Chapter 11: Preparing for the First Major Test (June–November 1942)
The months between June and November 1942 constituted a period of intensive and fruitful effort for the Signal Corps in all aspects of its many-sided activities. While communication facilities were being extended in every direction overseas, the headquarters organization in Washington pressed ahead with equal vigor and determination. Along with all the other segments of the Army, the Signal Corps was engaged in developing its organization and in building its strength for the period just ahead, when the defensive role would be abandoned and the first major offensive would be launched. The gathering of effort showed most clearly in three major fields: planning, procurement, and training.
Training
Training especially in mid-1942 was sharpened by the knowledge that it was directed toward a specific goal—preparing men for the first offensive action overseas scheduled for late 1942.1 The shape, the scope, and even the objective of the offensive were matters that had to wait upon basic tactical decisions on a higher level. But so long as the details remained in doubt, the constant shifting of plans for the types of units and numbers of men required caused corresponding uncertainty in the training programs.
Even though by midyear there was still no firm commitment for troop requirements, one thing seemed clear—the final figures would probably call for specialists in numbers that would strain Signal Corps facilities to the utmost to provide. By this time previous plans for getting men, and in particular the efforts of Colonel King, Chief of the Military Personnel Branch, were beginning to pay off. By midyear Signal Corps strength stood at about 7,694 officers, 121,727 enlisted men, and 54,000 civilians. Nearly 29,000 of the enlisted men were in training.2 More men were pouring in, not all of them able to absorb all of their training, but most of them able to acquire enough to become valuable. Some trainees were illiterate and obviously could not be trained in electronic skills, at least not until they learned to read and write. The Signal Corps had to assimilate its share of the Army’s intake of these men. By September they were becoming a burden when the War Department limited them, in the case of the Signal Corps, to three and a third
percent of reception training center housing capacity.3
Sources of Signal Corps Manpower
Some Signal Corps plans for getting men succeeded; others turned out badly. An example of the latter was Colonel King’s plan to obtain some 2,000 additional officers and 6,800 specialists for installing and maintaining radars through the Army Specialist Corps. The first requisition was submitted in June, but three months later, only 10 officers had been appointed, and only 40 specialists.4 The program suffered from administrative confusion, no one being sure whether the men were military or civilian appointees, since they were subject both to Civil Service classification and to military commissioning procedures. Part of the trouble lay with the appointees themselves. Of the few who received commissions before the Army Specialist Corps went into discard, some were poor officer material. In October the Army Specialist Corps was discontinued altogether.5
But other considerable reservoirs of manpower, of competent civilians both men and women, were becoming available. Some, after training, would serve the Signal Corps in civilian status. Others would don uniforms. As Waacs, for example, women would take over many a Signal Corps man’s job, releasing him for field duty. Colonel King, who remembered how effective women telephone units had been in France in World War I, advocated their use again. By October the Signal Corps had completed its first surveys and had determined that there were at least 2,000 jobs in the Corps that could be taken over by Waacs.6 As for civilian employment, the summer of 1942 saw the high tide. Late in August field employees numbered somewhat over 66,000, with nearly 5,000 more in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer in Washington.7
The small but valuable reservoir of officer manpower provided by the Affiliated Plan yielded a peak number of officers from the telephone companies in July. In August the Signal Corps obtained permission to call in an additional 100 such officers, even
though they had not been included in the 1942 Troop Basis. It called them to active duty in the company officers’ course at Fort Monmouth, on the understanding that their attendance would not interfere with the training of other officers required either for units which the 1942 Troop Basis had set up or for other units which had to be activated within the year, though outside the troop basis.8 Some of the affiliated officers, though technically very competent, were such poor students at the Signal Corps School that school officials wondered if they could qualify for commissions, until it was pointed out that these officers had been affiliated for special construction work wherein they had developed ability from long experience on the job. A man who had engaged in construction work, the Signal Corps reasoned, could not be expected or required to possess the same education as an engineer. Such men, like pigeoneers, could not be measured with the usual schoolmaster’s yardstick.9
Negroes constituted another source of manpower which the Signal Corps began to tap. The Signal Corps Troop Basis for 1942 included Negro units for the first time since World War I, and the first such unit to be activated was the 275th Signal Construction Company. Sent to Panama to build a pole line, it found itself unwelcome to the Panamanian Government and was returned to the United States after completing its task.10 Negroes in foreign theaters posed problems. Australia wanted none of them. They were not acceptable in China. In Africa itself the economic status of the United States Negro bred discontent among the native blacks. There were of course problems in the United States, too: segregation in some states, and strong local prejudices in some areas, notably in the vicinity of Camp Crowder, Missouri, where the Negro construction units trained. At Fort Monmouth the situation was quite different. The few Negro officer candidates who were in school there studied and lived among the white trainees and there was no race problem.11 Negro troops were needed, regardless of the social problems they raised, and the troop program for Negro units provided for the activation of the 93rd and 92nd Division Signal Companies in May and October 1942, respectively, together with six more Negro construction companies to be activated by August.12
The largest and most valuable group of trainees for the Signal Corps, generally destined for service in uniform, was provided
by the Enlisted Reserve Corps and the associated training program. The majority of students under this plan were already halfway into the Army as reservists, the Army paying their expenses while they attended civilian preservice schools in civilian dress. On 1 July 1942 more than 19,000 were enrolled in preservice training, as mechanic learners, junior repairman trainees, junior craftsman trainees, assistant technician trainees (preradar), and so on, at some 250 vocational schools and colleges the country over. By September’s end some 30,000 were on the rolls.13 Not all of them became reservists. Some remained civilians and took civilian posts in the Signal Corps or in industry producing for the Signal Corps. But by October so many of them were being called to active duty from a reserve status that they were jamming the Signal Corps replacement training centers. Added to the men from other sources, they became more than the large RTC’s at Monmouth, Crowder, and Kohler could absorb. For a while, late in the year, there was a backlog of ERC men awaiting induction while the RTC’s struggled with the overload. Early in December the ERC program came to an end, with a presidential order closing the door to further enlistment of men between the ages of 18 and 38. Those on the ERC rolls were permitted to finish. The Signal Corps estimated that well over 50,000 technicians had come to it through this productive program. The great majority were radio and radar technicians. Only about 3,000 were radio operators—that is, old style Morse code men—and 1,000 were telephone repairmen.14
Growth of Training Facilities
The rapid growth of Signal Corps training facilities was barely keeping pace with the increased flow of trainees. Congestion and crowding at the replacement training centers were chronic. The capacity of the two centers at Fort Monmouth and Camp Crowder stood at about 20,000 men. A third replacement training center at Camp Kohler, near Sacramento, would take care of an additional 5,000 trainees, but it had been authorized only as a temporary expedient. Under such circumstances, overcrowding was inevitable.15
By autumn movement out of the congested Fort Monmouth area eased the situation there somewhat. While Camp Edison and Camp Wood took part of the overflow, aircraft warning training moved out entirely to Camp Murphy, and in August all aircraft warning training at Monmouth ceased. Camp Wood still had the look of a muddy lumber camp when it opened officially on 14 July 1942. By autumn a full complement of barracks, mess halls, school buildings, and all the other necessary appurtenances of a full-fledged camp had appeared on the 275-acre tract. In October the headquarters of the replacement
training center also moved from Monmouth to Wood. Pigeoneering departed in August, going to Camp Crowder, and in October the Cryptographic Division moved to a rural site, secret and safe, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge near Warrenton, Virginia. There remained at Monmouth proper only the Signal Corps School, with its enlisted, officer, officer candidate, and training literature departments. Yet for every specialized subject no longer taught at Monmouth, a new one appeared. For example, there were the new VHF techniques which vitally concerned air-ground communications and radio relay, soon to play a significant role in North Africa. In August Signal Corps instructors at Fort Monmouth began teaching VHF courses to classes that crammed the rooms, with enrollment continually larger than authorized.16 Meanwhile, the Signal Corps had been unable to meet the target date of 1 August for opening its third replacement training center at Camp Kohler, California. Activated a month later, on 1 September, this center became an exempt installation under the command of Brig. Gen. Stephen H. Sherrill, the post remaining under the jurisdiction of the Ninth Service Command. Cadres of officers and enlisted men came from Fort Monmouth and Camp Crowder. The first 481 recruits arrived on 19 September; basic training began two days later. By the first of October there were 3,000 trainees, more than 50 percent above the capacity originally authorized. Having acquired Camp Kohler, the Signal Corps had no wish to give up the site at the end of the year, with the needs for trained signalmen steadily mounting. As matters stood, the only hope of retaining Kohler in 1943 lay in converting it into a unit training center. Therefore plans for such a center, with a capacity of 5,700, went forward concurrently with plans for Kohler’s use as the third of the replacement centers.17
The first unit training center had been established at Crowder in August. Crowder was growing fast. By September some 2,100 officers and men were developing teamwork in the unit training center, while more than 13,000 men were being trained in the RTC and another 6,000 specialists in the school.18 To administer and supervise this growing complex of virtually separate training activities, the Services of Supply on 17 September approved the organization of a new headquarters, the Central Signal Corps Training Center, thereby establishing a pattern which was soon followed at Monmouth, where the Eastern Signal Corps Training Center was established on 9 October.19
While the facilities for mass training of Signal Corps soldiers spread out in every direction, the highly specialized radar training at Camp Murphy, Florida, likewise flourished. Colonel Mitchell and his staff of instructors overhauled the courses, adding new ones from time to time during the late summer and early autumn. As elsewhere throughout the Signal Corps’ school activity late in 1942, emphasis was shifting from the training of individual specialists to group, or unit, training of electronic teams.
