Word: kaiser
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...July 1942, the Germans were sweeping unchecked across Russia and Africa. Help from the U.S. was crippled by German submarines, which were knocking off up to 700,000 tons of shipping a month. It was a dark hour for the Allies, and the man of the hour was Henry Kaiser, the miracle shipbuilder and idea man from the west...
Pudgy Henry Kaiser, by his own testimony before the committee, had bustled into Washington with a hatful of ideas. One of them paid off. It was a fleet of baby flattops to extend U.S. air power across the Atlantic. As much as anything, his carriers broke the back of the U-boat campaign. Another Kaiser scheme was a fleet of 500 enormous cargo planes to broad-jump over the subs...
Miracle Man Kaiser had had a little more trouble selling that scheme. The Army & Navy were against it. They needed scarce materials and technicians for their standard combat and transport craft. Planemaker Grover Loening told committeemen how, as a representative of WPB, he looked over Kaiser's plan and reached the same conclusion as the military men. WPB's aviation experts figured Henry Kaiser didn't know an airplane from a Sherman tank and that his promise to get the first model into the air within 20 months only proved...
...Kaiser had blustered his way to the top, where he convinced WPB Boss Donald Nelson of the worthiness of his idea. Nelson said go ahead, and RFC Chairman Jesse Jones produced the Government cash. Kaiser picked Howard Hughes as his partner in the venture. Witness Merrill C. Meigs, Hearst executive and senior consultant in WPB's aviation division, recalled with awe: "Kaiser is one of the world's greatest salesmen, in a class with Diamond Jim Brady and Bill Sunday...
Bluster & Ballyhoo. What these facts proved was that bluster and ballyhoo had been a big force in wartime Washington. The final super-cargo-plane contract turned out to be for only three 200-ton craft. Kaiser lost interest in the scheme and later bowed out, muttering darkly about a "mysterious kiss-off." With Hughes on his own, the contract shrank to one plane which has never yet flown...