Chapter 18: Signaling the World
The commodity dispatched overseas in greatest quantity during World War II, and at greatest speed, was neither munitions, nor rations, neither clothing nor supply items. It was words, billions of words, messages of strategy and comand, plans of campaigns and reports of action, requests for troops and schedules of their movements, lists of supplies requisitioned and of supplies in shipment, administrative messages, casualty lists. All of this and much more, such as services for the press (news dispatches, telephotos) and services for the soldiers (expeditionary force messages), poured over far-flung wire, cable, and radio circuits and channels—routine and urgent, plain text and enciphered, on a scale unimagined before the war by any communications agency, military or commercial. All this was the work of the Signal Corps Army Communications Service. ACAN was actually moving some fifty million words a day (with a capacity of a hundred million daily) toward the end of World War II. Maj. Gen. Frank E. Stoner, chief of the Army Communications Service throughout the war, estimated that eight words were sent overseas for every bullet fired by Allied troops. “The pen is still mightier than the sword,” he quipped.1
During the first half of the war, the many modes and agencies of communications within the continental United States were marshaled and reorganized to meet the needs of the armed services. The Army’s domestic radio network was replaced by landline teletypewriter nets (a few Army radio circuits within the country were kept available, however, in stand-by status in case of emergency need). By 1943 both the internal networks and their overseas extensions comprised the expanding Army Communications Service, headed by an
operating agency in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer with three major branches: Traffic, Plant, and Security. Together with Philadelphia’s large Plant Engineering Agency, which helped design, construct, and maintain installations, these several activities supported the Army’s ever-extending networks.2
In mid-1943 the major ACAN stations outside the United States were in London, Algiers, Accra, Cairo, Asmara, Karachi, New Delhi, Brisbane, and Hawaii. Many lesser stations tied into the net wherever a local Army radio served local troops or commands, as at Reykjavik, Tehran, Noumea, and on numerous Pacific isles and atolls.3 From the major stations, which often served as relay points to outlying posts, lesser radio nets and wire lines radiated out to meet the needs of local Army installations. Control over this world-wide military communications system—ACAN—was vested in the Chief Signal Officer in the Washington headquarters, the location of the net control station WAR.4
The needs of America’s world operations in World War II, together with the facilities and techniques the Signal Corps developed to meet the needs, opened up vistas of world communications on a scale and magnitude scarcely contemplated before. Or when contemplated by persons either in private enterprise or in government, the idea was not developed into a large-scale actuality until World War II provided the necessity, and the Signal Corps the men and the means.5
After the war, facile high-speed high-capacity world-wide communications, including such innovations as teleconferences conducted by teletype between conferees thousands of miles apart, became commonplace. Before World War II, the facilities to communicate overseas by commercial telegraph, whether via cable or radio, supplemented by high-frequency radiotelephone, were available, but slow and costly. Their use was not commonplace.
Army communications before Pearl Harbor scarcely extended beyond the boundaries of the continental United States. “Our facilities,” General Stoner recalled, “consisted primarily of radio communications, some wire and some cable to each one of the Corps Area Headquarters, and to some of the overseas commands, such as Puerto Rico, Panama, Hawaii, and the Philippines.” Then suddenly the exigencies of the first year of war took the United States Army around the world, and with it went the Army’s communications system. At the mid-point of the war, General Stoner could already say with pride, “We have got our net in, and it is the finest network in the world.”6
ACAN Facilities and Techniques
Fiscal year 1944 saw the vigorous emergence of the Army Command and Administrative Network as a communications system unrivaled either in peacetime or in time of war. Its myriad circuits enmeshed the nation and reached out to bring into its web every overseas headquarters and every command, however remote. It transmitted securely, thanks to cipher machines.7 And it transmitted fast, as signalized by the round-the-world passage on 24 May 1944 of a test message, completing the trip in three and a half minutes (a similar test in 1945 cut the time to nine and a half seconds).8 The ACAN system therefore met two of the most exacting requirements in military communications—security and speed. A third requirement was that traffic capacity be increased. The number of radio channels that the frequency spectrum permitted could not be multiplied. Laws of physics and the immutable spectrum itself forbade. Ways had to be found to provide greater traffic capacity over the same channels, using the same limited number of frequencies.
Thus, while the need for speed forced the abandonment of slow hand-keyed transmission and while the need for both speed and security urged the development of machine cipher devices, the necessity for greater traffic capacity compelled the Signal Corps to develop mechanical sending and receiving apparatus employing semiautomatic radio and carrier techniques, permitting the transmission of several communications simultaneously over circuits that handled only one channel before.9
The basic techniques that enabled these achievements were radioteletypewriter applications, coupled with carrier,
WACs operate teletypewriters at ETOUSA Communications Center, Paris
multichannel and single sideband radio developments. The SSB technique was in itself a major innovation that provided several short-wave circuits using only one-half, or one sideband (suppressing the other sideband) of the usual spread of transmitter frequencies that extend out for several thousand cycles on each side of the center frequency. The technique, valuable for the conservation of frequencies in the severely congested short-wave portion of the spectrum, had been partly developed by AT&T. Early in 1942, W. G. Thompson of AT&T discussed with Stoner the possibility of further development and perfection of the technique for military use. SSB was needed at once (coupled with teletypewriter equipment and automatic ciphering) to speed and secure Army’s growing traffic loads. SSB proved out well and quickly, and the first system, leased from commercial companies, opened successfully between Washington and London on 20 July 1942. Other big multichannel SSB systems followed, to Algiers, Brisbane, and elsewhere, until the technique became standard on all major radio circuits between the War Department and overseas ACAN stations.10
The conversion of numbers of Army circuits to RTTY (radioteletype) the world over constituted “perhaps the most important single Army Communications Service development during the year.” This was the cautious estimate of an ASF report of fiscal year 1944. The author ventured to add that the development was “revolutionary.”11 For not only did radioteletype eliminate the slow transmission of Morse code by hand-keyed radio telegraph (accompanied by the still slower procedures of hand enciphering and deciphering) but it also enabled semiautomatic methods of transfer of traffic from wire to radio circuits, and vice-versa. In addition, it created a standard world-wide message transmission system, comparable to a single-gauge
railroad system, over which any train can move to all points.
The standard “gauge” of the ACAN “track” was the 5-unit perforated tape, employing the five units of the standard teletypewriter code, which had been in general use for some years. This tape, with its 5-unit code perforations, was interchangeable between landline, radio, and overseas cable circuits. The resultant message in tape form could be routed by both types of circuits or a combination of circuits (wire and/or radio). After the creation of the tape at the point of origin, all the rest of its handling along the way, the relays and the transfers till the destination was reached, was automatic (except for reading or routing the tapes at relay points) . The typing of the delivered text at the destination was automatic.
The typing of whatever copies might be needed for information addressees along the way was likewise automatic. “A message could go from Keokuk, Iowa, around the world with drop-off copies at intermediate points, with manual typing necessary only at the point of origin,” General Stoner told an Army Industrial College audience after the war. And, very important in military communications, the encipherment of the plain language text at the point of origin and its decipherment at every point of delivery were also automatic, accomplished by cipher machines working in conjunction with the teletypewriters.12
During 1944 and 1945 increasing numbers of ACAN signal centers completed conversion to semiautomatic operation, relieving the troubles engendered by greater traffic loads and smaller personnel forces to move them. For example, before conversion, the growing load at the Atlanta station (having increased by more than 15,000 words a day) compelled the rerouting of some of that traffic by way of Washington and Dallas. After the semiautomatic equipment went to work at Atlanta, the station handled the full load readily. Another alleviating technique was the conversion of some circuits from operation at 60 words per minute to 100. This speed-up relieved congestion on 16 transcontinental wire circuits, on 2 radioteletypewriter circuits extending overseas from Washington, the one to Caserta, Italy, the other to Honolulu, and on a third circuit, one between Manila and New Delhi.
