Military Morse Code: Then and Now

No. A soldier, a sailor and a radio amateur send the same letters: A is .- and Z is --.. whoever holds the key. The standard is ITU-R M.1677-1, and this site's translator is built on it. How the code itself works is explained in What is Morse code?

What people often mean by "military code" is the military alphabet, the NATO phonetic alphabet. It gives each letter a word (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie) so a call can be spelled clearly by voice, and it became effective in 1956. NATO's page on its codes and signals lists it beside Morse code, flag hoists, semaphore, and the panel signals ground forces use to send simple messages to pilots.

One naval phrase shows how the two fit together. Bravo Zulu means "well done". Ships signal it with flags, and NATO notes that people in the forces also write it as BZ, for example in reply to an email. In Morse, BZ is two letters:

• BZ (Bravo Zulu)

  -... --..23 units · 1.38 s

To spell any message in the military alphabet, use the NATO phonetic alphabet translator. That also answers "how do you say I love you in military code": India, Lima Oscar Victor Echo, Yankee Oscar Uniform. The Morse version plays on I love you in Morse code.

Denton's message needed no radio at all. He had been shot down on 18 July 1965. On 2 May 1966 his captors set up a television interview with a Japanese reporter, and while he answered on camera he blinked the word in Morse. The National Archives describes it as the first clear confirmation to US intelligence that American prisoners were being tortured. This is the word he spelled:

• TORTURE (Denton, 1966)

  - --- .-. - ..- .-. .57 units · 3.42 s

It is seven letters and 57 units long: 3.4 seconds at 20 words per minute, and 9.8 seconds at 7 WPM, the speed the site's flashlight holds a flashing screen to.

Morse code's life outside the forces has a page of its own: the history of Morse code.

The US Army stopped teaching it in the 2010s, while the Navy was still training Morse intercept operators in 2020. The change came in late 2004 and early 2005, when the Department of Defense sent a message saying there was "no longer a need or requirement" for operators trained only in Morse code. The Army stopped enrolling students in 2012. Its last class at Fort Huachuca, a self-paced course of 81 days, began on 27 April 2015, and the course was to move to the Air Force at Goodfellow. David Germain, the Army's chief of Morse code training, gave the reason for the training in the Army's report that year: "We train [for] Morse code because the adversary still uses Morse code."

The Navy kept a course of its own, the Basic Manual Morse Trainer, at Corry Station in Pensacola. A 2016 report said Morse training had run there without a break since 2005:

• 2016: the course was offered to about 40 cryptologic technicians (collection) a year, in pay grades E-1 to E-5. Those who passed were classed as Morse code intercept operators (Navy Enlisted Classification 9169).
• 2020: the course was self-paced, 560 hours or 70 days long, and students finished in 60 days on average.

Other forces were still sending it in 2024. An article that year in The Conversation, on the war in Ukraine, describes Morse messages sent from Russian bombers to their control centres and from Baltic Fleet ships to their headquarters on shore, and notes that a Morse signal needs a bandwidth of only 100 to 150 hertz.

None of these sources says which other units train in Morse today, so this page makes no claim about them. For Morse outside the forces, in amateur radio, aviation and elsewhere, read Is Morse code still used?

In 2017 NATO wrote that Morse code had become "practically obsolete", then added: "Not completely though: in certain situations NATO still encodes messages via Morse using light-flashes and other visual signals because they are difficult to detect electronically."

The US Navy's own 2017 report said the way ships send messages by signal lamp "has barely changed" since World War II, and described a prototype meant to change it. The Flashing Light to Text Converter, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, mounts a camera on a signal lamp. The camera picks out the Morse flashes from another ship's lamp and software turns them into text on a laptop or handheld device. The sailor types a reply, and LED lights flash it back automatically, so it works even for sailors who don't know Morse code. The test ran between USS Stout and USS Monterey, 250 feet apart at the pier. It was meant for "communications-denied" situations, when satellite links are risky or unavailable.

You can run both halves of that loop with two phones:

1. 1Send. The Morse code flashlight flashes your message with the phone's torch at up to 15 WPM, or with the whole screen or a lamp on the page at up to 7 WPM. Screens stay at 7 WPM or slower, under 3 flashes a second, to protect photosensitive viewers. iPhones and iPads don't let a web page switch the torch on, so use the screen there.
2. 2Read. On the second phone, the light flash decoder watches the light through the camera and reads the flashes as letters.
3. 3Practise by eye. In Lighthouse keeper you read ships' names from their flashing lamps before they hit the rocks.

The list below is the international one, not a military-only list: the operating signals of International Morse code, defined in ITU-R M.1677-1. Several are prosigns: two letters run together into one signal, with no gap between them. The standard has no signals named "over" and "out". The nearest are K, the invitation to transmit, which hands the turn to the other station, and the end-of-work signal, which closes the contact.

A unit is the length of one dot. Each count above includes the one-unit gaps inside the signal and was measured with the site's own encoder.

A call is built from the same parts: the call sign of the station you want, the word DE, your own call sign, and then K. In the translator, type a prosign between angle brackets, like <SK>, to hear it sent as one signal. AR, BT and AS share their codes with the plus sign, the equals sign and the ampersand, listed on the Morse code punctuation page. For the radio shorthand operators use alongside them, such as QTH and 73, try the Q-code quiz.

At sea, Morse radio stayed in service into the 1990s. The US Coast Guard had worked ships by high-frequency Morse since 1959, and in January 1995 it announced that those services would end on 1 April 1995. NATO ships kept watch on 500 kHz, the international maritime emergency frequency, until the late 1990s. The replacement was the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS): adopted by the International Maritime Organization in 1988, phased in from 1992 and fully in force on 1 February 1999.

SOS can be heard two ways. As the distress prosign its nine elements run together, 23 units long. Typed as the letters S, O and S, it gains two letter gaps and runs to 27 units:

• SOS as one signal

  ...---...23 units · 1.38 s

• SOS as three letters

  ... --- ...27 units · 1.62 s

Ways to send it by light, sound or touch are on SOS in Morse code.

Type any message, or a prosign such as <AR>, and press Play to hear it at true timing. Open the full Morse code translator for every code table, or send the same message as light with the Morse code flashlight.