U.S. Signal Corps

)
, colors = Orange and white
, colors_label = Corps colors
, march =
, mascot =
, equipment =
, equipment_label =
, battles =
, anniversaries = 21 June 1860
, decorations =
, battle_honours =
, notable_commanders = BG Albert J. Myer
BG Adolphus Greely
, identification_symbol =
, identification_symbol_label = Branch insignia
, identification_symbol_2 =
, identification_symbol_2_label = Regimental insignia
, current_commander =
, current_commander_label =
, ceremonial_chief = Colonel Paul D. Howard
, ceremonial_chief_label = Chief of Signal
, command_sergeant_major = CSM Darien D. Lawshea
, command_sergeant_major_label = Sergeant Major of the Regiment

The United States Army Signal Corps (USASC) is a branch of the United States Army that creates and manages communications and information systems for the command and control of combined arms forces. It was established in 1860, the brainchild of Major Albert J. Myer, and had an important role in the American Civil War. Over its history, it had the initial responsibility for portfolios and new technologies that were eventually transferred to other U.S. government entities. Such responsibilities included military intelligence, weather forecasting, and aviation.

Mission statement

Support for the command and control of combined arms forces. Signal support includes network operations (information assurance, information dissemination management, and network management) and management of the electromagnetic spectrum. Signal support encompasses all aspects of designing, installing, data communications networks that employ single and multi-channel satellite, tropospheric scatter, terrestrial microwave, switching, messaging, video-teleconferencing, visual information, and other related systems. They integrate tactical, strategic and sustaining base communications, information processing and management systems into a seamless global information network that supports knowledge dominance for Army, joint and coalition operations.

Early history

While serving as a medical officer in Texas in 1856, Albert James Myer proposed that the Army use his visual communications system, called aerial telegraphy (or "wig-wag"). When the Army adopted his system on 21 June 1860, the Signal Corps was born with Myer as the first and only Signal Officer.

Major Myer first used his visual signaling system on active service in New Mexico during the early 1860s Navajo expedition. Using flags for daytime signaling and a torch at night, wigwag was tested in Civil War combat in June 1861 to direct the fire of a harbor battery at Fort Wool against the Confederate positions opposite Fort Monroe. For nearly three years, Myer was forced to rely on detailed personnel, although he envisioned a separate, trained professional military signal service.

Myer's vision came true on 3 March 1863, when Congress authorized a regular Signal Corps for the duration of the war. Some 2,900 officers and enlisted men served, although not at any single time, in the Civil War Signal Corps.

Myer's Civil War innovations included an unsuccessful balloon experiment at First Bull Run, and, in response to McClellan's desire for a Signal Corps field telegraph train, an electric telegraph in the form of the Beardslee magnetoelectric telegraph machine. Even in the Civil War, the wigwag system, restricted to line-of-sight communications, was waning in the face of the electric telegraph.

Initially, Myer used his office downtown in Washington, D.C. to house the Signal Corps School. When it was found to need additional space, he sought out other locations. First came Fort Greble, one of the Defenses of Washington during the Civil War, and when that proved inadequate, Myer chose Fort Whipple, on Arlington Heights overlooking the national capital. The size and location were outstanding. The school remained there for over 20 years and ultimately was renamed Fort Myer.

Signal Corps detachments participated in campaigns fighting Native Americans in the west, such as the Powder River Expedition of 1865.

In July 1866, Congress decided that there should be a unit or at least a Cadre of Signal even in peace time. It thereupon provided: One Chief Signal Officer of the Army, with the rank of Colonel. To confuse things even more, the 6 officers and 100 men authorized for the Signal Corp were to be chosen from the Corps of Engineers. Thus the Signal Corps was officially born.

The electric telegraph, in addition to visual signaling, became a Signal Corps responsibility in 1867. Within 12 years, the Signal Corps had constructed, and was maintaining and operating, some 4,000 miles of telegraph lines along the country's western frontier.

In 1870, the Signal Corps established a congressionally mandated national weather service. Within a decade, with the assistance of Lieutenant Adolphus Greely, Myer commanded a weather service of international acclaim.

Myer died in 1880, having attained the rank of brigadier general and the title of Chief Signal Officer. In 1881, as a lasting memorial to General Myer, Fort Whipple was renamed Fort Myer.

The Weather Bureau became part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1891, while the corps retained responsibility for military meteorology.

In 1881, the Signal Corps participated in the First International Polar Year. One of the groups under the command of LT Adolphus Greely was to write another grueling chapter of suffering and extinction in the history of the Arctic. Greely's Signal Corps volunteers became separated from their base camp and were marooned on a huge ice flow. They were decimated by starvation and drowning; of the original 25 volunteers, only 7 survived.

