Hello Jake:
On Mon, 15 Jan 2001 0:18:34 +0800, J. J. Young wrote:
> Sam wrote:
>>> Sam, thinking of cartography (as opposed to cryptography), there
>>> was a jokey news quiz on the radio recently which reported the
>>> UK Ordnance Survey's puzzlement over the popularity of a house-name
>>> in Wales. It turned out to be Welsh for "Beware of the dog".
>> Does the dog just bark? Maybe he really wails. Aaarf! Aaarf!
>> Has he ever caught a rarebit?
>> Well, I think it is time for me to go now and hit the bunny trail.
> Does this mean a trip to the grill (broiler?) to whip up a rarebit?
> Remember the Worcestershire Sauce, and try our fine Leicestershire
> cheese.
> ...Or is it a reference to Easter (chocolate eggs are always
> advertised early in the new year)?
> ...Or a gentleman's club?
I will send to you privately a photograph showing where easter eggs
come from. I will not send the picture to the list because it is
suitable for viewing only in a gentlemen's club.
> BTW, the Welsh Guards needed to take no special precautions with
> voice radio communications in the Balkans -- as long as they spoke
> Welsh. I heard similar things of Native Americans deployed during
> WWII.
In WWII the military conducted a special recruitment effort to sign up
some Native Ameicans of the Navaho Tribe. A special school was
established for their training and they were assigned to a special unit
known as the Navaho Code Talkers. Their authorized voice radio
communications was not simply "plain talk" in their native language.
The code was a system of phonetic symbols that would change from day to
day. The phonetic symbols were actual words from their native language,
and each symbol would represent a letter in the white man's alphabet.
Even if a Navaho Code Talker were captured, and some were captured, and
if he were to break under interrogation, he would not be able to offer
much information useful to the enemy because the table of phonetic symbols
would change the next day. WWII military commanders were extremely
impressed with the speed and accuracy by which the Navaho Code Talkers
could encrypt and decrypt voice messages. The code was never broken. It
has only recently become declassified. BTW, a man named Ira Hayes was a
Navaho. He was one of the seven US Marines who raised the flag atop
Mt. Surabachi at Iwo Jima. The popular country music singer Johnny Cash
wrote a ballad about him. It is a fact of WWII history that there was a
a very brief isolated encrypted message transmitted and decrypted by
Navaho Code Talkers a couple of seconds before the flag was raised. Just
before the flag was in the air, the message, whose plaintext translation
is "SURABACHI" was on the air. The proudly waving stars and stripes was
not the very first signal to the world that Surabachi had been taken. Only
the "real" Americans were the very first to know about it.
All the best,
Sam Heywood
-- This mail sent by Arachne, www graphical browser for DOS
-- Visit the Arachne DOS Browser Home Page, http://home.arachne.cz
