Chapter 15: The Technical Service a Supply Service (Late 1942–Mid-1943)
The Signal Corps function of providing a global network of communications for a global war was a highly technical duty typifying the technical aspect of the Signal Corps’ mission. Yet at the same time, from the standpoint of organization it could be regarded as a supply function, in the same sense that providing guns, aircraft, or medical services is a supply function. The duality and intertwining of the technical and supply missions was the most important characteristic of the Signal Corps’ place in the military organization in 1943.
In March 1943 the Services of Supply became the Army Service Forces. The chief, General Somervell, announced that henceforth the seven supply services would be known as the “technical services,” since their functions obviously embraced much more than mere supply. The announcement took official notice of a fact that certainly had always been true of the Signal Corps, yet it came at the very time that the Signal Corps, possibly the most technical of the services, was devoting less and less time to this aspect of its traditional functions and more and more to the business of supply. Even the laboratories, as General Colton had pointed out two months earlier, must be regarded as production agencies, since they were depending on industrial concerns for nine tenths of the development of signal equipment.1
Technical Specialization vs. Mass Supply
As a matter of fact, throughout the entire organization, nine tenths of all Signal Corps effort was now centered on some phase of supply. At the same time, the remaining one tenth devoted to technical specialization consistently made supply problems more difficult. This conflict arose from the essential incompatibility of the two aspects of Signal Corps responsibility: on the one hand, the increasing need for mass supply engendered by the commitment of large numbers of troops to offensive action, and on the other hand, the equally pressing need for technical specialization brought about by the changed techniques of modern war.
The Signal Corps was well aware that problems of supply were greatly simplified
whenever one piece of equipment could be made to do the work of two. Its engineers in all the research and development activities worked unceasingly to effect standardization and interchangeability of items of communications equipment. The Signal Corps also constantly sought to extend these aims through three of its agencies, two of which included representatives of other services: the Army Communications Board (until January 1943 called the Army Communications and Equipment Board), the Signal Corps Technical Committee, and the Communication Coordination Division.
The Army Communications Board, which technically was a supporting agency of G-4, in particular encouraged greater standardization among the using arms of Signal Corps-procured items, although until August 1943 it had no power to enforce its recommendations. The board was in reality a working committee, with the Chief Signal Officer as chairman and with a membership composed of representatives of the Secretary of War, the AAF, the AGF, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and some of the Allied nations.
Representatives of using forces also attended the meetings of the Signal Corps Technical Committee, which received data and prepared military characteristics and standardization actions for communications equipment. The SCTC also maintained liaison with comparable committees of the other technical services, with the NDRC, and with other agencies inside and outside the War Department.
The Communication Coordination Division supervised the assignment of radio frequencies throughout the Army, compiled and assigned tactical and international call signs for all Allied armed forces (except naval) operating in U. S.-controlled theaters, and represented the War Department at the Interservice Radio Propagation Laboratory, on the Combined Communications Board, and on other important committees. Obviously, the division’s interservice and international duties made it, too, an ardent advocate of standardization, simplicity, and interchangeability.
Nevertheless, in the final analysis, it was the using forces, not the Signal Corps, that decided whether a new item of communications equipment was needed. When, for example, a commander in the Armored Force stated that he needed a radio set which would do certain things, it was the job of the Signal Corps to provide the item, whether it meant designing and producing a wholly new set, or merely altering and improving an existing model. Thus research and development became in truth the first phase of supply.2
Each new complexity or delicate refinement introduced into a piece of signal equipment meant a loss of time in producing it. It meant new drawings, perhaps new tools, a hunt for materials, for manufacturing facilities, for skilled workers. Always it involved a mass of paper work—new contracts or change orders, letters, telegrams, records, files, drawing numbers, standardization procedures, catalogue listings, and incorporation on tables of equipment, to name but a few. The thickening of the Signal Corps catalogue bore testimony to the increasing technical specialization of signal items. In World War I, the Signal Corps’ entire equipment list totaled some 2,500 items, but more than 70,000 items appeared in the catalogue at the end of June 1943.3
The emphasis on supply, both in quality and quantity, was producing an uninterrupted expansion, agency upon agency, place to place. All together, in the field alone there were 104 agencies by the end of June 1943 and 37 of these, more than a third, were concerned in one way or another with supply.4
All this is not to say that designing signal equipment to do a particular job and to do it better was undesirable, but only that it diverted time and attention from quantity production. The Army, the Air Forces, and all the other users of signal equipment had a choice—they could accept fairly standardized items which could be produced quickly, or they could get custom-designed items less quickly.
The point was well illustrated by the problems of producing radar equipment, as General Colton pointed out in his production meeting in December 1942. Colton, a top research man who was also the director of the Signal Supply Service, was well qualified to speak on the subject. If the Signal Corps had been content to build radars on a strict production basis, without incorporating new improvements and better designs, he said, there would have been plenty of them. But the improved designs had in the long run been well worth the delay. “Any time that we schedule ... radar equipment as if we were manufacturing nuts and bolts, it will mean that we have stopped trying to get the very best that can be obtained, and ... if that attitude had been taken three years ago, in my opinion several battles would have been lost. ... If we had been satisfied with production, if we hadn’t made a compromise, our military position ... would not be as good as it is now.” He pointed out the handicaps under which radar had had to operate: priority ratings as low as A-1-g, far below tanks and armament; insufficient allocations of aluminum, copper, meters, brass rod, and selsyns; secrecy; and the difficulties of scheduling because of constantly changing demands in the tactical situation. The enthusiasm of the using forces and their demands, not only for more, but for greatly improved radars, had led to the setting up of production schedules which could not possibly be met unless research, development, procurement, and production all proceeded without any difficulties at all. Colton observed, “No production line can keep up with the scribbling of a pen.”5
The conflict between technical specialization and mass production constituted the most important drag upon Signal Corps supply in early 1943. Unfortunately, it was not the most evident factor or the one most readily understood and, in any event, little could be done about it. It was a matter not easily reduced to terms of charts and statistics. Other, more predictable problems, such as the manpower supply, received the major share of attention.
The Shrinking Labor Market
In November 1942 a Signal Corps staff officer had warned that lack of manpower in manufacturing plants would constitute one of the biggest stumbling blocks to Signal Corps production in 1943.6 Retooling
and conversion of industry were virtually complete, but the largest part of the production job and therefore the greatest demand for labor still lay in the future. Of 160 important market areas analyzed by the federal Bureau of Employment Security in June 1942, 35 had a shortage of male labor, and in 81 a shortage was anticipated in the near future. Only 44 areas had a labor supply thought adequate to meet present and anticipated future needs.7
The position of the Signal Corps in the labor market was unique. For producing its equipment, it had to depend almost wholly upon the electronics industry, which had grown up in the twenty years between the two world wars. The industry was staffed with youthful workers, a great majority of them within draft age limits. This immediately created a dilemma; as a supply service, the Signal Corps had to bend every effort to keep electronics workers on the job turning out communications equipment, yet the same men were especially valuable to it as communications soldiers.8
Industry experienced an especially trying loss when military service called up “second line” men: production planners, expediters, and foremen, who acted as the spark plugs of assembly line operations, and whose knowledge and experience were practically irreplaceable. The Bendix Radio Plant at Towson, Maryland, furnished an example. The plant was new, and had few workers in the older age brackets. In a little over two years the number of male employees had increased from 968 to 2,539, and of female employees from 404 to 3,656. During that period 768 men were lost to Selective Service, 350 of them from the original 968. At the same time production schedules increased; for example, the July 1943 schedule raised radio compass MN-26 requirements from 1,800 to 3,000, and airborne radio sets SCR-522 from 2,500 to 4,000.9
The devastating effects of Selective Service inroads were especially evident in industries which could not employ production line techniques, but instead depended upon “experience and such data as the men [carried] in their vest pockets.” Industries furnishing meteorological equipment and photographic supplies fell in this category. “The methods required for production of optical glass, for example, very closely approached laboratory techniques. Quite often neighborhood draft boards were ill-qualified to determine the essentiality of such highly trained craftsmen. Other industries coveted such workers, too, and if Selective Service did not take them, they might be lost through labor-pirating.10 In the rotary equipment industry, where the draft had taken skilled workers from the foundries, the only replacements to be found for the most part were inexperienced farmers who
could not stand the summer temperatures of a foundry and who worked only during the winter months.11
Another factor affecting the Signal Corps’ labor position was the prevailing low wage rate of the electronics industry. At the beginning of the war, the seven major industries from which the Signal Corps procured its equipment were among the ten lowest-paid industries in the country.12 With living costs soaring and industries competing fiercely for workers, the migration to higher-paid jobs was very heavy.
Fortunately, the electronics industry had always used women workers in large numbers. In most cases, major components and subassemblies could be put together on a production line under conditions suitable for women employees. Use of female labor brought other problems, however. Labor laws in many states limited the number of hours that women might work. In New Jersey, for example, where many women were employed in the critical steatite industry, labor laws prohibited their working between the hours of midnight and 6 A. M. Even where no restrictive legislation existed, it was very difficult to hire women for the second and third shifts in factories. The capacity lost by one-shift operation had to be made up by building additional plants, an expensive and time-consuming solution.13
Aside from electronics, there were other industries in which the Signal Corps had a substantial though secondary labor interest. The metal-working industry furnished the machine tools without which manufacturing plants were helpless. A mining shutdown could cut off copper, a vital ingredient of wire equipment. The logging industry of the northwest furnished telephone and telegraph poles, and large amounts of wood products—pulp, paper, and processed wood—for the growing amounts of packing for overseas shipments. Continuing production in rubber plants was vital to the Signal Corps for sheathing and covering for cable and wire. By midyear 1942 more workers were engaged in producing Signal Corps equipment than had been employed by the whole prewar electronics industry. It was imperative that these individuals stay on the job, and that even more workers join their ranks.
The Signal Corps was not directly responsible for control of labor problems. Indeed, during the early stages of preparedness, and in the first months of war, the War Department as a whole had rather consistently maintained a “hands off” policy concerning labor problems.14 Early in his administration, General Olmstead had designated Col. Conrad E. Snow, chief of the Legal Branch, as his labor representative. But under War Department policy, Snow had no authority to do anything more than to gather facts on impending or actual
strikes, labor shortages, deferments, morale problems, and the like, and to pass the findings along to the Under Secretary of War, who transmitted them to the appropriate civilian agency. By the second quarter of 1942, with manpower problems growing daily more critical, the Signal Corps and its sister services felt that it was time for the War Department to play a more active and direct role in handling labor problems.15 Obviously, in the larger sense anything that affected production of signal equipment was a Signal Corps problem.
In October, largely as a result of Signal Corps insistence, the Army Service Forces instructed all its services to designate labor officers, who would enjoy a wide scope of operative functions. To implement the directive, General Olmstead reorganized the Legal Branch, divorcing it from the Materiel Division and transferring it to the Administrative Division, where it remained briefly before it was raised to staff level in December, reporting at first to the Deputy Chief Signal Officer and later directly to the Chief Signal Officer.16 Colonel Snow became the Legal Director, with six assistants heading six sections, each with a corps of attorneys, patent advisers, engineer advisers, and accountants.17 To head the labor activities he named Maj. Kenneth D. Johnson, and set him the task of organizing field offices, each to be staffed with one labor officer and an alternate.
In selecting the locations for the field offices, Johnson considered the geographical distribution of Signal Corps contracts, and the concentration of factories in the electronics, wire, and battery industries. The plan was to locate the offices so that all, or nearly all contractors could be reached by overnight train travel, or within two to three hours by plane. The labor officers were not to operate in an ivory tower of remoteness in their offices, but in the plants. The problems they were to handle arose at the workers’ benches, not at the officers’ desks. The first field office was organized at Chicago on 1 December, the second at Philadelphia on 20 December, the third at San Francisco on 29 December. In February 1943 two more came into being at New York and Boston. In June the Dayton office was established, although it later moved first to Toledo and finally to Cleveland. Los Angeles and Buffalo sites were established later in 1943.18
With the organization of the headquarters office and the first field offices, the Signal Corps was in the labor relations business. Yet the only statutory authority rested with civilian agencies such as the War Labor Board, the United States Employment Service, the War Manpower Commission, the War Production Board, and the Fair Employment Practices Commission, plus the older peacetime agencies of the Labor Department. Whatever the Signal Corps could accomplish by tact, persuasion, cooperation, fair-mindedness, and deftness in the art of human relations could be chalked up as the measure of its success. General Olmstead struck the keynote when he told his labor officers at their first conference in Washington in January 1943, “I
look to you to handle delicate conditions with judgment and force and integrity.”19
The “delicate conditions” of which General Olmstead spoke included matters of labor supply, labor relations, draft deferment, and morale-building programs. On the day-to-day operating level, the labor officers were expected to keep a watchful eye on the numbers and kinds of workers in manufacturer’s plants; to inform contracting officers of the labor situation when a new contract was in the making for a given plant or city, or when a new factory or facility was planned; to help manufacturers obtain satisfactory wage scales; to urge employment of women, and handicapped, and overage employees. So far as possible, the officers must prevent strikes and help to settle those which did occur. On draft deferment problems, they would help the employer through the maze of paper forms and justification sheets. Morale programs might involve making talks to employee groups, showing movies of signal equipment in battle, sponsoring personal appearances by soldiers returned from the battle front, and recommending and presenting the Army-Navy “E” flags in recognition of outstanding production achievement.
