Word: airman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Secret. The school grew out of a complaint made by General Henry ("Hap") Arnold during World War II. Too many officers, Airman Arnold said, know too little about the needs of the other services. In 1943, the Government set up an Army-Navy staff college to help the two services understand each other better. In 1943-45, Washington brass began to think it might be a good idea if the services and the State Department also understood each other better. In 1946 they set up the present National War College (named by then Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower...
Postwar: At the insistence of Army Chief of Staff Eisenhower, Airman Norstad was named War Department director of plans and operations. While Air generals and Navy admirals brawled in public, Norstad and the late Admiral Forrest Sherman quietly conferred, arrived at agreement on service unification. Norstad became Air Force operations chief in 1947, went to Germany in 1950 as commander in chief of the U.S. Air Force in Europe, was named Al Gruenther's deputy air commander in July, 1953. At NATO Norstad shaped atomic strategy, built up the air base network-communications system-and radar-warning service...
...huge (200-ton) experimental flying boat, the Hercules, 14 years abuilding at an estimated cost of $25 million, will be viewed as a squatter on city real estate. Actually, the Hercules has done nothing but squat since 1947, when in its maiden (and only) test flight, with intrepid Airman Hughes at the controls, it briefly lumbered 70 feet up into the air. If Hughes decides not to fight the eviction, the Hercules will probably be towed away in final ignominy...
...Most big Air Force bases are located in desert wastelands or on backwoods plains, where remoteness helps soundproof their shrieking engines from the civilian ear. Seldom do airmen wear their uniforms in bars or rub shoulders (and tempers) with civilians in off-duty hours. Today's airman has become a solid professional man; he stays near his base and works in or around a cockpit, described by a top air general as a "damned laboratory...
...retire," he first lived in California, then bought a house in Tarrytown, N.Y., played polo, water-skied, flew small planes. After his wife persuaded him to stop flying, he took her up for one last ride, buzzed under the George Washington Bridge in a final amateur airman's salute. To win a $100 bet, he once water-skied down the Hudson