Postblogging Technology, June 1951, II: Let's Here More About Raw Material Controls!

Wow!

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada.

Dear Father:

Ronnie is in confinement. I promise a telegram as soon as we have word, but I have no such thing. I have been able to distract myself with the letter, but now that I am done I really want to go walk back and forth and take up smoking, just like in all the movies. Except if I hear about one more 50-year-old dying of a heart attack I am going to turn into a natural fabrics, vegetarian, pacifist anti-cigarette type myself, which won't be good for my career. Stifling my opinion of the "China blockade" is hard enough! 

Hmm. Turns out that ranting about politics is a bit distracting. Maybe I should go talk to Uncle George. 

Your Loving Son,
Reggie

Newsweek, 18 June 1951

Letters

John Swize of Delaware corrects Newsweek. The railway from Teheran to Tabriz is only complete to a town called Mianeh, where it stops due to mountains and also because the Russians built it up to the edge of their wartime zone of control. So central Iran is connected with the Communist world and there is no railway at all to the oilfields. Newsweek defends its map by pointing out that work is ongoing. Mexican politicians write to defend Mexican politics. Most correspondents are  happy that the courts struck down "fair price" laws, allowing for the price wars sweeping the country, but Robert Jackson of Chicago is upset because small retailers can't compete with big ones and will be swept out of business by the price wars. Charles Kraus writes to explain the very important details of how French Foreign Legionnaires who win the Medale Militaire are sometimes saluted by their officers, but also sometimes aren't. I draw the line at summarising letters about the origins of "Beefeater" and a new portraits-only gallery in San Francisco. For Your Information gives us a bit of background on the articles about industry in Detroit, climbing clothing prices due to textile shortages, and the cover story.

The Periscope reports that Washington is abuzz with talk about peace talks, because the Red spring offensive failed and because there are even more anti-Communist protests in China. This is in spite of The Periscope having the inside scoop about Secretary Marshall's  upcoming visit to Korea leading to "daring new manouevres" in "unexpected quarters." It also has word that Secretary Acheson's days are numbered, as Senator Connally has decided to try for re-election in 1952, and Texans oppose Secretary Acheson by a 10--1 margin. Walter Reuther will probably be the American delegate to some very important conference in Europe to show that America is still okay with the left and the labour movement, if not Reds. Gordon Gray will not be the next  head of the psychological warfare board. Aviation "flashes" include word of the Air Force's first jet powered transport, the Chase XC-123A and word that the Navy is practicing atomic bomb runs out of a closely-guarded Air Force base in New Mexico. The Army has a new, radio-controlled tank, controlled by a television camera and transmitter, for attacking bunkers and minefields. Meanwhile, it admits that the super-bazooka won't defeat the 45 degree-angled armour of the new Joseph Stalin III tank, so far kept out of combat.

The Army is looking for a new solution. The clever plan to invite the Russians to the Four-Power conference has sprung a leak due to the Russians asking to have some say on the agenda, which could lead to embarrassing things being discussed, or not. American officials are disappointed about the lagging rate of European rearmament, which they blame on war-weariness and reluctance to provoke the Russians, who are said to be placing their strategic bombers under the Navy, because they are based so close to the water, including a wing in Novaya Zemyla, the islands way up there in the Arctic where I thought there weren't even any people, except possibly loggers if there's trees. Periscope warns us that the Russians and East Bloc are going to be whining about mystery planes penetrating their borders again soon, and reassures us that they're just dropping propaganda leaflets and supplies for assorted not-Fascist-at-all nationalist resistance movements. So no worries! Except in Spain, where there is talk of a general strike against the not-Fascist-at-all General Franco in Madrid, and for Ava Gardner, recently exposed as (GASP!) having someone else sing for her in the movie version of Showboat.

Washington Trends reports that the Paris "talkathon" about the Big Four meeting may (GASP SOME MORE!) end soon and there might be a compromise on the beef price raise rollbacks. Draft calls will probably increase in the fall due to a recent crash in the number of volunteers. Congress is sending back the Administration budget proposal with slashed tax increases. The Administration won't fight it because it is just glad that it got as many hikes as it did. On the other hand it will fight for its foreign aid budget, which everyone, even beloved-by-all Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, wants to cut. The Communist Party is also expected to fight the Smith Act by changing their names, breaking up their party, only being seen with their friends ("cell structure!") and never talking about Communism. Fortunately, the FBI figures it can still "finger" them and round them up for their crime of thinking the wrong things. My country. 

National Affairs

Newsweek puts its finger on the pulse of the nation and decides that it would like peace in Korea and less inflation. Other than that, all there is, is miles and miles of newsprint about this and that (but, let's face it, mainly MacArthur), that doesn't really tell us anything. Real news about stuff that's happening in the world is also out there somewhere, but it's way too hard to track down, so we'll just talk about the Acheson hearings. Did he or did he not lose China? The Senate wants to know! After that, Newsweek can move on to beloved-by-all Senator Paul Douglas's one man fight to cut the Federal budget here and there, of this and that. No-one wants to help him. It's so sad. The Senate Armed Services Committee's preparedness sub-committee has just found that there are too many men in the service who spend their time doing nothing but serving on pointless sub-committees that put out reports about stuff that everyone already knows. Senators and Congressmen agree that Senators and Congressmen aren't paid enough, but they can't raise their pay because they they wouldn't bet elected, because voters are dumb and stupid. 

"Eight Jets Go Down" So I sometimes wonder about my superiors, but then I look at the Air Force, which tried to fly a group of F-84s from Wight-Patterson to Selfridge Field in Michigan on Friday, right through an electrical storm. Most went around but eight didn't, and conked out in mid-air and three pilots died, which left the Air Force so bamboozled that it flew Curtis LeMay out to take charge of the investigation, the early thought being very quiet atom bomb or alien death rays, or maybe sabotage. And not, say, icing due to flying right through a storm, because that's not something are nation's brave aviators would do. 

Under a special Loyalty banner, a story about Seth Richardson turning down his appointment to the President's new Subversives Activity Control Board after Pat MacCarran raised questions. It looks like MacCarran's committee (Judiciary) will make trouble for the rest of the President's appointments, too. Turns out that the committee in charge of loyalty thinks they're not loyal enough to review peoples' loyalty. 

Robert Vogele is back in America being a celebrity as he tells the story of his sufferings under Hungarian Communism while Attorney General McGrath is just pleased as punch that the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of the leadership of the American Communist Party under the Smith Act. US Attorney Irving Saypol thinks that now the US can get on with throwing all Communists in jail. On the other hand, Eugene Dennis thinks that it is a bad thing and that the FBI will now go after civil rights activists, trade unions and the "growing peace movement." Various left-wing organisations are also appalled, while Newsweek is upset that the Daily Worker put out some leaflets calling for a letter-writing campaign to get the President to "reverse the Court's decision," because that's against the Constitution. Most newspapers think that it's fine, except the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which pooped the party with a headline reading, "Six Men Amend the Constitution." 

Talk is that the next people to be prosecuted under the Smith Act will be the replacement leadership of the Communist Party, I can't help noticing lots of Jewish-sounding names, a group photo showing two Coloured men, and gleeful talk of prosecuting the Party's "Negro Commission" next. They are definitely going after Claudia Jones, who is easy to prosecute because  the Feds already have her in jail for being in the country while Communist. They can't deport her because Trinidad won't have her, so why not put her in jail some more? On the other hand, there's some fear that the Party's money man, Wilhelm Weiner, will flee the country. I'm so confused! Is leaving America good, or not? Also, is there even such a thing as an Anglo-Saxon Communist? There sure used to be, but somehow they don't get looked at by Smith Act grand juries. Give them time, I guess. 