Thus at Murphy a team-training department opened before the year’s end, instructing as coordinated teams all the various specialists who operate a radar station. Radar maintenance men, engine maintenance men, rigger-electricians all had to learn how to work together, and also had to learn such things as camouflage, chemical warfare defense, first aid, laying field wire, pitching tents. They had to be specialists to perform their highly technical duties. But they had to be soldiers, too, able to live, fight, and survive in the field.20 Radar men very often would serve under extraordinary conditions in every sort of climate and in every sort of situation. Their assignments placed them in positions of great individual responsibility and trust. “When you’re over there fighting and want to catch some sleep, you know someone is watching over you and you’ll be warned if enemy bombers start zooming in.” That was how a sergeant in an aircraft warning unit put it—a unit which survived a savage Japanese attack in Milne Bay, then landed at Oro Bay near Buna and pushed fifteen miles through the jungle to set up the radar sets which helped to provide information concerning the Japanese convoy later sunk in the Bismarck Sea.21
Meanwhile, in the Indio-Needles area of California and Arizona, where the Army Ground Forces’ Desert Training Center had been established, such signal troops as could be spared were receiving desert training under simulated theater conditions—training which would be invaluable in the campaign in North Africa. From the beginning, the role of the Signal Corps in that training project was a difficult one. The plans of Maj. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., for the Desert Training Center had called for a repair shop for signal equipment, a post signal officer, a signal property officer, and a service company detachment to operate post signal activities, in addition to the signal units with troops. With overseas needs for Signal Corps men remaining unfilled, it is understandable that he got less than he asked for. Signal Corps troops were in exceedingly short supply in the Desert Training Center. The local telephone company provided communications service for the area to a point, and beyond that, the much-under-strength 60th Signal Company of the IX Corps carried on.
The exercises also rapidly consumed signal equipment, likewise in short supply. Although the Signal Corps men involved were too few to provide any appreciable reservoir of men experienced in desert training, General Van Deusen, Commandant, Eastern Signal Corps Training Center, Fort Monmouth, was gratified to note that the commanders of the major units engaged in the training displayed a fuller appreciation of the necessity for proper radio training than had been evidenced in the past.22
Where motorized and armored units deployed at distances of 50 miles and more in the soft, smothering sand, commanders and staff officers came to depend more and more upon radio voice communication. Indeed, some Signal Corps observers at the maneuvers in the desert training area in October reported that the Armored Force was relying too much on radio communication, and overlooking the value of visual and messenger communication in many situations. A pigeon detachment had been assigned to the
whether communication by that means would be practicable in warfare in North Africa.23
Gradually support was building up for the Signal Corps point of view that the complexity and extreme importance of communications demanded men of superior qualifications for communications training. It was a point of view which, in the later years of the war when the value of electronics in warfare had won wide recognition, brought a high percentage of AGCT Class I and Class II men to the Signal Corps.24 In late 1942, however, other services, particularly the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Army Air Forces, were still skimming the cream of the manpower available. For example, General Somervell in September 1942 vigorously protested a War Department directive which aimed at channeling into the Air Forces for a number of months 50,000 of the men who scored 100 or better in both the Army General Classification Test and the Mechanical Aptitude Test. Somervell argued that the ruling handicapped the procurement and development of combat leaders for all the Services of Supply.25
All things considered, the Signal Corps was now doing rather well in the business of supplying and training soldier specialists, though the Army’s demands continued to keep somewhat ahead of output. By mid-October, the several RTC’s had turned out 25,000 specialists and had assigned them to units.26 The combined capacity at Monmouth, Crowder, and Kohler stood at 46,970, and would soon exceed 50,000. The Signal Corps enlisted strength stood at about 143,000. Military Personnel Branch estimated that the Signal Corps would be able to supply about 80 percent of the numbers needed to meet such requirements as had been stated on paper for the period ending 31 December 1942. The Army Air Forces requirements could not be known for certain until the War Department General Staff released an approved troop basis for air units. So far it had released none, either for the current year or for 1943, but the AAF estimated informally that its requirements would total 118,000 by the end of the year. At the end of October, Colonel King lamented, “I still don’t know what the requirements are, if any.”27
The lack of firm requirements made planning very difficult. Even when approved troop basis figures were available, experience showed that the specialists actually needed usually ran about 15 percent above the paper requirements. Also, when
requests for the men followed at once, no account being taken of the time needed to train specialists. The Signal Corps met the Army’s needs by such ruses as supplying partly trained men, pulling them out of classes two weeks short of graduation. The General Staff had authorized King to do this, on the sound theory that partially trained men are better than men with no training at all. Yet the courses had already been shortened to the limits of efficiency, and further curtailment thrust men into service before they were ready for it. Such wastage, no doubt inevitable in the turmoil of war, was to hamper the efficiency of Signal Corps units in the oncoming offensive.
Problems of Procurement
Of three big fields of Signal Corps activity—training, procurement, and planning—it was procurement which lagged in late 1942. Partly this was the result of the fact that the Army did not control the civilian economy in the same direct and telling way that it controlled the assimilation of men into service, or the channeling of research into directed areas. Partly, production fell behind because of the sheer weight and complexity of the manifold problems involved in converting industry to all-out war effort. The Signal Corps felt the pressure, albeit many times removed, from numerous powerful federal wartime production and manpower agencies.
Most of all, production lagged because it had to wait upon basic tactical decisions. Tables of equipment and tables of basic allowances determined what kinds of items would be needed by the Army, and in what amounts. Until the number of men to be outfitted was agreed upon, and the areas in which the men were to serve were decided, calculations of equipment needs were largely guesswork. Even then, the normal period of time between the date that a production contract was let and the date that equipment could be expected to come off the production line varied enormously, according to the type of items required. Three months might suffice for a very simple piece of equipment, assuming that the factory was tooled up, with all the materials at hand, and a trained labor force ready. A radio set might take a year, a radar set several years, assuming that all development was complete. But what if there were not enough factories, or materials, or laborers? And what if changing tactical decisions forced design changes in equipment in order to incorporate newly discovered research ideas? All these things greatly affected the progress of Signal Corps procurement.
Even admitting that the problems of production could not be expected to yield to solution quickly, the Signal Corps productive efforts still had to be rated as less than satisfactory in the late summer months of 1942. “The Signal Corps is further behind in meeting its objectives than the other services,” so General Colton wrote to the officers in charge of all branches of his Signal Supply Service on 21 August. The day before, the harried head of Signal Supply had attended a meeting in the Procurement Branch, Services of Supply, presided over by Maj. Gen. William H. Harrison. If production statistics and objectives were to coincide, then Signal Corps deliveries for the remaining months of the year would have to double and triple the July rate: “two and one-half to two and three-quarters times,” Colton said, as he asked his officers to report upon prospective future deliveries.28
Increasing Complexity of the Supply Organization
The pattern of supply had grown more intricate. While its responsibilities increased, the Signal Corps had less freedom of direct action under the Services of Supply, which acted at a supervisory level. The situation was much like that within the Signal Corps, wherein the Chief Signal Officer had interposed several echelons between himself and his operating divisions. Throughout the summer, General Olmstead had continued to reorganize his office. As new functions came into being or old ones assumed less or greater importance, he created new organizational units, killed old ones, or shuffled them around, seeking always to achieve a stronger and more complete decentralization.29 Each shift within the Office of the Chief Signal Officer brought a corresponding change in the field organization, in swift chronological succession.
At the end of the summer in 1942 the Supply Service under General Colton at last clearly reflected what Colton’s dual responsibilities had been for months; his two divisions were now labeled simply “Materiel” and “Research and Development.”30 The personnel of the Materiel Division branches—Scheduling, Facilities and Materials, Storage and Issue—brought the total manpower of this half of Colton’s realm to 207 officers and 2,856 civilians, more than one half of all the civilians in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer.31
In the field, meanwhile, Signal Corps agencies multiplied, with every month bringing at least one decentralization of functions. In October 1942 the Storage and Issue Branch of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer moved to Philadelphia and became the Storage and Issue Agency, with only a liaison branch remaining in the Pentagon. In the same month the Signal Corps Inspection Agency set up housekeeping at Dayton. In November a new procurement district started operating at Monmouth, handling procurement functions formerly carried out by the Signal Corps General Development Laboratories at Fort Monmouth and the Signal Corps Radar Laboratory at Belmar, New Jersey. December brought the creation of a new superagency, the Signal Corps Ground Signal Service, which would supervise the activities of the supply and development agencies in the Fort Monmouth area much as the Signal Corps Aircraft Signal Service supervised those in the Dayton area.32
Dayton was the center of Signal Corps procurement for the Army Air Forces, which now used more radio and radar equipment than all the rest of the Army put together.33 The activities of the Wright Field Signal Corps Procurement District and the Dayton Signal Depot were associated, the depot having had its genesis in the storage and issue section of the procurement district. The two agencies could hardly be said to be housed in the same building, for by October 1942 their offices and warehouses were scattered about the city in twenty-one
buildings, mostly former garage and automobile salesroom buildings.34
In the earlier part of the summer there had been a desperate shortage of officers, with only fifty assigned to both agencies, and the depot alone needing that many.35 Personnel matters had improved by early fall. The volume of work was growing steadily. The Meteorological Division activities alone were expected to increase 100 percent within a few months. When the meteorological equipment was moved to Dayton from Philadelphia in midsummer 1942 officers tried to fit it into the 30,000 square feet in the Ripley Building, but had to ask for an additional 6,500 square feet of floor space in the Shroyer Building, a block farther up North Main Street. By November, with employees working as long as sixteen hours a day seven days a week on two shifts, supply functions were in good shape.
The Signal Corps inspection service had been operating in a twilight zone of responsibility all summer, awaiting the results of the inspection study being made by General Olmstead’s trouble shooter, George L. Schnable. His fact-finding tour completed, Schnable had presented a plan which divided the country into zones, each office reporting to a central control agency, which would take over all inspection previously handled by the Philadelphia Signal Corps Procurement District and its field offices and by the various laboratories. In September the plan was approved. By October the necessary shifting of personnel and functions had been accomplished, and the new Signal Corps Inspection Agency was installed in its quarters at Dayton. Col. Lester J. Harris, formerly in charge of the now deactivated San Francisco Signal Corps Procurement District, headed the new activity. Five inspection zone offices, at Newark, Philadelphia, Dayton, Chicago, and San Francisco, reported to the agency, and there was a liaison headquarters section in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer.36
The Spare Parts Problem
Meanwhile, the decision to invade North Africa late in 1942 brought new urgency to a problem which had harassed the Signal Corps since the moment war began. This was the matter of providing enough spare parts, particularly radar parts. The basic reason for the existence of this problem lay in the initial lack of industrial capacity to cope with the tremendous volume of production demanded by global war. It was aggravated both by the concentration upon end item production to the neglect of spare parts and by the lack of a unified control in any Signal Corps agency.37 The responsibility for spare parts cut across the areas of development, planning, requirements, procurement, production, storage and issue, and distribution. At one time or another, numerous Signal Corps agencies in all those
fields busied themselves with the matter.38 The Services of Supply was also much concerned about spare parts, not only for Signal Corps items of equipment, but also for equipment of all the technical services.
