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  • Political Pressure

    In the late 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt anticipated that the U.S. could be drawn into a war in Europe. His administration began a pilot training program in 1938 to create a reserve of trained civilian fliers in case of a national emergency. African American leaders argued that blacks

  • Tuskegee Airmen

    Reflecting American society and law at the time, the U.S. military remained racially segregated during World War II. Most African American soldiers and sailors were restricted to labor battalions or other support positions. One experiment in the U.S. Army Air Forces, however, demonstrated

  • Bombing as a Manpower Problem

    The Norden bombsight served as the U.S. Army Air Forces' primary high-altitude visual bombsight during World War II. In 1939 a journalist exaggerated its accuracy with the claim that it could "drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 18,000 feet." The claim was exaggerated, but unprecedented accuracy was

  • German V-Weapons: Desperate Measures

    "I am informed by the Fuhrer for the first time that the big rocket bomb weighs 14 tons. This, of course, is a devastating murder weapon. I suspect that when the first projectiles plunge down into London, the English public will panic."- Josef Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister"The employment of

  • Northern Italy in 1945: The Noose Tightens

    By 1945, Allied bombing efforts began concentrating on cutting German transportation and supply lines in northern Italy to slow retreating Germans and to assist the Allied armies slowly advancing against the Germans. The number of antiaircraft guns (flak) defending these areas pointed to the

  • Glider Pilot Training

    Training time varied but consisted of daylight flying in light aircraft practicing unpowered gliding and "dead stick" landings; day and night flying in training gliders, unpowered light aircraft or sailplanes; advanced training in CG-4A combat gliders; and finally tactical training. Most graduates

  • Airborne Operations

    Airborne Operations was one of the tactical innovations introduced during World War II, although the use of parachute troops had been considered during World War I. In the 1930s, most of the world's major armies were experimenting with the idea of airborne operations as a rapid means of delivering

  • V-1 Buzz Bomb

    Germany answered the invasion of France by launching its first V-1 against London on the night of June 12-13. By July 21, 4,059 V-1s had been fired, 3,045 of which reached England. Although this "secret weapon" did little to alter the course of the war in France, it killed 3,875 people and injured

  • Winged Angels: USAAF Flight Nurses

    Before World War II (WWII), the US military was not properly equipped to evacuate wounded soldiers from the front lines. The need to access the remote battlefields of WWII drove the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) to revolutionize military medical care through air evacuation. At the same time, commercial

  • D-Day

    The first Allied amphibious troops hit the beaches of Normandy at 6:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944. Constant air cover was flown over the vast sea armada and the assault beaches, and only three Luftwaffe airplanes were sighted the first day. For the next several weeks while the Allies strengthened