EXIT the Cavalry… ENTER the Tanks
PICTURES on these pages tell more vividly than words of the impending passing of the United States Army’s most romantic arm— the mounted cavalry. Horses are too slow for modern warfare, says the Army’s Chief of Staff. Except for maneuvers “in some cases of especially difficult terrain,” they will be replaced by fast tanks, as shown on the opposite page. Even the sturdy horses that drag the artillery’s fieldpieces into action will give way to motor tractor. The contrast between war of the past and future is visualized in these striking photographs.
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SCHOOL for DEEP SEA DIVERS
IF YOU think diving is a glamorous profession, visit the Navy’s Deep-Sea Diving School, at the Washington Navy Yard, and be disillusioned. Here, picked men are trained in the grim and hard business of rescuing sunken submarines, repairing ship bottoms, and doing a hundred and one specialized mechanical jobs on the bottom of the sea.
With every man a potential hero, facing injury and death in his routine daily work, the idea of developing diving “prima donnas” is discouraged at the outset. Students are sent down to their underwater jobs strictly in rotation, and for periods depending upon their strength and ability— just as they will be later sent down as regular divers of the navy.
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DEBUNKING Poison Gas War Scares
Europe is preparing for war. Her people are being drilled to use gas masks and to fight poison gas air raids. Will deadly gas wipe out American cities, destroy U. S. armies? Here are an expert’s views on this “bogey man” of war.
by CAPTAIN GEORGE J. B. FISHER,
Chemical Warfare Service, U. S. Army, as told to James Nevin Miller ENORMOUS cities blanketed with death-dealing gas fumes. Citizens rushing about in panic as enemy planes roar overhead. Thousands of lives snuffed out in a few minutes. Countless humans coughing and screaming with fear, fighting among themselves to reach subterranean gas-proof cellars.
This is the terrifying picture so frequently painted by fiction writers, the movies, and the sensational press about the horrors of poison gas in the next war.
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Space Cops to Enforce World Peace
Man-made satellite rocketships may soon revolve in endless orbits around the earth, policing our civilization.
By Frank Tinsley
NATIONS of the world are racing to send the first man-made satellite revolving in an endless orbit around the earth. In the hands of an agressor, such a machine might mean slavery for all mankind, but as a police unit of the United Nations, it holds a promise of world peace.
Back in the closing days of 1948, when Secretary of Defense James Forrestal disclosed the existence of an “earth satellite vehicle program,” the press and public reacted with a gasp of incredulous amazement. For the first time, responsible officials had dared to admit that they were seriously investigating the fantastic dreams of Sunday-supplement screwballs!
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Can Russia Defeat Us With Atom Bombs?
Assuming that the Reds have enough A-bombs and the planes to deliver them—could they blast us into military, social and economic chaos by a sneak bombing attack on certain key American cities?
By Ralph Coniston
“THIS is WQZ, your favorite local station for music and news, bringing you a noonday program of recorded hit tunes. The first number on today’s show will be. …
“Just one moment, please. Here’s an important bulletin from our newsroom, just handed me. It’s date-lined Washington, D. C.
“A terrific explosion has just wrecked downtown Washington. The blast, of unknown origin, seems to have damaged communication lines out of the city.
“I can’t tell you any more because there is no more to the bulletin. So, until further news comes in we’ll return to our.
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Wouldn’t the noise of it’s own passage mask any sound an engine would make?
Plans Rocket Driven Bomb to Chase and Wreck Plane
A bomb that could chase an airplane in the air and destroy it is the amazing war weapon proposed by a San Diego, Calif., man. Launched from the ground automatically, the self-propelled rocket bomb would be guided in the air by the sound of the plane’s motor. No matter how the pilot might twist and turn, the bomb would follow him until it overtook the plane. The impact would set off a charge of high explosive.
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THE TRUTH ABOUT Poison Gas
By ALDEN P. ARMAGNAC
FRANCE sells gas masks to its citizens on a five-year installment plan. Germany reveals that it has secretly been manufacturing a new type of gas mask for noncombatants, by the million. Startled Britons learn that the world’s first factory for civilian masks, at Blackburn, England, has passed its 9,000,000 mark and is turning out 100,000 a day to reach its quota of a gas mask for every man, woman, and child in the British Isles.
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TRAINING ARMY AIR FIGHTERS
A LARGE percentage of each year’s graduates of the West Point Military Academy enter the autumn class at the Air Corps Training Center, Randolph Field, Texas. This fact, and the further fact that the flying school is conducted along lines similar to the Military Academy, has caused this Air Corps school to be popularly termed “The West Point of the Air.”
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