Word: haps
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Better than the Truth. This dispatch was a kick in the teeth for Lieut. General Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces, and the man to whom the U.S. people look for accurate reports on the quality of U.S. fighting planes. Only last fortnight, at a press conference called expressly to give Washington correspondents the truth, General Arnold had been asked about a report that U.S. fighter pilots were using British Spitfires in preference to available U.S. fighters. General Arnold called this report "a flat...
...fact is that the pre-war U.S. fighter program was nothing to boast about. Hap Arnold and others responsible for U.S. fighter design sorely misjudged the requirements of war. Notably, the U.S. fighters of 1938, 1939 and 1940 were under-gunned, under-armored. For this fact - and for the resulting combat deficiencies - General Arnold cannot wholly plead the natural innocence of peace. Britain went into the war, in 1939, with two fighters (the Hurricane and Spitfire) which were ahead of any U.S. fighter then in service. Both planes had been designed and developed in the years (roughly 1935-39) when...
...private luncheon at the Army and Navy Club, blunt Henry Kaiser outshouted Airt Chief Henry ("Hap") Arnold and tough Lieut. General Brehon Somervell, chief of the Services of Supply, when they challenged his ability to produce. He had found an unexpected ally in ubiquitous Harold Ickes, who suggested that the Bureau to Mines might help find some untapped mineral resources. Then Donald Nelson, acting tougher than Washington had ever seen him, took Kaiser's proposal to the White House, convinced Frankling Roosevelt in one session that the man who had shown shipbuilders how to build ships should be allowed...
...squashed the bug in production, set up new training schools, speeded development work (especially on the famous Boeing Flying Fortress), hotfooted after new business. When in May 1941 President Roosevelt announced the super-duper heavy-bomber program, Phil Johnson was right on the ball, gave Air Chief "Hap" Arnold a four-point program which is still the framework of the $3 billion-plus U.S. bomber program. Soon he had snagged a whacking slice of the whole schedule for his own bombers...
...prove this assertion is not the object of U.S. airmen. But their job is to prove it as far as concerns the enemy's armies and navies. And on the shoulders of Hap Arnold falls the major responsibility...