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Communications within the U.S. Army was provided primarily by radio, secondarily by telephone, and lastly by motorcycle dispatch riders and runners. U.S. radios were well designed and were found at all echelons from platoon up. The small tactical radios (the famous handi-talkies and walkie-talkies) were short ranged and of temperamental reliability, but had no counterpart in any other army. The larger sets used by battalion and above were very well built FM units, that suffered from a common limitation: all were subject to line-of-sight performance, in hilly or heavily forested terrain, their performance was severely degraded. The standard field telephones (including sound-powered phones) worked well in a static situation, although their telephone lines could be easily cut during artillery barrages.

A typical infantry division included some 1,500 Signal Corps personnel, who were responsible for all communications within the division. A field army would have a HQ signal service company; a signal operations battalion, one or more construction battalions that laid telephone cable and wire installations down to corps level and back to army rear HQ; one or more signal radio intelligence companies, a pigeon company and a signal photographic company, as well as a signal repair company and a signal depot company which would deal with the supply and maintenance of the signal equipment for the field army. An example of their scale of work would be that of the signal en of the U.S. Third Army, in their 281 days of active campaigning, they laid 16,000 miles of telephone wire, repaired and rehabilitated 4,000 miles of French and German wire and over 36,000 miles of underground cables. Their Message Center alone, handled a total of 7,220,261 code groups, while the forward and rear echelon switchboard operators handled an average of 14,000 calls per day.