[ARC5] SCR-274-N Installation dates

[David Stinson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert Eleazer" <releazer at earthlink.net>

> Does anyone have any idea of when VHF showed up 
>in the Pacific and became the preferred fighter equipment?

There was never, ever a time, in any theater, when VHF
"replaced" HF.  They were concurrent systems throughout 
the war and still are to this very day.

VHF became paramount in the North Eastern U.S., 
Iceland, the Canal Zone and the U.K. 
and haltingly, spottily advanced with the front until 
the end of the war, but there were still many, many aircraft
continuing in service with active HF.  The 8th Air Force tower
in England was equipped with both SCR-524 and SCR-274N.
The Army in the Pacific and especially the Navy were very late
in coming to VHF as there were "competing camps" over this
idea, even at flag level.   
And when they did, it was a unit-by-unit thing, so there is no
fixed date where everyone magically "changed."
I have documentation of fighters as late as October of 1944
which are equipped with HF and photos showing the HF
channels selected for active use.
As late as Iwo Jima, airborne HF was
still prominent in aircraft comm planning.  
Don't take my word;  the documentation is available and
when an officer who was there reports on the use of HF 
in his aircraft, I think we should believe him.

It was a *World War,* and most of the world was MF/HF.
"U.S.-centric" ideas about who did what when and where
often mislead us.  The Army, being in love with anything U.K.,
crash-shipped VHF as fast as they could (which resulted in piles of 
522s which didn't work), but it still takes time to get it there,
get it installed and get it working.  The war didn't wait, so they 
used what was there and worked.  I'm sure many of you have seen
the early 522 manuals that were shipped with diagrams
complete with "red lines" where the original UK design was 
changed "on the fly."  How many systems in the history
of the U.S. military were mass-produced and fielded while
still "red-lined?"  The 522 was jammed into a lot of Army aircraft,
but it was decidedly "not ready for prime time" and was 
discarded quickly when AN/ARC-3 came into large production
after the war.  The problems with 522 is one of the reasons the Navy
decided to go slow on embracing VHF.

You could get along with VHF only in a P-47 flying close air support 
on the Western Front in 1945, but God help you if you got in
trouble trying to fly to some airport not at the front (which
happened all the time).  What if you were on patrol on the 
Pacific Coast of Canada, or between Australian and New Zealand?
What if you were lost off the west coast of Africa?
If you didn't have HF, you were not going to talk to anyone 
nor get a "fix" on your location.  If you were flying into the captured
German airports in June of 1945, you'd better have HF because
the VHF gear wasn't there yet- I have the original notice on that.
I have photos of both Ike's and Patton's personal liason aircraft,
take in the ETO in what had to be late 1944 at the earliest.
Both are equipped with RCA HF.  I have a photo of an L-5 
recon plane at Iwo Jima.  It is equipped with HF.

Some in the U.S. seem to have this idea that the Air War consisted of
nothing more than waves of B-17s and P-51s with SCR-522
flying back-and-forth to Berlin. 
It was a very, very complex and world-wide war.
Uncountable variations and innovations were used all over the place,
and not many of them were 'by the book'.  
They used what they had and what they could scrounge.

OK back to work for me.

73 DE Dave AB5S