Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series.
This is the second time in this timeline that a world war forced amateur radio off the air entirely. It happened in WWI, and it happened again in WWII, only this time the shutdown lasted longer and the technology amateurs came back to was completely different.
The wartime blackout
When the US entered World War II in December 1941, the FCC suspended all amateur radio activity almost immediately. Unlike WWI, where amateurs were ordered to dismantle their stations, many WWII-era hams kept their equipment intact but off the air, some contributing their technical skills directly to the war effort instead, working in military communications, radar development, and electronics manufacturing.
MARS and the wartime volunteer network
Even with amateur bands silent, the government still valued the skill base amateurs represented. The Army and Navy each stood up an Amateur Radio Station Emergency Corps in the early 1940s, precursors to what would later consolidate into the Military Auxiliary Radio System, or MARS, giving trained amateur operators a legitimate, licensed way to keep their skills sharp and support military communications even while the amateur bands themselves stayed dark. The ARRL’s own station, W1AW in Newington, Connecticut, was reassigned during the war to a monitoring role rather than shut down entirely, tracking foreign broadcasts as part of the war effort.
The war years weren’t without amateur radio drama. In occupied Poland, the priest Maximilian Kolbe, SP3RN, was arrested by German forces who suspected his prewar amateur radio activity was tied to espionage. He was sent to Auschwitz and was later canonized as a saint after volunteering to take the place of a condemned prisoner. It’s a stark reminder that in some parts of the world during this era, simply having been a licensed amateur was dangerous.
How the war reshaped amateur technology
Even though hams themselves were off the air, the underlying technology amateur radio depends on advanced enormously during the war, mostly driven by radar and military communications research that had nothing to do with the amateur bands directly. Better vacuum tubes, more compact and reliable transmitters, and refined receiver designs, all developed under wartime pressure and wartime budgets, filtered down into postwar amateur equipment almost immediately. In a real sense, amateurs lost four years of on-air time but gained access to a full decade’s worth of technological progress the moment the bands reopened, since much of that military research had no peacetime commercial channel to reach them through until the war ended.
The bands reopen
On November 15, 1945, the FCC allowed amateurs back on HF CW subbands, though initially with restrictions: 75 watts maximum power and crystal control only, no free-tuning VFOs yet. It was a cautious reopening, but after nearly four years of silence, it was enough to bring hams flooding back to the air. The crystal-control-only restriction was rooted in wartime nerves about frequency stability, since a crystal locks a transmitter to one exact frequency while a free-running VFO can drift, and the FCC wasn’t ready to trust a fully reopened band to VFO-equipped rigs right away.
A flood of war surplus gear
One thing WWII left behind that WWI didn’t: an enormous supply of surplus military radio equipment. Command sets, receivers, and transmitters built for the military found their way into ham shacks across the country at bargain prices, and that surplus gear helped fuel a wave of new activity, especially once VHF operations picked up. Radios like the BC-348 receiver and the ART-13 transmitter, both built by the tens of thousands for military service, became the backbone of countless postwar ham stations, often for a fraction of what comparable commercial gear would have cost.
Setting up the postwar boom
The full reopening of the HF bands and the allocation of new VHF spectrum came within the year, and that expansion is really its own milestone.
Sources
- History of Amateur Radio, Wikipedia
- Military Auxiliary Radio System, Wikipedia
- Maximilian Kolbe, Wikipedia
Previous: 1934, the FCC takes over. Next up: 1946, when the 2 meter band opened.