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Originally Posted by Snestorm
The panzers didn't have to communicate with Germany, from as far away as Canada, The Carribean Sea, or The South Atlantic. Totaly different circumstances.
And how would one go about coding voice transmissions?!
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What Snestorm says speaks volumes for the issue...
The technical requirements for line of sight voice radios (known as RT - Radio Telephony) was significantly different from that of HF using morse code (known as WT - Wireless Telegraphy). Tanks needed only low-power short-ranges capability and in any case were usually limited to a fairly narrow frequency band. The artillery needed more range but much of the problem could be solved by using flexable long-wire directional antennas for a VHF RT setup. Until the American very portable VHF Walky-Talky came into service, radios in a infantry battalion below company level were rare. Ground-air voice communications was also available from the start but under most circumstances it was line of site only.
Continental navies and the IJN were remarkably slow to make the move to VHF RT for the tactical passage of information and command control, preferring flag signals and morse code with searchlights (Aldis lamps in British service). It is possible that part of the problem was institutional inertia, the signalling organizations in most major navies tended to be very large, bureaucratic and conservative; only in the USN was a VHF RT system in place from the beginning as TBS - Talk Between Ships.
U-Boats outside visual range generally had no direct means of communicating with each other or with friendly surface ships, coded WT was passed to BdU via HF and then re-broadcast. They could not talk to aircraft at all as a rule so any tactical infomation concerning convoys had to go through BdU to Group West to the corresponding Luftwaffe HQ in France and then back to the plane in the air, all repeatedly encoded, broadcast and reciepted and decoded. It is no wonder the Luftwaffe tried to operate alone when it operated over the Atlantic at all, information was frequently outdated before it was even recieved - and they knew it.
And none of the communications systems were close to perfect and are still not even today. For all of the vaunted German Army panzer radio excellence, when Rommel wanted to punch 7th Panzer across the Meuse River in May 1940 he had to dismount from his half-tracked radio command vehicle and pass orders in person rather than sending them via RT.
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And one does not code combat transmissions like that, its too tedious and silly.
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Maybe so but encoded WT was the rule for navies other than the USN for much of WW2 when passing information to and from ships and aircraft outside of visual range.