Extensive use of “packaged” sets of the new equipment helped in the conversion. The semiautomatic packaged unit, teletypewriter set AN/TGC-1, was a streamlined militarized version of the first bulky product. It was compact, rugged, and easy to install, operate, and maintain. It was also tropicalized. The War Department Signal Center, where new ACAN equipment regularly met its first trials and tests, had designed and developed the packaged sets under the officer in charge in 1943, Maj. William S. Sparks, and his assistant, Capt. Ralph A. Scofield. On 15 January 1944 the radio semiautomatic section went to work in the signal center, encountering “little trouble.” Its operations showed “immediate improvement,” Stoner reported. The equipment enabled the center to handle its World War II peak
Teletype conference, as viewed in telecom room of the Pentagon. Flashlight glare has obliterated the messages
load of almost 9,500,000 words on 8 August 1945.13
Meanwhile much was done to streamline and improve ACAN operating efficiency, not all of it involving equipment, but rather procedures and methodstraffic engineering such as the juggling of circuits and traffic loads in various ways in order to secure maximum effectiveness and economy. One innovation toward a uniform intra-Army relay procedure took effect on 1 February 1945. It was a revised teletypewriter procedure, intended to simplify and reduce transmission time. It did eliminate the confusion
that had previously hampered the relay of messages to combat zone stations.14
Telecommunication Group Conference (Telecon) Facilities
Radioteletype and automatic on-line encipher and decipher machines made conferences possible between various headquarters and men thousands of miles apart. The conferring parties needed but to assemble at the ends of an ACAN RTTY circuit and put questions that a teletype operator tapped out. The receiving party could answer and question in turn with only such delay as the typing time required, since both the transmission time and the encipher/decipher time were so nearly instantaneous as to be negligible. This was Sigtot.15
Thus, the instantaneous operation of the teletypewriters at the sending and receiving stations, however many thousands of miles apart, whether the connecting links were wire, radio, submarine cable, or all three, enabled men to confer with each other almost as over a telephone line. The use of a projection screen, which would display to a room full of persons the outgoing and incoming sentences, made possible teletypewriter conferences between groups of men at the ends of the circuit. In addition the system provided a written record of the discussions. All this came to be called a telecon system and came to be used extensively and importantly, sometimes between more than two parties, by the use of several circuits, each with its own viewing screen. Just before the Normandy invasion, for example, General Marshall in effect brought together in conference General Eisenhower in the European theater and General MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific. He also brought in by means of a third circuit and screen Maj. Gen. John R. Deane, head of the U.S. military mission in Moscow. The remarkable, almost world-wide, conference lasted over an hour, and produced, Stoner stated, “an understanding between commands equal to one where all would be present in person.” He exulted, “We carried three messages to Garcia today.” This tremendous communications facility, he added, was “really one of the secret weapons of the war.”16
Earlier developments in communications had, in time gone by (beginning with the Civil War), caused field officers to chafe under “control from Washington.” Now, direct control was possible to the extent that a commander in the Washington headquarters could handle affairs in a distant theater almost as though he were physically there. For example, General Arnold, head of the Army Air Forces in Washington, directed from his office the operations of the XX
Bomber Command against Japan through the radio and wire teletype facilities that Signal Corps installed first in the CBI and later in the Pacific island bases from which that bomber command flew its planes. For General Arnold modern electronics was a boon. At least on one occasion, however, General Eisenhower thought otherwise. In July 1943 at the time Mussolini was divested of his power, General Eisenhower wanted to broadcast encouragement to the new Italian Government. Realizing that he must first get approval from Washington, Eisenhower lamented “that in the old days, before rapid communications, generals were free to do whatever they thought best; nowadays an opportunity could be lost while officers argued back and forth.”17
At times the conferees had their bad moments since there were bugs in the system. “The teletype conference the other night,” wrote General Reeder, CBI signal officer, on one occasion in 1944, “was not a howling success from the technical viewpoint. We sat around the machines for four hours and the total transmission (effective) could not have been more than a quarter of that.” He complained to Brig. Gen. Frank C. Meade in the Washington headquarters that a “solid circuit” was needed, that is, good continuous transmission, uninterrupted by atmospheric interference and so on, and “a better operator than you had at your end.” But the system had its points. “From the agenda viewpoint,” Reeder continued, “the conference was interesting in that it showed how nearly we are thinking alike.” Its value was evident as a means of bringing field and headquarters commanders together and as a mode of working out their problems and coming to mutual understanding quickly.18
Its potential value as a means of direct command and control between headquarters thousands of miles apart had led General Arnold and the AAF to demand good conference facilities reaching the Far East. Some of the AAF plans for the system were so secret, it seems, that General Reeder did not know the details. This is evident from the following letter, which also throws further light on some of the early telecon difficulties:
What is prompting the tremendous urge for SIGTOT in Frank Stoner’s outfit? We had the SIGTOT conference set-up here for months. No one ever used it, except the Signal Corps itself, for talk with Washington, and then on the occasions it was used, it was thoroughly unsatisfactory. It was unsatisfactory for two reasons: first, that a clearly written message or letter from the end originating the conference could have been written, read, and answered in the time spent fiddling over the conference circuit. The second reason for its undesirability is that it will operate successfully only when there is a solid circuit between the terminal points. This means that between us and WAR, we must have favorable conditions all the way, and such favorable conditions occur during only a
fraction of the day. While awaiting the favorable period, much time is spent lining up, resetting tapes, etc. The advantage which will be quoted by the lovers of SIGTOT is that the text comes through clear. To us that is unimportant. Most of the messages we receive here are multiple address, so that if we receive a message in clear, we must encipher it instead of decipher, as we would do if it came in code. All this may be gravy for Eddie French’s outfit, but it is pure headache for us. Possibly there is some good reason behind this insane desire to force SIGTOT onto the field, and I will keep quiet in the hope that you will have one of Frank Stoner’s boys explain to me just what is the object.19
Time and tireless effort remedied the initial difficulties of the teletype conference system. Before the end of 1944, scheduled conferences over ACAN circuits were averaging three a day, some of them running to as many as 20,000 words.
