Chapter 16: Innovations in Signal Training
The Signal Corps’ responsibility for procuring and training its portion of the Army’s manpower remained one of its most important obligations throughout the war. The last two years of conflict brought significant changes in personnel and training objectives. Primarily the changes simply reflected shifts of emphasis in War Department policies and the necessary adjustments instituted as the war ran its course.
By mid-1943 moblization was virtually complete as the Army neared its authorized peak strength of 7,700,000 men. In the previous year, the Army’s officer strength had increased two-and-a-half times, while its enlisted strength tripled.1 The nation’s military and civilian agencies began to feel the pinch as the manpower sources that once had seemed limitless shrank alarmingly. In the earlier years, when the great mass movement of selective service men from reception centers to replacement centers, schools, and units had met the first urgent call for bodies, the Army’s expansion had taken place without much regard to troop basis ceilings.2 In the last two years of war, the Army zealously conserved its manpower. Fixed personnel ceilings necessitated strict utilization of limited service personnel, Wacs, Negro troops, prisoners of war, and the use of civilians in lieu of military personnel whenever possible. Training quotas declined sharply; many training installations closed their doors. Improved assignment techniques assumed paramount importance in order to assure that every man was placed in the job best fitted to his capabilities. The Signal Corps had a lower rate of officer malassignments than any of the other technical services or any of the ASF staff divisions, according to an ASF survey late in 1943.3
The Army’s initial requirements for cadres and fillers had constituted the primary consideration during the period of rapid expansion when many new combat units were being activated. By mid-1943 the greatest need was for more closely knit troop units, men drawn together in small groups and thoroughly instructed in teamwork. Thus the role of the Signal Corps replacement training centers declined in importance and that of its unit training centers (UTC’s) correspondingly became more important.
The shift in emphasis brought the Signal Corps relief from hardships
imposed by the cadre system during the early months of the war. No other arm or service required a greater number of different kinds of highly skilled technicians than the Signal Corps. Moreover, only men of high intelligence and special aptitudes could master electronics subjects, and real proficiency in some of the more complex specialties could be acquired only through many months of training.4 When the commander of a signal unit lost some of his skilled men for a cadre withdrawn to form the nucleus of a new unit, he could not replace them readily. At the beginning of the war there were so few signal units in existence and so many new ones being organized that some units were almost “cadred out of existence.” Within six months after Pearl Harbor, nearly every Regular Army Signal Corps organization had been stripped of trained men. Some had accompanied important missions overseas and others had departed for officer candidate schools, but the majority had simply been withdrawn to form cadres for new units.5
Gradual tightening of ASF control over training and personnel policies during the latter part of the war also introduced changes into Signal Corps procedures. ASF had wide authority in all technical service training matters, but the actual conduct of training was quite another matter. During the war the responsibility for actual conduct of training shifted between ASF staff divisions, technical service chiefs, and service commands.6
General Somervell, as commanding general of ASF, definitely wanted responsibility for technical training vested in the service commands.7 The technical services chiefs felt just as definitely that they should have complete control over their own training programs. General Somervell never did obtain for the service commands all the powers he wished them to have, but neither did the technical services chiefs ever acquire the unhampered control they desired. Although the Chief Signal Officer in his annual report for the fiscal year 1943 pointedly remarked that “vast, sweeping changes” during the year had decentralized to the service commands “a sizeable portion of the personnel activities previously performed by the Office of the Chief Signal Officer,” he was expressing a legalistic rather than a practical interpretation of the changes.8 For example, ASF had promulgated a change in Army regulations that placed all Class 1 and II training installations (including all RTC’s, UTC’s, and schools) under the service commands.9 Actually, the technical services chiefs continued to control the training staffs and faculties. Furthermore, certain training institutions were designated as Class IV, or “exempted” installations, entirely under technical services control. For the Signal Corps, these exempted installations included the important Fort Monmouth
Trainees operate portable field message center switchboard, Fort Monmouth, N.J.
and Camp Murphy training installations. In May 1943 a change of more consequence took away the technical services’ control over training programs and training staffs and faculties and gave it to the service commands.10 However, in order to keep the experience and specialized knowledge of the technical services, ASF gave them inspection responsibilities for Class 1 and II installations.11
The trend toward greater flexibility constituted still another development of major importance to the Signal Corps and to the whole Army in 1944-45. This trend produced changes in the organization of signal units and also resulted in the establishment of pools of trained men ahead of the time when they were needed. The Signal Corps won its fight for flexibility of unit organization with its introduction of the cellular teams.12 Through the medium of training battalions, it readied teams of specialists
before receiving a formal request for them. This plan ASF later instituted for all the technical services as “preactivation” training.
Military Manpower
Throughout the war the War Department’s manpower calculations amounted to ad hoc arrangements. Shifts in tactical situations resulted in frantic fluctuations in troop requirements. The Signal Corps operated on a feast-or-famine basis, now with an overstrength in officers and an understrength in enlisted men, now with substantial shortages or overages in both.
Requirements
As of 1 July 1943, the troop basis requirements for Signal Corps men were relatively small (6,000 each for the ASF and the AGF, 41,000 for the AAF), and personnel officers anticipated no difficulties in meeting the demands.13 But a revision on 4 October sent ASF-AGF figures upward by 17,000; at the same time there was some decrease in the AAF troop basis. At that late date there was no possibility of furnishing all the troops required at the time they were needed.14 Meanwhile the 1944 Troop Basis was evolving out of “rather thin air.”15 It picked up all the existing unfilled requirements from the augmented 1943 list and added a budget of troops for 1944. The total called for 2,539 officers and 32,843 enlisted men for ASF units, 18,118 troops for AGF, and a minus quantity for AAF.16
The over-all 1944 Troop Basis included substantial increases in service troops. In that respect the earlier troop bases had ignored the facts of life. As a result, the Signal Corps had been called upon for large numbers of troops to be activated in excess of the troop basis. In 1942 it had furnished 18,000 signal troops over and above the authorized basis, and 33,000 in 1943.17 The net effect of the 1944 authorizations so far as the Signal Corps was concerned represented a 50-percent increase in men in ASF units between December 1943 and the end of 1944. At the beginning of 1944, 60,000 signal troops were required for ASF units, and at the end of the year, 90,000.
Since the AGF troop basis contained mainly service support units, it became possible to transfer substantial numbers, mainly signal construction battalions, to the ASF during the early part of the calendar year. The AAF had a surplus of signal troops because of the contemplated disbandment of aircraft warning activities. But disbanding aircraft warning units did not mean transfer of either officers or enlisted men to the AGF or ASF. Instead the AAF kept them, building up its own communications units.18
As for Signal Corps officers, a surplus existed in the summer of 1943, and the War Department ordered the transfer of large blocks of officers to other arms and
services. Between October and December 1943, 800 Signal Corps officers were transferred to the Corps of Engineers, 200 to the Corps of Military Police, and 20 to the Transportation Corps. During a 6-month period between December 1943 and June 1944, the AAF received each month 55 Signal Corps officers to be trained as pilots or as bombardiers and navigators, and another 20 each month for training in AAF intelligence schools. To shut off the production of new Signal Corps officers, the officer candidate school at Fort Monmouth took in only 75 new candidates every two months for an authorized capacity of 150.19 When the increased requirements for 1944 became known, the ASF authorized an immediate increase in the Signal Corps’ OCS to 1,500 capacity for the first four months of 194420 By then it was impossible to produce the officers until late in 1944, since nearly all of the positions required additional technical school training of at least three months. The Signal Corps, which had begun the fiscal year with a plethora of officers, ended the period with far too few. In spite of a mad scramble to find the men and a resort to various temporary expedients, many requisitions for loss replacements of officers remained unfilled.
