Chapter 16: Signal Corps Position in Mid-1943 (May-June 1943)
The Situation at Home and Overseas
When General Olmstead was appointed head of the Signal Corps in the late summer of 1941, the Secretary of War realized that the Chief Signal Officer was receiving an almost superhuman assignment. “You have had to start behind scratch,” he told Olmstead, knowing that Signal Corps’ manpower and budget ran relatively behind the allotments to the other services.1 But by the spring of 1943, with the extreme emergencies of the first year and a half of the war behind him, General Olmstead could feel reasonably satisfied with the progress that his administration had made. Despite the still acute procurement and supply problem, despite the many other difficulties, the Signal Corps, shot through and through with severe growing pains, was filling its mission relatively well.2
Working since March 1942 under General Somervell’s Services of Supply, the Office of the Chief Signal Officer in the War Department in Washington had continued to function along the same lines as before the March 1942 reorganization of the Army with its creation of the over-all service forces headquarters. General Olmstead had himself carried out some drastic reorganizations since 1941. Dramatic growth had been imposed by the war effort. Operating and staff agencies of the Signal Corps had been separated. There were more agencies, especially under the staff, and they were bigger. But it was in the field that the largest expansion had occurred: in the schools, in the laboratories, and in the whole range of procurement activities. The handful of prewar field agencies had ballooned. Numerous new laboratories, new schools, new depots, and new field procurement installations now appeared on the Signal Corps organization chart.3
Everywhere Signal Corps men and Signal Corps equipment were doing their work with increasing effectiveness. North to south, east to west, the Signal Corps Army
Command and Administrative Network bound all the Army together, solidly and satisfactorily. The schools were at their peak. The Pictorial Service, in both its training film production at home and its combat photography in the field, was enlarging and improving. Supply and distribution were improving, too, even in the troubled field of radar, and more specialists trained to maintain and operate the sets4 were becoming available. New equipment was coming out of the laboratories and off factory production lines—better wire components, better radios and radars. Newer radios, such as the SCR-694 (replacing the 284) and the new walkie-talkie, SCR-300, would be furnished waterproofed and tropicalized. Packing and packaging were improving so that equipment might reach the troops intact. Supply of spare parts and arrangements for maintenance presented especially severe problems. But even here, although the responsibility and lines of control remained fuzzy (divided three ways, between the Army Service Forces, the using arms, and the Signal Corps), the situation was improving.
The crucial test of the men and the equipment, the ordeal in the fires of combat, had been met in the Pacific and in North Africa. The month of May saw the successful ending of the war in Tunisia. Already in that theater Signal Corps men had begun to prepare for further invasions, taking steps to avoid mistakes which had been made in the North African assault. One step was waterproofing all susceptible electronic equipment. Another was establishing an American equivalent of the British “J” or “Phantom” service to monitor friendly radio nets in order to provide commanders with immediate and accurate information upon the progress of their own troops.5 Still another important step was taken when the Navy converted for Army use the Ancon, a 20,000-ton combination passenger and freight ship of the Panama Line, into America’s first communication ship, equipped wholly and solely to transmit and receive vital information and intelligence, the reports and commands of combat.6
These steps, and very many more, had to be taken and were taken, culminating during the last weeks of June 1943 in a surge of effort which readied Signal Corps men and equipment against Sicily. The success of Army communications in the island campaign that followed spoke well for the entire Signal Corps organization, all the way from the outposts in the field back to the roots at home. Yet the Chief Signal Officer, General Olmstead, while taking satisfaction in what his organization had accomplished, nonetheless knew well that much room remained for improvement—in supply, for example, and in Signal Corps control over its multifarious and far-reaching operations. The supply problem, in the eyes of the War Department, was the more obvious and the more insistent. But the control problem was the more basic, the more troublesome, to General Olmstead and his staff officers in the Washington headquarters. They did not have all the authority they desired. Nor could they keep themselves adequately informed about signal
matters in the theaters overseas. Between the Signal Corps roots at home and the branches abroad the connecting trunk seemed at times tenuous, at times twisted and knotty, at times, indeed, almost severed. Defects repeatedly appeared in the flow of signal supplies and in the exchange of signal information between the field and Washington.
Additional problems developed out of the fact that the communications scene was changing from month to month almost faster than men could comprehend. As counterparts to the new developments in the laboratories and factories at home, there were now springing up in the field surprising applications—in radar, in radio relay, in carrier communication, in electronic Countermeasures. The impact of mechanized mobile war on the ground and in the air, the effect of new and better electronic signal equipment upon the new mode of warfare, the counter-effect of new combat conditions upon the application of the equipment—all led to new needs and new demands, sudden and unanticipated. Observing officers who could make themselves believed when they got back to Washington were needed in the field, as Colonel Tully pointed out after the North African campaign.7
In the summer of 1943 Colonel O’Connell commented that there were basic organizational reasons why both the supply of Signal Corps items and the exchange of information were so difficult. “There are so many layers of different organizations,” he said, “between the man in the front in the theater and the complex organization in this country which must take cooperative action that the remoteness is almost complete.” He added that there was “lack of understanding and appreciation of Signal Corps problems in the higher staff levels because no Signal Corps officers are made available for duty on the General Staff.” O’Connell cited in particular the North African theater staff with no Signal officers, but with several Ordnance officers. In Washington the War Department General Staff agencies, such as OPD, had very few Signal Corps officers assigned to them. Because of a lack of signal-minded officers in OPD and because of the fact that Signal Corps units were broken up into three categories (Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces, and Army Service Forces), Maj. E. McDonald, Chief of General Olmstead’s Supply Operations Branch, asserted that it had become “virtually impossible for one agency to know the whole story about a Signal Corps unit requested by a theater.” Pursuing this example in support of O’Connell’s remarks, McDonald explained further:
... the theater commander’s request for an Army Ground Force unit is never referred to the Chief Signal Officer, nor is a request for a Signal Corps unit with the Army Air Forces. Requests for Signal Corps casuals may never be referred to the Signal Corps, and in some cases requests for Signal Corps Army Service Force units are never referred to the Office of the Chief Signal Officer but are referred to the Army Service Forces headquarters, which makes the final decision without reference to any agency in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer.