Spare parts possessed a dual function, being used both for maintenance and for repair. Usually, the laboratory which was responsible for development of an item of equipment made up parts lists and calculated the amount of spare parts necessary for a year’s supply. The contracting officers were supposed to include that amount in the initial contract. These two points were basic. Obviously, without knowing what parts went into a set, it was impossible to buy spare parts for it. The laboratories, understaffed and overworked, were very slow about getting the lists compiled. As late as May 1942 the maintenance requirements for some items were based on 1939 lists.39 As late as October the Research and Development Division of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer was pointing out to the Signal Corps Radar Laboratory that the most complete radar parts list which it had furnished until then was in fact far from complete. Issued in March for the SCR-270 and 271, it omitted 33 capacitors, 7 resistors, and 3 coils that were actually used. The laboratory promised quick action, but as a matter of fact did not finish the first complete parts list for the SCR-270 and 271 until March 1943. Other vital lists did not appear until May and June.40 Furthermore, until field experience furnished better answers, the computation of spare parts required for maintenance and repair was largely guesswork.
On the procurement side, contracting officers could not be expected to order spare parts if they had no idea what to buy, or in what amounts. Although by autumn all new contracts contained clauses providing for concurrent delivery of spare parts and end items, delivery still could not be assured. Unfortunately, spare parts were nearly always components of end items on the contract, and the pressure to get out quantities of end items was heavy and unremitting.
Rather than interfere with production lines, manufacturers often asked for, and got, waivers on the required spare parts groups. The result was that increasing amounts of equipment did go out into the field, but, lacking spare parts, soon became immobilized. The question was whether it was better to equip initially as many troops as possible with the items listed in the tables of basic allowances, and let them use their equipment as long as possible without enough maintenance, or to equip fewer troops, but give them adequate numbers of spare parts to prolong the working life of the equipment. It was not a matter for the Signal Corps to decide, since the official Army policy, enunciated by the War Department early in 1941, required the immediate issue of equipment without waiting for spare parts. The problem was aggravated by the fact that troop activations were hasty, unorganized, and unpredictable. Provisional units sprang into being, and depots were stripped of supplies to equip them.41
Radar spares were especially critical. When war came there existed no radar industry as such. Radar was a completely new field; there were no experience tables on which to base life expectancy and maintenance requirement lists. Even the designs were not fixed. Each day brought new tactical applications, fresh demands from the using services. And as the potentialities of the wonder weapon began to be revealed in the trial of battle, the clamor for more and more sets of new and improved design quite drowned out the pleas for spare parts to maintain the sets already in the field. Spare parts for the SCR-268, 270, and 271 comprised three separate classes: first, complete component sets; second, depot spare parts, which were certain individual items thought to be most needed, and listed on spare parts lists; and finally, spare parts furnished with each operating set. The basis of issue for spare parts, one set for every twenty-five radars, had been established for peacetime operation, which contemplated not more than six hours of operation per day. On a wartime basis, demanding at least eighteen hours of operation each day, one spare parts set for each five operating units would be needed.42
When war began, the Signal Corps had on hand in its depots only 12 spare SCR-268 sets, and 23 SCR-270 and 271’s, together with 18 depot spare parts for the 268, and one each for the 270 and 271.43 During the first frantic weeks of war, the Storage and Issue Division distributed the 268’s and two of the 270’s as spares to the points of highest priority: to Hawaii, Panama, Puerto Rico, the various interceptor commands, and other danger points. While these priority shipments were being made, floods of direct requisitions from using organizations poured in. The Signal Corps sent whatever it could, but usually it did not have all of the items required to make up a complete depot spare parts set, almost certainly not in the quantities designated. At once Storage and Issue initiated a $5,200,000 purchase request to provide spare parts for 500 SCR-268’s for one year. During the next month it wrote up three more requests totaling $7,398,000 for spare parts for the SCR-270, and for massive quantities of tubes for both radars. But three months later, at the end of March 1942, purchasing officers had not yet been able to place all of the orders; no substantial deliveries could be expected at least until May, and “the situation in regard to depot spare parts [was] critical.”44
The search for radar parts turned next to the corps areas, merely to be frustrated. Only the First Corps Area at Boston had any complete parts sets, six for the SCR-268 and four for the 270. The others reported none at all, or groups in varying degrees of incompleteness.45 But most of the parts needed were of commercial design; perhaps the corps area signal officers could find them on local radio dealers’ shelves. Throughout the summer, the corps areas, or as they were now being called, the service commands, bought on the open market such repair parts as they could find. The results were disappointing, but not
unexpectedly so, since several parts sought could not be identified from the parts lists, and at least one part was of special design and could be secured only through a depot.
Any expedient which might yield results in the frantic search for radar parts was tried at least once. When General Electric’s $1,000,000 contract for aircraft transmitters was canceled, the company shipped several carloads of fabricated and unfabricated parts to the Lexington Signal Depot. The Office of the Chief Signal Officer sent down two experts to sort out the material, select as much of it as was suitable for radar parts, and ship the rest out to repair shops.46 Other experts searched the Philadelphia Signal Corps Depot general stock to see what portion of it could be used for radar parts, but found very little.47
The most rewarding effort resulted from formation of mobile procurement crews, three-man teams from the Signal Corps Radar Laboratory. They toured the eastern seaboard searching out radio equipment stores and buying up quantities of resistors and potentiometers, capacitors, transformers, tubes, switches, solder, and miscellaneous equipment. By July these roving teams had obtained practically all of the most critical items for the maintenance of 1,000 SCR-268’s, 500 SCR-270’s, and 100 SCR-271’s.48 For spare parts items not available on store shelves, the mobile crews had sought out small manufacturers, who could not make the complicated radars but who could make parts.49 By the end of October the emergency mobile procurement program had brought in $1,614,891 worth of parts.50 By then Westinghouse and other large concerns were shipping quantities of radar spares on the first large spare parts orders.
Yet the stock situation at the Lexington Signal Depot remained “very bad”; the Maintenance Branch felt that “hoarding had been going on,” and sent a man to make a spot check at some of the repair shops in the service commands to find out.51 The “considerable gap between the quantity of material shipped from the laboratories and depots and that received by the overseas bases” prompted Colonel Rives, chief of the Radar Division in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, to send a three-man crew to the west coast to inspect service commands, ports of embarkation, and the headquarters of the Alaska Communication System to try to find out what was wrong with the distribution system of radar maintenance and spare parts.52
Thus throughout the year the Signal Corps hacked away energetically at the spare parts problem. But the effort was scattered, a bit here and a bit there, so that the problem was dented but not reduced to manageable size. The basic difficulties underlying it remained. Not all of them were within the Signal Corps’ power to solve, but the Corps would be blamed for them nonetheless. There would be many a complaint from North Africa because of the lack of spare parts for signal equipment.53
Spreading Procurement to Small Business
Of the many policy matters affecting Signal Corps production in the latter half of 1942, not the least was the question of spreading the work to smaller business concerns. The Signal Corps, both by choice and by necessity, had placed its supply problems largely in the hands of the five giants of the industry. But there was a persistent feeling of uneasiness among Signal Corps supply officers that the concentration of awards among the very large companies might result in overburdening them to such an extent that they could not deliver the material on time.
It was true that the large companies were supposed to subcontract 30 or 40 percent of their orders to smaller firms, teaching them the necessary techniques and assisting them in getting into production. But subcontracting was a controversial subject in 1942. To the Big Five, it was an obviously necessary technique not entirely new, since most of them habitually subcontracted for parts and subassemblies and in some cases for complete units under sublicensing agreements. Nevertheless, they doubted the wisdom of the Signal Corps plan to subcontract a fixed percentage of all contracts, and the president of Western Electric had suggested that there were technical reasons why subcontracting had to be handled with care. Not all contracting officers were in accord with the idea of subcontracting, either. They were under tremendous pressure to get out equipment and to get it out fast, and subcontracting meant trusting untried, possibly less skilled, sources. Yet the War Department policy was to broaden the base of procurement. Though obviously unable to apply a rule of thumb, Signal Corps procurement officers in general tried conscientiously to develop secondary sources of supply and to enforce the subcontracting provisions.