Strength
Notwithstanding the valiant attempts of the War Department to account for every last soldier on its rosters at any time, the exact statistics were often in doubt. It was particularly difficult for the Signal Corps to give exact figures on its soldiers, dispersed here, concentrated there, engaged in a multitude of communications duties all over the world. The wealth of detail necessary in strength reports partially defeated the purpose. Indeed, the War Department had recognized this fact when, in the summer of 1943, it authorized theater commanders to employ bulk allotments of men for overhead, that is, for administrative functions. In addition, the War Department had authorized the organization of provisional units to meet urgent combat needs.21 Therefore, only the individual commanders in the theaters could know exactly what troops each theater had or how specialists were distributed within the theaters. The troop bases not only divided the Army into three main categories—AAF, AGF, and ASF—but added a fourth, Miscellaneous. That group contained trainees, including Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) students, men assigned to War Department agencies, certain medical technicians, patients awaiting discharge, and an overseas overhead figure that covered everything not set up under a table of organization. For example, a bulk allotment of more than 3,000 men went to the North African theater for use in establishing a group of provisional signal organizations needed temporarily.22
As of June 1943, the Signal Corps estimated its enlisted strength at 287,000 and its officer strength at 27,004. From a
peak reached in August of that year, officer strength declined slightly during the next 12 months, while enlisted strength rose. On 1 May 1945 total strength reached 321,862. At that time the Signal Corps represented 3.9 percent of the Army.23
The ups and downs of the Signal Corp strength problems during World War II reflect the personnel expansion and contraction of the Army as a whole. But the Signal Corps percentage increase in strength in the period June 1940 to June 1944 was greater than that of the Army as a whole. While the Army increased 3,139 percent, the Signal Corps grew 5,422 percent. Or, expressed another way, the Signal Corps in 1944 was more than 54 times as large as it had been in 1940.24
Military Personnel Procurement, 1944-45
In the earlier war years, the Signal Corps had solved its manpower procurement problems in a variety of ways not available to it in 1944-45. The Affiliated Plan, the Electronics Training Group organization, the special Signal Corps use of the Enlisted Reserve Corps—these and other successful manpower procurement plans discussed in the two previous volumes of this subseries were either closed or in the process of being closed by mid-1943.25 Signal Corps personnel officers felt that had the Signal Corps depended entirely upon “normal” channels of manpower procurement, it “would have failed miserably in its wartime mission.”26 The special procurement programs initiated by General King, chief of the Military Personnel Branch of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer from October 1941 until January 1943, and his successor, Lt. Col. Duncan Hodges, tipped the balance. These programs enabled the Chief Signal Officer to fill both the commitments foreseen by the War Department and the very large unanticipated demands that arose. Evaluating their work, General Code remarked after the war that “King and Hodges did a truly wonderful job in staffing the military training activities. They were ... always way ahead of the parade ... thereafter all you had to do was coast on the training job and see that you received your proper quota of bodies.”27
Officer Procurement
In August 1943 the Signal Corps reached its peak World War II officer
strength of 27,448.28 This figure represented an increase of approximately 6,900 percent over the 1939 total of 400.29 The prewar 400 (which oldtime Regulars referred to as the Light Light Brigade) represented both Regular Army and Reserve officers; about 350 held RA commissions at that time, and only 30 more for a total of 380 in 1943.30 The overwhelming majority of the officers who served the Signal Corps in World War II were commissioned during the war period. About 80 percent earned their commissions at officer candidate schools or in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) ; less than 20 percent by direct commission.
The Signal Corps used the term direct commissioning to define the status of all officers who were not products of the OCS or ROTC. The 5,250 officers in this group included Electronics Training Group (ETG) officers, those secured under the Affiliated Plan, and those procured directly from civil life under the so-called Specialist Plan. They were more valuable than their numbers would suggest because they all possessed special, hard-to-get experience and knowledge.
By mid-1943 the sources for officers in the “rare bird” category had practically dried up. Selective service, various branches of the armed services, and essential industry had drained them. War Department moves to limit and centralize officer procurement culminated in the establishment of the Officer Procurement Service (OPS) late in 1942.31 Further restrictions by redefinition to include only individuals who could not be secured through any available military training program and whose services were absolutely vital rang down the curtain on these programs. From that date on, OPS assumed sole responsibility for the commissioning of civilians in all branches of the Army.32
From early 1942, when the Signal Corps began putting its prewar Affiliated Plan into action, until the last request on 8 October 1943 for active duty orders on an enlisted man to be assigned to an affiliated unit, the plan brought in 1,281 officers and 4,146 enlisted men.33 These men provided the nucleus for 404 affiliated Signal Corps units. Of the forty-five sponsoring companies, the overwhelming majority were from the telephone industry.34 Such corporations and associations as the Western Electric Company, Inc., the Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Eastman Kodak Company, the International Federation of American Pigeon
Fanciers, and the American Racing Pigeon Union also gave valuable aid.
The ETG plan, from its inception in 1941 until its close in 1943, brought the Signal Corps 2,200 electrical engineers from a critically short labor market.35 Of these men, 900 were trained in England. The ETG in London was disbanded late in 1943.36 On 2 December, ETG headquarters issued its last order, General Order No. 7, closing out its own activities. Later ETG sections (19 and 20) had been sent to MIT, Harvard, and Camp Murphy for training.37
Enlisted Personnel
The October augmentation of the 1943 Troop Basis created a serious manpower problem for the Signal Corps. The Corps was obligated to secure and train 17,000 enlisted men in time to ship the units overseas for contemplated operations during 1944 in Italy, in the Pacific, and especially in the Normandy invasion. It could not look to the selective service, whose processes were bringing in altogether inadequate numbers of inductees. Moreover, the Assistant Chief of Staff for Training, G-3, had ruled that fillers for newly activated units must be drawn direct from reception centers, even though the priority for drawing such personnel was too low to permit the units to be activated in time for shipment.38
On the other hand, requisitions for loss replacements enjoyed the highest priority. Actually, this created a situation in which men could be pulled out of training battalions faster than they could be brought in. Heretofore, the RTC’s had trained a large proportion of both fillers and loss replacements. When special units had to be formed—and the Signal Corps was forever being called on for special units not on the troop basis—they could be provided in less than six months by taking men from the RTC’s, schools, and small training battalions, and by robbing existing units of specialists. With the RTC’s restricted to loss replacements and with fewer qualified men available from existing signal units, the Signal Corps had to devise some plan to meet both the October augmentation of the troop basis and the yet unknown special demands sure to arise.39
The Signal Corps steadily maintained that RTC and school training were both essential if signal units were to perform effectively, especially in view of the varying lengths of time needed to teach different signal specialties. The ASF recognized the validity of this position. Early in 1943, when the Signal Corps converted its TOE units to more flexible cellular teams, it organized the 847th and 848th Training Battalions at Camp Crowder, Missouri.40 A third, the 840th, had been activated in September 1943. Signal Corps training officers, casting about for some method of getting men they needed early enough to train them effectively, advanced an idea that the
ASF adopted for the other technical services as soon as its virtues became apparent. The mission of the training battalions, with some modification, could serve as a basis for requisitioning personnel. The battalions were considered refillable, after units had received source personnel for them, to the limit of units on the troop basis.41 The men could be given school, RTC, and cellular team training, then transferred fully trained to the ASF service units on the troop basis.
Hard on the heels of the October augmentation of the 1943 Troop Basis came the 1944 Troop Basis, which called for 23,966 new Signal Corps enlisted men. The training battalions furnished enough enlisted men for composite units during most of calendar year 1944.42 The most critical shortage of men occurred during the early part of the year. At that time, the first-phase signal units slated for early shipment overseas did not even have cadre personnel. The Signal Corps therefore asked for the return of all Signal Corps troops provided for the Army Specialized Training Program, which had replaced the Army’s Enlisted Reserve Corps program late in 1942.43 The G-3 agreed to the return of 3,000 men in February 1944, and a few months later gave up another increment of over 3,000. Among these men were advanced electrical engineers, including former Signal Corps personnel; about 600 civil and mechanical engineers originally scheduled for Fort Belvoir (Corps of Engineers) ; 1,175 miscellaneous ASTP students traded from the AGF in exchange for a like number of Signal Corps students from Camp Murphy; and about 1,400 linguists. These and other miscellaneous transfers accounted for nearly 10,000 ASTP students transferred to the Signal Corps by end of April 1944.44 They greatly helped the hard-pressed Signal Corps to meet its commitments.
