’s operation.41
At about the same time the AAF asked for a large number of the fixed 271’s. The AAF had on order 357 SCR-270’s when, in early July, it expressed a desire that only 20 percent of them be delivered as mobile sets; the rest the AAF now wanted converted to fixed SCR-271’s, possibly because the manufacturer, Westinghouse, along with some 90 subcontractors the country over, was ahead of the production schedule (the 271 was easier to produce than the 270). Accordingly, the Signal Corps Radar Laboratory prepared to have 286 of the mobile sets converted into fixed SCR-271’s, 196 of them equipped with 100-foot antenna towers, the rest with 50-foot arrays. Of these fixed radars, the Air Forces indicated that 215 would be erected outside the United States.42
The Navy, too, put in requests for these Signal Corps radars. By August, it was pressing vigorously for 270’s, having a high priority for 28 sets to serve task forces scheduled to sail in September. These, added to 52 already on order for the Navy plus another 42 for the marines, totaled 122 mobile radars. Besides, the Navy had an order in for 16 fixed SCR-271’s also.43 For some time previously, the Navy had been using an SCR-270 on Midway Island and the marines a 270 and a 271 on Samoa.44
While Signal Corps radars were thus moving out into the field in considerable quantity during 1942, the Air Forces stubbornly continued to demand copies of British ground sets too. Because Air Forces and British advisers had thought British radar would be the answer to American Aircraft Warning Service requirements, they influenced the War Department’s thinking that the American sets would eventually yield to the supposedly superior CH, CHL, GCI/CHL and so on. Canadian factories were to produce the GCI/CHL as SCR-588. This radar did not become abundant, however, while Signal Corps’ SCR-270 and SCR-271 became increasingly available and moreover were not inferior. Yet the AAF staff, retaining its predilection, continued through the year demanding such cumbersome long-wave sets as Saville and Watson-Watt had urged upon them in January and February.45 In April Colonel Marriner, speaking for the AAF, had listed its expected ground radar needs. Every type he named
Aircraft Warning Radars. The fixed SCR-271 on Ile des Pins in the Southwest Pacific (above) and the mobile SCR-268 in Greenland (below)
was British, CH, MRU, CHL (both fixed and transportable versions), GCI, fixed and transportable; and finally, portable sets which the British designated LW, light warning. For four of them, the CH, the MRU, and the TRU (identical except for mobility), and the portable LW, the only source was England itself. “The procurement of one hundred MRU sets,” Marriner had emphasized, “is a matter of the highest urgency.”46
By August Col. Clay Hoppough, on Signal Corps detail with the Army Air Forces, was asking for 60 LW’s for the BOLERO project. “It is the understanding of the Commanding General, Army Air Forces,” he wrote, “that orders have been placed for 200 British LW (lightweight portable) sets. There is a requirement for 60 of these sets for the BOLERO project.” He wanted also 9 MRU sets, 6 TRU’s, 3 CHL’s, and 19 GCI’s, specifically for BOLERO. “Steps should be taken,” he urged, “to procure these sets in sufficient time to utilize them for the BOLERO project.” Simultaneously, he repeated the request for a dozen huge CH stations for home defense, which Saville had sought so urgently early in the year.47 Some of these British sets arrived in the United States in due course, a TRU, for example, evidently the first on 29 August, and a very meager scattering of others during the last months of 1942.48
Meanwhile, pressure for British ground radar for the Army Air Forces began to peter out. The radars could not be had in quantity, whereas Signal Corps sets were becoming increasingly abundant. For instance, by July when Colonel Rearden tabulated the several hundred 268’s, 270’s, and 516’s which were in service, he could list only nine British sets: three in Iceland (one ACH and two CD/CHL’s) and six in Panama (four SCR-588-A’s, Canadian copy of the CHL, and two SCR-588-B’s, copies of GCI/CHL’s).49 Besides, they were old types, already outmoded. But before passing from the American scene,50 these British radars, which had given the Signal Corps many a headache, lent a parting shove to an Air Forces movement which relieved the Signal Corps from its obligation to install and maintain Aircraft Warning Service ground radars.
Installation and maintenance of the Corps’ many radars all over the world, chiefly for the AAF and its Aircraft Warning Service, placed upon the Signal Corps a need for an organization and for facilities which had not existed at the beginning of
1942. It soon became a galling problem which the Signal Corps tried to solve by various means. Early in the year the responsibility of training men to site and install the sets had been specifically charged to the Signal Corps Radar Laboratory at Camp Evans. By May, Maj. Paul E. Watson, executive officer at the laboratory, had outlined plans for an Installation and Maintenance School at the camp.51 For a while the school turned out radar crews, not many but enough, it seems, to keep up at first with the current needs. Colonel Rearden, after visiting the laboratory in July, reported that “temporarily the production of radar maintenance men has exceeded the production of the apparatus.”52
Crews had gone out, or were going, to widely scattered places. Of the 204 civilian radar installers who were already overseas, 64 had received special training. Twelve of them were in Alaska, 21 in Puerto Rico, 69 in Panama, 89 in Hawaii, 5 in Trinidad, 5 on Ascension Island, and 3 in Australia.53 For the time being, the Signal Corps planned to make much wider use of civilians for the maintenance of radars since it did not have enough trained men in uniform. Thus General Olmstead contemplated sending civilian maintenance men to Ascension Island, Australia, Bermuda, Canton Island, Christmas Island, Curacao, Fiji Islands, Galápagos Islands, Iceland, India, Mexico, Newfoundland, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Samoa, Society Islands, Tongatabu, and Trinidad.54
These arrangements, however, neither satisfied nor sufficed. As the war moved into the second half of the year with prospects of ever more overseas installation of radar, especially of such portable types as the British LW which could be used in tactical operations during invasions, there arose the same problem that had plagued the installation of Army Airways Communications System equipment: who would install the sets promptly when and where the Air Forces wanted them? The existing arrangement by which the Signal Corps provided a few civilian crews was unsatisfactory under war conditions overseas. The Air Forces wanted military crews, subject to military restraint and compulsion, to put in the equipment in unpleasant, if not dangerous, sites abroad, jobs which civilians were prone to decline, or quit.55 And whereas during these summer months of 1942, the AACS installation problem was being solved in Signal Corps’ favor, in radar the responsibility for installation and maintenance went to the Air Forces.
