History
Germany was the first country to produce dedicated ground-attack aircraft (designated CL-class and J-class). They were put into use in autumn 1917, during World War I. Most notable was the Junkers J.I, which pioneered the idea of an armoured "bathtub", that was both fuselage structure and protection for engine and crew. The British experimented with the Sopwith TF series (termed "trench fighters").
Between the World Wars, the United States Marine Corps Aviation applied close air support tactics in the Banana Wars. Though they may not have pioneered dive bombing tactics, Marine aviators were the first to include it in their doctrine during United States occupation of Haiti and Nicaragua.
Read more about this topic: Attack Aircraft
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“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
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