Along US Highway 550 in southwest Colorado

Don Moore’s Photo Album
Museum Findings: World War II

by Don Moore

More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer.

Learning should be a life-long pursuit for all of us. One of my ways of doing that is by visiting museums while traveling, whether in the USA or abroad. Cultural, historical, and science museums are my favorites. And if a museum’s theme includes the 20th century, there is a good chance that something related to radio will be found in the collection. In this edition of the Photo Album I want to share some findings related to radio and World War II that I’ve recently found in museums here in the USA.

Do A-Bombs QSL?

I’m based in Pennsylvania but my daughter lives in western Colorado and my son in Texas. So in September and October of 2024 I made a 45-day road trip to visit them both and see sites along the way. One stop was Santa Fe, New Mexico. The New Mexico History Museum downtown has an excellent exhibit on the development of the Atomic Bomb and the effect on the local area. The real place to learn about this, however, is an hour north of the city at Los Alamos, where the project actually happened.

In addition to the historical sites, Los Alamos has one of the best science museums I’ve been to anywhere. That’s not surprising considering that not many places have as many scientists per capita as Los Alamos does. And there I learned that radio was closely involved in dropping the first A-Bomb on Hiroshima.

The scientists at Los Alamos developed two types of atomic bombs. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima used a uranium-gun to initiate the explosion. The scientists were certain this would work so this was not tested beforehand. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki used the second method with a with a plutonium-implosion as the trigger. But they were uncertain as to whether or not this would actually work so it had already been tested in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. That was the first atomic explosion and the scientists collected lots of useful measurements.

But the developers had no such measurements for the uranium-gun bomb as it hadn’t been tested. But how to get them? They obviously couldn’t place monitors on the ground at Hiroshima beforehand. Physicist Luis Alvarez was tasked with finding a solution. Alvarez’s team built three canisters filled with monitoring equipment and VHF transmitters to be carried by The Great Artiste, the observation plane that would accompany the Enola Gay to Hiroshima. The three canisters were to be dropped by parachute at the same moment that the Enola Gay dropped the bomb.

The signals from the canisters were to be picked up by a bank of Hallicrafters S-36 VHF receivers on the plane and then feed to oscillographs to record the results, which would simultaneously be recorded by movie cameras.

It all worked according to plan and data was received from two of the three canisters before they were engulfed by the explosion. But, to the best of my knowledge, no QSLs were issued for the receptions.

The WASP Museum

My next destination after Santa Fe was San Antonio, Texas, 700 miles (1100 kilometers) away. To make the road trip more interesting I wanted to find some things to see along the way. While perusing Google Maps I came across the National WASP World War II Museum in Sweetwater, Texas. The museum has nothing to do with insects. The acronym stands for Women’s Airforce Service Pilots.

The use of women pilots in support roles to the US Army Air Force began in 1942 with the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD) and Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). In 1943 the two programs were merged to form the WASP program and the airfield at Sweetwater was chosen for the four-month training program. In total, 1,830 women started WASP training and 1,074 finished, about the same success rate as with male military pilots of the era.

The purpose of these programs was to free male pilots for combat duty by using women in non-combat roles, primarily testing new aircraft and ferrying aircraft from factories to bases. Over eighty percent of all ferry missions in World War II were piloted by women. At one base, when male pilots expressed hesitation at flying the new B-29 bombers, the base commander had two WASPs fly one in. There were no more complaints. And although no WASPs ever saw combat the work had its own dangers. Thirty-eight died while in service.

The WASP Museum is located in two original hangers at the Sweetwater Airfield. The displays tell the story of how the women trained and their contribution to the war effort. There are also dozens of biographies of the women, some of whom had very interesting lives after the war. And, yes, the museum has some radio-related items.

The T-74/CRT 3, a.k.a. “Gibson Girl” was a World War II era emergency transmitter included in provisions in lifeboats. It was also sometimes dropped by parachutes to lifeboats. The round compartment held a wind-up antenna wire. The user placed the unit between his legs and turned the handle to produce power. In automatic mode it sent “SOS” in CW on 500 and 8364 kHz. It could also be used to send CW manually or as a signal light.

Manufactured for the US Navy during World War II, the CWS-52245 transmitter was capable of up to 40 watts CW between 1.5 to 12 MHz.

The Western Electric BC-458A transmitter was often paired with an ARC-5 receiver.

Hammurland BC-779A SuperPro receiver.

The old radio gear was interesting to look at but what really drew my attention was the following small plaque:

I had no idea that the military had been experimenting with radio-controlled drones as far back as World War II. The museum didn’t have any additional information on this so I did additional research. The plaque doesn’t quite have all the facts right and the whole story is a lot more interesting.

The Culver PQ-8 and its successor, the PQ-14, were adaptations of the pre-war civilian Culver Cadet two-seat monoplane. A remote flight required two remote pilots. First, a control plane would take off carrying both its own pilot and an operator for the remote craft. Then a second operator, sitting on the roof of a truck, would handle takeoff for the remote plane. Once it was safely in the air, control would be passed over to the airborne operator. The remote pilots were nicknamed ‘beeper pilots’ because the control unit emitted a beeping sound to indicate it was in radio contact with the remote craft. The following picture from the National Archives shows a beeper pilot guiding a PQ-8 on takeoff at Wheeler Field in Hawaii in April 1945.