Thus other agencies, such as the ASF often took action in signal matters while the Signal Corps itself remained uninformed. To bypass such organizational blocks, which some may say inhere in the complexities of modern life and modern
warfare, O’Connell urged a direct exchange of officers to keep the Signal Corps at home and the Signal Corps in the field better informed. “Bring back key staff officers from the theater,” he recommended, “for short tours of duty to familiarize them with organizations and methods of procedure in [the] U.S.,” and use “trained liaison officers on a bi-monthly or quarterly basis to keep theater staffs informed of personnel and equipment plans.”8
Since the first of the year, after signal communications in North Africa became stabilized, a procession of Signal Corps officers had been traveling to that theater to report home on signal matters. By the summer’s end so many observers had come that overworked officers in the field were getting “fed up with visitors,” as Colonel Tully put it. Tully added that their tendency to report chiefly the troubles which undeniably harassed the field organization should be weighed against the fact “that there are a lot of things that are going all right.”9
The visitors included Colonels O’Connell and Rives (both from the Signal Corps supply organization in Washington) and General Olmstead himself. Colonel Rives surveyed the signal situation touching the Army Air Forces in England and North Africa during May and June. He had agreed to concentrate on the air view since O’Connell was spending two months to look into the state of signals in the Army Ground Forces and the Army Service Forces. What struck Rives most was the dual supply system in the Army: on the one hand, the Army Service Forces supplying the Army Ground Forces; on the other, the Air Service Command supplying the Army Air Forces. Units of the Signal Corps operated in both, happily in the Army Service Forces, unhappily in the Air Service Command. Those serving in the latter were orphans, he declared, their parent branch, the Signal Corps, having no control over them, and their adopted parent, the Air Forces, looking upon them very much as stepchildren. Such units, he recommended, should be transferred outright to the Army Air Forces.10
Colonel Rives found no very dire defects, however. Neither did Colonel O’Connell nor his companion, Dr. R. S. Glasgow, a radio consultant with the Army Air Forces. The comments of O’Connell and Glasgow touched chiefly matters of supply and maintenance, training, organization, and chains of command. “There has been a very definite development of communication consciousness on the part of tactical commanders and their staffs, as to the vital nature of fast, reliable signal communications,” O’Connell reported. But “uncertainty and indecision,” he added, “were observed generally among theater signal staffs as to the proper channels of correspondence and action on technical matters and channels, and command or policy matters and channels.” Communications were working, thanks not so much to the system as to the “zealous devotion to duty ... of all signal personnel,” said Dr. Glasgow, who commented that “it is my opinion that their initiative
and effort did much to offset some of the limitations and inadequacies” which O’Connell described.11
On the evidence of these observations, therefore, it appeared that there were some faults in Army signals. Signal Corps officers since the March 1942 reorganization chafed at their situation, especially at the consequences of that reorganization, which placed their Corps under the ASF. The Chief Signal Officer could not approach directly either the Air Forces or the Ground Forces; he had to communicate with them by way of an indirect channel, through the ASF headquarters. Quick action and authoritative control in matters of air or ground signal operations Olmstead found to be hampered at best, impossible at worst. Olmstead and his Signal Corps officers were not alone in the dour view they took of their situation. Maj. Gen. George V. Strong, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, recognized that there was trouble in signals when he said in late 1942 that the Corps’ difficulties lay in “the system they are working under.”12
Dr. Edward Bowles, electronics specialist and adviser to the Secretary of War, vigorously underscored the lack of communications leadership in the Army and especially in its Air Forces. The communications of the latter arm had been poor in the North African campaign.13 An AAF spokesman, Colonel Marriner, who was the Director of Air Communications during the first two years of the war, himself admitted in the spring of 1943 that there was need for a Chief Signal Officer of the Army with superior powers and control. This lack, he asserted, “is one of the biggest faults of the whole Army organization.”14
If to some these pleas sounded monotonously like similar cries from the chiefs of such Corps as Medical and Ordnance, who sought direct control over their bailiwicks also,15 to others the Signal Corps needs seemed unique. For example, Dr. Bowles informed the Secretary of War: “It is my belief that sooner or later the Army will be forced to recognize communications not only as a service but a state of mind that must pervade all planning, as well as operations, and consequently as a field of such importance that it warrants unique recognition.”16 Brig. Gen. John A. Hull, of OPD, made the same point in presenting his views to a board appointed to study army-wide communications problems in the spring of 1943: “The Medical Corps is a service; the
Quartermaster is a service; the Signal Corps has a dual function. It is an operating agency and a service. It is the operating side that I am interested in. ...”17 To this Signal Corps officers could say “amen,” praying too that it not be forgotten that the Signal Corps was an arm as well, sharing that distinction with the Engineers alone of the other services.
Having in mind the impediments hindering the direct operational control which he desired over Army communications, the Chief Signal Officer and the chief of his Signal Troops Division, Brig. Gen. Frank C. Meade, had taken off on 20 March 1943 for a grand tour of inspection. They traveled 28,000 miles to many of the theaters—North Africa, the Middle East, China-Burma-India. “In spite of the vision we had of these problems,” General Olmstead said, “it was necessary to go out and see the situation to realize how great the problems actually were.”18 More specifically Olmstead remembered the reply he had received the year before when he objected to the March 1942 reorganization—the reply that the Army must try out the reorganization and that, if it proved unworkable, adjustments might be made. When adjustments seemed indeed needed, Olmstead had told restive General Staff and Signal Corps officers, “I don’t want to make an issue of the matter until I go out and see how it [the reorganization] affects the troops that are fighting.” This was the central purpose of his trip in the spring of 1943.19
Headquarters Crisis over Supply and Control Problems
The Problem of Supply
General Olmstead set out on his inspection in March 1943. Problems unquestionably existed in the Signal Corps, particularly in the field of supply. In procuring the right kinds of equipment, in sufficient quantity and on time, the Signal Corps too often continued to lag. “Signal Supply was perhaps the most critical problem of the Chief Signal Officer [Matejka] throughout the Tunisian Campaign,” concluded the officers who served as the historians of the AFHQ Signal Section.20
In Washington the drive for production late in 1942 had produced gratifying results, but only for a while, principally in the last weeks of that year. The utmost efforts to improve supply under the existing organization did not maintain a consistently satisfactory level of production. They did not clear away basic difficulties. One of these was the fact that Signal Corps supply did not receive the full-time attention of its chief. It had remained harnessed with research and development since late 1941. For one of General Olmstead’s first acts in office a year and a half earlier had been the combining of supply and development under General Colton.
Colton was a research and development specialist, and a good one. But supply, the Army insisted, was the dominant demand. It is of course questionable whether a good research director can be expected to combine his talent and preference for development with the driving, mountain-moving
General Olmstead (seated) discusses signal operations in North Africa, April 1943
proclivities of an effective production chief. Rapid mass production inevitably clashes with the slow refinements of perfected research and development. The previous Chief Signal Officer, General Mauborgne, had encountered just the same problem and had to some degree fallen a victim of it. He knew research. He knew the business of designing intricate military equipment, and he was sympathetic with doing the development well and getting a fine product on the production lines. But his rate of production dissatisfied the Army in 1941.21
During 1942 and early 1943 Signal Corps experience continued to indicate that there might be intrinsically sound reasons for separating supply from research and development, putting the latter task into the hands of a research-minded officer and giving supply to one who was familiar with and favorable to the conditions of mass procurement, one who did not especially sympathize with the niceties of perfected development. Besides, Signal Corps supply and Signal Corps research had grown much too big for one man to handle. These matters Col. David Sarnoff and the other members of the Signal Corps Advisory Council well understood and stated when, in the autumn of 1942, they advised General Olmstead on Signal Corps procurement.
