Chapter 14: Equipment: The Laboratories—AAF Items and Their Transfer
By the mid-point of World War II the pressure of immediate needs, especially for the forthcoming invasion of Europe, rendered academic in the several laboratories of the Signal Corps any question as to which—the immediate present or the more distant future—should receive the greater stress. In the Signal Corps, as everywhere else in the Army, research temporarily had to give way to a heavy program of practical assistance in readying equipment for the invasion of Normandy in 1944.1
The laboratory workers were needed to help maintain and improve the operation of the equipment that was already in, or on the way to, the field, and they could help in many ways. Lists of maintenance parts and procedures had to be compiled; modification kits must be engineered; some engineers and scientists were needed in the field to help troops use their equipment to its full potential—members of the laboratories went as members of teams whose function it was to introduce new equipment in oversea commands.2
Early in 1944 Dr. Maurice E. Strieby, a scientist consultant and adviser in the office of the Secretary of War, reported a significant observation after a field trip—enough research had already been done. His reactions were echoed by various Signal Corps people. Dr. Lynne C. Smeby, acting chief of the OCSigO’s Office of Operational Research, wrote on 27 May 1944, “the peak development point for this war was reached several months ago.” Army communications would be entirely adequate, Dr. Smeby thought, “if we could have full effective use of the equipment we now have in the field and of the equipment in immediate production.”3 The Chief Signal Officer agreed. Army’s signaling devices, General Ingles noted in June 1944, “are now far ahead of training and they are changed with such rapidity that the personnel never reaches a stage
of training which permits the development of more than 50% of the capabilities of the equipment.” He added, “All development laboratories under my control are now directed entirely towards the improvement of existing equipment.”4
Cutbacks in Laboratory Personnel and Projects
In war, as in every other human activity, there are contradictions and dilemmas. In laboratory work, for example, the question was whether to put money, material, and men into further longrange development, lack of which might at some later date prove crucial, or to use them on short-range projects that would affect the invasion effort. In 1943 there could be no doubt where the most manpower had to be expended. So pressing was the need to provide the invasion forces with massive manpower that personnel cuts applied even to the laboratories. In Signal Corps laboratories these reductions in the mid-course of the war cut deep, postponing basic research and considerably jolting much of the development progress. Necessity reduced, narrowed, and straightened the war programs. There were not enough materials or enough of that most vital resource—men. Men had to be taken from one task and shifted into another. The nation’s leaders were all engaged in a jealous attempt to make ends meet. Much had to be taken from whatever was believed to be less important and reassigned to whatever was judged to be most urgent.
The ASF commander, General Somervell, charged with the Army’s biggest bookkeeping job, found himself obliged to curtail many research and development projects. He directed the technical services to determine the details of the lab reductions, reductions that the Army knew might be penny-wise and pound-foolish in an era of technological warfare. The Allied margin of technological superiority in World War II did in fact turn out to be uncomfortably narrow.5
General Ingles, receiving the ASF instructions soon after he took control of the Signal Corps, passed the reduction order on to General Colton, upon whom devolved the difficult task of
reviewing the laboratory projects in order to decide which would be canceled. Each project, no matter how long or how short a time it had been in the laboratories, no matter how broad or how detailed or how secret, came up for examination. Each was tested by two questions: Would its cancellation release critical materials to other projects still more vital? Would its cancellation tend to shorten the war and to lower the casualty lists? There was some leeway. If a project failed to meet either of these criteria, yet sought to forestall some technological advance of the enemy, the operation remained. And if a test had been going on so long that to bring it to an end would be economically unsound, work continued.
The order sounded drastic. Strictly applied, it would have been, but various circumstances helped to cushion the blow. The Army Air Forces, for example, eager to get projects begun by the Signal Corps for the AAF, did take over many. Expansion plans of the AAF benefited from the Signal Corps cut.6 Again, while a few installations (notably the Toms River Signal Laboratory) were closed out, administrators found ways to reassign some of the people concerned rather than cut all from the lists. Officers were moved about. All together 3,800 civilians were dropped. A total of 90 projects were canceled, but 31 of them had in fact been completed. The total cut in projects seems to have been about 17 percent, heavy but not drastic. Several projects were transferred to the Navy, for example the magnetic airborne detector and the sonic radio buoy for detecting submarines.7
Probably the cut was made as efficiently as possible in work that cried for more engineers, and more competent ones, if Signal Corps laboratories were to equal the standards of civilian laboratories or of the naval research establishments.8 Perhaps it was not expected that the various laboratories should be equal in view of the policy that the Signal Corps should look outside the Army for advance theory and application.
The effect of the cuts may even have been beneficial to some degree. In the
case of the Camp Coles Signal Laboratory, according to one subsequent comment, the personnel build-up in the 1941-43 period had been too rapid, and many people of little ability had been hired. The 1943 layoff, while somewhat reducing the laboratory output, also pruned away much of the dead wood and led to a better, more responsive organization of experienced workers.9
The same was true in the Camp Evans Signal Laboratory, recalled Dr. Harold A. Zahl, Director of Research in the U.S. Army Signal R&D Lab, years later. “Early policy directives,” Zahl commented, speaking of the first months of the war, “did not lean toward making the labs better as much as to ... making them bigger. ... We didn’t ask for all these trainees in the first place,” he recalled, “but it was understood that we had to take them ... [otherwise] Selective Service would eventually take every able-bodied scientifically-trained man, on whom almost our entire program then hinged.”
Then, after much time was spent training the unskilled workers, many were released in 1943. Dr. Zahl compared the Army’s R&D personnel policy with the one enjoyed by the OSRD Radiation Laboratory and Radio Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Had we only been able to hire moderately,” Zahl lamented, “and with some selection and then followed the same draft deferment policy under which the OSRD worked, we would not have had much of a scientific manpower problem in the laboratories.”10
The directors of the several labs in the Fort Monmouth area tried to handle the imposed cuts and still maintain acceptable efficiency by purging wisely both the work force and the projects themselves. Some projects were cut back part of the way in some areas, and not at all in others. The directors continued work on about half of the air navigation projects and on all but one of the air communications projects; nearly half in ground radar and almost all in airborne radar; almost everything in wire communications, in radio direction finding, and in power and testing equipment. They made deep reductions only in sound and light and meteorological projects. Operations were continued until completion of the service tests of the item of equipment being devised, or until the item became standardized; and usually they went on until the first production model had been accepted. All together, 234 projects continued. The biggest cuts in personnel took place at the Camp Evans, Eatontown, and Fort Monmouth Laboratories. Evans closed its subordinate areas in New Jersey—at Fort Hancock, Twinlights, and Rumson. But its station at Clermont, Florida, where ground radar equipment was undergoing field testing, was enlarged. Many of the civilians who had been working in optics, acoustics, sound ranging, and meteorology at Eatontown were dismissed. The Toms River installation shut its doors. So did the Bethlehem and Detroit Field
Stations. Many employees transferred to the Signal Corps Ground Signal Agency at Fort Monmouth, along with the work of investigation into methods of suppressing radio interference.
General Ingles, however he may have felt about reduction in research efforts, unquestioningly acknowledged the frowns of higher authority on new equipment developments. “I am in complete concurrence with Mr. Strieby’s observation relative to the development of new equipments,” Ingles said in mid-1944, adding that Dr. O. E. Buckley and other communications experts had argued the same view, namely that further developments be eliminated.11
As a consequence, the laboratory organization achieved a certain symmetry, the agencies dividing and lining up behind either air signal or ground signal work. Wright Field at Dayton became the focus for the former, and the Fort Monmouth area for the latter. As constituted for the rest of 1943 and until the middle of October 1944, when the Air Forces took it over, the Signal Corps Aircraft Signal Agency contained such units as the ARL, the Aircraft Radio Maintenance Division, and the field laboratories at Indianapolis and at Boca Raton and Eglin Field, Florida. The Signal Corps Ground Signal Agency was composed of a number of laboratories—Evans, Eatontown, and Fort Monmouth—all located in a series of New Jersey towns near the main Signal Corps post of Fort Monmouth. A Ground Signal Maintenance Division was also included.12
Equipment Problems
Military R&D by Government vs. Private Institutions
Another question touching Signal Corps laboratory activity—how much research should the Corps itself conduct in addition to its testing and engineering obligations, and how far should it depend upon private institutions and industrial facilities—also became academic in mid-1943. Before the war there had been research-minded men in the laboratories, notably those who first developed Army radar, officers such as Colonel Blair and General Colton, at a time when there was no radar research to speak of outside the military. Army officers and civilian scientists in the Fort Monmouth laboratories undertook R&D on radar tubes, for example, when they set up the Thermionics Section late in the 1930’s. Prewar private industry knew little of such tubes and would not attempt to manufacture them. Military research and development of this sort was unusual.