By V-J Day Sigtot facilities were available at 19 overseas stations:
| Algiers | Honolulu | Paris |
| Asmara | Kharagpur | Recife |
| Brisbane | Leyte | Tehran |
| Caserta | London | Valognes |
| Chungking | Manila | Versailles |
| Guam | Moscow | |
| Hollandia | New Delhi |
Special conference facilities were, moreover, extended to the military conclaves of Allied leaders at Quebec, Malta, Yalta, Berlin, and Potsdam, and were heavily used by the President and by State Department members.20
Communications for VIP Conferences
As ACAN’s efficient communications services became widely available and more efficient, they came to be demanded first and foremost by the heads of states. The meetings of these officials at the several highest level conferences during World War II repeatedly placed heavy pressure upon the Army Communications Service. The government heads and their civilian and military staffs had to have unlimited communications facilities, and the security of the messages they sent and received had, obviously, to be perfect. The circumstance that the VIP’s frequently chose out-of-the-way places, normally not well provided with communications facilities, such as Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta, did not make the task placed upon the Signal Corps any lighter. Signal Corps men had to create, on short notice, largescale local facilities and effective connections with the world-wide ACAN so that the Big Three and their delegates might maintain unbroken contact with their advisers at home and with their military commanders the world over. The first such conference was held at Casablanca, in January 1943, where Colonel Hammond, then the signal officer of I Armored Corps, effectively installed and operated the required communications.21
Less remote was the site of an important conference the following summer. This was the first Quebec conference (QUADRANT, 12-14 August 1943). Though no great difficulties arose in communications, Quebec being well supplied with facilities, security requirements caused some trouble. The Signal Corps’ chief problem in providing the facilities resulted from the fact that it was prevented for security reasons from beginning the work on installations till the last hours before the distinguished conferees arrived. No military preparations visible to the public were allowed until three days before Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill made his unheralded arrival. Then enough Signal Corps equipment and personnel drove into the city in a 15-vehicle convoy to get everything ready within the last two days. Everything included thirty-three items of teletypewriter and carrier equipment, a 320-line switchboard served by four operators, direct lines both to the White House and to the War Department Signal Center for relay to any point in the ACAN system.22
Conferences in November and December 1943 took place at Cairo (SEXTANT) and Tehran (EUREKA). For the Cairo conference the Signal Corps on short notice detoured some twenty tons of radioteletypewriter equipment that happened to be en route to Tehran. Landed in Cairo on 13 November, it helped to set up within four days a special radio channel reaching to Asmara. An efficient heavy-duty radioteletypewriter channel went into operation too, as well as a 4-position switchboard providing 300 telephone lines, not to mention a small single-position switchboard for the use of President Roosevelt and his party. Radio contact was maintained with the world around the clock by links from Cairo to the big Algiers station and to station WAR in Washington. At the Tehran conference, which immediately followed the Cairo conclave, the Signal Corps provided a local switchboard of 50 lines and radio circuits linking Tehran with the Asmara station in ACAN’s round-the-world belt line.23
The second Quebec conference (OCTAGON, September 1944) made good use of the latest radioteletypewriter conference facilities. These tied in with the Sigtot facilities in the ACAN system extending to Washington and San Francisco and to such overseas points as New Delhi, Kharagpur, Brisbane, and Hollandia. The connection to General MacArthur’s headquarters through Hollandia was importantly used, for it was at this conference that the Combined Chiefs of Staff sought to determine whether General MacArthur could attack Leyte earlier than 20 December, as then planned. In the course of the debate in the Chateau Frontenac, General Marshall requested General Handy to go to the signal control room adjacent and ask MacArthur in Hollandia, New Guinea, by radioteletypewriter if he could advance the attack date. Within five minutes Handy
rejoined the conferees with the answer that MacArthur’s headquarters had said he could invade on 20 October.24 When the British, including the Prime Minister, could not believe Handy, they all went to the Signal Corps control room for a demonstration of these unheard of communications. They were convinced. President Roosevelt nudged the British Prime Minister, “Winnie, has your Army any communications like this?”25
A major effort was necessary to provide conference facilities in February 1945 at Yalta (ARGONAUT), where adverse weather and terrain and limited personnel added to the troubles engendered by the short notice. First word of the Yalta requirement arrived in the Mediterranean theater early in January 1945 and the deadline was 2 February. The equipment needed ran to 250 tons. It had to be assembled from the Mediterranean and European theaters, from the Persian Gulf Command, and from the United States, some of it by air transport. It included not only radios, teletypewriters, switchboards, power equipment, but even telephone poles. A floating radio relay station had to be provided. To this end the Navy provided the USS Catoctin, which was outfitted at Naples with one of the first long-range radioteletypewriter transmitters ever installed on a ship. Arriving off the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea, the Signal Corps men found that the mine-infested harbor at Yalta could not be used. The ship had to anchor at Sevastopol, sixty-five miles away, and communications links had to be quickly provided across the mountainous peninsula to the Livadia Palace in Yalta.. In the palace itself, site of the conferences, elaborate teletype and telephone installations had to be made. The wire lines to the Catoctin had to cross two mountain ranges. In case they should fail, a VHF radio relay circuit was provided also, paralleling the long wire line. At Sevastopol it was found that, when the Catoctin turned on its transmitter to signal to Algiers, the powerful signal interfered with the receivers on the ship. Therefore the transmitting antenna had to be removed to a hilltop ashore.
All together, the Yalta conference communications arrangements were strenuous, and the results were sufficiently remarkable to impress President Roosevelt. On returning and reporting to Congress, he mentioned the “modern miracle of communications,” making it emphatic that “when we consider international relations, we must include international communications.” When quoting these words of the President to the Federal Communications Bar Association early in 1946, General Stoner detailed some of the reasons for Roosevelt’s enthusiasm:
While at Yalta the President had many teletype conferences with General Eisenhower—then at Rheims—with the White House and State Department in Washington, and even with Ambassador Hurley in Chungking. For the Chungking hook-up we used regenerative repeaters at Algiers, Washington, and Honolulu to create a single circuit over which the President and Mr. Hurley could exchange questions and
answers immediately—with absolute security.26
The last of the World War II international conferences (TERMINAL) took place near Berlin at Potsdam, from 6 July to 3 August 1945. By early July over 200 tons of material and over 300 officers and men (also 27 Wacs) assembled at Halle, 80 miles southeast of Potsdam. Arriving in a convoy of 100 vehicles, the Signal Corps men installed at Potsdam a 6-position board to serve the President’s party, about 500 telephones in some 100 separate buildings, and 70 miles of cable distribution, plus 2 radioteletypewriter systems, one to Washington, the other to Paris, and 2 VHF radio relay systems to SHAEF at Frankfurt, via Leipzig. The latter circuit utilized cable from Leipzig to Frankfurt, but, since the telephone repeater on that cable line had been bombed out, the Signal Corps had to install repeaters, ringers, and other equipment to permit the cable to work. A million and a half words flowed over the American facilities, with loo-percent continuity of teletype service.27
Expansion Through V-J Day
Midway through World War II the War Department Signal Center and station WAR were struggling to keep up with the flood of communications. By 1943 the 17th Signal Service Company, in charge of the station, was faced not only with heavier traffic loads but also with increasingly burdensome services such as larger training demands and the provision of special communications teams of various sorts.28 As of April 1943 the company was authorized only 302 men. Actual needs compelled an overstrength, which stood at 530 at that date. There were never enough operators.
The general trend went something like this: as duties increased, overstrength increased, but not fast enough. As overstrength mounted, authorized strength was upped, but even slower.
In this connection, it should be noted that strength figures are very misleading, whether they show authorized or actual size. These numbers have to be carefully analyzed since they include transport radio operators and students along with everyone else. Counting these men would bring the overstrength into the thousands in some cases, and would not reflect the number working in the Signal center station, Property Office, Telephoto Section, and other jobs directly related to the traditional duties of the 17th.
