Word: fourteenth
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...Fourteenth has grown in the past six months. Where Chennault once had a few score planes, he now has a few-a very few-hundreds. His force includes four-engined, long-range B-24 bombers, P-38 fighters. By the standards of more prosperous theaters, its facilities are few and primitive. But major bases have been leveled, graded and embellished with revetments and repair shops-in view of supply difficulties, a miraculous achievement. Personnel is well housed, clothed, fed. No longer does Chennault himself operate from mud-and-bamboo headquarters, but from a spic-&-span, map-covered, easy-chaired, well...
...Fourteenth is still confined by geography and tactical limitations. It operates chiefly in the vast pocket of Central China south of the Yangtze, hedged in on the north and south by the two great Jap bases at Hankow and Canton. Its fighters and bombers provide an air umbrella of limited scope when the Jap in Central China and along the Salween front of western Yunnan stabs at the tough, resilient Chinese lines. But the Fourteenth has a consolation of sorts: its men know that they are contributing to a much greater show. Every ship sunk and every plane shot down...
...coolie-hand. At the main base three Americans direct thousands of Chinese laborers in the constant process of reconstruction and repair. Asphalt and concrete runways are practically unknown; most of the strips are paved with mud, hand-poured and bound with crushed rock. On a very few fields the Fourteenth has strips of the Chinese version of asphalt, made of tung oil, resin, sand and hand-chipped rock...
Chennault has also imparted some of his faith in Chinese airmen. There is a training school for Chinese flyers in India, and its graduates return to Chennault. Although they operate chiefly in separate, locally defensive units, a few Chinese flyers are integrated into the Fourteenth. The best of them have proved to be reliable and hard-hitting in battle, and are now accepted by most of the Americans...
...bomber over the turbulent waters of the South China Sea. Wells pointed a finger at Shinchiku airdrome on Formosa, one of Japan's great nests of air power and transshipment centers. The only newspaperman to accompany "the most dangerous mission ever attempted by fighters and bombers of the Fourteenth Air Force" White cabled: "Surprise and good navigation were vital to success. The mission was to be at almost suicidal level-even five minutes warning would give the Zeros enough time to take off, climb and turn to the attack. We had to come in from the sea precisely...