Training
During the last two years of war the organization of the Signal Corps’ three large training centers shifted to keep pace with the changing needs of war.45 During most of the period, several different training activities were gathered together at the Eastern Signal Corps Training Center at Fort Monmouth; the Central Signal Corps Training Center at Camp Crowder; and the Western Signal Corps Training Center at Camp Kohler, California. Each center contained a replacement training center or a unit training center, or both, to provide basic military and technical training for enlisted men, and one or more schools to provide advanced technical training.
Signal Corps training activities took a sharp turn of direction in the summer of 1943. The strength of the Army reached its anticipated crest, and the need for loss replacements, fillers, and
new activations declined. Moreover, the adoption of the cellular plan of organization for signal units required the molding of different types of specialists to work together as members of smoothfunctioning teams and their consolidation into complete units for overseas shipment on short notice.46 The net effect of these factors converted the replacement training centers into unit training centers, increased the degree of Signal Corps control over the units it trained for the ASF, and reoriented school programs.
Unit and Team Training
Unit training, as the ASF used the term, meant specialized training of the different elements of a unit to function in skilled teams as a part of the whole. This training was given at technical training centers. Specialists were readied in schools, RTC’s, and UTC’s; upon activation, a unit received specialists who had completed their individual and team training. In contrast, the AGF trained the bulk of its Signal Corps men within the unit and sent to service schools only those specialists requiring a high degree of technical skill.47
Unit training centers trained two types of units, generally referred to as “standard” and “service” type. For many years the Signal Corps had trained the standard units—signal construction battalions, signal depot companies, signal port service companies, signal construction companies, and signal repair companies—that performed missions required in all combat areas. The service type companies were the relatively new units built up of cellular teams and tailored to perform such special missions as might be required in a particular theater or for a particular objective.48
In the earlier war years under the War Department doctrine that each service should have training responsibility for all tactical units assigned to it, in many cases both ASF and AGF had trained certain units common to both.49 By 1944 the ASF and AGF had agreed that AGF would activate and train service troop units for divisions and corps while ASF would activate and train troop units required for the communications zone in theaters. An arbitrary distinction was drawn between the only type of signal units still common to both services, the construction units. For the AGF, they became known as light construction units; for the ASF, as heavy. In War Department theory there was a difference between the two. The light construction battalion was intended to construct wire lines rapidly, following closely on the heels of a fast-moving army. Its lines were not intended to be permanent; they would be converted to permanent open wire lines later on by the heavy construction battalions assigned to the army group. But in practice in both the ETO and the Pacific the two types of units were used interchangeably. ASF and AGF training methods were
practically identical, and little was gained by the artificial distinction.50
Until mid-1943, most of the troops the Signal Corps had trained were those destined for tasks in lower-echelon communications systems. It was evident that, as the Allies pushed the battle fronts farther and farther into enemy territory in ever-widening areas, more Signal Corps men would be needed for the socalled higher echelon systems. In other words, instead of division and corps communications facilities, men would be required to operate the infinitely more complex communications systems between army and other associated headquarters, from army to army groups, and from army groups to still higher headquarters.51
Development of the Signal Corps Unit Training Program
Realization of the ultimate need for highly skilled unit teams for such line of communications missions had led to the activation of the first unit training center on 15 September 1942, and the organization of the first signal training battalions (the 847th and 848th), at Camp Crowder early in 1943.52 These battalions were the first to be rebuilt under the new blueprint provided by TOE 11-500. Their reorganization order also provided for the activation of a third training battalion, the 840th, at the Eastern Signal Corps Training Center at Fort Monmouth.53 Most of the men required for the new battalion and for the reorganization of the two older ones were to be picked up by tapping the loss replacement stream at the RTC’s.
In the summer of 1943 the War Department attempted to adjust trainee capacity of the AGF and ASF to an annual intake consistent with 1944 troop requirements, although as yet these requirements were not firm. It appeared that the replacement training centers, which had already outlived their originally allotted time, could be converted safely to unit training centers. Accordingly, all Signal Corps replacement training was consolidated at Camp Crowder, which thereafter supplied all loss replacements and such other individual technicians as were needed.54 The Eastern Signal Corps Replacement Training Center at Fort Monmouth was officially inactivated and the Eastern Signal Corps Unit Training Center was established on 10 August 1943, while the Western Signal Corps Replacement Training Center at Camp Kohler closed 31 December 1943 and the Western Signal Corps Unit Training Center opened on 1 January 1944.55 The new mission of the reorganized training battalions became an A to Z proposition,
taking in raw recruits and turning out fully trained teams of specialists.56 That meant receiving and processing fillers from reception centers, conducting basic training and short-term specialist training, sending long-term specialists to special schools, and, after these preliminaries were finished, forming the specialists into cellular teams and conducting organized team training. In short, the metamorphosis of RTC’s into UTC’s did not involve an overnight change in function, but merely a rearrangement of assigned responsibilities.57
A newly inducted soldier arriving from a reception center was attached to one of the companies of a training battalion for six weeks of basic training. Another six weeks of team training in another company of the battalion followed. Unit training, the final phase, occupied about eleven weeks of the trainee’s time, either in a unit organized under the battalion or in a tactical unit being trained at the center. In actual practice, especially in 1944 when many units were being shipped overseas, it was not always possible to provide a full six weeks of team training as a prerequisite to unit training. Under MTP-2, Mobilization Training Program for Signal Corps Personnel, which became effective 1 July 1944, the six weeks of unit training began as soon as 75 percent of the men were qualified in their basic specialty and present with the unit for training.58
In the spring of 1944 the ASF introduced an important training reorganization, intended to unify and integrate training methods and procedures among all the technical services.59 Under the new plan, all remaining branch RTC’s of the various technical services and many of the UTC’s were converted into ASF training centers. The ASFTC’s were to act as personnel clearinghouses as well as training centers. Training center commanders took over assignment of personnel, previously an AG responsibility. All trainees received the same basic training for the first six weeks, after which they could be conconverted readily from one service to another, as requirements demanded, by undergoing instruction in the basic technical subjects of the new service.60
Since the new ASF training plan was practically identical with the unit and team training plan the Signal Corps had placed in effect more than a year earlier in its UTC’s, the reorganization affected the Signal Corps very little. Camp Crowder became an ASFTC, but the unit training centers at Camp Kohler and Fort Monmouth continued as Class II, exempted installations, under the
command of the Chief Signal Officer. At Crowder, although ASF scrutinized programs more closely, it approved them almost automatically. During the fiscal year 1944 Camp Crowder received 36,725 men for training and shipped out over 37,000. Of these, more than 12,000 went on to service and civilian schools for further instruction; 1,880 entered the ASTP courses; 810 became officer candidates; the remainder received various duty assignments.61
The ASF reorganization plan also introduced the preactivation training program. Essentially, this merely provided that all recruits were to be trained first as individuals before being assigned to units for unit training. This marked the abandonment of the old system, under which fillers for newly activated units often had been supplied directly from the reception centers, a practice the Signal Corps had resisted vigorously from the beginning. The preactivation training the ASF decreed was essentially what the Signal Corps gave its units in its signal training battalions. Recognizing this fact, the ASF readily agreed to exclude Fort Monmouth and Camp Kohler from designation as ASFTC’s. Both the ASF director of training, Maj. Gen. Walter L. Weible, and officers in the ASF’s Military Training Division and Military Personnel Division stated that they were well satisfied with Signal Corps training and did not wish to interrupt it.62
One training problem, never solved to the Signal Corps’ satisfaction, concerned the length of time devoted to technical training. The War Department stressed basic training, to develop “a soldier first, a technician second.” Actually, many Signal Corps troops, particularly those ASF units on duty in the communications area, served the Army best if they were, first of all, skilled technicians. Signal units were trained with a particular mission in mind and, as far as possible, for the probable terrain and climatic conditions under which they would work. Inspections to determine their state of readiness for the most part were confined to the scope of their technical tasks, and it was not expected that Signal Corps units should be highly proficient in front-line combat tactics.63 Nonetheless, in most cases, basic training occupied more time than technical training and came first in the training cycle. If the training period had to be cut short, it was the technical training that suffered.
