NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2011 Jul 28, 21:51 -0700
You wrote:
"Sorry to bump an old subject, but I have a few comments about this link:
http://www.aggregat456.com/2006/07/geodet.html"
Nothing wrong with bumping an old subject, but when you do it's useful to provide the date of the original post or better yet quote some lines from it so that we know what it refers to.
You also wrote:
"1st.) I think the name "geodet" is fabricated by the author."
I've found good evidence that it was, in fact, the term used during the war. Of course, it was the jargon of a very small number of people, so evidence for it is slight. One bit of evidence: there's an out-of-print memoir listed on amazon http://www.amazon.com/Force-Geodesy-Recollections-Geodetic-Control/dp/B000SLNNFA/ that describes the experiences of one such "geodet" team member. The "editorial review" (which in this case probably means text on the back of the book) reads as follows "The word 'Geodet' was coined by Army Air Force personnel during WWII who were assigned to small teams that went into remote corners of the world to observe and record the passage of stars overhead to determine exact positions on the Earth's surface for the aeronautical charts required in prosecuting the war. This book is a compilation of the experiences and stories from that endeavor."
Better evidence: if you search for 'geodet' on google books for publications in the 1940s, amid many false hits for abbreviations of "geodetic", there are also a few direct references to "geodet" teams in the Army Air Force during the Second World War. Again, it must have been a term known only to those specialists actually involved in this survey work, but it is confirmed by (apparently) independent period sources.
-FER
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