Mildly interesting
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Unlikely unless he knew Russian and Cyrillic Morse code.
My father’s unit in Bremerhaven, who was taught Russian and whose job it was to translate Russian radio broadcasts, were probably the first or among the first.
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It seems like this claim originated from Cash himself, in his 1997 autobiography (quoted here):
The Air Force taught me the things every military service imparts to its enlisted men … plus one skill that’s pretty unusual: if you ever need to know what one Russian is signaling to another in Morse code, I’m your man. I had such a talent for that particular line of work and such a good left ear, that in Landsberg, where the United States Air Force Security Service ran radio intercept operations worldwide, I was the ace. I was who they called when the hardest jobs came up. I copied the first news of Stalin’s death. I located the signal when the first Soviet jet bomber made its first flight from Moscow to Smolensk; we all knew what to listen for, but I was the one who heard it. I couldn’t believe that Russian operator. He was sending at thirty-five words a minute by hand, a rate so fast I thought it was a machine transmitting until I heard him screw up. He was truly exceptional, but most of his comrades were fast enough to make the best Americans sound like amateurs, sloppy and slow. It didn’t matter, though.
A later biography of Cash writes however:
While he was, in fact, at Landsberg on March 5, 1953, the day Joseph Stalin died, his comment in Cash: The Autobiography that "I was who they called when the hardest jobs came up. I copied the first news of Stalin's death" brings a wry smile to the faces of those who worked with him. "That's nonsense," says one. "He didn't understand Russian, and if it came in code we wouldn't have been able to decipher it anyway. It created a certain aura about his skill that in my view was directly related to his celebrity."
So: True or not? -
There were units stationed in Bremerhaven who did this for real.
My dad aced the entrance tests when he joined the AF. They gave him the choice between pilot school and language school. He didn’t want to be dogfighting the Chinese over Korea so he went to language school.
The DoD contracted with the University of Syracuse to teach these smart lads Russian. It was their job, all day, 6 days a week, to learn Russian. Six months later they shipped him out to Bremerhaven and he spent 8hr shifts listening to Russian radio and transcribing.
All of this is googlable except the presence of my Dad.
Cash was talking shit. That’s ok. It happens.
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@George-K and they make it look so easy!
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@George-K said in Mildly interesting:
What have you achieved in the last 42 days?
The fucking Rubik's Cube, that's what!
Twice!