The problem of responsibility touching radar installation came to a head in arguments over the anticipated British CH sets, whose installation would pose great difficulty. This already obsolescent radar required several towers, each several hundred
feet high. As early as June General Somervell had considered transferring the responsibility to the Air Service Command, which would have the right to use Signal Corps personnel during an undefined period while ostensible control would still be required of the Chief Signal Officer.56 Now in September General Code, the Deputy Chief Signal Officer, wanted to know if the Air Service Command wished to take over the job of putting up the CH’s—a long-term task which would consume a year or more, Code thought—or did General Arnold desire that the Signal Corps do it?57
Twelve CH’s had been ordered by the Signal Corps for the Air Forces. Ten were planned for the vicinity of large coastal cities like New York. Two would go to Panama. The thorny problem of installation now became unavoidable, especially regarding TRU’s, planned for overseas positions. For this work the Signal Corps had no military organization, although it had the knowledge, while the AAF lacked even the latter. On 25 September the problems were debated during a conference between members of the Signal Corps, the Air Forces, and the Royal Air Force. The Signal Corps had found it difficult to get men for overseas installations. When Major Fletcher, from the Air Forces’ Directorate of Air Defense, brought up the intent to use “in overseas positions” the British TRU’s, Maj. Charles F. Fell of Olmstead’s Directorate of Planning remarked that the responsibility for putting them up would fall to the theater commander. But whom would the commander have on hand to do the work? He would have to look to the Signal Corps. And Fell added, “We have no organization to supply military people.” As for the civilian crews that the Signal Corps Radar Laboratory had been training, Fell remarked, “Colonel Corput [director of the laboratory] gets the people to the place [overseas] and they quit on him.”58 When the first CH was reported on its way to American shores in October, another group in conference decided that this first set should go to the Signal Corps Radar Laboratory where installation crews would receive training, both civilian crews for stateside installation and military crews (Air Forces supplying the soldiers) for the installations in Panama.59
Meanwhile, General Arnold substantiated the policy to which Somervell had consented in June toward giving complete responsibility to the AAF for erecting and maintaining its ground AWS radars. “The Air Service Command,” Arnold now wrote, “is in the process of taking over the responsibilities for the installation and maintenance of ground radar equipment used by components of the Army Air Forces. ... They will continue to assume this function as rapidly as they are able to do so.” Code replied that the Signal Corps would assist by training the first CH crews and would furnish instructions and operational and maintenance manuals. Thereafter, the AAF would take over the installation,
maintenance, and operation of its ground radars.60
Thus ground radars for the Air Forces, radars which the Signal Corps had developed and in the use of which it had pioneered, were moving out of Signal Corps’ hands. The operation of the equipment, explored and defined by the Signal Corps during its organization of the prewar Aircraft Warning System, along with the related tasks of installing and maintaining the sets, passed wholly to the using arm before the first year of World War II was out. The organization and control of the aircraft warning units, wherein the Signal Corps also had pioneered, had already, hard on Pearl Harbor, passed to the Air Corps. Now, toward the end of 1942, only Signal Corps’ basic responsibilities for radar development and procurement would remain with the parent organization.61 Radars on the ground as well as in aircraft had become essential to Air Forces’ mission, and the Signal Corps was supplying the sets in increasing numbers.
Defense to Offense in the West
Whereas in mid-1942 the invasion of North Africa became topmost in Army’s planning and toward it the Signal Corps would amass men and equipment, the Pacific arena remained uppermost in the mind of the American public. There, far to the west, America’s military men had first to plan a holding action against the Japanese. This meant creating and strengthening bases not only in the South Pacific but also in Australia, China, Burma, and India. By mid-year 150,000 Army troops had been established in the South and Southwest Pacific areas.62 The defensive turned into a limited offensive in July after General Marshall and Admiral King signed the Joint Directive for Offensive Operations in the Southwest Pacific Area agreed on by the United States Chiefs of Staff.”63 On 7 August the marines landed on Guadalcanal and were followed before the year’s end by Army troops.
Hawaii
Honolulu was the center of Pacific operations. As American forces spread out over the Pacific, the radio tentacles of WTJ, ACAN station at Fort Shafter, multiplied. True, the Japanese had lopped off the Philippine stations in May 1942, but new circuits quickly reached out along the route to Australia during the spring and summer.64 Shafter’s most heavily used circuits, toward Melbourne in one direction and, in the other, to San Francisco’s WVY and to Washington’s WAR, were now high speed, using Boehme equipment but still requiring much laborious hand-typing into the
Section of the radio room, Fort Shafter, Honolulu
Boehme perforated strips and out of them. The other circuits remained entirely manual, transmission being accomplished solely by hand-tapped keys. Traffic loads in busy WTJ had been running about a half a million words a month at the outset of the war and were now far exceeding that, so that doubtless Colonel Powell, Signal Officer at Fort Shafter, and his harassed radio operators of the 9th Service Company relished their first introduction to automatic equipment in October, when an installation crew from WAR put in IBM radiotype. The very first tests on the direct WTJ–WAR channel Colonel French in WAR described on 28 October as “very favorable.”65
Signal Corps activities under Colonel Powell waxed varied and tremendous. ACAN radio and WTJ were but one part of his responsibility. There were numerous wire nets in the islands, for example, no less than 45,000 circuit miles of fire control cable alone by the war’s end.66 His supply and depot responsibilities—storing, issuing, maintaining, repairing—grew heavier with each Army division dispatched to the Pacific, beginning with the 27th, which had arrived in Hawaii in March 1942. The Hawaiian signal office, moreover, provided all the fixed-station equipment of the Army
Command and Administrative Network for the Pacific area.67
In July Army signal intelligence activity in Hawaii received a badly needed boost with the arrival of the 101st Signal Company, Radio Intelligence (RI). Previously, the activity had been woefully weak. There had been a monitoring station on the islands since 1935. At the outbreak of the war it was Station Five, operated by a detachment from the 2nd Signal Company, under operational control of the Chief Signal Officer in Washington, but administered and supervised by Colonel Powell. It remained puny in size and ability, lacking even direction finders to determine the direction whence came the signals it monitored. During the first months of the war the Army depended upon the Federal Communications Commission to provide direction-finding facilities, to maintain, in general, the signal security of the Hawaiian Islands, and to guard against subversive radio activity. The main job of Station Five was to intercept and study Japanese Army radio traffic. To build up this activity the Secretary of War had informed the Commanding General, Hawaiian Department, on 31 March 1942, that he was sending the 101st Signal Company, Radio Intelligence, which would carry out its mission under the Signal Corps’ Intelligence Service in Washington.68
Southwest Pacific Installations for ACAN
In Australia the defensive attitude of the gloomy early months of 1942 had given way to a spirit of offense. Fears for northern Australia diminished by mid-year as the enemy’s push south now began to yield to the Allies’ counter-efforts. The north shore of New Guinea and the Solomons became the front line, and in June General MacArthur moved his headquarters north, from Melbourne to Brisbane. The ACAN station moved too, followed in September by the USASOS headquarters which switched, not to Brisbane, but to Sydney.