Early in February 1942 the Control Division had warned supply officers that even if all prime contracts with the nine largest firms supplying Signal Corps equipment were 30 percent subcontracted, Bendix would still need five years to complete its undelivered load, General Electric almost one and a half years, and Westinghouse two and a half years.54 In August an officer from Colton’s Aircraft Radar Branch wrote that overloading of the big companies had contributed to delay in deliveries because these plants could not work simultaneously on all their orders full blast. “Work on one order,” he wrote, “is at a standstill because a ‘higher priority’ has been temporarily assigned to another order.” This shifting of priorities in overloaded factories delayed less favored, yet badly needed, products. He wanted more insistence that the big
companies subcontract to the smaller, less busy, factories.55
Of the loaded concerns Western Electric was the largest, in terms of the Signal Corps contracts it held at midyear. Its share was $932,000,000 of the four-billion-dollar Signal Corps outlay. Nearest runner-up was General Electric, with $386,000,000 on contract, followed by Bendix ($325,000,000), Westinghouse ($263,000,000), and RCA, only $84,000,000. Of the remaining 248 manufacturers holding Signal Corps contracts aggregating over $100,000, only three had contracted for more than $50,000,000: War Supplies Limited, $62,000,000; Philco, $60,000,000; Galvin, $55,000,000. Seven held contracts aggregating above $10,000,000: General Cable, $29,000,000; Belmont Radio, $22,000,000; Crosley, Fairchild Aviation, and Zenith, each $18,000,000; Farnsworth and Graybar, each $11,000,000. Graybar, moreover, was but a subsidiary of Western Electric.56
If added pressure were needed, it was supplied by Congressional action in the summer of 1942 with the passage of Public Law 603, which granted the War Production Board power to establish a Small War Plants Corporation to certify manufacturers capable of producing specific items of munitions, and the power to make contracts with any government agency through subcontracts with the certified business concerns.57 General Somervell, chief of the Services of Supply, and General Harrison, his Director of Procurement, instructed all supply officers to utilize small war plants to the greatest extent possible, and General Colton instructed all branches of the Signal Supply Service to see that “when these plants are ready to take orders, they are given orders promptly.”58
For hearings before the Senate Small Business Committee, the Signal Corps thumbed through its procurement records seeking the latest subcontracting figures. They showed that on 1 September 1942 the Signal Corps had 25,521 prime contracts with a dollar value of $3,098,329,568, and 500,000 subcontracts with a dollar value of $1,120,000,000, or 36 percent of the total. Small war plants (that is, plants employing 500 or less people), held 17,009 of the prime contracts, representing $464,749,435, or 15 percent of the total, and also held 156,000 of the subcontracts, with a dollar value of $235,500,000, or 7.6 percent.59
There were persuasive reasons why Signal Corps contracts with large firms would always predominate, and these reasons General Colton pointed out in a 25-page memorandum. The Signal Corps procurement
problem was specialized. Almost entirely it concerned the electronics industry, because radio and radar equipment accounted for 93 percent of the total dollar value of Signal Corps procurement; wire and wire communication equipment less than 6 percent; and miscellaneous equipment such as photographic and meteorological items less than 1 percent. The radio industry was primarily an assembly industry, with prime contractors contributing engineering, design, and development talent. They placed orders for small parts with suppliers who in turn subcontracted with other suppliers, so that several layers of subcontracting resulted. In the case of one radio set, the different subcontracts in all levels reached into the thousands. Colton cited reasons why Signal Corps contracts were concentrated among only a few of the largest manufacturers: the inherent complexity and technical detail of much of the equipment; the necessity for hoarding machine tools, which had resulted in repeat orders to firms already producing equipment, rather than tooling up smaller concerns; the policy of purchasing complete sets whenever possible to simplify the storage and issue problem and to economize on signal personnel; and the necessity for keeping maintenance and repair parts interchangeable, which once again resulted in repeat orders from the same manufacturer.60
Actually the Signal Corps had already done much to help small business. When the limitation orders of early 1942 had brought about “distressed” labor conditions in some areas, the Signal Corps had placed orders such as the one with Kingston Products Corporation of Kokomo, Indiana, which was subcontracting sea-air rescue equipment SCR-578 for Bendix.61 It had contracted with small plant pools, such as the ninety companies comprising the Omaha Industries, Inc., which had two contracts for wire throwers RL-37, and the Peninsular War Products pool of eight companies, which had a contract for telephone poles. It had spread the work on field telephone set EE-8 through a number of telephone manufacturing companies in order to keep their production lines up, even though one or two of them alone could have handled the entire requirement for EE-8’s. The Signal Corps policy allowed a higher price to be paid small concerns for the same items that larger companies furnished at less cost. The Signal Corps had also transferred simple items from large manufacturers to smaller ones in order to make way for more complicated items, as in the case of headsets HS-30 transferred from Sonotone and Western Electric to the William J. Murdock Company, Kellogg Switchboard, North Electric Manufacturing Company, and others.62
During the late summer, the Signal Corps stepped up its efforts to subcontract, but without much effect. The total dollar share remained the same in terms of percentages. A report at the end of November showed that there were then 586,000 subcontracts in effect, averaging in value $2,240, for a total of $1,312,640,000. The number of prime contracts declined, to 24,251. The total value of all contracts was then
$3,643,354,837.45,63 which would account for about 36 percent of dollar value in subcontracts. Since the Signal Corps’ figures in October had showed that ten firms each having contracts totaling over $50,000,000 held more than 75 percent of all Signal Corps contracts, it must be assumed that some of the larger firms were subcontracting among themselves, and that the percentage of subcontracts held by small firms had not increased materially.64
Plant Capacity, Material Shortages, and Patent Licensing
Unfortunately, as far as the Signal Corps was concerned, the Small War Plants Corporation brought in new facilities in the very field of simple equipment where excess capacity already existed in established, qualified facilities.65 By the last quarter of 1942, plant expansions sponsored by the Signal Corps during 1941 and the earlier months of 1942 were coming into useful production. By October, 45 of the 64 Signal Corps plant expansions financed by Defense Plant Corporation and production expediting funds were in partial production. By the end of the calendar year, it was estimated, 52 would be in partial and 28 in full production. The list included plants producing capacitors, quartz crystal assemblies, radar components, radio antenna trailer assemblies, tubes of all kinds, testing equipment, insulators, field wire, assault wire, cable assemblies, dynamotors, motors, generators, lithium hydride, glass working lathes, powdered iron carbonyl, and tantalum oxide and metal. Plants were scattered over fourteen states from Redwood City, California, and Portland, Oregon, on the west coast to Salem, Massachusetts, on the east coast, and from Shreveport, Louisiana, north to Hamtramck, Michigan.66
Industrial capacity, however, hinged on many factors, and merely building factories was not a complete answer. Machine tools,67 raw materials, and shortages of skilled labor, plus an ever-changing tactical situation, had to be calculated. Moreover each industry had its particular bottlenecks. Ever since the middle of 1942 the Signal Corps had been authorized to place advance orders, even up to 1944 requirements, to keep production lines going.68 The Signal Corps lost some facilities to other using services because it could not supply enough
orders to keep them fully occupied. For example, General Olmstead had noted the Fred M. Link Company, which six months earlier had been devoting 90 percent of its capacity to Signal Corps work, but which by August had only 25 percent of its plant busy with Signal Corps orders.69
The fight for raw materials had begun early and had continued without respite. All the services needed more materials than were available, thus necessitating the imposition of the Controlled Materials Plan.70 This had gone into effect in late summer 1942, running concurrently with the Production Requirements Plan which it would entirely supersede on 1 July 1943. Neither the Production Requirements Plan nor the priorities system which preceded it had provided any effective method of controlling raw materials to channel them into the places where they were needed most.71 With the advent of the Controlled Materials Plan, the Signal Corps reorganized its field and staff offices which dealt with materials and resources, and brought in four industrial experts to assist: J. P. Howland, assistant to the president of Zenith Radio Company, L. W. Greenwood and J. L. Huck, scheduling experts from the Western Electric Company, and W. A. Kelley from the War Production Board.72 The Signal Corps was a relatively small user of most of the strategic materials under the Controlled Materials Plan, but it was highly important that its needs should not be overlooked.
The Controlled Materials Plan, like its predecessor allocation and priority systems, dealt with shortages of materials, critical components, and production facilities. Insofar as the production of items of electronic equipment was concerned, none of these systems alone would have been enough to assure a balanced flow of electronic items to the military services. Beginning in the late summer of 1942, and continuing until shortly after the victory over Japan in 1945, a special priority system known as the Precedence System, applicable solely to the electronic requirements of the armed forces and those of the Allies, operated within the framework of the War Production Board systems. The fundamental difference between the concept of “priority” and that of “precedence” lay in the fact that the latter was a measure of military urgency only.73
That some such precedence system was urgently needed became clear in the early months of 1942. The Signal Corps’ enormous orders of electronic equipment for the Army had consumed almost the entire plant capacity of the industry, shutting out smaller but equally urgent Navy orders. Army and Navy expediters had swarmed into contractors’ plants, subjecting the manufacturers to a cross fire of conflicting demands and competing fiercely for War Production Board priorities and directives. By midsummer, the various bureaus and divisions of the two services were even
competing among themselves, to the utter confusion of the manufacturers who were trying to set up workable production schedules. The creation of the Army and Navy Electronics Production Agency (ANEPA) was a first step toward establishing order. But it was not enough.
The War Production Board, which had authority to take emergency action, lacked knowledge of the relative military necessity of any particular item of equipment as between the competing claims of the Army and the Navy. There had to be “a yardstick ... to calibrate the urgency of various types of military electronic equipment within assigned priorities,” particularly in the field of radar. At the urging of General Colton and other Signal Corps officers, the Radar Committee of the Joint Communications Board (a supporting agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) prepared the first radar precedence list in June 1942. In August formation of the Precedence Committee of the Joint Communications Board was authorized. The Committee soon became a workable organization of great importance, with a group of Army and Navy representatives preparing precedence lists of radio, radar, sonar, and associated equipment in terms of military operational importance.
In October 1942 the War Production Board (through its Radio and Radar Division) issued Limitation Order L-183-2 making the precedence list for electronic equipment operative within the priorities system, effective 12 February 1943.74 Thereafter the Precedence Committee published precedence lists establishing the relative urgency of certain types and quantities of electronic items of equipment within any single preference rating category, and forwarded the lists to the manufacturers on official forms called PL-1 forms. It was mandatory that the manufacturers schedule their production in accordance with these lists.
The Precedence System as it operated throughout the war proved to be of immense value to all those concerned with the electronic program, but most of all to the manufacturers. At first glance it might seem that integrating precedence listings into priority ratings would complicate manufacturers’ problems, but in reality it did nothing of the sort. It enabled them to apply their facilities—plants, laboratories, labor, and all other resources—most effectively. Manufacturers welcomed the precedence lists, just as they did the creation of the Army and Navy Electronics Production Agency. Indeed, the electronic industry in general had responded to the wartime restrictions with admirable patience and resourcefulness, accepting each problem as a further challenge to ingenuity in producing equipment that fulfilled the exceedingly difficult requirements of warfare. One such instance arose early in the war in connection with patent rights.
