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Magicians of
Monmouth

Saturday Evening Post
by Shalett, S.

Aug. 23, 1952

pages. 34-35, 58, 62, 64, and 66 

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A certain closely guarded area...

 In a certain closely guarded area an Army vehicle known as the weasel might be maneuvering without a driver, obeying impulses transmitted by remote radio rays, scooping up samples of earth and automatically sending back a television picture of what it was gathering.  In a metal hut, pips of light on a radar scope would be telling scientists that clouds were gathering 200 miles away.  Elsewhere, a small car might be rolling along, with a teletypewriter in its back seat, unattended by human hand, registering: “The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Black Dogs.  The Quick Brown Fox - - - -”.

 As the nerve center of scientific research and development for the United States Army Signal Corps, Fort Monmouth, located on the site of a long abandoned, once-fashionable race track in the vicinity of Red Bank, is one of the nation’s important military reservations.  If and when the much discussed but still distant push-button warfare arrives, Monmouth will have provided many of the buttons and trained  many of the soldier technicians to push them.  Meanwhile, since the infantryman, even in wars of the non-push-button variety, urgently needs reliable communications, the Signal Corps laboratories are going ahead with the business to provide everything from field telephones to radio to radar - even pigeons.

 Fort Monmouth - actually the post’s area takes in three separate locations near the New Jersey seacoast - is a big place that does a variety of big and bewildering things.  Commanded by Maj. Gen, Kirke B. Lawton, who was Eisenhower’s chief of Army Pictorial Service in World War II, Monmouth not only is a scientific-research center but a combination Army post and Signal Corps school.  The Signal School trains thousands of enlisted men, officers and officer candidates yearly.


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