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.                         

Surrender On The Air

 The real story behind the surrender of Japan

Where it took place...

How it took place...

And the role the Signal Corps played in it

by –
Don Mehl, OCS Class 44-35

Communications directly with an enemy during a war is usually difficult if not impossible. We did not have a communications channel with Japan during the war. What the government officials of each side knew about the other’s thinking was from intercepted radio broadcasts and intelligence. The Allies’ terms of unconditional surrender were repeated often and the Japanese promise that they would fight to the death and never give up was reiterated many times.

During July and August in 1945 the big three leaders, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin, met at Potsdam, Germany, to discuss and arrive at decisions concerning the ending of the war and the post-war world. During the conference President Truman was informed of our successful atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945. Stalin was informed of the existence of the bomb but not our successful test. He probably knew all about it from his spy network. Out of the meeting came the Potsdam Declaration that was an ultimatum to Japan to surrender unconditionally or suffer total destruction. Japan’s cities were in ruins from our bombing, her islands were blockaded, her navy destroyed, her people starving. We were poised for the largest invasion of the war, yet Japan was preparing to fight to the death in defense of her homeland. Then we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

At first there was no response. Internally, there was disagreement between the Japanese civilian leaders and the military. The military wanted to continue fighting and the civilians wanted to find a way to end the war on more favorable terms for Japan. Then came the second bomb on Nagasaki and Truman’s announcement that Japan faced total destruction if they did not comply with the Potsdam declaration.

The Japanese Emperor believed that Japan faced extinction if they continued the war and he broadcast to the Japanese people on August 15th that the war was over and they were accepting the Potsdam ultimatum. Switzerland was a neutral country. The Japanese ambassador asked the Swiss to relay a message to the U. S. government that they accepted the ultimatum except that they wanted the Emperor to remain in power. We responded that he would have to accept the authority of our Supreme Commander. They complied with this.

Then there was an exchange of messages relayed by the Swiss Embassy telling Japan how to surrender. All Japanese forces would lay down their arms, all prisoners of war would be handed over, the formal surrender would be arranged, and arrangement made for our Supreme Commander to take over. They would have to send authorized representatives of their government to arrange all of these things. To coordinate with the Japanese and accomplish this was easier said than done! There was not a communications channel with the Japanese!

The White House ordered General George Marshall, U. S. Army Chief of Staff, to handle this operation. He passed the order to General MacArthur in Manila. General Spencer Aikn, his Chief Signal Officer for the U.S. Forces in the Pacific Theater of Operations was told to accomplish this. The Signal Corps radio operators at the army radio station, WTA, went to work.

The stations of the Army Communications Service participated in this extraordinary drama. It all began in the morning over the teleconferencing SIGTOT channel from the Pentagon to Manila. General Marshall sent a message in the clear to General MacArthur informing him of the Japanese surrender and instructing him to proceed with the surrender arrangements. This was a tactic used to get a message to the enemy in case they were monitoring our traffic. A more formal enciphered instruction to General MacArthur was received later. By 11:00 A.M., MacArthur composed a message to the Japanese Emperor and the Imperial Command asking that they begin negotiations with him. He requested that a radio station in Tokyo be designated to maintain communications with his Manila Headquarters. Until he received this information he designated a Japanese station, JUM, to be on a certain frequency to communicate with Manila radio station WTA.

“Surrender on the air” became a drama that consumed many hours on August 15, 1945.

First Army radio operators and then commercial stations world-wide attempted to establish radio contact with the Japanese and receive acknowledgment of the Allied peace terms and to arrange the termination of fighting.

No Japanese station replied. None accepted the American calls. They probably thought that they were being jammed. Even though the Japanese used the International Morse code, they had to use special systems called Katakana and Hiragana in order to transmit the 73 characters used to convey the Japanese oriental ideographic characters used for telegraph transmission. These characters, composed of three Roman letters, were copied on special typewriters. These differences may have contributed to some of the confusion although our intercept operators used these IBM special typewriters.

General MacArthur appealed to Washington for advice and help.  

Continued from left column... 

COIN as a technology, you say? Yes. More than just a doctrine or a strategy, in the realm of warfare COIN approaches that of being a technology of its own. First, it's utility on the field of war makes it akin to a weapon system and second, if the superior skills of our military leaders are part of Human Agency then clearly their ability to apply that cleverness to the task of assembling an integrated mix of kinetic and non-kinetic actions, troop movements, tactics, and other factors to create a means to defeat a strategic initiative by the enemy makes the result of that effort analogous to a new form of technology. Think of it: a 105mm Howitzer is clearly a piece of technology. When Human Agency is applied to it and it is placed en masse as part of a predefined set of supporting weapons and tactics such as are found in a firebase the combination becomes a technology upon which Human Agency has acted to create a new form of warfare. In our view this is no different that what happens when COIN is created from a seemingly motley mix of economic, social and political initiatives layered on top of troop movements, kill teams, drones, FOBs and special ops. It becomes a weapon system and in the triumvirate of war, technology and warfare weapon systems fit into the category called technology.

