[ARC5] Green Books

[Ken Kinderman]

I agree with Gordon and others about the lack of real technical meat in the
"Green Books". And some of the organizational details can be pretty dry at
times.

Nonetheless there is some great reading and equally revealing pictures.
Concentrating on radio as we do, we sometimes forget the efforts that went
into wireline comm... elephants in India pulling wires, GI's swimming the
Moselle River pulling telephone wire, rats nests of wires into CP's and
palaces commandeered as HQ's, a sailor struggling in a lifeboat to launch a
box kite (and to keep it dry) while his partner sets up the Gibson Girl,
etc. And don't forget the AN/CPG-1A, better known as the pigeon (just
kidding about the nomenclature).

Some of the photos are staged. Most are real: a BC-779 being aligned in
Stilwell's HQ, 2 GI's working a pogo stick radio in Sicily, a "supply depot"
on the beach in the Pacific, SCR-625's sweeping a beach in Italy. The
original radar plot of station OPANA on Oahu, dated 7 Dec 41, drawings of a
one-tube prison camp regen camouflaged inside a canteen (real? apocryphal?).

What the books reveal is the range of real, in-the-field, difficulties that
our guys encountered, as well as the supply and development problems at
home. For example, a discussion of the steps taken to improve the yield in
crystal manufacturing as the demand for blanks ballooned; a paragraph or two
about the failure rate of the 832, leading to the 832A in the SCR-522.

By the way, Disney's "Saludos Amigos" and those Don Ameche/Alice Faye-type
South America movies in the late 30's were more than just Hollywood fluff...
it was our way of cozying up to our southern hemisphere friends who were
also being courted by the Germans. That's where almost all our quartz came
from, and lignum vitae, which was used for propeller shaft bearings on
ships.

As Gordon points out, The Samuel Eliot Morison series is among the best
histories of the US Navy in WW2 (I have 7 of them and still collecting). But
you don't need to collect them all... you can get a good taste in his book
"The Two Ocean War" which summarizes the whole series. Although Morison was
commissioned  by the Navy as its "official" historian, he can be opinionated
at times, and is best read with other sources. But he is a real wit, and fun
to read. I also heard (not sure) that Henry Salomon worked with him. Salomon
was the creative force behind the NBC series "Victory at Sea".

Another shortcoming of the Green Books, at least for me, is that all the
radios are described with their top-line system SCR nomenclature. I grew up
knowing them better at the Basic Component (BC- ) level, so I often need to
do some translating.

73 and happy reading,

Ken
W2EWL


Message: 4
> Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:54:56 -0400
> From: gordon white <gewhite at crosslink.net>
> Subject: Re: [ARC5] [Milsurplus] The Green Books
> To: "Discussion of AN/ARC-5 military radio equipment."
>        <arc5 at mailman.qth.net>
> Message-ID: <4C3327A0.6040509 at crosslink.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Obviously, there is a very large set of WW II Army history volumes.
> Generally pretty academic and nowhere as interesting as Samuel Eliot
> Morison's Navy WW II histories, all 17 volumes of which I have.
> Morison, however, has virtually no technical details.  (Morison was a
> great student of Columbus and the early explorers. I am just reading his
> book on the southern explorers such as Magellan.)
>
>
>