Word: radford
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Radford had a variety of sea and shore duty, doing what he could all the while to improve the technique of carrier flying. In the autumn of 1941 he was called back from a base command at Trinidad to take charge of the Navy's air training program, a job which got him a rear admiral's two stars. Radford took over the training program a week before Pearl Harbor. His problem was to combine mass production with high quality...
...Emergency Turn 9." In 1943, with the training program running like a watch, Radford persuaded his superiors to send him to sea, fought his first major action as commander of a carrier group in the U.S. invasion of the Gilberts (Tarawa-Makin). He had a prescient hunch that the Jap carriers, fed up with heavy daytime losses, would launch an attack at night. With Lieut. Commander Edward H. ("Butch") O'Hare, famed Congressional Medal winner, Radford worked out a radar-equipped night fighter system. When -sure enough-Jap torpedo planes were reported approaching after dusk, O'Hare took...
...Radford was called back to Washington to straighten out Navy air administration -particularly in the matter of getting combat-equipped planes from the factories to the fighting areas. When that had been satisfactorily attended to, he went to sea again, this time commanding Carrier Group 58.4-a component of wizened, brilliant Marc Mitscher's Task Force 58. His group joined the first carrier strikes- after Doolittle-on the Japanese home islands...
...occasion when "bogies" (unidentified and presumably enemy planes) were reported only 18 miles off, an excited officer in the flag-plot cabin reached for the ship-to-ship radio telephone and dropped it. Another excited officer darted to pick it up, and upset the transmitter. Radford, who had been watching, picked up the telephone, quietly gave an order: "Emergency Turn 9," and turned away. No one ever heard him raise his voice in the stress of battle...
Four Stars. Since Radford was a man of charm and an able, forceful lobbyist, he was persuaded by the late James Forrestal, then Secretary of the Navy, to stay in the CNO's office to negotiate the service merger which Forrestal saw was inevitably coming...