Trent Telenko

History Friday — MacArthur’s Anglo-Australian Radars

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Radar was the “Revolution in Military Affairs” in WW2. If you wanted to know the fighting style of a particular military theater in World War 2 (WW2), you have to know the capabilities of the radars the theater had and how the theater was organized to use them. This isn’t just a matter of creating an early warning air defense system, like was used in the Battle of Britain. The far more important and little understood reason is stated in two words — “Operational losses.” The leading killer of aircraft in WW2 was “Operational Losses.” Operational losses are what happen when bad fuel, bad weather, bad parts, bad maintenance and just plain “getting lost” catch up with pilots. Radar as organized & practiced by the Western Allies saved many poor or average pilots that had all of the above happen to them to fight another day and become good pilots. However, when you try and find what radars MacArthur’s South West Pacific Area (SWPA) had in WW2, how and by whom they were used, there is very little in the US Army and US Air Force institutional histories.

The researching of Douglas MacArthur as a “Fighting General” in WW2 means you become used to discovering frustrating dead ends in established narratives. In the case of MacArthur’s radars, it was an exercise in internet searching to gain the understanding that these most important elements of MacArthur’s WW2 fighting style — his Australian and British radars — were designed completely outside the US Military. These radars were either not well documented in the narratives, or if they were, how they were used was classified until as late as the 1990s. Chief among these items from outside the US military were:

1) The Australian Light Weight Air Warning (LW/AW) and Light Weight Ground Control Intercept (LW/GCI) of radars the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and,
2) The British Light Weight (LW) radar, produced in Canada for the US Army Signal Corps as the SCR-602.

Australian Light Weight Air Warning (LW/AW) Mark I Radar Deployed in the SWPA
Australian Light Weight Air Warning (LW/AW) Mark I Radar Deployed in the SWPA

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History Friday: MacArthur’s Sioux Code Talkers

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I have mentioned in a previous column (https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/36669.html) that researching and understanding MacArthur’s WW2 fighting style was an exercise in frustration due to existing institutional historic narratives plus the patchwork and mayfly-like lives of some of the institutions MacArthur created and used to fight in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA). Organizations that were discarded by the US Army after WW2 and then hidden behind bureaucratic walls of classification for decades. One of my internet searches stumbled across another example of these many, small, ‘here today and gone tomorrow’, narrative busting organizations in MacArthur’s South West Pacific Theater, his Sioux Indian Code Talkers.

Unlike the much more publicized US Marine Corps Navajo Code Talker program, this smaller “Code Talker” program used Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Sioux Native American soldiers in MacArthur’s South West Pacific Theater and in Europe. The program was not declassified until the mid-1970’s and the US Army has never seen fit to publicly recognize their Sioux code talkers to the extent that the USMC has with its Navajos. It does not fit the narrative on MacArthur.

MacArthur’s Code Talker program was smaller than both the USMC program and the European Theater Comanche code talker program with the 4th Infantry Division (whose cover was blown to the Axis by the NY Times in 1940!) and was centered around the US Army’s 302nd Reconnaissance Squadron of the 1st Cavalry Division, a battalion sized horse cavalry Reconnaissance unit, that was reorganized into two company sized units, the 302nd Reconnaissance Troop (Mechanized) and the 603rd Independent Tank Company. Some of the 302nd code talkers graduated from the same course that the 6th Army Alamo Scout infiltration teams were selected from.

See this 1st Cavalry Division Association link (http://www.first-team.us/tableaux/chapt_02/) on the 1st Cav’s “Sioux Code Talkers” —

“During the fall of 1943, more changes came to the Division. On 11 October, the firepower of the Division was improved by the activation of the 271st Field Artillery. In the reorganization of 04 December, weapons troops “D” and “H” were added to each of the regiments. The 7th Reconnaissance Squadron was reorganized into the 603rd Light Tank Company and the 302nd Reconnaissance Troop (Mech). The 302nd had a specific Table of Organization and Equipment (TO&E) which incorporated a unique radio unit with troops of Lakota and Dakota Indian Tribes who used their ancient tribal Sioux language to communicate with other divisional headquarters troops. This secret organization, formed in the foothills of Australia and later to be known as “The Code Talkers” was recruited at the direction of General MacArthur. The close-knit group of individuals, Phillip Stoney LeBlanc, Edmund St. John, Baptiste Pumkinseed, Eddie Eagle Boy, Guy Rondell, and John Bear King took their task seriously. They saved many American lives using their language as an unbreakable code to fool the Japanese throughout the subsequent Island Campaigns.”

