september - october - Fort Sill

USE OF SIGNAL CORPS TRAINING MANUALS
Messages passing directly between offices, or officers of the same
headquarters, when they are near enough together not to require the
service of the message centre to effect prompt delivery or to insure
receipt or acknowledgment.
With this in mind, it may then be assumed, at least for the Field
Artillery, that when a message is of such importance that direct telephone
communication between officers (or officer's telephone operators) is
necessary, the telephone is taken out from under the message centre's
control. Generally, however, most messages can be written and sent
through the message centre if everyone realizes that the main idea of the
message centre is to get the message through. It can be recorded hours later
if necessary—the first thing to do is to send it.
A great deal of misapprehension was caused, it is believed, by the
advent of the Message Centre Manual. It must be remembered that the
Signal Corps was faced with the necessity of preparing a manual which
would work for anything from an army down to a battalion. But the fault
lies with the services using the Manual. If one goes into a restaurant to
order a dinner and the waiter brings a bill of fare, does he order the whole
thing or does he pick out what he wants? If he is wise and has regard to
the state of his stomach, he does a little choosing. The same applies to
this manual. What is fine for a corps would be superfluous for a battalion.
The only thing the Manual prescribes is that when messages are put
through the Message Centre, they will be handled and recorded in a
certain manner. The thing is really very flexible. The following may be
omitted:
Unit Operation No. 8—Use of the Pigeon Message Blank.
Unit Operation No. 9—Releasing Pigeons.
Unit Operation No. 11—Transmitting Telephone Messages, Use of the
Telephone Code, and the Phonetic Alphabet. (It is assumed that this
subject has been covered in the instruction in Training Manual No.
23—Telephone Switchboard Operator. If not, then this Unit
Operation should be included.)
Information Topic No. 2—Army Organization. (The remarks as
previously made on this subject apply.)
Information Topic No. 12—Pigeons.
Attention should be given Part II, Training Message Centre Specialists in
Team Work, page 289, and Part III, Training Message Centre Specialists in
Handling Traffic Records, page 305, as many valuable hints on training may
be picked up therein. Unit Operations dealing with Enciphering and
Deciphering, Encoding and Decoding obviously should be omitted in those
units to which Field Codes and Cipher Devices are not issued.
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