International communication came to Guam when the undersea cable linking San Francisco in California with Manila in the Philippines was completed more than one hundred years ago. The underwater section from San Francisco to Honolulu was completed during the year 1902; and in 1903, the three sections linking Honolulu to Manila via Wake Island and Guam were completed by two cable ships, the Anglia and the Colonia. The final cable junction with Guam was connected on June 5, 1903.
Initially, a temporary wooden shack
housed the equipment for the cable terminal just off the beach at Sumay near
Agana on the western coast of the island of Guam. On July 4, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt
officially opened this new TransPacific cable system, and then on April 2 of
the following year, a new and permanent cable house was taken into service.
Running concurrently with the
installation of this massively long cable system stretching for more than 8,000
miles across the almost empty Pacific Ocean was the development of a United
States naval wireless system on the island of Guam itself. Construction work on this new navy wireless
station, which was installed on Mt. Macajna some two miles south west of the island
capital Agana, began during the year 1904.
The two wireless masts were imported
into Guam, as was all of the electrical equipment, including a 3 kW spark
transmitter and an electricity generator powered by a kerosene engine. This new wireless station, under the American
navy callsign NPN, was taken into service on January 26, 1906 and it served as
an intermediate communication link between Honolulu in Hawaii and Manilla in
the Philippines.
Subsequently, a 5 kW German
Telefunken transmitter was installed at Mt. Macajna, though in 1914 this was
swapped for a 2 kW unit from Cavite in the Philippines in an attempt to obtain
direct transmission between the Philippines and the American mainland. Usage of this transmitter location at Mt
Macajna was phased out around the end of World War 1.
In 1917, a new naval wireless station was
constructed on Nimitz Hill, at Asan a little south of Agana. In earlier times, Nimitz Hill was known as
Fonte Plateau, and subsequently as ComMar Hill.
This large new station was planned
to accommodate two spark transmitters at 100 kW each, though initially only one
at 30 kW was installed. Two towers
standing at 600 feet were raised for the antenna system. The control point for this station was also
at Nimitz Hill, and the on air signal from this wireless station was described
as wideband and scratchy.
In 1929, another new naval radio
station was constructed at Libugon, a couple of miles inland from Nimitz
Hill. Initially, this station held three
spark transmitters, two at 100 kW and one at 30 kW, though soon afterwards,
additional regular shortwave and mediumwave transmitters were installed.
However three years later, all of
the transmitters were removed from Libugon and re-installed in an annex
building on Nimitz Hill. At this stage,
a Radio Intercept facility was transferred from an isolated inland location to
Libugon, and the tall towers were replaced by sloping V antennas. This Intercept Station, identified as Station
Baker B, was in use for monitoring all forms of Japanese radio transmissions
during the era that led up to the beginning of the Pacific War.
During this pre-war era, the navy
experimented with the installation of radio stations at several additional
locations on the island of Guam. For
three years, a receiving station was in use at Yigo on the northern tip of the
island (1921 - 1924); a direction finding Radio Compass Station was in use on
Mt. Santa Rosa for three years (1922 - 1925); and an additional transmitting
and receiving station was in use at Merizo at the southern tip of the island
(1922 - 1925). The transmitters from
Merizo were then re-installed at Nimitz Hill, and the main building at Merizo
is used these days as a youth recreation center.
Back in the early 1930s, Globe
Wireless established their own communication station on Guam, and the shortwave
transmitter and tower were located on Globe Wireless Hill, an abutment
overlooking the beach and the ocean, between the two Devils Horns on the
central western coast of the island. In
July 1930, several shortwave frequencies were approved for use by Globe
Wireless on Guam, though no callsign is shown in the official government
documents.
In fact, no primary callsign is
shown in any of the known documents of that era, though two apparently subsidiary
channel callsigns, KDC and KFQ, are shown in a shortwave callsign list in
1933. It is possible that the primary
callsign for Globe Wireless on Guam back then was KFH, a callsign that Globe
Wireless did use on Guam a half a century later.
This Globe Wireless shortwave radio
station served a two-fold purpose: As an intermediate relay station between the
Philippines and the American mainland, and also for the transmission of
commercial traffic and news reports from Guam back to the American mainland.
There were two shortwave stations
located in the waterfront area of Sumay on the central west coast, not far from
the original cable terminal of 1904. A
Marine station was installed in a solid structure building in the waterways at
the end of a causeway, a wooden jetty, in 1921, though it was subsequently
moved ashore.
Then in 1935, PanAm established a
shortwave radio station in Sumay for communication with its fleet of
TransPacific Clipper flights. PanAM took
over and modernized the old seaplane facilities that had been used previously
by the Marines, and the PanAM shortwave station was installed in conjunction
with the new and superior PanAm Hotel.
Two
days after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, the Japanese invaded the
island of Guam and they accepted its surrender, so what happened to all of
these many radio stations? The navy
communication station NPN at Nimitz Hill was destroyed in Japanese air raids, as
was the Marine Corp station at Sumay. The Globe Wireless station had been abandoned
some months before the war began, though the tall self standing tower was still
standing.
The PanAm station KNBG was bombed
but not destroyed in the initial air raids, and in the evening of the second
day of aerial attacks, a final message was transmitted to the continental
mainland, and then the operator deliberately destroyed the electronic
equipment. The Libugon station that had
served as a naval transmitter station and then as a secret monitoring station
was destroyed in aerial attacks, and the location is now an overgrown jungle
area on a jungle hiking trail that is popular with visiting tourists as well as
with local residents.
More on Guam next time.
(AWR-Wavescan/NWS 360)
