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.

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With this article we add a new concept to our website – the telling of stories of Signal Corps Successes. In the history of our branch there have been many engagements the Signal Corps has been part of, including engagements where it if were not for the aggressive efforts of Signaleers the battle would have been lost. These and other stories about how the Signal Corps goes about its business make engaging reading, and they are worth archiving, especially when we know the people involved. Starting this month we will begin collecting stories about Signal Corps Successes, and when we have one ready for publication we'll post it here.

Take a moment both before and after you read the following story, and think back and see if you have a story of your own to tell. The story doesn't have to be about heroism... just about the Signal Corps and the effort the people in it made to win the war. If you have a story, please drop us a note. We'll call you and set up a short telephone interview to ask a few questions and gather as many details as you remember. Then we'll fill in the background, write the story, and send it to you for your final changes and approval. Once you say go, we'll post it online.

Enjoy what follows - our first Signal success story...

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Signal Corps Successes
—
The Mukden Cable

Success at war is made up of three parts: brains, brawn and assets. One of the Signal Corps’ jobs is to make sure that when it comes to communications at least, we have the brains to figure out what assets are needed, the brawn to put them in place, and the ability to add to the assets as required to keep the lines of communication open. In the Korean war one of the assets that needed to be taken care of and kept operating was the Mukden Cable, a communications link that stretched from Mukden (known as Shenyang in Chinese) in China, down the Korean Peninsula and then across the Korean Strait/Sea of Japan to Japan.

As most know today, the Mukden Cable provided the backbone needed to link Japan to Korea and China during that time when Japan occupied both Korea (1910 – 1945) and northeastern China (then called Manchukuo, or “Manchu country”). The Mukden Cable was designed to provide the key communication link between Japan and these fledgling members of its new empire, so that she could maintain both economic, military and political control over these newly occupied territories.

Originally built by the Japanese through slave labor from both Korea and China, on its opening on September 30, 1939, it was the longest communication cable in the world, stretching some 2,700 kilometers along its full length. Interestingly, it took the Japanese only 4 years to lay the cable, install the repeater stations, and make the whole thing operational. To honor their accomplishment the cable was put into service with a celebration hosted by Japan’s Minister of Communications, Nagai Ryutaro. Speaking from the terminus of the cable in Tokyo, he described the accomplishment as a “revolutionary invention” and went on to say:

“As the longest cable in the world, completion of the Japan–Manchukuo connection telephone cable has become the focus of all the countries. This cable is not an imitation of the West but was completed with the unique technology on the basis of the Ministry of Communications’ research and invention; it is significant as the pride of a scientific Japan. In today’s world, full of uncertainties, I believe that as the only leading country of colored people firmly established in the corner of East Asia, Japan has a cultural mission that is both real and grave. Considering the great mission of building the new East Asia that has now fallen on the shoulders of the Japanese people, we are more acutely aware of the responsibility of constructing an East Asian telecommunication network as the first step.”[1]

The reader can see that as far as Japan was concerned, the Mukden Cable was to play an important part in helping Japan create its much heralded East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, and was destined to support Japan’s efforts to mimic British, French and German imperialism as it took control of China and Korea. As Japan so clearly said, it was time that it, as the leading nation of the “colored people… of East Asia” got on with making East Asia as powerful as the countries of the West.  

Boy do we have stories
to tell you...

This is how it works

Continued from left column... 

In trying to gather information on this topic we have had to dig long and deep, because as of the moment, while all of the material we talk of here is available to the public, only two correlated portions of the information that is out there has been published in any readable form. Back in 1977, the Department of Defense released a multivolume compilation entitled The "Magic" Background of Pearl Harbor; more recently, Dr. Ronald Spector edited and released a publication he titled Listening to the Enemy: Key Documents on the role of Communications Intelligence in the War with Japan. Other than these two, the rest of the historical glory of what is contained within the Special Research Histories housed in the special section of the National Archives and Records Administration still remains essentially hidden from the public… waiting to be mined by historians like us… which as you will see in the story that follows, we did.

