Main Categories Archives - Page 20 of 270

Idiot’s Loop

The Day I Nuked Los Angeles During the early 1950s, I fooled around with football, girls, and socializing while I was attending college and really didn’t know what I wanted to do in my life. When I saw the Korean War movie The Bridges at Toko-Ri, I knew right then I wanted to be a […]

World War II – The Pioneer Jets

The history of technology is replete with a concept called “multiple independent discovery.” Examples are the incandescent lightbulb by the American inventor Thomas Edison and the British inventor Joseph Swan in 1879, and the computer by Briton Alan Turing and Polish-American Emil Post in 1936. During the 1930s, on opposite sides of the English Channel, […]

Splash One Dreamboat

In a bizarre sequence of events, under orders, a P-61 Black Widow shoots down a B-29 Super Fort off of Iwo Jima. Arvid Shulenberger was at the controls of the night fighter turned Fort destroyer and in the October 2001 issue of Flight Journal, he tells, in his own words, how he came to shepherd […]

P-51 Mustang – An old war horse in its second war, free screen saver

The Mustang soldiered on longer than any other WWII fighter and we tend to forget its valuable role in Korea. There, most of the airplanes and their pilots were replaying roles they had executed so well only five years earlier in various parts of the globe. In Korea they were very much showing the patina […]

Rockoons: A Short Chapter in Atmospheric Research

At first glance, rockets and balloons would appear to be entirely separate technological species that would have little to do with one another. A modern rocket is a highly complex feat of engineering and, if powerful enough, can escape the Earth altogether. A balloon is as simple as simple gets (within reason), but even modern […]

Mitsubishi A6M Zero: Terror of the Pacific

Zero! Normally that’s a number signifying nothing, but to those who know history it indicates an able foe. A dainty, but lethal, dancer that cut a swath across the Pacific so bloody that for the first six months of World War Two it appeared as if nothing could stop it. The stories that filtered back […]

In Theater: Chariots of the Vanquished

By Stan Piet By mid-August 1945, the Japanese Empire was near collapse. Months of sustained bombing and two atomic attacks had devastated its prime cities and a widening blockade was strangling its faltering war industry and starving citizens. But Tokyo’s ingrained militaristic “fight to the death culture” still held sway, and an all out invasion […]

The Race for The Secrets

Disarming and Digesting the Luftwaffe. The gathering of German aviation technology by the United States in the final days of World War II was not a happenstance. As early as October 1944, the AAF created the Air Disarmament Division in England with a two-fold mission: collect examples of German technology, and scrap everything else that […]

Germany’s Wonder Weapons — V-2 Rockets

The German word was Vergeltungswaffe, which means “retribution weapon” but is normally translated as “vengeance.” Generically, the V program included a family of advanced concepts beginning with the V-1 cruise missile. The “buzz bomb” carried an 1,800 lb. warhead at around 400mph, but was susceptible to defending fighters and anti-aircraft guns. The V-2 was unlike […]

Honoring the ‘Flying Minute Men’

Flying Piper Cubs and Stinson biplanes, aircraft sometimes borrowed for the mission, the Civil Air Patrol guarded the American coast and helped turn back the U-boat onslaught that might otherwise have turned the tide of World War II. Men and women answered the call to serve as the nation went to war, joining the volunteer […]