The Chicago office, headed by Maj. John M. Niehaus, with 2nd Lt. Robert D. Morgan as his alternate, was one of the more important. Its geographical area of responsibility covered nearly one half of the nation—sixteen states from Indiana west to Colorado, and from North Dakota south to Texas. Nearly 1,300 Signal Corps war plants lay in the area, and the officers had to establish and maintain friendly relations with 4 service commands, 5 War Production Board regions, 5 War Manpower Commission regions, 5 regional offices of the War Labor Board and Salary Stabilization Unit, 16 state directors of labor, and 16 state directors of Selective Service, besides innumerable local groups and individuals.20
It was a large order for two men to fill, but the first six months of work gave evidence that they had already made a good start on the job that would earn them an outstanding record before the end of hostilities. One of the earliest successes came in December 1942. A jurisdictional struggle between the AFL and CIO unions seeking to organize the plant of Eicor, Inc., in Chicago, resulted in a strike which completely shut down the plant and halted the production of critically needed dynamotors. Major Johnson and Lieutenant Morgan of the Chicago office hurried to the plant and persuaded the workers to return to the job the following day and to submit their problems to the government agencies set up for that purpose.21 In January the Chicago office succeeded in ending a slow-down strike at the Dryden Rubber Company, after Navy Procurement and Sixth Service Command Internal Security District officers had failed to do so.
The Chicago office also started the surveys and reports which eventually led to the solution of a procurement problem that had existed for years: the unpredictable nature of the battery business. Dry batteries were bought under a general contract, let on an annual basis, with maximum and minimum requirements set forth. The Signal Corps then issued calls every thirty days
for delivery of numbers of batteries within the defined limits, to be produced within a month’s time. Since batteries are perishable, no great quantities could be made up ahead of time. The effect was to treat the battery industry like a faucet, to be turned off or on at will and expected to gush forth the product as needed. In peacetime, this was not serious, because the battery companies could keep their production lines busy turning out batteries for civilian use at times when there were no military orders. Now, however, with civilian battery uses drastically cut, with military requirements rising to fantastic levels, and with the labor market drying up, the battery manufacturers faced great hardships. Halfway through the 1943 fiscal year the procurement officers discovered that there was a surplus of certain types of batteries and immediately dropped the manufacturing calls to the minimum level for that year. The manufacturers would have been reduced to maintaining skeleton labor crews had not the War Production Board saved them by allowing them to manufacture enough farm radio batteries to take up the slack. Called in to study the labor supply problem in the industry, the Signal Corps labor officers saw that it could not be separated from the procurement problem. Their successive reports on the situation focused attention upon it until procurement officers took the necessary action to correct it.22
The Philadelphia office served a smaller area, but a particularly heavy concentration of Signal Corps suppliers lay in that region, covering Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia. Lt. Col. Robert J. Walsh, Jr., and Capt. J. H. Rhudy set up offices in the Philadelphia Signal Depot, where numerous other Signal Corps activities were housed, including the Philadelphia Signal Corps Procurement District, which had been handling labor problems through its Industrial Relations branch.
Capt. Joseph M. Asbury and 2nd Lt. Robert Savage of the San Francisco labor office performed double duties, being also the Signal Corps’ west coast procurement officers. It is more than 1,300 miles from Seattle to San Diego, and a swing around the area starting from San Francisco to the largest cities, Portland, Seattle, Spokane, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San Diego, and back to San Francisco, would approach 4,000 miles, without visiting Idaho, where the Signal Corps secured telephone poles by the trainload, or Arizona, where many of its most strategic metals were mined.
In much of the region, and especially in the northwest and along the waterfronts, the labor unions were exceptionally well organized and powerful, while in Nevada and southern California there was little unionization. The electronics industry, very young as industries go, was manned by even younger men in the west coast region, and Selective Service was making fearful inroads. Labor officers, accustomed to calls for help in getting deferments for electronic employees, found themselves asked just as often for help in deferring the boss himself. On the west coast the Signal Corps also had to face competition for labor and facilities from the huge shipbuilding and airplane industries, whose employees outnumbered those of the Signal Corps a thousand to one. Activation of new military installations, and the movements through the area of troops bound for the Pacific added to the congestion and to the problems of housing and
transportation. By May 1943, with an influx of more than 100,000 workers monthly, the housing situation was desperate. Laborers were sleeping in tents, trailers, sheds, or any conceivable structure that had a roof. The War Manpower Commission reported that not a single city in the entire region could be listed in Group IV (where labor was plentiful and expected to continue so) and that 90 percent of all the cities in the region were classified in Groups I and II (where an acute shortage of labor existed or would soon exist). Obviously, a labor crisis was approaching on the west coast.23
Boston, too, had regional problems, but of a somewhat different nature. Lt. Col. Harry E. Olsen and Maj. Arthur Tager, operating from an office in the Boston Signal Depot, had all the New England states except Connecticut under their jurisdiction. All together, about 300,000 people worked for the Signal Corps in the region, in 500 plants, ranging from small ones employing no more than two people to General Electric’s 16,000-worker plant. A major part of the Signal Corps’ field and assault wire came from twenty-one plants in this area, and in addition there were rubber insulating plants, mica mines and processing plants, and factories producing radio, radar, headset switchboards, capacitors, fuses, wire communications equipment, storage batteries, and crystals. These plants had to compete with the textile industry dominant in New England. Business practices were conservative; over 50 percent of the Signal Corps plants lay in labor areas designated as Group I or II, yet there was very little use of female labor, few incentive plans for workers, and not much attention to such things as workers’ cafeterias, adequate ventilation, sanitary conditions, and the like.
The Boston labor officers bent their efforts toward tactful suggestions along these lines. By June they had visited 70 plants, persuaded 14 different plant owners to provide 26 improved facilities, given advice to 31 companies, averted 1 strike, and settled 2 others, rendered assistance in 11 War Labor Board cases, delivered 15 talks to plant employees and other groups, obtained 8 relaxations of federal and state labor laws, and completed 21 labor-supply and utilization surveys to assist the War Manpower Commission. The Boston office had already gained a measure of fame through a program that later became known as the “Bristol Plan” and was widely copied throughout the war. At Bristol, Rhode Island, the United States Rubber Company, with a capacity of 12,000 miles of wire per month, was producing only 5,000 because it could not get enough workers. Bristol was a small town, and the War Manpower Commission had stated flatly that no additional workers could be obtained there, and the plant’s personnel department agreed that the saturation point had been reached. Nevertheless, the Signal Corps labor officers proposed a community-wide program to the Rotary Club, which agreed to sponsor the project with speeches from pulpits, at civic clubs, and elsewhere in the community, urging citizens to “go to work for the rubber company and help win the war.” Within a month the 700 needed workers were obtained, and many prominent people in the community, who neither needed jobs nor wanted them, went to work to keep the essential industry staffed.24
The New York office under Capt. James C. Short had only the state of New York and the northern part of New Jersey under its jurisdiction, but that was enough. The dollar value of Signal Corps contracts in that area was so great, and the number of products so varied, that almost every conceivable problem was sure to arise.
By the end of June 1943 the headquarters agency and the field offices then organized had averted 41 threatened strikes, and had helped to settle 37 others, had successfully processed 186 applications for wage increases through the regional War Labor Boards, had made 667 visits to Signal Corps war plants, and had delivered 173 morale talks to employees. Nearly 650 companies had consulted them, and they had received 131 letters of commendation and thanks from manufacturers, unions, and employees.25 But production requirements were still mounting, and the available labor supply was still shrinking. In the months ahead the Signal Corps labor officers would be busier than ever.
International Aid
Meantime, another aspect of signal supply was beginning to compete with the primary effort to achieve mass supply of signal equipment. Unlike most of the supply functions, the duty of furnishing lend-lease materials to the Allied nations had not been decentralized, but remained in the Washington headquarters. In many ways, it was a taxing and vexing duty. For several reasons, Signal Corps participation in the foreign aid program did not materialize as early as did that of other arms and services. For one thing, although most nations classed signal equipment as “munitions,” the United States did not. Furthermore, foreign nations felt that their own electronic industries were sufficient for their needs and spent their money in the United States on heavy equipment. There were technical reasons, finally: foreign frequency bands differed from those used by the United States, foreign operators were trained to use their own equipment, and electronic components manufactured in the United States were not interchangeable with those of other countries.26
An increased flow of technical information between the United States and Great Britain began after the exchange of military missions between the two countries. After the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, the Signal Corps became an active participant in the foreign-aid program, with a section in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer staffed by two officers and four civilians. By the summer of 1942, approximately 18 months later, this section had become the International Aid Branch, staffed with 10 officers and 87 civilians. In the first 13 months of operation, the Signal Corps’ lend-lease organization had provided $33,500,000 worth of signal equipment, but by October 1942 that amount was being equaled every three and a half months.
Instead of shipments to three countries, as at first, the list now stretched over five continents and embraced Liberia, Free France, New Zealand, Australia, China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium,
the Netherlands, Norway, Great Britain, Iceland, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Uruguay, and Chile. Not only the number of items, but the quantities were impressive: 201,174 telephones; 100,000 poles; 1,109 telegraph sets; 51,205 radio sets of all types; and millions of bits and pieces, such as resistors, condensers, relays, plugs, and jacks. The total of wire alone was 1,303,886 miles, enough to extend from the Pentagon to Tokyo 167 times. Russia had received more than 1,500,000 radio tubes, and Great Britain another 3,500,000.27 But the quantities of items and the dollar values reported did not reflect the complete value of Signal Corps equipment furnished to foreign nations, for no account was taken of the countless communication devices installed in airplanes, tanks, and other mobile equipment which were not included in Signal Corps International Aid transfer statistics. The value of the command radio set SCR-274, for example, was $2,431; that of the liaison set SCR-287 was $4,455; and the altimeter SCR-518 cost $1,607. A single B-24 bomber carried nine items of communication equipment valued all together at $11,262.28
The Signal Corps did not make the policy decisions that allocated equipment to various foreign nations, but it was responsible for carrying them out insofar as they related to communication items.29 Often this duty required a tremendous amount of work and considerable ingenuity, as in the case of an early request from the Chinese for “800 gross tons of telephone equipment.” Translated by the Signal Corps engineers, that meant a complete telephone system, along with a train-dispatching system for the railroad being constructed from the Burma border to Kunming in the heart of Yunnan province.30 Nor could American equipment simply be shipped from stock and expected to work satisfactorily. Nearly always it had to be modified to meet the voltages and types of current in different countries. It was usually designed for operation on 110 volts of alternating current at 60 cycles, but many countries had direct current, or if they had alternating current, it operated on various voltages from 105 to 250 and at various rates of cycles per second from 40 to 60.31 Climate introduced another variable, as in the case of telephone EE-8. Thousands of them had had to be modified to accommodate the larger, heavier, “non-freezing” battery that the Russians used in the below-zero temperatures of the winter front.
