US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0084/00844.txt

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$Unique_ID{USH00844}
$Pretitle{79}
$Title{The Signal Corps:  The Emergency
Chapter IX-C  Working for the Ground Forces}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Terrett, Dulany}
$Affiliation{US Army}
$Subject{corps
signal
equipment
procurement
supply
year
new
production
war
plant}
$Volume{D114.7:SI/V.1}
$Date{1956}
$Log{}
Book:        The Signal Corps:  The Emergency
Author:      Terrett, Dulany
Affiliation: US Army
Volume:      D114.7:SI/V.1
Date:        1956

Chapter IX-C  Working for the Ground Forces

Supply Service

     No one knew by then whether M Day had slipped past unnoticed in the
increasing activity.  The Protective Mobilization Plan was thrown awry, its
calendars unsettled.  There had been no declaration of war, and yet the
readying of the nation's manpower and productive economy was farther advanced
than an uncompromised peace would have produced.  Contrariwise, the record of
the nation's potential enemies gave warning that there would be no correct
transition from peace into war, but rather that one day would arrive with
abrupt notice that a state of war had existed for several years.  In that
case, the national war effort was far behind.

     The absence of a yardstick made it a problem to know how much to order,
and for whom.  "It has not been possible, in many cases, to obtain any basis
whatever for the computing of requirements," the Signal procurement planning
officer complained.  Realistic estimates had to allow for the requirements of
friendly nations, but in that black year their needs changed with their fate
almost from hour to hour.  Estimates also had to predict the supply of new
items to new units, a guess with a large margin for error even when both the
items and the units were well understood.  Current requirements were already
surpassing the greatest volume anticipated when the Protective Mobilization
Plan was new.  The sum allotted to the Signal Corps for radio equipment alone
had reached $148,638,747 by February 1941:  that is to say, with the fiscal
year little bore than half gone, the outlay for radio had already been more
than twelve times "the total for the whole fiscal year 1940.  As Akin and many
another had learned, the supply of almost everything was short.  BD-14's, the
old SCR-131's, 161's, and 17155, and other familiar equipment stood in the
critical list along with the radars.  Not until January 1941 was the Supply
Dixon able to report that the fiscal year long procurement of SCR-177's,
193's, and 245's was complete, and this procurement was for mere fractions of
the quantities desired for 1941.

     A closely revised forecast for the Munitions Program at the outset of the
fiscal year in progress had ranged the field to list more than a dozen
standard radios; telegraph, telephone, and telephone central office sets; all
of the switchboards; field wire; reels; flash-ranging and sound-ranging
apparatus; theodolites; cryptographic machines; and yet other items beyond
these.  The spread in cost of individual items was as remarkable as their
variety.  It extended from 45,000 telephone sets at $40 apiece and 80,000
miles of field wire at $50 a mile toward SCR-177's and 188's which cost $4,800
an item, to sound-ranging GR-3's at $11,000 apiece, and out to the radars
SCR-268 at $35,000 and SCR-270 at $65,000.  All of the estimates of the period
were directed toward the 2,000, Army contemplated with Selective Service.  As
that Army did not materialize at once, neither did the equipment.  The
Explanation was interwoven with the Contemporary scene. Raw materials had a
great deal to do with it; priorities entered in; sources of labor were vital;
design and patent, essential; allocation and expansion of facilities, basic.

     Even plant security was a factor.  With its record in formulating
aircraft plant protection in World War I, and as a supply arm markedly
responsible for the procurement of secret and expensive equipment, the Signal
Corps was particularly aware of the need for a system to guard defense
production against both accidental and intentional interruptions. Promotion of
security was a national concern and the Signal Corps part in it comparably
minor, but comparably necessary, too.  The War Department periodically sent to
the Federal Bureau of Investigation a list of plants working on important
military contracts, and with each list forwarded specific requests for surveys
from one or another of the supply services.

     If, for example, a contract officer in the New York Signal Corps
Procurement District wanted to make sure of a plant in New Jersey which was
working on aircraft radio, his request for a survey joined those from other
supply arms on a list in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War.  G-2,
the official liaison with the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent the list to
the Plant Protection Survey Division of that agency.  The reports of the FBI
agents were detailed, sometimes hundreds of pages long.  When the bureau had
described the hazards in a given plant and made its recommendations for
eliminating them, its duty and authority ended.  Beyond that, except that a
plant expansion could always reopen an FBI survey, security lay in the hands
of the manufacturer and the agency of government with which he had a contract.

