Word: slessor
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There Is No Defense. Such plain speak ing in Britain is most unfashionable. It represents a considerable victory, won in disregard of popular British opinion, for a group of professional strategists led by a famed airman: Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Cotesworth Slessor...
Cockpit & Goggles. Slessor's convic tions hardened, as he did, in the school of experience. The son of a British major in the Indian army, he grew up with a cruel impediment: a "gammy leg" that kept him off the rugger field, gave him a lifelong limp. Nerve alone won his commission in the Royal Flying Corps, but once in the air, Slessor proved a topflight pilot. In the Sudan in 1916, he swooped down on a dervish cavalry outfit, routed it with Lewis gunfire and bombs, and "by this unexpected method of assault," wrote the official R.A.F. historian...
...Jack Slessor still misses his World War I biplane. "Flying isn't nearly as much fun as it was when you had an open cockpit and goggles." As chief of a bomber group in World War II, he was often compelled to decide how many airmen's lives it was worth to destroy an enemy target. "He would sit down on one of the kitchen chairs in the operations room," wrote one of those who watched. "For anything up to ten minutes, he would quite literally do nothing at all. He simply sat there and thought. Everyone instinctively...
...with a New Look. As the R.A.F.'s top air-power philosopher, Slessor showed greatest talent by his ability to weld experience and theory. In 1936 he wrote the pioneer text (Air Power and Armies) on strategic air bombardment ; in World War II he used it. He also reasoned that land-based aircraft, because of their longer range, would be more effective than carrier planes as submarine killers. As chief of Britain's Coastal Command, Slessor amply proved his point: of the 280 German U-boats sunk by British aircraft, land-based planes sank...
Most formidable of Slessor's "notions" was his postwar proposition that the Atlantic alliance could only maintain world peace through "massive deterrent air power." This is how it began. In 1952 Winston Churchill summoned Slessor and the other British chiefs of staff to No. 10 Downing Street and advised them that British finances could not stand an indefinite policy of piling up guns and tanks...