Word: bomber
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...would be shot down before it reached its target: "Today . . . American planes by day or by night and at all speeds and altitudes which the B-36 can operate on military missions, can locate the bomber, intercept the bomber, close on the bomber, and destroy the bomber . . . It is folly to assume that a potential enemy cannot do as well . . . The unescorted B-36 is unacceptably vulnerable...
...Bomber Generals." The scorn that Airman Radford once saved for "battleship admirals" he now turned on his fellow flyers across the fence in the Air Force. "Are we as a nation to have 'bomber generals' fighting to preserve the obsolete heavy bomber-the battleship of the air? Like its surface counterpart, its day is largely past ... In the last analysis, the B-36 is a 1941 airplane...
...case? Obviously, the plain speech of patriotic men could not be dismissed as the whimpering of a proud service which now saw itself reduced to a second line of defense. It was clear that the Navy deeply distrusted Secretary of Defense Johnson, who had fathered the big-bomber program when he was Assistant Secretary of War before World War II, and had summarily canceled the Navy's supercarrier without consulting the Navy...
...initial atomic blow; the threat alone "serves to divert a great portion of any nation's effort to its internal defense." There were better planes than the B-36 on the drawing board and in the works, but until they were ready, the B-36 remained the best bomber in being, in a year of crisis...
What was the Navy's alternative? Said Radford: small, fast bombers which, escorted by fighters, could hit military targets with accuracy. It sounded remarkably like the formula for World War II carrier warfare. Certainly the Navy did not now have a bomber with the range, speed and armor of the B-36, which could drop the atomic bomb...