In December 1942 Olmstead had taken the Council’s advice to the extent of naming an assistant chief signal officer to relieve him of much of the detailed supervision over supply matters. Maj. Gen. James A. Code, who had been Deputy Chief Signal Officer since March 1942, got the post, to remain the assistant throughout the remainder of World War II. Col. Carroll O. Bickelhaupt moved up to become the deputy. General Colton continued as chief of the Signal Supply Service, under whom Research and Development remained a large object of attention alongside of Supply.22
What the Advisory Council had contemplated was a much more thoroughgoing reorganization than this. Its proposal that an assistant chief signal officer be appointed had been predicated upon a vigorous revamping of the Signal Corps—a revision upon a functional basis. The Council urged that the Corps undertake a reorganization which would recognize the difference in character between its operations in a military field and those it performed as a supply service, a reorganization which would “clearly define and sharply delimit the functional responsibilities within these two different areas of operation.”23
A shake-up in the Signal Corps supply function definitely seemed necessary. Yet no action was taken until General Ingles became the Chief Signal Officer in mid-1943. Colton himself opposed the division of his double responsibility. He believed that he best understood both supply and development. He regarded them as so interrelated that they should not be split. But his chief concern was good development. This, it seemed to him, was more important than mass supply, especially if mass supply meant hurrying imperfectly developed equipment off the production lines. He had said in December 1942, speaking of radar, that electronic production was not like making nuts and bolts; that if the Signal Corps had adopted such a crude view instead of seeking to produce the very best, American armies in the field would have suffered, would have lost battles.24
Olmstead agreed with Colton. “Supply begins with Research and Development,” Olmstead told a board of inquiry in May 1943. When asked if research and development and supply and procurement should be linked closely, he replied, “I do.”25 He did not therefore wish to introduce basic organizational changes in this matter. Even if he had wished to assign procurement to another man, he did not have in the Signal Corps any officers who were specialists in mass production. He would have had to look around for someone with experience in private business, such as William H. Harrison, former vice president and engineer with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, whom General Ingles subsequently appointed as Signal Corps’ supply chief.26
Olmstead did take steps to the extent of seeking out David H. O’Brien, vice president of Graybar Electric Company, and assigning him in December 1942 to the Distribution Division under Colton’s Supply Service.27 But he failed to take any further or more drastic steps to meet the lack of experienced production officers. Subsequently, late in 1943 Brig. Gen. Frank Meade expressed the opinion that Signal Corps’ failure to meet its production program in its entirety “could have been avoided had the Signal Corps had any production experts in its officer corps.” Such officers, Meade added, should be “not merely contracting or distribution specialists but men skilled in factory management and control and in the techniques of establishing and maintaining factory production and control of the flow of material and labor.”28
The Problem of Army-Wide Signal Control
The control of communications throughout the Army had been a sensitive point with the Signal Corps since World War I.29 Now in World War II Signal Corps control at home stopped at the division and the Corps had no direct control of its troops abroad. Even so, the overseas Signal Corps machinery was functioning with considerable success because of the excellence of the equipment, the zeal of the personnel, and the determination of officers and men to get the job done despite organizational confusion. As for the situation in Washington, it was General Olmstead’s opinion, shared by many of his officers, that the efficiency and effectiveness of the Corps suffered from the Chief’s lack of strong authority and central control, particularly in operational functions as distinct from supply matters.30
Lacking the high-level position of control it desired, the Signal Corps hitherto, in order to accomplish things which called for over-all coordination, had had to work cooperatively through numerous organizations such as the Joint Communications Board and the Army Communications Board with their many committees. Progress in matters submitted to boards and committees was slow and devious, passing through tortuous channels. Early in the war, just when the Signal Corps would have liked more Army-wide authority, the effective radius of its influence and power had been shortened, drawn into the sphere of the Army Service Forces, in consequence of the
reorganization of the Army in March 1942.31
General Marshall, determined to improve his staff relations and to relieve his General Staff officers of some of the tasks they had been trying to handle, had sought to put the service activities of the Army under General Somervell’s ASF. The move assisted the supply function of the Signal Corps but it hampered its ability to operate and control communications throughout the Army. General Strong, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, said in May 1943, “The use and control of communications is essentially a Command function. Under the present setup it is merely an adjunct to a Supply agency. That, fundamentally, is wrong.” “We have buried the Signal Corps way down in the Army Service Forces,” said the Air Forces’ General McClelland.32
Signal Corps’ struggles with the Air Forces and the General Staff had been difficult enough before the March 1942 reorganization. Now the Signal Corps had to reckon with ASF headquarters also. General Olmstead had disliked the new organization from its start. But he had accepted it on higher orders, as a good soldier must, and had tried to make it work. Now, after a year’s trial, evidence was accumulating which indicated that Army signals suffered under the new structure. Olmstead felt it was his duty to assemble the facts and seek a better organizational solution. His dissatisfaction over Army signals was shared by officers responsible for communications in the General Staff, in the Air Forces, and in the Navy. This was abundantly substantiated by numerous officers summoned before a board which the Chief of Staff appointed in May 1943 to investigate Army communications.33
At the same time, Olmstead believed that the moment had arrived to improve Signal Corps’ place in the framework of the Army’s organization. He wished to become the Admiral Hooper of the Signal Corps, doing for the Army what Admiral Stanford C. Hooper had done for the Navy when he strengthened naval communications, charging that activity with the operation of all Naval signals and with direct control over all Navy communication installations and their operators.34 Olmstead had good reasons for his effort to put a strong communications organization above the ground and air forces, but he did not succeed. The rational arguments for a Signal reorganization became entangled in a crisis which developed in the Signal Corps headquarters during early
1943. In June the situation exploded. Or rather, instead of an explosion, it was an implosion, which burst in upon the Chief Signal Officer, General Olmstead himself, destroying him.
Since the spring of the year before, the Signal Corps under the energetic impetus of the Deputy Chief Signal Officer, General Code, had pressed for a place on the War Department General Staff, in order that the Chief Signal Officer might serve in a position where he could grasp lines of control to (1) a signal officer in the Army Ground Forces, to (2) a signal officer in the Army Air Forces, and to (3) a signal officer in the Army Service Forces, wherein the bulk of signal work (all that pertained to procurement, research, and so on) might continue to be carried out. On 11 June 1942 General Code had appointed three Signal Corps officers, Brig. Gens. Charles M. Milliken and Frank E. Stoner and Col. David M. Crawford, to report to Olmstead “on the necessity for and composition of signal sections” to be placed in the War Department General Staff and in the staffs of the Commanding Generals, AGF, AAF, and SOS.35
Early in July 1942 these officers had announced that the reorganization of the Army the previous March “seemed to overlook the fact that the Signal Corps is both an Arm and a Service; that without adequate trained signal personnel and field signal systems the war can easily be lost; that signal communication is one of the major functions of Command, hence requires a trained Signal Officer on the Staff of all Commanders, including the Chief of Staff.” They pointed to the high place which signal control enjoyed in the structure of other armies: British, German, and Japanese. They concluded that the Chief Signal Officer should serve directly under the Chief of Staff, that he should have immediately under him in his high general staff function both the Army Communications Service and the Executive Control Division, and that he should have control over three Deputy Chief Signal Officers, one each in the Army Ground Forces, the Army Air Forces, and the Services of Supply.36 These officers may have been opinionated. But their opinions were the honest beliefs of specialists. They had merit. Dr. Bowles, troubled over Air Forces electronics in 1943, wrote to General Arnold, the Air Forces chief, in a similar vein: “Our German enemy has long had a keen appreciation of the vital character of these technical fields and has given them thorough application. Both the British Navy and our own recognize that communications are of direct concern to the highest commands.”37
No action was taken in mid-1942 when Crawford, Milliken, and Stoner submitted their report to the Chief Signal Officer. General Olmstead was absent on a trip to England. He did not return until late July of that summer.38 The report was laid aside,
apparently without being circulated outside the Signal Corps. But the idea which it contained would appear again. New and still newer needs for signal control were daily arising, concomitantly with the developments and applications which accompanied the fantastic growth of wire, radio, and radar in World War II—radar gunlayers, radio and radar Countermeasures, radio and radar intelligence. The supply and service obligations of the Signal Corps had carried the whole Corps into General Somervell’s Services of Supply. But signals could not be nailed down as a purely supply or service function. “I do not feel,” wrote Dr. Bowles in mid-June 1943, “that a field as broad as communications, so basic in all operational plans, of such tremendous potency as a weapon, and so essential to command can be treated in the same manner as photography and comparable detail services.”39
Pressure for better signal control, for better operation of communications, especially in the Army Air Forces, increased daily. In every theater of the war chiefs of staff found that they must have signal officers on their staffs, familiar with their plans and operations and able to control with a strong hand every detail of signal installation, operation, and procedure within their theaters. Just now in North Africa, the exigencies of combat were making commanders communication-conscious as never before, and on a scale which was enveloping all the armed services and all the Allies. An amphibious operation, for example, called for positive control over signals—a height of control which towered above the former lines of authority within the Army and the Navy and within that soaring Army offshoot, the Air Forces. Combined operations by American, British, and French armies working together called for still higher central control—control over more and wide-spread activity, over coordinated wire, radio and radar operation, over coordinated radio and radar Countermeasures, over coordinated intercept and analysis of enemy signals. To the extent that these higher needs were developing, the reorganization of March 1942, which had subordinated Signal Corps operations to the Services of Supply, appeared to have been a step in the wrong direction. It can be pointed out, of course, that the SOS embraced far more than merely supply and that since it included services it could properly encompass everything the Signal Corps did. But the fact remains that many officers regarded the SOS as a supply agency primarily.40
In short, inclusion in the SOS had spotlighted the supply aspect of the Signal Corps, and, as many Signal Corps officers viewed the scene, had cast a shadow over the very different and very important other aspect of the Signal Corps, its operational functions. In the Navy these two aspects of communications were entirely separate. Research and development, procurement and supply, fell to the Bureau of Ships. Operation of naval signals fell wholly to the Director of Naval Communications, who was Rear Adm. Joseph R. Redman during most of World War II. He and he alone with his small strongly knit organization controlled all naval communications down to every communicator in every ship and station.41
No remotely comparable control over the operations of signals existed in the Army.