The workloads rose. At the war’s peak, the control station was handling 20 percent of the network’s traffic. By mid-1944 Wacs were proving to be a great help (as of August 1944 authorized strength was 511 enlisted men and 27 Wacs) . A very great help came from automation, in particular the conversion of the station’s equipment to semiautomatic wire and radio and tape relay, completed in
January 1944. Mechanical ciphering increasingly replaced manual coding. By March 1945 the authorized strength, 920, began to catch up with the need. By then, too, the overgrown company acquired a new organization and designation, becoming on 1 February 1945 the 2506th Service Command Unit.29
Physical improvements in the Washington area outside the War Department Signal Center installations included by 1945 a UHF control system that linked station WAR with the receiver station in La Plata in nearby Maryland and with the transmitter stations at Fort Myer and Battery Cove, Virginia. This system provided a dependable line-of-sight radio service that was unhampered by wire line troubles or weather vagaries. As of June 1944 the Fort Myer and Battery Cove transmitter stations and the La Plata receiving station served as terminals for more than a score of major overseas ACAN circuits and stand-by continental circuits, accomplishing the task with an appropriate quantity of radios, up to 40 kilowatts in power.30 (Table 3)
ACAN installations overseas expanded rapidly in 1944 following the Normandy invasion and accelerated successes in the Pacific. Major stations developed in France, principally in Paris and Reims, at Hollandia in New Guinea, in Manila, and finally at the war’s end, in Frankfurt, Germany, and in Tokyo.
ACAN in the European Theater
The ACAN facilities serving SHAEF and ETOUSA headquarters in England had become huge and well established during the months before the invasion of Normandy. The major radio transmitters had been converted to radioteletypewriter operation—JEAR serving ETOUSA, JEJE serving SHAEF, and JBJB serving the headquarters of the United Kingdom Base Command. By the spring of 1944 JEJE and JBJB had radio connections with JJJJ (AFHQ in Caserta, Italy), the Army Air Forces headquarters, and a number of tributary stations. Six of these tributaries as of February 1944 were JEHD, Headquarters, 6th Army Group; JECB, Headquarters, Continental Advance Section; JENY, Headquarters, Delta Base Section; JEOB, Headquarters, Advance Section; JBAF, Headquarters, Eighth Air Force; and J BAD, Headquarters, Base Air Depot Area, Air Service Command.31
Changes followed swiftly after the invasion in June 1944. Within hours of the first landings, station WAR came into communication with points on the French coast by radio circuits routed through London. A portion of the ACAN communications center serving SHAEF at Bushy Park, London, moved to the Portsmouth area, where an advanced command post took form by 1 July. General Ingles was unhappy with this move because “it required the installation of a large amount of equipment which was
Table 3—ACAN Radio facilities, June 1944
| Call Sign | Terminus | Xmtr Power | Call Sign | Terminus | Xmtr Power |
| Fort Myer Transmitting Station | Battery Cove Transmitting Station | ||||
| Circuits in Operation | |||||
| WTJ | Hawaii | 15 kw | JDOA | Oran | 15 kw |
| JJJJ | Caserta | 15 kw | JBJB—G | London | 15 kw |
| WVKF | Recife | 15 kw | JBJB—Z | London | 15 kw |
| JCYN | Cairo | 15 kw | WVN | Puerto Rico | 15 kw |
| JBHC | Rekyavik | 10 kw | WVL | Panama | 15 kw |
| WTE | White House officials | As required | WYTE | Trinidad | 15 kw |
| WZT- | Bermuda | 1 kw | |||
| WYQY | Azores | 2½ kw | |||
| JKZA | Accra | 15 kw | |||
| Stand-by Circuits | |||||
| WVD | Seattle | WVT | Chicago | ||
| WVV | Fort Omaha | WVY | San Francisco | ||
| WVQ | Wright Field | WVR | Atlanta | ||
| WVP | Governors Island | WVB | Fort Sam Houston | ||
| Sets Installed | |||||
| 1 40 kw | 1 40 kw | ||||
| 5 15 kw | 5 15 kw | ||||
| 2 10 kw | 2 2½ kw | ||||
| 1 SSB multichannel system, 40 kw | 3 1 kw | ||||
La Plata Receiving Station
Circuits in Operation
Same as transmitter circuits listed above
Sets Installed
36 Semi-pro receiving sets
12 Diversity equipment
1 Multichannel SSB receiver
12 Press Wireless frequency shift receivers
1 Hammarlund super-pro receiver
13 Western Electric radioteletype terminal equipment 4 UHF Transmitters (6 channels each)
4 Voice frequency channeling sets (6 channels each)
Source: CSigO, Annual Rpt, FY 44, pp. 545ff.
badly needed in France and which was thus immobilized for weeks in a location that was not as good as the former one.”32
During the summer both the ACAN facilities serving SHAEF and those
serving ETOUSA moved to France, the former to Jullouville near Bayeux, the latter to the vicinity of Valognes, near Cherbourg. Neither move was brilliant, in part because of the lack of good local communications in these out-of-the-way provincial towns. The communications center of ETOUSA was by August jammed into the inadequate spaces afforded by a country chateau, circuits were dislocated, and traffic flow suffered considerable trouble for weeks until suitable and commodious facilities were eventually provided in Paris. On 1 September SHAEF communications moved across the Channel to a set of school buildings in Jullouville where the same unfavorable conditions prevailed as at Valognes. General Eisenhower had been eager to locate at Jullouville but had had to wait until some sort of communications could be assured back to England and among the forward echelons of air, naval, and French forces. Forward SHAEF communications closed out at Portsmouth on 1 September, opening in the main building of La Colonie Scolaire de St. Ouen at Jullouville, a location that proved as remote and unsuitable for the commanding generals as it did for the ACAN communications serving them.33
General Ingles believed that these ACAN moves to France before the capture of Paris were even a greater mistake than the shift to Portsmouth. He did not doubt but that ETOUSA communications should have remained in London until the entire setup could be moved bodily to Paris, the logical center in France for the business of conducting the support needed on the immense scale required by the war in Europe. He cited these instances to demonstrate that future moves of any large Army headquarters and its communication nets must be planned weeks in advance. A single major ACAN radio station, he explained, required nearly a month to install.34
It was weeks before an ACAN station in France entered into direct communications with station WAR. Traffic passed via London until the first powerful ACAN radio station on the Continent was installed in mid-August at Valognes, a 15-kilowatt set providing multichannel radioteletypewriter direct to Washington. As the Paris location soon proved to be the best communications center in France, 40-kilowatt stations were erected there, and at the war’s end in Frankfurt, Germany, also. For a while when the front was advancing from France into Germany, station WAR maintained a single channel radioteletypewriter circuit with SHAEF Forward at Reims. The Paris station went on the air in a remarkably short time, only ten days after the Germans had been driven out of the city, when high-frequency links direct to London were installed to replace such mobile radio connections as had been employed till then. In a few more weeks a powerful single sideband transmitter was in place and making direct contact with Washington, operating full time. The Signal Corps also restored for ACAN use the former German Horta-Emden cable, which provided two channels having a capacity of 110,000 words a day, a facility that proved especially
valuable during the German counterattacks in December. Sigtot conference facilities between station WAR and Paris became available in November. An important special circuit inaugurated in France was the Redline net, serving exclusively General Eisenhower and his group commanders.35
On 5 October 1944 main SHAEF at Bushy Park closed, opening at Versailles and absorbing Forward SHAEF there. Rear SHAEF continued operating at Bushy Park for a few days and then moved to 31-39 Bryanston Square in London. As French, Belgian, and Dutch wire plants and circuits were rehabilitated on the Continent, much wire, cable, and carrier equipment was installed (no fewer than eleven cables were in use under the English Channel by February 1945). Forward SHAEF opened at Reims in February 1945, where an advance command post had moved in September 1944. As the European war drew to a close, plans were first made to make the last move of SHAEF to Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany, to the I. G. Farben Industrie building there. Forward SHAEF closed on 25 May and opened in Frankfurt the same day. Meanwhile, the large fixed installations in France, notably the former SHAEF automatic telephone system in Paris, were taken over by the Chief Signal Officer, COMZ.36
