United States Air Force

The Amazing Cluster That Invading Sicily Became

by Daniel Russ on February 25, 2020

    From Rick Atkinson’s Day of Battle. “Ships wallowed like treasure laden galleons on the Spanish Main. The American convoys alone carried more than 100,000 tons  of supplies.  5,000 tons of crated airplanes, 7000 tons of coal, 19,000 tons of signal equipment the expedition manifest was Homerian in scale and variety. 6.6 million rations, […]

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Dresden

by Daniel Russ on December 29, 2019

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February 13, 14, 15. In four waves, 722 British heavy bombers and 427 USAAF assets dropped about 4000 tons of high explosive and incendiary munitions on a quaint little bedroom community called Dresden.   This was part of British Air Minister Arthur Harris’s strategy of Strategic Bombing.   A survivor commented:   It is not […]

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Letter to Mom

December 25, 2019
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    In Rich Atkinson’s An Army at Dawn, British Soldiers recovered a glasses case from a dead, pilot. In it was this note:   Mother, please do not grieve, but rather console yourself in the fact that I am happy. Try to enjoy the remainder of your life as best you can and have […]

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Super Cool DARPA VTOL X Plane Animation

December 12, 2019

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78 Years Ago Today

December 7, 2019
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Japanese Strike US 7th Fleet In Pearl Harbor Related Posts:Stay Tunes For Similar Posts

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USAF Commercial – Do Something Amazing

December 6, 2019

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The Horrors of Allied Bombing.

February 18, 2019
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  In the Spring of 1945 a massive effort was made to wipe out Germany’s last oil capacity. 500 Allied attacks on 130 targets reduced oil manufacturing to a fraction of its original capacity.   The Allied strategic bombing initiative would leave 7 million Germans homeless, 400,000 dead and who even knows how many injured? […]

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The Monroe Bomb

February 13, 2019
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The Monroe Bomb was a propaganda leaflet distribution device dropped from Allied heavy bombers. Named after it inventor: Capt. James Monroe during World War II. Thousands of pieces of leaflets with messages in whatever languages were spoken below were inserted into a laminated paper cylinder with a detonator and a delay, and then loaded into […]

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D-Day Details.

December 21, 2018
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    On the way to Normandy, the British were more than generous, adding to the US food allotment 240,000,000 pounds of potatoes, 2.4 million tent pegs, 15 million condoms, 1000 cake pans, 260,000 grave markers, 80 million packets of cookies, 54 million gallons of beer.   The US Army aggregated from overseas and from […]

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Reading from The Guns At last Light. The War in Western Europe 1944- 1945, by Rick Atkinson. Part II.

December 16, 2018

  The saying in England was that the problem with Americans is that they are “over sexed, overfed and over here.”   My father served in the 8th Air Force and was stationed in England in service there of. He told me that in England, women would signal that they were ready for sexual congress […]

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Reading from The Guns At last Light. The War in Western Europe 1944- 1945, by Rick Atkinson.

December 12, 2018
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  This book is brilliant as it paints pictures we rarely imagine. He talks about immensely altered landscape of Europe in the last year of the conflict.   Five years of warfare had left British cities as “Bedraggled, unkempt, and neglected as rotten teeth.” People talked about ‘Before the war” as if it were a […]

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The Origins Of Hitler’s Folly.

October 17, 2018
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Wehrmach Soldiers Examine A Destroyed T-34. Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gave the Germans purview over Poland, Belorussia, the Ukraine and the Baltic. It was the result of the end of World War I and it was a cornerstone of Hitler’s belief that there stood a Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy.  So his trajectory through Russia, he hoped, would […]

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The Convair XC 99

October 13, 2018
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This is the only XC 99 plane ever built. Convair wanted to turn the B 36 Peacemaker into a massive cargo plane. This piston engine propeller driven craft first flew on November 24th 1949. It was cancelled because so many new plane were on the way with better fuel efficiency and greater payloads Related Posts:Stay […]

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The AT-10 Wichita Trainer

September 4, 2018
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Beechcraft received a request for proposal for a flight trainer in 1940 from the United States Army Air Corps. It was called Model 25 and the The Wichita. It was a twin-engine plane designed to teach pilots how to fly multi engine planes. The prototype Model 25 gave way to the upgrade Model 26 and […]

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The Odd Beauty of Military Boneyards

July 10, 2018

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Korea Is Not Just The Forgotten War. It Is The Odd War.

June 28, 2018
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Marines at Yudam-Ni Douglas McArthur fell into a trap engineered by Mao Tse Tung and his combat planners. The Korean War began on the 25th of June 1950 and ended on July 27th 1953. It was a bloody back and forth struggle between local, poor and mostly uneducated masses and the United Nations combined force […]

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The Bell D-188

June 24, 2018
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In 1955 it was engineers at Bell Aircraft that received a US government contract to develop at short take-off and landing four engine Mach 2 jet fighter/bomber/interceptor. It was slow to prototype and for a lot of reasons the USAF fell out of love with the notion of what would become the F-109. Related Posts:Stay […]

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Developing The XF-108 Rapier

June 18, 2018
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A-5 Vigilante XF-108 Concept To the Cold War aviation engineers, speed was everything. So it is not surprising that as early as 1949 the USAF was issuing contracts to prototype Mach 3 interceptors. In fact the XF-103 was also known as the 1954 Interceptor, an all-weather radar equipped weapons platform for air to air missiles. […]

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The A-10 Warthog Destroyed 14 Tank Battalions And 83 Artillery Batteries In Just One War.

June 13, 2018
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The A-10 is exceptionally tough, designed to withstand armor piercing and or high explosive shells from small arms to 23  AP and explosive projectiles up to 23 mm. It has redundant hydraulic controls, and mechanical flight capability if flight by hydraulics is not possible.  It can fly on one engine, with half of one rear horizon […]

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The Bell Airacuda

March 2, 2018
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The first military aircraft produced by the Bell Aircraft Corporation once called the “Bell Model 1, it then became The Airacuda in 1937. The concept was a powerful and large and highly armed aircraft that was a cross between a bomber and an interceptor, and it would hopefully become a bomber killer. This plane had […]

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