The news that the Navy has abandoned its tradition of typing messages in all capital letters reminded me of the quirky communications I experienced in my seagoing days.
The all-caps format had its origins in the limitations of teletype technology. Now that Navy ships and aircraft are connected by high-speed data networks and secure voice circuits, modernizing the message format certainly makes sense. That would have been impossible when I went to sea in 1966.
My ship received its message traffic via World War II technology, with a radioman listening to Morse code and typing the letters on a typewriter. Classified messages, in the form of groups of letters, had to be decoded using a crypto machine. As the communications officer, I spent long hours typing code groups into the machine and assembling strips of paper into the finished message. In all-caps, of course.
Communication between ships has always been limited by technology and the need for security. For centuries, navies have used a series of signal flags hoisted on a halyard to spell words or use a shorthand vocabulary of frequently used phrases. In officers’ training my classmates and I amused ourselves by combining standard flaghoist phrases into nonsense messages such as “submerge to periscope depth and air bedding.”
It’s hard to be eloquent when communicating with signal flags. At the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Horatio Nelson wanted to inspire the fleet with the message: England confides that every man will do his duty. His signals officer reminded the admiral that “confides” was not in the standard flaghoist vocabulary and would have to be spelled out letter by letter. The resulting word substitution went down in history as: England expects that every man will do his duty. It required 31 flags.
Tactical communication was a little like the forced abbreviation of today’s text messages and Twitter. The Navy probably does not have a flaghoist for LOL or OMG, though enterprising sailors may have invented something on their own.
Voice radio for short-range communications presented the same challenge because transmitting in code entailed reading multi-letter code groups into the microphone. It was easier to use the standard vocabulary in the codebook than to spell words one letter at a time.
One morning our ship was proceeding to a rendezvous with the mother ship for our patrol zone. Along the way we responded to frequent coded voice radio messages asking: What is your position? Finally we arrived and, as we moored alongside the mother ship, received yet another what is your position? query. Using standard codebook vocabulary, we replied: Look out starboard porthole.
We communicated with nearby ships using Morse code on a signal searchlight.
That generally worked, though we were unable to converse intelligibly with a Russian trawler that shadowed us briefly. We occasionally encountered a South Vietnamese patrol ship that was technically an ally but not good at communicating. One day the Vietnamese ship flashed the standard challenge of A-A (what ship?). We made the customary response, our four-letter callsign, but got a second challenge. We replied with our ship’s hull number. The Vietnamese ship queried: What is your name? By this time our signalman was out of patience. Instead of laboriously spelling out USS Woodpecker in Morse code, he flashed: My name is Jim. What’s yours?