ACAN in Italy, Africa, the Middle East, and India
When AFHQ moved from Algiers to Italy in July 1944, the ACAN station serving it was installed in the Royal Palace at Caserta, near Naples, its radio answering to the call letters JJJJ. In February 1944, well before the main move of the headquarters, JJJJ had entered the ACAN system, employing Boehme high-speed transmission. This rapid but outmoded equipment gave way to multichannel radioteletype in March. JJJJ activity increased throughout the second half of 1944 as the Allies pressed the Germans northward through the Apennines. Although some of the station’s circuits closed out (Seventh Army and 6th Army Group, which landed in southern France in August, moved north into the ETO sphere), other circuits such as weather circuits with Russia were added, swelling the total number of channels radiating out of Caserta to eleven. Through early 1945 traffic loads continued to mount, culminating in April when radio message groups handled by JJJJ averaged about half a million a month. Traffic thereafter began to diminish, the enemy in northern Italy surrendering on 2 May 1945. As spring became summer, and summer wore on, American personnel in the combined communications center of AFHQ declined, British allies taking over increasingly. By August, Signal Corps men numbered about 300 out of the total of 745 comprising the station. Following V-J Day the station’s last radioteletypewriter circuit, Caserta-Algiers, was decommissioned, bringing to an end the
Radio Tehran, Iran
combined aspect of the AFHQ-ACAN operation, one of the oldest combined signal centers of the war.37
Aside from the radio stations that served the North African theater from late 1942 on, Casablanca, Oran, Accra, Cairo, notably Algiers (which remained an important relay ACAN station, JDJD, even after AFHQ removed to Caserta in mid-1944), there was the major station WVNT at Asmara in Eritrea, a site well south of NATO, and serving not so much that theater’s operations as a major relay in the world belt line of the ACAN system. WVNT soon proved to be ideally located to pass radio transmissions east and west with minimum ionospheric interference. As the value of the station became increasingly apparent, the Signal Corps installed more and ever better equipment there. One of the Army’s first 40-kilowatt multichannel SSB sets was sent that way in 1942, only to be lost at sea in a ship torpedoed off Madagascar. A second set followed, to handle heavy loads of east-west traffic in the earth-circling ACAN belt line, and to pass large amounts of intercept traffic on a one-way journey to Washington. In 1944 the link between Asmara and New Delhi was greatly strengthened and its service speeded by the installation, at the New Delhi end, of radioteletypewriter equipment left in Cairo after the conference there late in 1943.38
In the Middle East Persian Gulf Command, the 833rd Signal Service Company
maintained wire lines and radio in Iraq and Iran. Aided by the 95th Signal Battalion, which arrived in March 1943, these troops and facilities assured communications along the railroad supplying Russia from the Persian Gulf. Ever larger quantities of wire and teletypewriter equipment were installed, and by 1 August 1944 four carrier wire systems were moving a traffic load that ran into millions of words a month.
Radio stations were installed at Basra, Iraq, and Andimeshk, Iran, in 1942. The Basra station, serving the theater command headquarters, was the net control station and also provided relay facilities for traffic moving eastward to India and southward to Asmara in Africa. A number of other radio stations were soon added, at Ahwaz and Tehran and at the ports of Bushire, Khorramshahr, Abadan, and Bandar Shahpur. Radio traffic rose to nearly a million and a half words a month, until late 1943 and 1944 when carrier wire teletypewriter began to take over up to two-thirds of the radio load.
The radio net in the Persian Gulf Command remained local during the first year and a half of its existence. In mid-1943 its circuits began to work directly into the ACAN world net when a 15-kilowatt Press Wireless transmitter was set up at Tehran (JFZA) in order to provide a direct channel to station WAR. It converted to radioteletypewriter operation in May 1944. Its direct contact with station WAR suffered, however, from fadeouts, just as the Karachi circuit had suffered earlier. As a result, the Tehran-Washington traffic was diverted by way of the dependable relay station at Asmara.39
At New Delhi, CBI headquarters, the ACAN station JGTA had grown slowly, for want of facilities, since the start of the war. The Karachi station served as the major relay point in India until highpower transmitters arrived in New Delhi in mid-1943. Not till August 1943 was JGTA ready to replace its manual radio link to Brisbane with Boehme. Much more equipment arrived in 1944, when the important Brisbane link was converted to radioteletypewriter. The equally important link westward in the equatorial belt line was also converted from Boehme to radioteletypewriter early in 1944 with the equipment that had provided the Cairo-Asmara circuit during the Cairo conference the previous December. In fact so many RTTY facilities arrived in India by mid-1944 that the theater was able to report, as of 1 August, that it enjoyed five additional RTTY circuits operating out of New Delhi: to Karachi, Chabua, Shaduzup, Calcutta, and Kunming.40 In the spring of 1945 the India radio net, controlled from New Delhi, included, in addition
to the RTTY circuits named above, circuits to Bombay, Ramgarh, Myitkyina, Ledo, Bhamo, Kandy in Ceylon, and Chungking. Meanwhile, the major beltline circuit to Brisbane closed out, and its replacement, New Delhi—Manila, opened up on 24 April 1945.41
Throughout the last two years of World War II, the New Delhi station served as a major link in the ACAN world-wide system. Station JGTA occupied an air-conditioned building, which also housed the theater signal section. By late 1944 the station equipment included a Federal BC-340 (10 kilowatts) working on the Asmara 2-tone duplex A and B circuits, a Federal BC-399 (one-kilowatt) used as a utility transmitter, a Federal BC-270 (300 watts) on the Ledo circuit, a Hallicrafter BC-610 (300 watts) on the Bombay circuit, a Federal BC-447 (300 watts) on the Ramgarh manual circuit, a Federal BC-325 (400 watts) on the Karachi 2-tone circuit, and a Federal BC-399 (one-kilowatt) working 2-tone on the Chabua circuit. There were 3 large Press Wireless sets. One of 15 kilowatts worked the circuit to Brisbane; a second, of 40 kilowatts, served the Asmara C circuit at reduced power; and a third, of 2.5 kilowatts, operated a Boehme circuit with Chungking. A Wilcox 96-C, 3 kilowatts, worked 2-tone on the Calcutta circuit, a Federal BC-399 1 kilowatt performed on the circuit with Myitkyina in Burma, and a Federal BC-399 was employed as a utility transmitter. Radio traffic over these New Delhi circuits exceeded 13,000,000 words during the month of March 1945. Power for the equipment came from seven 50-kilowatt and two 100-kilowatt diesel-engined generators. The New Delhi antenna system included 11 rhombics—2 directed on Asmara, one each to Washington, Brisbane, Kunming, Chungking, Calcutta, Chabua, Myitkyina, Kandy, and Hollandia. Three long wire antennas were directed on Ledo, Bombay, and Ramgarh.42
To Moscow and Back
Beyond the ETO and north of the ACAN round-the-world belt line through Asmara and New Delhi lay the USSR, quite beyond the ACAN system, till late in the war. Indeed, through the first years of the war, Moscow was almost as remote in communications matters as though located on another planet. Good direct communications had long been needed, but the United States had no means to this end except through a Mackay circuit, which was seldom usable, being unable to maintain contact with the Russians for more than a few minutes each day because of severe fading and auroral interference on the direct route to Moscow over the polar regions of the earth. There existed an indirect route passing through London, but it could not handle the load of military traffic. Messages were delayed for hours, even for as long as three days on occasions, until the United States offered to lend Signal Corps help.
