Word: naval
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When he entered the Naval Academy he was 16, and younger than most of his classmates. His grades, mediocre at first, got better every year. The 1916 Lucky Bag (Academy yearbook) said: "Raddy came to us as a child-a pink-cheeked Apollo; since then he has been fooling people." The yearbook entry mentioned Radford's prowess with "drags" (i.e., girls), and sketched a disaster that happened in his second year-"he got a smoking pop with a hop only a week off"-which means that he was disciplined for out-of-bounds smoking and missed a dance...
...first postwar call for academy graduates to take flight training at Pensacola, Radford jumped at the chance, and might have gotten into the first Pensacola class if his ship had not been in Honduras. He made the second class, and got his "bird" (pilot's wings) as Naval Aviator No.2896...
...more than usually friendly battlewagon officer said to the bold young pilot: "Raddy, you guys are crazy to fly those airplanes like that. You're going to kill yourself one day with an engine failure." Raddy replied: "Look, sir, if we're going to accomplish anything in naval aviation, we can't reckon on engine failure. We have to think of these planes as being good enough to stay...
...Department of Defense, Radford remained one of the diehards. In integration he saw dire possibilities of damage to the Navy, its air arms and to the Marine Corps. He was sent out of Washington to command a peacetime task fleet, brought back again as Vice Chief of Naval Operations (as a vice admiral), sent out again in the spring of 1949, as a full admiral, to be CINCPAC...
...only grand-scale naval battle of World War I (May 31, 1916), in which the British lost 14 ships, the Germans...