Word: combat
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Wooden Guns. Exact figures on Europe's military establishment were technically secret. But it was no secret to anyone that the Western European powers between them could put no more than a dozen poorly equipped, poorly organized combat divisions into the field, virtually bare of armor and effective air support...
...Lattre de Tassigny had struggled hard to reorganize the French army and instill into it a new self-respect. The fact remained that at home it still trained with wooden guns and that even with overseas forces it could put in the field only five to nine ill-equipped combat divisions. France had about 1,000 planes, all of them worthless for combat service...
...Belgium and The Netherlands, the total of men in arms was around 260,000, who might at best make up five combat divisions. Of these, 150,000 men were committed in Indonesia. Holland had two fighter squadrons (also in Indonesia), and Belgium had five...
...walls. There seemed to be an upper limit to speed. As airplanes flew faster & faster, strange things had happened to them. Hard, unseen fists punctured their metal skins. Mysterious arms reached out of the air to wrestle with their controls. Sometimes a wartime fighter pilot, diving too fast in combat, would feel his stick freeze fast. No matter how he tried, he could not pull out of the dive. Sometimes he did not live to tell the tale. Sometimes the demon let go just in time, and the shaken pilot got back to his base to describe his hair-raising...
Chuck got his wings in March 1943 as a flight officer, a warrant rank below the level of the commissioned officers. He joined the 363rd Fighter Squadron and went to England in December. The timid boy from Hamlin flew 64 combat missions, shot down 13 German airplanes, won a captaincy and a hatful of decorations...