The Signal Corps' role in the Spanish–American War of 1898 and the subsequent Philippine Insurrection was on a grander scale than it had been in the Civil War. In addition to visual signaling, including heliograph, the corps supplied telephone and telegraph wire lines and cable communications, fostered the use of telephones in combat, employed combat photography, and renewed the use of balloons. Shortly after the war, the Signal Corps constructed the Washington-Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System (WAMCATS), also known as the Alaska Communications System (ACS), introducing the first wireless telegraph in the Western Hemisphere.

In October 1903,, Congress handed the then Chief Signal Officer Brigadier General Greely what may be considered the supreme challenge. Accompanied by an appropriation $25,000 it decreed that the military should "build a flying machine for war purposes". Needless to say, the first attempts at flying were failures, but BG Greely handed the contract to the Wright brothers who piloted the first aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

World War I

''For more details on this topic, see Aeronautical Division, U.S. Signal Corps and Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps''

On 1 August 1907, an Aeronautical Division was established within the Office of the Chief Signal Officer (OCSO). In 1908, on Fort Myer, Virginia, the Wright brothers made test flights of the Army's first airplane built to Signal Corps' specifications. Reflecting the need for an official pilot rating, War Department Bulletin No. 2, released on 24 February 1911, established a "Military Aviator" rating. Army aviation remained within the Signal Corps until 1918, when it became the Army Air Service.

During World War I. Chief Signal Officer George Owen Squier worked closely with private industry to perfect radio tubes while creating a major signal laboratory at Camp Alfred Vail (Fort Monmouth). Early radiotelephones developed by the Signal Corps were introduced into the European theater in 1918. While the new American voice radios were superior to the radiotelegraph sets, telephone and telegraph remained the major technology of World War I.

A pioneer in radar, Colonel William Blair, director of the Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth, patented the first Army radar demonstrated in May 1937. Even before the United States entered World War II, mass production of two radar sets, the SCR-268 and the SCR-270, had begun. Along with the Signal Corps' tactical FM radio, also developed in the 1930s, radar was the most important communications development of World War II.

During World War I, women switchboard operators, known as the "Hello Girls", were sworn into the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Despite the fact that they wore U.S. Army uniforms and were subject to Army regulations (Chief Operator Grace Banker received the Distinguished Service Medal), they were not given honorable discharges but were considered "civilians" employed by the military, because Army regulations specified the male gender. Not until 1978—the 60th anniversary of the end of World War I—did Congress approve veteran status/honorable discharges for the remaining "Hello Girls".

World War II

When the War Department was reorganized on 9 March 1942, the Signal Corps became one of the technical services in the Services of
Supply (later Army Service Forces). Its organized components served both the Army Ground Forces and the Army Air Forces.

The Army Chief Signal Officer (CSO) was responsible for establishing and maintaining communications service schools for officers and enlisted soldiers, ranging in qualifications from those holding doctorates to functional illiterates. The single pre-war Signal training site was Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. To keep up with the demand for more signallers, the CSO opened more training facilities: Camp Crowder, Missouri; Camp Kohler, California; and Camp Murphy, Florida.

The Eastern Signal Corps Training Center at Fort Monmouth consisted of an officers' school, an officer candidate school, an enlisted school and a basic training center at subpost Camp Wood. The officer candidate school operated from 1941 to 1946 and graduated 21,033 Signal Corps second lieutenants.

The term "RADAR" was coined by the Navy in 1940 and agreed to by the Army in 1941. The first Signal Corps Field Manual on Aircraft Warning Service defined RADAR as "a term used to designate radio sets SCR (Signal Corps Radio)-268 and SCR-270 and similar equipment". The SCR-268 and 270 were not radios at all, but were designated as such to keep their actual function secret. Although important offensive applications have since been developed, radar emerged historically from the defensive need to counter the possibility of massive aerial bombardment.

In 1941, the laboratories at Fort Monmouth developed the SCR-300, the first FM backpack radio. Its pioneering frequency modulation circuits provided front-line troops with reliable, static-free communications. The labs also fielded multichannel FM radio relay sets (e.g., AN/TRC-1) in the European Theater of Operations as early as 1943. Multichannel radio broadcasting allowed several channels of communications to be broadcast over a single radio signal, increasing security and range and relieving frequency spectrum crowding.

In December 1942, the War Department directed the Signal Corps General Development Laboratories and the Camp Evans Signal Lab to combine into the Signal Corps Ground Service (SCGS) with headquarters at Bradley Beach, New Jersey

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