By 1944 Army Communications
Service plans for a good ACAN channel to the Soviet Union had made progress, despite Russian scepticism. The plans called for a circuitous route via automatic relay at the Algiers station. By April 1944 a 2½ kilowatt Press Wireless transmitter together with radioteletypewriter equipment had been shipped by air to Tehran. The shipment both of the equipment and of a small team of Signal Corps men under Maj. Raymond B. Jewett was delayed by Russian intransigence, especially opposition to certain of the personnel.43 Radio frequencies and the Moscow call sign, JMRR, were not easily agreed upon either. It was late spring of 1944 when the equipment was ready and tests were completed.
The Moscow end of the WAR-JMRR circuit was unique in the ACAN system. Messages sent eastward from station WAR, relayed at Algiers to Moscow, flashed into the Soviet control center (SKWU), operated by Soviet personnel who had had some training in American communication methods. From this control center the Russians routed the messages to either of two destinations in Moscow—the U.S. military mission or a Soviet tributary. The Soviet tributary soon split into three terminals: the For eign Office, the Foreign Trade Commissariat, and the War Office. This arrangement whereby a switching center routed traffic to either the American or Soviet message center permitted fairly independent operation. It offered both governments rapid and secure communications. Each message center remained largely independent, avoiding differences in language, custom, and operational procedures.
Special arrangements also had to be made at the Washington end of this circuit. Messages from Moscow arrived in the War Department Signal Center. Those intended for the Soviet Embassy were at first delivered by Western Union to the Embassy; then a tie line was installed between it and the Signal Center. There were difficulties. Time on the circuit had to be shared, United States messages traveling on even hours, Soviet Embassy traffic on the odd. Moreover, the circuit, though intended for 24-hour operation, was sometimes unusable. There was, for example, some interference from facsimile circuits. Since shared use of the single circuit was not altogether satisfactory, a second channel was desired, so that each nation could enjoy a circuit of its own full time. The second circuit was approved in January 1945 and began operating in April. These Washington-Moscow radioteletypewriter circuits, via Algiers relay, continued to operate until 6 May 1946. They were then replaced by a commercial route connecting New York and Moscow by way of Tangiers.44
ACAN in the Pacific
After the loss of WTA Manila upon the fall of the Philippines early in 1942,
Melbourne, Australia, first became the anchor of the ACAN system serving the South and Southwest Pacific areas. As the campaigns against the Japanese progressed, Brisbane (WVJJ, later WTO) replaced Melbourne as the ACAN station site. Equipped with powerful transmitters, the Brisbane station by mid-1943 was able to reach San Francisco directly and dependably, as well as stations in the CBI, thereby establishing a reliable round-the-world belt line of signals.
Brisbane traffic reached a million words a day as the campaigns advanced up through the islands of the south and southwest Pacific. Captured in April 1944, Hollandia by May became a major station, WVLH. In October, MacArthur’s headquarters arrived and Hollandia became a communications center. The ACAN transmitters at Hollandia maintained connections with New Delhi and San Francisco, depending on radioteletypewriter supplemented by manual circuits to the many lesser stations among the islands. Traffic grew to a million words a day by mid-November 1944 and remained high even after GHQ moved to Leyte because supply headquarters USASOS remained for a time at the New Guinea base. Messages coming into the theater from outside continued to flow through Hollandia, where they were decoded, screened, and sent on to Leyte by courier or radio. The Hollandia ACAN station moved to Manila early in 1945, and the old station WTA, which had fallen to the Japanese on the capture of Corregidor in May 1942, arose from its ashes.45
The new WTA Manila used the 40-kilowatt transmitter that had gone in at Brisbane nearly two years earlier. It was set up at the Manila Country Club. The receiver installation went in the receiver station the Japanese had built. Code room, message center, and teleprinters were installed first at the Trade and Commerce Building, but later moved to the Municipal Waterworks Building. The USASOS at first used these ACAN facilities but later acquired parallel circuits of its own and removed to the Far Eastern University. A second multichannel SSB system was set up, beginning operations between Manila and San Francisco in June 1945. Manila ACAN thus became one of the largest overseas stations, with radioteletype circuits to Okinawa, San Francisco, Honolulu, Guam, Noumea, Finschhafen, Brisbane, Hollandia, Leyte, Calcutta, New Delhi, and Chungking.46
At the war’s end in mid-August ACAN stations in the Pacific participated in an extraordinary drama when the Allies sought to repair the communications links Japan had shattered on Pearl Harbor Day nearly four years earlier. Radio communications had to be re-established in order that surrender arrangements might be accomplished. Such links were neither easily nor quickly set up. Surrender on the air became a drama that consumed many hours on 15 August 1945.
First, Army radio operators in the ACAN system, then commercial stations the world over, became intensely concerned in establishing a radio contact whereby the Japanese might acknowledge the Allied peace terms and arrange to terminate the fighting, which meanwhile was continuing unabated.
It all began most unconventionally in the morning over a telecon channel to Manila, when a message in the clear arrived from Chief of Staff Marshall to General MacArthur giving notice of the Japanese capitulation and instructing MacArthur to proceed with surrender arrangements. A more formal instruction in top secret cipher came through a little later. By 1100 MacArthur had composed a message to the Japanese Emperor and the Imperial Command asking that they begin negotiations with him. He had to request that a radio station in Tokyo be designated to maintain communications with his Manila headquarters. Until he should receive this information, he arbitrarily designated a Japanese station (JUM) on a certain frequency to communicate with Manila WTA.