Washington Tides with Ernest K. Lindley reports on "Dean Acheson's successor." Because he's a dead duck, you see. He lost China behind the credenza and assorted politicians have been telling us not to like him since forever. Enough for me and Ernest K. Lindley, too! Ernest wishes for that lovely John Foster Dulles fellow to replace Acheson, but admits it won't happen under Truman. 

Korean War

"Blood Battle for Red Buildup Base" 

The much-predicted UN summer offensive might be an attempt to reduce the "Iron Triangle," a region in the centre of the 38th Parallel line with lots of rail lines serving it from the north. It was where the last Communist offensive jumped off from, and denying it to the Reds might forestall the next one. Newsweek also goes into the substance of the latest round of ceasefire talks, which are bubbling up at the same time as talk of a summer offensive because of Marshall's visit. There's also a story about how 17 of West Point's 450-strong Class of 1950 have been killed in Korea, with another 30 wounded and 8 prisoners. 

Somewhat related are that lovely John Foster Dulles' diplomatic efforts to secure a Japanese peace treaty, which, to me, sound like a stunning failure, as he hasn't got the British or the Koumintang, much less the Russians, on board due to being too afraid of what the Republicans and MacArthur might say. But as we have already decided to do the Treaty, on a bilateral basis if necessary. So he can completely fail at the diplomacy side of the diplomacy and still bring a peace treaty home. Hurray! 

International

"All in a Week's Work"

Newsweek catches up with all the important (involving America, as it says) news from Europe, which include the West German Vice-Chancellor getting upset because seven officers of the SS's "genocidal squads" that killed up to 250,000 "racial undesirables" in the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto were executed in an American military prison; the Yugoslav   Army's chief of staff possibly being in America to negotiate arms deliveries so that Yugoslavia doesn't turn into the next Korea, the US ambassador to Greece giving up on getting General Papagos and the King to kiss and make up, an incident in Vienna where a Russian military policeman shot an American MP, and the second round of the Italian municipal elections. The French elections get a full page story to themselves, but big deal, so does Margaret Truman's visit to London.  

"The Missing Diplomats" The story of the two missing British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, actually broke at the beginning of the month, but the British government is treating it as a very serious matter. The head of MI5 is flying over to Washington to brief Hoover, Secretary Morrison is making a statement to the House, and everyone is denying up and down that either man was a Communist (or, in Burgess' case, that he was still a Communist), or that confidential papers are missing. 

"Rehearsal for a New Reign" Reading between the lines, it seems as though the King of England will not make a full recovery from his "lung disorder," and so Princess Elizabeth is taking over all the more strenuous duties of modern kinging, such as taking the salute of the Brigade of Guards, and visiting Australia, or, worse, America. 

It looks as though the Iran oil nationalisation story will drag on longer than the King's health will last, but King Leopold of Belgium has gone before him. To retirement in Switzerland with his hotsie-totsie, but he went. 

In this hemisphere, Cuba has declined to send troops to Korea, no matter how much President Prio yells at the Communists. Argentina is also seing an outbreak of "Yanqui baiting," which Newsweek interprets as part of Peron's still-unannounced campaign for re-election in 1952. Bolivia is also having an election, much eye-rolling.

Business

The Business Trends Periscope reports that controls won't be relaxed any time in the future,but no-one is sure how much they are actually going to bite, from one raw material to another, with copper hit with everything but Chile's attempts to win a price increase to strikes and steel so short that there might be a tin can shortage soon. Higher prices abroad might divert a range of chemical raw materials, fair enough when the Administration is talking about withholding sulphur from Australia to force wool prices down. Giant-brained MIT scientists predict robot factories within 10 years, thanks to control devices perfected in the oil and chemical industries. Such factories might cost five times as much as regular ones, but will be worth it in the end. Push button factories could be "located near consumers without worrying about labour markets." 

Regular stories look into the beef price rollback, which has led to ranchers holding back their cattle in protest, and the prospects for a replacement for the Defence Production Act when it runs out on June 30, and with it the Government's power to control wages, prices and production. The President wants a new bill in place by then, and not an extension of the existing bill. That would be fast work from Congress, but the current bill is leaking all over the place with wage increases excused by productivity increases that may or may not be real, or "base-pay anomalies." There's also a big story on the ongoing price war at the department stores. Pay is up, housebuilding is down (a bit), and William Coolidge, "the J. P. Morgan of Boston," is in the news for his "venture capital" efforts to find new businesses and invest in them before anyone else does (or no-one does, causing them to fail.) Among his successes, Servo Company, which puts servos in guided missiles, Cro-Plate, which chrome-plates ball bearings, Kaman Helicopters, and Infra-Roast, which "expects to be in the black within two years" with its in-grocery-store infrared coffee roaster that gives a busy shopper fresh-roasted coffee in five pound batches in five minutes, or 45 to 50lbs of coffee an hour. 

What's New  has Fromm and Sichel's license to distribute Paul Masson champagne, 3M's new plastic-backed, black, waterproof household tape, Fort Dodge Tent and Awning's "Tractor Saver" combination windshield and motor cover, and Renick-Boggs and Company's plastic rain coats with special engraving to look like taffeta.

Special Report on Textiles Controls have led to rising clothes prices. That we all know, at least if we buy clothes and don't just drag along after our wives on shopping expeditions while trying to act like a conscious, thinking human. Cotton is not going to be short, notwithstanding price rises, which are due to mass armed forces buying for uniforms. Wool is going to be short, because of the unexpectedly fast unwinding of the enormous UK wool reserve, which was expected to last for 13 years but sold through in five due to the postwar surge in American demand. With everyone bidding for scant supplies, prices were rising until a consumer's strike in the spring, and there will probably not be a wool shortage, either. Newsweek then moves on to the new "synthetics." Nylon has gone from being a wonder fabric to a basic; Vicara, the protein-based fibre and wool substitute, gets a mild push, and so does Fiberglas, which I really don't think of as a clothing material! From there we get a brief view of Dacron and Dynel, and an introduction to the new plastic fabrics, currently being used on furniture rather than with people. 

And, oh melancholy moment in what should be a  happy occasion, we finally turn our attention to a Business Tides with Henry Hazlitt column, and it is not Ronnie taking on her bete  noire, only me. Henry is smacking his lips over "Price Controllers in a Panic," as he hates all that government controlling stuff. They're all talking about how there will be inflation and a wage-and-price spiral if controls are not extended, and Henry is busy scoffing. First, union men can't talk about wage increases. That's just a fact. Second, the Administration can't talk about inflation because it is causing inflation with all of its spending and low interest rates. Third, farmers can't talk about price supports. That's also a fact. And since no-one can talk about that stuff, it is either not happening or is bad and should be stopped. In conclusion, price controls are bad and should end on 30 June and if inflation follows it will be because bad people do bad things and nothing that a few years of mass unemployment can't solve.
 

Science, Medicine

"Penguin Kinsey Report" Penguins are very cute, and mate for life, which is even cuter, although they sometimes have affairs and divorces, which is steamy, like the Kinsey Report. So a New Zealand ornithologist named L. E. Richdale wrote a whole book about them. Newsweek loved it, and is here to tell us about it, because it is Science! 

"Blow Some My Way" It gets worse, as Newsweek turns the short bit about F-86s starting their engines in echelon into a story. The planes behind have their turbines turned by the exhaust gas of the aircraft ahead, speeding up engine starting.  Even Newsweek can smell a frontline tall tale when it reads it, so it tacks on a story about the GE "Advanced J-47" under the same heading. It is just like the old J-47, but better, although just how much better is secret. 

"On the Midway" For what I am sure are very, very good reasons, the University of Chicago's medical schools and hospitals get two-and-a-half pages of puffing up. There's a bit of a theme, in that there's a lot of talk of atomic medicine, including radioactive drugs so that you can trace their progress through the body and isotopes for treating cancer, so maybe that's what the magazine is trying to get at?

"Bright College Years" Last fall university administrators were predicting that the incoming class might be 40% of last year's due to the draft and all. The final report for this year is "better and saner" news. It's 82% of last year's! Colleges should handle that easily, oh, wait, no, fees are up an average of 65% and room rents are up 51%. Good thing it's only money. 

Radio-Television, Press, People 

Xavier Cugat is feuding with WNEW, and it's all Bernice Judis' fault. News!

"Quite a Week" It was, well, what it says, in television. This week, the RCA tri-colour tube was "completely unwrapped," with production specifications sent to 28 manufacturers. GE is meanwhile pushing its own "composite" system. The RCA move might be because CBS has accused it of dropping its own  technology to back the industry push against CBS. CBS sent Peter Goldmark to a big TV technical conference in Switzerland to get the CBS system going in Europe. Meanwhile, Loew's. Fabian, RKO and United Paramount theatres have bought the TV rights to the Joe Louis-Lee Savold fight, which will be televised only in theatres, a move that has renewed discussion of home subscription services like Zenith's Phonevision. The University of Pennsylvania has rejected the NCAA's ban on televised college football, and the ban will probably collapse. General Tire and Rubber, which already owns several small networks, added an LA station to its portfolio, making a fifth national television network likely. 

In press news, Walter Winchell got an exclusive interview with General MacArthur where he seemed to throw his hat in the ring for '52, Reuters celebrates 100 years in business by getting a puff piece in the magazine, The New York Times is in trouble with Madrid, and The Chicago Tribune has lost a libel suit for misidentifying a man as a Negro, which is a legal precedent as it establishes the mistake as grounds for, well, libel. In Canada, newspapers are talking about reducing page count to deal with the newsprint shortage. 

Newsweek's cover story is about "The American Cowboy," and is a little about ranching, which is in the news because of the beef price rollback, and dude ranches, which are in the news because of Hopalong Cassidy. The story seems to give each aspect of the story the attention they deserve, so it's all Hopalong. 

Estes Kefauver says that all Congressional hearings should be televised from now on, the Governor of Oregon isn't nearly as popular as Hopalong Cassidy, Maria Tallchief is getting divorced from George Balanchine, who turns out to be a cad. Rita Hayworth blah blah, Grandma Moses is still alive, which is news to me because I'm always thinking that she was alive a hundred years ago. Which is close enough to true, admittedly, but I mean that she was back then, if you know what I mean. She's not. She's now. Even though she's 91. Then Newsweek pads it out with some wacky crime stories before mentioning that Margot Fonteyn got a medal from the King and also some zoo animals are cute (but not as cute as penguins) and Marjorie Lawrence is touring in a wheel chair because she won't let polio stop her. Some judges in New York got promotions, including Learned Hand and some guy who knows Harold Medina. Nancy Chaffee is engaged, Janet Leigh is married to Tony Curtis, Sergeant Arthur Levine, 23, the first reservist in the New York Military District to return to active service, was killed in action on 26 May. Dr. Edward Howard Griggs, Leland Harrison, Herman Hupfeld and Stephen Bonsal are all dead at much more advanced ages because they were smart enough to be famous, not dumb enough to volunteer for Korea. 

New Films

Four in a Jeep is Swiss film that is meant to be an international comedy, because has military police of all four of the four Vienna occupying powers running around having hilarious adventures. Unfortunately, it allowed the Communist policeman to be funny, too, which is too much. Also, the subtitles weren't handled well, the plot was silly, and it was hard to shoehorn Viveca Lindfors in. Three Steps North is an Italian film with Lloyd Bridges. Newsweek didn't like the writing or the Italian casting. Hollywood Story is a "mediocre melodrama" set in old Hollywood. Hard, Fast and Beautiful is supposed to be a hard-hitting expose of the seamy side of professional tennis and also a vehicle for Sally Forrest, Ida Lupino's latest discovery, while the movie itself is a Howard Hughes discovery. With a build-up like that, how can it possibly crash, flaming, into a building that is also on fire and explode until the bursting dam drowns it? Surprisingly, it is probably the most okay movie of the week, at least it says here.  

Books

The big book this week is General Bradley's memoirs, which are a general's memoirs. Relegated to "other books" are Fred C. Kelly's, Miracle at Kitty Hawk: Letters of Wilbur and Orville Wright; The Innocence of Pastor Mueller by Carlo Beuf, and The Clocktower by Gordon McDonnell. The actual letters are mostly from before the first flight at Kitty Hawk, after which the magic is gone. (And, say some, the fraud begins!) This is a natural lead-in to the novel by Beuf, which is some kind of allegory or parable about a version of the historical "N-ray" scandal, where the fraud is a pioneering Austrian photographer/inventor type and not a French physicist, and the claimed X-Ray-like phenomena produces scandalously revealing pictures and not a challenge to contemporary physics. Then a gentle and innocent pastor reveals the fraud and everything is set to right. Somewhat. Not to be outdone, McDonnell's story is about a fantastic tribe of pagan nomads high in the Himalayas who get into a conflict with the village and the local rajah over a clocktower he is building. Newsweek seems to doubt that there are lost tribes of pagans high in the Himalayas, which is an odd thing to doubt compared with the likely verisimilitude (fancy character to translate fancy word meaning "appearance of truth") of a novel of Himalayan pagans, villagers and rajahs by a man named "McDonnell."

Perspective with Raymond Moley has "Just One Dam After Another" Remember how Moley spent three weeks describing the Dewey Administration in 1948 not giving up on his precious GOP second coming until the week after the election? Remember how private utilities in the West are waging war on public hydroelectric power? Well, guess what? Arizona wants to build a diversion canal and dam, and Moley knows all the reasons that it is a bad idea and won't pay for itself. On the other hand, it's nice to see him thinking about something that isn't happening in Washington for a change. Except for the lobbying, mind you, which is happening in Arizona.

Aviation Week, 18 June 1951

News Digest reports that North American delivered its 45,000th aircraft last week, that Taylorcraft will start delivering its Tourist next week, the USAF is lending the RCAF 100 North American T-6 Texans until Canadian production gets underway at Canadian Car and Foundry, Fort William. TCA's operating deficit is down from $4 million to $1.325 million, with domestic operations showing a profit for the first time since 1945. 

"How Thunderjets Fare Under Fire" This is not a normal editorial location for a regular news story, but the fact that it has a giant picture of the J-35 and a shot of some F-84s which  have survived battle damage suggests that it is an answer to last week's blast from General Vandenberg. The F-84s of 27th Fighter-Escort Wing have been doing fine in Korea, mainly in the fighter-bomber role. A lot of people will be telling us that F-84s are doing just fine in Korea in the next two weeks.

