Our Association is a not-for-profit fraternal organization. It's purpose is a) to foster camaraderie among the graduates of Signal Corps Officer Candidate School classes of the World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War eras, b) to organize and offer scholarships and other assistance for the families of Officer and Enlisted OCS cadre who are in need, and c) to archive for posterity the stories and history of all of the Signal Corps OCS Officers who served this great country. We are open to ALL former Army Signal Corps OCS graduates, their families and friends, as well as other officers, enlisted men, those interested in military history, and the general public. Please, come join us. For more information about our Association, to see a list of our Officers and Directors, or for contact details, click on the OCS Association link at left.

Please note: The views and opinions expressed on this website are offered in order to stimulate interest in those who visit it. They are solely the views and expressions of the authors and/or contributors to this website and do not necessarily represent the views of the Army Signal Corps Officer Candidate School Association, its Officers, Directors, members, volunteers, staff, or any other party associated with the Association. If you have any suggestions for improvements to this site, please send them to WebMaster@ArmySignalOCS.com. We are here to serve you. 

Sometimes The War Not Worth Fighting is Worth Fighting

It's Time To Get Rid Of This Abomination

In December we published an article entitled Not Every War Worth Fighting Is Worth Fighting. Being as misanthropic as we are, we thought we would flip the tables this month and publish one entitled Sometimes The War Not Worth Fighting Is Worth Fighting. If you read our December article, you know it was about the Ukraine. This one is about North Korea.

North Korea is an abomination. In our view, it’s time America do something about it. Specifically, it’s time America step forward and get rid of North Korea’s repugnant, abhorrent ruling regime and put an end to not just them, but this miserable little country’s existence, once and for all.

The "Hermit Kingdom" people call it, as though there is something captivating, enthralling and maybe even mysterious about it. It isn’t. It isn’t captivating, enthralling or mysterious. What it is is a disgusting hell hole of a place whose ignorant, antisocial, idiotic-looking leader subjugates his people to a perpetual state of semi-starvation, for the sole purpose of maintaining his own eccentric, lavish, cult-worshiped lifestyle.

And we allow him to do this. From our well-heated homes replete with all the food we could possibly want to eat, we laugh at the foibles of Sony Pictures and their hacking problems, snigger at the hoopla over a movie called The Interview, and poke fun at Kim Jong-un… as though this whole thing is a joke… while the people of North Korea eat tree roots and starve to death by the thousands.

What’s wrong with us? Where is our humanity? For how much longer are we going to allow this vile place to exist? For these poor people to live and die in squalor? While 195 kilometers to their south their brethren—sisters and brothers in the truest sense of the word—live in the lap of luxury and plenty.

North Korea isn't weird or eccentric, it’s the devil’s work on Earth. And we let it be so. Shame on us.

 

U.S. Army Signal Corps News - 1942 & 1944

So much of our writing is serious, analyzing the cause of war and how well our military and civilian leaders perform, that we thought this a good time to post something a little less weighty. How about a couple of copies of Signal Corps focused magazines from World War II?

Try these: originally published by Radio News, they focus exclusively on the Signal Corps as it stood back in WWII. The content includes dozens of articles on Signal Corps activities in the various theaters of war, as well as articles on Signal Corps engineering, enemy equipment, the Signal Corps Pictorial Center, operational research, amphibious operations, V-Mail, and much, much more. We offer them here for your pleasure:

– November 1942  edition of Radio News - a special U.S. Army Signal Corps Issue; 283 numbered pages of pure gold, made available courtesy of AmericanRadioHistory.com

– February 1944 edition of Radio News - published 71 years ago this month, this too is a special U.S. Army Signal Corps Issue; 172 pages.

                     

– Click either image above to view the magazine –

Enjoy!

