The needs of World War Two provided an exceptional stimulus for major and rapid innovations in electronics and radio technology and this was reflected in the designs of battlefield radios for the British Army. 

At the time, there were many small companies in Britain capable of quickly producing new designs with innovative features. The resources for the required large scale production were not available, and so manufacture of some of the wireless sets was subcontracted to companies in USA and Canada, the WS 19 tank set being the best known of these. At the start of World War Two, the sets available to the Royal Signals were heavy (indeed it seems that the military planners preferred that because they believed that lightweight sets would not be robust enough for battle-conditions), they were very inefficient by modern standards so battery supply and replacement was a continuing need, frequency drift was a major operational problem and they used the low h.f. bands (for example. 2 to 9 MHz) where interference of various kinds was significant. Morse code (wireless telegraphy) was still important at that time.

Well over 100,000 of the individual patrol set WS 38 had been delivered by 1946, and at the conclusion of the war, the Army had an inventory of over 190,000 radios..

The US Signal Corps had, for the most part, changed to v.h.f. with frequency modulation and had abandoned Morse code in favour of universal use of voice communication, but there was neither the time nor the resources for the British to start this change until the closing days of World War Two, by which time, much lighter, tropicalised, hermetically-sealed, easy to-operate sets with a small number of crystal-controlled channels were being developed, and eventually a few sets emerged which became standardised throughout NATO (for example the SCR 300 / WS 31).

About the Speaker

Professor Anthony Davies -  Emeritus Professor, King’s College London and Visiting Professor, Kingston University.