Radio equipment generally employed large numbers of inventions covered by separate patents. There were few pieces of equipment wherein all of the patents applicable were in the hands of a single holder; in the case of new equipment, it was impossible for a manufacturer to know ahead of time whether or not he was infringing one or more patents. To protect manufacturers, there had arisen the trade custom of granting blanket licenses under large groups of patents held or controlled by a single company, a type of pool
arrangement. Under such a system, the manufacturer who sought a license obtained one which covered the use of all the patents within a single field. He paid a fixed rate of royalty whether he used many of the licensor’s patents, only a few, or, in the case of a few licensors, none at all. There were perhaps a dozen or more such licensing groups, including the Radio Corporation of America, the Hazeltine Corporation, the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation, the Sperry Gyroscope Company, and others. The most extensive was the RCA group, which held licensing rights under about 20,000 patents, including its own, and patents of General Electric, American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Westinghouse, and other important electronics companies. About 150 of the patents were quite important to the manufacturers of Signal Corps equipment. Nearly 80 percent of the manufacturers, and a much larger percentage of the productive capacity of the industry, was licensed by the RCA group.75
Government practice had been to require the supplier of goods on a government contract to assume the risk of any costs that might be incurred by reason of infringement of any patent covering any part of the equipment to be manufactured. This requirement was incorporated in the contract in the so-called “save harmless” clause intended to “save” the government from “harm” in patent infringement. Contractors were loath to accept government contracts because of this clause. Either they refused to bid at all, or refused to execute a contract with the “save harmless” clause, or took out all the licenses offered by various groups, thus pyramiding royalties and increasing costs. Or, as most frequently happened, so contracting officers charged, they included in the cost of the contract additional money to be set aside as a fund to cover such a contingency. Well before Pearl Harbor, the Signal Corps had taken the initiative in War Department efforts to arrive at a satisfactory solution to the problem. On 9 December 1941 representatives of the radio industry met in the Office of the Under Secretary of War and formed a committee on research information, whose chairman was the Signal Corps patent expert, Maj. Donald K. Lippincott. The recommendations of the committee, adopted by representatives of the industry meeting in New York early in 1942, in effect promised a pooling of technical information by all radio manufacturers, in return for which the government would obtain licenses from patent holders, and would eliminate the “save harmless” clause from its contracts.76
By April of 1942 the government had been offered licenses, most of them royalty free, from 37 patent holders, including all of the important licensors of electronic equipment except Radio Corporation of America.77 That company took the position that, because it had already licensed more than 70 potential suppliers and offered to license all others, and because it had reduced its royalty rates so that it would not make more profit in the war years than in the last year of peace, it should not be
required to give the government a license, and that “the Government should continue to require its suppliers of radio equipment to assume normal and usual responsibilities for infringement by their products, which responsibility can be met by their acquiring the necessary patent rights.”78
General Colton, replying to RCA, merely inclosed a copy of a very recent contract in which RCA itself had objected to the “save harmless” clause, and said, “The instance cited shows ... that [the question] does arise with your company, and we cannot feel that the ‘Save Harmless’ clause should be used only when it works to the advantage of your company and omitted when it works to your disadvantage.” He mentioned the fact that royalties accruing to RCA during 1942 would be in excess of $30,000,000, and added, “We do not believe that even your admittedly great contribution to the war effort warrants a tax of this magnitude, especially since the principal justification for royalties is to pay for continuing research work, and since your own current research, to which you retain the commercial rights, is now being done largely by government contract and on government funds.”79
After a certain amount of legalistic skirmishing, RCA did arrive at a satisfactory basis for licensing the government, at terms considered quite generous. Under the terms of the license, RCA waived royalty payments from the more than 90 manufacturers already licensed, and gave the government a nonexclusive license to run “during hostilities and for six months thereafter” in return for the payment of $4,000,000 annually.80
The November Drive for Production
Thus throughout the summer the Signal Corps struggled with a host of production problems. When the planning to supply North Africa finally got under way late in August, Signal Corps procurement was less than ready to meet the test. The fact that many of the problems affecting Signal Corps procurement were not unique did not make them less real or less critical. The disturbing thing was that the Signal Corps apparently was not succeeding in overcoming them as well as the other supply services. The August production meeting which had reflected the Signal Corps in so poor a light caused repercussions that rumbled through the entire organization. General Olmstead himself was puzzled. What was wrong, he queried his deputy chief signal officer, General Code, that could “occasion the adverse comments and charts from SOS with which I am constantly being confronted?” Code’s answering memorandum acknowledged that the Signal Corps was not meeting either its “required” or its “anticipated” goals—that is, neither the long-range forecast of requirements established by the Army Supply Program, nor the more realistic self-set objective, which represented the portion of the ASP the Signal Corps thought it could produce for the period ending 31 December 1942. Code felt that “small but powerful manufacturing groups (had) a strangle hold on [Signal Corps] contracts”; that too little use had been made of small concerns; and that the Signal Corps had wasted vital strategic materials
by trying to maintain specifications on a peacetime basis instead of making use of substitutes. He suggested that the Signal Corps ought to have “an integrated, expert production program run by specialists.”81
In a memorandum to General Colton, a specialist in development rather than in, production, Code had already set forth the alarming statistics. The Signal Corps would need to have over $165,000,000 in signal equipment delivered monthly from August through December. In July it got only $65,363,000. That did not include some $28,000,000 in components, but adding them gave only $92,000,000, a little more than one half the requirement. And in the first week of August less than $3,000,000 worth of equipment was delivered. If the same rate was maintained through the month the Signal Corps would get $12,000,000 in deliveries when $165,000,000 was needed. What did Colton propose to do about it, asked Code?82
Colton’s first response was to ask that David Sarnoff, president of RCA and a colonel in the Signal Corps Reserve, be called to active duty for a few months as the executive assistant to Colton.83 Sarnoff did come on duty (for 30 days), and General Olmstead at once set him to studying the whole procurement structure.84 A few days later Sarnoff reported that “95 percent of the Signal Corps’ problems were in the Supply Service,” a conclusion which surprised no one. Sarnoff found many minor flaws which needed remedying, and recommended corrective measures in a concise report to Colton, who approved almost all of them.85 To General Olmstead, Sarnoff in his capacity as a member of Olmstead’s Advisory Council addressed a second report.86 Stripped of its excess verbiage, it said that the position of Chief Signal Officer had grown too big for one man to handle with competence. The function of supply should be segregated, the report went on, and placed under one man who would have authority to act without intervening layers of command obstructing him.87
There is no record that Olmstead took immediate action on this memorandum, possibly because very soon thereafter he entered the hospital for treatment. October passed in a flurry of worried consultations
within the supply service, but without many concrete results. At his staff conference of 3 November, General Somervell told the Signal Corps that it must meet at least 90 percent of its own forecast. After all, he said, the Signal Corps had set its target, and should have no alibis.88
With Olmstead in the hospital, Code felt that it was up to him to take over. Calling the top supply men of the organization together, he mapped out an intensive program designed to bring in $150,000,000 in deliveries that month. Within a week telegrams urging greater production went to all manufacturers working on Signal Corps contracts. They brought no results—deliveries the next week stayed at the same low level. All that happened was that some congressmen heard of it, and complained of the waste of taxpayers’ money. Code intensified his efforts. He told Signal Corps expediters to get the raw materials that manufacturers needed, to be “clever, not orthodox,” letting “nothing” stand in their way. He ordered the inspectors to redouble their efforts to complete clearances of finished equipment from plants. He organized a publicity campaign to enlist the cooperation of defense plant workers; set up daily “situation charts”; and assigned Colonel Bickelhaupt to get in touch with his friends in the world of big business to plead with them for more production in November.89 Finally, Code spread the word to cut red tape ruthlessly, no matter whose toes were stepped on in the process. Reporting his efforts to Somervell, Code found the chief of SOS ready to back him up. Somervell said, “Better to be in jail having gotten the $3,000,000,000 than to be in jail because we did not get it.” There would be repercussions from many places, warned Code. Somervell answered, “Let them come.”90
The month flew by. Everyone put aside other assignments to work on the production drive. Still in the hospital, General Olmstead could do little but worry. “The quickest way for you to get me thrown out by January 1st is to fail to meet that forecast,” he told Code.91 But the drive was succeeding. On the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Code was able to call SOS to report the good news—that the Signal Corps had not only met its November procurement objective of $141,000,000 in full, but had surpassed it for a final total of $174,000,000.92
The Signal Corps was elated. Yet organizationally, little had changed. The top-heavy and cumbersome structure remained. The supply function was still tied to research and development, and still lacked the single-minded attention of a production expert. Whether it would falter or fail under the extra strain of the Army’s first major offensive remained to be seen.93
Plans and Preparations, at Home and Overseas
In General Olmstead’s office there were two groups to perform the highly technical
work that constituted the Signal Corps’ participation in staff planning for actions in Atlantic areas, in Pacific areas, and in any other area where an invasion might be launched. Olmstead had created the Planning Directorate on his executive staff following the March reorganization of the War Department, and had picked Colonel Meade to head it.94 The other planning group, the long-established War Plans Division, was one of the units of the Signal Operations Service. Col. Francis H. Lanahan, Jr., served as its head until late July, when he was replaced by Lt. Col. Victor A. Conrad. Lanahan moved up into the Planning Directorate under Meade.95
As early as January, the Signal War Plans Division had labored over a plan called GYMNAST, which contemplated an invasion of the Casablanca area. Toward a radio and wire net planned to extend throughout French Morocco, the Signal Corps drew up call signs, prepared frequency assignments, and began readying equipment and signal units. Then in March GYMNAST was shelved, although it was to reappear a few months later polished and expanded as TORCH. In June the Joint Chiefs of Staff appointed a committee to draw up a communication plan for the South Pacific. The Army member of the committee was Colonel Lanahan, and another Signal Corps officer, Lt. Col. Francis L. Ankenbrandt, represented the Air Forces, to which the Signal Corps had detailed him. Together with naval Comdr. A. J. Detzer, they rushed their report to completion in July.96
Late in May a big assignment fell to the Signal Corps planning units. It was the demand for communications for BOLERO, the build-up operation in the United Kingdom. This plan was designed to provide a force of a million men specifically equipped to carry out an air offensive against the European continent in 1942, possibly a continental operation in conjunction with the British in 1942, and a major joint invasion in 1943.97 The Signal Corps learned that it would have to provide hundreds of specialists in dozens of categories, besides tons of signal equipment, all on very short notice. Some of the units to be shipped in August would have to be activated before the publication of their tables of basic allowances.