No Japanese station replied. None accepted the American call. Hour after hour, Army transmitters tried to break in on Japanese stations they could hear operating. MacArthur asked Washington to help. Finally near midnight on the 15th station JUM, while working Singapore, heeded the American intercession and asked the Singapore station to wait while the JUM operator listened to WTA. Army stations all over the western Pacific that had been anxiously listening for a Japanese response, swamped WTA with calls that JUM was answering. WTA sent the MacArthur messages, getting receipt for the first on 16 August at 0025. Another Japanese station (JNP) called WTA asking, “Do you want an answer to your message?” “Hell yes,” shouted the officer in charge at WTA when he was shown the message. The American operator signaled back “Yes,” and through the early hours of 16 August the exchange of messages on the surrender arrangements continued. The exchange went on through the 17th and into the 18th. Many stations the world over listened eagerly for the end. At one point, when there was some uncertainty as to whether Japan was receiving a certain important message, so many transmitters signaled the text that the Tokyo station after a few minutes desperately radioed, “Please send no more of message No. 5013. We have already receipted for over 500 copies.”47
Special Services
Radioteletype for the AAF
By all odds the largest undertaking of the Army Communications Service, besides installing and operating the enormous world-wide communications system of the ACAN, was the rather special support given to the Army Airways
Communications Service. “We had one other huge task, which is not generally known to the public,” remarked General Stoner speaking of the AACS. The AACS differed from ACAN in that it was strictly an AAF organization, manned and operated by the airmen, though Signal Corps men supplied the equipment, engineered and set up the installations, and in the early days of the war often operated the communications lines too, until the AAF could do so with AACS men, who very often merely transferred over from the Signal Corps.48
Pressure for radioteletypewriter service for the AACS developed early in World War II. Aircraft flights required swift communications between airfields. Weather conditions affecting air operations had to be transmitted quickly. When the AAF was harassed by the submarine war in the Atlantic during the first year and a half of the war, rapid communications were desperately needed to press antisubmarine combat. Army’s communications and radar expert in Secretary Stimson’s office, Dr. Bowles, studied the communications networks over the Atlantic and found them wanting. He noted on a chart of an antisubmarine net that he drew up early in 1943, “Telegraph communications of one kind or another now exist between all proposed stations on the antisubmarine net.” But except for two radioteletypewriter circuits, one to London and one to Algiers, he noted that the communications facilities were “very slow because of the necessity for coding and decoding,” slowed down still further “because of heavy traffic loads and inexperienced telegraph operators.” He concluded that the latest form of radioteletypewriter with automatic coding and decoding was essential. The Signal Corps was in fact already striving to provide this equipment for the AACS, with success. In August 1943, therefore, Bowles was able to inform Secretary Stimson that such a RTTY system, with automatic ciphering, “along the South Atlantic Ferry Route had been planned by the Signal Corps ... installation is now in progress ... the first few links being already in operation.”49
The Signal Corps had developed radioteletypewriter, single channel, especially for AACS needs. To accomplish the major task of installing it in the hundreds of AACS stations that had mushroomed over the world, the Chief Signal Officer greatly expanded his plant activity, an engineering service of long standing in the Signal Corps, to design and lay out Army’s communications stations. He expanded the activity into an agency, the Plant Engineering Agency, and located it in Philadelphia as a major field installation. Its Signal Airways Branch and Signal Airways Service divided up the world’s AACS stations in four groups and tackled the huge job of providing not only radioteletypewriter facilities, but all the other communications, meteorology, and air navigation needs.50
It was the South Atlantic route to Africa and Europe that first got the single-channel RTTY net, along the
string of Caribbean islands to the bulge of Brazil, across the South Atlantic via Ascension Island, reaching Dakar by mid-1943. One of Dr. Bowles’ expert consultants, Dr. Strieby, inspected the South Atlantic net in May 1943. Accompanied by Lt. Cols. Vernon B. Bagnall from the Office of the Chief Signal Officer and Stuart K. Baker from Signal Corps, and by two officers from the Air Transport Command, Strieby toured the South Atlantic route to study its military communications, in particular the radioteletypewriter facilities and the point-topoint and air-to-ground communications of the AACS. He found that despite considerable confusion and duplication, radioteletypewriter installations were making progress. When he made a second inspection a year later, amid a survey of AAF nets the world over early in 1944, he commented, “The South Atlantic route is definitely good, ... a marked improvement over operations observed early last summer.” By the early autumn of 1944 additional AACS radioteletypewriter circuits were in operation, reaching from the Atlantic to the Near East, as follows:
Marrakech-Algiers
Algiers-Naples
Algiers-Tunis
Tunis-Tripoli
Tripoli-Benghazi
Benghazi-Cairo
Cairo-Abadan
Tunis-Cairo
In the CBI theater, where pressure was mounting to provide the XX Bomber Command with such efficient communications that General Arnold could maintain control directly from Washington, there were troubles in the spring of 1944. One was that the requirements were mounting faster than the plans. Also, there were no stocks of matériel in the CBI to meet such sudden demands (ASF forbade theater stockpiling). Even so, the Signal Airways Service in the CBI Strieby found “well manned and functioning smoothly.51
By August 1944, Signal Corps had met the AACS needs in CBI, including the radioteletype control circuits and conference facilities Arnold needed all the way to Kharagpur. “The Kharagpur-Hsinching and Kharagpur-Honolulu circuits are in operation, for use by the Twentieth Air Force,” General Stoner reported. He added that the following AACS radioteletypewriter circuits were also in operation in the CBI as of 1 August:52
Karachi-Agra
Agra-Barrackpore
Barrackpore-Chabua
Chabua-Kunming
Kunming-Hsinching
Communications for the White House
A special service and a very important Signal Corps responsibility had long been the provision of communications for the President of the United States and his White House staff. In late 1941 Lt. Col.
William A. Beasely, assistant radio engineer at the Signal Corps laboratories, was ordered to the White House, where he took command of the White House Signal Detachment, a plain clothes unit of three Signal Corps officers and some forty enlisted specialists. The detachment was activated in early spring of 1942 under the direct control of the Chief Signal Officer.53
From then on the officers and men of this unit saw to it that the President and his staff were provided with rapid, efficient, and, above all, secure, communications not only in Washington but wherever the President might travelby land, by sea, or by air. President Truman subsequently remarked, speaking of the conference of the Big Three in Potsdam, Germany, in mid-1945, “A President of the United States takes his office with him wherever he goes, and the number of details that require his attention never ends.”54 That of course means that all the flow of telephone and teletype that normally pours in and out of the White House must somehow be carried along at the President’s elbow in the course of his rather frequent and sometimes very distant travels. The White House Signal Detachment accomplished the task without a failure throughout World War II, using all the military and commercial channels of the nation, and in particular the ACAN global system.55
The provision of the VIP conference communications in World War II of course figured large in the task of the White House Signal Detachment. President Truman took particular interest in the facilities, even to the extent of sitting at the radio teletypewriter sets and pecking out his own messages on the keys.56 Participation at the Potsdam conference in July 1945 initiated President Truman in the Signal Corps provisions that converted his quarters in the Berlin area into a “little White House.” He was much impressed and congratulated the Secretary of War, writing, “The Signal Corps in providing communication facilities for the American Delegation at the Berlin Conference, and in particular at the ‘Little White House,’ allowed me to keep in almost instantaneous touch with my office in Washington and provided a steady flow of news and information which greatly assisted me during the conference.”57
Telephoto—Pictures by Wire and Radio
Late in 1941, the Signal Corps, together with an engineer from Acme Newspictures, undertook to adapt equipment for wire telephoto work, and in June 1942 ACAN set up its first telephoto net, in consequence of the submarine warfare off the east coast of the United States. Daily submarine situation maps were distributed over the net, which extended from the first installations at New Orleans and New York City to each of the four defense commands and to the headquarters of the Alaska Communication System. Semiweekly weather charts were also transmitted, over a wire line network for the AAF. The technique, when applied to radio channels, became facsimile. It was first used on the Algiers multichannel single sideband transmitter when a special team flew there in February 1943 to ready the equipment, including a developing laboratory. The corresponding equipment at the Washington end, in the Munitions Building, was at first crammed into a converted broom closet presided over by Sgt. Joseph E. Dunn of the 17th Signal Service Company. Dunn operated the net control station of the entire telephoto system.