Modifying equipment to meet special needs of foreign countries involved many extra hours of engineering work. Often it meant setting up new production lines or even new manufacturing facilities. On the other side of the ledger, the Signal Corps benefited by receiving valuable information concerning equipment performance under battle conditions. Its laboratories incorporated a number of improvements brought about either by the special demands of lend-lease nations or by technical information they had supplied. Lend-lease,
as a matter of fact, was being regarded by many military planners as the equivalent of a large-scale supply maneuver in preparation for our more active participation in the war. A number of experimental and developmental models of signal equipment received from Great Britain through reverse lend-lease were turned over to the laboratories. By the end of 1942 the Signal Corps had received from the Allies equipment valued at $1,174,445.85.32 This included models of British and Canadian GCI sets, which indicated height as well as azimuth and which became the SCR-527 and SCR-588; the plan position indicator oscilloscope, which was being incorporated on later models of the SCR-270 and 271 radars as well as on newly designed radar equipment; and Askania theodolites, which were more accurate than the American ones.33 Whether one chose to regard the exchange as strictly reverse lend-lease, or, as General Colton did, “a contribution between allies,” the beneficial result was the same.34
Throughout the summer and fall of 1942, the build-up of huge stockpiles of military supplies in the European theater went on, and much of it was accomplished by means of reverse lend-lease procedure. The report of the purchasing agent for SOS, European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army, in October showed 15 categories of signal supplies in which such transactions were under way. They included 10,000 seventeen-foot telephone poles; over 2,000,000 yards of wire, with the necessary “bobbins, pins, and stays”; 800 special batteries; 800 miles of twisted cable; communication equipment for the deputy theater commander’s special train; 400 miles of permanent telephone line for signal headquarters; equipment for a photographic studio; 500 battery radios; 975 long-wave radio receivers; quantities of walkie-talkies; 2,400 transformers; 84,000 cartridge signals; and miscellaneous Signal Corps equipment.35
When the invasion of North Africa was launched, lend-lease demands shot upward. Large quantities of material went to the French forces: more than $4,000,000 worth in the first six months of 1943.36 The transfer statistics reflected the tactical situation. By the end of the fiscal year, the total of material transferred to foreign governments amounted to $139,298,701, an increase of more than 400 percent over the preceding fiscal year. For June alone material worth $19,249,230 was furnished.37 Until now, lend-lease procurement had had little adverse effect upon Signal Corps procurement, but with foreign aid programs incorporated into the Army Supply Program, and with demands rising, it began to pinch a little.38
The Shifting Emphasis in Procurement
The first six months of calendar year 1943 was a period of progress toward the Signal
Lend-lease to the French involved not only supplying the material but also instructing our Allies in the use of our equipment
Corps’ goal of mass production, despite the factors tending to impede its accomplishment. As spring wore on a shift of emphasis became evident. Equipment for which contracts had been placed in 1941 and in the first months of 1942 was beginning to come off the production lines in ever-increasing volume. Another year would pass before contracting reached its peak. But attention was shifting from procurement to distribution.39 By the spring of 1943 the procurement agencies had hit their stride. With more than a year’s experience under the frustrations and limitations of wartime operation, they had acquired competence. Standard procedures had been established which cut down paper work and red tape, and permitted heavy work loads to be handled with a minimum of confusion. New duties such as renegotiation, cancellation processes, and close-pricing programs were being integrated into the procurement structure. The inspection function, now centered in the Signal Corps Inspection Agency at Dayton, was past the initial reorganization headaches and was beginning to show strength. Best of all, the over-all production statistics of the Signal Corps were
encouraging, although there were weak spots in some fields.
Industrial Capacity for Production
The electronics industry by early 1943 was beginning to reach heights of productive capacity hardly deemed possible only a year before. In only twelve months it had been changed from a basic assembly industry to one in the first stage of mass production.40 There was still both public and official impatience when any headline seemed to indicate a lack of radio communication at the times and places troops needed it. What the public, and indeed many field commanders, did not fully understand was that military communication equipment was much more complex and difficult to build than comparable equipment for civilian use.
The peacetime radio industry, for example, was on a highly competitive, mass-production, low-price basis. The quality of the product was good enough for the conditions of use encountered, but fell far short of military quality standards. It required a long time to change over to the high quality level required in military communication equipment. Even the more experienced and reliable peacetime Signal Corps suppliers had difficulty in meeting the quality standards for making the more complex types of Signal Corps equipment.41
A civilian radio set could not simply be transported to the field of battle and put to use. Home radios operated only a few hours a day, in carefully controlled temperatures. Moreover, the portion of the radio spectrum reserved for commercial broadcasting was large enough to permit far more lax adjustment of the sets.
Military radio had to be exceedingly precise. Each army used as many as 4,000 transmitters, and three, four, five, or more armies might fight jointly on a single front. That meant slicing the radio spectrum into thousands of bits—thin bits. It also meant that radio receivers as well as transmitters must squeeze in between the closely packed channels, and once there, stay there. Furthermore, the radios of the armed services worked around the clock, in all sorts of weather, under the most severe climatic changes. They had to survive rough handling, frequent packing, and moving about in all manner of vehicles. In short, like the soldiers they served, they had to withstand all the hardships of battle. It was not easy to build that kind of equipment.42
Some Signal Corps planners believed that the industrial capacity of the communications industry was large enough to support all requirements, except for a few special items. Maj. D. C. Graves of the Facilities Branch said in April 1943 that there had always been excess capacity available except for radio transmitters, highly complicated equipment such as radar, and certain critical parts, materials, and components. What appeared to be lack of capacity was in reality caused by a lack of raw materials; new developments, particularly in radar; changes in specifications; and requirements not anticipated far enough in advance of desired deliveries.43
Nevertheless, it was these few special
items that were still causing production difficulties. The wire and cable industry furnished an example. Four months after war began the Signal Corps’ $7,000,000 expansion of wire facilities, aimed at providing 120,000 miles of wire W-110-B monthly, had cleared all procedural obstacles and was actually under way.44 But in peacetime there had existed no need for quantity production of the machinery required to manufacture wire: plastic and rubber extruders, braiding machines, knitting machines, twinning and cable machines, and test equipment. Only a few small companies manufactured such machinery, and they alone possessed the necessary machine tools, patterns, and the special knowledge. Furthermore, most machines had to be specially built for each separate wire company. Suddenly everybody wanted this machinery, and wanted it at once. Without it, wire plant expansions could not proceed. The Army, the Navy, the Office of Rubber Director, and three separate divisions of the War Production Board (for copper, chemicals, and tools) all had legitimate interests in machinery produced at the small plant of the single manufacturer of wire insulating machinery, John Royle & Sons Company. Furthermore, the Office of Production Management had followed its established procedure of assigning to plant equipment priority ratings no higher than those of the material to be manufactured, and Signal Corps wire had only recently been raised to A-1-b from a lowly A-1-i, in a time when AA’s and AAA’s were appearing, and A-1-a’s abounded. It took 20 months from the time funds were approved for the largest wire plant constructed during the war until finished wire was coming out of the plant,45 and 33 months till acceptance rates equaled rated capacity. Smaller plants needed at least 6 months to come into useful production.46
Lack of plant capacity was usually only one of a number of reasons which accounted for lagging production of special items. For example, power units for radio equipment were in short supply by late 1942. The Signal Corps had sponsored two plant expansions, at Eicor, Inc., in Chicago, and at the Bridgeport, Connecticut, plant of General Electric Company, and the industry itself had financed many additional ones. In spite of this, plant capacity was not sufficient to produce the estimated 2,000,000 units needed for 1943. Manufacturers were loaded with orders, but were handicapped by shortages of material and manpower, and power units were simply not being delivered fast enough. Expediting efforts had not been very effective so far. For one thing, standardization of the brushes was necessary if production rates were to be improved. Another big difficulty was that power units were actually the product of two separate industries, and involved the coupling of a generator with an internal combustion engine. Usually, a manufacturer who produced one did not produce the other. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, generators became the critical components of power units because of the heavy load on the electrical industry in equipping new war plants. In late 1942, more generators were
available, but engines were in very short supply.47
In the dry battery field, for a further example, the situation was so uncertain as to border on the chaotic. The Signal Corps figured requirements in terms of battery types, while the industry figured capacity in terms of cells, which in various combinations make up battery types. Trying to track down actual requirements, the Signal Corps succeeded only in producing sets of figures that fluctuated from month to month. The changing conditions of battle, the impossibility of climate control, the demand for new radio sets by the using forces, and the fact that in many cases parts breakdowns for sets were lacking, all contributed to the uncertainty. The only thing the Signal Corps could be sure of was that a lot of batteries were going to be needed. The full realization of the critical nature of dry battery supply did not become evident until near the end of 1942.48 In December 1942 the Signal Corps hurriedly pushed through the first two of the dry battery expansion plans which by the end of the war would cost $7,500,000 in Defense Plant Corporation funds alone. Both concerned the National Carbon Company, and were expected to yield 7,448,000 cells monthly for proximity fuze batteries, and 9,000,000 cells monthly for SCR-509, 510, and 284 radios. It would take more than two years to bring these plants into maximum production after surmounting difficulties which included critical shortages of acetylene black and African manganese, a lack of labor, and storage and distribution problems.
The Procurement Districts
By midyear 1943 business was booming in the Signal Corps’ three procurement districts at Philadelphia, Dayton, and Monmouth. The Philadelphia Signal Corps Procurement District was the largest and most important of the three. Except for aircraft items, contracted for by the Dayton Signal Corps Procurement District, and ground radar items, purchased by the six-month-old Monmouth Signal Corps Procurement District, Philadelphia bought all the thousands of Signal Corps items, large and small. In dollar value, the Dayton district was overtaking Philadelphia, because airborne communication devices were very intricate and expensive. But the dollar value of contracts let was not the significant measure of work accomplished. It took almost as many man-hours to process the necessary papers to buy a single small and inexpensive piece part as it did to handle a $50,000,000 order. Philadelphia handled the contracting for nearly 100,000 items, fifty times as many as Dayton did. The three districts together employed about 2,250 people, and of these more than half were at Philadelphia.49
By this time the measure of control which the Office of the Chief Signal Officer exercised over contracting had been greatly relaxed. Contracting procedures had smoothed out; contracting officers could
place up to $5,000,000 without first getting permission from higher authority,50 and the use of informal contracts and letters of intent had speeded the mechanics of placing orders. In December 1942 the Washington headquarters had ceased to designate the manufacturer who would receive the order for a specific item, and instead permitted the procurement districts to handle that responsibility.51 Thereafter the Washington headquarters provided only the Army Supply Program item number, and the procurement district office collected the specifications, which sometimes totaled as many as 100, got out the quotation requests, and selected the manufacturing facility. This system continued throughout the war.52
There was one exception, in the winter of 1942-43, to this trend toward decentralization of contractual responsibility. Airborne equipment used thousands of small electrical parts, and the rapid advance of the radio art, plus the “investigative vigilance” of the enemy in analyzing equipment on captured Allied aircraft, had to be dealt with by the constant change of components. This resulted in repeated requests from the Air Forces for changes in equipment even before it got off the production line. Only the large suppliers, such as Bendix Aviation and Western Electric Company, could handle such changes quickly and effectively. In these special circumstances, the Office of the Chief Signal Officer felt it necessary to control contracts for airborne equipment to the extent of directing the Dayton Signal Corps Procurement District to place the contracts with specific manufacturers. On 85 percent of the contracts, such large companies got repeat orders time after time.53
As the winter months wore on, it became more and more difficult to place contracts. The larger, more experienced firms were glutted with orders; although at first they had resisted the 40 percent subcontracting provisions of Signal Corps contracts, now they were eager to pass along some of their work to smaller firms, and on some items refused to take additional contracts. The number of small firms able to take on substantial orders was decreasing, too, and those that could take orders often were not able to follow the somewhat sketchy performance specifications. New, detailed specifications had to be worked out, and additional help given on every detail. All this increased the unit cost of items. And with shortages in raw materials and difficulties in obtaining components such as tubes and dry batteries growing more acute, it became ever more difficult to keep production lines going without interruption.54
Nevertheless, the growing difficulty of placing orders was largely offset by the increasing expertness of the contracting officers. By February 1943 the Monmouth district alone, although the most recently activated of the three districts, had 151 contracts totaling $234,509,626 completed,
in current operation, or under negotiation.55 By the end of June the procurement districts were placing orders at the rate of $500,000,000 a month. During the fiscal year, 74,000 contracts were placed, for equipment valued at $3,413,000,000.56
During the first year of war, the primary concern of the procurement districts had been to place contracts—to get the orders on the books in order to permit manufacturers to start production rolling. By 1943, however, some other aspects of contracting were beginning to claim a larger share of attention. These factors were termination problems, renegotiation procedures, and close-pricing policies.57
“Termination” began with cancellation of a contract, but the procedures following cancellation had to be very carefully worked out in order to achieve a settlement which would be equitable both for the government and for the contractor. Not infrequently, contracts had to be canceled, either because of changes in equipment devised by the laboratories to remedy operating deficiencies reported from the theaters, or because the tactical need for certain equipment had ceased to exist before it came off the production line. All contracts contained a termination article allowing the government to cancel the contract. At first the article required the contractor to make an extremely detailed documentation of all expenses incurred. This was followed by long-drawn-out auditing procedures. One of the first wartime terminations, begun in August 1941, on a $6,460,325 contract with General Electric for radio transmitter BC-420, was still not settled sixteen months later.58
To avoid this cumbersome procedure, the termination article was rewritten to provide for a negotiated basis of settlement. As the war drew to a close and the Army cut back its orders, termination activities obviously would increase in volume and importance, and procurement officers were already worrying about the matter. Terminations had, as yet, not reduced the total signal requirements; if a manufacturer’s contract was canceled, it meant a loss of time and material, but the contractor was sure to receive a substantial new order, often bigger than the first one.59
By June 1943 the Signal Corps had terminated 145 supply contracts, of which 92 were still not settled. The rate of termination was rising: from January to June, 33 cases were settled, 19 of them without cost to the government.60
Renegotiation rested upon a different principle; it was not a cancellation or cutback procedure, but rather an attempt to recapture excess profits. The Renegotiation Act passed by Congress on 28 April 1942 established methods and procedures for working out equitable settlements. Actually, excess profits resulted most often from miscalculations of unit costs in the first place, or a too hasty setting up of the whole contract structure. Neither procurement officers nor manufacturers could tell ahead of time exactly what the costs would be; there were
materials In a widely competitive market, the cost of labor, engineering costs on new items, and many another speculative item. As it eventually worked out, as much was saved by the pressure to estimate costs more closely as by the recovered excess profits under the act.
