Word: vandenbergers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Mature Youthfulness. At 46 (on Jan. 24), Hoyt Vandenberg is typical of many top-rank U.S. airmen. He combines the energy of an athlete with mature judgment. He is dead serious and fluent about anything having to do with aviation, reasonably interested in such lesser matters as golf (low 80s), tennis, gin rummy, Scotch highballs and good panatelas. Like most airmen of top rank, he has spent all his Army career learning and unlearning about air operations...
...that it was on the loose, the Ninth might turn in a classic of tactical air war. But the man who had speeded it into action was no longer commander of all of it. The German bulge had split Hoyt Vandenberg's rule over it. Two of his three fighter-bomber components-Quesada's and Brigadier General Richard E. Nugent's-had been shifted at least temporarily from Vandenberg's to "Mary" Coningham's command. The switch was a part of the realignment by which Field Marshal Montgomery had taken over command...
Tall (6 ft.), gregarious Hoyt Vandenberg still had a big outfit and able sub-commanders. The XIX Tactical Air Command, headed by quiet, efficient Brigadier General Otto P. ("Opie") Weyland (rhymes with island) was Vandenberg's link to the battlefields of Lieut. General George S. Patton's Third Army. Vandenberg's bomber outfit was a whopper, headed by Brigadier General Samuel E. Anderson, whose Marauders and Havocs had played a big part in pushing the German airfields back from the Atlantic in advance of Dday...
...well with Doolittle when he was Doolittle's chief of staff in Africa, but incurred his frowns for sneaking out on combat missions without letting Doolittle know. (Doolittle had wanted to go himself.) Once, on a flight to Gibraltar, Vandenberg manned a waist gun, helped drive off a German attacker while Doolittle took the place of the wounded copilot...
...Vandenberg (a nephew of Michigan's U.S. Senator) gets along 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...