General Ingles, a few months after he became the Chief Signal Officer, reaffirmed the circumscribed laboratory program that the Army had been accustomed to pursue. Indeed the Congress and industry generally would permit no variations until the strange new world of military and governmental science during World War II began to alter the nation’s attitudes in these matters. In October 1943 General Ingles wrote:
It has long been the policy of the Signal Corps to do development work on new
equipment by contract with civilian laboratories where one could be found which had the proper facilities. In my opinion this practice is sound and should be continued. Our own laboratories are principally engaged in testing equipment, in preparing technical specifications and in furnishing an engineering service for Signal Corps activities. Recent contracts we have made for research and development in new pieces of equipment have been in furtherance of a policy of long standing and have not been done with a view to personnel requirements. It has also been the Signal Corps policy for many years not to go into the manufacturing business but to procure the equipment on contract from industry built in accordance with specifications that we prescribe. There has been no extension of this practice because of recent personnel cuts.13
Other government laboratories in electronics and communications work entered the scene with a deeper feeling for basic research under pressure for new development, principally that required by the AAF. The requirements were not only pressuring the Signal Corps, whose AAF equipment added up to half of its total supply task, they also taxed the facilities of two great OSRD laboratories at Cambridge. There were no cuts in those civilian laboratories in mid-1943. They lay totally outside the military domain though they existed solely to serve it, and in general accomplished their purpose better under civilian control than they could have under the circumscribed conditions of military supervision in the World War II era. At the war’s end, as the Cambridge laboratories closed out, Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth continued to look to private institutions, such as university research establishments. “The present laboratory policy of entering into contracts with capable scholastic organizations is a step in the right direction,” Lt. Col. John J. Slattery stated in November 1945.14
Emphasis vs. De-emphasis of New Military Applications
The urgent demand for more soldiers in mid-1943 not only compelled the cuts in electronic laboratories but also lent emphasis to the opinion of many Army officers that electronic applications and gadgetry were running a bit wild, so wild that they dangerously complicated supply as well as personnel problems. Electronic equipment consumed too many materials and too many manhours. Yet when this very objection had been raised by Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson in 1942 and the Signal Corps had obligingly proposed a reduction in AAF radio types, the AAF had responded most emphatically that not fewer but more types must be supplied.15 The matter at issue did not rest there.
The question arose again in mid-1943. General Ingles wrote General Clay, Director of Materiel in ASF:
I can have a study made of the amount of radio equipment now authorized for units and submit the same to you. ... [but] I
do not desire to enter into a controversy with the AGF and AAF on the subject as I haven’t the time at present to combat the uproar that will arise if an outside agency suggests that they are using far too much radio.
There is no doubt that the amount of radio equipment has been at least somewhat increased by the salesmanship efforts of Signal Corps and other radio enthusiastic personnel, particularly by the Army Communications Board and the “expert consultants” headed by Dr. Bowles directly under the Secretary of War. I have taken steps to put a stop to the salesmanship efforts of the Army Communications Board and have discussed the situation with Dr. Bowles and he has agreed to cease his own and the efforts of those under him in the direction of selling the Army radar equipment that they never thought of themselves.16
General Clay agreed with Ingles’ views and replied: “we are prepared to support you to the full in this effort.” Clay urged Ingles to discuss the problem with “the Ground and Air Forces with a view to obtaining their concurrence in the reduction of the number of types as well as in the reduction of quantities.”17 Obviously the exigencies of supply took precedence over research and development. And though such experts as Dr. Bowles and Dr. Strieby and their associates were specifically employed in Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson’s office to analyze the needs of the Army and to recommend new applications and solutions, here was a countertrend seeking to cancel the purpose for which these scientists were employed. All in all, a good illustration was furnished of the conflicting viewpoints of supply on the one hand and of research and development on the other.
Improved Equipment vs. Better Training
Conflict also developed between R&D and training. As noted, General Ingles agreed with Dr. Strieby that the urgent need in 1944 was not better equipment but was how to enable troops in the field to use better the equipment they already had, how to train the users well enough to get more than 50 percent of the capabilities of, for example, the radar sets in the field. Yet it would be unfortunate if supply and training difficulties should lead the Army to suppress really significant new research and development advances. Something like this occurred in mid-1944, in the case of the GL radar SCR-584.
The SCR-584, after its first dramatic appearance in the field at Anzio early in 1944, rapidly proved its effectiveness in many ways other than in its intended function as a gun layer. It could detect targets on the ground such as distant bridges or armor concentrations and could direct air attacks against them, even in darkness. The radar operators, using radiotelephone, could direct an airplane over a ground target up to ten miles away with great precision.18 General Bradley instructed General Quesada, commander of the IX Tactical Air Command, to so use the SCR-584 in ETO by mid-1944. Obviously, the radar could greatly help the ground forces too,
since its potential indicated a method whereby moving enemy equipment might be detected at night. It indicated a breakthrough in the difficult field of how to use radar in ground fighting. This seemed too important to overlook.
Dr. Bowles in Secretary Stimson’s office did not overlook the matter. In fact he staged a demonstration of the SCR-584 at the River Entrance of the Pentagon Building. He set up the radar, a plotting board for controlling and positioning airplanes in flight, and proceeded on 12 and 13 July 1944 to demonstrate to high-ranking officers in the headquarters just what could be accomplished. Lt. Gen. Ben Lear, recently appointed Commanding General, Army Ground Forces, was among those who were impressed. But there was a block to such new AGF developments—the training problem. In his own account of the matter, Bowles recorded that he
... had on several occasions in the past attempted to arouse in the Ground Force Headquarters a greater interest in the application of radar and related devices, ... had found them rather completely preoccupied with matters relating to the routine training and equipping of ground troops. Although it is hardly fair to criticize them for this attitude, in view of the magnitude of the job with which they were confronted and the superb way in which they met and dealt with it, it is reasonable to say that they had neglected many of the new weapons created during the war.19
The Chief of Staff, General Marshall, a month after the 584 demonstrations, wrote Dr. Bowles that it was most important at that date to find ways to interdict enemy movements of supplies, armor, and men. He hoped radar techniques, something like aircraft control methods, might be developed “which would permit us to detect ground objectives such as motor transport and tank columns and, if possible, concentrations of armor and supplies. ... “ After the demonstrations, Bowles wrote General Ingles, “I believe this will do much to stabilize thinking and effort both within the Army and outside on the development and adaptation of equipment and techniques for close support.” But the reaction of the Chief Signal Officer was restrained, in accord with sentiments he had expressed earlier in 1944, namely that technical experts were putting too many ideas in the heads of troops and that the greater need was for better trained troops who could use well the equipment they already had. General Ingles replied to Bowles on 11 August:
At present the training of the operating and maintenance personnel is far behind the capabilities of the equipment we now have in use. This problem is not solved by sending small groups of experts to the theaters ... unless we adequately train the military personnel who are to operate the equipment in combat, we will never carry out the Chief of Staff’s desires in the matter no matter how much equipment we develop.20
Despite these counterefforts and trends, continuation of research and development in general won out. This was well, hindsight indicates. Highly advanced and specialized electronic Countermeasures greatly aided the
Normandy invasion. By deceiving the enemy into holding large forces in the Cap de Calais area for weeks after the real invasion had begun to the south, the Allies through countermeasure deception unquestionably saved themselves thousands of casualties. New electronic developments and applications promoted by Dr. Bowles and other scientists blunted German buzz bomb attacks and made possible blind bombing by radar techniques, employing such radars as the SCR-584 on the ground and the superlative airborne BTO (bombing through overcast) sets with which B-29’s over Japan were weakening the enemy’s resistance before atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.21
Lab Cutbacks vs. Crash Production for the AAF
The 1943 project and personnel cuts in Signal Corps laboratories did hurt the Corps’ ability to provide research and development services to the Army. When early in 1944 General Somervell asked the Chief Signal Officer to report on his problems, the one universal complaint voiced by all General Ingles’ research and development sections related to the consequence of the 1943 personnel reduction.22
The AAF was also vocal on this score. Because aviation electronic development (as well as that of the rest of the Army) was set back by the personnel reductions, the airmen could cite an obvious reason in support of their plaint that Signal Corps research and development of aviation equipment was unsatisfactory. They could point out that the chronic insufficiency of scientists and engineers engaged on AAF projects had been further aggravated by the laboratory cuts of 1943. This argument no doubt had a bearing on the transfer in 1944 of aircraft electronics from Signal Corps to the Air Forces.
