Word: hellcats
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Long Island's Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. performed the neatest reconversion trick of the week. It went into production of a brand-new commercial product: an aluminum canoe. Designed by President Leroy Grumman, who turned out the Navy's Wildcat and Hellcat fighter planes, the canoe weighs one-half to two-thirds as much as wooden canoes. A 13-footer weighs only 38 pounds, yet the thin skin is tough enough to deflect anything up to a bullet. When capsized, the canoe automatically rights itself in the water with the help of air tanks...
...Navy's planemakers, Long Island's Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. was, as expected, in good health. After the Jap surrender, Grumman stopped making its famed Hellcat and laid off all of its 22,000 workers, then hired some 5,000 back. By last week, Grumman was shaken down to production of two Navy pursuit ships, the Bearcat and the Tigercat. They still have Navy orders for production at a rate of 75 a month. This was far below Grumman's war peak of 658 planes a month but well above their best peacetime volume...
...dozen 35,000-and 45,000-tonners, all completed since Pearl Harbor. In the carrier task force were half or more of the 27 fast carriers now in service.* There were schools of destroyers and fast-stepping cruisers. Over them, when the air strikes began, were swarms of Hellcat and Corsair fighters, Helldiver dive bombers, Avenger torpedo planes...
...Pacific is no longer the same ocean. Its blueness and its vastness remain, but all else is changed since that hazy, calm September dawn in 1943 when the new Hellcat fighters flew against Marcus Island from the new Essex-and Independence-class carriers in their first combat mission...
Bearing the brunt of U.S. antitank defense were two reliables: 1) the M36 (Slugger) with a high-velocity 90-mm. gun; 2) the fast, low-slung M18 (Hellcat) and its 76-mm. pieces. But the best antitank weapon of all is the rocket-firing fighter-bomber-weather permitting...