In the latter half of calendar year 1944, the overseas theaters began calling for signal units at an accelerated rate. For example, the 65th and 97th Signal Battalions had a scheduled readiness date of 20 October, but early in August requests came from the ETO asking that the two units be shipped immediately for Ninth Army operations.64 The unexpectedly rapid advance of the Allied armies in Europe after the breakout from Normandy upset activation schedules. In the Pacific, operations scheduled to begin on 15 February 1945 actually started three months earlier, about 15 November 1944.
Both theaters demanded that units scheduled for later shipment be sent forthwith, in their “present state of training.” Between June and December 1944, the Signal Corps shipped nearly 25,000 men in units overseas, a greater number than in any other 6-month period during the war. Shipments for the entire fiscal year, ending June 1945, stood at 32,451 men. Nearly half, 14,959, were shipped before completing their training.65
When these units arrived in the theater not all, of course, were able to perform their technical functions satisfactorily and rapidly. The ETO resorted to many improvisations and was forced into a considerable amount of unanticipated training because technical training in the United States had been cut short.66 The Chief Signal Officer, anticipating criticism, in the summer of 1944 again asked that the ASFTC at Camp Crowder stress technical training “instead of putting all the emphasis on the basic training, which is now the case.” He also suggested lengthening the training week to fiftyfour hours, which was done.67 However, his admonition that, “since we have a woefully insufficient over-all time, we must spend it on the technical phases of training,” went unheeded.68
Although the Signal Corps remained dissatisfied with the length of time devoted to technical training, its training officers could take some satisfaction from the fact that the Signal Corps’ early inauguration of the plan that the ASF later adopted as preactivation training made it possible for the units to be shipped at the time they were needed. The use of the special companies and signal training battalions for the training of cellular companies, particularly those requiring long-term training, proved to be an invaluable training contribution. Officers calculated that 14,940 enlisted men shipped during the fiscal year 1945 would have been delayed in shipment one to ten months if they had not been trained in the training battalions before their units were activated.69
Training Cellular Teams
At the unit training centers, the Signal Corps readied cellular teams in a great variety of specialties. Among them were small and medium depot teams; crystal-grinding teams; radio broadcast and radio repair teams; very high frequency installation and maintenance teams; 40 kilowatt multichannel multiplex radiotypewriter teams; cable repair, open wire, wire repair, and operations teams; inspection and maintenance teams; signal center teams; newsreel assignment teams; enemy equipment intelligence teams; still picture laboratory teams; film reel, reader, recorder, developing, paper processing, enlarger, and mail section teams.70 In this
multiplicity of designations were those such as the signal center teams with which line troops were thoroughly familiar, and others such as the enemy equipment intelligence teams of which they had scarcely heard. Yet even the signal center teams faced new skill requirements. Linguists were sought for them—men who spoke French, Russian, Dutch, Spanish, Norwegian, Polish, Turkish, Chinese, Portuguese, Greek, or Italian.71 In 1944 Camp Crowder trained and shipped overseas 17 foreign language teams prepared to handle communications between U.S. armies and the armies of Allied nations. Six of the teams spoke Chinese; 4, Italian, 3, Russian, 2, French, and 1 team each was trained in the Dutch and Norwegian languages.72
Japanese language training in civilian institutions was one of the benefits the Signal Corps reaped from ASTP.73 At the request of the Chief Signal Officer, the Army Specialized Training Division of ASF in September 1943 began training men in Georgetown University, Stanford, and the University of California. The 3-month course served as an introduction to further courses in reading and writing Japanese that the Signal Corps conducted at Arlington Hall, Virginia. The Signal Corps’ standards for admission specified college graduates with considerable training in languages, preferably the classics, and a very high academic record. The ASTP, unable to select men on the same basis, required an Army General Classification Test score of 135 or better, and at least two years of college training. Despite initial Signal Corps fears that such ASTP candidates could not master the work, a total of 206 out of 254 enrollees successfully completed the extremely intensive and very difficult course.74
The signal sections of the enemy equipment identification teams required basic intelligence instruction, which the Signal Corps was not prepared to give.75 The teams therefore went to the Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, where the Signal Corps’ experimental and unused psychological warfare units had received their training earlier.76 At Ritchie the EEIS teams studied the German and Japanese Army organization, particularly the disposition of enemy signal troops and signal equipment. Teams learned to interpret photographs with a view to pinpointing radar and other communications installations, to use maps and terrain intelligence, and studied wire surveillance and enemy wire-tapping methods. These subjects consumed seventy-two hours. If time permitted, an additional eight hours provided eminently practical instruction in hand-to-hand Judo training, “chamber of horrors” tests, firing with enemy weapons, and lectures on booby traps.77
EEIS teams, each composed of five officers and six enlisted men, were provided
to each army.78 All members had to be men of special qualifications, rated for general service, because immediately upon completion of training they would be sent overseas, as would the linguists with the signal center teams.79 Another type of team used in intelligence operations, platoon traffic analysis units organized at the ESCUTC, underwent specialist training at Arlington Hall. These units operated in conjunction with radio intelligence companies, analyzing a tremendous bulk of intercepted traffic, and received training even beyond this phase in an active theater of operations.80
The development of on-the-job training became the most important technique used in readying cellular teams. The MT11-2, issued 1 July 1944, emphasized applicatory training methods for all line of communications troops. The Signal Corp had used such techniques since the beginning of the war. As early as 1942, teams from the 822nd Signal Fixed Radio Station Company had been placed in operating installations of the ACAN throughout the United States. In succeeding months, units were assigned to locations wherever functional on-thejob training opportunities existed. Photographic units learned their trade on actual photo assignments at the Signal Corps Photographic Center at Astoria, Long Island; base depot companies, base maintenance companies, repair teams, and storage and issue teams trained at various Signal Corps depots; 40-kilowatt multichannel radioteletype teams worked on the transatlantic systems in the War Department Signal Center in Washington; and the intelligence teams were assigned variously to Arlington Hall, Vint Hill Farms station, Two Rock Ranch, and the Signal Security Agency.81
In February 1943 the Signal Corps had established the Plant Engineering Agency to supply, install, and maintain the fixed plant equipment for the vast and ever growing chain of navigational and communications stations of AACS.82 The requirement for training many small teams of men needed to install and maintain the AACS equipment led to the opening of the Plant Assembly Center in Philadelphia in July. The Brookline Square Country Club at Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, provided housing and training space for the new center. At least one transmitter of each type installed by PEA was available at Brookline for study, and antenna erection courses included the study of those used for navigational aids.83 Enlisted men received instruction in outside plant construction; weather station, airdrome control, loop range, Adcock range, and radio and teletype point-to-point installations; telephone switchboard installations; cable splicing; and diesel engine installation, operating, and maintenance. The Planetarium of the Benjamin Franklin Institute at Philadelphia conducted tours, lectures, and demonstrations for the weather station classes. Cable splicers from the
Philadelphia Electric Company demonstrated methods of power cable splicing, which was particularly helpful because the center had few power facilities available. Officers’ courses were highly flexible, designed to take advantage of the individual’s previous training and experience. After graduating from the center, many of the students received training in courses conducted at Fort Monmouth and elsewhere.84 Even then, in many cases, months of field experience were necessary before the men could undertake some of the installations work PEA was called on to perform.
On-the-job-training offered many practical advantages, but operating installations could not assimilate all of the many units being trained during the latter part of the war. Instead, the Signal Corps set up whole simulated theater communications systems at the big unit training centers at Fort Monmouth, Camp Crowder, and Camp Kohler.85
The network system, signal facilities, and signal centers operated by cellular teams in training at Camp Kohler were representative of the others. By mid-1944 the Kohler Theater Headquarters Signal Center included a message center; teletypewriter, radio receiving and transmitting positions for remote operation; and a code room well equipped with cryptographic devices. From this signal center, trainees maintained communication with Kohler’s simulated 20th Army Group headquarters, located a half mile distant and equipped in the same way, and with the Camp Crowder simulated theater headquarters. There was also a base section headquarters, located at Davis, California. The signal centers were loaded with traffic, dummy messages prepared by typing students in training. All centers had telephone communication over the Camp Kohler training telephone system (the Cobra Exchange) and over leased commercial lines. The Cobra Exchange, though established primarily to train switchboard operators and maintenance men, became an important part of Kohler facilities when the post telephone system proved inadequate for the large number of students at the center.86 Later, Kohler built the Rambler Exchange to provide an additional telephone training facility. A teletypewriter and telephone switchboard net of five simulated headquarters, pole line construction routes, a rhombic receiving area, and other refinements at Kohler helped to create a facsimile of the conditions that communications troops would encounter overseas.