During June Signal Corps planners toiled over the assignment of officers and units. Ten types of signal units, and many of them, were contemplated for Army Air Force’s needs. Large numbers of specialists in 48 categories would have to be provided for the Signal Corps replacement pool for
BOLERO.98 Late in June the planners agreed that for all Army radio, radar, and wire installation and maintenance needs, the advanced section of SOS BOLERO would require six signal depot companies, three signal repair companies, five signal companies (depot aviation), twenty-eight signal companies (service group), and one photographic laboratory.99 The task of assigning officers was complicated by the fact that dispute and confusion existed both in London and in Washington over the areas of responsibility and channels of command for the BOLERO operation in the United Kingdom.100
The SOS supply organization for the build-up was being formed in the United States. It was to be headed by Maj. Gen. John C. H. Lee, and General Somervell had instructed his technical service chiefs to make some of their best men available for Lee’s staff. The Signal Corps had chosen General Rumbough, the commanding officer of Camp Crowder, Missouri, for this assignment.101 But on 8 June 1942 the formation of the European Theater of Operations United States Army (ETOUSA) was announced, to replace the planning, supply, and tactical command known as USAFBI. Under General Order No. 2, Rumbough was named Chief Signal Officer of ETOUSA.102 Thus he assumed a dual role, operating as the chief signal officer of both ETOUSA and the SOS organization. The situation was somewhat clarified in July, after General Eisenhower assumed command of ETOUSA. The chiefs of the operating services were placed under the direction of the Commanding General, SOS, who was designated deputy theater commander shortly thereafter. While the supply chiefs moved with General Lee to his headquarters at Cheltenham, ninety miles northwest of London, a representative of each service remained at theater headquarters. For this duty, Col. Jerry V. Matejka was designated for the Signal Corps.103 Matejka had been in England since May 1941 as signal officer of the Special Observers’ Group, and had already established working arrangements with the British signals organization on the use of British installations and equipment. He had also ironed out many of the difficulties that beset the early contingents of the Electronics Training Group officers sent to the United Kingdom for schooling in 1941 and early 1942.104 Largely because of Matejka’s
efforts, the Signal Corps appears to have been the first of the technical services to acquire practical working experience in England.105
Though the planning for the BOLERO build-up had begun on a grand scale, a sober study of the cold realities imposed by the critical shortage of shipping soon demonstrated that the supply targets would have to be scaled downward. Even while the United States embarked on the buildup to the limited extent possible, the strategy which underlay the plan was being questioned and revised.106 By mid-July plans for a 1942 attack on the Continent were abandoned, and the Allies settled upon an invasion of North Africa instead. TORCH became the design which would launch American troops on their first invasion across the Atlantic. While a planning committee in London under Maj. Gen. Mark W. Clark set to work on 13 July to map out the grand strategy for the invasion, the Office of the Chief Signal Officer in Washington turned to a survey of communication facilities in French and Spanish Morocco, in Algeria, and in Tunisia.107
Top-level planning suffered from confusion, haste, and conflict between the British and American viewpoints on the scope and objectives of the operation.108 To begin with, mounting the invasion would be something of a three-ring circus, the actors in each ring performing rather independently of the others. American troops comprising Task Force A, under General Patton, assigned to the western third of the invasion around Casablanca, staged wholly in the United States. Task Forces B and C, comprising both American and British troops aiming for the center and eastern sectors around Oran and Algiers, staged in England. Even with the best of communications, coordination between the widely separated groups would have been difficult. And Army’s communications were not at their best during the summer and autumn of 1942. It was to be many months yet before new Signal Corps developments and installations would make them so.
Furthermore, the BOLERO build-up had been intended to supply American troops in lands well equipped with communications, which North Africa lacked. To remedy the defect, the Signal Corps proposed the “A to H Wire Plan.”109 This plan aimed to provide a trunk line about 900 miles long between Casablanca and Algiers, together with subsidiary telephone communication to major headquarters. The Signal Corps planners reckoned on carrier telephone lines, with repeater stations, and upon voice frequency carrier telegraph. Also, they planned to link various air force and ground force headquarters by means of a new development called rapid pole line.110
The Signal Corps planners trusted that the first troops ashore would need little more than switchboards in the way of wire equipment (they would be well supplied with portable radios of course). They intended the Signal Corps units to put local facilities to work, rehabilitating and improving them. But trunk lines over the large distances of North Africa called for large-scale arrangements. For the Oran and Algiers area, the planners in their “Operation TORCH Wire Plan,” edition of 22 September, presented the details in fine order, on paper be it remembered. They planned good wire and cable systems, utilizing local facilities when available; but for the most part, the equipment would have to come from the United States, and in large quantities, in order to provide, for example, seven voice and eight telegraph circuits over the 836 miles between Casablanca and Algiers; six voice and ten telegraph circuits over the 267 miles between Algiers and Constantine, and so on.111
Toward getting material to implement the A to H plan, Captain J. D. Stewart, Army Communications Division, conferred in September with the Long Lines and Operations and Engineering Departments of the American Telephone and Telegraph. Long Lines agreed to prepare the detailed material and equipment lists. Facilities would include hundreds of miles of cable and four-wire lines for carrier C and H operation. Local facilities would make it unnecessary to construct new pole lines in some cases, the planners were assured. This, however, was to prove a painfully misleading piece of optimism. As the deadline for shipment approached, the heat of activity intensified. The requirements by 23 September included the new packaged No. 11 telephone switchboards, 69A1 teletypewriter switchboards, C and H carrier telephone systems, AC-operated repeater stations, and DC telegraph. Some, probably unaware of current radar developments, thought this was “the hottest job at present for the Signal Corps” in Western Electric shops, and the Kearny plant was asked to rush it in every way. It lagged, nonetheless, and by October the Signal Corps became so frantic that it waived all government inspection while granting permission to fill the A to H project needs by diversion from any other, save only the Alcan Highway job.112
The equipment thus planned did not arrive in North Africa nearly as soon as intended, despite all efforts and deadlines. The planners who thought the troops would find sufficient equipment to get along well enough initially and who thought they possessed a fairly complete summary of what would be available in the way of wire, were to get some dismal jolts.113
As for large fixed radio installations, the planners knew that several high power stations already existed in North Africa. The Signal Corps, organizing the 1st and 2nd Radio Broadcasting Detachments to take them over,114 could expect some damage, and therefore ordered equipment of a type required to repair and rebuild them if need be. How to get the right parts and components was a poser until someone discovered that a French communication company had operated in New York several years earlier. The equipment was still there, idle, and was presumably the same type as would be found in French Morocco. Arrangements were made for Western Union to buy up
the company, whereupon the Signal Corps requisitioned the equipment to ship to North Africa. But of course most of the larger radio equipment would have to be brought in.115 TORCH radio plans touching Oran alone called for a complete corps signal battalion, with additional men to handle extra equipment which would be issued beyond the table of basic allowances. The equipment list included six SCR-299’s, power units, portable masts, and accessories, not to mention parts and supplies for 60 days’ maintenance. Included, too, was a 40-kilowatt radio station, able to provide high speed multichannel facilities. In case it could not be had immediately, the planners allowed for two smaller stations, of 10- and 1-kilowatt outputs, to be landed directly after the assault to serve until the 40-kilowatt set could be obtained.116
Nevertheless, hard work and the best of plans could not completely offset the short time allotted to TORCH preparations and the difficulties which attended the physical separation of the planners. The Western Task Force was to be equipped wholly from the United States, and was thus the focus of planning in Washington. In theory, the American forces within the central and eastern groups in England were to be supplied largely from resources on hand from BOLERO shipments. The rub was that too little had been sent under the BOLERO plan. Furthermore, as D Day drew near, it became apparent that many of the items which had arrived were hopelessly lost in British warehouses. The SOS, ETOUSA, had not had time to become firmly and efficiently organized to handle the daily increasing tonnage of supplies for TORCH. There were far too few service troops available in the theater. Moreover, equipment was poorly marked, badly packaged, hard to identify, and often misrouted. Under the task force shipping plan then used, organizations were shipped to the United Kingdom on fast transports and the bulk of the organizational equipment by slow convoy. The equipment was supposed to be marked in such a manner that it would catch up with the unit in England. Actually, this “marrying” of equipment and organizations was exceedingly difficult. Either the equipment arrived first and was stowed away in warehouses where it could not always be located when it was needed, or the unit arrived first, and, lacking equipment, drew new items from stock, thus depleting the already scanty supply.117
In the last weeks of preparation, the theater demanded so many items which had already been shipped “once or twice” that supply officers in the United States who were concentrating their efforts toward equipping the Western Task Force became alarmed lest General Patton’s force should be stripped of essentials. They took equipment from units in training, diverted items from lend-lease shipments, and “borrowed” from equipment already earmarked for other destinations.118
The Signal Corps officers, like those of all the other technical services, spent hectic weeks of preparation in a most confused situation. Some planners were in
Washington, some in Norfolk, and some in between and up and down the coast. The headquarters of the Amphibious Force (Atlantic Fleet), and its training facilities, were in the Norfolk area, and there the Amphibious Force staff, responsible for specialized training, naturally remained. But the headquarters of “Task Force A” was in the Munitions Building, Washington. This separation at once presented difficulties of maintaining liaison, coordinating planning, and maintaining secrecy. “These difficulties,” one officer described in a post mortem, “cannot be over-emphasized.” Signal officers found their plans bedeviled by numerous factors, on which they were badly informed or about which they were uncertain, for reasons often beyond their control. They overestimated the capacity of ports to handle the equipment which they planned to supply, and they failed to grasp the limitations of convoys. Ships would have to serve as communication centers in some cases, and here the planners had to wait upon Navy’s choice of ships before they could estimate equipment needs and engineering. Often the choice remained uncertain until very late. Furthermore, the signal officers in subordinate headquarters, which were dispersed along 500 miles of the Atlantic coast, were unable to participate in the planning, and the Force Signal Section had to do the job for the Sub-Force as well as for the parent organization. Worse, there was no opportunity for the Sub-Force signal officers to become familiar with the plans thus formulated. Not one of them had had experience in amphibious operations or had even witnessed the training of signal personnel in the exercises at Solomon’s Island, Maryland.119