Thus pricing policies and renegotiation were closely related, and indeed some supply officers considered them inseparable. If costs and prices could be calculated with absolute accuracy, there would be no excess profits and therefore no need for renegotiation. At first the whole business of establishing pricing standards was largely in the hands of the district procurement officers, under the over-all supervision of the Purchases Branch in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer. Obviously a great deal of time and money could be saved by negotiating bids at reasonable prices if the contractor knew before he submitted a final bid just what the government would consider “reasonable.” Early in the year, Purchases Branch set up a Price Policy Committee, whose members were available to talk over with manufacturers such things as proper contingency allowances, allowable and unallowable items of cost, pricing of subcontracts, application of overhead charges, and profit mark-up.61 All this was preliminary to the contract signing. Even with the most earnest good will on both sides, there still remained the possibility that there would be unforeseen circumstances which permitted too much profit advantage to the manufacturer. It was at this point that renegotiation procedures took over.62 From July 1942 to June 1943 Signal Corps renegotiators saved the government $187,078,214.63 Two-thirds of that sum was renegotiated in the procurement districts, the remainder by the appropriate staff section in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer.
The Signal Corps Inspection Agency
With the increased flow of deliveries of signal equipment Items, heavier duties devolved upon the Signal Corps Inspection Agency. As has been noted, its commanding officer, Colonel Harris, found it difficult to keep enough inspectors. The demands of Selective Service ate steadily into the supply of 2,273 male inspectors, most of them of draft age. With some misgivings, the Signal Corps turned to hiring women, and was pleased when they proved to be excellent for many inspection jobs.64 Still more inspectors were needed, and in May 1943 the Signal Corps set up the first of several six-week training courses to teach unskilled workers to perform inspection duties. High schools, vocational schools, colleges, and contractor’s plants offered their facilities. The Chicago zone graduated 339 trainees; San Francisco, 34; Philadelphia, 103; Newark, 200; and Dayton, 31. At first the graduates did simple mechanical inspection of wiring, soldering, setscrews, fastenings, and mounting fits, and assisted In electrical inspections. Gradually they took over more responsible duties, and most of them became full-fledged inspectors.65
Other approaches to the manpower problem involved methods of increasing the efficiency of the inspectors, simplifying the jobs, and sharing the inspection load. The Signal Corps tried them all. It standardized inspection procedures, published more complete instructions, and delegated more responsibility to the inspectors. It broke down many processes into simpler elements to permit less highly skilled personnel to perform the work.
One very sensible approach had already been tried in a few instances where both the Navy and the Signal Corps were buying the same or very similar articles from the same plant and had agreed to let one service perform the inspection for both. The Signal Corps encouraged the inspection zones to enter into as many such arrangements as possible. By March 1943, under such arrangements, the Signal Corps was inspecting radio transmitting tubes, sonic buoys, belts, converters, and numerous other items for the Navy in individual plants all over the country, as well as clock mechanisms, switchboards, and telephones for the Marine Corps, small motors for the Air Forces, and radio tubes for Ordnance and the Corps of Engineers. Air Forces inspectors performed inspection for the Signal Corps on plywood parts and meters, Ordnance inspectors performed chassis inspection on Signal Corps trucks, and the Navy and the Signal Corps pooled forces on many radio items.66 Such arrangements applied only to particular plants, not to given geographical areas or to types of equipment. The arrangement was to consider the situation in each plant on its merits, and to let the service having the primary interest handle the entire inspection procedure for its sister services.
By one method and another, the Signal Corps steadily built up its corps of inspectors to 4,419 officers and civilians by the end of 1942, to 5,663 by March 1943, and finally to a peak strength of 7,507 by the end of June 1943.67
Industry was being called upon to accomplish production miracles, and at times felt a certain amount of irritation because the military organization insisted upon such rigid control of the methods by which the miracles came into being. Industry accepted government inspection as a bothersome but necessary procedure—even a welcome one where new items were concerned. But in the matter of stock items, that is, items of ordinary commercial use, many manufacturers felt that inspection ought to be waived completely. In December 1942, for example, the Western Electric Company complained that Signal Corps inspectors in its Kearny plant were being too picayunish in the inspection of certain telephone equipment being furnished on a rush order. The Inspection Agency investigated, but came to the conclusion that the inspectors could not do less than they had been doing, and that in fact they had been requiring only a minimum of inspection.68 Nevertheless, some manufacturers, or at least some plant managers, continued to feel that a product which was good enough for the public certainly ought to be good enough for the Army. The whole matter of inspection procedures, or lack of them,
came to a focus in the Anaconda Wire and Cable Company case early in 1943.
The Anaconda case came to light largely through the alertness of a civilian Signal Corps inspector, Cyrus Shipp. Shipp had been assigned to the Marion, Indiana, plant of the Anaconda Wire and Cable Company in the early part of 1942, then transferred to another manufacturing plant in the same town in April. While on duty there, he became acquainted with two former employees of Anaconda, who told him it was the general practice of contractors to “put things over” on the Signal Corps inspectors, and illustrated the ease with which it could be done by describing conditions at the Anaconda plant. They asserted that in testing field wire W-110-B for dielectric strength and insulation resistance, Anaconda used the same reels over and over again, changing the tags at night when Signal Corps inspectors were not present in the plant. Furthermore, a switch device had been rigged up, hidden in a panel on the side of the testing desk, and accessible to the operator, but unsuspected by the witnessing inspector. By manipulation of this switch, the operator could change the test voltage so as to secure any desired reading. Also, the informants said that samples of wire from picked reels, selected because they would pass all the necessary tests, were kept handy in a separate storage place. These were the samples that were presented to the inspectors for test, although the inspectors believed that they were testing run-of-the-mill samples. It was also alleged that fictitious reports had been turned in on a spark test which Signal Corps inspectors had insisted on after the Navy Department had instigated an investigation, apparently because it, too, had heard rumors of irregularities.69
Inspector Shipp sent a detailed report of these allegations and unconfirmed reports in a confidential letter to Maj. Frank Prina, his superior at the Philadelphia Signal Corps Procurement District. Major Prina promptly sent Shipp back to the Anaconda plant, with instructions to try to find out whether or not the situation was as described.
Bit by bit more evidence came to light, to the consternation of the Signal Corps, which was very loath to believe it. The Signal Corps had placed contracts totaling well over a million dollars for assault wire, field wire, power cable, and subterranean cable with the Marion plant, and had other contracts with Anaconda’s plant at Pawtucket, Rhode Island.70 Business relations with the company had been very satisfactory, and there had been no known instances of failures of the equipment in field use. Indeed, the Marion plant proudly flew the Army-Navy “E” pennant for excellence in production, which had been awarded to it in May 1942, at the initiation of the Navy, which held the preponderance of contracts at the plant.71 In August the Soviet Government had complained to the Signal Corps through its purchasing commission in the United States that field wire W-110-B furnished it through lend-lease was unsatisfactory because of poor abrasion
characteristics, but that complaint concerned wire furnished by another company.72
During September and October 1942, investigations, conferences, allegations, charges, and countercharges obscured the situation. Officials of the Anaconda Wire and Cable Company denied any irregularities and were confident that the local management of the Marion plant was without fault. They were inclined to blame overzealousness on Inspector Shipp’s part, and initially the Signal Corps itself was not sure what was happening or where the fault lay.73
About the first of November the Signal Corps learned that there were still more elements in the case which apparently had not been disclosed until this time. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had two agents in Marion, and was conducting an investigation of the “production and inspection methods being presently used by the Anaconda Company in the production not only of Field Wire W-110-B but also other types of field wire for service use” being produced at the plant.74 They were willing to be quoted as saying that “all charges contained in the reports of Mr. Shipp ... were amply supported by substantial evidence” as shown by more than twenty sworn statements of employees of the Anaconda Wire and Cable Company.75
By this time Anaconda officials were convinced that things were indeed wrong at the plant, and called Signal Corps officials in Washington to tell them so and to inform them that they were starting action to remedy the situation insofar as possible. The Signal Corps Inspection Agency for its part was concerned about the evidence of faulty inspection procedures used at the Marion plant which had permitted the situation to exist before Inspector Shipp came on the scene. It again overhauled its inspection procedures in an effort to be sure that no other such case would arise. It also took steps to see that none of the faulty field wire it had accepted got into the hands of troops overseas.
The Anaconda Wire and Cable Company of Marion and five of its officers and employees were indicted for fraud. In federal court, on a plea of nolo contendere, the company received the maximum fine of $10,000, while the five individuals received other fines along with prison sentences which were to be suspended upon payment of the fines. Judge Thomas W. Slick, in sentencing the general mills manager of Anaconda and the local plant manager, said, “I believe these men can better serve the
war effort by getting back to work,” and added that he believed the case would stop anything of a similar nature anywhere else.76
This hope apparently was not to be fully realized, however, for in the meantime, on 15 January 1943, the government brought a second criminal suit against the Anaconda Wire and Cable Company in its Pawtucket plant; on 4 May suit against the Collyer Insulated Wire Company, with plants in Providence, Pawtucket, and Central Falls, Rhode Island—all on similar charges; and on 1 December 1943 another against the Acorn Insulated Wire Company, Incorporated, of Brooklyn, New York.77 In each case the company involved and the indicted employees and officials were found guilty, fined, and the individuals concerned given prison sentences, except in the Collyer case, where the three top officials indicted were cleared of fraud. The Anaconda Wire and Cable Company in the meantime had replaced for the Signal Corps all of the defective wire which could be traced and returned to it. It also settled a civil suit against it on terms considered favorable to the government.
