[ARC5] Off topic German and US Tank Radios

[Mike Hanz]

On 1/6/2012 11:03 AM, J. Forster wrote:
> Fair point, Mike, but many of the British, Canadian, and possibly the
> Russians (I say that because I've heard the Russians didn't like radios in
> their tanks) used the WS 19, whose "A" set is 2-8 MHz am or CW.

That's a fair observation, John.  I had the wonderful experience of 
going to the National War College and Industrial College of the Armed 
Forces in 1989-1990 at taxpayer expense (thank you very much!:-) ), and 
one of the things I recall from the exhaustive review of WWII strategy 
was the careful separation of forces for Allied operations.  You didn't 
see British forces landing alongside US troops on Omaha Beach, for 
example - they were assigned to different beaches.  That concept pretty 
much continues today - look at "UN" operations in Afghanistan.  What all 
that means is that U.S. jamming missions were pretty much focused on 
narrow U.S. geographic combat mission areas.  You certainly don't want 
to jam your Allied comrades in any joint operations.  The jammers I have 
here are narrowly focused on German (AN/ART-6 through 11 and AN/ART-3) 
and Japanese walkie-talkie (AN/ART-2) tactical traffic, so the jamming 
is in a different  (and higher by almost an order of magnitude) 
frequency range.  See http://aafradio.org/countermeasures/ART-7.html and 
http://aafradio.org/countermeasures/ART-2.html for airborne examples, 
and there were ground based counterparts for these sets.

There are a number of documents that unfortunately I don't have time to 
excerpt at the moment which have information on the effectiveness of 
this effort, including the three volume Signal Corps books, the NDRC 
Division 15 report, and several countermeasures history books.  The 
British were also extremely active in the area, helped by the different 
frequency range of their equipment.  No, you can't win a war with a 
single technology, but every little bit helps.  Postwar interviews with 
German and Japanese commanders mention comms difficulties in the face of 
jamming, and that lesson has been taken to heart even in today's 
environment.

73,
Mike