Thus, the scene which Colonel Hammond, the signal officer of the Western Task Force,120 entered when he arrived in Washington to assume his duties was anything but bright. He had scarcely two months before D Day, 8 November, in which to complete enormous tasks such as (1) working out the details of the complex communications required ; (2) determining the specific signal troops and equipment needed for the invasion; and (3) preparing the signal troops and their thousands of tons of equipment for shipment on the assault and supporting convoys. Undoubtedly, he received invaluable assistance from officers in the Signal Corps Directorate of Planning and in the War Plans Division (the annual report of the Chief Signal Officer lauds especially the Directorate of Planning). These men, working under conditions of extraordinary secrecy, hastened the activation of special units, the training of signal troops, the procurement, assembly, and shipping of equipment. In general they coordinated the multifarious activities of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer toward meeting the D Day of America’s participation in the first great Allied amphibious landing upon hostile shores.121
In England signal plans for TORCH progressed at Allied Force Headquarters, officially activated on 15 September under General Eisenhower. His Chief Signal Officer, Brig. Gen. Jerry V. Matejka, was well
aware of the difficulties imposed by the isolation of the Western Task Force group, far from the central and eastern groups in England. To this factor he afterward ascribed “many unfortunate developments which should be avoided.”122 Matejka was an ideal choice for the position he filled. The year and a half he had spent in England working closely with British signal officers had given him a familiarity with British signal matters and personnel that proved invaluable for the task of coordinating the signal procedures of the two nations. Matejka’s deputy was a British officer, Brig. W. A. Scott. In all matters, British and American signal experts worked side by side. For example, Matejka’s radio officer and authority on frequency allocations was Capt. Esterly C. Page, whose British counterpart was Maj. C. A. Henn-Collins.123
These signal officers were pioneering something new in military communications, setting a precedent for things to come. There were many novel problems to contend with. Patton’s force would be all American, but the force staging in England would include both American and British units. This meant that American and British communications would have to be coordinated. There were no precedents, and neither nation’s set of rules would do by itself. Hence a Combined Signal Board, which met daily during the planning phase, had to sit down and hammer out new techniques and arrangements. Further, since the signal officer in the United States Army was responsible for radar, signal supply, communication intelligence, and photography, all outside the province of his British counterpart, the Signal Section of the Allied Force Headquarters had to deal not alone with the Royal Corps of Signals, but with several other components of His Majesty’s forces as well.124
Matejka and his British and American officers in the AFHQ Signal Section were expected to furnish communications for the entire headquarters with all its amazingly diverse elements. That meant providing service for representatives of the United States Army and Navy, Royal Navy, British Army, Royal Air Force, and American and British civilians, diplomatic, political, economic, propaganda, and counterintelligence agencies. All this lay far beyond the service which a headquarters signal section, United States Army, had been accustomed or designed to provide. Much had therefore to be extemporized, or rather pioneered. There were additional jobs, too, such as providing fixed plant equipment for the British since the American radios were more powerful and better suited to the long distances of North Africa. Yet the American signal supply was already more than fully occupied with American troop requirements for all three task forces. Moreover, time was desperately short. It was August before planning began; it was September before the Allied Force Headquarters was actually activated. Each problem had to be solved in some fashion, nevertheless.
In the Signal Section, the American share fell to four Signal Corps officers, who started work on 15 August; they with several others who came in subsequently worked thereafter night and day.125 Radio circuits had
to be decided upon, frequencies allocated, combined procedures ironed out. At one point the officers had developed the necessary schedules for sixty days in advance, but then were compelled to recast everything in consequence of a major change in the over-all plan. Improvising became the rule rather than the exception. Small wonder that Captain Page felt it “a great relief” when he left “the frenzy of last minute changes” for North Africa and Algiers and could “relax and rest in a comfortable bunk with nothing particular to do.”126
Communication procedures were bound to be most perplexing. They are bad enough when only one homogeneous army is operating, for they must insure clarity, make certain that men know with whom they are communicating, and conceal as much information as possible from the enemy’s intercept service. But in TORCH the normal perplexities would be compounded. There would be not one army, but several. In August General Eisenhower warned the Americans not to affix topmost priority notations to their messages, as was the practice, according to American Signal Operating Instructions. The British had no equivalents for such notations and, if the priority symbol appeared in their traffic, it would immediately flag the message for the benefit of any enemy monitor intercepting and copying British radio communications. The priority symbol would by itself indicate that the message was American and might even indicate the location of the general himself.127
Eisenhower ordained that each service use its own communication procedures for its own intercommunication. He added that two services, if not of the same nation, would use the signal procedures already in effect between them. American-British communications, if not already provided with an agreement, would employ the standard radio procedure, the self-evident code, or “Q” signals.128 Obviously, much remained to be done, and this was the job of the Combined Communications Board (CCB). The AAF in the European Theater of Operations was especially concerned about keeping up to the minute on all communications procedures, instructions, promulgation orders, and the like issuing from the CCB, and Eisenhower asked on 7 October that his ETO air force be so posted.129
General Eisenhower’s staff in London and the planners in Washington were now feverishly laboring at TORCH arrangements, which, in Signal matters, revolved around trained operators, intricate equipment, and complex communication procedures. Late in August they contemplated for signal troops: One battalion armored; one corps battalion; one radio intelligence company; one operations company separate; one construction company separate for the Allied Force Headquarters; one signal operation company separate; one signal construction battalion; three port signal service companies; one signal service company to include a 115-kilowatt team; four
300-kilowatt teams; four SCR-188 teams; six SCR-299 teams; one pigeon platoon; one cable operation section of 18 men; and one administrative section of 13 officers and 238 enlisted men. The 299’s and 188’s, Eisenhower intended to be used for immediate communication upon landing. Fixed radios would follow for Army use, not to mention the array of radio and radar which the Air Forces would have to have, principally the very new, very high frequency equipment for air-to-air and air-ground communication, together with LW and GCI radars.130 An added wrinkle was communications for psychological warfare. Eisenhower on 6 October desired equipment and operators for three American-British teams intended to broadcast to Arab and French citizens, to French troops, even perhaps to German and Italian troops. The teams planned to operate transmitters and sound trucks based at Casablanca, Fez, and Oran.131
The signal plan for TORCH did not attain printed status till 28 September. Worked over by signal officers, both American and British in London, and by Colonel Hammond and his associates in Washington, it laid down in general outline the communication arrangements for the several phases of the great effort: the approach and assault phases under naval control, and the stages of Army consolidation ashore. The combined signal center would be at Gibraltar initially, in the advanced command post. The three invasions would establish signal centers for their command posts as they landed, at Algiers, Oran, and Casablanca, and would at once set up radio channels between themselves and between them and Gibraltar. These would be the essential command nets, relying upon radio until wire facilities could be taken over from the Moroccans or could be installed by Army units. The plan included diagrams which set forth the channels appointed for the United States Army and the Air Forces, for the British Army and the Royal Air Force, and also channels for naval shore stations. Many details together with plans for tactical nets within the infantry and armored force were left to the task force commanders, since in this effort as elsewhere Signal Corps responsibility stopped at the division. Below that, the several signal users took over, within a framework of limitations, such as frequency allotments and cryptographic regulations, imposed by the Chief Signal Officer.
Above the division, the Signal Corps retained responsibility for communications, for the operation of headquarter message centers and the large linking networks. Here the signal plan for TORCH went into detail, assigning the equipment and the men to operate it. The radio sets were the large SCR-299’s and 188’s, and the men were the members of three companies of the 829th Signal Service Battalion. The Algiers assault to the east, principally a British operation, would receive two 299’s (to communicate with the 299’s at Oran), four 188’s, two one-kilowatt and two 300-watt transmitters, all this to be handled by
Company A of the 829th Signal Service Battalion (the British of course would land radios of their own, such as their No. 33’s for long circuits to the United Kingdom and Malta). At Oran in the center where both Americans and British would attack, the planners assigned six 299’s and six 188’s under Company B. Two of the six 299’s at Oran would link up with their counterparts in Algiers, two with Casablanca, and two would make contact with Gibraltar. Such were the hopes and plans. To the several separate American landings planned in the Casablanca area were assigned four 299’s and several 188’s under Company C of the 829th.132
While the establishment of this command net linking the headquarters of the several task forces and the Allied Force Headquarters at Gibraltar would be Signal Corps’ largest single responsibility after task force headquarters went ashore (until then, ship radios and message centers would have to serve), Signal Corps planners had many other tasks, such as apportioning the channels for all the lesser nets.
Consider, for instance, the Western Task Force alone, WTF, in Washington generally called Task Force A. First came the command net, entailing four SCR-299’s: one at task force headquarters, one in the Port-Lyautey sector to the northeast, one in the Fedala sector near Casablanca, and one in the Safi sector far to the southeast. All four would tie together the three assault areas, widespread over several hundred miles of the western Morocco coast. This channel, designated F5, would operate on 2,770 kilocycles. Next came the administrative radio channel F4, on 1,610 kilocycles, which would net WTF headquarters, using an SCR-193, with an SCR-177 of the Port-Lyautey main shore-party command post, and with an SCR-197 of the Safi main shore-party command post. Still another long-range radio net would use channel F29, on 4,070 kilocycles, tying the command posts of each sector with regimental headquarters and the main shore-party command post, all using, in the case of the Port-Lyautey sector, SCR-193’s.