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War Department Film

 - Enemy Weapons -

German Infantry Small Arms

If you enjoyed our magazines above, you're going to love this film. Shot by the Signal Corps as a training film to help American soldiers in the field learn how to use captured enemy weapons, this film covers the:

– German Mouser Short Rifle Model 98K 7.92 mm caliber

– German Schmeisser Submachine Gun, MP40, 9 mm caliber

– German Machine Gun Model MG 34, 7.92 mm caliber, and

– German Machine Gun Model MG 42, 7.92 mm caliber 

For those unfamiliar with Germany's WWII weapons, the MP letters associated with the Schmeisser stand for Maschinenpistole. This type of weapon was a submachine (note the emphasis on the prefix sub...) gun, developed and used extensively by Fallschirmjäger (paratroopers), platoon and squad leaders, and, of course, the Waffen SS.  

The MG 34 on the other hand was a dual purpose full machine gun, able to serve as both a light and heavy weapon. In its various forms it could be mounted on a light bipod, an adjustable height antiaircraft triangle-pod, a heavy-weapon tripod where the shooter would sit on the ground behind the weapon and cradle it between his legs, and even bolted onto tanks, aircraft and the like. To match its firepower to its capabilities, the weapon was able to be fed from any number of high capacity housings, including a standard 250 round belt fed from a box, and the smaller and more often seen 50 round "basket" type container.

The movie shows you how to field strip and handle each of these four fascinating weapons. Don't be surprised if after you watch it you find yourself digging your own weapon out of your bedroom closet and heading out to the backyard to plink off a few rounds. It's that kind of film, it makes you want to cradle a weapon, clean it, and listen to it talk to you.

The film length is 00:12:23. 

  

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Now That The Afghan War Is Over, Wither Pakistan?

It’s nice that the war in Afghanistan is finally over. Now we can all sit back and congratulate ourselves on having won that war.

We did win it, didn’t we?

Jeesh, one never knows. Our government tells us we won it, yet there’s no peace agreement in place, the enemy is still on the battlefield, and people are still dying… albeit the people dying are, thankfully, only civilians. Gosh, that makes me feel better…. only civilians dying.

What happened to the good old days… when wars were considered over only when the enemy was defeated? When the leader of the enemy was found, tried and hung for good measure? As well as all of his henchmen? When a peace treaty was signed, and the winning side stepped in and occupied the country for 50 years… just to make sure that the idiots that caused the war didn’t try to resurrect their… well… ideology? Is that where the term idiot came from… ideology… as in an idiot is someone who believes in an ideology?

Anyway. Now-a-days it seems that the only thing you have to do to win a war is pack up your men and leave the battlefield. That too is strange to me. When they did that in my war, everyone said we lost. Have the standards changed so much so that now when you give up and leave you are considered the winner? Is the goal no longer to defeat the enemy, but merely to degrade him to the point that he no longer annoys you? So that you can go home? So he can stay behind and keep on killing… well… civilians?

Oh well… modern warfare. The whole thing escapes me.

What does not escape me however are the residual effects of the wars we fight, especially the ones where we unilaterally leave the battlefield, claiming that we won and the war is now over.  Residual effects… you know… like civilians dying by the thousands because suicide bombers are again free to roam around and do their stuff… and the bad guys are free to come out from under their rocks and do their stuff too… and corrupt tribal leaders are once more able to assert control over their areas and resume pillaging their community, to their heart’s content… and the central government is now able to enshrine corruption as a modus operandi, now that Uncle Sam is no longer looking over their shoulder. Residual effects, like leaving behind a country wholly unable to stop itself from becoming a failed state… again.

Or how about this one: a war concluded with such lack of finality that the neighboring countries are left in worse condition than when the war started. Like Pakistan.

Whither Pakistan?

Before the Afghan war, a sad and dyspeptic state that for all of its years of existence had amounted to little more than a camel stop somewhere on the Indian sub-continent, it is in an even more sorry state now than before the Afghan War started. Now that its neighbor’s war is over, it’s on its own… left to fight a royal mess created by, well, the War in Afghanistan.

Thank you America. Thank you for leaving this mess for us to deal with. What now?  