But we don't have to argue this point because the more important point is that its the superior skills of the military leaders who created the concept of COIN that is what is important here. From a military perspective superior skills encompass all of those things that come from superior training and best of breed combat principles, like distributed decision making abilities, enhanced capacity to communicate in real time, numbers of men, and will to succeed. It also encompasses the ability to think on one's feet, combine the tools at one's disposal to create a better tool, and things of this nature. Intellectually, it's what philosophers and sociologists call the capacity of an agent to act. In other words: Human Agency.

Thus, it’s Human Agency that, when applied to a known technology, allows the “agent” to alter that technology so that it is more effective… in this case in combating the enemy. The result of such a situation, the application of Human Agency to a given technology, more often than not results in an extended form of the original technology, one that is more effective in accomplishing the chosen purpose. By these standards most wars, when properly reviewed and assessed in terms of how they were won, can be seen as having had their outcome determined not by politics but by the nature of the technology that each side could apply to its mode of warfare. You can see then the importance of a country not only fostering newer forms of technology, but of denying their distribution to potential enemies.

Why do we put the emphasis on the emerging technology and not Human Agency? Because while we may want to think otherwise the truth is that America does not have a stranglehold on creativity and unique skills. What stops other countries from being able to do what we can do when it comes to warfare is not a lack of Human Agency potential, it's a lack of emerging technology on which to put that Human Agency to work.

Thank God.

So when it comes to assuring that a country has the best form of warfare at its disposal to protect its interests what we see is that a fine balance must exist between i) the quality and quantity of people with Human Agency that are made available by a country to work on improving its form of warfare, ii) the extent to which the country continues to invest in emerging technologies so that there are sufficient doors opened for those people to walk through, and iii) the encouragement that a country gives to those people to pass through those doors and apply their Human Agency to the emerging technologies.

Think of it as a three legged stool: the availability of people with Human Agency, the availability of new technologies for them to act on and a country bound and determined to bring these two together.

If there is anything that we should learn from this it is that it's not the weapons that determine the result of warfare folks, it's a country's determination to keep this three legged stool in play—during both war and peacetime. Throughout history hundreds of seemingly wondrous new weapons were thought to be able to change the result of a war but they didn’t. Such emerging technologies from the introduction of gunpowder by the Chinese through to the great battleships of the past, trench warfare, the airplane, carpet bombing, agent orange, and even nuclear weapons did little more than impact how a war’s managers fought the war not what the result ended up being.

For those of you who are skeptical and would point to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples of technology ending a war we would disagree. Yes, the nukes we dropped on Japan worked well but they didn’t win the war. It was the mode of warfare adopted that ended the war. That mode—unconditional surrender, a determination by America’s war leaders to turn Japan into an unpaved parking lot by dropping more and more nuclear  bombs, and a very determined U.S. Army itching to get on the ground on the mainland of Japan and dish out a little payback for the losses incurred in Guam, Saipan, Attu, Guadalcanal and the rest—that caused the Japanese government to throw in the towel. Warfare determined the outcome, not technology. Warfare that was made possible because America's leaders at that time deigned to turn Human Agency loose on emerging technology to create weapon systems that sat the Japanese back on their ass.

Turn up volume and click icon above to play. 

Last month we posted an article that discussed the U.S. military considerations driving America’s strategic interests in the Philippines. We thought the topic timely in light of Secretary Clinton’s recent statements about “pivoting” U.S. foreign policy away from Europe and looking instead towards Asia.

To be fair to the Secretary of State, the State Department has recently dropped the term pivot in favor of “rebalancing.” I guess that offends fewer Europeans. Either way, in our view this rebalancing is long overdue and welcomed. We tip our hat to the Secretary for moving forward with this effort.

To help you understand how this rebalancing will impact our military, next month we will begin running a series of articles that look at several of the key countries involved. Among those we will look at are Burma (Myanmar), Japan, South Korea, North Korea, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, India, and Vietnam. In each case our interest will be in bringing you up to speed on the strategic role each of these countries plays in its neighborhood and what you can expect in terms of how the U.S. military will begin altering its approach to these countries in order to underwrite the State Department’s rebalancing effort.

We hope you will join us for these articles. They are part of our ongoing effort to bring you stimulating, socially responsible and even on occasion an in your face view or two that will make you rethink the role of the U.S. military in America’s free society. If you are a student of history… military history... and what Signal OCS graduate is not… then you should be reading...

ArmySignalOCS.com.  

The Early Days Of Ft. Monmouth

With the passing of Ft. Monmouth on September 15, 2011, many of us who spent time there are still shedding tears. Missed it will be. But the question is, how did it get there to begin with?

There are lots of stories about how Ft. Monmouth came about. Some are accurate while most are long on personal recollections but short on facts. We thought we would set the record straight and tell you the real story about how Monmouth came to be.

The answer can be found at the beginning of WWI. At the time the U.S. entered the war the Signal Corps had only 55 officers and 2,530 enlisted men. Clearly, more men were needed if the battlefields of Europe were going to be populated with America's best. Early projections suggested some 50,000 or more would be needed by the Signal corps alone.