Further, the Army Air Forces had become increasingly independent, and now even the Ground Forces were far removed from the Chief Signal Officer since the latter had been placed under the Army Service Forces.
For example, it was lamented, possibly with some exaggeration, that:
... The Chief Signal Officer is virtually powerless in directing action on Tables of Organization, Tables of Equipment, doctrine, procedures, allocation of critical equipment and trained personnel and establishment of requirements ... The Chief Signal Officer under the Commanding General, Army Service Forces, is constantly at a disadvantage because of the attitude that his is basically a supply function. To carry out the imperative operational staff functions, the Chief Signal Officer should be in position in the organization permitting operational direction.
Such were the words with which one officer in Olmstead’s office expressed his views of the matter in 1943, whatever the view others might take of the Army Service Forces.42
Dissatisfaction over Signal Control in the AAF
The state of communications in the Army Air Forces greatly concerned the Signal Corps, which supplied the equipment, signal units, and many services. During the first two years of World War II, Air Forces communications remained a good deal less than satisfactory.43 Operational control, in the hands of the airmen, did not receive adequate consideration and guidance until General Arnold finally reorganized the activity late in the summer of 1943 under General McClelland, who took for his deputy Colonel Rives of the Signal Corps. Earlier in the war Arnold had relied upon Colonel Marriner, charged with a Communications Office which was bandied about like the hot potato that it was.44 “Arnold will listen to no one on communications, not even the Chief Signal Officer, except one Colonel Marriner.” So Maj. Gen. George E. Stratemeyer, Arnold’s Chief of Staff, had told the Deputy Chief Signal Officer, General Code, in September 1942.45
Code also learned from Stratemeyer that Air Forces officers “want none of us within their organization, but only air-minded communicators who understand their air problems.” However reasonable this may have seemed to the airmen, it was not an argument that Code would accept. “These are words,” he informed the Chief Signal
Officer at the time. “Communications know no particular service,” he generalized, “nor recognize any restricted field. The operation,” he argued, “whether from air, ground, or what, is similar. There are no unique problems in the Air Corps not readily recognizable by communications personnel.” Code pressed Olmstead that “as technical advisor to the Chief of Staff you cannot afford to permit this portion of the Army to be self-sufficient unto themselves. No war and especially this one in which communications play such a vital part can be sufficiently waged by fractional elements operating under independent leadership but only by completely synchronized bodies.” He made it emphatic: “The chain of command must start at the top.”46
Communication control in the Army Air Forces remained weak and confused all through 1942. In June of that year General Code had complained, “The present distribution of Signal Corps officers on the staff of the Commanding General, Army Air Forces, makes it extremely difficult to coordinate Signal Corps matters with that staff.” In July 1942 Col. Jay D. Lattin, Chief of the Signal Corps Military Training Division, had complained specifically that there was “no one Army Air Force office to which members of the Military Training Division, OCSigO, can go for consultation and coordination on training matters.” What was needed, he urged, was “a signal officer on the Staff of the Commanding General, Army Air Forces, charged with the planning of all matters pertaining to signal communication for the Army Air Forces.”47 General Olmstead had summarized the Signal Corps view in August 1942, recommending that General Arnold “authorize and immediately create a signal section on the ‘policy level’ in the Army Air Forces; such section to be headed by a Signal Officer who will be a member of the Staff of the Commanding General, Army Air Forces.”48
General Arnold had done nothing. As Stratemeyer had told Code at the time, Arnold wanted “air-minded communicators,” not Signal Corps men, and he would not heed the Chief Signal Officer. Meanwhile, communications in the Army Air Forces had continued unsatisfactory right on into the North African campaign. In 1943 Brig. Gen. Gordon P. Saville, AAF director of Air Defense, returned from the African scene dissatisfied. He attributed poor air communications there to the absence of a signal officer on the AAF staff, according to General Meade, who commented on the matter to Code in January 1943. Further, Saville wanted a Signal Corps officer assigned to the job. Colonel Marriner agreed. Both Saville and Marriner discussed the matter in May 1943 with General Colton, who was the acting Chief Signal Officer during Olmstead’s world tour. They stressed the need for a Chief Signal Officer with over-all powers. They emphasized that the “absence of a Chief Signal Officer
of the Army, in fact, was hampering development of Air Force communications and the situation,” they declared, “was becoming more serious.” Marriner added, “There should be a Chief Signal Officer of the Army with superior control of all communications.”49
Several weeks later, in June 1943, Dr. Edward Bowles, in the office of the Secretary of War, sharply criticized the state of communications in the Army Air Forces. “At present,” he wrote “despite the vital importance of communications, the Army Air Forces have neither the organizational framework nor the integrated group of qualified military and technical minds which is necessary to derive the most from these important fields.” He extended his indictment to all the Army when he added, “At the present time there is no strong consciousness of communications, radar and electronics within the Army as a whole. ... High staff planning agencies lack the essential concept of communications as systems which are fundamental in tactical planning and in successful combat operations.” He defined communications and signals as including wire, radio, radar, beaconry, Countermeasures (both radio and radar) and related electronic fields.50 Thus the ever-strengthening, ever-diversifying currents of U. S. Army communications were flowing fast and widely and, it seemed, almost without operational control, certainly without strong control in the Washington headquarters of the War Department.
Proposal that Army and Navy Signals Merge
The unsatisfactory state of control over Army-wide communications, when coupled with resurgent problems of amphibious operations, had already led to thoughts about an Army-Navy merger in signal matters. As early as 1 April 1942 General Somervell had passed down to Olmstead a directive from the Secretary of War asking that plans be evolved for coordinating communications and radar for amphibious task forces, in which units of the Army, the Navy, and the Army Air Forces would participate.51 Some months later General Styer, in Somervell’s office, asked Olmstead to “please contact appropriate officials in the Navy Department and proceed with a survey with them looking toward a merger of Army and Navy Communications Services into a Joint Communications Service.”52
Members of an ad hoc committee, drawn for the purpose from the Joint Communications Board, together with officers in Olmstead’s Office of the Planning Director, especially Colonels Lanahan and Guest, worked upon the survey, without benefit of
the Navy. For Admiral Redman, the Director of Naval Communications and senior member of the Joint Communications Board, would not concur in the preparation of the survey, saying he would report separately and directly to Admiral King. Thus the eventual study was made independently of the Navy, as Olmstead explained to Somervell when he presented a copy on 9 March 1943, although it had the concurrence of General McClelland, Army Air Forces, and of the other Army members of the Joint Communications Board. At the same time, scarcely two weeks before he departed on his long overseas trip, Olmstead summarized his own conclusions. He believed that an over-all services of supply should be set up, embracing the present functions of the ASF with those bureaus of the Navy which involved related activity. He would, moreover, split supply from operations. Operations, he thought, should involve “some form of single national defense control with [a] superior staff over the Army and Navy and possibly an Air Force.”53
Concluding his comments upon the committee’s survey of an Army-Navy signal merger, Olmstead further informed Somervell, “The principle that communications are an attribute of command is adhered to throughout.” That is to say, the Signal Corps committee members who participated in this merger study did not argue for control of Army communications all the way down to the front line. In France during World War I the Signal Corps had had such control. The Navy had it of course. Many Signal Corps officers hoped to recover such control. But the established Army policy since World War I was that commanders in the field should enjoy absolute command. As General McNair expressed the policy in the spring of 1943:
... the Quartermaster Corps in the past has tried to take over the operation of all army messes; the Ordnance Department has tried to take over the supply of ammunition to include the front line, and the Signal Corps has tried to take over signals to include the infantry regiment. The decision uniformly has been that the integrity of the arms should be preserved in the interest of teamwork and unity of command. ...54
These committee studies of the proposed merger of military communications, made at the turn of 1942-1943, had been exploratory only. There were many blocks at that early stage of collaborative operations by the several armed services. For example, in 1943 Admiral Redman, responsible for all naval communications and enjoying a place on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations, complained that he encountered difficulties when he tried to coordinate naval communications with those of the War Department. The reason was that he had no opposite number with whom to deal in the Army. There was no officer on General Marshall’s staff possessing powers comparable with his. “Don’t you think we have got to put it [Army communications control] on a par with Admiral Redman in the Navy ...?” asked Col. Carter Clarke, a member of the Army board investigating communications in the spring of 1943.