Continued at top of page, COLUMN AT RIGHT

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This page last updated 1 February 2015. New content is constantly being added. Please check back frequently.

Update 1 February 2015 – Terry Rushbrook, Signal Corps OCS Class 10-67 sent us an update and a short bio of himself. We've posted his bio and a few of his pictures on a special page which we linked to his name on his Class Page. You can get to it by clicking here and then scrolling down and clicking on his name. The best part though is that Terry maintains his own website, which has lots more content than what we have posted. On it you can find stories, poems and lots more pictures of his time in Vietnam. Some of his pics of Cam Ranh Bay are especially good. Check out his personal bio page, and then use the link there to jump to Terry's website.

Update 1 January 2015 – Alvin H Watkins, LTC(R) Signal Corps OCS Class 7-66 sent an update in the way of more photos for his album. Al's chopper from his Vietnam days is on display in the Smithsonian. You can see his latest pictures of his days in Vietnam by visiting his personal bio page and clicking on the album at the bottom of the page. Our thanks to Al for his update. Now, all of you Army Signal OCS Grads out there that have not yet sent in your own short bio, how about getting to it this coming year? Make it one of your top priority New Year's Resolutions!

Update 1 January 2015 – Signal OCS Graduate Nick Mills (Class 01-68) has overseen the publishing of a new book about Vietnam. Nick is an associate professor of journalism at Boston University. He is also responsible for putting together the volume on Combat Photography for the Time-Life series "The Vietnam Experience". Nick's book is called "The American Experience in Vietnam -- Reflections on an Era", published by Boston Publishing Co. Inc., Zenith Press, 2014. Find it on Amazon and buy it today . One reviewer commented, "As a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, I saw a lot of what's in this book firsthand, but this book covers the whole country and it was very interesting for me to see what was going on in other areas of operations. The photos are very good. I recommend this to anyone who was there if they have any interest in the bigger picture. I also recommend to those who have questions about what is really like - the photos tell the story."

 

 

Continued from left column... 

Having watched Pakistan struggle to figure out what role she should play during the war in Afghanistan, it is clear that she does not have the leadership needed to fix her problems. Back during the war years she was lost. Trying to thread the needle by supporting both sides… the U.S. side, as well as the Taliban’s… all she proved was that she was eminently qualified to play the role of a failing state on the road to complete failure... just like the one we wrote about in our column at left.

Today Pakistan sits just there… on that precipice from which if she takes the wrong step she will find herself an ungovernable, has been of a country. Already she boils with internal violence, brought on by armed Islamic fundamentalist and every sort of separatist group one can imagine. Caused in part by our dear friend England—that wonderful country whose legacy of imperialism left the world with more scars and open sores than any other single entity except perhaps religion—Pakistan’s violence today is the legacy of having been carved up in the 1947 partition of British India, as well as the 1971 civil war that broke the country into two further pieces; what we today call Pakistan and Bangladesh. 

Confused as to who she is, what she represents, who she should represent, and why she even exists, the only positive thing we can say about Pakistan is that she tried. That is, while everyone that could take a piece of her did so, she still tried to act like there was a reason d’être for her existence… that somewhere, amongst all of the fighting factions living within her borders, there was a group of people that deserved a sane and safe country.

And so she tried democracy… over a painful decade of honest attempts she approached parliamentary democracy from every possible angle, trying to make something work. When that didn’t work and the country still acted like a fragmented family run more by a narcissistic child than parents, she opted for military rule (since 1958). And when that resulted in Pakistan’s military lording it over the people, those multitudinous factions we referred to earlier rose up in arms.

Fortunately for the world, politics Pakistani style seems at this time to be swinging back towards democracy… but not much. There still is much work to do if she wishes to get it right this time, and the world—yes, the world—will be at risk if she does not.  