So it was that by mid-1942 Station WVJJ at Brisbane was becoming the nerve center of the Southwest Pacific ACAN system, replacing WTJJ at Melbourne. The circuits from Sydney, Townsville, Darwin, Nouméa, and Honolulu were now relocated to terminate at Brisbane. Great expansion ensued, as American and Australian forces, reacting to their earlier defeats, began to consolidate their strength and make their first victorious advances. New equipment was flowing in. WVJJ transmitters multiplied and their power increased to 10 and then to 40 kilowatts.
Following the progress of the armies, the web of fixed Army communications, ACAN stations, extended further northward. A new channel, direct from Brisbane to San Francisco, was accompanied by ramifications of the Southwest Pacific local networks; for instance, a significant one to the north went to work in September between Brisbane and Port Moresby, New Guinea (WVLQ).69 The Port Moresby radio, significant advance though it was, still fell pitifully short of reaching the few survivors of Bataan and Corregidor, now holding out as guerrillas and suffering relentless pursuit. As of mid-October, the latest radio contact by
MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane with the 14th Infantry, Philippine Army, had been made on 7 August. At that time the guerrilla force explained that imminent danger from the Japanese was compelling it to close down its radio transmitter.70 But the socalled “guerrilla network” in the captive Philippines continued to operate, sporadically. Portable radio sets—in the hands of fugitive Americans, Filipinos, and others, some of whom were smuggled in by submarine—continued to transmit reports on Japanese activities, assisting Allied operations and the subsequent recapture of the islands in 1944.71
Late in 1942 Signal Corps units in Australia such as the 436th and 440th Signal Construction Battalions began constructing considerable landline wire links through northeastern Australia, especially, in the vicinity of Townsville. They also constructed an alternate landline for part of the telephone system connecting the Brisbane installations with those at Melbourne and Sydney as well as at Townsville. This system ran close to the coast. An alternate line inland seemed desirable in case of enemy action along the coast, and this they built also. Besides building new lines, they made use of existing Australian facilities, which they found they had to alter not a little. All this long-line telephone work they accomplished under the eye of the Australian Postmaster General, who insisted upon placing his own supervisors over Signal Corps construction jobs. Communication procedures, equipment, and construction methods differed considerably between Australia and the United States. “The so-called supervisors,” one of the Australian officials admitted, “learned how open wire-lines should be built.”72
Southwest Pacific Communications for USASOS
The Army Command and Administrative Nets constituted only a part of the stations and circuits which it was Signal Corps’ duty to provide. Other nets had to be set up for the supply services. Supply of armies is so vast an undertaking that it requires its own separate communication systems of wire and radio nets to handle the endless bookkeeping details which otherwise would harry administrative and operational communicators. In some minor areas of activity, one single communication set-up may serve all functions. But generally the Signal Corps finds it necessary to establish separate stations and separate nets for the supply service of the Army. A good example of Signal Corps’ effort toward communications for the supply function overseas is afforded by the Australian nets beginning in mid-1942. In July 1942 Col. Calvert H. Arnold became the Signal Officer of the United States Army Services of Supply in the Southwest Pacific Area (USASOS SWPA).73 Shouldering his large burden at first at Melbourne, Arnold presently moved to Sydney,
opening the SOS headquarters radio station there on 6 September. A week later the new Sydney radio opened channels to Melbourne, to Brisbane, and, five days later, to Townsville, Honolulu, and Darwin, and then on 28 September, to Nouméa.74
The Services of Supply maintained base section headquarters at Brisbane and at Townsville. It maintained an advanced base section in Port Moresby. A large 10-kilowatt radio served the Brisbane base section. Beginning operation in mid-July, it provided channels to Melbourne, Sydney, Townsville, Darwin, Nouméa, Honolulu, and San Francisco. Another channel opened in mid-September bringing in Port Moresby.75
From the major stations in the base sections, local networks fanned out liberally and Arnold had to provide fixed radio equipment for all of them (not very fixed either, since they shifted frequently as the tactical situation changed and the men moved on). During the late summer and autumn of 1942 there were radio nets operating around the clock along truck convoy routes, as for example along the route through the Australian interior from Townsville to Darwin, with stations at Night Camps No. 1 and No. 2, at Helen Springs, Birdum, and Adelaide River. There were low-power radio sets at Cairns and Mount Isa in the Townsville base section net. In the same base section area, two low-power radio stations perched on Cape York jutting north into the Coral Sea looking toward New Guinea, in order to relay messages to and from the Allies who were now locked in the Papua Campaign.