Over the Algiers facility news pictures from the North African theater traveled direct to station WAR. Similar radiophoto provisions followed in ACAN stations in London, Paris, Caserta, Honolulu, Brisbane, Manila, and, finally, Berlin. From processing a few dozen prints weekly beginning in June 1942, the operators of the radio telephoto facilities in station WAR reached a peak of 600 prints processed in the first week of the Normandy invasion. The pictures were all black and white, and each required about seven minutes to transmit and receive.
The picture or print to be sent was clamped to a drum at the transmitting station, and at the receiving end a similar drum was covered with sensitized paper. While both drums revolved at the same speed, one hundred revolutions a minute, synchronized, a beam of light scanned the transmitting drum laterally, covering a band about an inch wide a minute. The intensity of the beam, varying with the black, white, and gray tones of the picture, modulated the radio wave, which traveled to the receiver where the varying light was recreated, varying exactly in step with the pick-up beam at the transmitter end. As the beam at the receiver traveled over the sensitized paper on the drum, it reproduced the scene.
The methods and quality of this process improved steadily through the war. Then in August 1945, the first news color picture ever transmitted by radio (Sergeant Dunn receiving) arrived from Berlin on 3 August, picturing President Truman, Prime Minister Atlee, and Marshal Stalin at the Potsdam conference.58
By the end of 1945 there were six outlying stations of the facsimile net in operation: Manila, Honolulu, San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, and Frankfurt. There had been at one time or another during the war 25 such stations. The peak year of facsimile traffic was 1944.
when 11,533 transmissions passed over the ACAN system.59
Expeditionary Force and Casualty Message Services
Messages from soldiers to relatives and friends back home were provided at reduced cost where communications facilities of American communications companies were available.60 In areas where the British held control, there was difficulty over routing and financing such communications until mid-1942, when the Chief Signal Officer and the chairman of the Imperial Communications Advisory Committee in England worked out a satisfactory arrangement. Expeditionary force messages, chosen from some two hundred fixed texts, were sent at a flat rate of 60 cents a message, regardless of the land from which sent. The EFM’s were approaching a million a month by the end of 1943. By that Christmas the commercial companies were overtaxed and it fell to ACAN to handle the overflow, some 111,000 messages. A similar overflow developed before the invasion of Normandy. ACAN sent about 8,000 EFM’s between 5 and 8 May. Then on 8 May the Joint Chiefs of Staff suspended the service, fearing that the heavy increase in ACAN traffic would reveal to the listening enemy that something big was afoot. A year later, in May 1945, ACAN had to handle another, very different overflow of EFM’s, beyond the capacity of commercial companies—some 6,000 messages from released prisoners of war. A tragic category of messages was the casualty message service. Western Union Telegraph Company, it had been agreed, would handle such messages after they had been received at station WAR over Army’s communications system. The large number of these messages through the second half of 1944 required a special staff in the Pentagon, WAR, and the Adjutant General’s Office.61
The Around-the-World Belt Line
The techniques of communications, also the air and sky through which radio waves speed, know no boundaries, no national or international restrictions. The air encompasses all nations of the world alike, and radio waves sweep as readily over one country as over another. But radio transmission and reception require land-based stations. The stations, the control of them, and the control of the communications passing through them, raise seemingly insolvable problems of international, diplomatic, and military complexity. To control communications is to control propaganda and to mold public opinion. Communications control implies access to much information and knowledge. And then there is the acute matter of security, concealing message texts,
reports, and intelligence in cryptic form and preventing unauthorized persons from prying, copying, or seeking to learn the hidden meaning.
Before World War II, there had never been a unified international communications system under a single central control. Numerous wire and wireless companies of several nationalities offered wide, competing service, depending upon the location of their circuits and channels. The quality of the service varied much, and the expense was high. The messages they carried served chiefly business and the affairs of government. Inconvenience and cost precluded most people from wiring or telephoning to friends or relatives overseas.
The conditions of World War II made it imperative that the U.S. Army create and use a world-wide communications net, and Signal Corps ACAN became that net. Station locations around the world were obtained by conquest or by emergency agreement. Signal Corps operated and controlled the stations. Not all station sites were equally good and reliable since the vagaries of the ionosphere, by which long-distance high frequency radiations were directed over the earth, favored some sites and hampered others. By trial and error the better sites were discovered. The best routes, over which high frequency sky waves were most reliably transmitted with least disturbance, were found to lie around the equatorial regions. Stations in these areas—Asmara, Karachi, New Delhi, Manila, Honolulu—with their high capacity, multichannel radioteletypewriter equipment provided Signal Corps and the U.S. Army with dependable channels for any number of messages, which could be relayed to other stations over the world efficiently, inexpensively, and rapidly, under a single integrated system. Private communications companies some years before the war had demonstrated that a message could be sent around the world in about nine minutes—but with some awkwardness of relaying and retransmitting through different facilities and companies.
On 24 May 1944 (the centennial of the first telegraph message that Samuel Morse sent from Washington to Baltimore) Signal Corps transmitted the same words that Morse had telegraphed in 1844: “What hath God wrought?” Station WAR transmitted the words both east and west around the world belt line. The two messages passed through four relay stations, San Francisco, Brisbane, New Delhi, and Asmara. The eastbound message made it first, returning to Station WAR in three and one-half minutes. The westbound message arrived a minute and a half later. Again on 28 April 1945, after the Signal Corps had installed faster radioteletypewriter equipment (semiautomatic tape relay) , another message circled the world during a Sunday afternoon Army Hour radio program. “This is What God Hath Wrought, Army Communications Service,” sped out of WAR, was automatically relayed by radioteletypewriter from Washington through San Francisco, Manila, New Delhi, and Asmara. Having covered 23,200 miles in five skywave hops by high frequency radio, it returned and was printed on a WAR receiving teletypewriter in nine and one-half seconds, those seconds representing the mechanical transmission time. The flight through the sky of course occurred
Army Command and Administrative Network Overseas, December 1943
Army Command and Administrative Network Overseas, June 1945
at the speed of light—in one-eighth of a second.62
The Army Communications Service controlled at its peak about 3,000 officers and 21,000 enlisted men, Wacs, and civilians who built up and operated ACAN. General Stoner wrote to Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway early in 1947:
At no time during the war was the President of the United States, the Chief of Staff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the War Department without communication to any commander in the field. Nor was the international, rather the global service, which the Signal Corps provided limited just to military and government agency use. Considerable ACAN effort went into the needs of the press, into the transmission and circulation of news and information.63
ACAN, designed, installed, and operated by the Signal Corps Army Communications Service, had created the first world system of communications. True, it was intended to be temporary. It had been created despite international vexations, in the overriding need to win the war. And it served as but one tool of the U.S. Army. But it opened up areas that General Squier foresaw in World War I and that General Stoner now saw approaching in reality. There might someday exist for all men an equatorial communications belt line, dependable and free from electrical disturbances. It might be operated as a cooperative enterprise—belonging to no one nation alone—into which the people of every nation might feed messages addressed to any part of the world. It could be a communications system over which any man might communicate with his fellows in any other nation at a nominal cost. It could become, barring the perversities of politics and power, a powerful instrument toward building a better understanding among the peoples of the earth.