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Nothing shows the difference in how today’s wars are fought versus those of our country’s recent past more so than taking a look at how a tour of duty in wartime has changed over the past 99 years.[3]

A tour of duty. We all know what that term means. It means that exercise we each lived through as we had our bodies dragged from the farm or three story tenement we came from in some factory town somewhere, to where the Army wanted us to go. Usually that trip took us from a soft warm bed and family that loved us to some God forsaken place on the other side of the world… some place where people were shooting at us. A lot of people. A lot of shooting.

Yet while this appears to be the common thread that runs through every tour of duty, for every soldier, in all the wars of the past 99 years, something seems to have crept into the concept of what a tour of duty is composed of such that today’s tours are turning out to be dramatically different than those of even 60 or 70 years ago. More specifically, from our perspective we think that the tours of duty soldiers experienced in WWI and WWII were different from those experienced from Vietnam forward. And as you will see in the next article in this series, in our view that change came about in the middle of the Korean War. But the question is, why? Why have tours of duty in wartime changed?

In this article we will tell the story of a typical tour of duty during WWII. Along the way we will occasionally digress from the main story and try to analyze what factors make up a tour of duty. As we do you will see that the difference between what a tour of duty was in early 20th century wars versus those of today is both stark and real, and in that difference lies a story that says much about how the methods by which we prosecute our modern wars have changed… changed from those we fought in the not too distant past.

For now though, let’s look at a typical WWII tour of duty. Let’s look at what was likely to have happened to a typical country soldier performing signal duty in the 56th Signal Battalion, in World War II.

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If you looked at such a soldier you would generally find he entered service sometime between the ages or 21 – 24 and was more likely than not drafted into the Army. Timing wise, this would have happened sometime towards the middle of 1941, and he would have been sent off to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for some preliminary training before being sent on again for specialized training… likely at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where our soldier would have been assigned to the 56th Signal Battalion.

So far what we have is a draftee being assigned to the 56th Signal Battalion, with his tour of duty just getting underway. As a member of the 56th, over the next four years and a few months more, he would end up living through three years of constant overseas time… all of it in Europe, at the end of which he would be returned to the States and honorably discharged. Likely as not that honorable discharge would come sometime in July 1945.

However, that's all off in the future. If we want to know what his tour of duty was really all about, we would have to follow him from where we find him today, at Ft. Jackson, each step along the way towards that far off honorable discharge. And if we did that we would see that his tour of duty displayed one never ending goal: a goal to do all that is necessary and possible to relocate this man from the soft warm bed in which he was found at the time of his drafting to some place only a few feet in front of the nose of the enemy… so that he could then employ the skills the Army would teach him along the way, to kill that enemy and put an end to the war that dragged him and all of his fellow soldiers from home.

In the next article, Part III in this series, you will see that this defining factor is, while rather obvious on the surface, what actually distinguishes a tour of duty during WWI and WWII from one in Vietnam, or any of the latter wars we have fought up until today. The point being that something happened during the Korean War that changed the makeup and purpose of a tour of duty, from what our draftee 56th Signal Battalion soldier experienced in WWII to what our Vietnam through Afghanistan soldiers experience today.

As for understanding the kind of man that ended up on a tour of duty like this, what we can fairly well guess about our man of the 56th is that he was drafted from a home likely somewhere on the East Coast of the US and taken off to Fort Dix for preliminary boot camp. From there, as we said, he would have been reassigned to Fort Jackson, SC. But how did this happen, and for what purpose?

Part of the answer comes from his being part of the 56th Signal Battalion. Looking back in history we can see that the US Army’s 56th Signal Battalion was activated at Fort Jackson, SC, in January 1941. To fill it out a group of 460 peacetime Selective Service Draftees from the reception Centers at what was technically Fort Dix but was still called Camp Dix, NJ, and another reception center at Camp Upton, NY, were assigned to it. Originally these soldiers were told that they would serve for only one year, as per the then existing government regulations. However, as we all know, on December 7, 1941, all of that changed, and our typical 56th Signal Battalion wet behind the ears soldier found himself in for the duration.