Another radio net which Arnold and his men operated for the SOS Base Section No. 2 at Townsville opened for business on 6 October and took in northward-reaching stations at Cairns, Cooktown, Portland Roads, and Home Island, all in Australia, together with Merauke, westward along the south coast of New Guinea. While some channels closed down, their purpose having been served after the tactical picture changed (for example, the Merauke and Home Island stations closed on 5 November), other new ones opened: Townsville-Darwin on 10 November, Townsville Moresby on 12 November, Townsville-Portland Roads on 25 November.
In Port Moresby itself, the signal office of the U.S. advanced base set up for business in August 1942, establishing links at once to Townsville and Brisbane with such radios as could be had at first. In fact, Arnold’s men began setting up communications at Moresby before any American combat troops arrived. Col. John C. Grable, Arnold’s executive signal officer, wrote to Colonel Parker in Plant Division exclaiming that “we, as an SOS, are being required to do considerable work in combat zones and of a type that corresponds more to combat work than SOS functions.”76 Subsequent radio links took form as fast as Signal Corps men could acquire the equipment, in particular two additional channels to Townsville established in November as the Papua Campaign intensified and the flow of messages increased. Local nets spread out from Moresby as the offensive moved on against the Japanese. For example, before the year’s end a low-powered net serving SOS needs linked Port Moresby with Milne Bay at the tip of New Guinea and with Oro Bay on the north shore, near the bitter battleground of Buna.77
Installation and Maintenance of Signal Equipment included such assignments as installing radio equipment in aircraft (left, above), repairing radio compasses (right, above) in Australia, and the operation of general repair shops (below) in New Guinea
Meanwhile, as Arnold provided communication nets for SOS, another equally vital part of his responsibilities, supply of communication equipment, rapidly magnified. His Signal Corps men multiplied supply depots and dumps throughout the Southwest Pacific base sections of SOS. Site after site seethed with activity. In the Brisbane area alone, the signal section of Base Depot No. 3 acquired one building after another, not to mention parking lots, expanding from about 15,000 square feet indoors and from 20,000 outdoors, as of 1 June, to 158,000 under roof and 95,000 in the open by early 1943. All this, jammed with Signal Corps equipment, was looked after by ninety civilians and the 202nd Signal Depot Company, less two storage and issue sections that were serving at Port Moresby.78
In Sydney and Melbourne the 201st Signal Depot Company had its hands equally busied in the signal sections of the depots there (the Melbourne depot gradually merged with the one at Sydney). At Townsville, 22,400 square feet of covered storage space and “an almost unlimited amount” in the tropical open had been acquired. There was no refrigeration for dry batteries and unroofed storage had its disadvantages. Near Port Moresby, in the advanced base section of SOS, the storage and issue detachment from the 202nd Signal Depot Company established a dump in October. Frame and canvas shelters increased the warehouse space there, for certainly open storage was useless to attempt in New Guinea jungle heat and humidity. The men at Milne Bay used grass huts to supplement storage space. Thus Sydney, Brisbane, Townsville, Port Moresby, Milne Bay were the main line of Signal Corps supply.79
An important responsibility of Arnold’s supply function was repair and maintenance. Badly handicapped by the lack of proper test equipment, especially in the very high frequency ranges of radar, a scant 200 Signal Corps repairmen serving under the SOS headquarters “provided repair services for all combat units of the Fifth Air Force, for all Aircraft Warning organizations, for the 32nd and 41st Infantry Divisions, for the Netherlands East Indies Intelligence Section and for remote fixed radio installations operating under the Signal Section of Headquarters USASOS.” Scattered everywhere in small sections at airfields, in base depots, in forward combat areas, and in trucks moving with combat troops, the men repaired everything electrical, from radars such as SCR-286’s, 270’s, 521’s, and 535’s, to motion-picture projectors. At times they even constructed equipment. For example, the signal repairmen in the Melbourne Depot built fifteen special portable radio sets which intelligence units of the Netherlands Indies forces put to use. Colonel Grable reported at the year’s end that USASOS had purchased about seven million dollars’ worth of radio equipment in Australia, designing it and getting it built in local factories. He added, “This is the only way that radio communication has been maintained, because the supply of equipment from the States came no-where near meeting the requirements.”80
Port Moresby and New Guinea
One of the most important terminals of the Brisbane net late in 1942 was Port Moresby. In that area America’s initial assistance to the fighting Australians was in the air. Consequently, the first complete signal company to arrive from the United States was an aviation company—the 415th Signal Company, Aviation. The unit, originally intended for service in the Philippines, arrived from the States in Brisbane on 15 July. For two weeks its 136 men staged at Townsville in northern Australia, then sailed for Port Moresby. Their mission was to maintain communications for Headquarters, Advanced Echelon, Fifth Air Force. They quickly set up a message center in the Papuan Hotel at the port and began at once to relieve Australian communicators.
By 25 August the 415th was handling all administrative traffic for the Allied Air Forces headquarters. But teletype lines to the five Allied airstrips, lines stretching out along 20 miles of road from the town, were not so quickly laid or readily maintained. Air raids from the Japanese fields on the north side of the island, grass fires, and rampaging trucks continually severed the wire. The linesmen, on the alert twenty-four hours of the day, literally slept with their boots on. Moreover, as the base of military operations continued to shift from Australia to New Guinea, the traffic load upon the 415th steadily increased, accentuating a personnel shortage which became acute, thanks to tropical illnesses. Fevers and bowel and skin disorders chronically incapacitated 10 percent of the company’s men.
In mid-October 1942 four men of the 415th, who were ferried by airplane over the mountain backbone of New Guinea, along with elements of the 32nd Infantry Division, established at Wainegela Mission the first American radio station on the northern coast of New Guinea, somewhat down-shore from Japanese-held Buna. Using an SCR-188, these men provided weather reports and communication facilities for the aircraft shuttle between Port Moresby, Milne Bay, and the Buna area. On 30 November they moved again, to Dobodura, within ten miles of the enemy lines, close enough to experience frequent night raids. Additional communication equipment and more men from the 415th were flown to the Dobodura airstrip in December to provide for the increasing flow of air transports which brought supplies and reinforcements to the Buna campaign.81
Holding Action in CBI
Far beyond the nets of Signal Corps wire and radio in the South and Southwest Pacific, other Signal Corps radios had been belaboring the ether since April, when the ACAN station, WVNA, Karachi, India, had first gone on the air. The Signal Corps communication nets in the China-Burma-India theater, General Stilwell’s command, served chiefly two principal organizations comprising that theater: The Tenth Air Force and the Theater Supply Services, SOS, United States Army Forces, CBI.