Quite aside from the moral and legal aspects involved, the loss of production of field wire and cable was significant. At a time when the country was building up strength for its first major offensive, and unprecedented quantities of field wire were needed by combat troops, a severe blow had befallen the wire industry as a whole. The production rate of wire W-110-B during 1943 never equaled that for the fourth quarter of 1942. As for the Anaconda plant at Marion, it did not regain full production until the third quarter of 1943.78
The wire fraud cases resulted in a general tightening of inspection procedures in the Signal Corps Inspection Agency. Actually, insofar as inspection jobs in wire plants were concerned, the effect was bad. Inspectors became uneasy, and inspection jobs became hard to fill. Signal Corps inspectors in wire plants became over-exacting, much of the good will that had existed previously between the Army and the industry was lost, and many manufacturers became reluctant to accept new Signal Corps contracts.79 On the other hand, the inspection activity as a whole benefited from the increased attention to inspection procedures. This was demonstrated on 2 July 1943, when the ASF released its report on inspection procedures in the various technical services. The Signal Corps and the Chemical Warfare Service were rated as the best of the technical services on nearly every point considered by the survey: uniformity of method; responsibility of inspectors; control of inspection practices; training; coordination of inspection and testing; and collaboration between development, engineering, production, and inspection units in simplifying equipment design and specifications.80
The Increasing Importance of the Distribution System
When war came, the initial emphasis naturally fell on procurement, the first
broad phase of supply. But equipment was of little value in the factories, or in depots, or on the docks, or in warehouses, or anywhere else except in the hands of the fighting men who used it. Thus as procurement became more stabilized and increased quantities of signal equipment became available, the second phase of supply, distribution, began to receive more critical attention. A reorganization of General Colton’s Signal Supply Service in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer in December 1942 created a Distribution Division, thus underlining the growing importance of this aspect of supply. To head the new division, Colton felt lucky to have David H. O’Brien, vice president of the Graybar Electric Company.81
Moving the material from the factory to the battle front was the responsibility of the distribution system. Interrelated in this effort were the depots—into which supplies flowed directly from the manufacturing plants for storing and packaging, and out of which they moved to troops—and the agencies which maintained the records that provided means of cataloguing and identifying equipment and of controlling the flow of supplies.
Stock Control: The Storage and Issue Agency
The stock control function at the end of the summer of 1942 was centered in the Storage and Issue Branch of the Materiel Division, just where it had been at the beginning of the war. But Storage and Issue had suffered growing pains no less acute than those of the other sections of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, and now with the increasing emphasis on distribution was the most sensitive spot in the supply body. The single teletype machine linking the branch with the Philadelphia Signal Depot had grown into a battery of four machines connected with the large depots.82 Every day its 1,200 employees processed a small mountain of requisitions, stock records, and other papers and forms, with an efficiency somewhat impaired by the fact that they were housed in several buildings scattered over Washington. It was a logical step in the progression toward decentralization to gather up these scattered employees, and transplant them to Philadelphia, where the depot, already acting as gratuitous landlord to several other Signal Corps agencies, could offer them house space.
On 8 October the move was made, the actual transfer taking place all in one night, with an office force already set up and operating in Philadelphia while the bulk of the personnel reported for work. The Storage and Issue Branch had hoped that most of its employees would go with it to the new location, but as it turned out almost 30 percent of them chose to stay in Washington and had to be replaced, a serious blow at a time when the work load was very heavy and getting heavier.83 The movement of supplies to North Africa was still not complete and would be a continuing operation for several months to come. Storage and Issue initiated movement of equipment to units prior to their activation, to task forces, and to organizations already overseas. It prepared all the maintenance parts lists, maintained suspense files for future
shipments, prepared all depot requisitions, shipping, marking, and packaging instructions, and maintained all stock records. To lighten its burdens, all distribution functions relating to radar, meteorology, fixed installation equipment, and airborne matériel had already been taken away from it and allocated to other agencies. The business of assigning stock numbers and nomenclature had also gone elsewhere.84 But a very large amount of important work remained. To a considerable degree, success or failure of the signal supply mission hinged upon the success or failure of the Storage and Issue Branch.
On 1 January 1943 the Signal Corps formally recognized the importance of Storage and Issue by making it a separate agency. Now the chain of command moved from the Office of the Chief Signal Officer through the Signal Supply Service to the Distribution Division, then through the Storage and Issue Agency to the depots. The number of requisitions continued to rise: in January the agency issued 8,016 of them; in March, 10,858; in May, 14,280; and in June, 16,517.85 To handle the work, the civilian staff increased from 1,017 in January to 1,317 in March, and then to 1,525 in June 1943.86 Yet, by June, the agency was staggering. Personnel, space, and equipment all were overtaxed. There was a tremendous backlog of work: unposted records, unanswered correspondence, unfiled reference material, stock requirements for which no purchase requests had been written, and 6,000 unprocessed requisitions.87
Storage: The Signal Depots
While the Storage and Issue Agency struggled to keep some sort of control in its stock control functions, the depots which were the repositories of the stock continued to grow, in number and in volume. After July 1942 the signal sections of depots were termed simply “signal depots.”88 By November 1942 there were 10 signal depots, either wholly Signal Corps establishments, or within general depots, at Philadelphia, Lexington, Dayton, Atlanta, Chicago, San Bernardino, Memphis, New Cumberland, San Antonio, and Ogden. Before the end of the fiscal year 3 more were added at Boston, Sacramento, and Seattle. To deliver airborne radio equipment to west coast airplane manufacturers faster, the Dayton Signal Depot on 31 May 1943 opened a Western Branch, with 200,000 square feet of space at Los Angeles and another 80,000 at San Pedro. The 13 depots altogether occupied more than 100 buildings, with a total floor space of almost 8,500,000 square feet. In addition, there was over 3,000,000 square feet of open storage space. The need for more storage space of all types was expected to increase for at least the next six months.89
Each of the depots had its special problems, but the need for more space was common to all of them. The Chicago Signal Depot furnished an example. Measured on the peacetime scale of military meagerness, the depot between wars had been a fair-sized installation, occupying three large
warehouse buildings, and staffed by two or three officers and about 25 civilians. By 1943 the depot had expanded enormously. It occupied 829,375 square feet of open and closed warehouse space, and required 51 officers and 2,784 civilians to keep it operating continuously. The depot, located strategically in the nation’s most extensive transportation center, sent 75 percent of its shipments overseas, handling 3,000 requisitions for 6,000 tons of incoming shipments and requisitions for about the same outgoing tonnage monthly. To handle the message traffic, there were 700 lines of automatic switchboard, with 300 more soon to be installed; 5 Bell printers, including 2 perforator transmitter sending and receiving printers equipped with a distribution switch; 3 teleprinters for Western Union; 1 for Postal Telegraph; and a direct line and printer from each teletype room to the corps area radio station.
Teletype, dry batteries, and the assembly of SCR-299 radio sets were three of the most important specialties handled by the Chicago Signal Depot. It was the designated storage point for all the Signal Corps’ teletype equipment. As for dry batteries, the depot continued as it had in the past twenty years to handle all purchases and inspection of all dry batteries for the Army. In the fiscal year 1942 it bought 65,000,000 batteries; the requirement for fiscal year 1943 was set at 150,000,000 and it was expected that even more would be required in 1944. Two floors of one of the large warehouse buildings were devoted to battery storage.
To take care of the SCR-299 sets, the depot had acquired the former General Motors Building, containing about 200,000 square feet, and here depot workers assembled the SCR-299’s and installed them in the trucks and trailers. By early 1943 the depot had shipped 1,300 completed sets to tactical units in this country and overseas, as well as 125 each to the British and to the Russians, and three each to China and Mexico. All those for lend-lease were boxed in waterproof boxes weighing 16,800 pounds. Outside the building was 180,000 square feet of open storage space, where 1,000 more trucks waited for SCR-299 installations.
The depot employed 216 people in its repair shops alone, where radios, telephones, teletype equipment, motor generators, typewriters, meters, and motion picture equipment were made serviceable. Both men and women were being trained in repair operations.
Besides its own activities, the Chicago Signal Depot early in 1943 acted as host for the Chicago Signal Corps Labor Office, the Chicago Inspection Zone, field offices of the Signal Corps Stock Numbering Agency, the Philadelphia Signal Corps Procurement District, and the Cost Analysis Section of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, and for two training schools, a radio school for field artillery officers and a depot procedures training school for enlisted men selected from Camp Crowder. The commanding officer, Col. F. E. Eldredge, was a reservist who had been called back to active duty in October 1940 and who had served as executive officer under Brig. Gen. A. A. Farmer at the Philadelphia Signal Depot before coming to Chicago. Despite the space he had, Eldredge needed more. He wanted more warehouses, he hoped to install a cafeteria for his workers, and he had his eye on a garage building where he could install garage and repair shop
facilities for the trucks and motor vehicles belonging to the depot.90
The signal section at the San Antonio Army Service Forces Depot was one of the oldest, dating unofficially from 1876, when San Antonio received the new military telegraphy system which General Greely had brought to Fort Lancaster a year earlier. The World War I period had brought San Antonio a sharp increase in signal activity, along with the fledgling aviation service then under the Signal Corps’ auspices. World War II brought bustling activity to San Antonio once more, and by June 1943 the signal section had 13 officers and 250 civilian employees who in May had processed 3,883 shipments, comprising 1,793 tons of material. San Antonio was a key depot for Stromberg-Carlson telephones and parts. It also supplied signal items to the many posts, camps, and stations of the 8th Service Command and operated a signal repair shop for the command. It occupied four warehouses, including a new processing section devoted to fungus-proofing and moisture-proofing equipment for overseas shipment. Altogether, it had 143,000 square feet of open and closed warehouse space, but it was 84 percent occupied, and the commanding officer was looking hopefully at new warehouses being built on the post, hoping soon to acquire more space and to be able to consolidate operations.91
The signal section of the New Cumberland Depot at New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, had come into being at the close of World War I, especially to store and dispose of signal equipment returned from overseas, an activity which had continued well into 1939. Through the years from 1918 until 1940, its duties had not changed very greatly. For a while, from 1920 until 1939, it was the principal distribution depot for pigeon equipment. But its most important activity began in 1930, when it was named the principal storage depot for field wire, a mission which was to assume major importance in World War II. When Maj. Harold R. Jordan was recalled from the retired list in 1940, and assigned to duty as Signal Officer at New Cumberland, he found a depot not greatly enlarged since 1933, when it operated 61,975 square feet of storage space and 10,000 square feet of open storage space. Jordan had only one assistant, a warehouse foreman, and a few laborers, who had no mechanized equipment. He started building up a supply of modern warehouse handling equipment, and hiring and training workers to operate it. By the time war came, New Cumberland had a head start in the methods and procedures that would be necessary to handle the gigantic amounts of field wire that would be swallowed up by World War II.
In 1933 New Cumberland had handled 1,056 tons of incoming and outgoing equipment during the entire year. In 1943, in the peak month of August alone, it handled 5,037 tons. Besides field wire, New Cumberland was now handling about 1,500 other items. In addition, it was a key depot for lend-lease material, the repository and issue point for over 4,000 items. Another unique function was salvage of electron tubes for scarce precious metals.92
All the depots had common problems stemming from the lack of any strong control at staff level over warehouse procedures and operating activities.93 Until the advent of the Distribution Division in December 1942, the depots had been left very largely to themselves, except for such supervision as the overburdened Storage and Issue Branch could give them. The result was that procedures varied from one depot to another, particularly in warehousing. Some depots were wasteful of storage space, and others economical; some handled stock at far less cost per ton than others; some had modern warehousing equipment such as fork lifts and trucks, and others had none. All of them operated under a system of maximum and minimum stock levels, set individually by the Storage and Issue Agency, which also determined the depot to which equipment on any given order would be sent. When stock was received, it was stored according to class, each depot attempting to store material in the same general fashion, so that depot officers and workers could be moved about from depot to depot and still be able to find any item in any depot. This did not always work out; not all the depot buildings were alike, and first consideration had to be given to the size and weight of certain items, rather than the class into which they happened to fall. Signal items were further classified as controlled and restricted items, issued only on orders from the Chief Signal Officer, or as requisitioned items, which could be issued to any post, camp, or station signal property officer.94
To some extent, depots specialized in the stock they carried, but in general by this time they carried stocks of all ordinary signal items. Although each depot sent in daily reports listing its surpluses and shortages, some were continually overstocked on some items, understocked on others. If a requisition called for an item not in stock, the depot could do one of three things: tell the requisitioning agency to reorder it from another depot, ship a substitute item, or simply hold up the order.95 Any one of these courses of action was time-consuming, and, to the organization waiting for the supplies, completely frustrating.
The situation was not confined to the Signal Corps—the ASF headquarters was deeply concerned over operating inefficiencies in all the technical services’ depots. Early in 1943 the ASF’s Operations and Control Divisions undertook a joint study of the operating and storage methods of typical depots of the seven supply services. The findings issued in March found much to criticize. It was charged that all the supply services had set up too many intervening levels of command between the depots and the chiefs of supply. The cumbersome clerical and administrative procedures that resulted required far too much paper work. According to the report, methods of handling material were not uniform, there were too few training programs for depot personnel, and improper stock catalogue numbers and nomenclature accounted for more wasted time and manpower at depots than did any other single factor.96 The report spoke approvingly of the system just put
medical depots. This so-called “key depot plan” divided the country into three geographical areas and provided for storing medical supplies of a given kind in only one depot within an area, so that requisitions for a certain item would always be addressed to one depot, which was expected to be amply supplied with the particular item at all times. Only after the key depots were stocked would others be supplied with the particular item. Thus an agency making a requisition could be sure that the key depot would have the material requested if it were available anywhere.
