Some Details of Babe’s Training as a Radio Operator

Dated April 17, 1943; postmarked April 18, from Camp Wheeler.

Dear Folks,

As you can see, I am printing this letter, but I don’t think I’ll do very well with it because I never did much printing and it has to be done a certain way. I am going to radio school now and all messages I receive will have to be printed. I am on the third lesson now, which means that I am learning 21 characters of code now. When I say characters, I mean Morse code, but not the way you think of it.

We don’t use dots and dashes, but we use dits and da’s. For instance, instead of saying dot-dot-dash-dot for “F,” we say dit-dit-da-dit and we say it as fast as we can so that we learn the letter by the sound as a whole instead of learning the letter by each individual dot and dash. That way, we can take code much faster than we could if we did it the Boy Scout way.

We also have a phonetic alphabet we use when we want to spell out a word when we use voice transmission. Here is the phonetic alphabet, the way each letter is written and the order each stroke is made.

With a little practice, you’d be surprised how much speed, accuracy and legibility you can obtain by this method. Legibility is our main purpose in printing.

This radio buiseness business is good stuff and I like it. I’m perfectly satisfied where I am right now and I wouldn’t voluntarily leave here for anything. I just came to realize that I am sitting on top of the world right now. Why, I don’t even want to get in the air corps anymore. All we do all day is sit in school all day with a pair of earphones on and listen to dits and da’s all day long. Pretty soon, however, we will go on night problems and then we will have the fun. Read more of this post