In April of 1917, as the United States entered the First World War, every amateur radio operator in the country received the same grim letter from the Department of Commerce: get off the air and dismantle your antennas. More than six thousand hams, at the height of the spark era, fell silent almost overnight. The American Radio Relay League, formally organized that very year, suddenly had nothing to relay — so it did the next most useful thing it could think of: it recruited its members into the nation's communications services.
Thousands of amateurs served in uniform during the war, carrying their knowledge of Morse code, wave propagation, and field-expedient rigging into military radio work. But when the Armistice came in November 1918, the hams streaming home found the Navy in no hurry to give the airwaves back. The Secretary of the Navy refused to lift the 1917 order, and bills were introduced in Congress to put all American radio permanently under Navy control. League president Hiram Percy Maxim testified before congressional committees while thousands of hams wrote to their congressmen, the bills were defeated, receiving privileges returned in April 1919, and full transmitting privileges were restored that fall.
A generation later it happened all over again. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Federal Communications Commission suspended all amateur radio activity in January 1942, clearing the spectrum for military and emergency use. The League — which had created the Amateur Radio Emergency Service back in 1935 — argued that trained operators were too valuable to sideline, and pressed the FCC to give them a wartime role.
The answer was the War Emergency Radio Service, authorized in May 1942 and established by the FCC in June at the League's insistence. WERS licenses were granted not to individuals but to entire communities, though every participant still had to hold an amateur license. Nets ran mainly on the 2-1/2 meter band, 112 to 116 megahertz — the "ultra-high frequencies" of the day — plus the 1-1/4 meter and 70-centimeter bands, limited to 25 watts for about ten miles of range, often built from salvaged receiver parts to spare wartime-critical components. Its mission was air-raid warning and disaster communications, and it worked: by the end of 1944 roughly five thousand transmitters were operating under some 250 WERS licenses. When the war ended in 1945, WERS became the model for today's Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service.
Meanwhile the military was absorbing hams as fast as it could. The Army Amateur Radio System suspended operations and asked its members to enlist in the Signal Corps or serve as civilian radio operators; in April and May of 1942 the Civil Service Commission and the Chief Signal Officer toured eleven cities coast to coast recruiting experienced radio operators. Back home, with no ham bands to transmit on, QST magazine filled its pages with electronics theory, radar articles, and civil-defense radio projects. Twice the government took the hams' stations away — and twice the hams simply picked up their keys in uniform and carried on.