Major Sam P. Bakshas woke up that morning with the secrets in his head.
Bakshas was one of the men flying B-29 Superfortress bombers from three Pacific islands Guam, Saipan, and Tinian. A writer dubbed these men “the thousand kids.” There were actually several thousand, and they were giving heart and soul to bombing the Japanese home islands what they called “the Empire” with no success. They were dropping bombs from high altitude and not hitting much. The air campaign against Japan was failing.
Bakshas believed the situation could be turned around.
Bakshas was 34. He was older and bigger than the Superfortress crewmembers around him. He was six-feet-one and almost 200 pounds. He was from Fergus County, smack in the center of Montana, and had courted his wife Aldora with the gift of an airplane ride. Today, Bakshas commanded the 93rd Bombardment Squadron, part of the 19th Bombardment Group.
National greatness depends on more than simply victory in battle, as the persistence of U.S. power suggests.
Here s What You Need To Remember: Though these defeats were catastrophic, none was final - and the United States came back from each, eventually.
Nations often linger on their military defeats as long as, or longer than, they do on their successes. The Battle of Kosovo remains the key event of the Serbian story, and devastating military defeats adorn the national narratives of France, Russia and the American South. What are the biggest disasters in American military history, and what effect have they had on the United States?
The B-25 continued to be the preferred medium bomber in the Pacific until the war’s end.
Here s What You Need To Remember: The B-25 was an all-around excellent aircraft; it lacked any serious vulnerabilities, and its configuration was varied during the war to best fit its requirements.
During the 1920s, U.S. Army Air Service commander Brig. Gen. William C. “Billy” Mitchell drove himself into an early grave while frantically trying to convince the ground-bound generals of the U.S. Army that the airplane was the weapon of the future.
Mitchell’s efforts reached the point of insubordination, for which he was court-martialed in the fall of 1925 and suspended from further service for five years. The verdict led Mitchell to resign from the Army, and he soon succumbed to the ill health his battle had earned for him. But his name would live on in the tactics he had advocated and in the bomber that was named in his honor.
SR-71 Blackbird, I am Your Father: Meet the Lockheed A-12
The CIA’s twelve ultra-fast A-12 jets were doomed to a brief operational career after the first flight in 1962.
Here s What You Need To Remember: Ultimately, the A-12 was done in by a far more ancient enemy than the Soviet Union: budget cuts.
Analysis of Week’s photos located the USS Pueblo near Wonsan anchored next to two patrol boats and also revealed that Pyongyang had not mobilized its troops for war. This led Johnson to rule out plans for a preemptive or punitive strike in favor of diplomatic measures which eventually saw the ship’s abused crew released nearly a year later.
What if Nixon had never gone to China?
China’s shift of weight towards the United States had major international implications. It heightened Soviet military vulnerability, while also providing what would become an engine of global economic growth. Within China, the pivot opened space for major domestic economic reform, although the Chinese Communist Party would not take advantage of this for several years.
We think of China’s shift as an inevitability the consequence of timeless currents associated with the balance of power. But in fact, the summit between Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon demanded bold thinking from Chinese and American policymakers, thinking that ran against decades of foreign-policy orthodoxy in both countries. Even then, the summit required careful choreography, played out across several countries.