     For some time in the emergency, the Signal Corps formal organization for
plant protection consisted only of a liaison officer, Major Bogman, who was
primarily assigned as the officer in charge of procurement planning.
Informally, the inspectors in the procurement districts took over the
responsibility; they went in and out of plants which were working on Signal
Corps contracts, and thus could most readily follow up the FBI surveys. When
orders began to mount past the point where inspectors could continue to handle
the extra duty, the Signal Corps established a plant protection section in the
New York district, the largest of the three Signal Corps procurement
districts.  This action anticipated by some weeks instructions from the new
Office of the Under Secretary to do just that.  The Under Secretary authorized
the Signal Corps to assign seventy-five civilians and fourteen Reserve
officers to plant protection.

     On the part of the manufacturers, there was a certain amount of passive
resistance.  Some, like Du Pont Company, were accustomed to using the same
frame of thought as the Federal Bureau of Investigation; but in general, even
manufacturers who attempted to carry out the recommendations of a survey
interpreted them rather freely.  One plant engaged in work upon classified
equipment bought safes to hold the drawings and blueprints, then pasted the
combinations on the outside.  Another manufacturer surrounded his plant by a
fence with locked gates, but provided keys to children accustomed to taking a
short cut to school through the grounds.  A third management, warned of a fire
hazard, placed barrels of water and buckets at frequent intervals, then, to
discourage mosquitoes from breeding in the water, poured oil upon it.  The
manager of still another defense plant, which had hired a substantial force of
guards, agreed that it was a good idea to require written reports from them
describing the delinquencies they had observed but pointed out that it was not
practicable because few of them could read or write English.  After a
conference of procurement officers with major industrialists and the director
of the Plant Protection Survey Division of the FBI, the security in plants of
prime contractors gradually tightened.  Eventually a clause requiring both
prime and subcontractors to conform to specified standards of plant protection
and make their factories accessible to Signal Corps inspectors became a part
of every instrument of procurement.

     Security, of course, was much broader even than in its effect on defense
production.  The telephone company employees engaged in putting in a phone
system at a defense plant or on an Army reservation had to be cleared and
identified before they were admitted.  And many offices of government
tightened their Organization, warned their employees against talking about
their work, scrutinized them for evidences of subversive behavior, issued new
badges, put new force into secrecy regulations.  As was to be expected of a
people of easy, casual, and unsuspicious approach to one another, the new
policy was more honored in the breach than the observance.  Even generals
could not always remember that a "secret" telephone was not secret.  But good
will and intelligence accomplished what regulations never did, with the result
that the nation went through the war with few such instances of negligence or
sabotage.

     Lt. Gen. John L. De Witt, in command of the Ninth Corps Area, had
proposed that the War Department exclude aliens from Army employment, arguing
that inasmuch as the Congress had expressly barred them from the Panama Canal,
from aircraft plants, and so on, common caution demanded that they be denied
jobs at any Army post.  The President of San Francisco was his headquarters;
many west coast citizens mistrusted Orientals; and newspapers at the time were
detailing the activities of the German consul, Fritz Weidemann, whose office
windows over looked the Golden Gate.  What General De Witt suggested, however,
was extra-legislative action.  Moreover, the Signal Corps, being asked for an
opinion - and agreeing in general - pointed out that "if such exclusion were
applied indiscriminately to skilled and unskilled labor at overseas depots and
Army posts, serious delay in the completion of construction projects and
installation of Signal Corps equipment thereat might result."  And so it
might.  A project like the new $660,000 warehouse at Schofield Barracks had
employed noncitizen laborers, and the Caribean and Latin American defenses
depended upon local hiring.  In short, the challenge to a supply arm was to
protect itself against spying and sabotage without crippling itself by ruling
out the contribution of thousands of trustworthy persons.