Industry Observer reports that  the USAF recovered a MiG-15 wreck in April. The Air Force's statement to the effect that it hadn't captured a MiG-15 or its engine, just meant that they had not got hold of the whole thing. It is very interesting to read that the engine showed "beautiful precision workmanship" and improvements giving the engine high performance without water injection or an afterburner. Ford expects to start receiving parts from its R-4360 plant in Chicago by 1 November and complete engines sixty days after. A second-hand DC-3 is going for $85,000 these days. Various manufacturers are offering reconditioned Lockheed Venturas and B-25s as executive planes. Seem a bit hot for a business plane to me. The Army is going full steam ahead on its new Nike ground-to-air missile. The Avro CF-100 with Orenda engine is almost ready for test flights some more again.

Sidelights reports that the Army wants its own aviation engineering establishment so it doesn't have to rely on Wright Field. Some people think that getting rid of the Navy's General Board is a bad idea, since it sounds like the Air Force's General Board, but actually it is just a place to store old admirals. The Douglas X-2 is admittedly taking forever, but will probably be ready in '51, says NACA. Stuart Symington still thinks he could be Secretary of Defence some day if General Marshall is abducted by the Spanish Inquisition. Forrest Sherman's defence of the Administration probably means he is going to be the next Joint Chief of Staff. The Defence Department is hoping to give even more money to flight schools for ROTC training.  

Katherine Johnsen's (I think we've been spelling her name wrong around here!) Washington Roundup reports that Forrest Sherman says that the aircraft carrier will go on indefinitely, what with tactical air increasingly losing its mobility, that strategic bombing has a long future ahead of it, that atomic artillery isn't likely to replace tactical air, that lighter-than-air has no future in military transport, and that battleships are obsolete. You don't say! Sherman doesn't say, but hints, that with the Army moving on from its 12 division plan of 1948 and the Air Force aiming for the Billion-Wing Air Force, it is time for the Navy to get its own colossal expansion from the current 16 carrier group, 8000 plane  target. He just doesn't want to go ahead in a hurry and compromise quality. Right now the Navy is getting less money than the other services, but that's because there really isn't much to ask for. Souped-up WWII carriers are enough for now, and the main concern is upgrading the reserve fleet. The Navy might look smaller than the "Pearl Harbour fleet," but saying that the navy had 5300 planes in 1941 requires counting everything from liaison planes on up. Finally, Johnsen reports her take on developments at the National Security Resources Board. She thinks that Averill Harriman will definitely be the new chair, unlike Newsweek, which says he won't.  

"Vandenberg Expected to Step Out Soon: Twining Seen As Likely Successor: Other Command Changes Hint at Policy Shift" The Air Force is being hit by a wave of retirements due to all the officers who transferred into the Air Corps from the Signals Corps at the same effective date at the end of WWI. This is not a problem at the chief of staff position, where the Administration gets to choose from brilliant, young high flyers like Twining and Norstad, but it is at the next level. Who gets the strongest commanders, and what does it say about policy? The answer is that tactical seems to be overtaking strategic air. That's the policy shift. (Also, the separation of research and development from procurement that we have heard about before.)

"Mass F-84 Crashes Traced to Inlet Icing" Pretty much what I expected. Automatic control sent more fuel to the combustion chambers when thrust dropped, leading to overheating and turbine blades throwing, which made the engine failures even worse. Allison is revisiting production to make sure that the inlet screens of new engines are less vulnerable to icing. 

"New F-84 Fitted for Air Refuelling" This is the F-84G, which is getting a Boeing flying boom. It also gets a new make of the J-35, with a 5600lb thrust, up more than 10%. That's probably a static thrust rating, so somewhat less in the air. Due to aerodynamics, the increased thrust will mainly be seen in a higher climb rate. The F-84G is also the first Thunderjet with an autopilot.

"First Details on Jet Transport Plans" Boeing and Lockheed have jet transport design proposals on the board, "subject to US military approval," because the airlines won't pay for them. With three Comets now in the air and service expected to start in September, the American failure, let's call it what it is, is getting ever more clear. The Boeing and Lockheed proposals both call for engines that don't exist yet, with the Boeing requiring 9250lbs static thrust and the Lockheed, 12,200lbs. Both aircraft are promised to be safe and comfortable. 

Production Engineering has Irving Stone reporting that "Optical Tooling Faces its Biggest Test" Republic, you might remember, imported a package of British and German production techniques including an optical system for laying out production and a pipe-framing casting method to simplify airframe setups. This is now reaching Phase II testing under the Air Force machine-tools contract, where they set up large production fixtures at some other factories run by other builders. Parts have been chosen at North American and Lockheed (an F-86D outer wing panel and F-94 mid-fuselage frame panel), among other West Coast plants, and the Republic-made assemblies will be shipped to the west coast plants on 15 June, set up there, and should start producing the test parts immediately. Stone explains at some length that the new method is cheaper, faster and more accurate, and also good for making very large parts. The British have found that the original Hobson-Taylor optical tooling method, borrowed from shipbuilding, gave fairly accurate results on the Avro Lancaster, but was "tedious" and required highly skilled toolmakers. The German pipe casting method was pioneered at Henschel and was made German standard practice by the German Air Ministry during the war. Japan acquired the rights in 1942. Republic is very pleased with a number of improvements it made in the original process of optical tooling and pipe casting. 

"Garnet Abrasive Saves Blasting Costs" Ryan Aeronautical shifted from silica sandblasting to garnet sandblasting and saved a million dollars. A billion! Aren't garnets jewels?

"New Instrument to Study Gusts" Haven't been bored by a NACA report lately? Here's a "compact flight-research aid" for measuring gust-loads. It is a velocity/acceleration measuring device and oh, boy, does NACA want to tell you about the diaphragms, recording tapes, and transmitters. (I shouldn't have said "bored." Now the next article will probably be from the National Bureau of Standards.) Oddly, the article ends with a bit of criticism of the "compressed time scale" of the readout tapes, which makes it impossible to discern the "structure" of the gust. This is not where you say mean things about new gadgets, guys. You wait until you have its replacement to talk about!

"Gust Alleviators" We look at well, gust alleviators. Here in America, the Air Force has been working with Douglas on a mechanical linkage to the ailerons, while in Britain they've been working on a probe in the  nose. Either way, the problem is that gusts bend the wing up, and the devices cause the aileron to deflect,  for a "relieving effect." The British system probably isn't as good, because it is more complicated and was reported in The Aeroplane. 

"Engineering Group Gloomy Over Supply" We are short of engineers (maybe 19,000 graduates this year versus 30,000 needed), and the draft isn't helping.

NACA Reports have a look at "Creep of Lead at Various Temperatures," which is a study of creep against stress-strain curves for "single crystals of lead at a wide range of temperatures" which will presumably have some application for turbine makes facing creep problems in turbine blades that definitely aren't made of lead, single crystal or not. There is also a report on the "Fatigue Testing Machine for Applying a Sequence of Loads of Two Amplitudes."  NACA made two machines that specialise in slowly tearing sheet material apart. 

Avionics has "New Radar Trainers for the USAF" Newsweek went to the same press conference and came back with an exciting blurb about how the Air Force is training its men in complicated new methods of electronic warfare. Aviation Week wants to tell us about a gun laying radar trainer and a navigational bomb aiming radar trainer. We lumber through a description of how a gadget with light beams and dials turns the trainee's attempt to aim a gun by pretend radar into hits and misses, and then do iut again for the Navigation trainer.

George L. Christian has "All Big DC-6 Fleets Go to Skydrol" Skydrol hydraulic brake fluid is less flammable. All the big companies use Skydrol. Says Skydrol. It is also heat stable, not corrosive, has small viscosity changes over a wide range of temperatures and has no halogenated hydrocarbons, salt or water. Also, Pure Carbon, Incorporated has a new high-altitude brush for electric motors in planes that fly to high altitudes. 

New Aviation Products (weren't we just reading that?) has the Arctic Cable Tester, which is a tool for testing aircraft control cables that you can use without taking your gloves off. Speed Nuts' latest are like the old Speed Nuts, only lighter. Ford Instrument's new mechanical differential employs only a single spider gear instead of two gears, now with less backlash. Adams-Rite hs a great new quick-locking tie-down fitting. 

Under Airlines, which I  usually give a miss, I see that United is doing some fog-busting trials involving dropping chemicals from a plane this fall. Fogbusters, moonshine, have I ever mentioned the time I had to land a B-s24 in a giantBunsen burner approach. I did?

A. C. Robson's Cockpit Viewpoint takes on the recent Presidential Emergency Board decision on the dispute between American and its pilots, which threw out half of the ALPA request, which is mostly quite arcane,  having to do with who gets paid for deadheading, and when and minimum (paid) flying times.

Robert H. Wood is back at Editorial to complain some more about people not respecting pilots and their work. Yes, airline pilot is no longer a particularly dangerous job, as measured by additional life insurance premiums, but that is precisely because pilots do such a good job, and no reason to cut their pay. He is also still fighting with the Munitions Board about timely publication of Air Force contracts, with the air show industry for all of its crashes, and pointing out how the railways are killing their own business by raising fares and driving customers away. 

  

Letters

Two people involved write to thank Newsweek for the article about the Christian-run orphanage in Tokyo and gently redirect credit where it is due, and ask for more money. The article about Yale College leads to lots of letters from Yale alumni, which somehow arrived at the right address, even though it has numbers in it. Jim Walsh of Vinton, Virginia, makes the interesting point that Yale is even more famous because of the Merriwell brothers, so the article should have mentioned that. It's interesting because I never heard of them (because I avoided sports pulps like the plague!), and now I have. So very Yale. Emil Schmid of Sika Chemical Corporation writes with an impassioned protest against the recent article about cement "admixture" and "dispersing agents." Newsweek "welcomes this contribution." It turns out to be something that they argue about over in the Civil Engineering cave. 

For Your Information is very happy with the interview with America's "first jet ace," Captain Jabara, and goes on to tell us how happy the GIs are to see their copies of Newsweek, which they read for the opinions of the Chiefs of Staff and not the pictures of starlets from In Passing. Our editor also acknowledges that after their cranky comment about the Communists who control magazine distribution in Hong Kong not paying for their copies, Newsweek got a cheque for $500.

The Periscope reports that  the Russians can make any new weapon the Americans have, but will do so with only a third of the industry that America has, which will make them more selective about what they make. Speaking of which, an informed informant rushes to tell Newsweek that atomic artillery shells are still a few years away, and some in the Army think they're a bit silly for reasons I feel like I shouldn't even have to mention like fuze failures and the fact that any shell you can shoot you can also drop out of a light plane. "Word" is that the US Communist Party gets its Moscow line from the Polish consulate, which receives coded messages from the Cominform headquarters in Romania, which gets them from Moscow. General Wedemeyer hopes to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs under a Republican administration, but meanwhile tells friends he has lots of good job offers from industry. Anti-Taft Republicans are discouraged at all the organising Taft people are doing, while Democrats are trying the new tack of ignoring McCarthy until he goes away. 

The Army, and here I am editorialising a bit more than The Periscope, because I haven't heard a lot of talk about this even though it is quite the thing amongst the  men (and it's all men, let's be honest here!) who worry about "small arms," must be feeling the heat with news that the .280 self-loading rifle is going into production. Confusing British talk aside, a "self-loading rifle" is a selective fire weapon that can be shot in automatic mode. The Germans introduced one late in the last war as a combined replacement for submachine guns and regular rifles. A standard infantry rifle can't be shot in automatic mode because the recoil is just too much, while the pistol rounds fired by submachine guns have no range. So the Germans cut their old Mauser cartridge to halfway between a rifle and pistol cartridge on the argument was that the infantry soldier never actually used the old Mauser's muzzle energy to full effect because there were always bushes and burned out rubble in the way. The German rifle was a big success, but the British thought that maybe sometimes there wouldn't be bushes, and that a better fix might be a smaller bullet with a higher muzzle velocity,  hence the British .280. 

Whoosh. All of that is my editorialising, which I feel like I shouldn't need to add because people should be talking more about the .280, but they're not, because the British like to keep these things secret and the Army seems to be pretty uncomfortable about it. That is why, and here I finally come back to Newsweek, it has commissioned two studies in Korea, one that claims to show that dead-shot riflemanship, presumably with the .30-06 Springfield round, still has a place on the modern battlefield, while the other explores why American troops don't fire their rifles in combat, with "up to 75% of firepower" being wasted. 

Not to be outdone in the field of giving obsolescent firearms a stretch, the Air Force has a new incendiary round for the .50 calibre machine gun that it is putting in its fighter jets even though it should just give up and go with the 20mm already. Which even F-86 pilots are saying now. Potential civil defence wardens get a blast for believing that what with residual radiation and all there is no point in the job. Residual radiation doesn't exist, Newsweek tells them. So hurry up to sign up for a job telling post-atomic apocalypse survivors to get right back into that rubble to rebuild! The Russians are building long runways for jet bombers in eastern Europe, and you know what that means. There's a feud in Iran between this one guy and this other guy and that's why the nationalisation thing  hasn't been settled already. Tito is cutting the dinar-dollar exchange rate to get more American tourists, the US military has decided to ease back on trying to get Spain into the Atlantic alliance until they see if the strikes are going to unseat Franco, there might be a Cimarron musical, more opera movies after the success of Caruso, and a new Thomas Wolfe work, because the University of East Carolina at Podunk is putting out the Grocery Lists of Thomas Wolfe in the spring. 

Washington Trends reports that Congress is facing the worst legislative logjam in history and is going to fix it by just extending all the expiring legislation, for instance controls and foreign aid. Truman can't go on his planned whistle stop tour because of the fight in Congress, but plans on getting testy on foreign affairs and talking back to his critics instead, while the public waits for a ceasefire in Korea, the Army fights to keep its inactive reservists on the rolls for longer than 17 months, and everyone but the Air Force lines up to fight the current One-Million-Wing Air Force drive. 

National Affairs reports that the "summer doldrums" have set in along the Potomac. There's no news, and we're going to tell you about it! The President is hot under the collar about being stuck in Washington, so he lit up a press conference by telling it that losses in the Korean War don't hold a candle to the carnage on the roads, with a million accidents compared with 40,000 deaths, which I thought would be a good argument if I wasn't volunteered to be one of those 40,000, and also he took on the National Association of Manufacturers for wanting to drop controls and let inflation rip, because that would just be letting Communism win. The latest about Acheson hearings is that Louis Johnson doesn't like him and let the press know at length. Is it about dropping China in the loose change jar and forgetting about it? You bet your socks it is! Then for an after-card they dug up Albert Wedemeyer who says that when he is driving with Acheson, Acheson always says he knows the way to China and won't stop to ask for directions or look at a map. Also this week in not news, General MacArthur, who is still on his speaking tour, says he definitely won't run for President in '52. McCarthy is now saying that George Marshall is a commie pinko traitor, also, too, in a 60,000 word speech in the Senate to a packed audience but no other senators. (See, "Ignore him and see if he'll go away.") In actual news, the Ways and Means Committee brought down the current version of the budget. I know that how much income tax Americans will be paying next year is way less interesting than McCarthy fighting Marshall or Taft fans getting ready for '52, but I think maybe it counts as news, at least a little bit?