“Then you’ve got a director,” responded Lt. Col. James McCormack, War Department General Staff G-4, adding, “the Navy has much better centralized administrative control [of signals] than we have.”55
This dissimilarity in the operation of Army and Navy signals constituted one block in the way of a merger. Another block lay in the fact that there was some disinclination on Navy’s part to establish joint communications.56 Furthermore, the scope, the mission, and the details of Army and Navy signals varied too widely to permit ready merger at the time. “The scope of the Army Signal Corps with respect to army communications,” according to the survey by the ad hoc committee members, “is, except for operation, considerably broader than that of the Naval Communication Service with respect to Naval Communications.” In operation it was narrower, because “the Army Signal Corps, unlike the Naval Communication Service, does not conduct the intra-communications of all branches of the Army,” and scarcely for the Army Air Forces at all. In sum, according to the survey, “The functions of the two communication services are unlike fundamentally as a result of the differences in the primary missions of the services. Practicable consolidation,” the committee members concluded, “is contingent upon unification of command.”57
High-Level Control by Communications Boards: J CB, CCB, ACB
Such operational control over Army communications as did exist in Washington at levels above the supply-laden Signal Corps was to be found in certain communications boards. One was the Joint Communications Board (JCB); another was the Combined Communications Board (CCB).58 Both before the mid-1943 Signal Corps crisis and after it, the JCB, serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff, constituted the highest coordinating agency in U.S. Army signals. “The Joint Communications Board has inadvertently become the communications and radar brain for the Army,” asserted Dr. Bowles in June 1943. It had acquired top-level control over electronics, he emphasized, precisely “because of the lack of well-defined leadership in these matters within the Army.”59 One reason the Army lacked well-defined leadership in signals was that its representation on the JCB and CCB was divided. The two Army members, who sat on both boards, were the Chief Signal Officer and the Director of Technical Services, Army Air Forces. Since these two officers were not always entirely of one mind, they did not present a unified point of view for the Army. The two Navy
members were united, being the Director of Naval Communications and his subordinate, the Communications Officer of the Staff of the Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet.60 An inevitable result in Army-Navy signal relations, as Bowles pointed out, was “the usurpation of leadership by a Joint Communications Board dominated by a wide awake Navy group and with no corresponding Army strength to balance interests.”61
The four top-level communications officers who constituted the JCB established policies, while the great bulk of work which the board had to handle was processed by numbers of committees. The JCB was buttressed, as of mid-1943, by a Coordinating Committee and no fewer than twenty-four working committees. These committees provided “a means for coordination of plans, procedures, research, development, standardization and procurement precedence.” The board itself was intended to be “the agency wherein the communications interest of the ground, air and sea forces are brought together and coordinated as a single organization. ...” In short, during World War II the JCB brought the communications services of the Army and the Navy “as close together under a single directing agency—the Joint Chiefs of Staff—as is possible without a unified command.”62 Similarly, the CCB served to coordinate the communications of the United States Forces with those of their Allies, especially the British. There was also a Joint Radio Board, formed in November 1941, which sought to standardize aircraft radio equipment: Army, Navy, and British.63
Participation in these boards gave the Chief Signal Officer some degree of operational influence. He took action, in behalf of the Army, to implement the directives of both the JCB and the CCB. But the channels to the field remained many and devious, and the boards themselves acted slowly. Complaints arose “that extreme delay is usually experienced in receiving decisions through War Department channels. ...”64 When time can be afforded, discussion and coordination have great value, but they are luxuries which do not often adorn military action. Speaking of the need to get things done by command action, General Meade said, “In war time coordination is one of the most wasteful ways to accomplish things I have ever seen.” That eminent commander, General McNair, reflected Meade’s sentiments when he ejaculated, “I am a great leather of boards. ...”65 These high-level boards,
then, certainly did not give the Chief Signal Officer the direct Army-wide control that he desired. He could not act with quick directness.
If in these boards or in the proposed merger of Army and Navy signals General Olmstead had thought he saw an opportunity to improve his operational control, he had been disappointed. For this purpose there remained yet a third board, the Army Communications Board (ACB), which served the General Staff and of which the Chief Signal Officer was the president. Early in 1943 the ACB had taken form out of the remains of the Army Communications and Equipment Coordination Agency (AC&EC). This agency went back to the days just before Pearl Harbor, when General Marshall had ordered Olmstead to combat the tendency of electronics to multiply into specialized applications seemingly without end. At Olmstead’s entry into office in 1941, the Chief of Staff told him to simplify, coordinate, and reduce electronic equipment, and to attain these ends Olmstead had set up in his office the AC&EC Agency.66
This agency had been at first merely an advisory unit within the Signal Corps. In March 1942 it had been subordinated along with the rest of the Corps under General Somervell’s SOS. What was wanted was a more powerful agency, on a higher level, to coordinate and control communications Army-wide. Consequently, early in 1943 the AC&EC Agency became the ACB, technically a supporting agency of the General Staff. Composed of not more than five officers from each of the three major commands of the Army, with liaison officers from the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Allied powers, the board was headed by the Chief Signal Officer himself. The ACB, as it replaced the AC&EC Agency, looked as though it might be potent and an answer to Olmstead’s hopes. The duties of the Board, as set forth in a War Department Circular in January 1943, were “to take such action as may be necessary to coordinate, for the Army as a whole, communication methods, procedures, operation, equipment (including the recommendations for the coordination of research, development, procurement, and allocation to meet operational needs), and all communication matters applicable to the United States Army. It will formulate directive recommendations on Army communication policies which will be forwarded to the Chief of Staff, G-4, War Department General Staff.”67
Like other General Staff subagencies the Army Communications Board under G-4 could merely advise. It had no real power to do things directly. In common with most boards and committees, it tended to work with creaking slowness. Therefore the board did not provide the type of higher control over Army signal policy and operations which General Olmstead and other Signal Corps officers thought they should exercise from General Staff level.
But officers in General Somervell’s headquarters did not think so. For example, a few months earlier, the Control Division, SOS, had opposed any suggestion that centralized control of communications operations be established unless evidence could be produced that the current organization
was breaking down. “The excellence of present communications makes it extremely unlikely that such evidence could be produced,” they asserted in January 1943.68 But in the very next month they spoke with less assurance when they commented darkly upon the communications of the Western Task Force in TORCH. In a report from SOS headquarters they referred to “a glaring deficiency” in signals, and to “the almost complete breakdown of communications in certain instances. ...”69
Whatever the view in Somervell’s headquarters, Signal Corps officers did not stand unsupported in their wish for a higher control centered in Washington. Others expressed the same desire. Dr. Bowles, watching the scene from Secretary Stimson’s office, was troubled over so much committee work by the boards. He believed that the Chief Signal Officer should be taken out of the Army Service Forces and put, minus his supply functions, into the General Staff. Admiral Redman, Navy’s communications chief, thought it logical that the Chief Signal Officer be moved into the General Staff, too.70
Proposal To Put Signal Control in War Department General Staff
Meanwhile, despite such occasional failures as had occurred in the Western Task Force late in 1942, Army communications in the field were improving. Field signals had become quite good by the spring of 1943. “Strangely enough,” said General Meade, after his world tour with Olmstead, “in the combat theaters where there should be most trouble, they are having least.”71 It was in the Washington headquarters where most of the difficulties centered.
On 20 March, the day Olmstead and Meade left to inspect signals in the overseas theaters, a high-level move was undertaken to improve operational control over Army communications. Officers in the Operations Division and in G-4, War Department General Staff, initiated the move as an “informal proposal.” Together with Brig. Gen. David M. Crawford, a Signal Corps officer and executive of the ACB, they conferred to see what could be done to facilitate action on the directives of the JCB and the CCB.72
Upon meeting again a week later, the group agreed that OPD officers, insufficiently acquainted with signal matters, had hesitated to act on board directives and had depended upon the Chief Signal Officer, going to him directly and bypassing the Army Service Forces. “OPD depends upon the Chief Signal Officer for determining the method of implementation of JCB and CCB decisions,” reads a contemporary Signal Corps diary. “Of late, decisions have been transmitted to the Chief Signal Officer
with authority to direct the Adjutant General to take necessary action. Agencies in the Army Service Forces,” the diary continues, “have challenged this procedure as being out of channels. Normal channels,” the diary concludes, “would introduce intolerable delays.”73
If some ASF officers frowned upon such irregularities, General Somervell himself, on at least one occasion, sensed that the coordination and operation of Army signals might not be altogether a proper activity of his headquarters. Late in 1942, when he had urged that the AC&EC Agency be moved from his domain up to the General Staff, he had said, “Communications know no bounds.” He had even asserted, “There are things in the Signal Corps which do not rightfully belong to me.”74 Thus the Chief of the ASF had agreed to relinquish the AC&EC Agency, which became the ACB on the General Staff level. Further acts independent of ASF were now occurring in the spring of 1943, as whenever a directive implementing high-level board decisions was issued by the Chief Signal Officer, without his taking the action through ASF channels. For a moment, the OPD group proposed granting the Chief Signal Officer an ex officio staff status by making him the head of a new communications unit which they hoped to create in the General Staff. But objections at once cropped up against giving Olmstead a dual status. It would be an intolerable situation, the OPD officers thought, if the Chief Signal Officer should be in a position to give orders to the commander of the ASF while remaining also the head of the Signal Corps, which was subordinate to the ASF. Yet some means had to be discovered, they believed, to make competent Signal Corps action in communication matters possible at General Staff level.75
The OPD group then proposed informally that the entire ACB be converted with all its members (except the ex officio president, General Olmstead) into a Communications Division on the War Department Special Staff.76 The proposed Communications Division would receive the power to implement the decisions of the JCB and the CCB. To head this new division the Chief of Staff would appoint a general officer, who would be someone other than the Chief Signal Officer. All this the Acting Chief Signal Officer, General Colton, rushed in a radio message overseas to Olmstead on 12 April 1943. At the same time a study was drafted in the Office of the Planning Director (Colonel Lanahan) summarizing for General Somervell Signal Corps’ grievances and solutions touching Army-wide signal problems and control. But the study was not delivered to the chief of the ASF because the Deputy Chief Signal Officer, General Code, decided it was not “sufficiently strong to justify transmittal to the Commanding General, Army Service Forces.”77
General Olmstead, now halfway around the world in the Middle East, answered posthaste. The whole matter he naturally regarded as very urgent, so urgent that he would, if need be, cut short his trip and come
home at once. Otherwise, he charged his subordinates that they defer decision, or comment, until he returned in due season. His observations on the trip made it clear to him, he replied to Colton, that the ASF should not sit over Army communications. Following the pattern of the report which Milliken, Stoner, and Crawford had made in July of the year before, Olmstead now repeated their prescription. The Chief Signal Officer, he believed, should head the proposed top-level Communications Division, having under him subordinate chief signal officers serving in the AGF, the AAF, and the ASF. He believed too that he should also head both the Combined Communications Board and the Joint Communications Board in order to coordinate and control effectively and efficiently all signal operations. In short, the Chief Signal Officer of the Army must, Olmstead repeated, serve the Chief of Staff directly if he were to carry out his duties as the law prescribed them (he regarded the 1942 reorganization as clashing with the law in some respects). Any other arrangement Olmstead arbitrarily ruled out, for in any other arrangement Army communications would be confined within boundaries which, he believed, the universal nature of signals inherently transcends.78
Concluding the reply to Colton with an order that his officers submit no informal comments unless authorized by specific approval from himself, General Olmstead drew the reins tight on his Washington headquarters. Signal Corps action on the OPD proposal would therefore have to await his return, although General Staff officers were anxious to make a move. Nearly a month passed while G-2 “nonconcurred” over the informal proposal and while Olmstead continued to tarry abroad.79
On 6 May Brig. Gen. Patrick H. Tansey, chief of the Logistics Group of OPD, spoke with Colonel Lanahan about the need for a Communication Section in the War Department General Staff. The need was pressing. The communication problem within the General Staff was “one of the most critical problems facing the Staff,” Tansey told Lanahan, adding that “it appeared impracticable for him to work out the problem through the staff of the Army Service Forces.” Lanahan made no comment, “in view of the gag established by the Chief Signal Officer.” Meanwhile, the OPD proposal, which G-2 had kept in a pigeonhole, was brought out and returned to active status for processing through the War Department General Staff.80
Important signal decisions now seemed in the making. The informal proposal by the OPD group merged into a larger, more formal investigation. General Joseph T. McNarney, Deputy Chief of Staff, was appointing a board which would hear witnesses and review the entire communications problem as it concerned the whole Army, touching especially operational control and the implementation of ACB, JCB, and CCB rulings. The letter establishing the board was dated 10 May and hearings began at once.81
Less than a week earlier, on 6 May, General Olmstead had returned to Washington. Now, it seemed to him, was his chance to obtain the powers he wished to win for the Signal Corps.82 He coached his officers upon the strategy to be adopted. He instructed Code, Stoner, Meade, Crawford, Lanahan, and Guest. His deputy, General Code, was to be “master of ceremonies.” Code would “review testimonies to be given by the Signal Corps members,” and he would be “prepared to step into the breach as an emergency witness upon call.” (He was not, in fact, called before the board, but the others all testified at length.) Support was expected from General Staff officers, General Tansey and Col. Frank N. Roberts; from Air Forces officers, Colonels Marriner and Smith; and from Admiral Redman of the Navy.83
Further support was sought from a former Chief Signal Officer and friend of the Chief of Staff, Maj. Gen. George S. Gibbs. Two years earlier General Marshall had called upon Gibbs for advice in communication matters. Gibbs had argued then for a stronger Signal Corps, with direct, unequivocal control over signal operations. Now he argued similarly in a letter addressed to the Chief of Staff: “The one best solution,” Gibbs urged General Marshall, “is to place the Chief Signal Officer in position of direct access to and by the Chief of Staff and the heads of the major Army Forces, retaining under him all of the resources and establishments that are necessary to him in the performance of his mission. Any other solution would be a compromise—harmful in proportion to the degree of its departure from the ‘best solution.’ ”84 So Gibbs emphatically believed, restating Signal Corps’ long-standing contention.
