Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (93 page)

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 The Japanese admitted to 140,000 deaths during the massacre of Nanking. The Chinese cited about 300,000 dead and 20,000 women raped. Again, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

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 Three were executed for “war crimes”: Lieutenants Farrow and Hallmark with Corporal Spatz.

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 He’d also remarked once that a “ship is always referred to as ‘she’ because it costs so much to keep her in paint and powder.”

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 Mitsubishi A6M Type 0 Model 21, known to the Allies as a “Zero.”

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MI
was “Midway Island,” and the secondary target of the Aleutian Islands was referred to as
AL
—an astonishing oversight on someone’s part. It was initially disregarded by U.S. intelligence as too obvious, yet turned out to be true.

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 Not something we’d see in present times. James Roosevelt later won the Navy Cross in combat.

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 The Air Group commander off the
Hiryu
.

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 Japanese submarine I-168.

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 Confronted with Allied success, the French government switched sides—again. Mussolini was replaced as prime minister and Italy signed a separate armistice.

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 The U.S. II Corps commander had been Lloyd Fredendall—a two-time washout from West Point who had never seen combat and stayed aboard his ship during the invasion. He was replaced by George Patton and the rest, as we say, was history.

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 A single Focke-Wulf 190 fighter contained over 4,000 ball bearings.

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 Among others, aircraft engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney suffered a 150,000 shortfall from SKF. Sweden was hardly neutral, and more than 20 percent of the munitions fired at Allied troops came from Swedish iron ore.

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 Actually a 41 percent loss rate if the irreparably damaged bombers are added.

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 NA-16 Harvard trainer.

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 Ironically, Kindelberger was the son of German immigrants and Schmued was born in Germany.

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 Called an A-36 “Apache,” over 500 were built and they fought well in North Africa, Italy, and the Far East.

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 Ford was mentioned in
Mein Kampf
and sent Hitler 50,000 Reichsmarks every year as a birthday gift.

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 At 20,000 feet the Mustang’s range was 950 miles at 350 knots.

^‡
 RAF Mk II gunsight was manufactured by Sperry as the K-14.

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 By this time their RAF and USAAF counterparts had anywhere from 350 to 450 hours before facing the enemy.

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Schwalbe
—“swallow.”

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 Japanese dead numbered more than 110,000.

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 The pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, named the plane after his mother.

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 Twelve percent of Army deaths and 10 percent for the Navy and Marines, respectively, were aviators.

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 Allied forces did the same thing in Europe with former Nazis.

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 USS
Boxer
,
Valley Forge
and
Philippine Sea
.

^*
 With the formation of the USAF in 1947, all former “P” designations used by the USAAF were changed to “F” for fighter; e.g., P-51 became F-51.

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 47,000 of these were U.S. troops.

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 Lieutenant Don Bolt. He was killed in action shortly thereafter.

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 On the streets of Tokyo the assault was called “Operation Common Knowledge.”

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 The average Chinese soldier would need about 8 pounds of supplies per day versus 60 pounds per day for his UN opposition.

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 Of the original 2,500 in RCT-31, over 1,000 were dead and less than 400 men were fit to fight after Chosin.

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 A 23 mm shell weighs 6 ounces and a 37 mm shell weighs over 2 pounds. By comparison, a .50-caliber bullet weighs 1.5 ounces.

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 The copied engine produced 5,000 pounds of thrust while the best indigenous Soviet engine was the RD-20 at about 1,800 pounds of thrust.

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 German aerodynamicist Adolph Buseman introduced the concept in 1935 but was virtually ignored. Possibly because engine technology hadn’t evolved to the point where a wing could be accelerated into the sonic region.

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 This occurred six times in combat and resulted in the loss of two Sabres.

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 The AN/APG-5C radar was factory installed on the third production run of 333 F-86As and was eventually replaced by the APG-30.

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 For the sake of appearances, today’s USAF still has dirt painted green to look like grass and occasionally a tree trunk is spray-painted because it isn’t “brown enough.”

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 Despite the base’s illustrious history, apparently having “Home of the Fighter Pilot” on the main gate was deemed politically incorrect by the wife of General Norton Schwartz, transport pilot and former USAF Chief of Staff. Fortunately, his successor, General Mark Welsh, promptly had it put back where it belongs.

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 Colonel Whisner also won the Bendix Trophy in 1953. He died from allergic complications following a wasp sting in 1989.

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 This happened 10 to 60 percent of the time, according to Ed Rock, Dolph Overton, Charles Cleveland, and Glenn Carus.

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 Lieutenant No Kum-Sok, KPAF MiG-15 pilot.