Crime! Okay, it's not the actual header, but Newsweek gives us the scoop on the "Trenton Two," who are the two members of the Trenton Six finally, it seems, convicted. Then there's a colourful story about teen school drug crime degradation in New York City.

"Carving Out the Pork" Newsweek devotes three columns of slavish admiration to Congressmen Gerald Ford of Michigan and Clay Davis of Wisconsin (both R) and Christopher McGrath(D) of New York for cutting 20% worth of pork out of the Bureau of the Budget proposal. 

Washington Tides with Ernest K. Lindley has "One Year in Korea," which concludes that Korea has been just the tonic a body needed. 

International

"Elections Retain the Shaky Centre" France fails to fall apart, banner headline blares! Although De Gaulle's Rassemblement pour la République is the largest party in the National Assembly, making him "the No. 1 French politician," as the magazine says in a separate profile.

(It's this or Ma Legionnaire)

"Dulles the Peacemaker" John Foster Dulles is truly a peacemaker because Clement Atlee rescued the "Dulles Provision" that Japan won't have to make peace with China now, but will have to make peace with a China to be named later in two years, because Atlee is the only man in the room smart enough to see that it would be pointless for Japan to negotiate with anyone but the Reds. Also in Britain, invitations to the Royal Enclosure at the Ascot somehow got mailed late and it was almost a scandal. Much more important news than 25 Royal Ordnance Factories and 40,000 workers going to the benches to produce a new rifle and machine gun for the British Army! Which, to be fair, isn't news because it isn't allowed to be news. Also not news is the whereabouts of Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, who definitely didn't go visit Truman Capote

on some sun-drenched Italian island and just might be in Moscow, although, if so, Donald MacLean is a cad for not cabling his wife to congratulate her on the birth of his daughter. Speaking of mysterious appearances, the Russians in Shanghai are not only living very well, but are accompanied by a suspicious cohort of Germans, all with camp tattoos on their wrist, who are suspected of being German POW technicians working on some secret project somewhere in China. (Near Shanghai, you would think.)  

The Korean War

"Jet Flare-up Marks Year of War" It looks like the Korean War has settled into a stalemate and the only thing that will change that is a "large-scale commitment of Russian air power," says Air Secretary Linkletter. "Ominously, Red planes, of whatever nationality, were now flashing as far as the Seoul area to heckle Kimpo and Suwon airfields." The MiG-15 is a very concerning aircraft that is much faster than American planes even though our flyboys are shooting them down by the dozen with no losses to themselves, just ask the fighter boys, they'll tell you. (50 MiGs shot down and 130 probables to just 6 US jets lost, it says here.) Most US jets in Korea are actually F-80s doing fighter-bomber runs, which they're quite good at compared with prop planes due to their not trying to shake themselves apart. Oh, and the peace talks are "slowing down."

If you're wondering how the boys are dealing with the Red Baron's Fokker Triplane shooting them all down in Korea, Newsweek has you covered with a complete breakdown of how all the fighters and everything else compare in Korea in a handy two page spread complete with silhouettes of more planes than you knew existed. Did  you know that the Russians have 900 MiGs in eastern Europe? I don't know who counted them, but they do! It says here, anyway. Follows the promised interview with Captain James Jabarra, who explains that the MiG is faster and has a ceiling advantage, but the F-86's computing gunsight gives it a marksmanship edge. 

It's Latin America's turn to get skipped this week because something actually interesting is happening in Canada. The price of newsprint is going up! The lead story, by a reporter who was obviously very impressed by the trip up the Inside Passage from Seattle, is about the new pulp mill in Prince Rupert, "500 miles north of Vancouver." It has a capacity of 200 tons a day, and a thousand square mile "Forest Management License," the first issued by the provincial government under its new, scientific forest management plan, under which the company has only that thousand square miles forever, and will be responsible for reforesting it to keep the harvest going for as long as the mill operates.  The big story on the $10/ton increase in the price of Canadian newsprint exports is something that newspapers and magazines care about a lot more than regular people, and that  you know all about already, so I'm not going to say anything more before, and if, a trade war starts.

Business

Business Telescope reports all sorts of hickups from controls and mobilisation, from war plant construction getting in the way of regular construction, to problems keeping labour at war plants and auto production being held up by shortages of rubber for tires and batteries. On the bright side, increased sulphur and shoe production is in sight. On the less bright side, production of armou-piercing shells and the army machine tool programme are way behind schedule due to toolmakers being afraid to bid on army contracts for fear of price freezes and a failure to stockpile tungsten. The government is talking about tying foreign aid to reciprocal agreements for raw material exports because of the way those darn foreigners keep asking us to pay for the stuff we need. There's also a scrap metal crisis, and the inventory overhang problem is getting worse, with warehouses around the country "95% full," 
 

"World Chamber's Formula for Sanity" Some lucky Newsweek reporter was sent off to cover the International Chamber of Commerce meeting in sunny Lisbon, Portugal. They want lower tariffs, fewer trade restrictions, relaxed currency controls and more private overseas investment. That out of the way, Americans yelled at Europeans for their trade cartels and not spending enough on defence (earlier, Newsweek quoted an authority that thought that the US might have to permanently spend up to a billion dollars to make up the gap in European defence spending). Then the Europeans talked about how it was all necessary to achieve European unification and then they elected some rich Swedish businessman to replace  Arthur Sloan of GM as their president, and everyone went and bought cheap wine to take home. 

In other news, it looks like DiSalle was sadly right when he said that there was no beef supply crisis of disappearing cows and that there wouldn't be a black market in beef. Where's my crisis? The latest sailor's strike isn't turning into a crisis, either, because there are no American sailors, because they get paid too much. Two and a half times more than British sailors!  A nice graphic shows how the US work force is going to increase from 65.2 million in 1950 to 68.4 million in 1952, allowing the defence workforce to increase from 4 million in 1950 to 12 million in 1952 without affecting us as much as you'd think.  Small business reminds Newsweek that it would like a piece of the action. Did you know that the Mormons have a co-op department store chain out in Utah? It has been around for a hundred years, and isn't really a co-op any more, but they just opened a new central warehouse in Salt Lake City and wow, is it big! Also, considering that its board of directors is practically the same as the board of the church, it all seems a bit un-Christian to me. 

What's New reports on the Richard M. Decker Corporation of Chicago's tamper-proof locks for wheels and tires; Athletic Films of Hollywood's movie-viewer in the form of a baseball with a handle attached with film showing correct method of play in many sports; Bene-Craft Products of New Jersey's "legal jimmie," a tool fo rforcing open paint-sealed windows; and C. S. Hammond's pocket-book-sized 78 city street atlas. 

Business Tides with Henry Hazlitt answers my criticism of last week with his own "Anti-Inflation Programme," which predictably consists of higher interest rates and a balanced budget via cuts of "unjustified expenditures" rather than more "burdensome taxation." He is also against government-run war factories and food subsidies, but thinks that allocations are okay, as long as they don't include price controls. Because nothing stops inflation like idle factories and unemployed workers. 

