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From Our Home Page Archive:
Home Page as originally published in
June 2013
— This Month —
A
three part series on the impact of how changes in the way
America fights its
wars is also changing what makes up a typical tour of duty.
Or...
What a tour of duty can tell you about America's intention
to win the wars it fights.
Including...
Part I: A background
movie on U.S. Army Communications, Vietnam.While the
subject of this movie is not tours of duty per se, watching
it says a lot about what a Vietnam tour of duty was and will
help you understand what follows.
Part II: A Typical WWII Tour
Of Duty. Read this
story to see how closely a WWII tour of duty matched
the goals of the Second World War.
Part III: Conclusions About What
Today's Tour Of Duty Tells You About How We Fight.
Most disturbing of all, learn how America's
determination (or lack of it) to win the wars it fights
today can be seen in the makeup of a typical modern day tour
of duty.
MISSION STATEMENT
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.
Part I: U.S. Army Communications
- Vietnam -
In this movie you will see how the Signal Corps functioned
in Vietnam: it's purpose, goals, objectives, structure, and
achievements. While the movie is most definitely not about
the tours of duty that the Signal Corps men who fought in
Vietnam lived, if you look behind the scenes you will
quickly figure out that the kind of cohesive, unit
integrity, purposeful objectives that made up the tours of
duty of the men that served in WWII was missing in Vietnam.
The question we are asking is, why? More to the point, we
are asking if this lack of unified purpose says anything
about how America fights its wars today... anything we can
learn from, and possibly change to our betterment as a
country.
As for the movie itself, even without reference to what it
can tell us about a typical Vietnam tour of duty, it's a
great flick to watch. It was brought to our attention by
Dennis Neal, OCS Class 05-67, and we owe a big debt of
gratitude to him because this movie definitely belongs in
the movie archives of this site.
Originally published as a DOD video about the Signal
Corps' communication work in Vietnam, it runs a comfortable
18:55 in length. If you served in Vietnam you should watch
it. If you served in the Signal Corps in Vietnam it's a must
watch, as it will help you finally understand what that whole scene was
about. That is, if you are like many of us, during much of
your tour your daily life was spent so close to
the trees that you probably didn't know there was a forest out there
somewhere. This video will show you the parts of the forest
you may never have seen, and how they depended for their
existence on the few trees you were tasked with minding each
day.
Finally, for those of you who like watching what's happening in the
background on these old movies, you are bound to find lots
of interesting things to see. We caught sight of some of the signal
sites we were stationed at, and even think we saw an old EM
or two that served under us. It's a good movie, and one we
are happy to add to our collection. As they would say in
England, "give it a watch" and see if it doesn't bring back
memories for you too. Thanks Dennis... Hooah!
Loading the player ...
DOD Movie United States Army Communications - Vietnam; SFR
66-43B; A Staff Film Report, LR-9622; 18:55 in length.
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.
- - - - -
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.
This page last updated 1 June 2013.
New content is constantly being added. Please check back
frequently.
Posted 1 June 2013
–New class picture for Class
01-67, courtesy of Herb Worff, has been posted. Be sure to
check it out on the 01-67 Class Page. Thanks
Herb, it's sure strange to see how young we all looked back
then, including you!
Posted 11 May 2013
–Candidate Don Mehl, OCS Class
44-35, sent us a
great reunion booklet from his old unit, the 805th Signal
Service Company. Filled with 13 pages of pictures and
historical information on the unit, it lists many, many
Signal OCS graduates that went through Monmouth's program
and served in the 805th. Take a look at it by going to our
reunion page, scrolling down
the page, and clicking on the picture of the 805th booklet there.
Posted 10 May 2013
–Think you have done well
all of these years since you left High School? Then you are
in for a surprise. Candidate Ron (Romuald) Stone, OCS Class
13-67 sent us a short bio of his life experiences since
graduating Signal OCS. It's scary how much Ron has done in
his career and life. Take the time to read Ron's career
experiences
and then get busy pushing your grandkids to accomplish more
in their life! Seriously, if you will forgive the analogy to
race horses, in our mind Ron is a best-of-breed example of
what being a military Officer is all about. Truly, best of
breed.
Posted 10 May 2013
–Catching up on old work piled in the corner of
our Editor's Desk... we finally added a few pics from the
2012 Army Signal OCS Reunion. Check them out on our Reunion
page by clicking the Reunion Info link in the left
column above, scroll down the page, and then click on the
appropriate icon. Oh, and if you have any pictures of your
own of that reunion, please send them to us so that we can
add them to our album. Our thanks to Candidate Preas Street
for sending the pics to us nearly a year ago. We may be
slow, but we are diligent in our duties, Sir.