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History Friday: MacArthur’s “Red Bull Dust Express”

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One of the maddening things about researching General Douglas MacArthur’s fighting style in WW2 was the way he created, used and discarded military institutions, both logistical and intelligence, in the course of his South West Pacific Area (SWPA) operations. Institutions that had little wartime publicity and have no direct organizational descendent to tell their stories in the modern American military. This is a huge problem for readers/researchers interested in World War 2 Southwest Pacific history because most modern historians have become like modern journalists. They both have lost the have lost ablity to do systematic record searches “outside the accepted narrative.” And as my previous post “MacArthur — A General Made for Convenient Lies” made clear, MacArthur’s historical narrative was written by his enemies.

A case in point of a ‘here today and gone tomorrow’ logistic institution was MacArthur’s “Red Bull Dust Express“, or more properly, “Motor Transport Command No. 1.” Unlike the fabled “Red Ball Express” that trucked supplies to Patton’s 3rd Army in it’s dash across France. The efforts of the 3,500 African-American truckers in the racially segregated 29th and 48th Quartermaster Truck Regiment’s to convoy supplies across the Australian Outback to a besieged Darwin, in the dark days of 1942, have been largely forgotten. Their story was hidden behind veils of wartime censorship, Mid-World War 2 American Army organizational restructuring and the post war demobilization.

29th Quartermaster Truck Regiment at Mt Isa, Australia

The African-American drivers of the 29th Quartermaster Truck Regiment taking a water break at Mt Isa, Australia

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History Friday: MacArthur’s SWPA Intelligence

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One of the most important things to know about General Douglas MacArthur is that almost everything you “know” in popular culture and from official WW2 US Navy and US Intelligence histories about MacArthur as a military commander is wrong. This is especially true with regard to his intelligence operations. Like MacArthur himself, when MacArthur’s intelligence institutions were very, very good, such as in the use of Ultra intelligence in the Bismark Sea, Lae, Wewak,and Hollandia in 1943 and 1944, his bureaucratic enemies described his intelligence work and motives badly in official histories…if they mentioned them at all. And when MacArthur was struggling with intelligence, they were worse…and what they did “while being worse” wasn’t documented in those official histories.

MacArthur developed a wide ranging set of intelligence institutions that supported his drive to the Philippines, which answered only to him, and through him to Washington, DC. This made these organizations “less efficient” than the centralized intelligence model the British used, and the FDR Administration partially copied, because it duplicated cryptographic efforts of other commands and Washington, DC. However, it was far more responsive to MacArthur’s needs and especially the needs of battlefield commanders in his theater.

General Douglas MacArthur created the following intelligence agencies —

o The Central Bureau, under the direction of his Signals officer, General Akin
o The Allied Intelligence Bureau, under the direction of his G-2 intelligence officer, General Willoughby
o The Allied Translator and Interpreter Section, under the direction of his G-2, General Willoughby
o The Allied Geographical Section, under the direction of his Chief Engineer, General Hugh J. Casey
o Section 22 Radio and Radar Countermeasures, under the direction of his Signals officer, General Akin

Every one of the organizations above was run by one of MacArthur’s “Bataan Gang”, officers who had been with him at the siege and defeat at Bataan in the Philippines. And every one of them gave their chief loyalty to MacArthur. This drove the US Army and US Navy intelligence Mandarins in Washington, DC crazy, particularly with regard to the caviler way MacArthur’s people used Ultra signals intelligence.

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Royal Air Force at Omaha Beach

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One of the little know stories of D-Day is the fact that a British Royal Air Force early warning radar unit — the 1st Echelon of 21 Base Defence Sector — landed at the Les Moulins Draw, on Omaha Beach, Normandy about 5:30pm on 6 June 1944.

The 21st BDS’s mission was to operate British ground control intercept (GCI) radar truck convoy the first night of the invasion so British night fighters could cover the Normandy beach head from Luftwaffee “night heckler” bombers with German SD 2 Schmetterling (butterfly) cluster bombs.

German SD2 Butterfly Bomb

Of the 180 men of the 21st BDS that landed there, eleven men were killed and 37 wounded. That is a 26.7% casualty rate for the assault. When actor Tom Hanks says Obamha Beach was “an all American affair,” these are some of our British Allies he is slighting.

You can find their story at this link —

http://www.therafatomahabeach.com/?page_id=91