Word: grounds
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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President Roosevelt followed up this warning by saying that $150,000,000 would have to be added to next year's Navy budget if work was to go ahead on six new battleships. Besides expanding the fleet and the ground forces, air forces must be geared up by mass production of planes, as they are doing abroad (see p. 18). And private utilities must be stimulated to spend $1,000,000,000 if the U. S. is to have adequate wartime power resources. Observers took all this as a tip: watch for billion-dollar Army & Navy items...
Bombers can be downed in two ways: by gunfire from the ground or gunfire from defending planes. Antiaircraft gunnery is soundly organized, having within each combat component (of four guns per battery) an effective detection and warning system, based largely on the fact that big planes can nearly always be heard, and in fair weather can be seen, in time to aim the guns. The one large question mark remaining is accuracy, with which the Army was not primarily concerned last week. Pursuit plane defense is not so soundly organized. Bomber speeds of 250 m.p.h. so nearly equal...
...area worth bombing there are bound to be plenty of civilians. The Army proposed to use civilian eyes & ears. An Army reservation surrounded by civilians, and big enough for a variety of targets and ground defenses, was the Field Artillery's Fort Bragg, 100 miles inland from the North Carolina coast. Two months ago, Brig. General Fulton Quintus Caius Gardner went to work to sharpen civilian eyes, prick civilian ears in 39 counties and 20,758 square miles around Fort Bragg. In each of 307 eight-mile squares, the cooperating American Legion found farmers, storekeepers, housewives, amateur radiomen, foresters...
...Army's 800,000,000 candlepower searchlights are the world's most powerful. Last week 26 of them, needling the sky above Fort Bragg, seldom found a bomber. Sometimes moonlight diffused the searchlight rays, or clouds blocked them. At dawn, most difficult time of all for ground gunners, searchlights were of no use whatever...
Furthermore, civilian netting in rural and small-town North Carolina did not answer the defense questions of Manhattan, Pittsburgh, Chicago, San Francisco, around which lie vast patchworks of smaller cities, replete with well nigh indispensable lights, ground noises to dull groundling ears, an appalling number of dispersed targets for enemy hunters. Army men neatly turned this fact to their publicity uses. In North Carolina was concentrated all the modern antiaircraft equipment east of the Rocky Mountains. Twenty-four guns, in six batteries, were barely enough to defend the 1½-square mile objective marked off at Fort Bragg...