MacArthur’s Forgotten New Guinea Air Warning Wireless (NGAWW) Company Aircraft Spotters
Posted by Trent Telenko on August 19th, 2018 (All posts by Trent Telenko)
I have often stated in an earlier Chicago Boyz columns on Gen Douglas MacArthur that:
“One of the maddening things about researching General Douglas MacArthur’s fighting style in WW2 was the way he created, used and discarded military institutions, both logistical and intelligence, in the course of his South West Pacific Area (SWPA) operations. Institutions that had little wartime publicity and have no direct organizational descendant to tell their stories in the modern American military.”
Today’s column is on another of those forgotten institutions, the New Guinea Air Warning Wireless (NGAWW) company, and the US military leader who saw to it that it’s story was forgotten in the institutional American military histories of World War II.
Australian signallers from the New Guinea Air Warning Wireless Company (AWM photo 015364 ).jpg
Australian signalers from the New Guinea Air Warning Wireless Company with a AWA 3BZ Teleradio transceiver (AWM photo 015364 ) Public Domain photo found on Wikipedia
DESPERATION & INNOVATION
In January 1942 — after the Fall of Rabaul and before the Japanese Carrier Strike on Darwin — the Australian military recognized it needed a system of radio equipped ground observers in New Guinea to warn Australian outposts of incoming air attacks. Thus was born the New Guinea Air Warning Wireless Company (NGAWW), which was a inspired combination of innovation and desperation using the organizational templates (and Amalgamated Wireless Australasia (AWA) Teleradio series wireless sets) of the Australian Royal Navy Coast watchers and the Royal Air Force Wireless Observer Units used in North Africa. [1] [2]
Read the rest of this entry »
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/57892.html#more-57892You've heard of the Coast Watchers, how about the NGAWW? Just trips off the tongue, right.
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