The key depot plan could not be adopted for all signal items, which differed vastly in bulk and character, and were infinitely varied as to delicacy, complexity, and the areas of use. Some specialization already existed. The Dayton Signal Depot, for example, stocked all nonclassified airborne and all meteorological equipment; Lexington carried radar and other classified radio equipment; the Chicago Signal Depot, dry batteries and teletypewriter equipment; and Philadelphia, the photographic stock. To further the plan, fifteen types of signal equipment were classified as key depot items, to be carried at one depot only.97
The recommendations of the Operations and Controls Divisions were mandatory; they provided for a complete reorganization of the depot system by 1 July. Although the Signal Corps had already put many of the recommendations into effect, or had made a start on them, the time allowed to effect the “complete reorganization” was exceedingly short. For one thing, the plan required mechanization of warehouses, including the use of pallets and fork lifts, which the Signal Corps had only begun to use in a few of its depots.98 Hand trucks, warehouse trailers and tractors, stackers, lifters, elevators, jacks, and conveyor belts had their place in the mechanization program as well. The pallet system was obviously a saver of both space and manpower, but at first the Signal Corps found that it was not an unmixed blessing. Because material could be moved about much more rapidly and frequently, the system permitted material to be placed in any available space in the warehouse instead of in a predetermined order. This in turn meant installing a locator card system to show where the material might be at any given time. Theoretically, each time the material was moved, the new location was entered on the locator card. In practice, the untrained workers of rather low wage classification who did the moving seldom bothered to make the notations on the locator cards.99
Throughout the early summer the depots worked feverishly to put their procedures into acceptable form. The rate of mechanization in the four months between
January and May was impressive, despite the initial reluctance of depot employees to use the new devices. For example, during the period the number of fork-lift trucks in use at depots increased from 14 to 80, pallets from 269 to 26,594, two-wheeled hand trucks from 617 to 1,447, and warehouse trailers from 956 to 1,131.100 Depots reported progress measured in other statistics: unfilled requisitions on hand at the end of the month had dropped from 31,992 in January to 16,090 in May; requisitions filled had risen from 28,716 in January to 40,690 in May. The number of personnel had also risen, however, from 14,873 in January to 17,491 in May, and the number of requisitions filled by each civilian employee had not made a very impressive gain.101 The Storage and Issue Agency, which issued the requisitions in the first place, still had a large backlog. The tonnage of equipment coming into the depots continued to rise, and demands from the theaters of operation to increase. There were numerous complaints of signal supply failures and deficiencies overseas. It was obvious that the Signal Corps distribution system still had a tremendous job ahead of it, and that it would have to improve a good deal more before there would be anything to boast about.
Overseas Complaints of Distribution Deficiencies
It was not enough to get equipment to the theaters of operation; it had to arrive in good condition and give the best possible service for the maximum length of time. From signal officers in the field, from special observers and inspection teams sent from Washington, and from returning combat officers and men the Signal Corps received reports that permitted a constant check on the quantity and quality of equipment.
The reports from all fronts were remarkably consistent. With only a few exceptions the performance of Signal Corps equipment was excellent, and combat soldiers and field commanders alike praised it highly. Nevertheless, there were complaints, and they fell into three categories. Theaters felt that signal items did not reach them quickly enough. Often when items did arrive, they were damaged as a result of poor packaging or waterproofing. Finally, there was almost universal complaint about the lack of spare and repair parts.
Some of the deficiencies of distribution resulted from factors beyond Signal Corps control. For example, until the procurement lag was overcome and deliveries caught up with requirements, the Signal Corps could not immediately furnish all the theaters with all the material needed. Most theater commanders had little conception of the length of time required to produce electronic equipment. Whether for military or civilian use, electronic items on the average required from two to four years to develop, one or two years from development until production began, and ordinarily another one to two years to complete production on a specified contract.102 The War Department policy of putting items on tables of allowances as soon as they were developed and adopted for military use, without regard as to whether or not they were actually in production, naturally led commanders to ask for items which were not yet delivered from the manufacturer.
Furthermore, theater commanders
demanded a great many items not on the tables of allowances, and not even included in the Army Supply Program (ASP).103 The ASP covered requirements for the Army on a troop basis, but tactical operations such as the North African invasion showed that there had to be additional equipment over and above that required by the troop basis, to take care of what might be termed theater operational requirements. Tables of equipment were designed only to keep troop units operating on a minimum basis in an average situation. They did not provide for unusual situations—amphibious operations, mountain warfare, or theater needs beyond the minimum level of reserve.104
The War Department, therefore, instituted the “operational project.” It authorized the theaters to estimate their requirements for future operations, and the technical services to put the material under procurement and make delivery against theater requisitions as it was needed.105 By May 1943 a great deal of additional signal equipment was being requisitioned for future operations. Much of it was required for fixed installations in the theaters, or in areas expected to be occupied soon. Equipment for such uses was not provided for in the Army Supply Program, which ceased to reflect accurately the real needs of the Army for signal equipment, as the Chief of Staff, ASF, pointed out.106 Signal equipment differed from other kinds of material in that more and not less of it was needed in situations where the greatest tactical success was achieved; when armies were advancing rapidly and headquarters moved often, they needed huge reserve stocks of fixed and semi-permanent communication installation equipment.107
Furthermore, even had sufficient material been available, there was a scarcity of ships to bring supplies to such areas as the South Pacific,108 and Signal Corps material carried a low priority. Very often, therefore, it was crowded off the cargo ships. When it was put aboard, the Signal Corps had no direct control over the loading and discharge, and delicate communications equipment might be ruined by careless handling.
But packaging, tropicalization, and the provision of spare parts were direct Signal Corps responsibilities. In the early months of 1943 it was these matters that were getting the most concentrated attention.
Packaging and Waterproofing
Proper packaging of signal equipment involved many considerations, not the least of which was the distance which supplies must travel to reach the battle fronts. From the United States, the China-Burma-India theater, for example, was literally at the end of the world. Once within the theater, after a 12,000-mile water journey, supplies had to be shipped to points as widely separated as San Francisco is from Buffalo, over primitive roads or by rail that varied from standard to narrow gauge and back again. This required moving material from one freight car to another, without aid of machinery, by laborers who could not be expected to obey “Fragile—Handle With
Care” signs they could not read. China-bound supplies had to survive the dangerous journey over the Hump, and the loss of a few airplanes could mean that a month’s planning had gone for nought.109 It was no wonder that the men in the theater often found the equipment that reached them “pretty well beaten up.”110
About 5 percent of all signal equipment received in the first landings in North Africa was damaged, partly as the result of faulty packing, shipping, and improper stowage. Comparatively large pieces of equipment which were carried on deck without full protection and sets which were stowed in leaky holds suffered the most from salt spray.111 Carrier equipment was so severely mishandled in transit that signal officers had to set up test and repair facilities to rehabilitate the equipment before issuing it to the troops. “The abuse ... was far worse than anything that had been anticipated in the design or that would be at all likely ... in the hands of troops.”112 The very first reports after the landings had unanimously stressed the inadequacy of packaging, not only to avoid breakage, but to keep out moisture. General Matejka, AFHQ signal officer, said flatly that “the signal equipment issued was satisfactory, but the waterproofing was not.”113 The SCR-536 handie-talkies were very poorly waterproofed, and frequently became inoperable, and the SCR-284’s needed moisture-proof cords, plugs, and insulators.114 The “waterproof” canvas coverings provided for signal equipment were not in fact waterproof.
Packaging had received scant attention in the first year of war. Contracting officers handed manufacturers the packing instruction, U.S. Army Specification 100-14, and assumed that it would provide all the necessary information. Quite often, they granted a waiver of the specification, sharing the contractors’ feeling that it was unnecessarily costly in money, time, and trouble, and that equipment was ready for shipping after it had been wrapped in tar paper and crated.115 Specification 100-14 provided that the first destination of a shipment would determine the method of packing to be used, and since most of the early stock was accumulated in depots for later shipment overseas, this meant domestic packing only. The depots were disturbed when they realized that almost all equipment would require repacking for overseas shipment, for they possessed neither adequate facilities, materials, nor trained personnel to do the job. Neither did the large industrial concerns, the Signal Corps discovered when the first overseas reports started flowing back. Their experience with methods of peacetime export packing had not prepared them for the problems presented by global warfare. There were such considerations as the wide range of destinations, from subzero arctic to the tropical Pacific islands; transportation by air, ocean, rail, motor, or animal pack; the length of time goods might
be in transit; and conditions at the end of the journey, when supplies were likely to be stored in the open for long periods of time for lack of warehousing and handling facilities.116
In July 1942, with the invasion of North Africa only four months away, the Signal Corps took the first short step toward putting its packaging activities into organized form, with some degree of staff authority. It organized a packaging unit as a subsection of the Storage and Issue Branch of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, and staffed it with one civilian. His stated duties constituted a fairly large order: to solve the packaging problem at the initial point of purchase, at assembly plants and depots, and at the laboratories, to assure the “proper use of lumbers and other materials ... and also their preservation during the process of uncrating,” and to “assure that all parties concerned with packing and crating are carrying out instructions and performing their work in the proper manner.”117 In October, the packaging subsection moved with the Storage and Issue Agency to Philadelphia. By January 1943 the pressure of work forced the addition of two packaging experts and two secretaries to the staff. Still this was not enough. Reports of damage continued to flow in from theaters; procurement districts, inspection zones, and manufacturers were asking for specifications to cover export packing; the industry was sending samples of packing materials for appraisal; and there was pressure from ASF staff level to do something.118
Now came belated recognition of the size and complexity of the packaging problem. The Signal Corps asked for advice and assistance from other services and organizations which had packaging problems: Ordnance, the Quartermaster Corps, the Corps of Engineers, the Canadian Mission, and the Navy. To centralize activities and fix responsibilities, the Signal Corps raised the packing subsection to section status, assigned officer and civilian specialists, and gave the green light to elaborate expansion plans. A conference in June 1943 brought together representatives of Army Service Forces, the Chief of Chemical Warfare Service, The Surgeon General, and all Signal Corps depots, engineering groups, procurement districts, inspection zones, and laboratories to discuss the problem.119
Throughout the early summer Packing Section personnel worked feverishly, writing packaging specifications for individual items of equipment. But there were thousands of items; the war would be won or lost before individual specifications could be produced for all of them. And specifications were not enough. As Lt. G. Mark Strohecker explained late in June, there ought to be greatly expanded facilities to expedite replies to complaints and inquiries; standard marking and packing clauses for contracts should be written; men should be available to teach proper packing methods to inspectors and depot personnel; and there was a vast amount of research and coordination that needed attention desperately.120 It was quite evident that it was very late indeed to be building a packaging organization, and that measures taken so far fell short of what was needed. Eventually the Signal Corps
solved the problem with notable success, but not until another year had passed.121
Tropicalization
Wherever signal equipment was in use in hot, wet climates, it deteriorated quickly, corroding, sprouting fungus, and accumulating rust. Tropicalization—protecting equipment from these conditions—was partly a packaging problem, but to a greater extent one of equipment design. Signal Corps equipment was built to specifications drawn up by the using arms. These services had expressed little interest in tropicalization until the first months of war brought reports of equipment failure under heat and moisture in New Guinea, Australia, the Middle East, the Philippines, and remote spots in the China-Burma-India theater.122
The climate of Guadalcanal, for example, was hard on communication equipment. From sundown to sunup, everything was very wet, and at midday it was hot and dry. Since none of the equipment was moisture-proofed or fungus-proofed, the men fought constantly to keep communications working. They constructed heating cabinets of electric lamps and scrap lumber; covered dry-cell terminals with candle wax; and, after dumping thousands of poorly packed and therefore useless batteries into the ocean, discovered that packing batteries in discarded ration tins assured them longer life.123 Field wire in the South Pacific Area deteriorated so quickly that it was in trouble most of the time.124
In New Guinea the signal troops with the 41st Infantry Division hoarded their equipment, because in outlying sections everything had to be packed in or flown in over the Owen Stanley Mountains. The moisture soon incapacitated the walkie-talkies, and even field wire lasted no longer than several weeks. Ants attacked the insulation on telephone wires and radio connections; salt water and spray corroded metal parts, and jungle heat and moisture caused the leather parts of telephone EE-8 to mold and drop off the frame.125
When the using arms realized that their specifications for signal test equipment ought to include waterproofing and tropicalization, they besieged the Laboratories for modifications. Camp Coles and Fort Monmouth divided the work. Beginning about the middle of May 1943, Coles concentrated on modification kits containing varnish, brushes, spray guns, infrared lamps, and other items, to enable the troops in the field to treat the equipment already on hand. Monmouth investigated means and methods for moisture-proofing and fungus-proofing items in the course of production.126 Contracting officers modified as many as possible of the existing contracts to include a requirement that the items be
tropicalized, and provided for it in new contracts. Many of the processes, however, required special machinery and materials, and personnel trained to use them. The techniques were new; it would take time to get them into operation at all the factories making signal equipment destined for use in tropic regions. In the meantime, the Army Communications Board was studying the matter as well, but it would be several months more before its report would be issued.127 This problem, too, yielded to time and experience, and by the end of the war all signal items destined for tropical use were moisture- and fungus-proofed as a routine matter.128
Spare Parts
Overshadowing all other complaints from overseas were the vigorous outcries over lack of spare parts. Small parts were particularly scarce in the CBI theater. The vacuum rectifiers on the teletypewriters blew out because of overloading, since there were not enough machines to go around and no replacements for repair.129 Shipping space was short, theater priorities were low, and the depot stocks in India were very limited. In midsummer of 1943 the shortage of signal supply was so critical that no reserves at all could be built up by units in the field, and radio stations were frequently off the air for emergency repair by crews who improvised as best they could without vital tools and spare parts.130 Compounding the difficulties of repair were the vagaries of the climate. In the monsoon season, the heavy rains descended, and the atmosphere became hot and steamy; in the dry season the weather remained hot, but the air was filled with dust. This was particularly hard on equipment with any moving parts, such as typewriters and teletypewriters.131 In the South Pacific there was an extreme shortage of radar parts; in fact, as the Signal Officer, Colonel Ankenbrandt, pointed out, there were shortages of everything: ships, supplies, harbor facilities, and storage space.132
Spare parts constituted the most pressing need in North Africa also, as Colonel McCrary, a special representative from the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, learned on a trip to the theater early in 1943. Colonel Williams, formerly signal officer of the 1st Armored Division and by February its chief of staff, said:
We have had an awful time as far as spare parts are concerned. Every place this Division has been we left requisitions covering our requirements for supply parts, expendable supplies for 60 days. ... We expected to get automatic issue, but have received none so far. We have to go to the depots and yell and scream and steal to get even the few spare parts we have. The worst part is to get tanks and other vehicles with no radio equipment at all. The mountings, plates, brackets, and cabinets are even harder to get than the radios themselves. Some sets put in without cabinets soon wear out. Tanks and vehicles are not much good without radios ... and a poor installation is better than none at all.133
Colonel Williams added that he lacked adequate repair facilities. Ordnance had taken
over the repair of motor vehicles, and “if the Signal Corps does not do a better job of repair of radio sets within the Armored Force, it is quite possible that Ordnance will take this over also.” Lieutenant Bloodworth, commanding officer of a detachment of the 175th Signal Repair Company, reported an “acute shortage of spare parts and transportation,” and added wistfully that if he had all the authorized equipment and a few spare parts he could do a fine job, but that as it was “most of our work is makeshift.”