But men by themselves wouldn’t be enough. Training facilities were needed to prepare these men, and they had to be built quickly and made operational even faster. To get the effort started training camps were planned for “somewhere near New York” so that use could be made of the excellent road and rail links flowing into that part of the country. As search teams scoured the area for available ground they stumbled across the old Monmouth Park Race Track, near Eatontown, New Jersey. Within a few days, in June 1917, a lease was signed and work began in earnest to build a training base. And just like that Camp Little Silver came into existence.

Its first complement was 25 Officers and 471 EMs. By September 1917 Camp Little Silver had been renamed as Camp (Alfred) Vail, after the guy who invented what we know of today as Morse code.

Back at the turn of the century… the 19th century… military matters were not always conducted with the consideration and concern for personal rights that we have today. Intending to build a Signal Corps to fight on the battlefields of Europe was one thing, filling it with 50,000 men was another. And if you think back and realize that not 20 years earlier navies were still filling their ship’s quota by shanghaiing men off the street, you can imagine the shenanigans that went on when it came to recruiting men to fill the Signal Corps America was readying for WWI.

It’s with tongue in cheek then that we say the Signal Corps mounted an aggressive recruitment campaign to find the Signalers it needed to fill its new signal school at Camp Vail. How aggressive? Well, let’s just say that a June 17, 1917 article in the New York Times gave an account of some of the excesses of this recruiting effort. They even went so far as to quote LTC Carl F. Hartmann, the Signal Officer of the Signal Corps' Eastern Division essentially bragging about “a hustling campaign which would be conducted in New York City this week to get recruits.”

Whatever the tricks used, men were soon on their way from the New York city area to the training site in New Jersey. Encompassing a nicely sized 381-acre tract the plan was for two telegraph battalions to be formed. The first would come from the New York City recruiting effort while the second would come from a similar effort getting underway in Philadelphia. If not enough men were found to fill the required TOE more would be hustled from the Buffalo-Syracuse-Albany area.

Not surprisingly the battalions would consist mostly of technical men, with a high priority being placed on electricians, engineers and telegraph operators. Very quickly the two telegraph battalions morphed into ten field battalions. MAJ Henry G. Opdyke, an expert telegrapher, was given the task of filling the most critical slots and he set about raiding every newspaper and telegraph office in the New York area, in search of the best talent he could find. So good was his effort that the New York Times published a piece warning that the Signal Corp’s success in recruiting telegraphers from newspapers and railroad companies was threatening to denude the businesses that depended on this high level talent of the very people they needed to keep their business operating.

Once New York and Philadelphia were tapped out the Signal Corps reached even further afield, sending letters to colleges and universities seeking their help in establishing telegrapher training programs. As explained at the time the Signal Corps was looking to train 6,000 Signalers to support what was termed a “first army of 500,000.”  Not content to just teach telegraphy the training programs being put together also included courses in elementary physics and electrical engineering. Practically speaking, the training program was set at 6 weeks and was heavily slanted towards foreign languages and codes. The area of instruction was called Signals Intelligence and in order to graduate you needed to master the ability to intercept German at 25 words per minute and to translate and send at the rate of 15 words per minute. Early radiotelephones were introduced into the regimen in 1918, but for the most part the focus stayed on telegraphy and the odd carrier pigeon or two.

To help support this overall effort, Congress jumped in and authorized inducements to the enlistment package. Overnight Congress doubled the pay of a Signal Corps private while at the same time increasing that of Signal Corps NCOs too. Even the food and clothing allowances were sweetened. The new pay levels looked like this: Corporal – $36; Sergeant – $44; Sergeant First-class – $51; Master Signal Electrician – $81.

At the same time as this effort at bringing the Signal Corps and its staff into the modern age hastened along, basic military skills were not forgotten either. Proud as they were of their heritage, the Signal Corps still defined itself to new recruits as a “mounted service.” To enter you needed to have knowledge of horses. If you did not already possess such, then you had to acquire it through one form or another. As the recruitment refrain ran at that time: “it is claimed by officers of the corps that in no other branch are there better opportunities for character development and vocational training. The corps, although having the status of a staff corps, offers many of the advantages of the cavalry and Infantry.”

According to History Office documents, Camp Alfred Vail trained a total of 2,416 enlisted men and 448 officers for war in 1917. The Camp trained 1,083 officers and 9,313 enlisted men in 1918. Between August 1917 and October 1918, American Expeditionary Forces in France received five telegraph battalions, two field signal battalions, one depot battalion, and an aero construction squadron from Camp Alfred Vail.

In 1919 the Chief Signal Officer decided that leasing was not the most cost effective way to pay for use of the base and purchased the property. By 1925 everyone began to recognize that the facility was something that the Army could not do without, with the result that in August of that year the installation was granted permanent status and renamed to what we still know it as today: Fort Monmouth. As to where this name came from, it drew its honor from the soldiers of the American Revolutionary War who died in the Battle of Monmouth. 

This story adapted from information obtained from the CECOM Historical Office, the writings of BG Squier, the Iowa Historical Society, and others.

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