Our Air Force – A Farce! (May, 1939)
Interesting article from just before WWII pointing out that the U.S. air force sucks ass, has slow planes, is disorganized and hobbled by politics.
Our Air Force – A Farce!
“We are five years behind England and Germany in planes, engines and equipment and a full 10 years behind in the development of our air force as a third arm of defense”
by Major Al Williams
AMERICA is not an airpower! We have, instead, two flying services— one with the Army and the other with the Navy—and they are not adequate for the defense of the nation.
As airpower goes, I estimate that we’re about five years behind Europe’s leaders in planes, engines, and equipment, and a full 10 years would be needed for the maturity of a brand new service. This goes in spite of a European demand for American fighting ships, in spite of “downhill” speeds of from 575 to 700 m.p.h. claimed for blunt-nosed radial engined planes, and in spite of a college-student civilian training program which portends to be a solution to the pilot problem.
Our air-cooled engines are good, and hold their own with foreign radials. Our ships came in handy in the scramble for planes after the Munich incident; they are fill-ins for building programs that weren’t geared to air war. But they are powered by engines which can’t approach the English Rolls-Royce streamlined power plants, for instance, and none of the planes is in the same speed bracket with standard fighting ships of the airpower nations.
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