“Manila mopping up operations.” Yeah, right.
The sweeping piece by Hanson W. Baldwin on pg 10 is an amazing piece of poetic writing about the war on the Eastern Front.
Interesting what gets reported in the NY Times.
Whitney Nephew Killed
Daniel C. Payson Army Battle Casualty in Belgium
Most private first class soliders did not get this much lineage in the paper. But he was from a prominent New York family.
His mother Joan Whitney Payson went on to be the first owner of the Mets. Good friends of my family were distantly related to her and we rooted for the 1969 Mets to win the World Series. She had an “summer” estate here in Maine. Her funeral in 1975 was in Falmouth Maine and I was an alcolyte for the service. I don’t know if I ever actually met her when she was in Maine for the summers.
From page 4:
“The pipeline project not only concerns the entire world petroleum picture, with ramifications in international strategy affecting tanker availability, aircraft and war vessels as well as merchant shipping and oil markets and reserves, but also raises questions of a diplomatic in nature. Among these are how extensively the United States wishes to interest itself in Middle Eastern affairs and how closely the American government would participate in such a venture, how much protection it could guarantee it and how the idea would be viewed by interested great powers, such as Britain and France, or by smaller independent nations, such as Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.”
The big items on the agenda in the story, it seems, are such things as “merchant shipping,” Great Britain and France as “interested great powers” and a Lebanon described without irony as an “independent nation”! What ultimately mattered in that part of the world for the next 70 years is nowhere to be seen here, nor in the predictions I would imagine of any other contemporaneous expert. Predicting the human future in any detail is, it seems, an impossibly complex task. Of the extent to which ultimately “the United States wishe[d] to interest itself in Middle Eastern affairs,” little need be said.
I was under a prior impression that the Germans pioneered swept wing design with their rocket and jet powered aircraft.
Because the XP-55 went on the drawing boards in 1939, I now have to assume swept wing design for high speed aircraft was a widely understood technology even though the Germans may have been the first to make use of it in an operational aircraft.
I like the way the plane looks. Because i never before heard of it, I did a little research and concluded that this particular article must have been run on a slow news day because performance-wise, the XP-55 was something of a dog. Even though the author calls it the "ascender", it's climb rate was one third of the P-38 and one half of the P-51's climb rate.