The Tenth Air Force, in turn, fathered six offspring (1) its Air Service Command (not to be confused with the main Air Service Command at Wright Field, Ohio);
(2) the 10th Communication Region of the AACS; (3) the India Air Task Force; (4) the China Air Task Force; (5) the Karachi Tactical Area; and (6) the Chabua Tactical Area. In the early autumn of 1942 representatives of each of these units came together in order to draw up a theater signal plan, detailing the duties of each signal officer and specifying the extent and operation of all nets. Aside from general supervision and coordination, the principal duties of the theater signal officer, Maj. George L. Townsend, were allocation of call signs and blocks of frequencies, with clearance by the Indian and Chinese governments, and technical control of the aircraft warning system. The actual planning and coordination of the AWS, however, was the function of the signal officer of the Tenth Air Force, Col. S. S. Lamb, who was also responsible for maintaining channels between his headquarters and those of the four subordinate tactical forces. The local Air Service Command had its own administrative net, and so did the theater Services of Supply. The 10th Region of the AACS, officially relieved of administrative traffic, devoted itself solely to its part in service and tactical aviation.
The United States Army Forces, CBI signal plan, seeking to assure military communications in these remote areas of the world, expressly encouraged a resort to naval, commercial, or Allied Air Forces facilities “when available and suitable.” In his headquarters at Chungking, at theater field headquarters, and at signal branch offices in New Delhi and Ramgarh, General Stilwell had such communication facilities in use as could be supplied. Little enough they seemed, for the major items in use at Chungking included, for example, only one telephone switchboard (BD-72) and 13 phones (EE-8); only one teleprinter and three telegraph sets; three typewriters, except that one had been lent to the Navy; an assortment of receivers and generators, transformers and power units; and a 300-watt continuous wave transmitter (BC-447), supplemented by another, of 40 watts, borrowed from the Navy. On duty with this equipment were 6 officers and 16 enlisted men, rather than the required 14 officers, 49 enlisted men.
Brig. Gen. Claire L. Chennault’s air force had two radio nets: one administrative, one tactical. The first served the Air Service Command, the second the China and India Air Task Forces and the Karachi and Chabua Tactical Areas. To the Air Service Command net went men and officers of the 861st Signal Service Company, the 43rd Signal Company Service Group, the 83rd Signal Company Service Group, the 235th Signal Operations Company, and detachments of certain Air Corps units (the 51st Fighter Control Squadron and the 7th Bombardment Group).82
After the Signal Corps’ first large transmitter in India, at Karachi, had begun operation in April 1942, satellite stations rapidly sprang up. During the summer New Delhi in Central India became the net control station, serving the whole area, one far-reaching circuit excepted: New Delhi-Karachi-Washington. Three local networks radiated from New Delhi, one using a 300-watt Federal Transmitter, reached to Karachi on the west; another using a BC-447 of similar power, reached both south and north, respectively to Bangalore and to Allahabad; the third, using a 300-watt Federal, reached to Chabua, Calcutta, and Ramgarh, all lying eastward toward China. At Karachi there were two nets: the
original long circuit to Washington on a 10-kilowatt BC-339 and 340, and a net embracing New Delhi, Asmara in East Africa, and Chungking in China, all using 300-watt transmitters. Chabua in eastern India had two nets, one to New Delhi and one to Kunming and to Chungking, using 300-watt sets also. Chungking’s return circuits to Chabua and Karachi used a 300-watt transmitter borrowed from the Navy. There were numerous lesser Signal Corps radio channels, too, operating in those faraway lands: Ramgarh to New Delhi, Bangalore to New Delhi, Allahabad to New Delhi, Calcutta to New Delhi, Kunming in China to Chabua in India. In China there were two local nets which belonged originally to the American Volunteer Group: one from Chungking to Linchow, Lingling, Kweilin, Chinkaiang, and Hengling; the other from Kunming to Yunnanyi and Changhi.83
American forces in CBI relied at first almost entirely on radio, and naturally so, both because of the distances involved and because the native wire networks were rather ineffective. Early in 1942, however, the Indian Government Department of Posts and Telegraph provided local telephone communications for United States Army use through civilian switchboards at New Delhi, Karachi, and Calcutta. In June negotiations began for the installation of a switchboard at New Delhi by the Army and the Indian Government for exclusive military purposes. Meanwhile, the Army experienced difficulty in getting the use of teleprinter circuits for longer distances even on a part-time basis. The reason given was that the facilities were already overloaded by British military traffic. Wire lines were eventually provided, however, by new Army construction on a “project” basis or by exploiting the organizational equipment of certain units for local communications.84
Strengthening Eastern Outposts
All this varied and romantically remote Signal Corps effort in the Pacific and the Orient, however, was but a sideshow, a decidedly subordinate arena of activity. American military planners were looking eastward over the Atlantic to the defeat of Germany first. The enemy in the Pacific would have to wait.