     In any event, the Signal Corps was more concerned with the general
possibility of a labor shortage than with any of the details.  Although this
was a matter almost wholly outside its scope, it was of firsthand interest.
When the Office of the Under Secretary established a Labor Section where
policy could be formed for the whole War Department and integrated with the
action of other parts of the government, the Signal Corps welcomed it, for
complex matters quite beyond a small branch of the Army had been building up
and then halting in the jam of the channels ahead of them.  One of the
fiercest pertained to the Fair Employment Practices bill, which the Signal
Corps opposed with a somewhat narrow statement of self-interest subsequently
submerged by the bill's passage.  Civilian and military agencies alike, the
Departments of Interior and Labor, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the
National Youth Administration, the Civil Aeronautics Administration, and
procurement planning groups within the armed forces, had been examining the
labor prospect and coming up with the expected conclusion that there might be
a deficiency.  Skill was what the Signal Corps was especially interested in;
and as Affiliated Plan discussions with the American Telephone and Telegraph
Company had noted, the depression had reduced it by 25 percent.  So far as the
recurring surveys could make sure, the first reopening of industry under the
demands of emergency had trained enough skilled workers to restore 15 percent
of the loss.  The nation had to make the rest up, and create more, if the
rapidly accelerating requirements of the current period were to be met, not to
speak of what would be needed in case of war.

     But for the time being, shortages in raw materials looked more immediate
than shortages in the labor supply.  Gradually, as 1941 lengthened, one after
another developed, in quartz crystal, steatite, tungsten, tantalum, mica,
aluminum, carbonyl, rubber.  The materials supply could not keep pace with the
production demands of wire, cable, insulating machines, insulating materials,
resistors, commutators, dynamotors and tubes, of glass envelopes, carbon
anodes, tungsten filaments, magnets, metal stampings, diamond dies, and disks
of copper oxide and selenium.

     Beginning of work on the multicrystal FM and VHF sets produced an instant
sharp increase in the quartz requirement; the Procurement Planning Section
estimated a need for 300,000 pounds for the forthcoming fiscal year.  The
section was deeply worried about getting it, because the nation's authorized
stockpile was only 106,000 pounds and less than half of that had been
collected.  Production of the essential wafers remained at laboratory level,
carried on in twenty-nine small plants by craftsmen who did most of the
cutting by hand.  Yet without quartz-plate oscillators, there could be no
effective control of radio frequencies, no pushbutton tuning; without
quartz-plate resonators, long distance lines and ocean cables could not
transmit hundreds of messages at once.  The supply of raw quartz had to be
dramatically increased, or the processing of crystals had to be simplified for
mass production, or the Army would have to economize on their use.

     At a meeting which the Office of Production Management held with
representatives of the Treasury, the Bureau of Mines, the Bureau of Standards,
the Army-Navy Munitions Board, and the Signal Corps, the discussion was
concerned primarily with the basic shortage of raw quartz. The Office of
Production Management set broad quotas of 300,000 pounds for civilian needs,
600,000 for military, the latter amount to include the Signal Corps
requirement.  Through its Metals Reserve Company, the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation, which was also charged with stockpiling rubber, was responsible
for building up the supply of raw quartz.  Those present at the conference of
the Office of Production Management agreed that the Brazilian supply, which
was almost all there was, ought to be solidly underwritten, with no chance for
it to get into other hands, by a credit to the Bank of Brazil which would
cover half of the anticipated purchases.  Japan had taken far the greatest
part of the Brazilian export for a long time, until Britain suddenly moved
ahead in 1940; but in that year, Japan's purchase was still five or six times
greater than that of the United States.  The American Gem and Pearl Company,
which had a South American cartel arrangement, had now once again begun to
sell more quartz to the Japanese than ever, and in June informed the Army -
the company president telling Bogman - that they had just tripled their order.

     Meanwhile, the Signal Corps and the Bureau of Standards looked toward two
further goals:  the most efficient use of the quartz already on hand, and the
possible development of artificial quartz.  There was no perceptible expansion
in the United States of manufacturing facilities, although the limited
capacity was coming under scrutiny.  All of the raw quartz in the world was of
little use unless it could be precisely cut into crystal slivers.  The truth
was that neither supply officers nor manufacturers nor the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation were universally educated to the magnitude of the
conflict about to encompass them.  At the beginning of that year, Signal Corps
opinion believed that the production facilities were sufficient.  Zenith and
Emerson, among manufacturers, said so, as did General Cable - in this last
case despite a general knowledge that a British demand would tax the market as
never before.  As late as July Lt. Col. James H. B. Bogman was reporting that
"the available manufacturing capacity of the communications industry" had not
yet been overtaxed and that "expansion of facilities . . . has been necessary
in only one or two instances."  Actually, various points of the communications
industry were already clogging.

