Before Pearl Harbor: Basic Training in Fort Jackson, SC

Before Pearl Harbor: Basic Training in Fort Jackson, SC

The 56th Signal Battalion was stationed at Fort Jackson, SC for basic training and participated in the Carolina Maneuvers of 1941 with encampments in the area of Chester and Kershaw. Military Training for these May 1941 Selective Service "Citizen Draftees" was a strange adjustment and limited with outdated military equipment, wire placing and communications technology. Field wire and field telephones along with Morse code made up the extent of the contact between practice battle units.Shortly after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii the Battalion was dispatched to Europe, in July 1942, to prepare for the allied Air assault and the landings on the coast of France. It would be three long years before most of the Battalion members would return home to the USA, at the end of the European War.

Robert Howard Searl Sr.