The next step in our soldier’s tour of duty was prescribed by war time tactical decisions made in Washington. Specifically, within 6 months of Pearl Harbor happening it was decided that the 56th was going to fight the war in Europe, as opposed to the new one starting up in the Pacific. And so our soldier’s tour of duty commenced with an order being issued in June of 1942 to move him and his unit from Fort Jackson to a New York overseas staging area. By July 1 he and his mates in the 56th found themselves aboard the troopship SS Argentina, watching in awe as a Naval convoy that they were clearly a part of set sail for Greenock, Scotland.

By now our soldier’s tour of duty was well underway. The unit arrived in Scotland on July 12, 1942, after what was to many a frightening, nervous and risky voyage across submarine infested waters.

Once in Scotland their work level picked up, compared to what it had been in the States, with the unit both training as well as providing the communication services needed throughout the United Kingdom. For some 2 years the men of the 56th trained on one day, learning how to establish a Communications Network, while on the next they went out and did it… actually building the commo networks required to support the growing Allied Forces arriving in England. During this time they also spent innumerable hours rehearsing beach landings with units of the Royal Navy Academy at Dartmouth, England. Actual amphibious landing training itself took place at a place called Slapton Sands in Cornwall, England, and filled most of the unit’s time during the early Winter of 1943.

Eventually, when the brass felt that everything was in place to launch an assault on the continent of Europe, the 56th found itself going along for the ride. For our Signaleer, the one drafted out of his warm bed on the East Coast of America, his tour of duty was about to kick into high gear. Unbeknownst to him there was an unstated goal controlling his tour of duty, one that proscribed everything he did, everything he experienced, and every place he went from the first day he joined the Army until the last. As to what that goal was, as we said before, it involved marching him from where the Army found him, across Europe, until he was face to face with the power center that drove the Third Reich’s war effort. At that point it was to be his and his fellow soldier's job to contribute his all to destroy that power center and end the war. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to stop him, his unit, and every other unit Uncle Sam could muster from storming the gates of the seat of power of Hitler's government, dismantling that government, and ending the war. All those German soldiers the US military ran across along the way, they were nothing more than speed bumps in the road, to be done away with as the American juggernaut wound its way to the heart of Germany's wartime political power.

Continued at top of page, column at right

This page last updated 1 June 2013. New content is constantly being added. Please check back frequently.

In support of this tour of duty, before dawn on May 23, 1944, our Signaleer and his unit found themselves leaving their assigned station at Norton Manor Camp, Taunton, England, for an as yet unannounced destination. And yet while the place they were heading to was unknown to them, much like in every other tour of duty every American soldier has experienced from the Revolutionary War until today, every man involved knew that this early morning departure was not about training or providing local communication support. They knew that this time their troop movement was for real; action was on the horizon for them.

Transported as part of a truck convoy, looking at the surrounding countryside they passed through, the 56th Signal boys couldn’t help but notice that the level of readiness and security they saw along the roadways far exceeded anything they had seen to date. Wherever they were heading, this was the real thing. There was no turning back now. The convoy was going to push on.

It came as no surprise then that sometime around 1530 hours the trucks began to pull into staging areas near Truro, England. In disciplined fashion the men unloaded into a tented camp area outside of the town of Truro. There, each man slowly took stock of the man beside him. To a person, while the apprehension was palpable, so was the determination shown in each man’s eyes to get it on. Standing in the midst of this temporary tent camp, it all came together: one year of training in the US and two long years of stationed service in the UK had prepared these men for this moment in time. They were ready to marshal not only the apprehension they felt, but the calmness and strength that unit cohesion brings to soldiers, to do the job that lay ahead… whatever that job was. And just like that the tours of duty of tens-of-thousands of individual men jelled into one: a tour of duty whose purpose was to march together across Europe, to the very seat of German power, and decimate and defeat that power.