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 Sixteen MiGs were also destroyed by B-29 gunners.

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 Nicknamed “Old Iron Tits,” Ridgway wore two hand grenades on his chest.

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 The U.S. military suffered 33,686 battle deaths; 8,176 are still listed as missing in action.

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 Among other things, he was a cook at the Parker House Hotel in Boston in 1913.

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 Named for the World War I battlefield of Dixmude. It was just to the south of this city that Roland Garros scored the first air-to-air kill with his forward-firing machine gun in April 1915. See Chapter 1.

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 The pillboxes all had female names: Gabrielle, Anne-Marie, Huguette, Béatrice, Françoise, Éliane, Claudine, and Isabelle—supposedly for de Castries’s local mistresses.

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 Trichlorophenoxyacetic acid mixed with dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, better known as Agent Orange.

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 The water was only 20 feet deep and the
Card
was patched up, repaired, and returned to service in December.

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 The first USN combat jet loss in Southeast Asia.

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 Secretary of State Dean Rusk—see Chapter 12. This is the same man who drew the arbitrary line separating Korea at the 38th parallel.

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 DEHAVEN Special Operations off TsingtaO. The USS
DeHaven
made the first such patrol in 1962.

^*
 In 1962 the USS
Ticonderoga
had been commanded by Captain James G. Daniels, formerly Ensign Daniels of Pearl Harbor fame. See Chapter 10.

^‡
 Senator Ernest Gruening (D-AK) objected to “sending our American boys into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is steadily being escalated.”

^*
 Until 1966 when Dixie Station was discontinued and all the carriers went north.

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 Ironically, McNaughton himself died in a plane crash two years later.

^*
 
Bull’s-eye
is a common reference point used to describe threat locations or your own position. Hanoi, often called “Dodge City,” was commonly used.

^*
 A pioneer like Beatrice Shilling (see Chapter 8), Joan Curran and her husband, Sir Samuel Curran, also developed the proximity fuse and were later members of the Manhattan Project. Joan rowed crew at Cambridge, where she earned a degree in physics, but was not awarded this in 1935 because she was a woman.

^*
 Patent #2,292,387. To Hedy Lamarr, the gorgeous American actress famous for playing Delilah. Born in Vienna during the Great War, she was fiercely pro-American and had a magnificent brain to complement her terrific legs. Her technique is the basis for many forms of modern communications, including Bluetooth.

^*
 Donovan was a former B-52 EWO. When the new, fighter-based program was explained to him he replied, “You want me to fly in the back of a little tiny fighter aircraft with a crazy fighter pilot who thinks he’s invincible, home in on a SAM site in North Vietnam, and shoot it before it shoots me, You Gotta Be Shittin’ Me!” The abbreviated version of this, “YGBSM,” has been a Weasel motto ever since. Thanks, Jack!

^*
 By comparison, the F-86 wing area was 313 sf for a 50 lb/sf wing load. Sopwith’s triplane carried 6.5 lbs/sf over a 201 foot wing area.

^*
 The author has been in the MiG-29 and flown the MiG-21—both are ergonomic disasters.

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 The Sidewinder snake moves forward by rapid side-to-side movements as does the missile as it corrects, and zigzags to its target.

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 Colonel Ed Rock’s first experience with the AIM-9 was in 1957 at Nellis AFB. The tech rep stood on the other side of the hangar waving a lit cigarette so everyone could watch the missile fins move accordingly.

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  U.S. fighter squadrons typically maintained at least a 70 percent readiness rate.

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 James McDonnell named it himself, though his designers wanted to call it the “Ghost.” The Phantom I had been the first jet aircraft to fly from a U.S. carrier—the
Franklin D. Roosevelt
in 1946.

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 This was conceived to provide a pool of trained pilots for rapid USAF expansion.

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 Once the battle began, they would revert to their own flight call signs: Olds, Ford, Rambler, Lincoln, Tempest, Plymouth, and Vespa.

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 Incidentally, Pardo and Aman were both wingmen. Their flight leads had already gotten separated and were on their way home when all this occurred.

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 $171,500 in 2012 U.S. dollars.

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 900 of the 2,584 GDB sorties were flown by Marines. USAF B-29 missions made up the remainder.

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 Mining of the ports to prevent seaborne resupply still wasn’t permitted by Washington.

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 Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden, likened the bombings to other international crimes like Guernica and the Katyn Forest. Apparently he’d forgotten his own nation’s involvement with Hitler and SKF. See Chapter 11.

^*
 Moshe Dayan, the one-eyed defense minister, called the canal the best anti-tank ditch in the world. He lost his eye to a Vichy French sniper in 1941.