In article .net, "Dan/W4NTI"
w4nti@get rid of this mindspring.com writes:

Operators there at that time included W3GRF(sk), W0DX (sk) W9BRD/VA3ZBB,
W0US
and others.

Real hams. Not these wanabees we have today.

Go for it, Dan boy, "real" hams even if SK by now. :-)

In all fairness, Washington Army Radio was an old, small effort using
old-fashioned (for its time, not ours) up until about the summer of
1942. Quite inadequate to mount a worldwide war effort. The largest
real communications network was maintained by the US Navy back
then (they had already introduced TTY to warships of cruiser size
and above by 1940, the Sigaba real-time encryption cut in in 1941).

The U.S. Army Signal Corps of the beginning 1942 times was, and
their historians grudgingly admit it, not up to the herculean task
ahead. Prior to the Japanese striking Pearl Harbor on the morning
of 7 December 1941, the warning message to the Army commander
on Pearl was sent by RCA commercial-carrier message, not over
any Army radio circuit.

The very first HT (a Motorola design) was operational in 1941, even
used by FDR's Secret Service personnel, but in limited quantities.
The backpack walkie-talkie was still in the design phase in the
summer of 1942, as was the Hallicrafters conversion of their
commercial HF transmitter to the BC-610 military model. High-
power HF transmitters in the military of early '42 were largely
off-the-shelf commercial models or the antiquated 1 KW BC-339
and its big brother, the 10 KW BC-340. ACAN, Army Command
and Administrative Network, was a rather sorry lot in the middle
of 1942, mostly the left-overs of the 20s and 30s sparky days
hardly more than amateur efforts with uniforms. That would change
remarkably in the next year, taking at least two plateau jumps in
both equipment type and quantity...field tested in North Africa and
Italy and over the enormous spans of the Pacific as that island-
by-island campaign began...the Army long-distance radio comms
greatly helped by the USN in the Pacific.

What had been a picayune effort by the Army up to about the
middle of 1942 ended by 1943. By then there was less reliance on
commercial radio carriers for long-distance communications and a
tremendous growth of INTEGRATED wire and radio, truly networked
to enable the excellent logistics capability of the US military
demonstrated in WW2. The era of copying the sparky methods of
the USN for land use was ending...the Army was expanding in
technology of radio and electronics much like the end product of
the Manhattan Project.

The second-highest national priority level (behind only the A-bomb
project) of WW2 was the production of quartz crystals for radios.
In the last three years of WW2, quartz crystal unit production
averaged 1 million units per month from over 30 companies in the
USA! Not any sort of "amateur" effort." Galvin (later Motorola) was
the production Hq for the quartz crystals in a time when artificial
quartz blank growth was not yet known. The vast majority of those
crystal units was intended for non-morse-code radios used on land
and in the air and on landing craft.

The core of network messaging in the military of WW2 was the
teleprinter, principally the militarized models from the Teletype
Corporation headquartered in Chicago...as were Hallicrafters and
Motorola. Teleprinters were ideal for integrated communications,
operating well over both wirelines and radio, capable of 60 words
per minute continuously, needing only to be fed paper and ribbons
and some occasional oil.

The image of the lone morseman with headphones and hunched
over his code key saving the nation was only that...an image...no
relation to reality. That image is UNreal.

LHA / WMD