Word: groundmen
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...slightest sign of the milkshaky unpreparedness that enveloped the occupation troops of Germany and Japan. The Strategic Air Command (known to the Air Force as SAC) was a $310 million-a-year business, a top-priority task force with 1,100 planes, some 60,000 pilots, crewmen and groundmen. For 22 rugged months Curt LeMay had been holding them all to a relentless, competitive training schedule. With an impersonal assortment of charts and graphs -his "numbers racket," he called them -he kept a sharp, hazel-eyed watch on everything from bombing accuracy (up 500%) to venereal-disease rates...
East v. West. Serious interracial friction might have come to China with U.S. pilots and groundmen. That it did not was due in part to Claire Chennault. He insisted on having waiters and houseboys who spoke English in the barracks, to minimize language friction. Striking a Chinese, carrying arms on visits to nearby towns, promiscuous firing of arms were made court-martial offenses. Pilots were forbidden to "buzz" airfields: the diving planes frightened the Chinese laborers...
Some of the pilots, some of the mechanics, radiomen and other groundmen who made up the Group donned the khaki with winged insignia of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Some were already headed home. For some of these, the end had not been altogether pleasant. General Chennault at first had not looked kindly on their going, although he later relented. Two-thirds of the A.V.G.'s pilots had come out of the U.S. Navy, and they did not relish going into the Army any more than the Navy liked the Army's bid for them. But for those...
...between those who wanted an entirely separate air force and those who wanted to keep the Army's wings tied securely to the ground command. But the entente was not sufficiently strong to withstand a barrage of one-sided and slightly inaccurate publicity calculated to exalt airmen above groundmen. Having paid his respects to diplomacy, the General then proceeded to get on with...
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