Another factor in the transfer developed in mid-course of the war, a consequence of an urgent requirement, costly in manpower, which came upon the laboratories in the second half of 1943. Crash production, that is the construction of special equipment on sudden demand, provided the impetus.23 The need for crash production, and the difficulty it entailed, at once became a bone of contention between the Signal Corps and the AAF.
For example, early in August 1943, the Air Forces asked the Chief Signal Officer to produce at once two dark trace consoles for experimental use with the MEW radar under test at AAF School of Applied Tactics. When the Signal Corps, replying, asked for a formal development requirement and request for two service test units—the prescribed routine—Air Forces answered, in effect: “No. We’re in a hurry. We want two lab-built models and forget the red tape. ...” The Signal Corps radar laboratory at Camp Evans replied that it could not hand-build two models. Director Paul E. Watson stated he was “unable to undertake the construction of the two subject
equipments, due to reduction of personnel.”24
The Aircraft Radio Laboratory serving the AAF at Wright Field also suffered for the want of men. “The recent reduction of ARL personnel makes it imperative that the efforts of this laboratory be expended only on those items which have the highest priority,” urged the commander of the 1st Proving Ground Electronics Unit of Eglin Field, Florida, where RCM equipment was put to test and where everyone had in mind the dire needs of the Eighth Air Force against the devastating German flak so accurately directed by enemy GCI and GL radars. Jammers were needed immediately, and in some quantity.25
The only way emergency items of equipment such as electronic transmitters to jam radars could be obtained quickly was to adopt the British practice of hand-building them. The Americans did so, successfully at the civilian Radiation Laboratory (in its Research Construction Company), less successfully in Army laboratories. Under AAF pressure the Signal Corps in late 1943 prepared a crash procurement procedure for RCM equipment, with representatives of AAF, ASF, the Navy, and the NDRC participating.26 The plan was to handle “a limited number of truly urgently needed RCM equipments” in quantities not exceeding 100 sets or a value of $1,000,000. To cut corners and gain speed, the planners assigned operations to ARL and the Dayton Signal Corps Procurement District and Depot. General Ingles submitted the plan to the AAF on 3 January 1944. Three days later General McClelland replied, concurring with this crash procedure “in its entirety.” He added: “It is hoped that you will adopt this procedure at the earliest practicable date.” Accordingly, on 10 January General Ingles authorized the procedure, and ARL put it into operation by March.27
The plan did not prove very effective, possibly in part because of insufficient personnel at the ARL. Dr. Bowles noted that as of 15 April 1944 only three items had been procured by this effort by the Army to crash-produce Air Forces equipment. In his opinion, “the results to this date are not encouraging.”28
So far were the laboratories of the Signal Corps from being able to build single sets of experimental equipment (after the manner in which they had once built the first SCR-268 and 270 radars), that the Air Forces ceased looking to the Signal Corps, even for modifications in these basic radars. For example, General McClelland early in
1944 heard of urgent complaints that Air Forces SCR-268’s in Mediterranean areas were being badly jammed by the enemy. Instead of looking to the Signal Corps for relief, he wrote directly to Dr. Terman, Director of RRL:
I understand that you have had your people working on possible “palliatives” for this radar set. Will you please inform us on the state of your study, and present outlook for a simple adaptor which will do some good? I would, also, like an estimate of what can be done on a “crash” basis in your laboratory to obtain a few sets of adaptors. ... I consider this study to have a very high priority. Please let me hear from you soon since I would like to cable General [Maj. Gen. Ira C.] Eaker to inform him of possible corrective measures. I will, at that time, initiate appropriate action through the Signal Corps.29
Thus the Signal Corps appears to have played second fiddle in Air Forces electronic matters during the crucial months of late 1943 and early 1944 just when maximum effort was needed for the supreme effort against fortress Europe. To a considerable degree the Signal laboratories were prevented from meeting all needs. For example, Ingles’ crash procurement program could not succeed without men to implement it. The Signals Liaison Office in the Air Ministry, London, pressing for countermeasures equipment early in 1944, urged that the Signal Corps expand its facilities and build “experimental models for operational use,” but this was asking the impossible.30 For the Corps’ laboratories, far from expanding, had been cut down. The ARL was still losing men as of May 1944; yet its workload was increasing. Air Forces officers tended to blame the Signal Corps “which controls the quantity of personnel at the Aircraft Radio Laboratory.” Col. George C. Hale, communications equipment officer in the Air Communications Office, stated the matter on 16 May 1944 as follows:
It might be pointed out at this time that the Aircraft Radio Laboratory has on its books more mock-up and installation work than ever before and is seriously being handicapped by having its quota of personnel, which is not now adequate to perform all the work which they have, cut down even more by directives from the Office of the Chief Signal Officer which controls the quantity of personnel at the Aircraft Radio Laboratory. This situation is growing more serious every day since the draft is also pulling men from Aircraft Radio Laboratory who are vitally needed.31
Transfer of Communications Equipment Responsibilities to the AAF
In 1944 the Army transferred to the Air Forces all air electronics activity along with the Signal Corps installations and personnel that had so long served the AAF.
A Look Backward
A first long step toward the transfer had been taken in March 1942, with
the reorganization of the Army. At that time, the Air Forces received control of many of the supply and service functions that ASF provided to the rest of the Army. The AAF set up its own Materiel Command and acquired many medical, quartermaster, and other services. Thus, certain AAF services, such as photography and training films, medical and hospital service in continental United States, storage and issue of common supplies, supply of air stations, and so on, duplicated the services to the rest of the Army, services that for the rest of the Army were gathered up after March 1942 in the ASF (SOS). The AAF considered that it had to have independent control over all items it deemed “peculiar” to its activity.32
From the reorganization of 1942 on, the AAF asserted that its radio and radar, especially airborne types, were “peculiar” to the Air Forces and that AAF ought to have complete control of the items. General Code, the Deputy Chief Signal Officer, led the opposition to this view, and General Somervell backed him up. Code summed up the matter years later, as follows:
Immediately after the War Department reorganization at the beginning of World War II the Air Corps were given the procurement, research, and development of all items peculiar to the Air Force, General Arnold sent for me and requested that I arrange for such transfer at once. I demurred as General Olmstead was away in Panama. General Arnold was kind enough to suggest that we select an arbitrator before whom we would meet the next morning to present our cases. General Arnold was represented by General [B.] Meyers ... and [Col. Alfred W.] Marriner and other staff officers. The Signal Corps was represented by Colton, Rives, Meade, and myself. We listened from 9 to 12 to the Air Corps present to General Somervell (his first day on the job) their reasons why the Signal Corps should turn over to them everything we were doing for the Air Corps. We adjourned for lunch and Colton said we were licked and was reluctant to return with us. I felt that such a move as the Air Force was suggesting would sabotage the war effort, so Meade and I conferred and when General Somervell asked what the Signal Corps had to say I spoke up and said, “I thought radio was radio whether under, upon or over the land or sea and could not be peculiar to the Air Corps.” Somervell took a long time just looking at us and then said he agreed and everything would stay in the “status quo.”33
Thus AAF effort in early 1942 to get control of its signal equipment failed. The Chief Signal Officer, at that time General Olmstead, put his finger on the real question involved, whether or not the AAF was to remain a part of the Army. Since in 1942 it did remain in the
Army, the AAF had to look to those best qualified in the Army to provide signals. Obviously the qualification lay with the Signal Corps and would continue therein unless or until the AAF acquired qualified men (as it steadily did). The entire communications problem boiled down to cooperation and the Signal Corps won its point for the moment.34
For two more years the Signal Corps retained research and development, procurement, storage, and distribution of wire, radio, and radar required by the AAF. But friction remained frequent, particularly in interpretation of what items were “peculiar to the Air Forces.” Again and again, the Air Forces claimed the right to take over activities that it felt were peculiarly its own in order to insure the success of the AAF mission. The Secretary of War himself had coined the phrase, according to Lt. Gen. Joseph L. McNarney, Deputy Chief of Staff, and the Secretary intended it to mean, McNarney believed, those items of equipment that the Air Forces had previously been accustomed to procure—aircraft, their motors, airframes, and so on.35
On the other hand, Col. Alfred W. Marriner (General Arnold’s communications director) had no doubt that the phrase must include airborne electronic gear. “The existing division of responsibility,” Marriner wrote in March 1942, “for the development, procurement, supply, maintenance and operation of communications and related radar equipment peculiar to the Army Air Forces, which has proven completely illogical and unworkable, is one of the serious faults in the organization of the Army. This experience has definitely shown that the Signal Corps ... has been wholly unsatisfactory, with disastrous effects upon the efficient functioning of the Air Corps.”36
Despite Marriner’s charges, Signal Corps-AAF relations were not “unworkable.” Cooperation was not “disastrous.” In fact, the radio and radar of the U.S. Army Air Forces ranked among the world’s best. However, at AAF headquarters in Washington experience in communications was weak, particularly up to 1944. Marriner’s office had often been shuffled about in AAF headquarters reorganizations, two moves in 1943 alone. After the first of these 1943 shifts Marriner’s office was elevated in the hope that more could be accomplished thereby, as General McClelland, the Deputy Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Operations, Commitments, and Requirements, wrote hopefully:
... the inability of the Army, probably through the divided authority that exists between the Army Air Forces, the Signal Corps, and the Aircraft Radio Laboratory to come to decisions on development and production, is extremely embarrassing and certainly discouraging. I believe that there is a lot that you can do in your new position to improve the situation
immeasurably. In fact, I think that this is one of your foremost responsibilities.37
Communications experience and knowledge in AAF headquarters were increasing, but they still remained insufficient in an activity as dependent upon electronics as air operation was becoming. Both the Signal Corps and Dr. Bowles had complained of the insufficiency, and by the autumn of 1943 General Arnold reorganized his electronics activity, elevating it another notch. He replaced the Communications Division with an Office of Air Communication in the Air Staff, and replaced Marriner with General McClelland, an air communications officer who knew his subject well.38 The airmen would listen to McClelland because he was a pilot. Even General McClelland needed bolstering by a competent and experienced Signal Corps man, who might not be a pilot but who would be especially skilled in electronics development and communications activities. To this end, General Arnold sought and obtained from the Signal Corps one of its ablest officers, Colonel Rives, who had worked closely with air electronics since the early 1930’s. Rives became McClelland’s strong deputy, though he remained a Signal Corps officer until late 1945. Dr. Bowles, who promoted Rives’s assignment, subsequently asserted that he was not being partial to the AAF. “They fell over their own feet, too,” he reminisced.39 Air Forces desperately needed all the communications help obtainable at a time when air applications of radio and radar were far outpacing ground forces needs (ground communications—electronic applications would begin to step up more at the end of the war and especially in postwar years).
While Signal Corps officers and men were first working for, and then transferring to the AAF both in the headquarters and in such field activities as the Aircraft Warning Service and the Army Airways Communications Service, there were points of contact where relations became a chaffing, and the chaffing occasionally rubbed raw—for example, in the maintenance of ground radar sets, and again, in the matter of installing and maintaining stations for the AACS.
AACS and PEA
Throughout 1942 the building of radio, beacon, and direction-finding
facilities for Army airway stations over the world generated troubles. Sometimes the Signal Corps, upon whom the responsibility rested by War Department regulations, did the work. More often AACS men themselves put up the stations, using whatever equipment they could scrape together. This was an emergency improvisation. Late in the year, after much conferring and negotiation, the Signal Corps was confirmed in its responsibility. To accomplish it better the Chief Signal officer organized the Plant Engineering Agency and a Signal Airways Service (SAS), complete with dozens of teams whose sole job it was to install AACS facilities wherever they were needed throughout the world.40
The labors of the PEA and SAS teams provided essential support for the AACS. Relations had to be cooperative since the Signal Corps men came under one command, the AACS operators under another. Signal Corps control over installation teams centered in a few bases and sector headquarters such as Philadelphia, Miami, and San Francisco, which lay hundreds and thousands of miles from the actual sites of field station installations. It is not surprising that station engineering plans drawn up in the continental headquarters did not always correspond with conditions in the faraway sites. Naturally, troubles ensued. As a result, in the Near East the AACS wanted responsible SAS officers on the spot, at least as near as Cairo, so that the airmen would not have to deal with Signal Corps officials in distant Miami. Similarly in the South Pacific, complaints arose that the island installations ought to be engineered in the area of operations and not in San Francisco. In Africa AACS men often had to put up their own equipment clumsily because the channels for getting SAS teams worked impossibly slow. Often AAF tactical needs were sudden and could not wait for the slow process through channels. Theater Air Forces commanders, suddenly needing AACS stations, ordered them to be completed on early deadlines. Also, as tactical air units advanced, the AACS stations serving them had to move forward without awaiting Signal Corps assistance.41
The problem of getting supplies and maintenance parts was a most discouraging aspect of Signal Corps-AACS relations. It loomed especially dark in the far Pacific. Possibly the need to supply the relatively small but highly specialized requirements of the Airways Communication Service tended to be overlooked because of the extreme pressure ASF put upon the Signal Corps to supply the rest of the Army (at least so it seemed to the AAF). Annalists of the 7th AACS Wing in the Pacific noted that AACS had no authority to supply its own technical equipment independent of the Signal Corps. Officers of the 71st AACS Group complained bitterly that they had no clear-cut authoritative channel for getting signal maintenance supplies.
Directives did assign the storage and issue of AACS equipment to the 905th Signal Company in the South Pacific, but that company did not procure the equipment, the AACS charged. AACS charged further that the men of the 905th had no knowledge of the special fixed communications and air navigational equipment AACS required. The communications service hoped it could perhaps obtain what it needed directly from the SAS, but on trying, the AACS men found their hopes dashed. The Signal Airways Service was not designed to provide such service. General Stoner, chief of the Army Communications Service, admitted as much in November 1943 saying, “the creation of the Signal Airways Service did not contemplate the assumption of all maintenance associated with AACS equipment.”42
This, the 71st AACS Group discovered when a requisition on SAS-PEA for sorely needed supplies came back seventy-six days later without comment, without indorsement, without action. When the frantic airmen sought action through the Services of Supply in the area, the local SOS authorities ruled their channel of supply improper. Finally, the 71st succeeded in getting AACS equipment directly from the Signal Depot in Hawaii, Colonel Powell, Signal Officer, U.S. Army Forces Pacific Ocean Areas, coming to the rescue. The 70th AACS Group annals likewise record thanks to Colonel Powell for improvised supply assistance. All the AACS supply frustrations in the Pacific came to a head early in 1944 when half a million pounds of signal equipment was transferred from Noumea to Guadalcanal and carelessly dumped, like so much lumber, on the beach in a pile thirty feet high. Heavy power generators on top crushed delicate radios and teletypewriters at the bottom, and most of the equipment was damaged or ruined.43
Amid these and other signal supply troubles, AACS men in the Pacific (and elsewhere too) continued to store, issue, and even install equipment as best they could. When at last signal equipment responsibilities were taken over from the Signal Corps, the AAF acquired the facilities it desired.44
Of the many essential services for the AACS that the Signal Corps did perform, one in particular the airmen thoroughly appreciated—the provision of radioteletypewriter facilities. Overtaxed communicators had worked frantically in AACS message centers and cryptographic rooms during the first two years of the war literally hand coding and hand keying increasingly heavy traffic loads. Beginning in 1943 Signal Corps men began installing radioteletypewriter service, which “saved the day,” in the words of one AACS chronicler.45 Teams working out of PEA as units of SAS began installations along the southeast airways in Central and South America. One of the first circuits went into
service in May 1943 between Miami and Borinquen Field, Puerto Rico. Another followed on 11 June between New Orleans and Albrook Field in the Canal Zone. Thereafter, the net spread along the island and coastal airfields of the Caribbean to the bulge of Brazil and thence to Ascension Island and Africa.46
In the North Atlantic area, Signal Corps men began in October 1943 to make radioteletypewriter installations linking Presque Isle in Maine with Gander and Goose Bay in Labrador, Narsarssuak in Greenland, Keflavik in Iceland, and Prestwick in Scotland. By 1944 AACS radioteletype circuits were installed from the United States across the Pacific to the China-Burma-India theater, especially to provide General Arnold in Washington with direct control over the fleets of heavy bombers he was readying for assaults on Japan. This was the first effort of a commander chaired in Washington to direct personally tactical operations in an overseas theater using the capabilities of the rapid, secure communications that the radioteletypewriter and accompanying teletype conference (telecon) system made possible.47
The communications had to be completely secure from enemy radio eavesdropping. And in that security lay another Signal Corps service the AACS, along with all other Army communicators, appreciated—the provision of automatic cipher machines. Even in the Southwest Pacific areas, the supply of cipher machines was good, markedly so on Biak, at Hollandia, and on Los Negros. The 68th AACS Group commented that the program introducing these efficient machines “progressed by leaps and bounds,” and eliminated the tedious work of enciphering heavy loads of traffic by hand on the M-209 Haglin cipher cylinder box and on the hated “washboards” of the strip cipher systems. Writing in October 1944, the historian of the 68th AACS Group recorded: “The cooperation and expeditious handling by higher headquarters of the request for the above equipment made it possible to procure and install the equipment in record-breaking time.”48
So much for some of the troubles and successes in Signal Corps-AAF relations in matters over which the Signal Corps possessed control under War Department regulations. This control, as it touched upon provision of supplies and of maintenance parts, was obviously not good in some sectors of the globe. Yet myriads of Army aircraft navigated, or as some would put it, “avigated,” along world-circling airways in notable safety. That safety attests to over-all success of the combined AACS-Signal Corps effort. The venture was cooperative, just as was Signal Corps labor for the Ground Forces. Despite the bickering, the effort succeeded. “Communications generally are functioning quite well,” reported a War Department expert consultant after a theater survey trip in the spring of 1944. “The South Atlantic route is definitely good,” he added.49
Problems of Ground Radar Installation, Maintenance, and Spare Parts
Another area wherein Signal Corps supply for the Air Forces suffered sharp attack concerned radar maintenance. The maintenance itself was no longer a Signal Corps chore. It had been, since late 1942, a responsibility of the Air Forces, specifically of the Air Service Command, but the Air Service Command received radar supplies and maintenance parts from Signal Corps procurement and depot activities, and that was the friction point.
