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The Ground Observer Corps, sometimes erroneously referred to as the Ground Observation Corps, was the name of two American civil defense organizations.
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World War II Organization
The first Ground Observer Corps was a World War II Civil Defense program of the United States Army Air Forces to protect against air attack. The 1.5 million civilian observers at 14,000 coastal observation posts used naked eye and binocular searches to search for German and Japanese aircraft until the program ended in 1944.
Observations were telephoned to filter centers, which forwarded authenticated reports to the Aircraft Warning Service which also received reports from the Army Radar Stations.
Cold War Organization
The second Ground Observer Corps was reformed during the Cold War as an arm of the United States Air Force Civil Defense network which provided aircraft tracking with over 200,000 civilian volunteers. The corps was established in early 1950 to supplement the Lashup Radar Network and a permanent radar network started with "ADC radar site" P-1 (McChord AFB) on June 1, 1950. "Filter centers" (e.g., in New Haven, Connecticut and Baltimore, Maryland) received telephoned voice information from 8,000 posts, and the information was relayed to Air Defense Command ground control interception centers.
By 1952 the program was expanded in Operation Skywatch with over 750,000 volunteers at over 16 thousand posts (98 per post in shifts) and 75 centers. The program ended in 1958 with the advent of the automated 1959 USAF radar network (SAGE) and the automated Army networks (Missile Master). The first officially commissioned rural skywatch tower was the Cairo Skywatch Tower. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.
GOC volunteers were encouraged to continue their service in the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES).