ABSTRACT

RADIO Wireless telephones were not yet imagined during World War II, and most military communication took place on radio waves. The relatively few telephone lines in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) often were destroyed in battle, and, in most of the Pacifi c Theater of Operations (PTO), no phone lines ever had been installed. Thus communications between headquarters and battlefi elds used radios, much like the citizens band radio communication that was popular in the 1970s. Members of the Women’s Army Corps, who were assigned to the Army Signal Corps, operated these radios at headquarters, especially ETO and the North African front. Like early cell phones, the sound from such radios often was fi lled with static-but much more diffi cult was the fact that messages were encrypted to frustrate enemy eavesdropping and had to be decoded by cryptographers. Although women in the naval branches were not allowed to go overseas, they also assigned women as “radiomen.”