Iceland
In Iceland on the northern route to Europe the Signal Corps by mid-1942 had supplied the equipment needed to complete the radio stations serving ACAN. Yet adequate and reliable quantities of electrical power for the big transmitters remained a problem until late in September when the Signal Corps mended matters by sending a large 35-kilowatt generator for the main transmitter and eight lesser ones (four of 7½ -kilowatts and four of 5-kilowatts) to
serve the smaller ACAN radios which communicated with Greenland, Iceland, and with each other within the local Iceland net. There was no standby for the big 10-kilowatt transmitter on the Washington-Iceland circuit. But there was the peacetime Icelandic radio station at Vatnesendi, and this the Signal Corps sought to lease. Negotiations initiated through the State Department led to a contract early in November, whereupon Radio Vatnesendi not only became a valuable standby facility in case of emergency but also began at once to carry traffic, assisting the now heavily loaded ACAN circuits routed through Iceland.85
Beginning in July 1942 the 26th Signal Construction Battalion put in many miles of open lines, put up an aerial cable catenary crossing over the Olfusa River at Selfos, and strung aerial cable between Utskalahammar and Castle Hill. When the Signal Corps proposed assigning this battalion to General Eisenhower to serve in North Africa, Eisenhower refused, answering that its work in Iceland was too vital to be interrupted. He cited as especially important its work toward completing facilities for the airdrome at Keflavik and toward strengthening the aircraft warning system on the island.86 The wire project, called “Latitude 65,” continued to occupy Signal Corps men on Iceland; for example, the 54th Signal Battalion put in many miles of tape-armored subterranean cable and aerial cable, too, under the severest kind of weather and over most difficult lava rock and muskeg terrain. The project would never be completely finished,87 for the defensive character of the war which had drawn America into Iceland and which had made the island’s defense seem important at first, was now changing to the offensive. An offensive which, if it no longer contemplated BOLERO and the immediate invasion of Europe, did envision TORCH and war upon the Axis in Africa.
Panama to Trinidad
Iceland was but America’s left hand extended to England. The right arm reached down around the Caribbean and out toward Africa. The South Atlantic route paralleled the northern in importance. Along the way Panama had its own tremendous significance, of course, because of the Canal. By June 1942 Army’s uttermost efforts to bolster its defenses were showing results. Even the Signal Corps received some encouragement, despite the dark report which Watson-Watt had leveled in March against American radar and aircraft warning measures. Brig. Gen. Harry C. Ingles, former Signal Officer in Panama and now chief of staff for the commanding general, had told Colonel Rives, Chief of the Radar Division in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, that “in spite of Mr. Watson-Watt’s damning report, which was a most casual survey as he was here only three days, our Aircraft Warning Service is not so bad and is improving rapidly.” Ingles added, “There are two basic faults which we knew long before we ever heard of Mr. Watson-Watt, namely: defective siting of some sets and totally untrained personnel.”88
Warmly encouraging was a personal note to the Chief Signal Officer from Lt. Gen. Frank M. Andrews, commanding in the Panama and Caribbean areas, who wrote to “Dear Dawson” on 9 June:
Reference your letter of June 5th, Dr. Bowles arrived here Sunday and has already started to work. I am sure, from my talk with him yesterday morning, that he is going to be very helpful. How is everything coming with you? We are still pestering you about personnel and equipment, but I know that you are doing all you can for us. The truth of the matter is that we have got a pretty elaborate and expensive radar set-up down here which is of very little use to us until we can complete the picture. For example, even when we do get a good plot of an incoming airplane we cannot make a satisfactory interception because we cannot accurately track our own pursuit and cannot reliably communicate with it. Everybody is interested, however, and is working hard. Equipment is coming in and the situation is improving.
General Olmstead replied gratefully to this, one of the relatively few good things anyone had to say of the Signal Corps and its labors in the early days of World War II. “It is a pleasure,” he replied on 16 June, “to know that someone in the field appreciates the enormous job that remains for the people here to do.” He summarized the equipment situation, relative to identifying friendly airplanes and communicating with their pilots. “IFF equipment,” he wrote, “should be available on the aircraft in the Canal Zone at a very early date. The VHF ground equipment will be shipped to Panama for installation within the next sixty days. The Radio Set SCR-522, which is the airborne portion of the VHF equipment, is being installed on airplanes at the present time. ... When the equipment is operating,” Olmstead concluded, “you should be able to track our own pursuit, communicate with them and to make satisfactory interceptions under normal operating conditions.”89
The new VHF radio facilities (100-156 megacycles) were already in place in some of the Caribbean ground stations; for instance, transmitters and receivers SCR-562 and 563 at Henry Barracks on Puerto Rico, also VHF direction finders, SCR-565 and 566, at Cerrote, Corozal, Fajardo, and Maunabo, all on Puerto Rico, and also on St. Thomas and St. Croix in the Virgin Islands.90 Even so, it would be early 1943 in the Caribbean, as elsewhere, before VHF intercept facilities would become completely integrated and implemented with SCR-522 and IFF on every aircraft cooperating with ground VHF and GCI radar.
Upon completion of long-range high frequency radio (2-20 megacycles) installations both for ACAN and for AACS, business was now booming. ACAN work loads in the Caribbean Command headquarters waxed mightily, the load on the Quarry Heights-Washington channel (WVL–WAR) multiplied fifteen times over during 1942—from 362,000 words a month to 5,388,725.91 By the autumn of 1942 the welter of air communications serving the myriad fields and flight activities along the South Atlantic ferry route began to shape into an organized pattern. For service from field to field, the 325th and the 327th Signal Companies, Aviation, were responsible; for communications from plane to plane
and from plane to field, the airmen were responsible.