Whenever possible, units were trained for the specific conditions of the theater area in which they would work. The 980th Signal Service Company, a tactical unit under training early in 1944 and destined for the ETO, would install, maintain, and operate a radio relay communications system. In training, the men of the company worked with the same equipment they would use in actual operations.87 The 989th Signal Service
Company, headed for the Pacific, was taught Melanesian pidgin English in addition to the usual subjects.88 The 3184th Signal Service Battalion, activated at Camp Crowder in the spring of 1944, was trained to operate a signal center in a large headquarters.89 Such a battalion might operate any kind of wire circuit (field wire, open wire, or spiral-four cable), large multiple switchboards that might have associated dial equipment, and associated switchboards at other locations. Its men would probably operate Sigaba or Sigcum equipment and be responsible for message center service. The maintenance and repair company was trained to maintain all wire and cable facilities within a limited radius of the headquarters, and to operate and maintain all vehicles in an emergency. Unit training, after completion of specialist and team training, concentrated on practice operations under difficult conditions involving frequent traffic overloads and shortages in teletypewriter and switchboard personnel. All members of the company were schooled in occasional continuous operation for 24-hour periods under the stresses and precautions of night operations.90 Not all units would be so thoroughly trained, however.
Changing tactical situations sometimes altered or canceled the specific purpose for which a unit had been trained. The 998th Signal Service Company was activated and trained to operate one-kilowatt fixed radio stations at the terminals of a petroleum pipeline in an overseas theater, and the twelve 300-watt stations spaced along its length at airports. In such a network the traffic would be light and manual operation would suffice. Then ETO changed the route of the pipeline. Communications service already existed along the new line, and the teams of the 998th had to be retrained for work other than manual operation.91
Specialist School Training
While unit training was becoming firmly established, the training of individual specialists in Signal Corps schools continued largely within the original framework, which was inherently flexible enough to accept new methods, new requirements, and new trends.
On 11 January 1943 a third school augmented those at Fort Monmouth and Camp Crowder. The Western Signal Corps School was located at Davis, California, some twenty-eight miles away from the Western Signal Corps Training Center at Camp Kohler, of which it was a part administratively.92 The new institution experienced few of the growing pains the older schools had felt.93 The men sent there for communications training found no raw, bleak buildings set in muddy fields or sandy wastes. Instead, they moved into the
comfortable dormitories and classrooms of the University of California’s College of Agriculture.94 Despite conditioning on infiltration and obstacle courses and simulated combat in realistic dummy villages, living generally resembled life in college. It left the soldiers accustomed to hot and cold showers, soft bunks, and airy classrooms, not entirely ready for the physical hardships in theaters of war.95
Compared to the central and eastern schools, the authorized capacities of between 1,000 and 2,000 students at the Western Signal Corps School seemed low, but strength failed to reach even those figures. The school provided only radio and wire sections until July, when it added radar. Teaching followed the patterns established at Monmouth and (Crowder. Except for students coming from non-Signal Corps sources, who had to be taught basic electricity and magnetism, the trainees were well qualified for the courses. Before the school was inactivated in October 1944, more than 95 percent of the 1,412 radio repair students and 1,730 operators enrolled had been graduated. The wire courses with a lower enrollment—1,212 in repeatermen courses and 405 in teletype maintenance—also graduated about the same proportion. Placement examinations contributed to the high average.96
Originally the radar school had been set up at the Presidio of San Francisco to train civilian mechanics as Signal Corps installation and maintenance crews. With its transfer to the Western Signal Corps School, the entire student quota was allotted to the Western Defense and Alaskan Commands, for training officers and enlisted men, not civilians, in radar repair. The courses were slanted specifically to meet the needs of the antiaircraft units of the two commands. Of the 85 officers, 555 enlisted men, and 6 civilians enrolled, more than 97 percent of those staying to the end of the courses were graduated.97
By this time the needs of the various theaters were better known than they had been earlier in the war. Combat tactics and equipment innovations were exerting a strong influence on training doctrine and practice at all Signal Corps schools. The issue to troops of the FM SCR-300 walkie-talkie in the summer of 1943, for example, inaugurated 144-hour courses in its use and care. Similarly, the introduction of radio and radar countermeasures opened up a new field of training activity.98
The National Defense Research Committee, the Navy, the Army Air Forces, and the Signal Corps were all engaged in projects designed to recognize and overcome the enemy’s
interference in the ether lanes and to confound him by counter interference. At the center of this activity was the radio operator, who had to learn to hear through the jamming, and the radar operator, who had to learn to distinguish between the genuine and the spurious signal on the oscilloscope.
The National Defense Research Committee devised a set of training aids, recordings embodying random noises and “bagpipe” sounds designed to be fed into the ear circuit. Other recordings combined jamming signals and speech by means of a mixing mechanism. The projects sounded simple, but it was not easy to rate student operators on the tests when students and instructors alike lacked experience in working through any sort of interference. Camp Coles Signal Laboratory prepared a “Listening Through Jamming” test record similar to a “Listening Through Noise” test record issued by the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory of Harvard University. One side of the Signal Corps test record embodied random noises, the other “bagpipe” jamming signals.99
At best, radio jamming slowed up the speed of the fixed station operator, who used a typewriter to record the messages, or of the high-speed field operator who used a pencil. At worst, jamming could stop operations completely. Occasionally operators unfamiliar with jamming tore their sets apart looking for the source of the noise. Training radio operators to cope with enemy jamming greatly delayed their development of speed and accuracy, and therefore combat speed seldom equaled school speed until an operator had become accustomed to working under stress. Instructors learned that the higher a man’s normal speed, the less jamming interference bothered him. An operator highly skilled in sending could practically annul the effects of deliberate interference with his transmissions, but this skill involved the use of tricks that were as individual as the operator. The enemy soon came to recognize them and was able to trace the movements of a unit by the transmissions of its radio operator.100 Not all suspected enemy interference was real. For example, a station on Tontouta encountered interference on its air-ground frequencies nearly every day at the same time. Sleuthing eventually traced it to the cook’s electric potato peeler.101
A radio net cast over a large part of the earth’s surface, and serving all elements of the Army, required large numbers of operators of exceptional skill and ingenuity to cope with the many difficult situations into which they were plunged. In the early part of the war more criticism was leveled at radio operators than at any other product of Signal Corps training.
To improve the performance of radio operators in training, teams were assigned to the stations of the domestic radio network, which was being retained in a stand-by status for emergency use.
Members of the emergency staff served as instructors, and the students did not know that the presumably live traffic they were handling had been especially prepared for them by the Signal Security Agency with an eye to its possible interception by the enemy.102 A system of monitoring student nets was instituted; more attention was given to the classification of operators as low speed, intermediate speed, and high speed, manual and automatic. When a new standard of code speed was adopted, students rated at twenty-five words per minute were found to be actually several words better than that. In brief, “so many weeks of instruction” became less impelling than “development of the specialist.”103 Radio security was stressed more. Nonetheless, General Somervell, aroused by reports from Pacific theaters, expressed dissatisfaction with radio operators produced in the Signal Corps’ schools and suggested overtime use of the Fort Monmouth–Camp Crowder–Camp Kohler training network as a remedy.104 But no one thing could turn a novice into an expert radio operator. Aptitude for the work, training, and combat experience all were needed to produce an expert, and jamming merely added another obstacle to becoming one.
