Apparently, some electronics chips are, so the meme/theory that China installed kill-switches in these.
Do you have any idea how much money a single battalion motorpool spends on parts and maintenance?
When morale is taken seriously.Time to go on a beer run
The Air force providing some useful support to ground troops there by delivering beer to the frontlines. It was even nicely chilled after the flight
Apparently the USN did something similar with Ice Cream where a quick flight up to high altitude was enough to set it for immediate consumption upon landing
Some bright chap figured you could hang kegs from the bomb racks, in some cases they added their own home made streamlining to the barrels. To an almost fanatical degree
And in the other side of the world it was even more vital for morale. Carriers ransomed downed crews from their rescuing destroyers and submarines (some who did truly heroic efforts to retrieve fallen pilots under enemy fire) with gallons of ice-cream. On a more somber use any marine or soldier who managed to capture a living japanese for interrogation was rewarded with ice-cream and downtime as a way of stopping execution of the unarmed POWs, a grimm reminder of the brutality in the Pacific.Story goes that a British brewery was dedicated to making free beer for the troops but after D-day there was no way to get it to the front. Every truck and ship in Western Europe was packed with more critical war materiel
The air force decided to help, at first they filled drop tanks with beer but that made it taste off, even for English beer
Spitfires like that one were the most famous beer run planes, they used some Typhoons which could carry more but had to stop when the USAAF tried to shoot one down causing it to jettison its payload. Tragic
It was never an official mission, just something a bunch of pilots and ground crew decided to do on their own. The brass looked the other way given there wasn't much else for interceptors to be doing.
US planes may have done the same thing a little later after seeing it in action, but apparently it was ice cream that was the absolutely priority
The Air Force should never be indepentant of the Army. It's the boots on the ground which actually get shit done while the Air Force gets all the credit.
during times of war they can be transferred over to DoD/Dow's authority
If I was a WWII merchant captain I would thank God if my ship was lucky enough to be escorted by a Treasury-class USCGC.
Those things where hands down the most effective escorts in the Atlantic
The problem is the immediate post-WW2 era where the nuke was a thing that comes into play. Remember, at the time it was reasoned that armies and navies were obsolete with the advent of nuclear warfare. The Army would create the Pentomic Divisions while the Navy would carry out numerous nuclear weapon tests (including Crossroads). What would become the USAF had some damn good PR going on to allow the split to happen backed up by technology.
Thing is, the US Coast Guard wasn't always the US Coast Guard, it used to be the US Revenue Cutter Service (aka an armed customs service)... and is the second oldest branch of the US armed services (1st is tied with the US Army, the USMC, and the USN) and it -occasionally!- did better than the USN!
They, like the Secret Service, were also part of the Treasury Department when founded.
Given how willing the US states were when it comes to screwing over the federal government of that money (the Confederation era was basically an era where shit really went downhill and was the poster boy of 'what could go wrong in making a government, did')...
The person taking it later disappeared.
I'm more interested in what's going on in the farm fields than whatever the hell a B-2 leaving low altitude contrails near a mountain range (probably the Ozarks) and just passing through is up to.