     For the Congress had admitted foreign orders almost without limit to the
production plant.  This act was the cause of the greatest of all of the
debates over the degree to which the United States should commit itself in the
war.  Not even the struggle over Selective Service had aroused and prolonged
so much controversy as the proposal to put the country's industrial capacity
at the service of all opponents of the Axis powers.  On one side, narrow
interest dilated at the prospect of commercial profit, and broad interest
responded to the opportunity to aid and comfort allies without making an
alliance.  On the other side, narrow interest shrank from sharing the nation's
own vital reservoir with others who might drain it, and broad interest dreaded
the risk of a step which might pitch the United States forthwith into war.
The controversy culminated in March when the Lend-Lease Act was passed.

     Beforehand, there had been a long stage when any foreign orders which
entered the ken of the Signal Corps came from the foreign purchasing missions.
In effect, this meant Great Britain, many other powers being either submerged
or isolated and Soviet Russia remaining beyond the pale until an uneasily
common cause lowered the bars.  During that period, the Signal Corps did not
know how much foreign purchases cut into its market. In the first place, there
was no single report of them.  Not only did the Royal Corps of Signals, the
Admiralty, and the Royal Air Force all buy signal equipment, but they might do
so through the Supply Board in Canada, the British Purchasing Commission in
the United States, or one of their own officers sent out on a special
assignment.  In the second place, only if the equipment were classified
against espionage was it necessary for the Army-Navy Munitions Board and the
Signal Corps to designate the manufacturer.  Otherwise, the purchasing mission
could place the contract anywhere, and, unless it happened to go to a Signal
Corps prime contractor, the Signal Corps would have no knowledge of the
transaction.  Until 1941 nine-tenths of Signal Corps equipment was commercial.
Foreign purchasing commissions could of course buy any of it.  Nine-tenths of
it, also, comprised processed raw materials and unassembled components.

     Signal Corps procurement dealt almost exclusively with the large
companies, confident that they would always consult the Chief Signal Officer
before accepting a contract for end items and would in no way permit foreign
orders to interfere with the delivery of U.S. Army equipment.  But most of the
signal equipment, being not only commercial but also fractional, was
manufactured by secondary or subcontractors of whom the Signal Corps had no
knowledge at all.  When the foreign orders came in, they were usually for
these items wire, batteries, tubes, microphones, ceramic insulators, crystal
oscillators, tantalum sheets.  Because many were made of critical materials,
their uncontrolled manufacture intensified shortages.

     Thus the whole foundation of communications equipment could have been
undermined before a threat was suspected.  Practically, nothing of the sort
happened.  Before lend-lease, the cash-and-carry principle drastically limited
foreign purchase, and, afterward, procurement vision was refocused.
Nevertheless, the inability of the Signal Corps to know the extent of foreign
orders of vital components served to throw procurement planning further askew.
If, along with ordnance, aircraft, and certain strategic supplies,
communications equipment had been included in the Munitions Control Act of May
1, 1937, the opportunities for sounding out and "educating" lesser firms by
means of foreign orders would have been much greater.  As it was, the Tizard
technical mission had somewhat stimulated purchase beyond the ordering of
quantities of routine components, but the chief effect, as a result of the Air
Corps discovery of British equipment, had been reproduction of the foreign
designs, again with little educative advantage to Signal Corps procurement.

     With lend-lease, everything commenced to look different - except
shortages:  the consecutive shortages of labor, materials, and plant
facilities, and the ultimate shortage of end products.  Communications
equipment became "defense articles" along with almost everything else.  All of
the orders for Army signal equipment once placed by foreign nations now went
to the Signal Corps to place.  To handle lend-lease in the War Department - so
far as policy was concerned, the actual operation devolving upon the various
technical services - the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War set up a
Defense Aid Division within a month of the enactment of the legislation.
Before Pearl Harbor, and until the Services of Supply materialized three
months after Pearl Harbor, this division was one of the mentors of Signal
Corps supply activity.  Another was the Statistics Branch, to which the supply
services reported their procurement progress or backsliding every week.