A 17th TTS ‘Beeper Pilot’ atop the radio truck uses his Metal Stick controller to guide a PQ-8 on takeoff at Wheeler Field on Oahu, Hawaii. (NARA)

In 1943, after graduation from Sweetwater, nineteen WASPs were sent to Liberty Field in Hinesville, Georgia to learn to fly the PQ-8 remotely. Ironically, the first step was to log flight hours in the pilot’s seat in the plane. That was the only way to get a feel for how the aircraft handled. Once that was mastered the trainee would move on to learning how to fly remote flights. During this phase there was always a human pilot in the craft to take over the controls if needed. In the next picture a beeper pilot in a UC-78 is guiding the PA-8A just ahead to a safe landing at Wheeler Field.

A ‘Beeper Pilot’ aboard the UC-78 guiding the PQ-8A ahead of it into a safe landing at Wheeler Field, Oahu on April 15th, 1944. (NARA)

Being remotely controlled wasn’t the only unusual thing about the PQ-8 and the PQ-14. The military had the planes built because it wanted them to get shot down. They needed a way to train the crews of anti-aircraft guns to track and shoot down enemy planes. And what better way to do it than with real planes, minus the pilot. The control plane would safely circle a few miles away but sometimes even that seemed too close, given that the gun crews were still learning their job. Some units made six or seven “missions” before meeting their demise.

In fact, simply damaging a remote-controlled plane could cause real problems, as described here by WASP Betty June Deuser.

“Today the radio control mission (at 8,000 ft) had a sad ending. The PQ-8 got shot and the radio went out of control (nobody in the PQ – it’s a target) so the C-78 couldn’t make it come down. It went scooting off towards Savannah all by itself and the C-78 chased it. There was nothing it could do to control it – the thing was set so it would fly straight or turn and it stayed up for 4 hrs. before the gas ran out and it crashed near Chatham Field just outside of Savannah. That has happened before – when the PQ’s get away – and even in one case a farmer saw one crash and a searching party was formed to hunt for the pilot who was never found, of course because there wasn’t any!” [Oct.26, 1943]

Betty June described another incident in which she was remote-flying a PQ-14 when her control unit blew a fuse. They had to chase after the plane until she got the control unit working again.

The USS Indianapolis Radio Room

In November 2022, I got to stay a few days in downtown Indianapolis so I made sure to visit some of the city’s excellent museums. The Indiana War Memorial Museum focuses on Indiana’s connection with the United States military from the Revolutionary War to present day. If you like military history the museum is very much worth the few hours it takes to visit. For me, as a DXer, the most amazing thing was the USS Indianapolis Radio Room.

The Indianapolis was a heavy cruiser launched in 1931 that played a major role in the war in the Pacific during World War II. In July 1945, the vessel was chosen for an important top-secret mission – carrying the uranium and bomb parts for the Hiroshima bomb from San Francisco to Tinian Island. From Tinian, the vessel headed south to Guam and then on toward the Philippines.

On 30 July, while crossing the Philippine Sea, the Indianapolis was spotted by an Imperial Japanese submarine, which launched six torpedoes. Two of those struck the cruiser and it went down in just twelve minutes. About three hundred of the 1,195 crew went down with the ship. The rest were in the middle of the ocean with only a few lifeboats and very little food and water. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The commotion of the explosion followed by blood in the water caught the attention of sharks. The sharks feasted on the dead and the injured and then began attacking the survivors, many of whom were still in the water due to the shortage of lifeboats. It is believed to be the largest mass shark attack in history.

As the ship went down the radio operators managed to get out an SOS but the few stations that received the message ignored it, thinking it a Japanese hoax. No one noticed when the Indianapolis didn’t show up at Leyte on the 31st and it wasn’t uncommon for large ships to be out of radio contact for several days. So no help came until four days later, the 2nd of August, when the survivors were spotted by a plane out on a routine patrol. By nightfall several ships had converged to pick up the 316 survivors.

In terms of loss of life, the sinking of the Indianapolis was one of the worst disasters in US Navy history. The Navy recognized that its own haphazard communication and ship-tracking policies were partly to blame for the large number of casualties. New monitoring procedures were put in place to prevent anything like this from happening again. Several books and movies have been made about the Indianapolis. The best known is the 2016 film USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage. Like most Hollywood movies, it takes some liberties with what really happened to make a better story.

So, back to the museum. The USS Indianapolis Radio Room is a project of the Indianapolis Radio Club. It contains a recreation of what was in the vessel’s radio room at the time of the sinking plus some other radio gear of the period. It is also a functioning amateur radio station with the callsign WW2IND. Any amateur can make arrangements with the club to use the station, although you do have to bring your own transmitter. They have antennas for all the standard amateur bands.

The following photos came from the radio room and I think you would have a hard time finding a better collection of vintage equipment on display anywhere.