Jamming multiplied the difficulties for the radarmen as well as for the radio operators. Radar was susceptible to interference by several types of emissions. A new technique by which moving pictures could be made of the cathoderay indicators of radar equipment under conditions of jamming was put to use to produce training films for the AGF and AAF. Showing the films to general officers of the Army to acquaint them with the abilities of communications jamming units became “an essential part of radar Countermeasures instruction.”105 The jamming course introduced at Camp Murphy cautioned that “every radar man must be able to recognize jamming, must know how to track in spite of it, and must be able to deal effectively with it.”106 A jamming signal generator for use in training with the SCR-296 radar set was ready for demonstration by July 1943 and was issued to the Coast Artillery School in September.107 Somewhat later similar equipment went to the AAF.108 In radar, as in radio, however, combat was the finishing school as well as the test.
Combat situations directed training projects into many new fields. Camp Crowder opened a malaria training area
in August, one of the first in the country, as a result of reports from units such as the 835th Signal Service Battalion, which had gone to India in the early months of the war. The 835th suffered greatly from malaria and dysentery, and many of the men had to be invalided home for treatment.109 Convalescent training, inaugurated in the summer of 1943, proved its worth as an aid to recovery as well as a means of developing skills.110
After the Navy Department was assigned cognizance over all antisubmarine activity and equipment, the Southern Signal Corps School and the Fort Monmouth School dropped their maintenance courses on magnetic airborne detectors and sonic buoy equipment, late in 1943.111 On the other hand, the enemy’s heavy use of land mines made it necessary to add mine detectors to linemen’s TOE’s, and courses in mine detection became part of the curriculum of the wire schools.112 The advancing Army Airways Communications System called for greatly increased numbers of weather technicians. Meteorological equipment instruction, conducted initially at the Toms River Signal Laboratory and later transferred to the Eatontown Signal Laboratory in New Jersey, outgrew the laboratory facilities, which could provide training for no more than 2 classes of 20 men each in a 12-week course. In June 1944, when the AAF asked the Signal Corps to train 400 men as weather technicians, the Signal Corps was forced to propose that the Army Air Forces establish this type of training elsewhere.113
Photographic training took on new interest at Astoria with the introduction of color photography.114 The Signal Corps quietly dropped its unrealistic requirement that a photographic officer must possess a degree in physics or engineering and substituted a requirement for journalistic experience.115
By mid-war, overseas theaters were operating a number of schools. The War Department kept them under close scrutiny, lest they mushroom and grow to rival the training centers in the zone of interior.116 One such overseas training activity was the Signal Corps Training School in the Southwest Pacific Area. It had been organized at Fort Monmouth on 10 December 1943, under Lt. Col. Clayton Steele, and arrived in the theater on 29 March 1944. Its mission was to conduct short, intensive courses in Signal Corps specialties for selected replacements for overseas specialists. This overseas school had to build its facilities before it could teach. By July the structures were ready and the first 119 students had enrolled. By the end of the month, 547 men from SWPA were
Students waterproof boxes at the Processing and Packing School, New Caledonia
studying in eighteen courses.117 Such training activities, bringing the school to the student rather than the student to the school, served a very useful purpose. They trained men in the specific specialties a theater needed, with no lost motion.
Especially in the last two years of war, combat theaters demanded that men be trained in a minimum of time. How to continue teaching the fundamentals, add new material made essential by combat experience, and still not extend the length of courses became a major problem. The Signal Corps steadfastly maintained that the quality of the end product, not the length of the training course, should be the criterion for graduation.118 Often the schools in the United States and overseas merged the training of officers and enlisted men in order to conserve time, facilities, and instructors, and because it was essential that officers be acquainted with what the enlisted technician had to know. Often, too, civilians were enrolled in the same classes with military men and women because of the close relationship of the functions for which each was responsible. This was true to a greater extent in the in-service or on-the-job courses conducted at Signal
Corps depots and other administrative installations, however, than in the military schools.
Supply Training
Late in calendar year 1943, another specialized school, this one for supply training, opened at Camp Holabird, Maryland. Nothing in its prewar experience had prepared the Signal Corps for the size and complexity of the supply problems it encountered in World War II. It is not surprising that the number of officers well trained in supply procedures very quickly became insufficient, even though the depots began training courses for officers quite early, first at the Lexington Signal Depot in June 1942.119 The Chief Signal Officer on 2 July 1942 directed the Philadelphia Signal Depot to establish a similar supply school for officers.120 By the autumn of 1943, more than 2,100 officers had completed courses at these installations. Philadelphia had trained 851 officers in field supply. Another 736 had finished ground electronics supply courses at Lexington, where the number of students had exceeded the authorized capacity of the school by 74 percent during the summer. Still another 530 studying at the Dayton Signal Depot had completed courses emphasizing signal equipment for the Army Air Forces, particularly airborne equipment.
Although the Signal Corps specialist schools necessarily concentrated on courses designed to create graduates to fill operational assignments, they did not altogether neglect supply training. Fort Monmouth, for example, in July 1943 inaugurated a 60-day advanced course in signal supply subjects for field grade officers. Monmouth also injected problems covering supply under abnormal conditions into its field unit training.121
By summer 1943, enlisted men as well as officers were enrolled in depot supply schools, and on-the-job unit training at depots was assuming importance. The UTC at Camp Crowder sent wire repair sections of units in training to the Chicago Signal Depot, where the men spent eight weeks in practical work, repairing wire communications equipment in depot shops.122 Parallel practical training went on in the simulated base camp at Crowder, where students repaired about 100 items of equipment weekly for the Chicago Signal Depot and shipped them back, ready for reissue to troops. Crowder sent the 212th Signal Depot Company to the Lexington Signal Depot to take an 8-week course. Two weeks were to be devoted to a paper problem into which tangled supply situations were injected; six weeks, to practical on-the-job repair work. Unhappily, the need for depot troops was so great at the time, in anticipation of the Italian campaign, that the entire course had to be compressed into two weeks’ time so the company could be shipped overseas in mid-August.
These school and depot courses, together with other bits and pieces of specialized supply training such as special packaging courses given at other training locations, could not completely meet the need for supply officers and men. The Signal Corps recognized that supply training was quite as important as specialist training for operational assignments.123 Thus when Camp Holabird became a Signal Corps installation, the Chief Signal Officer at once consolidated supply training there.124 Holabird was one of the few military establishments that combined a post and a depot. It had “all the storage, packaging, and shipping facilities of a large military mail-order house,” plus the classrooms, barracks, laundry, mess facilities, and other appurtenances necessary for housing, feeding, and training several thousand troops.125
The first class of 70 officers, arriving on 28 October 1943 before the depot was fully organized, found themselves acquiring practical experience in putting the depot’s various activities into operation. A second class of 30 students reported on 16 December. The curriculum included requisitioning, receiving, warehousing and shipping, property accounting, and stock record procedures.126
Before the first officers arrived at Holabird, 144 enlisted men reported for enrollment in the frequency modulation radio school. The Signal Corps planned to use practical on-the-job training to qualify all radio repairmen as both FM and AM mechanics.127 Frequency modulation repair training began in an open warehouse area, noisy and cold, lacking power outlets and storage and stockroom space. Although the FM school was classified as advanced training, as usual some of the students sent to take the course had no knowledge of radio, or even of electricity, and had to be given a preliminary course in basic radio.128 Some 300 civilians, former employees of the ordnance depot previously housed on the post, were enrolled in supply classes to learn the differences between communications equipment and the ordnance items with which they had been working. By January 1944, Holabird’s various courses accommodated 325 civilian and 500 military students.129
At Holabird, as elsewhere, new courses were added from time to time to meet changing needs. A course in crystal grinding was transferred from the Camp Coles Signal Laboratory to Holabird in November. Holabird initiated courses in nonelectrical instrument repair on the SCR-584 and in instructor guidance. Instruction included the AN/PRS-1, AN/TRC-2, and SCR-300 radio sets,
about to be introduced in overseas theaters in the summer of 1944.130 The Transportation Corps’ railroad repair shop, which occupied part of the post, taught Signal Corps classes certain machine shop courses. The 1342nd Service Unit, a Negro unit activated at Fort George G. Meade, moved to Holabird in October 1943 to continue training designed to give its members the equivalent of a third or fourth grade grammar school education before moving on to a replacement training center.131 Supply officers of the 166th, 167th, and 168th Signal Photographic Companies received instruction in requisitioning, packaging, and storing photographic materials.132 Military and civilian students qualified there for U.S. Army projection operators’ permits, and still others learned maintenance and repair of photographic equipment.
