The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition. Part Two. Radios and Telegraph

 Army Signal Corps recruiting poster for World War One depicting telegraphers.  This same equipment was in use in 1916.

Recently we published a long entry entitled "The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition" that dealt with motor vehicles, small arms, aircraft and artillery, making the point that the expedition was a modern military campaign not something that was the last adventure of the Frontier Army.  Here we one on a singular topic.  

Here we look at Communications.  Radios and telegraphs, that is.

I'll confess that this is an item I started on, thinking I knew quite a bit about it, but I had to go back and redo it.  I knew a lot less than I thought I did.  And oddly its is quite related to a topic we just posted, More Medieval than Modern?, which itself was an amplification of Are Robert J. Gordon and George F. Will reading my blog?  The reason for this is that both of those posts related to the rapid expansion of technology in the late 19th and early 20th Century, and this is certainly an example of that.   Although this story really starts in the first half of the 19th Century.  It starts with the telegraph.

I've dealt with communications quite a bit here, but I've never dealt with telegraphs specifically.  It's quite an omission.  And the omission of it, I think, related to how little they are used today. Indeed, they're a dead technology, for all practical purposes. But they played  a huge revolutionary role for nearly a century after their invention and provide an example of a technology that expanded amazingly quickly, and into every area of society. We will have to deal with most of that in some other posts, but the extent to which it is true cannot be denied.

Wire telegraphs (the first "telegraphs" were semaphore signaling towers) were invented in the 1830s.  The technology exploded almost immediately and by the 1850s they were a hugely important technology everywhere where there was civilization.

Prior to the telegraph, no news of any kind traveled any faster than a horse or ship, for all practical purposes.  After telegraph wires were strung up, however, news  could be transmitted nearly instantly.  They were strung everywhere in the inhabited areas of North America and everywhere in Europe.  New York and Washington D.C. were connected by telegraph in 1846.  Western Union was formed in 1856.  The Transatlantic Telegraph line, a submarine line, was laid down in 1858, two years before the American Civil War.  In twenty years the technology had gone from non existent to shrinking the globe.

Not surprisingly, telegraph became militarily important quickly  By the American Civil War it was being used by armies to transmit information whenever it could be used, and conversely telegraph lines were targets for enemy raids.  This was known even on the Frontier where the Army spent a lot of time guarding telegraph stations and lines, and rebuilding them as Indians tore them down and burned the poles.  Guarding the transcontinental telegraph line was just a much a role of troops stationed along the Oregon Trail as guarding the trail was.

Army Telegraph Corps, Civil War.

The U.S. Army introduced the Military Telegraph Corps to its organization in 1861.  A unique military unit, it employed civilian operators and was somewhat outside of the command structure of the Army.  It's role was a dangerous one as it strung wires and posted poles in front line conditions with special equipment, the first time that the US Army had taken on what would become a familiar wire stringing role for soldiers in later years.

The end of the Civil War meant the end of the Telegraph Corps, but ultimately the telegraph would come into the Signal Corps.  The significance of the telegraph was simply too large to be lost.  Prior to the telegraph in military application, and indeed well after it, the news from the front, including the news of enemy troops and movements, came no faster than a man or horse could carry it.  And often that meant it didn't come at all, as for example in the famous case of J.E.B. Stuart's separation from Robert E. Lee prior to Gettysburg, a separation that left Lee blind in the field and which may have ultimately resulted in the Confederate loss in that battle.  Prior to the telegraph, all such scouting news, a prime role of the cavalry that was equally as important as any combat role it had, had to come via dispatch rider.  The telegraph offered new possibilities.

 Army telegrapher, Civil War.

Not new possibilities, however, that were of much use in the field during the Indian Wars, where distances were simply too vast.  Civilian telegraphs were used when available, of course, and by the 1890s they were playing an important role of getting news from town to town, and out of the state.  The military importance of telegraphs at that point may perhaps best be demonstrated by the actions of both sides in the private Johnson County War in tearing telegraph lines down to keep news of what was going on from getting out.  By 1916 the Army had the ability to set up its own lines in the field, which is not surprising.

