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Complete panoramic view of 15th Regiment sector

What I was doing here was taking pictures of the Regimental CO's Jeep as it traversed the backside of our front line position.  We had real communications problems as all of the telephone lines for this entire area on the other side of the Han Tan river crossed at the bridge out of view in the lower-left of this picture with the twisted-pair field telephone lines tied in neat bundles.  Any time an incoming hit close to these lines, they would whip around and sometimes break a line in the cable. There were only 2 copper strands in the field telephone wire combined with 5 strands (I think) of steel.  You could not tell by looking, sometimes, where the break was as it was hidden under the plastic insulation in what looked like a good, solid cable. A direct hit on one of these cables and all telephone communications went out.

So we were in the process of checking out the possibility of using our field radios for communications to back up our wired telephone capabilities.  Our higher powered radios were all AM (Amplitude Modulation) which worked just like the AM stations on your radio dial.  The Chinese had lots of AM radio capability and could and did monitor everything we transmitted.  We could encrypt messages, but it was slow and required that the message be sent by Morse code.

On the other hand, the newly issued Walkie Talkies were FM.  These new-issue radios were not put into service until after the line had stabilized so the Chinese had not captured any (yet).  If you click on the picture above, you'll see that there are 3 Jeeps on the road.  It's the same Jeep, but I took each picture (there are four) of the Jeep as it moved down the road.

I had the radio operator on the Jeep equipped with a walkie talkie and he was making radio checks as he went.  The newer FM (Frequency Modulated) radios operated on a higher frequency than the AM radios (just as FM does on your radio) and was pretty much limited to line-of-sight.  We confirmed, in this test, that if you could see each other you could talk.

As a result of this test we set up emergency radio connections, using the new FM radios, between Regimental Headquarters and each of the line companies to cover the event of a catastrophic loss of telephone communications.  We never had to use them while I was at Regimental Headquarters, but it was in place.

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