     The Signal Corps portion of the first $7,000,000,000 appropriation for
lend lease was nearly $225,000,000.  Even the cumulative total of the past
three fiscal year appropriations fell short of that.  The first authorized
request for signal equipment under the new legislation came in just the day
before the huge sum was approved.  It was a British request for 35,000 more
miles of telephone wire.  The Signal Corps had covered more than half the
distance toward the Mobilization Plan's goal - of 101,853 miles of field wire
W-110.  This came in addition.  The General Cable Corporation had a contract
to manufacture 57,917 miles, Anaconda Wire and Cable, 20,729.  They were the
chief recipients of the British order for wire, as well as for 200,000 feet
each of cable.  In the wireless category, a large order had gone to the Bendix
Radio Corporation for thousands of aircraft radio compasses, SCR-269A's,
under two contracts which totaled $2,075,363.  Lend-lease production, then war
production, soon over shadowed these contracts.  For the time being, they
provided a chance to build up and test the capacity of these companies, even
though the chance was of less than first importance because there was little
doubt that large companies would work at peak capacity in any event.

     Considering all of the influences upon Signal Corps procurement, what was
its status?  Or, better, its progress?  General Mauborgne felt that he was
doing well.  He believed that his agency's supply procedure and supply
organization were "efficient and adequate to meet the present emergency and
. . . sufficiently flexible for such future eventualities as can now be
foreseen."  That was at the halfway point of the fiscal year and a year before
Pearl Harbor sharply cast up accounts.

     One way of looking at the procurement record was that whereas at the end
of the fiscal year 1940 there had been little radio equipment on hand and only
a million and a half dollars worth of wire equipment, by the end of the 1941
year the Signal Corps manufacturers would have delivered more than $28,000,000
worth.  Another way was that by virtue of the inevitable lag between signing a
contract for equipment and getting delivery of the finished product, this
$28,000,000 actuality would look meager by contrast with the expectation.
During the fiscal year 1941 the Signal Corps would be letting contracts for
equipment up to the amount of $223,000,000, or, bluntly, $195,000,000 more
than it would be getting from its contractors.

     Between these two views lay a discrepancy; and a persisting
misinterpretation, coupled with the frequent protests of the Air Corps,
established an impression that the Signal Corps was in default as a supply
service.  The Signal Corps contributed to this impression by placing its
contracts within too narrow a range of manufacturers and by a less energetic
approach than the situation warranted.  Yet some of the discrepancy would have
been expected as an inevitable part of the procurement lag.

     At the time when General Mauborgne wrote his opinion, the Signal Corps
procurement districts had obligated about three fourths of the 1941 funds.
They assumed in most cases that deliveries of equipment would keep up smoothly
with the Protective Mobilization Plan.  The PMP requirements for the EE-8
field telephone, for example, totaled 63,593.  Six manufacturers were
delivering 56,678 of them, and in addition 39,708 were already on hand in the
depots or in actual use.  Nevertheless, even these simple statistics, which
looked like the innocent flower, held a serpent under them.  Beneath any such
figures of ostensible progress lay the exasperating complexity of procurement.
The 56,678 new EE-8's had not all been delivered, but were in the process of
being delivered.  The 39,708 on hand were not all brand-new; they included
World War I EE-4's and 5's.

     The situation was much the same for field wire.  The Signal Corps had
indeed provided fifty thousand of the hundred thousand miles of W-110 which
the Protective Mobilization Plan required.  Fiscal year 1941 contracts
specified that 70,498 additional miles would be delivered by the end of June:
more than enough to meet the PMP.  But there was yet all of the lend-lease
demand.  Again, the PMP required 764 portable field generators, used for
charging storage batteries.  The contract called for delivery of 680 of them
to begin in January.  Actually, delivery began in mid-April.  Another
important item was the standard telephone central office equipment.  The
Signal Corps had arranged for 36 of these sets; but at the moment there were
none on hand, and deliveries were not to commence until February.  In short,
figures showing estimates or even quantities actually let to manufacturers on
contract could never be taken as the equivalent of deliveries.

     Change kept altering the procurement outlook as much as delay.  Orders
for 3,855 of the SCR-131's, 161's, and 171's which had been "critical" in June
simply because nothing else was ready were canceled late in the year in favor
of SCR-288's.  This was the set which the Swedish Government had ordered; the
manufacturer was tooled up for it; and until production could begin on the new
American sets which were due to replace the old series, it made an acceptable
stopgap.  Accordingly, the supply program classified it under "limited
procurement" and the 131,161, and 171 under "limited standard."  Changing
circumstances also showed in a sequence on the SCR-245.  A requirement for
1,237 had dropped to 589 on the Munitions Program list; by the end of the
fiscal year the set was no longer "critical"; and by October 1941,919 were
stricken from the First Supplemental Program for fiscal year 1942.  Production
of the SCR-245's was necessarily quite a different thing.  Between the middle
of August and the first of October, just before Pearl Harbor, the Signal Corps
issued 1,035; and by the end of the year nearly half of all the 245's ever
built had been delivered.  Thus the manufacture continued for more than two
years after planning had foreshadowed its end.  The equipment itself continued
in use throughout the war.