Numerous nets, smaller in scope but larger in the number of stations, entailed many short-range radios such as the SCR-511, the SCR-284, and the Navy’s TBX’s and TBY’s. These were nets for the beach battalions in each sector, for the naval ship-shore circuits, for the Army inter-beach nets (in each sector were numbers of landing beaches, Red 1, Red 2, Yellow 1, and so on), and for the boat-control circuits. Then there were frequencies for the very short range SCR-536’s, good for a mile or so, within small infantry units. Finally, there were special channels—special frequencies set aside, for instance, for naval air support, different in each sector, and special frequencies for fire control nets, using SCR-284’s. All of these were amplitude-modulated radios: the vehicular 193, mounted in a jeep or halftrack; the not very portable 284, which weighed over 100 pounds and which had to be set up and hand-cranked to operate; and the genuinely portable 511. All of them operated on the old conventional
amplitude-modulated waves. They were, therefore, subject to interference and static.
But now for the first time new frequency-modulated radios would see action, installed in Armored Force tanks and cars and in Artillery Corps vehicles also. The 1st Armored Division had some of the very first military FM sets, the stopgap Link-built SCR-293 and 294. The 2nd Armored Division had the new FM “500” series sets: 508, 528, and 538. The Artillery had its “600” series counterparts, including some portable battery -powered SCR-610’s. These frequencies were determined by the crystals supplied with the radios. They would not interfere with AM nets or with each other. The Signal Operation Instructions needed to say little respecting them, other than that “existing FM channels will be utilized ... and will be retained after the conclusion of the Assault Operation for subsequent operations. ... The Division Signal Officer will coordinate channels used and allocate any special frequencies required.”133
Late September saw the days of planning and preparation grow fewer as they merged into the days of loading the ships, for by the 24th of October, the convoy of the Western Task Force would sail from America’s east coast. On 3 October Colonel Hammond, General Patton’s signal officer, got out the signal plan specifically for Task Force A, nineteen pages of details with many appendixes and circuit diagrams. General Patton planned to maintain his headquarters aboard the heavy cruiser USS Augusta, until the signal officers could move ashore at Fedala and thence to nearby Casablanca. There would be three subordinate forces, North, Center, and South. The North Force was commanded by Brig. Gen. Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., whose signal officer would be Maj. Eugene A. Kenney, the divisional signal officer of the 9th Division. Its headquarters would remain aboard the transport USS Henry T. Allen, until it could land at Port-Lyautey and thence move by D plus three to Rabat. The Center Force under Maj. Gen. Jonathan W. Anderson had as its signal officer Lt. Col. James F. Brooke, Jr., signal officer of the 3rd Division. The Center Force headquarters would remain on the transport USS Leonard Wood until it could go ashore at Fedala, thence to Casablanca. The South Force, under Maj. Gen. Ernest N. Harmon, was served by Lt. Col. Donald H. Nelson, the signal officer of the 2nd Armored Division, who would maintain headquarter communications aboard the USS Harris till Safi might fall.
Colonel Hammond issued details on radio, wire, and visual communications; on call signs and frequencies; on codes and ciphers; on radio intercept, radio jamming and Countermeasures; on naval fire control parties using SCR-284’s; on air support parties using SCR-193’s mounted in jeeps; on ground-air support parties using SCR-299’s and 522’s. He dealt with supplies and depots, even with the marking of supplies for particular units, emphasized as signal by an orange stripe and marked whether radio or telephone equipment. According to the Task Force A plan, Hammond completed arrangements with the Navy, with the British, and with the Air Forces. “The Navy and Army Air Force is trained in Joint U.S. Army-Navy Procedure FM24-10,” assured the plan. It gave assurances too that “the British Navy, Army and R.A.F. are trained
in the use of basic British-U.S. W/T Procedure.”134
All this, which was set forth in the plan with the plausible appearance of a fait accompli, was far from accomplished. As a plan it was doubtless good, but like any large blueprint, it could not be carried out overnight. In some cases, the units lacked even training. They were being formed hastily, their equipment packed sight-unseen too often. In all cases, the full quota of equipment would not be sent. It was already 3 October and shipping exigencies were even now compelling the AFHQ to ship only one quarter to one half of the quota of vehicles alone.135 Men and equipment were already moving to the ports of embarkation amid haste and confusion. Most notable was the failure to comply with all the details of the printed plan which touched batteries and waterproofing.136
Every morning, beginning 25 September, Colonel Hammond held a short conference in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer with his assistants, such as his executive officer, Maj. William B. Latta, and his communications officer, Maj. Jesse F. Thomas. Col. Emil Lenzner participated heavily as Signal Corps representative for the Services of Supply. The signal plan and Signal Operating Instructions, SOI’s, were being rushed, continually revised, and brought up to date. In particular, the SOI’s of the several divisions, the 3rd and 9th Infantry, the 2nd Armored, and so on, had to be correlated and completed. The Signal Corps had to work across differences between services. Colonel Hammond had planned for joint Army-Navy message centers on Navy ships, only to get word on 7 October that the Army would be eliminated. The Navy would be responsible for all communications until after the assault phase. Yet how could Navy expect to know how to handle Army’s own particular brand of communications? And in truth at the invasion the Army did have shipboard signal centers and operators. The Air Forces at the last moment on 16 October altered its radio frequencies.137
A sore point with the Navy was the installation of a broadcast transmitter on a naval ship—a propaganda station favored by G-2 both of the War Department and of Task Force A. But “the Admiral,”
Hammond reported in the morning conference of 25 September, “stated that this [station] should not be brought along unless absolutely necessary.” Necessary it was made out to be, and Western Electric hurriedly acquired one of its five-kilowatt transmitters back from the purchaser, a Jersey City broadcast station, and dispatched it to Norfolk. The Navy would make the installation supervised by one Signal Corps officer, and the Navy insisted upon mounting it in a battleship, the Texas, so Major Thomas reported to Colonel Hammond on 29 September. Hammond foresaw the trouble which might ensue if the ship’s big guns were fired, shocking the commercial set which had not been built to take the Navy’s hard knocks. The next day he insisted that extra parts be provided against breakage, which did, in fact, occur when the Texas fired her heaviest guns against North African targets. The demand for the propaganda radio was so strong that on 1 October Hammond described the broadcast unit (he was evidently thinking of the operators whom the Signal Corps had to provide) as “now No. 1 priority in the country.” On 6 October he asked again about spare parts against breakage. Major Thomas assured him that they were being provided. No mention was made of spares for the signal equipment which would be mounted in Patton’s signal center on the USS Augusta, where, as on the Texas, gunfire shock would also damage and cripple communications.138
The problem of waterproofing the assault radios constantly plagued Colonel Hammond and his staff. The signal plan had directed that “every portable radio set, combat loaded, will be enclosed in a watertight container.” Fine, if done, but what about vehicular radios? The question arose on 6 October and again on the 8th, when Hammond asked if the radio sets in vehicles had been waterproofed. Major Latta thought that they had been, but Hammond wanted to be sure and asked Major Thomas to check up. Thomas found that they were by no means waterproof, not to the extent that they could be immersed. Evidently they had only covers to keep out weather and rain, for Thomas replied on 11 October “that the only thing they do is to use the covers provided with the sets and keep them covered.” However, the men of the 1st Armored Signal Battalion were waterproofing their vehicular sets in a superior way. Colonel Hammond asked that the radios of the 3rd Division be similarly protected.139
Time was too short. As late as 30 September the signal planners of Task Force A admitted that the instructions they were drawing up for radio nets were a bit confusing. “Is the data in the SOI,” Hammond asked, “sufficient so that anyone can work the nets from it?” “Will everyone,” he added, “know that they have to work such and such a station?” Major Thomas admitted that “it is rather confusing right now, but it can be improved.”140 Yet, if these details were not crystal clear at the planning level by September’s end, how could the signal operators master them and when would they have the time? Indeed, some of the signal units had hardly been scraped together yet, neither the men nor their equipment. Some, to be sure, were ready, notably the 1st and the 141st Armored Signal Battalions, the men well trained, their
equipment in hand and in shape. But some were decidedly not ready, for example, the Signal Section Headquarters unit, Task Force A. The signal plan as printed on 3 October left the status of this unit in limbo, putting question marks where the numbers of officers and men should have appeared.141 In his morning conference on that very day Colonel Hammond spoke of thirty-eight radio operators for the Signal Section Headquarters; he wanted to know when they could be had. It was late, two weeks till time to embark. Yet eight days later, on 11 October, Hammond complained that the unit was still “seventeen radio operators short, as of last night.”142
There were uncertainties also about equipment in some categories: batteries for example, and vehicular radios, such as SCR-193’s, mounted in jeeps or in halftracks. Not till 12 October did the 2nd Division get its batteries. On 17 October, two days before the conferences ceased entirely and the officers packed up their plans and departed to their transports, Colonel Hammond asked if the half-tracks with SCR-193’s were ready yet, and would the radios work. They were ready, he was assured, “all fixed up to the satisfaction of G-3.”143 But were they waterproofed, would their batteries be charged, come 8 November? Would they be loaded on the right ships and put ashore when and where their operators needed them, ready and able to put a signal on the air? These questions now awaited the test.
The rush to ready the Western Task Force had, of course, its counterpart in the mounting of the other two North African task forces in England. American and British troops there were preparing to leave for Oran and Algiers in a fever of haste that matched the situation along the east coast of the United States. Much of the equipment for the American troops staging in Britain had to come directly from America, one consignment of radio batteries arriving for the 1st Division by air transport. Their absence till the last moments before sailing, Col. Terence J. Tully (Signal Officer, II Corps, staging in England) later said, “almost wrecked the whole signal plan.” His men, moreover, had been unable to train with their sets while they lacked the batteries.144
Amid the apparent confusion of routing men and equipment to the dock areas, getting the ships, getting them loaded and under way, order must often have seemed conspicuously absent. Units were often separated from their equipment. Indeed, some of it was never loaded, or was stowed
deep in holds quite inaccessible for the first landings.145 Yet sufficient order emerged to launch the invasion of hundreds of ships from the United States and the United Kingdom carrying a large force of men and supplies, and to converge the two armadas into a mighty coordinated flood and dash it overwhelmingly against North Africa.