It seems strange to say so, but the fundamentalists that lay in Pakistan’s past… those men and women that created a country out of the disparate religious ideologues that first inhabited the place…  were the right kinds of people from which to form a country. For instance, the night before Pakistan, as a country, received her official independence from England, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, spoke eloquently of his vision: “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State … We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.”

Unfortunately, Jinnah died before his vision could be written into a constitution, and so today, none of the various documents that have come down through the ages since Pakistan’s inception, and purport to be her “constitution”, contain words that either enshrine his promise or come anywhere close to it. Instead, Pakistan has evolved as a spiritual state, whose every spiritual group fights to rule and control it. How could it be any other way, the official name of the country is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan? (...our emphasis)

Now that the war in Afghanistan is over, and Pakistan can look again to solving its own internal troubles, it is time to reclaim Jinnah’s vision, if only because political stability requires a shared understanding and belief in the notion of a unified people living within the confines of a shared idea… in this case, one called Pakistan, rather than a religious construct or caliphate of some sort. And so we say that if Pakistan is to make it through another decade, as a functioning state, it is going to have to find a way to create belief among its peoples in yet another, new constitution… one different than the one it has now. One that again looks to democracy, but this time in a manner that attempts to use democracy as a means of devolving power from the elite sitting in Islamabad to the people who govern the provinces…. the people where the ungovernable live, the people who want to see change because, since devolution from Britain, nothing has changed in their lives.

Yes, we know this is risky, because so many of the “leaders” that rule the various border areas of Pakistan hold radical fundamentalist religious views… but let’s face it, one reason they hold these beliefs is because their life stinks, and it ain’t gonna get any better without some radical tinkering with the system that exists now. So let it be so, let the government in Islamabad begin to restructure the country’s principles of government such that there is a more equitable distribution of power between the capital and the provinces, between the elite and the poor, between the center and the regions that cry for a better life. That’s what we did when our country faced the same problem. It worked for us, and is in fact one of the key principles on which America was founded—a balancing of power between the states and the central government. If it worked for us to help tamp down religious extremism, why not Pakistan?

In our case our balancing of the power sharing between Washington and the states helped safeguard against the usurpation of power by the elite in Washington… people like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others. Yes, it’s true, these particular men weren’t inclined to usurp power for themselves, but that does not change the fact that they could easily have done so if state’s rights had not been promoted as more important than federal rights. The same is true for Pakistan today. A great national leader will not usurp power, but a lesser one will. For all of our years as a country, during our times of trouble we have been fortunate enough to have great leaders. Pakistan has not.

Don’t see the analogy? Think we are stretching things too much? Look then if you will to our own past, when people like Roger Williams left Massachusetts to start his own state, a place that later became known as Rhode Island. Why did he do this? Because the central powers that ruled the Massachusetts Bay Colony would not let him promote and promulgate his own brand of religion. They branded him a dangerous radical ideologue advocating an extreme fundamentalist religion that had no place in civilized society.

In his case he and his followers felt the need to practice their religion in their own way. Massachusetts thought that what they were doing was not just apostasy, but a threat to their very form of government. They persecuted him and his followers. He fought back. Eventually, he simply packed up, took his followers, moved south, negotiated with the indians to take over a parcel of empty land for his people, named it Providence Plantations, and established his new religion and government there. Today we know this spot as the city of Providence, the capital of Rhode Island.

The same happened again with Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He too suffered from persecution, so much so that he gathered up his followers, left the state where they lived (New York), and tried a few others in the mean time before ending up, like Roger Williams, forming his own state. In his case it’s called Utah, and in the last election all of us from the rest of the states… the ones that didn’t want him among us… came very close to electing one of his followers as our President.

Such a long way… from rogue religious ideolog to nationally respected Presidential candidate. And he might even run again.

Whither Pakistan? Do they not suffer from religious intolerance? Do they not need a better balance of power between their central government and their states? Do they not need a better mechanism with which to separate politics from religion? Do they not need an effective means by which to let people worship as they may, yet stop the violence that comes with religious intolerance?