     As rapidly as possible, new items were moved forward to take the place of
the old, sometimes as stopgaps, most often as full replacements. Equipment
unknown when the fiscal year was beginning, barely developed and standardized
when it was gone, filled the planning lists as the new supplemental programs
were prepared.  The Fifth Supplemental for 1941 asked for 2,849
handie-talkies, for instance; the $15,000-apiece, 100-miles-in-motion
SCR-299's neared production; and the Field Artillery's "600" series for
manufacture.

     But after a slow start, Selective Service was increasing the procurement
demands by 75,000 men a month.  Delays in delivery were proportionately
serious.  It became important to know just what and how much was actually
coming off the assembly lines.  The lump figure for "radio sets, ground," gave
way to statistics for specific items, the most closely watched being the new
sets toward which Infantry, Cavalry, Armor, and Artillery were making their
plans and training the incoming men.  The last week in the calendar year, a
month after the Chief Signal Officer had expressed confidence, sounded
warnings.  There was no delivery of the radars SCR-268,270, and 271; none of
the short-range SCR-288, the temporary replacement for the SCR-131, 161, and
171; none of the long-range SCR-197, the temporary stand-by until the SCR-299
could be made ready.  Apart from radio, there was no delivery of the portable
switchboards BD-71 and 72; of the GR-3 and 4; of the M-134; of the TC-2.  In
the case of the SCR-197, a change in the truck which transported it was
causing the delay.  A shortage of tuning units had held up delivery of the Air
Corps command set, the SCR-183.  Contractors for the radio direction-finder
SCR-206 and for a battery charger, SCR-169, had not yet furnished satisfactory
samples.  The manufacturers of the SCR-177 and the theodolite ML-47 explained
that difficulty in obtaining component parts and materials made it impossible
for them to meet their delivery schedules.  And these shortages were Indeed
showing up:  in aluminum; brass; iron dust; mycalex, an insulating material;
and carbonyl E, essential in the making of radio tuning coils.

     Things promised better as spring approached.  The first factory-built
SCR-268 arrived in the week ending February 28.  (Almost four years had
elapsed since this radar's great day of revelation.)  In March delivery of the
SCR-206 and SCR-288 commenced, with 5 sets each.  Delivery of the SCR-193
resumed with 15 sets, and 34 of the SCR-245's appeared.  Production of the
EE-8 was flowing in the thousands; field wire W-110 reached 5,980 miles in one
week. Two hundred fifty Air Corps command sets, both the 12-volt SCR-183 and
its 24-volt twin, the SCR-283, came from the assembly lines the first week in
March, and in the second week the first five liaison sets arrived.  The Supply
Division took an optimistic tone and informed the Assistant Secretary that
"the Signal Corps procurement program is showing very satisfactory progress."
Even so, an aluminum shortage had "made it necessary to revise some delivery
schedules," several contractors had been "slow getting into production," and
delinquencies were Impressive.  They involved nearly 10,000 sets of 25 items.

     Thus the supply program hung in balance, looking well, looking ill.  In
the midst of an emergency it represented the Signal Corps chief service to the
fellow arms more immediate than research, more insistent than training. It had
to be done well, but it was "exceedingly difficult," the Signal Corps pleaded.
By the end of May, shortages in minor parts and accessories were holding up
nearly 3,000 of the commonest ground radios, all standardized and familiar so
long that nothing except a shortage could have detained them in the factories.
Similarly, hundreds of the FM police sets hastily legitimized in the
expectation of quick manufacture, were being retarded not by reason of their
newness but for lack, in one model, solely of microphones, in the other,
solely of whip antennas.  For other new equipment, never before manufactured,
let alone manufactured in quantity, mere shortages were compounded with
technological difficulties.  In self-extenuation, the Signal Corps supply
spokesmen went over familiar ground now become stonier than ever: "Before
contracts can be awarded, it is necessary to develop and built test models;
after testing and standardization, the contractor must tool for quantity
production; months necessarily elapse between the time a new item is
engineered and its production in quantity is achieved."