Word: hellcats
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stubby Grumman Hellcat, No. 1 Navy fighter craft in World War II, has long been outmoded by later propeller-driven types and by jets. Now the Navy has found a use for some of its old Hellcats: it has turned them into robots to punch the Communist enemy in Korea...
Several weeks ago a pilotless Hellcat, remote-controlled by radio, was catapulted from the carrier Boxer in the Japan Sea. For the first few minutes the robot's flight was controlled from the carrier's deck; then a piloted AD attack bomber, serving as a guide plane, took over. The Hellcat had a 2,000-lb. high-explosive bomb strapped to its belly, and a television camera under one wing. A TV screen in the guide plane enabled the observer to see just what the robot plane's camera "saw." Another screen on the Boxer also reproduced...
...robot (or "drone") reached Korea's east coast. The target was a rail-and-road bridge on the Reds' main line from Vladivostok to Wonsan. When the attacking party reached the target area, the AD hung back out of flak range, sent the robot on in. The Hellcat's camera and the AD's TV screen picked up the bridge. The control man in the AD put the robot into a screaming dive, kept his aiming crosshairs on the bridge as he watched it grow bigger & bigger on his TV screen. When the screen went blank...
Back in Tokyo after an interesting trip, U.P.'s Robert Gibson and A.P.'s Fred Waters wrote the story anyway of how they had seen Grumman Hellcat fighters, carrying TV transmitters, take off without pilots and be guided from "mother" planes. They thought censors might clear the story. They also mailed their home offices uncensored carbons of the stories to use in trying to get clearance from the Pentagon. The I.N.S.'s Don Dixon, taking the Navy at its word on the supersecrecy, did not even write the story...
...additional facts gave it top Page One play in many papers. In Washington, Navy brass called in all three services to find out who had leaked secrets and why. Retorted U.P.: What secrets? Popular Science had run a story about the possibilities of equipping Hellcat "missiles" with TV as long ago as April...