On this day in 1941, expressing its growing significance and the need to increase its autonomy, the United States Army Air Corps became the United States Army Air Forces.
The date I learned here:
The evolution had been occurring for some time so the increased degree of separation from the rest of the Army was not surprising. None the less, it stopped short of full separation, as Air Force would not become a separate branch of service until 1947.
It was the Washington National Airport in 1941.
The airport opened, obviously, just before the United States' entry into the Second World War, it's 1941 opening partially explained by a prohibition in airport funding that was lifted in 1938.
On this day in 1921, Bessie Coleman received a pilots license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, making her the first black person to be a "licensed" pilot. As her grandparents were Cherokee, she was also the first licensed Native American pilot.
The event is a real milestone, but it's somewhat deceiving. The US didn't require pilots licenses at the time and the global requirement was far from universal. Pilots licenses would be introduced in the US in 1927. This is significant here as Coleman's international pilots license was a real license, but one that was not recognized everywhere and, moreover, she was not the first black or female black pilots as is sometimes suggested.
She was a pioneering aviator however and earned her living as a barnstormer after taking up flying. In that career she was also an advocate for African Americans. She tragically died in 1930 at an airshow when her aircraft had catastrophic failure.
Czechoslovakia and Romania signed a treaty aimed at Hungary, which they feared may seek to redraw its borders at their expensive.
Problems with passengers have become so prevalent since air travel started to resume as the pandemic eases the US due to the increase in vaccination that United Airlines and Southwest Airlines have banned the serving of alcohol on their flights.
I've frankly always thought this a bit odd in the first place. Most modern airline flights are comparatively short and I don't know why you'd want to drink. . . anything. I've actually posted about this on one of our companion blogs, but what I've learned over the years is that if you offer people something, for the most part people will take it.
"Would you like a big steaming bowl of walrus blubber?"
"Yes, please".
I've been on flights so short that there would be really no way to consume any beverage without a dedicated effort. None the less, I've seen, even on those, and even if they're in the morning, people take a drink. One one memorable flight a gentleman in his late 60s or 70s took a beer and immediately needed to go to the restroom, which he couldn't as the flight was too short and there wasn't time. Why do that to yourself?
Alcoholism may be one reason. I once was on a flight that took off and the shaky man next to me ordered a beer as soon as he could. This was no later than 10:00 a.m. Either he was scared to death or he had dependency on alcohol that was pronounced. Indeed, serving customers in that condition may be the one thing that justified booze on flights.
I should note that I don't even take water, soda or coffee on flights. They're not that long. The current American "I must constantly be drinking" cultural trait that causes people to pack around 55 gallon drums of water all the time predates me, and I don't need to be constantly sucking down fluids and I don't want to on something that can be pretty bouncy. Indeed, its inevitably the case that if I'm on a flight with mild turbulence the passenger next to me will order coffee and sit it on the seat tray, so I can then watch it bounce around and threaten to drench me.
Showing both the rapid advance of air travel, as more people were able to fly, and in more comfort, than before, and that aircraft remained very much an unknown in some ways, the deadliest air accident up to that time occurred when a Curtiss Eagle of the U.S. Army's Air Service crashed in a severe thunderstorm at Morgantown, Maryland.
All seven occupants were killed. The plane was serving as an air ambulance.
Allow me to have a large element of skepticism.
If you follow the news at all, you've been reading of "leaked" Navy videos of UFOs, followed by official confirmation from Navy pilots along the lines "gosh, we don't know what the heck those things are".
Yeah. . . well. . .
What we know for sure is that in recent years, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena have been interacting with ships of the U.S. Navy as well as Navy aircraft. Video of them has been steadily "leaked" for several years, and the service, which normally likes to keep the most mundane things secret, has been pretty active in babbling about it.
Oh. . . and not just that.
The Navy also has applied for a patent for technology that appears to offer impossible high speed drives for aircraft, and acting to force through the patents when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office looked like it was going to say "oh bull". The patenting Navy agent, moreover, a mysteriously named and mysterious scientist, has written babbly papers that are out there, but not well circulated.
So, what's going on?
Gaslighting, most likely.
To those who follow international developments, the US and the Peoples Republic of China are, quite frankly, sliding towards war in a way that reminiscent of Imperial Japan and the US in the late 1930s and early 1940s. China acts like a late 19th Century imperial power and is building up its naval forces in an alarming way. China is a land power and has no real need whatsoever for a defensive navy. The only real use of a navy for China is offensive, or to pose a threat as it could be offensive.
And China has been busy posing a threat. It's using its navy to muscle in on anything it can in the region. It's constantly at odds with Vietnam off the latter's coast. It's threatening the Philippines, whose erratic president shows no signs of backing down to China, and its been so concerning to Japan that Japan is now revising its defense posture. Most of all, it's been threatening to Taiwan, which it regards as a breakaway province which it sort of is.
The problem with a nation flexing its naval muscle is that sooner or later, it goes from flexing to "I wonder how this stuff really works?" Almost all totalitarian powers with big navies get to that point and there's no reason to believe that China won't. Given that, the US (and as noted Japan) have been planning to fight China.
This has resulted in a plan to overhaul the Marine Corps with a Chinese war specifically in mind, and the Navy, upon whom the brunt of any Chinese action would fall, at least initially, has been planning for that as well. And the Navy is worried.
As it should be.
The United States Navy has been a aircraft carrier centric navy ever since December 7, 1941 when it became one by default. And its been the world's most power navy as a carrier based navy. Carries have allowed the United States to project power around the world in a way that no other country can. But in the age of missiles, a real question now exists and is being debated on whether the age of carriers is ending.
Plenty of defense analysts say no, but plenty say yes. Truth is, we just don't know, and absent a major naval contest with a major naval power, which right now there isn't, we won't know. But China is attempting to become that power and it has the ability to act pretty stoutly in its own region right now.
So how does this relate to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena?
The U.S. military has a long history of using the UFO phenomena/fandom for disinformation. It notoriously did this in a pretty cruel way in at least one instance in the 60s/70s in which it completely wrecked the psychological health of a victim of a disinformation campaign that it got rolling, even planting a bogus crashed UFO to keep it rolling. Beyond that, it's been pretty willing to use the stories of "weird alien craft" to cover its own developments, with plenty of the weird alien craft simply being developments in the US aerospace industry.
Given that, and the fact that at the same time the service purports to be taking this really seriously, it continually leaks information about it, and it doesn't seem really all that bothered, the best evidence here is something else is going on, of which there are a lot of possibilities. These range from the service developing some really high tech drones and testing them against the same Navy units (they're usually the same ones) again and again to just having the ability to make this stuff all up.
So why the leaks?
If the service is experimenting with high tech drones, and if the experiment is going well, leaking the information may serve as a warning to potential enemies, notably the PRC, that "look, we have something so nifty our own Navy can't do squat about it. . .let alone yours". Being vague about it probably serves the US interest better than simply coming out with "Nanner, nanner. . surface fleets are obsolete . . .". After all, once we admit we have them, at that point the race to figure them out is really on.
On the other hand, maybe we're just making the whole thing up. We have been worried in the past about other nations development super high tech aircraft, notably the Soviet Union, then Russia post USSR, and now China. Running around patenting mysterious things and having weird things going on may be a disinformation campaign designed to make a potential enemy a little hesitant. And they'd hesitate, because. . . .
Maybe we really have developed some super high tech craft, either manned or unmanned, that are now so advanced that we feel pretty comfortable testing them against a control set, that being, at first, the same U.S. Navy units again and again. A recent report indicates that other navies are now experiencing the same thing, and we might frankly be doing the same thing with them. There's no reason to believe that a nation that would do U2 overflights over hostile nations in the 60s, and then SR71 flights the same way, which tested the spread of biological weapons by actually spreading biological agents off of the coast of California, and which tested the intelligence use of LSD by giving it to unsuspecting CIA employees, might not do this.
Indeed, it'd make for a pretty good test.
On this day in 1941, Stalin's government began a purge of Soviet air force officers, which I'm aware of only due to this item:
By this point in 1941 the signs were there that Germany was getting set to invade the Soviet Union. Eliminating air force officers was a bizarre thing to do, given the risk of impending war. But much about Stalin's reign was bizarre.
Speaking of things airborne, the RAF inserted a company of British troops on the Baghdad road in Iraq by air, using Vickers Valentia's to do so.
The German Navy commenced Operation Rheinübung with the Bismarck. It would prove to be a short sortie.
It's mission was to raid British convoys.
Petty Officer Alfred Sephton would receive the Victoria Cross posthumously for his actions in directing anti aircraft fire on the HMS Coventry on this day in 1941. The Coventry was aiding the Aba, a hospital ship under attack by German dive bombers.
More about that can be found here:
Prince Aimone, the Duke of Aosta, was crowned the King of the Independent State of Croatia. He never went there, however, and refused to do so over the issue of Italian annexation of Dalmatian land, making him a particular odd character in that he was an Italian and an officer in the Italian navy. Following Italy switching sides, he resigned his presumptive kingship and served again in the Italian Navy. He resigned his ducal title upon the fall of the Italian monarchy.
