Word: thunderbolting
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...mates of the 365th "Hell Hawk" group of Thunderbolt pilots, 22-year-old Lieut. Edward Syszmanski is "The Mad Polack of Brooklyn," in recognition of his fanatic artistry at ground-level train-busting. The Syszmanski technique: "I come in from the back of a train, aiming at the third car from the engine. I watch the bullets creep up toward the locomotive, and my plane is usually about 25 feet above the cars before I get enough shots into the boiler. Some of the locos blow up a few feet and settle back on the tracks as if heaving...
Cassady and Jaffe got back with the information. Vandenberg's men were ready with antitank guns that travel 400 m.p.h. - P47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers. For the next four hours the Thunderbolts struck in groups of four, boring in through the mist with flak-scarred wings nearly scraping the towering hills, to drop their bombs and to rake the column with rockets. One contingent found another column of comparable size on a winding road, gave it the lethal works...
...with his crewmen and enlistees by talking air-slanguage with the slangiest of them,* playing volleyball and ping-pong with them, and usually beating them. A dashing figure in impeccable uniform, cap set at a rakish angle, he seems to be always in action. He usually flies his own Thunderbolt in hops to staff headquarters. Back at his own post, he wants a lot of his own staff around in the evening, insists on singing with a quartet although he cannot carry a tune...
Unnerved Gunnery. Stevens retired beyond ack-ack range and hung around to plot the Japs' course for the Mitchell medium bombers and Thunderbolt fighters then taking off from Mindoro. At 7 p.m. the air-sea battle was on. U.S. air attacks spoiled the Japs' gunnery and left them with no stomach for slow bombardment runs which might have inflicted serious damage on Mindoro installations. Instead, while being chivvied from the air, the Japs steamed up & down the coast, taking pot shots as they went, doing negligible damage ashore...
...tons of equipment. Next day, while fighting went on in plain view, survey parties, each including six engineer-riflemen, set out to plot the new field. Within 24 hours they had bulldozed enough coral gravel to fill in 600 shell craters, and the first P47 Thunderbolt fighter landed...