A pressing need for frequency allocation officers overseas led the Signal Corps to establish an ionospheric utilization unit at Holabird. Collaborating closely with the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and with the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory at Harvard University, the Signal Corps training officers worked out a course that included instructions in the conversion of inonospheric data and the solution of actual problems. A hand-picked group of ASTP students, after an initial period of special training with the Interservice Radio Propagation Laboratory at the National Bureau of Standards, went to work immediately to produce information urgently needed by the AAF.133
In the 3-month period April through June 1944 Holabird graduated 269 officers, 847 enlisted men, and 288 civilians from the various courses. By then, Holabird’s classes reflected the growing emphasis on team training and on-thejob techniques growing out of combat experience. Training of individual students in the standard supply courses declined. Only a handful of young officers were enrolled since most young officers were now being sent immediately to the overseas theaters. WAC and overage officers filled up the classes, which came to a close in midsummer. Crystal-grinding instruction ceased. Courses in the preservation and packing of equipment, tropicalization, personnel management and training, property disposal and salvage, and identification of equipment began.134 The radar power school no longer maintained a regular schedule, its facilities being used for on-the-job training of civilians and signal units. The 221st and 222nd Signal Depot Companies from Camp Charles Wood arrived in January; three signal
repair companies were undergoing on-the-job training; other units followed.135
At Holabird, as at other training centers, it was difficult to get and hold a competent teaching staff. Urgent calls from combat theaters took away the younger military instructors. By January 1944, 120 of the instructors were civilians who had had to learn the subjects before they could teach them, and many of these men were subject to military call.136
The Lexington Signal Depot’s unit training program began with the activation of the 216th Signal Depot Company at the depot on 16 January 1943. The 210th and 215th Signal Depot Companies supplied the cadre; Camp Crowder furnished fillers. The 8-week training course included practice in handling the paper work of the depot and in solving tangled situations purposely introduced, as well as practical on-the-job work.137
In August the 188th and the 189th Signal Repair Companies arrived for eight weeks’ training in the repair of signal equipment. In the next two months the 185th and 186th Signal Repair Companies, two storage and issue sections of the 819th Signal Post Service Company, and several sections of the 825th Signal Repair Service Company received training at Lexington.
Aside from general supply training, the Signal Corps operated scores of specialized depot schools that trained men in desperately needed specialties throughout the war. The electronics power school, inaugurated at Lexington Signal Depot in May 1942 and later moved to Holabird Signal Depot in October 1943, is an example. This was the Army’s first such school.138 Many important types of electronic equipment depend on gasoline-powered or diesel-powered generators for their power source. Unless men were trained to operate and maintain these power sources, the most complex and important electronic equipment could be rendered impotent very quickly. The school encountered the full range of teaching difficulties—scarcity of qualified instructors, an almost complete lack of instructional literature, a lack of students competent enough or interested enough to train, and a shortage of equipment so severe that the units on which the students trained in 1942 could not be torn down for instructional purposes. Instead the equipment had to be maintained in a condition in which it could be shipped out, in operating condition, on eight hours’ notice.139 The Cummins Engine Company of Columbus, Indiana, helped tremendously by furnishing the school with equipment, textbooks, film strips, and other training aids.
The Lexington Supply School also trained numbers of special teams for urgent overseas assignments. Between December 1942 and November 1943 Lexington activated and trained twenty-four Signal Corps mobile technical crews composed of inspection and maintenance teams. Some were ground equipment specialists, others were especially trained for work on airborne signal items.
Aircraft Warning Training
By mid-1943 one of the most demanding of the
Signal Corps training jobs was nearing its end. Aircraft warning duties had absorbed thousands of radar technicians, trained almost overnight in what was still an esoteric science. The Signal Corps and the Army Air Forces divided the training responsibility. The Southern Signal Corps School at Camp Murphy devoted itself to individual training, while the Air Forces’ three unit training centers in Florida, California, and Virginia prepared Signal Corps ground radar units for field service with the Army Air Forces.140
Camp Murphy, following a pattern common to all military training centers during late 1943 and throughout 1944, reached its peak strength late in 1943 and then began a fairly rapid decline. In September and October 1943 more than 4,500 officers and enlisted men were enrolled in courses, 75 percent of them radar maintenance specialists for the AAF.141 By May 1944 only about 1,500 were enrolled,142 but the ratio of officer students to enlisted students rose sharply, reflecting a trend to qualify officers in technical subjects. In the fiscal year ending 30 June 1943, 10,226 enlisted men and 1,375 officers completed courses, but, in the following year, enlisted graduates dropped to 8,003 and officer graduates increased only slightly to 1,495.143
Two factors accounted for the economical concentration at Camp Murphy of a greater proportion of the Army’s electronics training for officers in 1944. As pressure for enlisted radar specialists eased, it released facilities that could be utilized to train additional officers. Secondly, a War Department General Staff decision in late 1943 to discontinue training Electronics Training Group officers in British military schools provided a reservoir of officer students qualified to receive this type of instruction. The 19th and 20th ETG’s, last of the second 500-student increment, had already been sent to Camp Murphy for preliminary instruction while they awaited transportation overseas. The men remained at the Florida school, and the overseas training was discontinued with the 18th ETG, then overseas.144 With the exception of a few officers on research duty, all ETG students were returned to the United States for assignment. On 2 December 1943 the officer in command of the ETG in England officially disbanded the London headquarters, and all radar training was thenceforth concentrated in the United States.145
In general, aircraft warning officers followed a fixed training pattern. They learned the principles of radar at Harvard and their application at MIT. They moved next to Camp Murphy, where they supervised the installation and
maintenance of field sets. Then, along with the enlisted technicians, they received training in teamwork at the Aircraft Warning Unit Training Center at Drew Field. Officers trained in the ETG in the United Kingdom were the exception. Most of these men went directly to Drew Field, to aircraft warning units, or to the Army Air Forces School of Applied Tactics at Orlando, Florida.146
Out of every five radar officer students, one was a man educationally qualified to pursue advanced study to become an instructor, a design and research engineer, or a liaison officer in a plant manufacturing radar equipment. Since Signal Corps schools were not staffed or equipped to give this scientific instruction, such students, if not sent to the British military schools, enrolled at Harvard in the Cruft Laboratory course and at MIT. These institutions provided advanced courses in electronics and its applications to radar.147
About 80 percent of radar officers found themselves in a second category, men who would be assigned to field duty to supervise the installation, maintenance and repair of tactical radar equipment. Such assignments required less highly technical training. The Signal Corps trained these officers at Camp Murphy in a course whose subject matter approximated that conducted at the Cruft Laboratory, which was less advanced than the courses at MIT. The Signal Corps presentation relied heavily on graphics and word pictures instead of the mathematical analyses embodied in the Harvard course. A degree in electrical engineering, an essential prerequisite for the Harvard, MIT, and British courses, was a desirable but not mandatory prerequisite for the Camp Murphy training, for the practical reason that it was becoming increasingly difficult to fill the electronics quotas with men who possessed engineering degrees. At Camp Murphy the men devoted two months to the study of electronics principles and one month to radar, UHF, and microwave principles, and then went to aircraft warning units, the Antiaircraft Command, the Air Service Command, and possibly as many as one-third to Signal Corps depots and other headquarters.