By now the accumulation of installations and equipment was becoming impressive. Along the South American coast, for example at Curaçao, Hato Field possessed a BC-410 working point-to-point communications, also a BC-460 serving this purpose too, plus air-ground. Much more equipment was on order: radios and a radio range, both for Hato Field and for nearby Camp Suffisant, Curaçao, and for Dakota Field on the adjacent island of Aruba. Out in the Lesser Antilles island chain, Beane Field on St. Lucia now rejoiced in two BC-401’s for air-ground and for point-to-point service, also in a radio range B-446. Whether one flew along the coast or via the Antilles chain, the routes converged on Trinidad. There, a number of AACS stations now flourished. Waller Field had a BC-329 for airdrome control, a BC-401 for air-ground, a B-446 radio range. Fort Read had a BC-401 in operation and three more on order. Port of Spain had a BC-401 serving the XXVI Fighter Command net control station, and Edinburgh Field had two BC-329’s on order, one to provide airdrome control for each of its landing strips. Next, farther along the ferry route toward Natal and Africa, came Atkinson Field, with a BC-401 for air-ground, a BC-642 for point-to-point, a B-446 radio range. Farther on was Zandery Field, Surinam, as yet unequipped but awaiting two BC-401’s and a B-446.92
Radar stations now multiplied too. By the end of July, while three SCR-270’s were scheduled to go to Aruba and Curaçao, four were already operating in the Puerto Rico area, as well as three 271’s, one each at Santa Ana, El Yunque, and St. Thomas, and a 270 at Borinquen. No less than nine 271’s were to be delivered between August and October in the Trinidad sector, which included St. Lucia, British Guiana, and Aruba-Curaçao. Already fourteen SCR-268’s were on Trinidad for the use of the Coast Artillery. Improvement in radar operation, siting, and calibration was steady as the crews grew in experience and as the Signal Corps learned more about siting problems. On 2 August General Andrews complained that the inadequate supply of test equipment and spare parts still stood near the top of his troubles with the AWS. Even while the supply was improving, the increasing number of radars operating day and night imposed a demand that continued to outrun the supply.93
While manpower became less and less a problem, the tropical environment remained hostile to electronic equipment and to its operators alike. A field sanitary inspector looking over AWS radar stations in September found conditions ideal for
disease and fever. Drainage through the puttylike, waterproof soil was impossible. Round about were lagoons full of algae and croaking frogs, the larger pools rejoicing also in crocodiles and caymans. The Signal Corpsmen at the radars worked amid the raucous chorus of frogs, the bark of crocodiles amid heat and disease, the heat could be lethal enough to knock a man out and yet the night so cool that though wrapped in a wool blanket and shrouded by a mosquito netting canopy, one would shiver all night through.94
Panama became a testing ground for new and newer radar, especially for such microwave sets as the SCR-615, which began to get into the field in 1942. Dr. Bowles, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Secretary of the Microwave Committee of the National Defense Research Committee, having been recently appointed the expert consultant for radar to the Secretary of War, stimulated developments both at home and on excursions into the field.95 At Stimson’s request Bowles and Ralph Bown of the Bell Laboratories, the latter also a member of the Microwave Committee, inspected Panama in June. They urged microwave ASV in place of the long-wave equipment ASV-II, or SCR-521, then in use by patrol bombers. In particular, they urged microwave radars for the Aircraft Warning Service in order to provide low coverage against aircraft, something which the long-wave radars in Panama, both the SCR-270 and 271 and the British CHL (SCR-588), could not adequately provide. In consequence of Bowles’ trip and recommendations, two more scientists from the Radiation Laboratory, Dr. DuBridge and L. C. Marshall, also visited the Canal soon after and worked out plans to send two SCR-582’s and an SCR-615 to the Canal Zone, these being the first Signal Corps microwave radars put to use on the ground.96
Trinidad to Africa and to the Middle East
America’s right arm, with Signal Corps nerves and sense centers, punched right through a succession of bases from the West Indies and Trinidad, on along the coast of Brazil, British Guiana, Surinam, to Natal, at the eastern tip of Brazil, on across the South Atlantic to Africa, by way of the lone volcanic isle of Ascension in mid-ocean, a counterpart to Iceland in the North Atlantic. The small advance party of soldiers of the Composite Task Force 8012, who had been at work on the isle since early spring of 1942, were completing initial installations and running low on their rations when the Steel Engineer arrived on 10 July, followed on 14 August by the James Parker, bringing enough men to complete the Army garrison. Aboard the Steel Engineer came two SCR-271’s, minus their towers and operating buildings. Even so, the 692nd Signal Aircraft Warning Company improvised and got both radars installed and operating before the end of September. The African invasion, drawing imminent, now gave tremendous importance to the Natal-Ascension-Accra ferry route. The AACS radio station, WYUC—serving Wideawake Field—its radio beacon and homing facilities, and its radiotelephone circuits, all labored hugely as the weeks brought TORCH nearer. November, the month of the
invasion, would bring a sevenfold increase over September in the number of shuttling aircraft which would pause on Ascension Island.97
In Africa itself the airway routes divided: northward to the Azores and the United Kingdom; eastward to Egypt, the Middle East, and India. The AACS, with the aid of the Signal Corps, had, by October 1942, set up Army airway stations at Roberts Field in Liberia, at Accra on the Gold Coast, at Lagos and Maiduguri in Nigeria, at Fort Lamy in French Equatorial Africa, at El Fasher and at Khartoum in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, at Cairo in Egypt, at Gura (near Asmara) in Eritrea, and at Aden in Arabia. As of October nearly all the equipment installed was commercial (much of it had been taken over from previous Pan American Airway stations in Africa). But more and more Signal Corps equipment was arriving. For example, a quantity which the Signal Corps shipped in October for these stations included: 4 each BC-400’s and 446’s, 9 BC-460’s, 10 each BC-329’s, SCR-556’s and SCR-551’s, 1 each BC-339 and BC-340.98
These were AACS stations, equipped by the Signal Corps but operated by the Air Forces. Important ACAN stations were going up in Africa too, essential links in the round-the-world equatorial belt of U.S. Army communications. Before mid-year Signal Corps planners had decided upon the equipment, the frequencies, and call signs for an administrative net along the African ferry route to relieve the heavily loaded Pan American and AACS stations.99 Outstanding among the new ACAN stations would be the ones at Accra and Asmara, on the west and east coasts of Africa, respectively. A 10-kilowatt transmitter had just arrived at Accra, General Olmstead learned early in October, and members of the 830th Signal Service Company hoped to have it ready for service by November.100
Among the Signal Corps men who helped to put up the ACAN station at Asmara, Eritrea, was Team Seven, 1 officer and 20 enlisted men from among the early comers to India. By July they had flown in from Karachi and set about their labors. The antenna towers were already there, thanks to the Italians (Radio Marina), and they were high—“reaching somewhere near the sun in the daytime and the moon at night.” Lacking the planned 40-kilowatt transmitter, the men put to temporary use a 300-watt set.101 Within a few weeks, as ACAN Station WVNT, they began working Karachi, some 2,000 miles to the east, and then Accra, also about 2,000
Antenna towers of Radio Marina, Asmara
miles away but to the west, across the breadth of Africa. More men were needed and in September Company C of the 850th Signal Service Battalion sailed from New York bound for Asmara by way of Suez. Already two smaller groups of the 850th had arrived in Asmara, a section of 1 officer and 13 men on 5 August, followed by a second section of 1 officer and 7 men on 14 September.
Team Seven was thus relieved, only to receive at once an exotic assignment to Cairo where the men lived luxuriously in the patio palace of an oriental prince while they installed an ACAN station in the Egyptian capital. With the one-kilowatt transmitter which the Plant Division had just sent over, Team Seven succeeded by the end of October in establishing a direct circuit, Cairo to Washington, WVNV-WAR. By this time, too, the men of the 830th in Accra were making good their intent; the direct Accra-Washington radio channel was shaping up and on 9 November it went into operation, WVNI-WAR, using high speed Boehme.102 Whereas before, the signals of Karachi could get through to Washington, and vice versa, only at certain favorable hours of operation
(the radio beams passing over the troublesome polar regions), now communications over the long distance, halfway around the world, became dependable at all hours, passing through the favorable equatorial regions by way of the stations at Accra and Asmara, which served as relay points.
Meanwhile, members of the 833rd Signal Service Company were at work in the Persian Gulf Command, or the Iran-Iraq Service Command, activated 24 June 1942. Two sections of the company arrived in the command area in July. By 1 August they completed installing a radio station at Basra, Iraq, and another at Andimeshk, Iran. The former served as the net control station, working Andimeshk on schedule and serving as a relay point for traffic destined for Karachi, for Cairo, and for Asmara.103
England: Signal Corps’ Efforts Looking Toward TORCH
Beyond the Atlantic, in England itself, the Signal Corps had begun its overseas effort during the defensive period even before Pearl Harbor, when it sent special observers, followed by officers of the Electronics Training Group. The effort had steadily expanded during the first half of 1942 with the arrival of Signal Corps units serving the United States Army Forces in the British Isles (USAFBI), and with the establishment of a signal center at 20 Grosvenor Square. In July the Signal Corps men installed their first large transmitter just shipped in from America, a powerful 40-kilowatt multichannel radio. By mid-July it began regular operation directly with WAR,104 providing several telegraph channels and one voice or telephoto channel, operating from an American Telephone and Telegraph Company terminal in New York to a General Post Office facility in England. The big heavy-duty transmitter was essential. In the event of its failure, the Signal Corps received access to a State Department wire line, leased in June. It was a direct Western Union teleprinter duplex submarine cable circuit between Washington and the Embassy in London. The Washington Message Center made use of it, as and when State Department business permitted, by means of an extension patched on in response to bell code signals. Delays were not uncommon. Even so, the circuit proved an invaluable facility, especially since it provided an emergency channel for the highest priority traffic.105
By mid-1942, as General Eisenhower took charge of the European Theater of Operations, United States Army (ETOUSA), which replaced USAFBI, American Army signal centers were multiplying. One served the new Headquarters, Service of Supplies, ETOUSA, at Cheltenham. Brig. Gen. William S. Rumbough, newly appointed as Chief Signal Officer, ETO, commanded both the Signal Section, ETOUSA, and the Signal Service, SOS, ETOUSA. At Cheltenham the SOS signal center began with seven American officers, six
American enlisted men, and numbers of British civilian and military men working at a huge 17-position British switchboard. Another new signal center in London itself was one serving the central base section headquarters, which began life modestly with a handful of men working the relatively limited wire facilities provided by a 4-position British switchboard. Still other smaller signal centers began operation in the United Kingdom during the last half of the year serving lesser SOS headquarters, as in Northern Ireland and at the Western, the Eastern, and the Southern Base Sections.106
When in August the Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) for the invasion of North Africa began to take form and was lodged in Norfolk House, in London, its communications were kept closely tied to the signal center at 20 Grosvenor Square by means of two special simplex teleprinter circuits linking the code rooms in the two buildings. From early summer until November the signal center was involved in special preparations for TORCH, creating or augmenting communication links with far-flung strategic points—Iceland at one extreme, Algiers at the other. The vicinity of Grosvenor Square itself, however, was too exposed, too vulnerable to the dangers of bombing, to remain the communications center. In the summer of 1942, therefore, the Americans asked the British to supply a safer building, not too distant from the original headquarters. Offered and accepted was the Selfridge Annex at Duke and Somerset Streets, a sizable steel and concrete structure blessed with deep basements running 45 feet down. It was mid-December, though, before the Signal Corps men could accomplish the move. Meanwhile, work began on a second, auxiliary bombproof signal center on Goodge Street to be completed in early 1943. Plans for TORCH were in full swing by the end of August. The telephone switchboard at the signal center of the Central Base Section expanded to ten positions. And still more switchboards went in, with more trunk lines, more cross-connections, more of all the things that speed communication signals. The American signal center in London was now handling telephone calls alone to the number of 16,000 a day, and its teletypewriters, a dozen Creed printers of British manufacture, pounded out over half a million words during August.107
Thus the American build-up in England steadily intensified during the summer, preparing for the invasion of Africa and for the bombing of Germany. For if the
Continent could not be invaded immediately it could be bombed. In this the British needed all possible American help, which General Spaatz, commander of the Eighth Air Force, was now readying. Just as Eighth Air Force planes began participating in air raids, General Olmstead arrived in the United Kingdom to look over his installations. He talked with Spaatz, who said he expected to lose a good deal of equipment in his tactical operations. He emphasized to Olmstead that he expected to get sufficient quantities of communication material, an abundant unending flow of it, to keep full the communication stores of the Eighth Air Force, despite the steady drain of combat losses. Olmstead promised to do his best and informed General Arnold on 1 August, “I have advised my supply agencies that they are not to take any action to decrease the amount of communication equipment to be shipped to England below General Spaatz’ requisitions unless I personally have approved such cut.”108 On 4 July 1942 the Eighth Air Force committed its first bombers, when six American craft joined an RAF attack on targets in Holland.109