Science, Medicine, Education

"Operation Greenhouse" The current round of atom bomb tests at Eniwetok included a series intended to find out how much residual radiation is left over after an atomic bomb burst. It turns out that, even when the bomb goes off close to the ground, there isn't that much, and it isn't enough to stop rescue and reconstruction work. (The area right under the blast, of maybe a square mile, is highly radioactive, but it is also devastated, so there is no need for rescue work there.) The tests also exposed aircraft and experimental animals to blast and radiation effects to see what would happen, and one of the bombs was a bit bigger than previous bombs, but there were no hydrogen bombs, so what was the big deal, the press asks AEC Chairman Gordon Dean, who hedges. Everyone keeps saying that America has hydrogen bombs, he says, but we never said that, so kindly give us some room! The press was bored, but liked the cheap drinks and steaks at the officer's mess, and said as much, although when the Air Force did pause to let off a bomb, it was like the "gates of Hell opening." This caused David Lilienthal to reappear from wherever he was hiding and complain that the news coverage gave away all of America's secrets about being in touch with Hell and 20 cent bourbon, because everyone is a Communist spy.  

"Doctors Triumphant" Newsweek checks in with the AMA annual meeting, this year in Atlantic City for the fourth time in a hundred years, and who says doctors know how to have fun? The article leads off with politics. The AMA is patting itself on the back for stopping socialised medicine in Congress and celebrated by extending its public relations agents' contract. Then it passed a resolution about patriotism and anti-communism and the schools with their liberal agenda and the youth today. If that's how doctors think, maybe they could stay in Atlantic City?

Then we get on with some actual medicine. The AMA is very worried about obesity, which is probably causing all those heart attack deaths we're having these days. "Fork and plate disease" has led to about fifteen million Americans being at least 10% over their proper weight, some 5 million being "pathologically overweight." They'll probably all have heart attacks, or, if not, diabetes or kidney disease. Another exhibit celebrated advances in the treatment of cleft palate at the Lancaster Cleft Palate Clinic, while Doctor Edward Strucker of Philadelphia is skeptical about drug treatments for alcoholism. Doctors Huggins of Chicago and Professor Bergenstal, his "associate" are here to explain progress in prostrate (removal) surgery and also their new procedure for removing the adrenal glands, while Dr. Curtis and associates of Baltimore have a new burn salve incorporating milk solids, which seems a bit unsanitary to me, but casein is a miracle substance, so maybe. 

"Draft Test Results" The second round of the draft-deferment test is going ahead on 30 June and 12 July, and this week results from the first round back in the spring, which 167,000 boys sat, are coming back. The tests, administered by Educational Testing Services of New Jersey, and completed and scored on IBM cards, were supposed to be tough, and gave a 65% pass rate. This seems typical of similar tests from WWII, but people are still complaining, especially since colleges are saying that they might defer admission to anyone who failed it, which some boys think is undemocratic. 

Radio-Television, Press, People

"Sports versus TV" Newsweek liked the stories about the collapse of the NACA boycott of televised college football and the theatre chains buying the rights of the big fight that it runs them again. To be fair, there are new developments, as Notre Dame joins the UPenn boycott-busters, and the fight has now been fought to a sell-out crowd, proving that televising it, at least to theatres, doesn't have to hurt at the box office. The television antenna on the roof of the Empire State Building started broadcasting today, twenty-two years after Governor Al Smith insisted that the building have a roof mast for dirigibles to moor at. That turned out to be a terrible idea (but helicopters can land on Post Office roofs!), but the better TV reception effective today is a gift from the late governor.

The Ford Foundation is promising its own gift for viewers in the form of more highbrow television (and radio.) Thank you, Ford Foundation! The National Association of Educational Broadcasters was briefly upset because they thought that the new Ford Foundation workshop might work kand-in-opera-glove with the advertising hucksters of regular TV, but the Ford Foundation promised it wouldn't, that it would stick to funding and possibly making educational television shows, and so it is all okay. Then Newsweek checks in with Lawrence Spivak of Meet the Press to see how he likes being a press and politics institution. He likes it!

"S.T. to P.D" The St. Louis Star-Times folded last week and was bought out by the Post-Dispatch, with the usual absurdly unfair results, including two staffers stranded in Europe, two new copy editors and an editorial writer, hired last week, out of a job before their first paycheque, and veteran staffers being sent to the unemployment lines with 30 weeks of severance pay. The cause was a combination of losses at the Saturday paper and the newsprint price increase, as well as an attempt to launch a Sunday paper that sucked up all the money the publisher's family was willing to put back into the business. The moral is that the other 1700 US dailies better think about printing their own Sunday edition if they don't already have one. 

The Daily Worker's series that suggested the writer had been given a tour of American air bases around Europe turns out to have been lying about that and everything else in their communistic anti-American screed by an awful. lying correspondent, Newsweek reports in a completely unbiased way. So all that embarrassing publicity that Third Air Force got last week was completely unwarranted!

Even Newsweek thinks that Andrew Tully of the Scripps-Howard chain is getting unhinged about Dean Acheson.

The wife and daughter of two Pakistani UN officials, arrested as suspected "gypsy shoplifters" in New Rochelle, New York, on account of their dark skins, have been released with an apology, although the Pakestani delegation to the UN is still going to complain officially. Charles Coburn, the Crosby kids are in the news. Elsa Maxwell, the Duchess of Windsor, Henry Ford II, Barbara Hutton, the Aga Khan, Aly Khan and Joan Fontaine  were all seen at a party in New York. Mrs. Mary Coe, a 25 year-old housewife but also full time medical student, graduated as an MD at 25 from USC last week, thanks in part to her husband helping out with the babysitting. It says here. Tokiko Matsudaira is a six-year-old girl from Tokyo who will be living with a family friend in Washington for the indefinite future, which is also news. Billy Graham's crusade for Jesus is bringing out the rubes. Nina Warren graduated from high school last week. Speaker Sam Rayburn says that Texans are tired of all that investigating and want Congress to get down to some real work, while British army wife Benita Lasseter smuggled herself into Korea and visited her husband. Even more news!

Hedy Lamarr has married for the fourth time, freelance writer William S. Friedman was killed at an air show in New Jersey last week when the plane he was a passenger in, crashed into the sea. (The pilot is okay, though.) C. V. R. Thompson, J. B. Chifley, Vice Admiral Nelson McCuddy and Federal judge and former congressman T. Alan Goldsborough have died. McCuddy, Goldsborough and, arguably, Chifley had their innings, but Thompson was only 45. It doesn't say cause of death here, but what do you want to bet it was a heart attack? I honestly don't think that obesity is the only thing going on here.  Have you heard of Alton Ochsner?

New Films

Excuse My Dust is a zany musical comedy with Red Skelton as a pioneering auto enthusiast back in the day, while No Questions Asked is a crime thriller with Steve Keiver and Night Into Morning is "too intelligent" to be a tearjerker. He Ran All the Way is a gangster drama with John Garfield and "sexy Shelly Winter" in regular clothes, "a suspensful film" of "trapped fear." The Frogmen is a "first rate second-world-war film" about frogmen who frog. No, wait, swim places and do derring-do. If you're keeping score, that is five American studio films in a row with good reviews, compared with three European imports last week, all with bad reviews. There's things I like about Newsweek, and things I don't like, and the fact that it's got its hand out to anyone who'll pay for coverage is a lot of what I don't like. 

