1943 Fighter Director School
Ensign Bisher attended the secret Fighter Director School at Pearl Harbor in May 1943. The 4-week cram course educated classes of green junior officers about the basics of Navigation, Radar Theory, Radar Plotting,
Communications and CICs--the Combat Information Centers that most of them would
eventually man aboard Pacific Fleet warships. Events made the course seem relevant: the Japanese bombed the city of Darwin, Australia the day before the course began, and midway through the course US troops landed on Attu in Alaska's Aleutian Islands to expel the Japanese invaders. They finished the course
just before the first anniversary of the Battle of Midway, the island where Ensign Bisher was destined.
Select pages from Ensign Bisher's classified course notebook are depicted below.
Communications and CICs--the Combat Information Centers that most of them would
eventually man aboard Pacific Fleet warships. Events made the course seem relevant: the Japanese bombed the city of Darwin, Australia the day before the course began, and midway through the course US troops landed on Attu in Alaska's Aleutian Islands to expel the Japanese invaders. They finished the course
just before the first anniversary of the Battle of Midway, the island where Ensign Bisher was destined.
Select pages from Ensign Bisher's classified course notebook are depicted below.
Ensign Bisher began the Fighter Director School course May 3, 1943. Students were instructed to mark their books "CONFIDENTIAL" on the cover and to write their surnames on the spine, probably because the notebooks were collected at the end of each class day and distributed again each morning for security reasons.
Interesting pages and a handout from the course are in the Gallery below.
Interesting pages and a handout from the course are in the Gallery below.