Global War, Global Network

Huddled in a landing barge at Guadalcanal, a unit of the Army Airways Communications System prepared to shove off. Their destination was a New Georgia landing strip recently clawed from Jap hands. Their mission, performed last summer but described by the Air Forces only recently, was to install a radio station for the guidance of Allied planes.

For once, rain and fog were welcome. When the word came to move, the weather hid the little party of 20 and their six truckloads of equipment--radio apparatus, tents, personal effects. Twenty-seven hours later the A.A.C.S. barge scraped to a landing at Munda. It was the first Air Forces unit to reach the island.

A.A.C.S. men installed their equipment within half a mile of Jap guns. They were visited by as many as ten air raids a day. A bomb made a direct hit on the sick bay. But eight days after the landing strip had been taken, a complete A.A.C.S. station was open for business, sending a strong, clear signal into Guadalcanal. The new Allied airdrome was in the net.

Hidden History. Behind the New Georgia job lay a long-secret pyramid of accomplishment. Not until the A.A.C.S. held its first convention a few weeks ago at its Asheville (N.C.) headquarters did the Air Forces decide that the story of the world's largest communications system could now be told.

Army Airways Communications System (strength: 15,676 officers and men) is a global network of radio stations. Operating as an individual outfit under Army Air Forces Command, it is responsible for all airplanes in motion: taking off, flying A.A.C.S. beams, getting messages in flight, including weather reports, ground-to-air and point-to-point communications, reaching the field, landing. The A.A.C.S. control towers watch each plane until it is safely parked. To do all this, A.A.C.S. maintains units in 48 states and 52 foreign countries, divides the globe into 23 regions of operations.*

In the early days of the war, A.A.C.S.'s backlog was six powerful intercontinental weather-and-traffic stations run by the C.A.A. at San Francisco, New Orleans, Everett, Wash., Anchorage, Alaska, New York City and Honolulu. In May 1942, these stations were turned over to the Army Air Forces and tied into the A.A. C.S. network for the duration.

The Small Troubles. Now A.A.C.S. stations cover the world, range in personnel from four to 150, in temperature from the sticky wet heat of the Solomons to the numbing cold of Greenland. One Greenland station recorded a wind velocity of 137 m.p.h. before the weather rig blew away.

At stations far from the beaten trails of traffic many a human problem flares up. Sometimes a lonely man will pick up a typewriter and heave it through the window, tear out a signal key and trample it on the floor. But if a newcomer suggests discipline, oldtimers reply: "Hell, no. He'll be all right for two or three weeks now. Better watch the other guys who haven't done anything yet.'"

More problems than isolation wear A.A.C.S. nerves thin. Example: vital equipment reached a central African station accompanied by a note, "Screws for installation may be obtained at the nearest hardware store.'" The nearest hardware store was 1,000 miles away.

The Big Goal. These are only minor problems to A.A.C.S. 's boss, genial, energetic Brigadier General Harold M. McClelland. A military pilot since 1917, mustached '"Mac'" McClelland knows that the big job is to give U.S. pilots complete weather information and standard operating procedure on beams and homing bea cons in every corner of the world.

His brag is that to do the job A.A.C.S. has gathered one of the smartest outfits of soldiers and WACs in the Army: an aver age I.Q. of close to 130 is not unusual for crews of his stations. Airmen with an eye to the postwar future think that is all to the good. When U.S. commercial lines reach out into the world, the first thing they will need is proper weather and radio service. The Air Forces, working at war, have done their best to make sure that peacetime flyers will have the service in peace.

*Russia is excluded, South Africa not active.

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