US Fighters shooting down Soviet fighters - Berlin 1945 ???

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Great story! I love it. Does anyone know where the phrase "cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey" came from?

Okay, a cold war question. You are over Germany, circa late twentieth centry and you hear "Brass Monkey, Brass Monkey" on guard. What does that mean and what are you suppose to do?
 
Cannon balls were originally kept in a piece of metal called a monkey, normally made of brass. When metals get cold, they shrink so when the brass monkey was cold enough, the cannon balls would fall out because threy wouldn't fit

At least, I think that's where it came from
 

Thats' what I heard.
 
One of my friends in the aces assn. had been a P-47 squadron CO. He described jumping a formation of unidentified single-engine aircraft near Berlin c. April '45. Back at base the intel shop naturally asked what type a/c but nobody could ID them. The IO got out the recognition manual and started flipping pages. Nobody recognized anything from the German section. Ooops. The IO flipped to Russia. Finally the CO exclaimed "That's it! Whatever it was we got 13 of 'em!" Shturmoviks. (I've been unable to confirm the event via Russian aviation historians.)
 

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