It was one thing to develop and produce radar sets. It was quite another to maintain them—to keep them operating smoothly and continuously—in the field. The growing pains of radar harassed all the Army during the middle years of the war, and complaints continued to lash the Signal Corps, though the Corps had been stripped of its installation and maintenance obligations in ground radar since December 1942 when the ASC acquired these responsibilities. The ASC was even responsible for such coastal defense sets as SCR’s-296, 582, and 682, which would seem to be no concern of the AAF.50
The AAF had its troubles efficiently maintaining ground radars. For one thing, AAF complained that it was unable to obtain parts and maintenance spares from Signal Corps supply channels. In North Africa, for example, LW radar such as the SCR-602’s was badly needed but often inoperative for want of a tube or a power unit. Likewise, in Pacific theaters, officers reported that “the spare parts situation for all aircraft warning radar equipment is very unsatisfactory.” Search radars were often off the air for days awaiting parts.51 Meanwhile, the search areas lacked protection in locations where Japanese airplanes were strafing the Allies. Especially troublesome was the lack of spare fan belts and water pumps for the Le Roi power units employed with the SCR-270. Replacements were not to be had and the men had to use “every conceivable means of solving this problem.”
Within the United States, the maintenance situation touching radar was also bad throughout 1943. For example, at the Aircraft Warning Unit Training Center (AWUTC) at Drew Field, Florida, fifteen radar sets were at one time out of operation for lack of spare parts. Parts had been stripped from forty-nine new SCR-270’s that had arrived at the field for shipment overseas. Thus did the Chief of Air Staff, Maj. Gen. Barney M. Giles, draw up a bill of charges and hurl it at General Somervell in November 1943, saying “the spare parts situation is definitely critical ... action must be taken.”52
The Signal Corps, defending itself before General Somervell, rehearsed the
War Department letter of 26 December 1942, which had transferred to the Air Service Command the installation, maintenance, and supply responsibilities for all ground radar in overseas theaters.53 Signal Corps concern ended with the filling of ASC radar requisitions. A substantial percentage of these, more than 80 percent, had in fact been met, according to Brig. Gen. John H. Gardner, Assistant Chief of OCSigO’s P&D Service. Further, at the depots, “vigorous action is being taken,” Gardner wrote, “to supply all unfilled items for which stock is available.”54
A few weeks later Lt. Col. Haskell O. Allison, assistant adjutant general at ASC headquarters, Patterson Field, Ohio, commented that there had indeed been “a decided increase in recent shipments of material on back order from Lexington Signal Depot.” But such spurts of activity, Allison added, were hardly the solution to the long-standing problem of ground radar maintenance. The Air Forces believed that, first, the Signal Corps must increase its procurement; and, secondly, that the channels of supply must be improved. There should be “emergency procurement facilities and methods so as to get emergency parts out of the routine channels that have been established.” Colonel Allison illustrated how sluggish the flow of supplies through routine channels could be. “It is an actual fact,” he wrote, “that even today the spare parts for SCR-268 and SCR-270 equipments have not caught up with actual needs despite the fact that these sets have been used over two years.”55
As for the SCR-602 LW radar, Allison added, “the only source of spare parts (other than from cannibalization of equipments) is the group of one hundred ‘interim’ set spares.” These had been ordered at least as early as March 1943, but even by January 1944, he averred, “only 31 of these have been delivered, of which only three remain on hand.” In addition to the inadequate interim spare part kits, the ASC had requested in August 1943 fifty complete depot spare part groups for the SCR-602, but “to this date,” Allison complained, “not one group has been delivered nor can any definite information be obtained as to when any may be expected.” “It can be seen,” he concluded, “that the supply of maintenance parts for the world is at a dangerously low point and has been for some time.”56
Allison added similar charges
touching the SCR-588, saying that these sets had been in use for about a year and a half, but that not one depot spare parts group and not one complete ABC plan had been provided. There had been an interim XYZ plan, according to which the Signal Corps had sent a few parts but they were not enough. There was, incidentally, a story behind the lack of spares for the SCR-588. The set, like a number of other copies of British sets, was manufactured by a Canadian company, Research Enterprises Ltd. The company simply was not producing spares and refused to inform Signal Corps representatives of the status of production spares. Col. R. L. Hart, a Signal Corps production officer, recorded that whereas formerly production men in the plant had provided Signal Corps representatives with some information, even this source had been cut off since the manager of the radio division of the plant had ordered the production men not to talk. Colonel Hart reported that strenuous and repeated efforts had been made by the Monmouth Signal Corps Procurement District and by the resident Signal Corps officer at REL to discover the status of SCR-588 spare parts, but to the end of 1943, “none of these requests have produced satisfactory results.”57
General Arnold read the entire sheaf of papers that Colonel Allison had prepared and then handed it over to General Somervell on 8 March 1944. The AAF chief asked that “all possible pressure be brought to bear in the effort to relieve this critical spare part shortage at the earliest possible date.” Arnold added: “As will be seen, lack of same is seriously hampering the use of aircraft warning equipment in combat operations.” Not very expeditiously, the ASF passed the complaints on to the Signal Corps nearly three weeks later in a fifth indorsement dated 25 March. Colonel Gardner again answered, on 10 April. All means of expediting had been taken. Gardner itemized them: reorder points had been set up; the responsible depot had been instructed to place orders on the procurement district without processing in the routine manner through the Storage and Issue Agency; special technical sections had been enlarged both at the S&I Agency and at the Camp Evans Signal Laboratory in order to hurry identification and substitution; the processing of stock number assignments had been speeded; maintenance lists, ABC plan, had been distributed, and so on.58
The problem of Signal Corps supply of radar parts displeased the Ground Forces, whose commanding general expressed annoyance over the situation in mid-1943. Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair urged that: “supply, maintenance and repair of Ground Forces radar equipment be handled through the channels normally employed for other signal equipment and not through the medium of the Air Service Command.” His view was upheld in a conference with ASF and the Signal Corps on 27 July 1943. The conferees agreed that theater commanders should be free to organize the
arrangements overseas as they wished, but “radar installation, supply, maintenance and repair for Ground Forces units in the continental United States should be a concern only of the Ground and Service Forces as is the case with other signal equipment.”59 This view won out, leading to a War Department order in October 1943. Previous arrangements issued 26 December 1942, “and all conflicting instructions pertaining to this subject” were rescinded by a new plan announced on 11 October 1943. It assigned to the Chief Signal Officer the storage and issue of all ground radar equipment, whether Air or Ground Forces, together with fifth echelon (or depot) maintenance of all ground radar within the continental United States. Maintenance of AGF radar at the third and fourth echelon levels would fall to the ASF, that is, to the Signal Corps. Signal Corps would also acquire responsibility for ground radar maintenance overseas, at fifth echelon level. This new distribution of responsibilities was to be completed and in full force by 1 April 1944.60
