Golf, George, Gravy or what????
 

I apologise for intruding upon this wonderful Military forum, but I hope there might be some veteran readers who can throw light on the following.

Can anyone help? I am writing something about an aircraft built in 1937-38, but how would its identifying registration have been spoken using the phonetic alphabet of the period? If, for example, its registration was 'G-ABGG' would it then have been ID'd as:

'Golf - Alpha - Golf - Golf'?

Or would it perhaps have been uttered:

'George - Alpha - George - George'?

Or wot???? The reason I ask is that it appears the original WW1-era phoentic alphabet used 'Gallipoli' for 'G' - and the NATO alphabet using 'Golf' was not current until 1951. Yet we hear so much of wartime 'G-for-George'.

I have also placed this conundrum on the PPrune Historic Forum. As I say, sorry to take up some of your electrons here, but can anyone definitively put me right????

Any advance on George Able Baker George George?

G-ABGG


G-INFO Record Number: 1 of 1
Search Again
Registration: G-ABGG Current Reg. Date:
Previous ID: First Reg. Date:
Status: De-registered De-Reg. Date:
Reason: To:
Manufacturer: AV ROE AND CO LTD
Type: AVRO 621 TUTOR
Serial No.: 476
ICAO 24 bit aircraft address: (hex):
Popular Name: TUTOR
Generic Name: -
Aircraft Class: FIXED-WING LANDPLANE


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Aviate

Spot on.

BZ.

:D

I'd suggest that very few civilian aircraft in that era would have RT (voice) and those that were wireless-equipped would use WT (morse).

Or hand signals.

So the survivors to modern times are Charlie Mike Victor and X-ray.

And the Zulus have killed off the Zebras.

And Whiskey has been approved by ICAO:ok:

"Broadsword calling Danny Boy - Broadsword calling Danny Boy";)

In the interests of historical accuracy, I seem to recall that in the 1943-1956 list in post #3, certainly at the 1956 end, we used NAN rather than the examples shown. Or maybe it's another brain failure? :confused:

So, based on Aviate's post, it was Edward Company in Band of Brothers - sounds more like a detachment of adminners to me...

Hoo no, easy was always spam talk. They just took a little while to catch up. I heard that it was a film unit that started te e - easy thing and that the GI liked it and adopted it but that could just be spitefull spam bashing.:}

So

Queen Fox Easy was not a myth?

Y_G

Easy company was an American unit... we used slightly different words than you Brits.

"Interrogatory".

Who the hell came up with that?

It sounds like an Americanisation wordwise.....:suspect:

Fantastic! Thank you so much. Don't take 'G-ABGG' literally - the actual reg no of our late associate's aircraft simply included those particular letters. We're talking about 1938 so such an ID (if theTudor had existed then) would have been - according to Aviate's wonderful listing 1924-1942:

'George-Ace-Beer-George-George' - Right?

aviate1138

I have N = "Nan" for 1945 (from "Signal, A History of Signalling in the Royal Navy")

" We're talking about 1938 so such an ID (if theTudor had existed then) would have been - according to Aviate's wonderful listing 1924-1942:

'George-Ace-Beer-George-George' - Right?"

The pedant in me points out.....

Avro Tutor not Tudor - Right? :)


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P.S. It's airworthy - still, I hope.

The excellent Dambusters site http://www.thedambusters.org.uk/index.html
refers to P-Popsie and L- Leather and lots of other 'unofficial' phonetic code names so I guess there was some variations even at the height of WW2.

I'm not sure how well the BBC researched this but, for what it's worth:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A8245910

One can certainly remember when one was a baby pilot, aged controllers still speaking about Queenie Nan How ..... although 'twas already out-of-date then.