Word: bomber
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Navy's case was simple but grave: the U.S. was entrusting its defense to a "fallacious concept"-the atomic blitz, and an inadequate weapon-the Air Force's six-engined B-36 bomber. Said Radford: "The B-36 has become, in the minds of the American people, a symbol of a theory of warfare-the atomic blitz-which promises them a cheap and easy victory if war should come...
...Navy retaliated with a concentrated campaign against the Army's present service bomber, the B-36. A civilian employee named Cedric Worth drafted an "anonymous" letter, with the help of some interested friends, denouncing the B-36 as a slow and eminently vulnerable airplane. The letter also hinted that the awarding of the B-36 contracts had involved political skulduggery. Worth's letter was picked up by Congressman James Van Vandt, Pennsylvania, a Navy man himself, and aired before an investigating committee this summer. Most of its charges were neatly shot down by the B-36 men. And the Navy...
There were some immediate and obvious revisions to make. The Air Force, which had been budgeted at 48 groups, had a powerful new reason for going onto a 70-group schedule as soon as Congress provided the money. The Air Force, heavily accenting bomber construction, would also have to emphasize another kind of plan: it would need more interceptors than it has contracted for. It would also have to speed work on construction of a 24-hour radar net across the Arctic frontier from Alaska to Greenland...
...Army and the second-ranking air officer, but he was kept in Washington. His account of those years is the familiar one of War Department myopia, never enough and that too late. Billy Mitchell wanted to bomb Germany, but the U.S. hadn't a single bomber. When Mitchell was court-martialed in 1925 for his obstreperous advocacy of air power, his friend & follower Hap Arnold was sent off to rusticate at Fort Riley. Determined not to quit under fire, Arnold passed up the job as president and general manager of Pan American Airways...
...crash (his F51 Mustang went out of control at Cleveland's National Air Races); in Berea, Ohio. Odom's round-the-world flight in April 1947 (78 hrs. 55 min.) broke Howard Hughes's record; his solo global trip four months later in a converted A26 bomber (73 hrs. 5 min.) shattered Wiley Post's old solo mark; his 5,000-odd-mi. hop in 36 hours from Honolulu to Teterboro, N.J. last March set a new light-plane record...