United States
During the late 1930s, Bell Aircraft of the United States designed the YFM-1 Airacuda "bomber destroyer". Very large and heavily armed, the Airacuda was plagued with design flaws; only 13 examples were eventually built, none of which participated in WWII.
The most successful heavy fighter of the war was the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. It was designed to carry heavy armament at high speed or long range. For a variety of reasons, notably its excellent twin General Electric-designed turbochargers and its crew of one (rather than two or three), it dramatically outperformed its German and British counterparts. In service it was used as an escort fighter, following B-17 Flying Fortress raids deep into German-held Europe where it was able to hold its own with the much lighter German fighters. In its escort role, the P-38 was the first Allied fighter over Berlin. It was also highly successful in the Pacific theatre, where its long range proved a pivotal advantage. Expensive to produce and maintain, it was relegated to other roles when the single-engined but equally long-ranged P-51D Mustang reached squadrons.
Read more about this topic: Heavy Fighter
Famous quotes related to united states:
“So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)