Continued from left column...
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.
Part III –
What A Tour Of Duty Tells You About A Country’s Resolve To
Win The Wars It Fights
Something radical happened sometime between the end of WWII
and the end of the Korean War. How America fights and wins
wars changed. More specifically, America’s determination to
win the wars it fights seems to have changed. Not the
determination of the soldiers who fight the wars,
mind you, but of the government leaders in
Washington that send those soldiers to war. We think you
can see this by looking at the changes that came about in
the content and purpose of a typical soldier’s tour of duty
during these wars.
If you have been reading along with us so far, you saw what
a typical tour of duty was composed of in Part II, where we
followed an archetypal Army Signal Corps EM (and a couple of
Army Signal OCS graduates as well) from the 56th Signal
Battalion, through their tour of duty. In the case of the
EM, what you saw was that everything he did during his time
in the Army was driven by an overwhelming need on our
government’s part to move this man along a path that would
take him from where he was found when he was drafted to the
very steps of power and decision that ruled the country
America was up against. At that point in time it would then
be his lot, and that of his compatriots, to dismantle that
center of enemy power… to decimate it, grind it into the
ground, and forever put an end to its ability to rule and
therein do the world harm.
Like
one long straight arrow that led from America across Europe
to the doors of the Reichstag in Berlin, the tour of duty
given to ETO Army men during WWII was based on this simple
objective: the objective of tearing down the German
government, at its seat of power, so that America could then
replace it with a form of government that would forever end
Germany’s ability to wage war.
It’s true that many of the men that took this tour of duty
did not end up at the Reichstag per se, but that’s a minor
point. It was to be expected that men would have to be
dispatched to other destinations than the steps of the
Reichstag, if only to clear paths to the center of power in
Germany for those whose job it would be to dismantle it. It
was necessary because the war in Europe was a complex war,
and there was no guarantee that one path would work better
than any other. And so, many paths had to be tried… some
through Africa and from there up the leg of Italy towards
Germany; others through Russia, or through the Baltic
Countries, or across Scandinavia, or through the Low
Countries, and of course straight across France to Berlin
needed to be tried too.
To assure the effort to unseat the people who ruled wartime
Germany and dismantle this power center and government
worked, many moves and counter moves had to be tried by the
Allies. But don’t let these moves fool you, they all served
only one purpose: find and take the most direct route
possible to the doors of the Reichstag, tear it down, and
capture and imprison its leaders.
As for the German soldiers encountered along the way, they
were irrelevant to the tour of duty an American service man
was on. In today’s lingo they were nothing more than speed
bumps to be dealt with as the march continued along the path
to the power center of Germany. Big speed bumps... dangerous
speed bumps... but speed bumps nonetheless. It was the march
and the path that was important, not the enemy resistance
that was met along the way. Yes, it had to be dealt with,
but no, that was not the objective. The objective, again,
was to march America’s military from where it was originally
assembled to the doors of power of the government of
Germany, there to dismantle the government and imprison its
leaders.
Quick, close the window, the flies are coming in!
The first successful test of a 3-D printed gun last month
pretty much ended the debate over background checks for gun
purchasers. If you can print a gun in your own home, it’s a
rather useless exercise to require background checks at gun
shops.
For this author, that’s good. Enough about this absurd idea
that slowing gun sales is going to make anyone safer.
Educating people and instilling in them morals, ethics, and
respect for society might help, but telling them they don’t
qualify to own a gun is a) not going to stop someone from
getting their hands on a gun if they want to, and b) not
going to stop them from shooting whoever they wish with that
illegally gotten gun.
So, in a manner of speaking, it was kind of nice to see the
print-on-demand gun issue come up last month, as it ended
that silly debate about background checks, the number of
bullets that can be put in a magazine, and all the rest of
that baloney.
However, don’t sit back on your laurels and think that the
issue of making the normal day to day world we move around
in more secure is over and done with. It ain’t, my friend.
The unfortunate fact is that along with printable guns comes
all sorts of other printable things… like printable bomb
parts, counterfeit aircraft parts, and other things that
probably should be controlled. The fact is, “additive
manufacturing,” as 3-D printing is called, is full of
opportunity to make the bad guys more bad. Compared to
printing a single shot pistol, what can be done with
additive manufacturing… for pennies… will boggle your mind.