Upon Colonel Lanahan, his Director of Planning, Olmstead relied heavily. Lanahan prepared careful comments to offer before the board, lending support to a Communications Division in the General Staff, with the Chief Signal Officer in charge and commanding subordinate signal officers in the Ground, Air, and Service Forces. Lanahan readied a review of the signal situation in the Army: in the Ground Forces, a signal officer with too small a staff to cope with all his problems; in the Air Forces, no agency at all charged with over-all coordination, direction, and supervision (“With the result,” he asserted, “that chaos exists in Air Force communications,”); in the Service Forces, the large entire apparatus of the Signal Corps available for both supply and operations but unable to control operations adequately; in the War Department General Staff, the Army Communications Board under G-4 impotent to implement its decision because it was a deliberative body only. Obviously, one agency, Lanahan argued, was needed on the General Staff level to direct and supervise (1) radio frequency assignments, (2) coordination of procedures within all components of the
Army, (3) operational direction of radio Countermeasures to insure proper coordination of strategic and operational plans and to insure effective deception of the enemy, (4) coordination of equipment types for all the Army, (5) operational direction of radio intelligence, and so on, for a dozen more matters which Signal officers believed pressed for better control. While Lanahan worked over these comments, Colonel Guest drew up charts showing the proposed War Department Communications Division enjoying a box alongside the four G’s and OPD of the General Staff.85
General Olmstead expressed his own views most fully in a memorandum which he prepared for the Chief of Staff. It read:
My recent tour to several theaters of operation has confirmed my opinion that a strongly authoritative centralized agency is essential to coordinate the many and diverse problems of signal communication for the Army as a whole. This agency must have authority to establish policies, issue directives, and act, or prepare action, for the Chief of Staff. While charged with these responsibilities by law, I have been seriously handicapped in exercising them from a subordinate position in one of the three coequal interested components of the Army. My actions and recommendations frequently have been subject to approval by uninformed staff sections of the Army Service Forces and further delayed in implementation by Assistant Chiefs of Staff, again requiring concurrence of the Commanding General, Army Air Forces, or Commanding General, Army Ground Forces, or both. If, as I firmly believe, signal communications are vital agencies of command in this war by which commanders gain warning and information, and by which they exercise control of operations, then the War Department General Staff Sections charged with strategic and operational planning and the operational direction of the Army should have immediately available to them an agency capable of advising on the signal communication aspects of each strategic and operational plan. Conversely, an agency charged with the policies, plans, and broad operational direction of signal communication must be in continuous contact with these General Staff Sections.86
On 11 May, the day on which the hearings of the new board were scheduled to begin, General Olmstead informed General Somervell about his aspirations for himself and for the Signal Corps. “As a result of the reorganization of the War Department in March, 1942,” Olmstead wrote, “essential coordination of Signal Communications with the Army as a whole has inadvertently suffered.” It had suffered so severely, he continued, that “authoritative centralized coordination is not now being exercised.” What was needed, General Olmstead contended, was a Communications Division on the War Department General Staff, headed by the Chief Signal Officer.87
Between 11 May and 8 June the Board to Investigate Communications took testimonies from some thirty high-ranking officers, who represented all branches of the Army, and from, Admiral Redman, Director of Naval Communications. The findings of the board, published in detail on 21 June 1943, asserted, among much else, that “control and coordination of signal
communications within the Army are inadequate, unsatisfactory and confused.” The board recommended that there be established on the War Department General Staff a Communications and Electronics Division with broad powers and direct control.88
The board’s recommendation was disapproved. The notion of lifting the Signal Corps or any part of it out of the ASF, transferring it to the General Staff to constitute an additional activity there, ran counter to the intent of General Marshall’s purpose when he reorganized the Army in March 1942. The idea was repugnant to a number of Marshall’s administrators. “McNarney [the Deputy CofS] is basically against other Staff sections,” Brig. Gen. Raymond G. Moses, General Staff G-4, told the board, though Moses himself favored some changes, saying it was essential that communications “not be buried down below and through some complicated chain of commands as it is now. Where it belongs, I don’t know.”89 Maj. Gen. Miller G. White, General Staff G-1, resisted the idea: “There ought to be some way to control it [communications],” he said, “without creating a new Division of the General Staff to do it.”90 The head of the Army Ground Forces, General McNair, when discussing the unsatisfactory control exerted by such communications boards as the JCB, said flatly, “Rather than put the Signal Corps into the War Department [General Staff], I’d go for a board. I think that would be the lesser of the two evils.”91 These were the views that prevailed. However real and pressing Army communication troubles were, the decision was against any change in the headquarters organization, except in respect to the Chief Signal Officer himself.
The Signal Corps Swaps Horses in Midstream
General Olmstead Retires
In early June, some days before the communications board submitted its recommendation, General Marshall and General Somervell had decided to ask General Olmstead to retire. There were various reasons for this decision—including Olmstead’s personality, which had contributed both to low morale within the Corps and to a lack of confidence, not only in higher quarters of the Army but also among his own subordinates. In mid-1943 officer morale within the Signal Corps was reported as low, especially in the supply service.92 In high places Olmstead had failed to win backers. Too often he was out of his office, ill, or away on long trips. However right he may have been on many points and however devoted to his work, to the Signal Corps, and to the Army, as he certainly was, yet he was gruff and careless of human relations and the social amenities. He had made many enemies. He had failed to compromise, perhaps, and to play the game; he was, perhaps, set in the rigidity which comes from too rigorous devotion. When an officer loses the
confidence of his fellows, whatever the reason, his position becomes untenable, as General Bradley said of the American II Corps commander, Maj. Gen. Lloyd R. Fredendall, after the disaster at Kasserine Pass in North Africa.93 He had to be replaced.
For many months previously things had not been going well between Olmstead and his superiors. General Marshall, receiving reports in October 1942 that the Signal Corps failed to handle messages properly, failed to meet personnel requirements, failed to display vision and foresight in planning, had taken the charges to Somervell. In November of that year, Somervell had exclaimed to the Deputy Chief Signal Officer that just once he would like to see a letter that said something good about the Signal Corps.94
Olmstead’s relations with Somervell deteriorated rapidly in early 1943. Somervell, visiting Caribbean, areas, wrote that he had been “shocked” at communication conditions there, “after all the song and dance I have received from Olmstead and Code.”95 Twice in February Somervell criticized Olmstead, once touching unspecified problems of communication, and then again, specifying a Signal Corps radio station in Eritrea, in eastern Africa. “Our radio installations at Eritrea,” he said, “appear to be too far to the rear. The same should be moved to the vicinity of Cairo at the earliest possible moment.” Somervell added, “I understand that you have refused to give your consent to this and I wonder why.”96 Actually, the huge ACAN station at Asmara, Eritrea, occupied a strategic position in the equatorial belt of large Signal Corps radio stations where it could best maintain its link in Army’s round-the-world connections.
An especially ominous memorandum came to Olmstead in mid-March. “All of the reports,” wrote Somervell categorically, “which I have received on combined operations variously called amphibious operations, landing operations, indicate that the Army Signal System has fallen down during the operation. I want you to be sure to remember the Chief of Staff’s admonition in regard to your responsibility for seeing that the equipment is provided and that the training is adequate for the job.” Evidently, the breakdown of the radios serving General Patton’s headquarters aboard the Augusta early in the North African landings drew Somervell’s attention away from signal successes at other points along the beaches.97
In the end, Somervell’s opinion of Olmstead sank impossibly low. He stated his judgment in stark terms when he testified before the communications board on 4 June. Replying abruptly to the first question, put to him by Colonel Burnap, who
asked what might be done to improve Army-wide communications, Somervell snapped back, “Get a new Signal Officer.” “Will that answer all the questions,” was the next query. “Yes,” said Somervell. “Of command and control?” Burnap asked further. “Yes,” came the reply. Somervell professed to believe that the established organization could be made to work without changes. The trouble was in the men involved, or more precisely in General Olmstead. “I see no difficulties at all in the situation provided the Signal Corps is handled by a man with some imagination and get-up and go to him,” declared Somervell. Another board member, Col. Carter W. Clarke, asked, “In other words, to get rid of the man you have there and get another man will solve the entire communication problem?” Somervell replied “Yes,” and he added, “Did you ever hear of Napoleon’s remark that there weren’t any poor regiments, there were just poor Colonels?”98
Obviously the personal side of Army’s communication problem was not the dominant one, despite Somervell’s brusque emphasis of it. Army signals had been and continued to be a veritable Gordian knot. It was unfortunate that the personality of the Chief Signal Officer in the spring of 1943 happened to figure large in the situation. It provided what seemed an easy solution, which in reality bypassed the real organizational difficulties. The board recommendations were turned down and General Olmstead was turned out. As president of the board, Colonel Burnap, in his report to the Chief of Staff on 22 June, commented that the board unanimously agreed Army communication and electronic troubles could not be solved by personnel changes only. Burnap added that General Somervell’s solution was not proposed by any other witness. “Drastic organizational change is mandatory,” Burnap concluded.99 It was accomplished within the Army Air Forces a few weeks later. But the only change within the Signal Corps was the swapping of horses in the midstream of the war.