Previously, officer students had entered the Southern Signal Corps School at three levels of preparation: directly from officer candidate school; OCS plus Harvard University’s Cruft Laboratory course; and OCS plus Harvard, plus MIT. They had arrived in small numbers at indefinite and irregular intervals. Under the new plan, students arrived regularly. The existing Harvard and MIT courses financed by the U.S. Office of Education were discontinued on 21 December 1943, and new contracts were entered into for the training of the
better qualified 20 percent required for the more highly technical assignments.148
Between the inception of the program late in 1941 and the end of June 1944, 2,349 officers graduated from the Harvard course out of a final enrollment of 2,566. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during the same period, 2,099 students received certificates out of an initial enrollment of 2,182. No comparison can be made between the Harvard and MIT instruction and radar courses given at other civilian institutions, because the former was more advanced than the instruction given anywhere else except in the United Kingdom. The practical training the ETG officers received in the United Kingdom with British troops in action makes comparisons there of little value.149
Despite all efforts to fill the electronics training program quotas, a shortage of men qualified to take the training persisted, and output did not equal estimated requirements for this type of officer specialist.150 Moreover, of the electrical engineers obtained from the ROTC, not many could be spared for radar training because they were needed for technical assignments on radio and carrier transmission systems, particularly since the Signal Corps had scraped the bottom of the barrel by calling the last twenty-three officers provided by the Affiliated Plan to active duty during June, July, and August. The ASF had closed the door to further civilian procurement, and without additional procurement from civil life the number of officers in prospect for radar duty by the end of 1944 would about equal estimated requirements at the end of 1943. Requisitions placed in 1942 for radar officers were still pending, unfilled, in mid-1943.151
Lacking Signal Corps students to fill the Camp Murphy school to capacity, quotas were assigned to the Navy and the Marine Corps and for the training of a limited number of officers of Allied armies. In the fall of 1943, twenty-one French officers, slated to take over operation of the American and British networks in North Africa, were studying the SCR-268 when it was learned that the newer SCR-584 would be used for gun laying in North Africa. Accordingly, instruction on that set was substituted for the original course.152
Meanwhile, as officer classes expanded during 1943 and 1944, Camp Murphy continued enlisted instruction largely along the lines originally planned. Until 1944, however, inadequate training facilities, especially a lack of equipment items, prevented the school from operating at maximum efficiency in all of its departments. For example, unlike Drew Field, Camp Murphy had no airplanes of its own. The Civil Air Patrol at Lantana Air Base, Lake Worth, Florida, and the Army Air Forces Technical School No. 5 at Boca Raton arranged informally to make a limited number of
controlled flights for Camp Murphy. These provided some training in the calibration of radar sets, operator instruction on all types of ground radar equipment, use of radio recognition and identification equipment, and radar-controlled searchlight operation training.153
The AAF controlled all radar equipment and dictated training requirements, and the availability of equipment had a direct bearing on the curriculum. The Signal Corps, anxious to give more attention to jamming techniques, suggested in September 1943 that the Southern Signal Corps School and the Army Air Forces Technical Training Center at Boca Raton jointly conduct a series of problems. Such exercises could provide valuable practice for students at both institutions and for the crews in the aircraft warning networks within range and frequency of the jammers. ASF approved the proposal, but headquarters AAF tabled it because jamming equipment could not be provided.154 Phonograph records had to be substituted for more realistic training in the increasingly important field of Countermeasures.155 At the request of AAF, Signal Corps planned to train half a class of airborne radio equipment repairmen on the new SCR-718 set, leaving the remainder to study the RC-24, on which all such specialists had previously learned their trade. Then the AAF decided that the new set was too simple to waste instruction time on it. Familiarity with the necessary maintenance literature and test equipment IE-45 would suffice. However, when the first IE-45’s arrived from the manufacturer on 1 November, the Army Air Forces sent the entire lot overseas. It was mid-December before Camp Murphy got any IE-45’s for school use, and until then the gap in SCR-718 enlisted instruction could not be closed.156
Camp Murphy undertook team and field training, but initially without a separate department set up for the purpose. Training did not progress smoothly. Double duty for facilities, training equipment, and instructors resulted in subordination of team training to individual instruction. When Camp Murphy acquired fifteen Civilian Conservation Corps buildings in March 1944, it organized a separate department for team training. The scarcity of instructors delayed the project until June, and by the time the new division started functioning, its days were already numbered since aircraft warning training was definitely declining. In October, the Southern Signal Corps School at Camp Murphy closed its doors. Aircraft warning training, with reduced student quotas, transferred back to Fort
Monmouth, the site of its beginning. Between the opening of the radar school at Riviera, Florida, in April 1942, before the completion of Camp Murphy, and its close in October 1944, 10,330 enlisted men received training and went to demanding assignments in every part of the world.157
Meanwhile, in March 1943, a Signal Corps officer, Brig. Gen. Stephen H. Sherrill, was transferred from the Western Signal Corps Training Center at Sacramento to take command of the Army Air Forces’ largest training center, the Aircraft Warning Unit Training Center at Drew Field.158 Up to this time the center had used the stage system of training, forming a unit in one stage and training it in another, with the result that responsibility was divided. General Sherrill instituted a system embodying a group of training battalions, each of which was responsible for the formation, training, and complete preparation for overseas movement of all units within a given category.159
Other circumstances contributed to a rise in training efficiency at Drew Field during the first months of General Sherrill’s regime. AAF headquarters began regulating the flow of enlisted men into the center, providing about 6,000 each month, half of them fillers with previous training in service forces schools, a third qualified for specialist training, and no more than a sixth, basics. The AAF was able also to provide a more adequate supply of highly qualified instructors. Finally, training equipment, once very scarce, became available—both radar sets and airplanes. As conditions and techniques improved, AWUTC production of welltrained aircraft warning units mounted steadily. During the first nine months of 1943, Drew Field graduated 14,189 AWS specialists.
September 1943 brought instructions to the center to organize and prepare nine battalions to take part in the Normandy invasion and to gear its program to large-scale airborne and amphibious operations being planned for both Europe and the Pacific. Newer types of equipment arrived, necessitating new techniques and new types of training. Eleven new subcenters sprang into existence from Bradenton, Florida, to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to house the overflow from Drew.
In the spring of 1944 Drew Field concentrated on exercises and field maneuvers. But, as at other training centers, the AWUTC’s boom days were passing. By June 1944, the number of fixed station training sites had dwindled to nine, and all troops except those on field maneuvers were housed at Drew Field proper. More than 37,000 men had gone out in the preceding 16 months, and all the combat theaters had benefited from the training the radar units and crews had received at Drew Field. The next few
months witnessed the rapid decline of aircraft warning training. In the early winter of 1944-45 the AWUTC was inactivated, and its staff and equipment transferred to the AAF installation at Pinedale, California.160
Summary
Signal Corps personnel and training activities during the last two years of war benefited from the vigor and ingenuity that had characterized the efforts of the earlier years. Although much of the Chief Signal Officer’s control of personnel procurement and training was taken over by ASF, the basic signal doctrine and techniques of training remained securely in his hands. Signal Corps organization and training innovations often set a pattern adopted by the ASF and applied to all the technical services. The cellular plan of organization of units and the plan for preactivation training represent the two most significant examples of Signal Corps training contributions.
The Signal Corps’ tasks were so varied and its responsibilities so wide that training the large number of different kinds of units demanded an enormously complex curriculum. Lessons learned in combat continuously provided new material that was quickly reflected in Signal Corps training courses during the last two years of war. Not all training methods succeeded equally well. The value of on-the-job training came to be recognized in 1944-45 as at least equal to that of classroom schooling.
The principal training deficiency from the Signal Corps point of view was the length of time available for technical training. For most of the war the Signal Corps was unable to establish its contention that electronics subjects are more difficult than any other Army specialty and that they require better students and a longer training period. By the end of the war in Europe, the Signal Corps’ need for men in the higher intelligence brackets had been conceded, but unfortunately by then few such men were available.
In order to accommodate its heavy training load during the war, the Signal Corps required three replacement training centers, six service schools, four depot schools, two unit training centers, and dozens of technical vocational and industrial schools, colleges, and universities in the United States as well as technical schools in the United Kingdom. In addition, 268 civilian schools and colleges were utilized in a countrywide program of preservice training that produced about 50,000 Signal Corps enlisted reservists as well as a large number of trained civilian employees. Approximately 387,000 officers and men completed communications courses conducted by the Signal Corps.161