The signal officer of the Mediterranean Base Section, understandably a little bitter because he had submitted eight requisitions in the period from 22 October to 6 March with almost no success, thought that “spare parts are more important than new equipment, and they should be sent at once.” This was the crux of the matter. The zone of interior could not fill the requisitions for the very reason that spare and repair parts were also components used in new sets, and War Department policy had been to supply complete sets at the expense of spare parts. The maintenance officer of the 34th Infantry Division was “woefully short of spare parts ... practically all we have is what we brought with us.” His supply consisted of some resistors and condensers for the BC-312 and 342, a few tubes for some sets, and a scattering of parts for the SCR-299. He had no spare parts at all for the much-used SCR-608, 610, 511, 536, 288, or 284 sets, or for the teletypewriters. The II Corps’ signal officer, Colonel Tully, who had spoken optimistically of supply in general, admitted that “there is and has been ever since we arrived in North Africa an acute shortage of spare parts for repair of Signal Corps equipment, especially radio equipment.” He cited his own detachment of the 177th Signal Repair Company, consisting of two radio repair sections, two wire sections, and one small arms section. In the whole detachment there were no spare parts at all, and one of the radio repair sections had no tools.134
Colonel Tully sent Washington a plea for spare parts for the SCR-299 in April. praised the performance of the 299, but said that he feared that 35 generators which had been running continuously for over two months would give out simultaneously. With no spare parts, and only one spare generator PE-95 available for replacement, what would happen, he asked, when all of them reached the 3000-hour service period at the same time?135
Radar spares were especially short. The commanding officer of a communications battery in an antiaircraft unit of the 68th Coast Artillery reported to Colonel McCrary in February that he had been using the SCR-268 to track airplanes with good results, but that he had been unable to get any spare parts at all and his stock was almost exhausted.136
General Matejka reported in April that spare parts for radar were practically nonexistent. He suggested that not only maintenance but also breakage as a result of faulty packaging be considered when setting up maintenance plans for supplying radar spare parts. Lack of spare parts and replacement components had resulted in
abandonment of complete units or important parts of units during combat, he noted. He added that now there was also a serious shortage of spare parts for tactical radios, and that he had to cannibalize some sets in order to repair others.137
The Aircraft Radio Laboratory’s director, Colonel Yeager, visiting North African air bases in April and May, had found a “very serious shortage of test equipment and spare parts.” Among Air Transport Command ferry route bases, he found Natal, Brazil, especially short of spare parts. At Atkinson Field, British Guiana, SCR-517 equipment was working only 50 percent of the time for lack of parts.138
Back in Washington, near the end of 1942, three things had happened which together blasted the question of spare parts wide open.139 The firm of management engineers, Wallace Clark Company, issued a series of comprehensive reports on spare parts; the complaints of shortages started rolling in from the North African theater; and the Army Service Forces, worried about the matter not only in the Signal Corps but in all the other supply services, stepped in to take control.140
The Wallace Clark report covering spare parts for airborne radio and radar sets was issued 27 November 1942. It reviewed current contracts for a number of important sets, compared the actual rates of delivery of spare parts with those called for, and found them disappointing. Delivery of spare parts groups was lagging, and contracts with General Electric for BC-191 and BC-375 failed to specify any spare parts at all. Contractors had used up all their component parts to make complete assemblies so that the assembly lines would be kept in full production, partly in order to meet airplane assembly schedules, but also because of “the belief that some of the spare parts requirements are exaggerated, and that the parts if delivered would not be of any immediate value.”141 The second report covered spare parts for ground and vehicular sets, and was even more devastating. Of the 87 outstanding contracts, 74 provided for concurrent delivery of spare parts. Of the remaining 13, several called for delivery of spare parts groups two to four months after delivery of the equipment, but 7 contracts with General Electric (the sole manufacturer of transmitter BC—191, a major component of several sets) “not only do not call for concurrent delivery, but [are protected by] a blanket waiver of all spare parts deliveries, signed by the contracting officer.”142
Of 63 orders on which deliveries were due, assembled equipment was complete on 19, but no spare parts had been accepted, and in 62 out of 66 cases in which sets were in various stages of completion, the spare parts were behind the sets on the basis of delivery. The report cited reasons for the lag: the necessity of supplying initial equipment to task forces; the shortages of materials which led to the slighting of spare parts in favor of complete sets; and the fact
that spare parts groups could not be inspected and shipped until all items comprising a group were on hand. This factor illustrated the “for-want-of-a-nail” nature of much of signal supply. One small part in critical supply could hold up delivery of a much-needed piece of equipment or spare parts group for weeks or months. The Wallace Clark report recommended among other things that this method of contracting for spare parts groups be changed, and that the Inspection Agency be authorized to accept and certify for payment such parts as were fabricated and ready for shipment, although the whole spare parts group might be incomplete.
General Colton was quick to follow up the Wallace Clark recommendations. He had already emphasized to all signal supply agencies that a change of policy was in effect, that equipping task forces initially was no longer as important as maintaining equipment already in the field. On 28 November he notified the Wright Field Signal Corps Procurement District to get busy immediately reviewing all airborne sets to find out what spare parts the men in the field required for repairing their equipment, taking the most-needed sets first; to find out what had been done to supply the parts, and, if it had not yet been done, to do it at once; and to report to him within one month what had been accomplished.143 On 31 December he told the directors of the Signal Corps Ground Signal Service, the Signal Corps Aircraft Signal Service, and the Philadelphia Signal Corps Procurement District to “give this matter your personal attention,” the military method of informing them that it was urgent and that he had to have results. Colton pointed out that neither contracting officers, contractors, nor expediters had been as much concerned to obtain delivery of spare parts as of complete equipment, and added that undoubtedly directives from his office in the past had led to that attitude. However, the time for that was past. Over $900,000,000 worth of equipment had already been delivered—it was essential to keep it in service.144
The Wallace Clark researchers had pointed out that there was no single place in the Signal Corps where they could get a complete picture of the spare parts problem, and had listed five agencies involved: the Laboratories, the Procurement and Engineering Section of the Philadelphia Signal Corps Procurement District, the Storage and Issue Agency, the Signal Corps Shops Branch, and the Maintenance Section of the Signal Corps Ground Signal Service.145 They might well have added that there were too many agencies outside the Signal Corps having a proprietary interest: for example, the manufacturers, the commanding generals of the theaters, the Army Service Forces, and numerous top-echelon planners and requisitioners.
Meanwhile, the ASF directed the Signal Corps to participate with the other technical services in a spare parts study, covering procedures used for estimating requirements, storing, and distributing parts.146 The Signal Corps set up a special project within
its control division which started preparing the report called for by the ASF. It found twenty-two factors which had to be considered in requisitioning spare parts.147 Before it could forward its report, new directives from the Army Service Forces broadened the base of inquiry to include stock control. The ensuing three months were a grueling period, with every Signal Corps agency even remotely concerned with the matter pressed on every side for answers to a problem which was rapidly assuming nightmarish proportions. The files grew thicker with surveys, suggestions, and counterproposals.
That there were as many points of view on the spare parts problem as there were interested agencies had been demonstrated in February 1943, at conferences held in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer and attended by representatives of the Services of Supply, the Army Ground Forces, the Antiaircraft Command, the Antiaircraft Artillery Board, the Camp Evans Signal Laboratory, the Fort Monmouth Signal Laboratory, and the Monmouth Procurement District. The specific subject under discussion was the spare parts and vehicle programs for radars SCR-268, 545, 547, and 584. From the Signal Corps maintenance viewpoint, it was desirable to have as many spare parts as possible in the field with the operating sets. For example, each gun battery and each searchlight platoon ought to have complete maintenance equipment accompanying each set, assuming of course that there were enough maintenance men trained to use it. On the other hand, as the Army Ground Forces and the Antiaircraft Command pointed out, tactical considerations demanded that units be kept mobile, carrying as little maintenance equipment as possible. The distribution representatives wanted a spare parts program that would achieve the objectives sought by both the maintenance and tactical planners. Obviously, this was very difficult, and the best approach they could suggest was to provide each radar set initially with the minimum amount of spares for first- and second-echelon maintenance, and to place all remaining spares and maintenance equipment either in a rear echelon or in depot stock.