On 11 June 1943 Chief of Staff General Marshall informed his Chief of the Army Service Forces, General Somervell, that he had dismissed the Chief Signal Officer. He had had a “lengthy talk with General Olmstead.” The Chief Signal Officer “expressed a willingness to accept our decision in a soldierly manner. ... I told him,” wrote Marshall, “that the decision was taken for his relief and General Ingles’ appointment in his place at the head of the Signal Corps.” Olmstead, wishing to continue his service in the war effort, hoped he might remain on active duty as head of an important communications board which the State Department was about to set up. To this Marshall consented, saying to Somervell, “We could assign Olmstead to this job and allow him to remain on active duty at least for the time being.” Somervell had readied a letter of resignation for Olmstead to sign. Marshall, though he had the letter at hand, forbore presenting it. “I am attaching your draft,” he wrote to Somervell, “of a letter for him to sign which I did not use, pending consideration of the State Department affair.”100
Yet it seems that Somervell confronted Olmstead at once with the draft letter and got him to sign it. For such a letter appears in the records, dated 11 June and signed by Olmstead, requesting retirement. This
request hardly accorded with the desire Olmstead had just expressed to Marshall saying that he hoped to remain in active service. That this was the letter which Somervell had drafted is borne out by the reasoning it employed—professing weariness and urging a younger, more vigorous successor (actually, Olmstead, age 59, had returned from his trip invigorated, confident, and high in hopes for the future of the Signal Corps). The only papers touching the whole incident in the files retired from Somervell’s office are a copy of this letter together with Somervell’s indorsement, also dated 11 June, stating, “General Olmstead has devoted himself without stint ... is entitled to relief from a responsibility which has been exacting to an extreme. ... I am appreciative both of his accomplishments and of the spirit in which his request to retire has been made. I recommend approval. ...”101
The War Department had selected, as Olmstead’s successor, Maj. Gen. Harry C. Ingles. Ingles’ long and varied career in the Signal Corps had recently culminated in important posts under Lt. Gen. Frank M. Andrews, commander in Panama and the Caribbean, where he had served first as Chief Signal Officer and then as Chief of Staff. The new appointee took full command of the Signal Corps on 30 June, the date of Olmstead’s formal departure. “General Somervell,” the Chief of Staff was advised, “recommends the nomination of Major General Harry C. Ingles as Chief Signal Officer of the Army, vice Major General Dawson Olmstead, who retires June 30, 1943, at his own request.”102
But of course Olmstead did not actually “retire at his own request.” The War Department had fired him. Yet he had done a good job, all obstacles considered. His administration had cleared the ground and sown the seed from which not he but his successors would gather a good harvest.103
General Ingles Inherits Problems of Signal Control
Olmstead’s removal, by which General Somervell had apparently hoped to slash through the Gordian knot of Army communications, settled Signal Corps’ position with respect to the General Staff for the remainder of World War II. Instead of expanding its sphere of communications control, the Corps would soon lose to the Army Air Forces all development and procurement of their electronic equipment, and it would lose to G-2 its signal intelligence activities involving intercept and cryptanalysis. The problem of Army-wide communications control remained with General Ingles. Another problem which he inherited
was the continued shortage of qualified officers, especially in the higher ranks. Having lost more of these than it could afford to the Air Forces, the Corps had too few to do its own work, notably in procurement, let alone to provide able and persuasive officers to furnish the staff work which was everywhere needed. “Their [Signal Corps] personnel is spread thin,” General Moses, General Staff G-4, told the board investigating communications in June 1943. “Damn few men know the game,” he added.104
What the Signal Corps lost in these events of May and June 1943 became the Air Forces’ gain, an outcome which Colonel Sarnoff had prophesied in late 1942.105 Urged on by the efforts of Dr. Edward Bowles, trouble shooter in the Secretary of War’s office, Army Air Forces communications were at last reorganized and improved. On 16 June, in a forceful letter to General Arnold, Bowles hewed to the line as he and many a Signal Corps officer saw it. Bowles’ sharp criticism, while stinging the Air Forces especially, lashed all the Army as well.
At the present time, there is no strong consciousness of communications, radar and electronics within the Army as a whole. Electrical communications are still regarded as a commodity to be provided immediately upon request, like goods from a shopkeeper’s shelf. High staff planning agencies lack the essential concept of communications as systems which are fundamental in tactical planning and in successful combat operations.
The Air Forces, he emphasized again and again, suffered from lack of communications leadership, there being no one man or staff “having the primary responsibility for tactical and technical planning, for coordination and supervision, and for establishment of over-all policy in communications, radar and allied fields.” Before the summer’s end General Arnold finally set up strong operational control over his air communications, borrowing another of Signal Corps’ too few officers, Colonel Rives, to assist General McClelland in this task.106 The new Signal Corps chief, General Ingles, would do some reorganizing too, touching supply and development. But he and his Corps remained hampered as to control over the operation of Army communications.
The sole high-level coordinating and controlling agencies remained the communications boards. How important their services were General Ingles realized as soon as he took informal command of the Signal Corps in mid-June. Within the first week of his new responsibility he corresponded with General Somervell on the subject. Lt. Gen. Joseph McNarney, Deputy Chief of Staff, had been annoyed at the slow inefficiency of the boards in getting important signal tasks accomplished. Somervell was similarly dissatisfied and believed further that the boards occupied the time of far too many officers and committees. “It is reported that there are some 40 or 45 of these [committees and subcommittees], and of course this number is entirely too many to handle business promptly,” Somervell wrote to Ingles. He added, “It is also reported that there are some 245 officers engaged on the work of the boards. The speed with which the job has been done has been far below what is necessary.”107
Ingles answered with vigor on 25 June. McNarney and Somervell had been misinformed. Total membership was 143 officers and 22 civilians. The Combined Communications Board had 23 committees and 6 subcommittees. The same men and the same committees served in the Joint Communications Board also. Their work was part-time only, performed by men who were informed specialists in their fields: radar, frequency allocation, Countermeasures, identification, codes and ciphers, and so on. They performed essential tasks and they could not be eliminated, or even much reduced. “In my opinion,” Ingles declared, “none of these Boards can be discontinued.” He made one exception, the Army Communications Board. And it could be eliminated, he added, on only one condition, namely, that the Chief Signal Officer inherit all the board’s duties. General Ingles recommended “that the Chief Signal Officer be charged with the mission of coordinating communication procedure throughout the Army of the United States, that the Army Ground Forces and the Army Air Forces be so advised by authority of the Chief of Staff, and that the Army Communications Board be then discontinued.” Though Ingles was not urging that he be moved out from under the Army Service Forces to the General Staff in order to receive these powers, he was asking for the substance of Olmstead’s goal.108
General Somervell approved General Ingles’ recommendation and passed it on to General McNarney. But beyond and above the ASF stood other obstacles—General Marshall’s policies and General Arnold and his Air Forces ambitions. Ingles, in asking to be allowed to coordinate and standardize Army communication procedure throughout the Army had specified that he have authority in these matters over the AAF. This apparently presented a situation which the AAF, or more specifically its chief, did not want to entertain. In any event, General McNarney, himself an Air officer, shelved the entire proposition laconically with words that have crushed many a high hope: “No action, file.”109