The Army Behind the Army

Before the war made most Americans as conversant with the functions of the various branches of the army as they are with the duties of the gardener and the cook, the work of the Signal Corps troops was popularly supposed to consist, in the main, of standing in full view of the enemy and frantically waving little red-and-white flags. Don’t you remember those gaudily colored recruiting posters which depicted a slender youth in khaki standing on a parapet, a signal-flag in either outstretched hand, in superb defiance of the shells which were bursting all about him? This popular and picturesque conception was still further fostered at the officers’ training-camps, where the harassed candidates spent many unhappy hours attempting to master the technic of semaphore and wig-wag. Yet, as a matter of fact, during more than four years of war I do not recall ever having seen a soldier of any nation attempt to signal by means of flags, save, perhaps, in the back areas. Had such an attempt been made under battle conditions the signaler probably would have provided, in the words of the poet, “more work for the undertaker, another little job for the casket-maker.”

By this I do not mean to imply that the changed conditions brought about by the Great War made the army signaler a good life-insurance risk. Far from it! But they did have the effect of making him a trifle less dashing and picturesque. Instead of recklessly exposing himself on the parapet of a trench in order to dash-dot a message which the enemy could have read with the greatest ease, he dragged himself, foot by foot, across the steel-swept terrain, a mud-caked and disreputable figure, on his task of repairing the tangle of copper strands which linked the infantrymen in the front-line trenches with the eager guns; crouching in the meagre shelter afforded by a shell-hole, with receivers strapped to his ears, he sent his radio messages into space; carrying on his back a wicker hamper filled with pigeons, he went forward with the second wave of an attack; or, by means of a military edition of the dictaphone device so familiar to readers of detective stories, he eavesdropped on the enemy’s strictly private conversations. Even though he had no opportunity to wave his little flags, the Signal Corps man never lacked for action and excitement.

If the Air Service is, as it has frequently been termed, “the eyes of the army,” then the Signal Corps constitutes the army’s entire nerve-system. Under the conditions imposed by modern warfare, an army without aviators would be at least partially blind, but without signalers it would be bereft of touch, speech, and hearing. It is the business of the Signal Corps to operate and maintain all the various systems of message transmission—telegraphs, telephones, radios, buzzers, Fullerphones, flags, lamps, panels, heliographs, pyrotechnics, despatch-riders, pigeons, even dogs—which enable the Commander-in-Chief to keep in constant communication with the various units of his army and which permit of those units keeping in touch with each other. It was imperative that General Pershing should be able to pick up his telephone-receiver in his private car, sidetracked hundreds of miles away from the battle-front, perhaps, and talk, if he so desired, with a subaltern of infantry crouching in his dugout on the edge of No Man’s Land. The Secretary of War, seated at his desk in Washington, must be enabled to talk to the commander of a camp on the Rio Grande or of a cantonment in the Far Northwest. Though every strand of wire leading to the advanced positions was cut by the periodic shell-storms, means had to be provided for the commanders of the troops holding those positions to call for artillery support, for reinforcements, for ammunition, or for food. It was essential to the proper working of the great war-machine that the chiefs of the Services of Supply at Tours should be in constant telegraphic and telephonic communication with the officers in charge of the unloading of troops and supplies at Bordeaux and Marseilles, at Brest and St. Nazaire. It was vital that the Chief of Staff should be kept constantly informed of conditions at the various ports of embarkation. All this was made possible by the Signal Corps. But it was also necessary that these various conversations should be so safeguarded that there was no possibility of them being overheard by enemy spies. And the Signal Corps saw to that too.

When Count von Bernstorff was handed his passports in the spring of 1917, the Signal Corps consisted of barely 50 officers and about 2,500 men. When, nineteen months later, the German delegates, standing about a table in Marshal Foch’s private car, sullenly affixed their signatures to the Armistice, the corps had grown to nearly 2,800 officers and upward of 53,000 men. It comprised at the close of the war seventy-one field signal battalions, thirty-four telegraph battalions, twenty replacement and training battalions, and fifty-two service companies, together with several pigeon and army radio companies, a photographic section, and a meteorological section.

Not many people are aware, I imagine, that nearly a third of the officers and men who wore on their collars the little crossed flags of the Signal Corps were recruited from the employees of the two great rival telephone systems of the United States—the Bell and the Independent. The former raised and sent to France twelve complete telegraph battalions; the latter ten field signal battalions—to say nothing of the great number of experts, specialists, and telephone-girls who left the employ of those systems to embark on the Great Adventure. So you need not be surprised if, the next time your telephone gets out of order, your trouble call is answered by a bronzed and wiry youth who wears in the buttonhole of his rather shabby coat the tricolored ribbon of the D. S. C.—won, perhaps, while keeping the communications open at Château-Thierry. And the operator who says, “Number, please,” so sweetly, may have been—who knows?—one of those alert young women in trim blue serge who sat before the switchboard at Great Headquarters and handled the messages of the Commander-in-Chief himself.

For a number of years before the war it was recognized in Washington that should the United States ever become involved in a conflict with a first-class Power, the handful of officers and men who composed the personnel of the Signal Corps would be utterly incapable of handling, unaided, the enormous system of communications which is so essential to the success of a modern army. It was perfectly evident, moreover, that should the country suddenly find itself confronting an emergency, there would be no time to train officers and men in the highly technical requirements of the Signal Corps. To insure the success of the great citizen armies which we would be compelled to raise with the utmost speed in case of war, it was essential that there should be available an adequate supply of men who were already thoroughly trained in the installation and operation of the two chief forms of military communication—telegraphs and telephones. And this trained personnel was at hand in the employees of the great telephone and telegraph companies. It was not, however, until June, 1916, when Congress, tardily awakening to the imminent danger of sparks falling on our own roof from the great conflagration in Europe, passed the National Defense Act, which authorized, among other things, the creation of the Signal Officers’ Reserve Corps and the Signal Enlisted Reserve Corps, that the way was opened for definite action. Shortly thereafter the Bell Telephone System was approached by the Signal Corps with the suggestion that a number of reserve Signal Corps units be recruited from its various subsidiary organizations. The suggestion met with the hearty approval of the Bell officials and the work of organization was turned over to the Bell’s chief engineer, Mr. J. J. Carty, the foremost telephone expert in the world. In accordance with the plans drawn up by Mr. Carty, there were organized from the employees of the New York, New England, Pennsylvania, Chesapeake and Potomac, Central Union, Cincinnati, Northwestern, Southwestern, Southern, Mountain States, and Pacific telephone companies twelve reserve telegraph battalions. I might mention, in passing, that Mr. Carty was given a commission as major, was later promoted to colonel, was made chief of the telegraphs and telephones of the A. E. F., and for his invaluable work was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.

While the Bell System was devoting its efforts to the raising of the telegraph battalions, the Chief Signal Officer of the Army asked the co-operation of the Bell’s great rival, the United States Independent Telephone Association, in the organization of a number of field signal battalions for front-line work. Mr. F. B. McKinnon, vice-president of the association, assumed charge of the work and enthusiastically threw himself and all the agencies at his disposal into the business of recruiting, ten field battalions eventually being raised by the Independent System.