This directive laid upon both the ASF and the Signal Corps component thereof a large responsibility, more especially upon the Signal Corps, whose officers now became embroiled in much correspondence with the Air and Ground Forces. A plan, then an organization, would have to take form to permit Signal Corps maintenance of all ground radars. General Ingles, General Colton (who headed Ingles’ Engineering and Technical Service), Col. William L. Bayer (who headed Colton’s Maintenance Branch), and many others thus had to learn the details of the numerous stateside radar maintenance arrangements so that they could draw up plans, arrange conferences, and finally take over the new job, together with Air Service Command facilities and personnel, by 1 April 1944. While General Colton asked the AAF on 28 October 1943 to provide him with summaries of their ground radars, repair shop facilities, tool and test equipment, and personnel, General Ingles and Colonel Bayer addressed similar requests “by direction of Somervell,” to each of the service commands within the United States.61 Within his own headquarters, Ingles apportioned the radar responsibilities handed him. To Colton he assigned technical data; to Harrison, the supervision of fifth echelon shops; to Matejka and the Personnel and Training Service, the matter of technical instructions and technician training; and
to Meade and the Plans and Operations Division, the preparation of T/O’s and TOE’s for fifth echelon units, as well as the training requirements and assignments of third, fourth, and fifth echelon maintenance men.62
The October 1943 directive had been “intended to correct certain deficiencies reported from North Africa,” according to Maj. Gen. Russell L. Maxwell, Assistant Chief of Staff G-4. In December General Maxwell asked General Somervell for a progress report. Ingles already had considerable for Somervell to include in his reply to Maxwell. Toward supplementing the fifth echelon ground radar maintenance shop at the Lexington Signal Depot, Ingles now had received authorization for fifth echelon radar repair facilities at the Holabird Signal Depot in Baltimore and at the Sacramento Signal Depot. On 23 November the War Department had approved a signal base maintenance company T/O and TOE 11-587, under which the four existing (214th, 216th, 221st, and 222nd) signal base depot companies would be reorganized. General Ingles had asked also that three new signal base depot groups be constituted and activated. Meanwhile, he obtained from the Air Forces a summary of equipment, facilities, and men to be transferred into the new maintenance organization for which the Signal Corps was making plans. He had also begun training some eight hundred officers and men specifically for third and fourth echelon maintenance of AGF radars within the United States.63
Unfortunately, all the War Department efforts to straighten out the radar maintenance maze failed. Perhaps conditions in the field, or perhaps human nature, made effective Signal Corps-Air Forces cooperation unworkable. On the west coast the ASC balked at transferring its ground radar maintenance to ASF and Signal Corps. In May 1944 General Arnold petitioned the Chief of Staff to modify his policy, indeed to reverse it, at least in west coast areas.64 But for the moment, the General Staff stuck to its policy and ordered General Arnold to comply, adding “informal information indicates to the War Department that the transfer of personnel and equipment as required has not been consummated.”65
The Air Forces bowed for the moment but its discontent with the War Department policy continued. Fourth Air Force headquarters complained in August 1944 that it received conflicting messages from General Arnold’s
headquarters in Washington and from ASC in Ohio on the subject of who should store, issue, and maintain the ground radar of its AAA units.66 The Third Air Force in Tampa plied General Arnold with bitter complaints against the Signal Corps system for supplying radar parts and urged that “a new method of supply of radar replacement parts be established at the earliest practicable date.”67 As the various air service commands over the world wrote to Washington, they expressed surprise and confusion at the change contemplated in ground radar maintenance. Always they claimed that they had been doing quite well providing maintenance facilities and men. The trouble, they generally agreed, lay in getting quickly (or at all) the items of equipment they requisitioned from the Signal Corps.68
When finally it came to implementing the War Department order that the Signal Corps take over fifth echelon maintenance of ground radars overseas, the ASC vigorously objected. “It appears ...” the command wrote on 14 July 1944, “that an attempt is being made to effect a gradual change in the supply system for AAF types of ground radar equipment in overseas Air Service Commands so that the overseas Signal Depots would be stocked by the Chief Signal Officer direct, and would then be the reissuing agency to the Air Force Service Command.” “This is not the way we have been doing it,” the command said in effect. It did not want to put the Signal Corps in business overseas supplying or maintaining Air Forces ground radar. The command recommended that Arnold “definitely and unquestionably establish the supply of maintenance parts for Army Air Forces types of ground radar equipments as an exclusive function of the Air Service Command.”69 Col. George C. Hale in the Washington headquarters, replying for General Arnold, sought to soothe the ruffled ASC, saying that of course “the correct channel for all ground radar equipment of exclusive interest to the AAF should be through AAF channels.”
Only ground radar sets and parts intended solely for the AGF would move through ASF channels. Then Colonel Hale added a significant statement touching the recommendation that the AAF take undisputed control over Air Forces ground radar supply. Consideration was currently being given, Hale wrote, to these very matters, and the ASC would be advised of the action taken.70
AAF Wins Control Over Its Communications-Electronics
The action was being taken. The decision had already been made. The Army
Air Forces had at last reached the point of gaining control over all electronic items and activities “peculiar to the AAF.” Its radio and radar gear and applications had grown of course to tremendous proportions by 1944. Communications officers serving the AAF—McClelland, Rives, Maude, Ankenbrandt—had mended aviation’s communications weakness of which Dr. Bowles had complained a year earlier.71
Dr. Bowles was, in fact, a considerable “power behind the throne” in all Army communications, an electronics scientist and college professor whose sympathy with the military and its problems and whose quick and keen appreciation had won him complete acceptance in the top military household since General Colton had induced him to leave the Massachusetts Institute of Technology early in 1942. Colton’s intent that Bowles serve as adviser concerning Army communications-electronics in the ASF under Somervell failed when Bowles was “captured” by Secretary Stimson to work in the highest Army echelon, where in fact Bowles was more able to aid the Army over-all than he could have done in the ASF. Bowles served throughout the war as Stimson’s expert consultant in communications and radar. Finding AAF needs especially pressing and receiving General Arnold’s wholehearted welcome, Bowles received in September 1943 complete authority over AAF communications with power “to act for the Commanding General through the medium of the Chief of Air Staff, ... and of the Air Communications Officer.” Working with quiet efficiency and with the overriding authority that civilian status directly under Stimson gave him, Dr. Bowles was able to cut across all Army commands. He played a large part in the transfer of communications-electronics to the AAF.
It was Dr. Bowles who induced General Arnold to appoint General McClelland director of AAF communications and then used influence in the transfer of one of the ablest Signal Corps officers, Colonel Rives, to the AAF. Bowles wrote to Robert A. Lovett, Assistant Secretary of War for Air, in June 1943:
... it seemed to me that McClelland was the outstanding man. At the same time, it was recognized that because of his characteristics it would be necessary to support him with a deputy whose characteristics were complementary. Universally it was felt that Colonel Tom Rives of the Signal Corps would be the man. In addition, the selection of Rives would make for a strategic combination of Air and Signal officers.72
By 1944 AAF radio and radar offspring felt well-weaned from the Signal Corps and sought to cast off all parental control. The beginnings of the final break, Colonel Rives subsequently recounted, took form during the last months of 1943, just when the Signal Corps, ironically enough, was expecting to recover ground radar maintenance. The break began as an AAF staff study launched in 1943 at the direction of General Giles. “The study was rewritten at least fifty times,” reminisced Brig. Gen. Tom C. Rives (USAF, Ret. ) in 1950,
P-61 Black Widow with AI radar antenna in the nose radome
“and was finally presented through Dr. Edward L. Bowles direct to General Marshall.”73
The AAF study, completed in June 1944, attacked the problem rather differently from earlier onslaughts. It did not castigate the Signal Corps. In fact, the Signal Corps received praise. General Arnold wanted to avoid any criticism of the Signal Corps and emphasized that the Corps should be thanked for its invaluable aid. The problem was recognized as one of extreme complexity, and the Air Forces believed those complexities could best be solved if the AAF took over the responsibility for its own electronics.