The procurement representatives offered still another view. From the standpoint of facilities and materials, spare parts ought to be reduced to the very lowest point consistent with minimum adequate maintenance, because of the many critical items and materials required in their manufacture. And finally, from the production point of view, any revisions either upward or downward meant a disruption of production. Once a basis of decision was reached, procurement officials begged that it be allowed to stand, because constant changes cost much money, time, and trouble.148
In March the ASF issued its consolidated
report on spare parts for all the technical services. It noted that the Signal Corps, insofar as it was concerned, had already taken steps to alleviate many of the difficulties. For example, it noted that the Signal Corps maintenance parts annexes formed a part of the contract specifications, which in turn were the basis for determining parts requirements. These annexes were lists of maintenance parts which, in the judgment of the laboratory engineers and the manufacturers, were considered necessary for one year’s maintenance. They represented the most expert guesses available until field experience reports could come in. In January 1943 the Signal Corps had directed the repair shops to prepare quarterly reports, and had instructed each signal unit having a repair section and each depot performing repairs on signal equipment to send in temporary reports on items requiring excessive maintenance. From these, the laboratories would be able to tell, for example, whether the dynamotor armatures and bearings they ordered as spares were actually used by the field repair organizations or whether repairmen simply replaced the entire dynamotor, and whether ordering three sets of every fixed capacitor used in a radio set was necessary, or whether certain capacitors failed more quickly than others, resulting in excesses of some kinds and shortages of others.
The most important finding of the ASF report struck hard at the lack of standardization, both of individual items of equipment and of components to permit interchangeability of parts between various items of equipment. It called this lack of standardization “the one major factor impeding the successful accomplishment of the supply of spare parts.”149
It was at this point that the Signal Corps dilemma—the conflict between technical specialization and the “frozen-design” concept necessary for mass production—came into sharp focus once more. There could be no argument about the desirability of standardization. The only question was how far it could go without colliding head on with some other equally desirable objective. Certainly such badly bungled cases as that of headset HS-30 could be cured. The HS-30 was a relatively simple device. In a zealous attempt to spread the work among small contractors, Signal Corps contracting officers had divided the order for the headsets among ten different manufacturers, who produced ten different electroacoustic elements, each of which met the specifications but none of which was interchangeable with any other. This meant that ten different types of maintenance parts groups had to be obtained and distributed to all using units in the field.150
To prevent such absurdities of duplication, the Signal Corps had set up the Signal Corps Standards Agency, which was working with the War Production Board, the American Standards Association, the Navy, and industry, to standardize components. The agency had already completed a preferred list of vacuum tubes and mica capacitors and was at work on lists of fixed and variable condensers, ceramic, paper and electrolytic capacitors, and meters. From now on, before any new items of signal equipment were put into production, the contractors’ samples of components would be submitted to the Standards Agency for approval.151 Commendable though these
efforts were, they could accomplish only limited reforms. The roadblocks erected by the desire of the using arms for flexibility of design were based upon sound tactical reasons, but they illustrated once more the problems the technical services faced in trying to reconcile the basic incompatibility between the two points of view.
The ASF report did not specifically discuss this point, but by inference it acknowledged its existence by the proposal it advanced for solution of the spare parts problem. The remedy sought to “put the contracting officer, supplier, distributor, and user of maintenance parts upon a basis of mutual understanding” by publishing a tabular list of replaceable parts which became a maintenance list when edited, approved, and stock-numbered, and which provided the basis for estimating requirements, initiating procurement, and requisitioning parts in the field at various echelons.152 It appeared to be a workable arrangement, and actually it or something very like it was used thereafter throughout the war, becoming the basic element upon which maintenance planning depended.153 But by itself it was still not enough.
At about the same time that the ASF report reached General Colton’s desk, he had before him a fifty-page report from the Wallace Clark management engineers which reviewed the many programs under way. The Signal Corps was attacking the spare parts problem on all fronts, with varying degrees of success. Identification—proper description, stock-numbering, and published lists of spare parts—was proceeding well. Efforts to obtain better estimates of requirements were far less successful. The Signal Corps Aircraft Signal Service agencies at Wright Field had made good progress, both in determining what parts were needed and in building up a supply of them. But the organizations under the Signal Corps Ground Signal Service at Fort Monmouth seemed to be lagging.154
Some weeks earlier, Colton had set some of his best officers to work on a comprehensive “Maintenance Plan” to establish policies for procurement, distribution, and use of repair parts. On 1 May this plan was published. It embodied the best suggestions from the Signal Corps’ Control Division study, the various Wallace Clark reports, and the ASF study. It went to the Signal Corps Aircraft Signal Service, the Signal Corps Ground Signal Service, the Signal Corps Eastern Signal Service, and the various branches and divisions of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, and it stated specifically what each agency should do.155 As the weeks slid by and the spare parts situation improved only slightly, the fires that were being built under every organization straight down the line were growing hotter.
But it was becoming apparent that the spare parts problem involved factors that could not be controlled on the home front by the technical services alone. It was as if a merchant had set out to furnish trade goods for an exploration party without advance information as to whether beads, knives, or bolts of calico were required.
The ultimate consumers of spare parts were the overseas forces, yet the technical services had little idea of how parts were used or distributed overseas. The Wallace Clark report had called this lack of detailed knowledge of activities in the overseas base depots and repair echelons the great deficiency in the distribution system. “It is not known what organizations are doing in practice, how they are being set up to receive stock and to distribute repair parts, and what the real needs and problems are.” Field requisitions were made “not on the basis of spare parts groups or maintenance factors, but on the judgment of the supply officer as to his need,” and 30-, 60-, or 90-day supply needs of task forces were also computed “on a basis differing from the procurement computations.”156 Thus no matter how carefully the Signal Corps supply system at home might calculate the “probable” needs, the “actual” overseas needs, real or imagined, could throw the complete system into chaos. Obviously, more inspection teams and more carefully compiled overseas reports were needed.
The Army Service Forces and the War Department moved to fill the breach. On 15 May the ASF issued Circular 31, which covered in detail the policies for spare parts lists.157 It followed this with a series of letters to the technical services devoted to special aspects of the problem.158 On 6 July the War Department issued Memorandum W700-32-43.159 It provided for “continuously analyzed” reports from the field as to the actual end use of spare parts. It also enunciated an official policy: spare parts “easily broken, rapidly worn, or otherwise required for frequent replacement” would be furnished integrally with each item of equipment, and spare parts for all echelons of maintenance would be delivered simultaneously with equipment deliveries.
No one was naive enough to think that a mere enunciation of policy could solve the spare parts problem. But at least it set up the ground rules and, more importantly, made it clear that they applied to everybody. From now on, the conflicting viewpoints and practices of overseas commanders and zone of interior supply organizations could be channeled into the same lines of action.160
The Fiscal Year Summary
Thus, as the fiscal year ended on 30 June 1943, the fever chart of the Signal Corps supply organization told little about the actual state of the patient’s health. Looking well, looking ill, it fluctuated from crisis to crisis, and could be evaluated as either very good or relatively poor, depending upon the criteria used. On the one hand there were the persistent reports of shortages overseas, and the production lag in certain important classes of equipment. But the vigorous efforts to overcome these difficulties were encouraging, and seemed to be about to pay off.
The last half of the fiscal year had begun on a highly optimistic note. The Signal Corps had not only met the current
requirements of the Army Supply Program (ASP), but had exceeded its November procurement objective of $ 141,000,000 for a total of $174,000,000161 A few days later came even better news. The War Department announced that between January and November 1942 the Signal Corps had far outstripped all other components of the Army Service Forces in percentage increase of dollar volume. The figure for the ASF as a whole was 337 percent, for the Signal Corps, almost four times as much: 1,328 percent.162 From October to November the Signal Corps percentage of increase was 30.5 percent, compared to an average increase of 13.4 percent for the technical services as a whole.163
Taken at face value, these statistics made Signal Corps supply look very good. But percentages reckoned in dollar value were deceptive. In terms of Army needs and objectives, the picture was spotty; in some places, dark indeed—especially in regard to spare parts, radar parts above all. The fact that production in late 1942, in terms of dollars, approximately equaled the dollar value of the demand then existing meant little when much of the equipment in the depots and in the hands of troops could not be used because it lacked essential components.164 Furthermore, the November 1942 drive for production was an artificial stimulus that created a temporary upsurge in dollar volume of deliveries without curing the basic difficulties. These troubles lay partly in the multiplicity of types of equipment and their growing complexity, partly in the questionable policy of keeping supply and development combined under Colton’s command in the headquarters organization.
Thus General Colton, who was in a better position than anyone else to assess the real value of the statisticians’ reports, warned on 12 December 1942 that although from an over-all standpoint the Signal Corps program appeared to be progressing very well, the same could not be said of schedules for all items. In particular, ground radio equipment and radar were trailing. In the case of ground radio, the Signal Corps was behind schedule by $15,000,000, most of it for SCR-188’s. This set employed a transmitter used also in airplanes and tanks, and since both these items had higher priority than ground equipment, the transmitters for the SCR-188 were falling Also, until August, the Signal Corps had supposed that it would be required to have by December only the 2,407 SCR-188’s already scheduled, but in August the scheduled number was boosted by over 50 percent.
Radar was a different story, one which pointed up the inequity of comparing ASP “requirements” with the amounts of equipment a technical service could provide. Put another way, the ASP was a long-term forecast of Army needs, which took no account of the factors impeding or accelerating production of individual items. In terms of dollars, the 1942 ASP called for radar items in the amount of $270,146,000. Up till 30 November only $146,903,000 worth had been delivered. Of the $82,000,000 deficiency, almost half was for the SCR-584, a gun-laying radar which had not yet been
fully developed, but which the using services had demanded the moment they saw the first test model. Tooling for production alone involved $10,000,000 worth of machine tools. The ASP requirement had been figured at 461 sets, although there had never been any possibility of getting any of them in 1942. The remainder of the ASP deficiency was largely in the SCR-270 and 271 radars, although by January 1942 the Signal Corps had supplied all the sets then scheduled for delivery during the entire calendar year. Later, the using arms had clamored for a great many more sets, but by that time the production lines were down and it took time to get them started again. Thus on the face of it, the Army Supply Program showed by December that the Signal Corps had supplied only three fourths of the number ultimately and belatedly required for the year. Colton said, “That is no criticism of anybody, but when these requirements were set up, few people had seen radar, and many of them who had seen it didn’t believe it.”165
Six months later, at the end of June 1943, the radar picture had brightened considerably, although only the earlier models were in full production, distributed, and in use by troops. Later models were in production, and still more recent ones were in the development stage.166 Radar and radio shipments had increased twelvefold over the early 1942 figures, and now averaged $250,000,000 a month.167 Nearly all items were apparently in good supply: airborne communication equipment for the Air Forces, for example. Radar was more abundant, especially for airborne use. Radios for tanks were in excellent supply, and the situation respecting plant equipment was sound. But there were weak spots in ground signal equipment and in photographic supplies, the latter because estimates had been too conservative and manufacturing facilities hard to obtain. Ground signal equipment was lagging for several reasons, the most important being that tables of equipment did not reflect all the items that theater commanders were demanding.168 Such extra items did not appear on the Army Supply Program.
Although the Signal Corps led all the other technical services in the increased amount of equipment made available for distribution during June 1943 (with a percentage increase of 21.6 percent, representing a dollar value of $100,896,000),169 General Somervell was not pleased with the trend of progress. The May monthly progress report indicated large decreases in the amount of items issued to the using arms, and increases in the number of items going to storage. This meant that no matter what the tonnage rates and dollar-value statistics seemed to indicate, the using arms either were not getting the kinds of equipment they needed, or the assemblies coming off the production line and going to the depots
were not complete.170 The Signal Corps was embarrassed in May when some organizations were unable to move overseas as scheduled because of shortages of Signal Corps equipment. They included Company C of the 62nd Signal Battalion; the 210th Signal Depot Company; the 233rd Signal Operations Company; the 909th Signal Depot Company, Aviation; the 898th Signal Depot Company, Aviation; and the 7th, 11th, and 14th Airdrome Squadrons. This list did not include other units whose readiness dates had been deferred because of unsatisfactory T/BA and training status reports, which could not be submitted until enough equipment was on hand for training purposes. Items in short supply consisted principally of telegraph central sets, terminal equipment, and maintenance and tool equipment.171
Procurement, too, was falling off again rather seriously as the fiscal year closed in mid-1943. War factories serving the Signal Corps were laying off workers and discontinuing night shifts. Much of the fault could be traced to delay in placing contracts. The Signal Corps had a large backlog of unobligated funds—until the first of May it “had not spent a dime of the money received the previous July”—and delay in translating funds into contracts would inevitably mean a slowing down of deliveries. It still took forty days to process an order through the Philadelphia Signal Corps Procurement District.172
All these incidents pointed up the fact that General Olmstead’s many reorganizations had not yet succeeded in providing a completely efficient and coordinated headquarters supply staff, but there is no indication from the records that he was aware that his career was about to founder, ostensibly upon the rock of supply.