Detachment 101: Communications in the Jungle
With agents being infiltrated over thousands of square miles of mountainous jungles, Detachment 101 faced the problem of establishing a communications network. In the signal unit, Donald Eng and Allen R. Richter solved the problem. Eng had been at Area B, but Richter, alone among the two dozen, had been at neither Area B nor Camp X. Instead, while the paramilitary training was going on, Richter, who had been in the communications industry, had been assigned to purchase radio supplies directly from stores in New York City. By the time the others had graduated from the training schools, Richter had assembled the materials—tubes, wires, another components—that they would need.51

From the OSS base at Nazira, the target area, Myitkyina airfield was 150 air miles away by air or 400 miles by land. Richter and Eng set up a base station at Nazira, but what was needed were relatively lightweight portable wireless radios that the agents could carry and that could transmit and receive messages over the mountains. The two of them designed a prototype by December 1942; it weighed 50 pounds including the battery and carrying case. The transmitter was a straightforward crystal oscillator and amplifier, usually a pair of 6V6s; radio tubes depended on what they had on hand; the receiver was a three-tube regenerative design using assorted materials. They built the containers for the prototype radios out of materials they scrounged from local airports. “We used the aluminum belly skins from crashed planes,” Richter recalled. “It still needed to be put into something strong, yet lightweight, so it could be carried. The manager of the tea plantation came to the rescue by supplying us with boards used to make wooden apple crates. It worked out fine.”52 “We called it the Burma Radio,” Richter said proudly, “and it could transmit 1,500 miles!”53

The forerunner of the OSS SSTR-1, “suitcase radio,” it made Detachment 101 self-sufficient. Natives and Americans were trained how to use it, but one of the complaints that instructor Jack Pamplin had when he returned to Washington was that although most of the “commo” operators being sent from Area C were fast enough, they were not adequately trained in how to repair and maintain the equipment in the harsh jungle environment. “Stress [the] fact that a fast operator is not necessarily a good one,” Pamplin advised OSS “commo” instructors, “for the Far East, a resourceful operator is the ideal.”54 At the same time, the chief of the OSS Communications Branch, Colonel Lawrence (“Larry”) Lowman, praised the work of the “commo” men in Burma for their innovation and for the delivery of intelligence and other information even in the most adverse conditions. “Our work has, we believe, played a unique, successful and important part in the realization of the overall OSS objectives in this war.”55