Last month we began this series of articles by looking at how the Signal Corps took charge of preparing the U.S. military for WWII. What we saw was that while no one assigned the Signal Corps this duty, there was no one else stepping forward to take responsibility for it either. Knowing that nature abhors a vacuum, as all good Signal Corps engineers do, the Generals that ran the Signal Corps between WWI and WWII simply stepped forward and filled the vacuum that was being created by others.

And so it was, while most everyone in all of the other services and branches were celebrating the successful outcome of WWI, the Signal Corps was going about preparing for the next great war, even though the world at large thought that the lessons of WWI made it such that there would never be another world war ever again.

Among the things the Signal Corps did between the wars was build an infrastructure for the research and development of newer and better forms for control of the battle space. They did this not only in the area of communications, but also in those areas that were allied with the process of communicating. And so when WWII rolled around the U.S. military found itself not just with better ground to air spotlights with which to spot incoming bombers, but also better means to track those bombers, predict their path, aim anti-aircraft guns at them, and communicate these intentions and more throughout the battle space. Incredibly, almost all of this, for not just antiaircraft guns, but everything else from better bomb sights to the design of combat aircraft and much more, was driven by the Signal Corps.

The Signal Corps’ role in helping bring better command and control to this and other areas was wide-ranging. It extended from initiating and overseeing the research required to develop more effective equipment and arms right down to rewriting the battle field strategies, tactics, and procedures that needed to be followed to make the new equipment and arms being brought to the field more effective.

As we discussed last month in the first part of this series of articles, the foundation of this effort was the creation of a research and development operation at Ft. Monmouth, as well as some 17 other laboratories around America. Yet while this was the foundation of the effort, it was not where it stopped.

The Signal Corps’ efforts between WWI and WWII also included spurring the establishment of the MIL-SPEC system, the building of theoretical research liaisons with major American universities, partnerships for military product production with America’s best manufacturers, the creation and management of logistics system able to deliver the new equipment being produced to the field where it was needed, and most importantly the establishment of a military-wide education and training system to assure that the troops who received the new equipment being delivered knew how to use the toys they were being given. In simple fashion, the Signal Corps led the effort to take the remnants of the American military system at the end of WWI and turn it into a 20th century fighting machine. As important, so thorough was the Signal Corps’ efforts back then that it crossed service lines, extending itself throughout the Army, into the Navy, and of course was the driving force behind the creation of the Air Force itself.

To gain a sense of how the Signal Corps did its magic, we will look this month at how it went about improving the capabilities of one of the elements that led to a successful war fighting effort in WWII. And just to make our point, rather than pick something revolutionary for the time, like the development of better means for air to ground communication and bombsite targeting, we will look instead at how the Signal Corps brought improvements to the mundane, unglamorous element called “wire.” For without wire based communications the left hand in the U.S. military between the wars, and certainly throughout WWII, would not have known what the right hand was doing.

Wire: The Most Simple Way To Get The Message Through

To those who used the communications equipment, whether it was of wire or wireless design mattered less than whether it got the message through. Generally speaking, wireless was something new, hovering at the edge of the wire based communication world. Back in the 1930s everyone knew of it, but it was most certainly not available throughout the military, and definitely not in the field—that is, the battle space the common soldier inhabited in 1939.

The unfortunate fact was that the true capabilities of wireless communication lay in the future… at least 12 or more years down the road when the “front-line handietalkie” would be introduced.