Prior to 1916, however, a new technology had come on, that being the radio.  Radio, however, didn't come on the way we think.  Now we think of radio in the context of local AM/FM radio broadcasts. Radio quickly developed to allow for voice transmissions, but prior to that, radio really developed for "Wireless Telegraph", or what was later called radio telegraphy.

Telegraphs, that is wire telegraphs, relied upon Morse Code to relay their messages. For technical reasons I'll omit, early radio worked better in that fashion than in voice transmission.  While I'll omit the discussion of that, it's fairly obvious that this would be the case.  Transmitting signals is, by its nature, easier than transmitting voice.  Experiments with this sort of telegraphy go back into the early 19th Century, but it was not until Marconi's pioneering work with the radio that it became practical. It began to expand thereafter.

 Signal Corps telegraphers, 1904, using a very early truck in the field that has been adapted for this support role.

The Army appreciated the meaning of the new technology almost immediately.  By 1906 the Army had incorporated pack radio telegraph and wagon radio telegraph units into its structure. They used quite of bit in the way of resource to operated. According to the manual "The wagon wireless section is normally composed of 18 mounted men, the wagoner and engineer, who ride on the wagon, and one wagon wireless set, drawn by 4 mules."  The mule borne pack set "section normally composed of 10 mounted men and 4 pack mules."

Photograph of a Wireless Telegraph pack set, March 24, 1916.  Mobile by equine transportation, obviously, but not so mobile that it could keep up with the cavalry.

Starting in 1914, the Army began to experiment more extensively with trucks in place of wagons, although the Army was already using trucks in a support role for conventional telegraph, uniting two new technologies in hopes of making both more efficient. These were mobile units entitled the 1914 Radio Tractor, although oddly the trucks that existed in the Army with that designated were not standardized.  I.e, they were not one pattern.  Trucks were built by White, FWD and Thomas B. Jeffrey Company.

1914 Radio Tractor No. 3, built on a White Chassis.

They all carried the same radio, however, a SCR-50, 2 kilowatt spark transmitter with a crystal or vacuum tube detector receiver that operated at 0.15-0.50 Megahertz.

 1914 Radio Tractor No. 2, built on a Thomas B. Jeffrey or FWD four wheel drive (yes, 4x4) chassis.

All of this, that is the pack units and the radio tractor units, went into Mexico with Pershing.

The story of their use, however, is short as the number of radios used, in practical terms, by the U.S. Army in the Punitive Expedition was limited and their impact quite small.  Pack radios were not sufficiently small that cavalry units could carry them and the special radio units simply cold not keep up with the cavalry..  Therefore, those radios, and indeed any radio could not keep up with the cavalry and were of little immediate field use.  The Army did set up two mobile receiver units, one at Pershing's headquarters in Mexico and another at Columbus, which after the raid because a substantial support base for the expedition, but atmospheric conditions made their use spotty.

Indeed, this pioneering effort turned out to be somewhat like that for aircraft.  The mere fact that the Army had radio trucks and radios showed that it new radios were coming on, but they were weren't a success in field operations.  The trucks were too primitive, like most of the trucks used in the expedition, and the radio sets were frequently defeated by the high altitude atmospheric conditions in Mexico in which they were expected to operate.  Nonetheless the Army's Signal Corp ultimately set up nineteen radio stations during the campaign.  They may not have worked well, but they worked well enough that the effort wasn't abandoned.

 World War One Signal Corps poster emphasizing the new technology of radio over the older ones of telegraph and telephone.

As a result of radio's limited utility, the Army Signal Corps constructed miles of telegraph lines in Mexico to support the expedition.  677 miles of telegraph line were set up during operations, running lines as far forward as could be done.  So the "old", if it could be considered that, technology remained important.  But even it wasn't that old. 

Fairly obviously, given the situation, much of the communications during the campaign truly were of the old fashioned variety, word of mouth by dispatch personnel. That would be true, however, all the way through World War One, even though the new technologies were increasingly applied..  It wasn't really until the 1920s that effective field radios started to some into use.  It was really World War Two where they had a real impact, showing again the blinding pace of technological change in the mid 20th Century.  For the Punitive Expedition, as with aircraft, what was introduced showed what clearly would be in terms of communications.  Not what was there yet.

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The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition