Word: combatting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Song. Throughout U.S. history, Negroes have fought-and died -in the nation's wars (and Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave, was the first to fall in the Boston Massacre of 1770, prelude to the American Revolution). Yet always the verdict was the same: in combat, Negro units were "unreliable"-a euphemism for an uglier word. Even in the Korean war-nearly three years after President Truman's 1948 order for armed-forces equality-the classic story was of Negroes who fled from battle, then huddled around a campfire singing The Bug Out Boogie, the "official song...
Carved into the memory of every combat pilot are moments of total recall-the unforgettable glimpses of a foeman starting to smoke, the inescapable sounds of the typewriter-tapping of tracer on fuselage and rudder. Captain Heinz Knoke, winner of Nazi Germany's coveted Rit-terkreuz and the youngest squadron commander in the Luftwaffe, pinpoints his most vivid memory high above Helgoland, one July day in 1943. In I Flew for the Führer, Knoke tells how his Messerschmitt squadron loaded up with 500-lb. fragmentation bombs and climbed high above a formation of U.S. Flying Fortresses...
...that single encounter, reports Knoke, the U.S.A.F. lost eleven bombers, the Germans only one. Knoke chalked up his 13th combat kill, and his mechanics carried him shoulder-high from his cockpit. The bombing technique delighted his superiors. His colonel, he wrote, "bleats away happily ... I hope his monocle will not fall into his cup of cocoa in the excitement...
Heavy Babies. Knoke ached for combat, and in the bloody days of 1943 it hit him with a bang. His radio told of "heavy babies in [sector] Anton-Quelle-eight," and Knoke saw some 300 Liberators, "like a great bunch of grapes, shimmering in the sky." He attacked head on and got the surprise of his life. "I almost scrape [one] fat belly as I dive past. Then I am caught in the slipstream, buffeted about so violently that ... I wonder if my tailplane has been shot away . . . Damn all this metal...
...Fanfani." Close to 6 on a rainy afternoon, word got around that the two most dramatic antagonists in Italy, Communist Leader Palmiro Togliatti and Christian Democrat Alcide de Gasperi, would meet in parliamentary combat. The galleries filled up and the chamber hushed for the performance of Italy's brilliant Red orator...