[Milsurplus] RS-6

[Hue Miller]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott Johnson" <scottjohnson1 at cox.net>
To: "milsurplus" <milsurplus at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 8:23 AM
Subject: Re: [Milsurplus] RS-6


> Ditto what Breck says, I find that a lot of speculation is made do to 
> misinterpreting snipets of information from fragments of T.O's, etc.  While 
> the RS-6 may have been mentioned in an early B-47 or B-52 TO, I doubt there 
> a many crew dogs that even know what one is. I believe a similar radio WAS 
> issued to early U-2 pilots, but was contained in the seat kit.

I'd be real surprised if the U-2 pilot had anything other than a URC-4 or URC-10.
What would Francis Gary Powers have done with a cw rig in the middle of 
Russia?  He had an E&E kit, including pistol, currency, language cards ( "pointee-
talkie" in WW2 ? ) and a suicide kit. That represents the far ends of the spectrum
of his options- which does NOT include  rescue. 



> As to a WWII 
> fighter pilot needing 20 WPM CW skills, I have never met one that supported 
> that argument. All a pilot needed was the ability to remember A and N, 
> station ID's were (and still are) shown as dots and dashes on the WAC 
> charts.
> 
> Scott

I doubt if 1 pilot in 100 could copy 5 wpm. They had no need to.  I also suspect only a 
minority of crewed aircraft radiomen could do 20 wpm. Remember, you did not need to
score 100% to graduate from Radio Operator school. You just had to meet some
arbitrary measure of having got most of it. Especially for radio ops flying in large
bomber flights, frequency of using CW would be small. I think i could maybe support
my opinion on this with documents i have.

This also shows the problems in doing vet interviews if one hasn't done some 
research prior. The vet's facts might be unfounded unfactual opinions frozen in time 
since he was a not so well-informed 20 year old.  I have run into this over and over.
I'd hasten to add, i don't believe in editting anything out. Vets' opinions even if
not factual can still be interesting and even informative about the times. -Hue Miller