The Quest for Cryptologic Centralization and the Establishment of NSA: 1940 - 1952

Chapter 1. Early Army-Navy COMINT Relations, 1930–1945

During the 1930s and throughout World War II, the United States Army and the United States Navy dominated the U.S. COMINT effort. The Army and Navy COMINT organizations operated as totally autonomous organizations. They were fiercely independent, with little dialogue or cooperation taking place between them. Their working relationship represented a spirit of strong rivalry and competition, with overtones of mutual distrust. During the first two years of the war, the Army and Navy persisted in maintaining their totally separate cryptanalytic roles. Each worked independently and exclusively on its assigned cryptanalytic tasks, as approved earlier by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President ...