The causes leading up to the transfer were many; not the least being the universal unhappiness caused when someone other than the operating organization obtained, delivered, and maintained one’s operating equipment. A very definite cause, in the case of rapidly evolving airborne radar and communications-navigation electronics, was the Army supply routine. Quick, direct, tapecutting procedures were necessary, but the Signal Corps had to conduct its development and supply service amid the Army routines under heavy (and as
Signal Corps officers felt, stifling) administrative layers of the ASF. Still another very basic cause was that newly evolving radar types required special aircraft specially designed around the radars.
Airplane design was unquestionably an AAF concern only. The first airplane so designed was the P-61, the Black Widow, which was engineered for the microwave AI radar of the SCR-517 type, a radar that enabled pilots to hunt down and destroy enemy planes at night or in clouds. Another airplane designed to carry radar was the B-29, fitted with an auxiliary wing to accommodate the antenna of that most efficient BTO radar, the AN/APQ-7, or Eagle.74
All the arguments for the transfer that could be thought of were contained in the staff study General Giles had requested. Preparation of the study and of its many supporting documents was directed by Dr. Lewis M. Hull, one of Dr. Bowles’s operational specialists. Bowles passed the entire file on to the AAF chief, General Arnold, on 9 May 1944, urging the transfer on the grounds that “the existing set-up represents a major obstacle ... prevents you from controlling one of the most vital of the elements making up a combat aircraft and ultimately a combat air force. Practically speaking, you have no actual control over the types, quantities, or deliveries of this type of equipment.” Bowles ascribed this communicationselectronics supply to “an archaic system called upon to do that for which it was never intended, to develop and procure special instrumentalities for the Air Forces as opposed to conventional communications equipment common to Air and Ground Forces.” Bowles concluded, “I see no cure short of transferring to the Air Forces complete responsibility and authority for develment, procurement, and distribution of communications equipment peculiar to the Air Forces.”
The accompanying study elaborated: “Communications equipment has become an inseparable part of every military aircraft and Air Force operation. Modern aerial tactics are based on maximum use of radar and radio navigation bombing and fire control aids, aircraft warning, ground-to-plane and plane-toplane communications.” The study itemized 6 components for the P-61; for the 6-29, 14 items plus 8 Countermeasures components. The study determined that “in military aircraft, modern communications equipment has of necessity become an integral part without which the aircraft is useless in tactical and combat flight.” As for the difficulties of getting supplied by a Signal Corps under layers of ASF, the study concluded:
The critical delays in procurement do not result from lack of effort or good will within the military organization. They stem primarily from:
a. Huge quantities of war-stimulated developmental sources, whose channelization into the Army is immeasurably complicated by the necessity for access to a procuring service which is independent of the using arm.
b. Sincere but non-essential controversies between military participants whose primary allegiance is necessarily to independent Forces.
c. Absence of decisive coordinating authority at any level which is readily accessible to those agencies and individuals who are charged with operating functions.
d. Practical impossibility of effective
understanding and employment, by most personnel inside and outside of the two Army Forces in questions; of their complex organizational inter-relations.
Illustrative case histories of the procurement woes were added, for example, the receiver component of the SCR-521-A, the AN/APQ-13, the AN/APS-15, the AN/MPN-1.75
General Marshall, after receiving the staff study, agreed with the AAF recommendations. On 26 July 1944, Marshall informed Arnold and Somervell that he, too, believed “airborne radar and radio equipment, guided missiles and ground radar, and radio navigational aids should be considered as items of equipment peculiar to the Air Forces.” Marshall sent drafts of the order he proposed to issue to the AAF and ASF.76
Much debate ensued. The director of the AAF communications directorate, General McClelland, itemized his reasons for seeking the transfer: the red-tape delay occasioned by the interposition of the Army Service Forces and the Signal Corps between the Army Air Forces and its electronic equipment; the division in responsibilities; the separation of the administrative offices; the increasing oneness of electronic devices and aircraft design, production, and operation. The director added, too, “the vast majority of the research and development work on communication equipment is now done by either the National Defense Research Committee or the Navy Department and the Signal Corps acts as the agent and Coordinator for the Army Air Forces.”
General Ingles, rebutting, felt he successfully refuted every one of McClelland’s points. As for the oneness of electronics with military machines and operation, this was no less true of all the Army than of aircraft. Administrative and red-tape troubles could be ironed out, but splitting up the essential oneness of all communications covering all the Army (and this included the Army Air Forces) would require the creation of a still higher signal organization, on General Staff level, that could arbitrate the electronic activities in both the AAF and the rest of the Army, which alone the Signal Corps would now serve. The higher over-all organization, Ingles believed, would be necessary to prevent chaos in frequency control and in duplicated effort and equipment. This would in turn increase, not simplify, administrative red tape. And as for AAF playing down the work of the ARL, Ingles attacked the assertion that the National Defense Research Committee and its laboratories, the RL and RRL, did the “vast majority of R&D work. ...” All Radiation Laboratory work stopped far short of completion. The laboratory simply produced a breadboard model. And when it did crash-produce a handful of sets, “the Signal Corps has never yet seen two identical models.” Thus an immense amount of necessary development work remained after the NDRC turned over its breadboard model. Such
work as bench engineering tests, flight tests, preparations of U.S. Army specifications, drawings, maintenance parts lists, technical descriptions for stock numbering, replacement factors, and coordination with the War Department Standardization Program on components still remained to be done. All this work had to be done by ARL before manufacture could start and before a set could be put into the hands of relatively unskilled men to use and to keep in operation in a theater of war.
General Ingles urged upon the Army Service Forces that the Marshall memo on the proposed transfer not be issued. The matter, Ingles believed, should be decided on the basis of efficiency in getting on with the war, and, Ingles asked pointedly, was it not obvious that things were succeeding, the AAF better equipped and more effectively operating than the air force of any other country? General Ingles reiterated his belief that any split in Army electronics would “introduce the necessity for an over-all adjudicating agency hitherto unnecessary.” The split would break up research and development and would require more engineers in duplicated laboratories, where already there were too few talented men. Such talent was effectively applied in the Signal Corps laboratories as they existed in 1944, where skilled electronic engineers frequently worked on both air and ground items, concurrently or successively. Moreover, the proposed transfer would run counter to all tendencies to unite the military services. “The Secretary of War has advocated a union of Army and Navy to avoid duplication of operating agencies and to secure unity of action,” Ingles reminded his superiors. “The purpose of such advocacy is not furthered by dividing the science of the propagation and reception of radio waves between two independent Army groups, each with its own laboratories, scientists, and programs.” Ingles concluded, quite as General Code had said in a similar debate with the AAF over a year earlier: “The principles of electronics is a single science with multifarious applications and all discoveries germane whether the equipment is to be used in the air, on the ground, or on or under the sea.”77
This and much else were all to no avail as far as the Signal Corps was concerned.78 General Marshall’s decision became mandatory on 26 August 1944 when the Secretary of War ordered the Army Air Forces and the Army Service Forces to accomplish the transfer. He directed that a board (chaired by Maj. Gen. R. L. Maxwell) be set up to
arbitrate the details. The move would involve over half the value of all Signal Corps procurement, many Signal Corps establishments, about 1,000 officers and enlisted men, and more than 8,000 civilians.79
So huge a move could not be accomplished easily or completely at once since many AAF activities in the Signal Corps intimately concerned ground force interests too, for which the Signal Corps remained responsible. Some activities, offices, laboratories, and workers could be transferred easily, but many could not. Meanwhile, the progress of the war effort must not be unduly hampered by the change-overs. The transfer was in fact months in completing. In order to carry out the entire transfer smoothly, General McNarney instructed Generals Arnold and Somervell to set up a board of officers, to include three representatives from the AAF and three from the ASF, who would arbitrate and direct the undertaking. Disputed matters were to be referred to General McNarney himself for final arbitration.80
Of the heavy tasks this board encountered none was more tedious than the determination of just what items were peculiar to the Air Forces. Such matters as the transfer of the Aircraft Radio Laboratory, and the assignment to AAF of Signal Corps’ experienced R&D officer, General Colton (whom Arnold had requested) , were relatively easy. But many things went hard for the Signal Corps. By October 1944, General Ingles felt that “the major difficulties occurring are the result of an attempt on the part of the representatives of the Commanding General, Army Air Forces, to expand the interpretation of the original intent of the Chief of Staff.”81
On 21 October Ingles informed Somervell that transfer of the Aircraft Radio Laboratory posed no very great difficulty even though some few projects concerned the Army Ground Forces. “For purposes of continuity,” said Ingles, “it was decided desirable to leave such projects under the control of the Aircraft Signal Agency with the expectation that minor adjustments between the Army Air Forces and Army Service Forces could be later made, if found necessary.” But transfer could not so easily be accomplished at the Monmouth congeries. The Signal Corps would very much prefer to get the interests untangled and the transfer over with, since, General Ingles declared, “the details of the transfer are materially interfering with our operations.” The completion of the move had to wait
upon certain developments of important equipment needed by all three major forces.82
The ARL with all that pertained to it, such as field laboratories at Boca Raton and Eglin in Florida and at Indianapolis, went over to the AAF on 15 October 1944. This segment of the transfer took into the AAF about 300 Signal Corps officers and men and some 1,500 civilians.83 Here, in the Signal Corps Aircraft Signal Agency, there were few Ground Forces interests to filter out. And there was no problem of physically moving men and plant. They were all already on or adjacent to AAF installations.