So let us begin... here is Part I of our four part series:

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WITH LITTLE DOUBT, the story of signal intelligence came of age in World War II. However, it did not begin there. Instead it began in June of 1916, when from then until May of 1918 various attempts at cryptanalysis were conducted by a civilian who undertook the effort for purely patriotic reasons. At his own expense, a Mr. George Fabyan organized a small group of highly skilled cryptanalysts to work at his Riverbank Laboratories, in Geneva, Illinois, on the task of trying as best they could to break the codes and ciphers forwarded to them by the War, Navy, State, and Justice Departments.

Their efforts were laudable, and they succeeded. So well that sometime around June 1917 the War Department took notice of the importance of what they were doing and decided that this work should be more formally brought under its own jurisdiction. On the surface, this idea seemed fine… except for two problems. First, while the War Department wanted to control the work, the only agency benefitting from it was the State Department, whose cipher messages were being forwarded to the group for analysis from State Department offices around the world; and second, the War Department had no funds to cover the cost of the exercise.

Being the good brothers that they were in those days, the two colluded such that the War Department took on the responsibility for the work to be done while State provided the funds. To assure that discipline and secrecy was maintained the War Department assigned a Colonel Van Deman as G-2 for the operation, placing him in the unique position of reporting both directly to the War Department as well as to the Signal Corps (Chief of Signals). This in effect made this group of cryptanalysis a branch of the Signal Corps, without giving the Signal Corps direct responsibility for its supervision.

At the same time that Van Deman was appointed, the War Department commissioned Herbert O. Yardley as a 1st Lieutenant, and put him in charge of operations. A civilian with no military training, Yardley was thought to fit the bill as he had been a telegrapher at the State Department, the group that spurred the creation of the unit in the first place. That, plus his keen interest in cryptography, and two civilians to support him, comprised America’s first ever effort to initiate cryptographic signals intelligence.

By late 1917 the amount of work requests flowing from the State Department to this group overwhelmed the group. To make sure that no signal information fell through the cracks the War Department increased the group’s staff while at the same time it reorganized it as a “section.” It’s name? The much vaulted MI-8, a legendary name today, if only in Hollywood.

Subdivided into 6 subsections the duties it took on included:

(1) A subsection that focused on code and cipher solutions. Today we would call this work crypto analysis or cryptanalysis.

(2) A subsection that handled code and cipher compilation. Interestingly, at this point the semi-involvement of the Signal Corps in MI-8 began to show itself, as under Army regulations of the time the compilation and revision of codes was a function of the Chief Signal Officer. It appears that when the Chief Signal Officer became aware that the Germans possessed copies of the War Department’s Telegraph Code, he felt it better to move this function out of the Signal Corps proper and into MI-8, rather than continue to risk code compromise from within the Signal Corps itself. There in MI-8 the group that ran the code and cipher compilation subsection began working on producing several replacement codes for the ones that had been compromised. Among these were the very early codes known as Military Intelligence Codes No. 5 and 9, as well as a series of small pocket codes to be used by the American secret agents that were roaming the world at the time.

(3) A training subsection was established, not only to train MI-8 personnel but also to train most of the personnel being sent overseas to handle field force cryptanalytic duties, including those stationed with the U.S. Army in its Allied Expeditionary Force group, as well as those U.S. military personnel supporting White Russian military efforts in Siberia of all places.[2]

(4) A secret inks subsection was set up to create invisible inks for use by secret agents. This group also examined letters for secret ink writing. Not simply a ‘nice to have,’ the work this group did was absolutely essential in those days. At times over 2,000 letters were examined and decoded each week.

(5) A shorthand subsection was also added, with the people in this group doing decipher work on texts produced in various shorthand systems, such as the ones used in Germany.

(6) A communications subsection was established to handle messages to and from military attaches and intelligence officers around the world. As in the secret inks subsection, traffic here too was voluminous, with over 33,000 messages typically being processed every 12 months … nearly all of which were in code and had to be decoded by hand.