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  • Integration of the USAF

    When the 322nd Fighter Group returned to the U.S. following the Allied victory in Europe in 1945, three of its squadrons were deactivated. The fourth, the famous 99th Fighter Squadron, was assigned to the 477th Composite Group at Godman Field, Ky. Equipped with both bombers (B-25s) and fighters

  • African Americans Segregated into Separate Units

    Meanwhile, the War Department forced the AAF to reverse a two decade old policy of excluding African Americans. After World War I, the War Department had segregated blacks into all-black units, and since the Air Corps had no black units, they accepted no blacks at all. The Selective Training and

  • President Ronald Reagan

    Several years after graduating from college and while employed as a sports announcer by a radio station in Iowa, Ronald Reagan began taking home-study U.S. Army Extension Courses. He enrolled in the program on March 18, 1935, and by December 1936, he had completed 14 courses. He then joined the

  • 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