How do you trace the history of the US Army's 1049th Signal Corps during World War 2?

Answer 1

Its not going to be easy. I've done a little preliminary research on your question. It appears you must be asking about the 1049th Signal Company. A company had less than 200 men, and there were more than 8 million in the Army. For your purposes it is problematic that this was an "independent" unit. This means it was not a permanent part of any larger formation, meaning you cannot get the unit's history by finding that of its parent unit. The bigger the unit, the more likely you are to find material. Many larger units published their own histories after the war, copies of which were marketed and sold to former members and their families. With small units there was such an insignificant market this was hardly ever done. SO to find anything out on a small, "independent" unit you've really got to dig. To top all this off, it appears the 1049th Sig Co was in the CBI - the China Burma India Theater of Operations. This is the least written-about area of WWII.

The key to finding information for you is to search for an Order Of Battle. An OOB is a list of all units within a particular command at a certain specific time. So, if searching online you would look for "Order Of Battle", or "OOB", plus "1049th Signal Company", or "1049 Sig Co", every permutation of those terms you can think of. Once you know the 1049th Signal Company was in a certain command at a certain time, you can then search for information on the command which included the 1049th, which you are much more likely to find. This will not, of course, in most cases give you specifics on the company in which your relative served, but it will inform you about what was going on in their part of the world, and the events that impacted them.

I've done a little bit of this for you. See Related Links below. Here's a real surprise for you. The first link below lists "independent" Signal Corps units. Go to the section on companies, and scroll down until you find the 1049th. There is a large photo of the company taken in Hsingtao, China in 1945. Maybe you'll see someone you know. The photo was submitted by the grandson of a unit member. If you can get contact information for him from the website administrators, chances are he has been doing what you would like to do, and researching this unit. Maybe he would share what he has. What's more this website informs us that the 1049th Sig Co was part of the 315th ASG - Aviation Service Group. Now you've got another clue, another unit to search for on Orders of Battle.

So, maybe this company ran communications between aircraft and the ground, maybe aids to navigation like radio beacons, possibly they were a radar unit. In China the 14th US Air Force operated for a while, trying to bomb Japan, but it was difficult, because all supplies - food, gasoline, bombs, etc had to be flown in "over the hump" of the Himalayan Mountains, the most massive on earth, and mostly a howling, trackless wilderness. Many supply planes were lost flying The Hump and have never been found to this day. So possibly they were involved in the 14th AF bombing effort, or more likely with the aircraft flying The Hump. Either way, they lived in primitive conditions, with few creature comforts, very, very far from home, in an "unsexy" Theater of Operations, performing thankless tasks little understood or even known of back home. I wish you all success in learning more, and I am certain it will be fascinating as you do.