Washington, D.C. · December 27, 1938 In 1938 America’s armed forces had less than 3,000 pilots. To speed the production of pilots outside the armed services, President Franklin D. Roosevelt unveiled the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP) on this date in 1938. The program was intended, the president said, to provide a boost to general aviation…
London, England · November 18, 1943 On this date in 1943 the Royal Air Force Bomber Command under Arthur “Bomber” Harris launched the airborne Battle of Berlin, which lasted through March 1944. Harris believed the aerial assault on Berlin—if it came anywhere close to Hamburg’s terrifying destruction the previous July (Operation Gomorrah)—could be the blow…
Telemark, Occupied Norway · November 16, 1943 In the spring of 1940 Norway fell under the Nazi jackboot in a campaign that lasted 62 days and cost 5,000 lives on both sides. Three and a half years later, on this date in 1943, a massive daylight bombing raid by 143 U.S. Army Air Forces B‑17s caused extensive damage…
Honolulu, Hawaii · October 29, 1943 In World War II’s Pacific Theater, sea mines—explosive underwater devices that damaged, sank, or deterred Japanese warships, submarines, and maritime commerce—were weapons that had difficulty gaining the same respect as guns, bombs, and torpedoes enjoyed in the U.S. arsenal. Over time, however, a small number of mining advocates in both…
London, England · August 4, 1944 The British had begun deploying the first of several bunker-buster bombs (Tallboy and its successor Grand Slam) in 1944 while the Americans had none to deploy. On this date in 1944 the U.S. Eighth Air Force kicked off Operation Aphrodite, a program developed in total secrecy and designed to…
Leipheim Air Base, Bavaria, Germany · July 18, 1942 In mid-April 1941 test flights began of what would become the world’s first operational turbojet fighter, the Messerschmitt 262 Schwalbe, or Swallow. The test was really of the airframe, because the BMW turbojets—primitive and temperamental—were nowhere close to being ready for fitting. On this date in…
Aboard the U.S. Carrier Shangri-La · July 14, 1945 On this date and the next in 1945, less than four months after the start of Operation Starvation—the joint U.S. air and naval effort to strangle Japanese maritime traffic by the aerial mining of Japan’s harbors and straits—Navy air groups destroyed over half the train ferries…
London, England · July 8, 1941 On this date in 1941, five months before the United States was drawn into World War II, the Boeing B‑17 Flying Fortress was flown in combat for the first time, this by the Royal Air Force in an attack on the North German port of Wilhelmshaven. The first production model,…
Chengtu, China · June 15, 1944 On this date in 1944 67 B‑29 Superfortresses took off from their base in Chengtu, mainland China, to release 221 tons of bombs on the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata on the southern-most Japanese home island of Kyūshū. This was the first attack on the Japanese homeland since…
Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio · April 22, 1945 During the war Allied countries were keen to gain access to the products of German research and development. A British commando raid on a German radar installation on February 27–28, 1942, in occupied France convinced British scientists who analyzed the radar array that it was impervious to jamming…