How about printing chemicals? Yup, it’s already under
development. Bioprinting, as it is called, allows lots of
good things to happen, from printing cells and tissues to
help those suffering from illnesses, to printing drugs at a
cost much less than that involved in making them the
traditional way. Heck, already scientists can print ears [Popular
Science], so what’s next?
How about ricin?
See, along with the good stuff that science brings, is a
bunch of bad stuff too. Or, as Deng Xiao Ping, that paragon
of Communism, said when he opened up China to the west in
1985, “When you open the window, along with all of the fresh
air that comes in are a few bugs and flies too.”
Keep your eyes out for the bugs and flies. They’re coming.
Now, aren’t you glad you still have the right to own a gun?
You may need it if you are going to start plinking at bugs
and flies.
Germany Launches Invasion Of Russia
June
22, 1941, a new chapter in World War II got underway. On
that day Hitler launched his invasion of Russia. How time
and circumstances would change the relationship between the
US and Russia from that date until today... from being
partners at war, through lend lease designed to help rebuild
Russia after the war, to proxy enemies during the Korean
War, cold war adversaries, on to becoming equal superpowers,
then back to only one superpower, through dismemberment, to
rule by oligarchy, trust but verify, learning to barely
tolerate each other, and now on to nearly open contempt for
each other's foreign policies... Russia and the United
States have tested and retested each others resolve and
arrived nowhere.
In all of
history no war has risen to the level of absurdity of
Hitler's war on Russia. Its scale of destruction was beyond
measure, as at least 25 million Soviet citizens lost their
life. From Leningrad to the Crimea, and Kiev to Stalingrad,
Russia was devastated. And for what?
In the summer of 1940 Hitler could look
back on a stunning victory over France. Yet his efforts
against the British were beginning to bog down. Frustrated
by the impediments of geography caused by the English
Channel, he seemed to think that if he stuck to land battles
all would be well. Little did he know that the immense
openness of the space between Berlin and Moscow formed a
channel of its own, one that would swallow up his armies and
hand him a defeat. No student of history, Adolph Hitler
thought he could rewrite it.
His arrogance on this, and so man other matters, proved his
undoing.
Let us hope the leaders of today—all
of them— have learned the lessons of pride and arrogance.
June's Crossword Puzzle
Theme:
More
Military Trivia
Hint:
Join 2 and 3 word answers together as one complete word.
For
answer key to this month's puzzle,
see icon at bottom of page
Footnotes:
[1]This
story is loosely based on the experiences of Robert Howard
Searl Sr., Technician 4th Class, a member of the 56th
Signal Battalion, Company A, and as of February 2013 the
second oldest living American WWII veteran. In May 2013
multiple attempts were made to seek permission from
Technician Searl for use as background in this piece his
war experiences and the material included above. No response
was received. For historical accuracy the exploits of the
Signaleer above follow Technician Searl’s experiences,
however the conclusions drawn as to the underlying values
and meaning of such a tour of duty are strictly those of
this author. Notwithstanding this, we wish to gratefully
acknowledge any copyright Technical 4th Class Searl may hold
on the story that underlies this article. More information
is available on Technician Searl from many sources on the
internet, including these:
,
and
- To return to your place in
the text click here:
[2]The
artwork showing the flying squirrel is one of the actual
authorized unit insignias for the 56th Signal Battalion
during WWII. Interestingly, the cartoon was one of many
Disney-produced unit insignias authorized during the
war. The insignia designs that were created by the studio
for military units during World War II remain, remarkably,
quite inaccessible, in that very few copies of them
exist. The book Disney Dons Dogtags by Walton Rawls
presented the largest known collection of Disney
insignia-related artwork; it was published in 1992 but
unfortunately has long been out of print. For the curious,
the Walt Disney Studio created an estimated 1,200 insignias
over the course of World War II. In doing so Walt Disney
himself assembled a crew of five artists under the direction
of studio artist Hank Porter to produce the insignia
designs. One of the crew's key members was Roy Williams, who
would go on to become the "big moose-keteer" on the Mickey
Mouse Club. Of all of the Disney characters used in the
insignia artwork, Donald Duck was the most popular
character. He was featured on more than 200 insignia. For
the 56th Signal Battalion the artists said that the insignia
represented the concept that "performance of communications
duty under fire requires speed and agility as well as
technical skill." This insignia certainly personifies that
motto. - To return to your place in
the text click here:
[3]From the
beginning date for WWI in 1914 until today 99 years have
passed. - To return to your place in
the text click here:
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