Welcome to Section 22 Week’s Sixth & Concluding Post
Page 53 (62)
“One of the most important discoveries of captured documents was made
by the Japanese Navy from the U.S. submarine Darter, which ran aground
west of Palawan on 23 October. The Japanese recovered many documents
dealing with radar, radio, and communications procedure, as well as
instruction books, engine blueprints, and various ordnance items.
It is difficult to evaluate the intelligence which the Japanese have
obtained from documents, but in those cases here it has been possible
the information has been found to be relatively accurate.“
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See my Chicagoboyz post here for a more complete telling of the Darter’s lost classified documents story:
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The Grounding of USS Darter — A Case Study of an Operational Security Disaster
October 29th, 2017
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/56192.html
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The Bilgepumps podcast is now posted, see–
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Bilgepumps Episode 38: Section 22 – The Forgotten Electronic Warfare Superstars of WWII and the Historians who are changing that
FEBRUARY 24TH, 2021
Welcome to Section 22 Week, Day 5
Helter Skelter Redux?
The stated aim of that murderous freak Charlie Manson and his deranged family of dropouts and druggies in committing the brutal slaughter of seven people in 1969 was to incite a race war. The murderers deliberately left bloody graffiti at the murder scenes, attempting to frame the Black Panthers yet another set of murderous and equally racist freaks active in that period. In Manson’s twisted vision, the Tate-LaBianca murders would set off a brutal race war; black against white, in which whites would be enthusiastically genocided. During this mayhem Manson and his followers would hide out in a vast underground city. They would then emerge to take command over what remained of society. Manson was a particularly noxious racist, unsavory qualities which were veiled by the last putrid remnants of the hippie commune culture, which let his cult family fly under the social radar as it existed in the afterglow of the so-called “Summer of Love” in the formerly golden state of California. (Jim Jones was another one of those super-organized racist-cult freaks of the era, whose’ commune was slightly longer-lasting and successful, until suddenly it wasn’t. Yeah, a supposedly race-prejudice-free socialist commune, with a white leadership cadre and mostly dead black bodies when it all came crashing down some years later.)
Welcome to Section 22 Week, Day 4
Welcome to the fourth Chicagoboyz post (Feb 22, 2021) in the “Section 22 Week” count down to the 24 Feb 2021 Bilge Pumps podcast with the Section 22 Special Interest Group e-mail list. Today’s post will include slides 49 through 60 of 82 of the Section 22 Powerpoint information packet. These slides cover Section 22 combat operations from January to July 1945.
It is worth pointing out that while there are 82 slides worth of material I will publish over “Section 22 Week.” They represent, at best, a “picture book highlights reel” of what the between 500 to 1000 men involved in Section 22 radio counter measures operations did between May 1943 and August 1945.
It is simply very hard to draw a line on who was in or not in a Section 22 field unit as the US Navy field units outfitted dozens of ships and submarines in the Australian and American navies and many air crews on Section 22 missions were pilots and gunners teamed with a one or two RCM operators simply because their plane was on the roster for a mission that day.
Certainly the crew of the submarine USS Batfish did not think of themselves as part of Section 22, yet they carried Section 22’s institutional DNA and the radar intercept equipment that helped them hunt down three IJN submarines in February 1945.
This fuzzy ‘were they/weren’t they Section 22‘ grey area is where I pull into this post one Radio Electrician George L. Johnson (USN) of the AGC-3 USS Rocky Mount. The AGC-3, like all of it’s contemporaries was the forward logistical repair node for all things radar. This included the Mark III IFF as its transponder was a form of “secondary radar.”
The USS Rocky Mount had been Admiral Raymond Turner’s flag ship in the invasion of the Marianas in the summer of 1944. During the Leyte invasion, it flew the flag of Rear Adm. Forrest B. Royal as commander of Amphibious Group Six.
Cmdr Jolley’s Oct 1944 Section 22 Current Statement and his Appendix N to the Leyte invasions orders hit people like Radio Electrician George L. Johnson on the USS Rocky Mount in the gut. They maintained the Mark III IFF for the Pacific fleet and his ship along with every other AGC in the invasion force were tasked with making sure every Mark III in the Leyte invasion fleet worked and worked well. Some time in the six weeks leading up to the invasion and the few weeks after — in the midst of Kamikaze attacks — Radio Electrician Johnson found time to redesign the Mark III IFF and submit that redesign up the USS Rocky Mount’s chain of command in November 1944.
This redesign package was endorsed the the captain of the USS Rocky Mount, Admiral Royal and reached Admiral Raymond Turner’s staff in late November 1944. On December 7th, Turner endorsed the design and sent it to the Bureau of Ships in Washington D.C. See the archival document photographed below: