[ARC5] Re: [Milsurplus] Re: What did they talk to ??

[David Stinson]

Bob Wilder wrote:

> According to the pilot of "Patches", the B-17 which appears on the 32 
> cent airmail stamp, the radio operator used the BC375 to send the strike 
> report right after the plane left the target.  The only time the pilot 
> used the command set was during emergencies while in combat.  Otherwise 
> all comm was performed by the radio operator.

That may have been true for an average 8th Air Force bomber driver
who flew his 25 missions as part of a middle "V" formation
in a big flight going back and forth over the ETO every few days.
But this does not represent everything going on in the air
during the war.
Sometimes, we get this fixation that the only things
flying during the whole war were clouds of B-17s
escorted by P-51Ds, all going to Berlin over and over.
Take the HF Command Sets away from a flight of
B-25s flying from North Africa to Sicily at night
and you would have had a bunch of scared bomber boys.
I have a copy of a letter from General Doolittle himself,
issued to the workers at the Kearny plant,
praising the Western Electric workers for building
the radios that kept them in contact during
the Tokyo Raid.

Quote:
   "... Radios you helped to build aided us to bomb Tokyo...
    through those radios we issued commands between ships
    that sent our bombers on their marks; through those
    radios we cheered each other on as our bombs crashed
    into vital Japanese naval and military installations..."

Western Electric workers at Kearny didn't build
liaison radios in 1942; they built SCR-274N and SCR-283.
It would have been pretty hard for the radio ops to
keep up with passing "cheering" messages on their
liaison rigs, not to mention the delay in issuing and
receiving commands through the radio op during
"30 seconds over Tokyo"
(they don't call them "Command Sets" for nothing),
and I don't think anyone had an SCR-522 in early 1942,
nor did W.E. make them.

Many of us have quoted radio operators as saying
they "hardly ever used the Command Set."
Well, that's entirely true;  the *radio operator*
almost never used the Command Set.  The pilot and
co-pilot used the Command Set, and with all the noise
and a tight-fitting set of headphones,
most radio ops couldn't have told you how many times
it was keyed during any flight.  Their job was to
"set it and forget it" before the flight,
unless something in the mission parameters called
for him to change it.  There's no way he could have
told you one way or the other if the Command Set
was used during a flight unless the pilot told him so.

We have photos of the towers with HF installed
and the tower operators using them.
We have logs of the radio ops, logging
Liaison-type transmissions, but none of
him asking the tower for landing instructions
or wind direction over a certain runway
or permission to take off or if gas was
available at the next landing strip, etc.
If the Radio Op had been doing this, his log
would be filled to the brim with this mundane
stuff, and I have the training documents that
clearly order that he must log *EVERY* transmission
he makes and *EVERYTHING* he hears.
It's not logged because these "routine" communications
were done by the pilot and copilot using the
Command Set radios.  They were not logged
because the Radio Op had nothing to do with them;
he "almost never used the Command Sets-"
an entirely true statement that has lead
some of us to an inaccurate conclusion.

I don't know what else we can do to convince
people that HF Command radios performed
a vital and on-going role in WWII.
The evidence is extensive and conclusive.
I will never understand this resistance
to the proven and obvious.

David S.