Much more difficult was the separation of AAF-AGF interests in the New Jersey laboratories of the Signal Corps Ground Signal Agency. For example, in the Eatontown lab segment, the Signal Corps worked on meteorological and DF equipment which concerned AGF as well as AAF interests. Likewise, at the radar labs at Camp Evans, some radar development concerned both forces—for example, the superb microwave gun director, the SCR-584. The 584 had been developed basically for antiaircraft artillery, but it could also be used to direct aircraft in bombing operations. Could the 584 be called an item peculiar to the Army Air Forces? General Ingles pointed out, too, that the air search radar AN/TPS-3, though it had been developed for the AAF and seemed at first to qualify as “peculiar to the AAF,” had been found in practice to be an efficient mortar locator, and so became very much a concern to the Army Ground Forces. Such were electronic intertwinings and developments that mocked all efforts to pigeonhole the equipment. For a time the AAF wanted to operate the laboratories jointly with the Signal Corps. This action however, General Ingles refused to contemplate. He wished the transfer to be made when and as it became possible to sort out such mixed-up activities, even if in some cases the transfer might have to wait until the end of the war with Germany. The AAF, while refusing to wait that long, did agree to accept delay and accepted a target date of 1 April 1945 for completing the transfer of AAF interests in the New Jersey labs and at signal depots and in such agencies as the Plant Engineering Agency, the Storage and Issue Agency, and others (all these involving a transfer of 600 officers and enlisted men, and 5,776 civilians).84 On 31 January 1945 the research and development of ground radar and ground communications equipment peculiar to the AAF were transferred, involving the Eatontown Signal Laboratory, recently
renamed Watson Laboratory,85 and a field station in Clermont, Florida.
Haggling over what was “peculiar to the AAF” and what was not went on throughout the transfer. At a conference on 9 October 1944 a total of 392 items was declared “peculiar.” But conferees on the 19th of that month deleted 21 items from the list and then added 202 more. The next day they added another 112. By 17 March 1945 it was agreed that these 685 items of electronic equipment that the Signal Corps had been developing and supplying were entirely of AAF concern and were so transferred.86
The AAF, which preferred, with the Navy, to split communications operations from communications development and supply, transferred the research and development and supply aspects of the former Signal Corps domain to the Air Forces matériel structure. Aircraft Radio Laboratory at Wright Field changed hands. Operational communications for the Air Transport Command became the sole and specific responsibility of the AACS. The Office of Air Communication under McClelland was consolidated in the special staff of AAF headquarters.87 By then, however, World War II was nearing its end. The AAF went through the entire conflict with Signal Corps communications-electronic equipment. In the words of at least one postwar summary, “All Air Force material in this field that saw combat during World War II was developed under Signal Corps auspices.”88
Signal Corps easily survived the loss of half its domain, a fact that shows how large a military effort electronics activity was becoming. The applications (of radar especially) to air power had been seen first and were fantastically implemented during World War II. The applications to ground fighting were less quickly recognized. But ground applications, such as mortar-locating radar, had begun to take form during the war and were increasing by the war’s end on a scale that would soon fill the void left by the AAF transfer.
Signal Corps Research and Development at War’s End
The center of Signal Corps research and development, the collection of
laboratories in the Fort Monmouth area,89 continued to flourish to the end of the war and beyond, in proportion to the rate at which electronic applications and communications developments within the Army Ground Forces continued to grow. New applications in the Army came harder than those for AAF. Yet there was no doubt even in the midcourse of the war that the many new uses would come eventually. “The Ground Forces problem,” Bowles informed Secretary Stimson in August 1943, “though less ramified, is in some ways more difficult because it still demands the laborious exploitation of the full values of radar and other facilities in such applications as fire control and warning means to detect slow-moving ground objects. ...”90
There remained much for the Coles Laboratory to accomplish in radio and wire communications equipment, for Camp Evans to do in radar applications (troop detectors, mortar locators, gun layers), and for the Squier Signal Laboratory91 to achieve with electronic components, batteries, power equipment, and so on. But as 1945 wore on, especially after V-E Day, the pressure for engineering support of equipment in the field lessened. The practical work toward helping troops in the use of communications-electronics devices, to which the labs had devoted their efforts since 1943, now diminished.92 It was
time to think of orienting research and development toward future military needs.
In spite of the loss of so much to the AAF late in 1944 and into 1945, overall activity at the Fort Monmouth labs remained high. Dr. Bowles, who had just returned from a visit to the laboratories, had spoken well of them, noting the fine spirit, cooperation, and enthusiasm among the laboratory workers, and commenting favorably on the projects under study, on the competence of the scientists, and on the very close cooperation between them and the industries engaged on the projects. “A very happy and constructive state of affairs,” Bowles wrote General Ingles, “a healthy and enthusiastic atmosphere.” The main problem, he noted, related to “the difficulties of retaining some of the very able civilian talent because of the inroads of the draft and the attractiveness of Navy commissions.”93
The Chief Signal Officer did feel some disquiet about the laboratories in the late winter of 1944-45, and in March he informed Dr. Bowles that “neither [Maj.] General [George L.] Van Deusen [commanding the labs] nor myself are entirely satisfied with the organization of the Ft. Monmouth group of laboratories and have decided that it would be advantageous to have a survey made. ...”94 General Ingles did not specify his worries.
The Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories were in fact more than holding their ground. Research and development projects in hand as of 30 June numbered 258, only 31 less than the number reported at the close of the previous fiscal year, and 24 more than the 234 that remained after the transfers to the AAF. During the months that followed that transfer there was a gradual increase in the number of lab workers who were employed in the Squier Laboratory and in the Coles Signal Laboratory on seven groups of projects.95
As World War II ended, and plans for the future needs of the Army began to shape up, Signal Corps policy in R&D matters as set forth by the Engineering and Technical Division of OCSigO, looked to a wise peacetime program. Research and development, where reduced, was reduced with care lest necessary projects be struck out. As contracts with the NDRC were concluded, some R&D projects were transferred to the interested services. Other R&D was carried on under Signal Corps contracts. New contracts were undertaken in basic research toward integrated systems of radio and wire equipment (replacing the gamut of individual components that had characterized much of the war’s hastily extemporized electronics), toward the eternal goals of lighter weight, smaller but more dependable equipment, and toward totally new
applications of electronics to ground warfare.
These were matters that could not be overlooked. They could not be neglected in peacetime, not after the lessons of World War II had deeply impressed upon the nation the vital character of scientific contributions to war.96