Books

"The late" Frank Smythe has The Unknown Country, which is about his adventures mountain climbing out in the British Columbia wilderness, not including the last one where he was eaten by a bear. I might have made that bit(!) up. General Bar-Komorowski's The Secret Army is his memoir of leading the Polish Underground in the war right up until he was stabbed in the back by the Russians. The caption in his photo suggests that the book is retaliation against those who wronged him, but the review is surprisingly measured. The reviewer thinks that the Communists set out to destroy the Home Army, but admits that the belief that the Red Army would come to the relief of the Warsaw Rising was just a mistaken assumption. George Simeon's new novel, The Heart of a Man, is disappointing. Edward Bass's Umberto's Circus is a pleasant novel and a British Book-of-the-Month club July selection. I'm more interested in the financial details that come out due to the author dying, without any heirs, in 1946, before the book's Czech publication and the English translation. Forty thousand dollars in royalties have already accumulated in the author's bank account, and no-one is sure what to do with it. That's it. I'm going to be a novelist! 


 Raymond Moley is not done with that dam in Arizona that we shouldn't build. Not by a long shot he's not. 

 

Aviation Week, 25 June 1951

News Digest reports that National Airlines might buy Northwest's Martin 2-0-2s if the price is right. Lockheed F-94Bs can't fly with wing tip tanks until the air force figures out why one broke off, causing an F-94 to crash in Long Island Sound this week. The Navy's new blimp is flying. Chance Vought is building some Corsairs for the French. The PAA strike is over. 

Sidelights reports that Maryland's Representative Sasser wants to lift the rank cap on women officers so that they can become brigadier generals and rear admirals, instead of colones and captains. The Navy wants to scrap the word "super" in "supercarrier." Colonel Charles Lindbergh wants everyone to know that the Air Force isn't ignoring him and that he continues to work on call and give them invaluable advice about being as Fascist as you can get away with. The Navy has scheduled the 27,000t Essex-class carriers Randolph and Hornet for a full modernisation, including a new, heavier flight deck. 

Industry Observer reports that "another Anglo-American aviation controversy is brewing," as between the new Vickers V-660 four-jet engine sweptwing bomber and the Boeing six-jet B-47. Flight says the Vickers plane is the best due to superior aerodynamics. Curtiss-Wright is building a flight simulator based on an electronic computer for the McDonnell Banshee that will actually go aboard an aircraft carrier. Republic says that its F-84Es are doing just fine in Korea, and Lockheed says it didn't just make up the 12,200lb thrust engine its L-193 needs. It is just a version of the upcoming GE J-53[?]. North American F-86Es are back flying again after a temporary grounding a few weeks ago due to actuator trouble in the irreversible hydraulic boost of its all-flying tail. The USAF is doing more rocket-firing tests in its interceptors. Rocket barrages seem to be the solution to shooting down a high speed jet bomber at high altitudes, where interceptions are so brief and difficult, but something has to be done about the drag from all those rockets, perhaps putting them in a special weapons bay in future designs. The National Board of Standards has developed a "new" method of analyzing exhaust gasses. Because we've been doing this for years, and every installation has been just fine, and yet every few years there's a new one that is much better, and also just fine. Lockheed and Armstrong Siddeley have come up with a brake to stop windmilling turboprops in carrier landings. Boeing and the Air Force are upset that their stunt cross-continent flight by a B-47 was stopped in Wight Patterson just because it broke down. 

Katherine Johnsen's Washington Roundup reports that the JCS has a new strategic plan intended to even up the ground force balance, as strategic bombers take care of the "strategic" situation. Well, obviously. There will be more tactical air; guided missiles and atomic artillery will even things out in Europe; the Navy will intrude into the Arctic, Baltic and Black Sea and give the Russians something to think about. Tactical air superiority is  another key to "holding" Europe in the next war. While the Joint Chiefs are agreeing, an inter-service "war" is brewing as the Army, Navy and Air Force fight for funds. The Air Force wants a 150-win air force, while the JCS has only approved 95. The 150 wing number would give the Air Force a full half of the defence budget. Senator Lodge is still pushing for it, but the Taft-Wherry wing, which was promoting it, has begun to cool on the idea, even though it is the only option on the table that avoids more US forces in Europe. Finally, Senator Johnson has tabled an investigation of connections between the CAB and the White House until the air mail bill is cleaned up. Since that won't happen, neither will the CAB-White House probe, which, sources say, would have been very embarrassing to the Administration. 

Ben S. Lee reports, "Atom Blast Studied as Key to New Design" Not everyone thought that OPERATION GREENHOUSE was boring. The industry is buzzing over what it means for aircraft design. The Joint Task Force III, struck in 1949 to study planes in the atom age. says that 112 planes of 15 types from bomber to utility, were exposed to the blasts. No planes dropped bombs; all were detonated on test towers. Some planes were flown right through the blast under drone control. Manned, instrumented planes flew at various distances. The precise details are classified, although 5 drones were lost in flying accidents. The Air Force won't tell us anything about what happened to the test planes, atomically speaking. 

Alexander McSurely, "Production 4-0-4 Nears Flight" The first new airplane, with 80% changed tooling over the 2-02, is 80% complete. Martin has 101 orders, amazing considering the 2-0-2's record, but everyone but Convair has given up on the Super-DC3 market. The design has improved aerodynamics and has been careful with 75S's corrosion problems. In shorter news, the August DC-6 crash, when a propeller blade broke off and penetrated the cabin of an American Airlines DC-6, has been traced to a defective blade. Didn't we already know that? In back-to-front style, "freelance writer" William "Blimp" Friedman, reported killed in an aviation accident in Newsweek, was lost in that F-94B accident that led to the fleet grounding. His death "saddened" the 13th annual Aviation Writers Association convention in New York City. Friedman leaves a widow and two young children. At various local seminars, CAB and CAA officials predicted that local airfields with no instruments will get terminal VOR navigation or ILS systems in the next few yeasrs, while a CAA economist predicted that 20--25 seat passenger helicoptes will be in wide use within five years. The CAA prototype aircraft development committee is hoping that a DC-3 replacement will come along very soon. 

There will be new exemptions from raw material controls for light plane builders soon, and the WSB is looking at airframe wages. The Air Force's West Coast small-business clinic drew 53 visitors, and General Vandenberg denies reports that he is retiring soon. General Bradley will be reappointed JCS in August, instead of retiring as planned, instead of being replaced by Admiral Sherman. 

David S. Anderton, "F-94: Variations on a Lockheed Theme" The F-94 is an upgrade of the F-80 and "may lead a trend back to straight-winged fighters." I have no  idea why, although it is said to be a 600mph fighter in spite of the old-fashioned wings, so they're doing something right and it sure isn't the engine. On the other hand, some people say it has the same performance as the F-80, which would make it a 550mph fighter. Besides the F-94A, just entering service, there are B models with more avionics, and a C with a redesigned wing and J-48 engine with afterburner. The F-94D will be a single-seat version with extra fuel tankage, and the thin wing and engine of the -C. Lockheed is convinced that with the right wing profile, sweep back isn't needed in the transonic realm, and that the F-94 could lead the way back to designs with better low-speed handling. 

Boeing technicians have refined their understanding of the aeroelasticity of the B-47 wing by putting a model in a wind tunnel and putting braces on the wings at various points so that they will bend in appropriate directions, while Fairchild is very pleased with the streamlining of C-119 small parts hardness testing using a "job-tailored automatic tester" from Topflight Tool Company. 

NACA Reports has one on "Effects of Some Solutions Treatments Followed by an Aging Treatment on the Life of Small-Cast Turbine Blades of a Cobalt-Chromium-Base Alloy," which seems self-explanatory and also the first of a series of reports on the same trials. Also, "Estimatoin onf Low-Speed Lift and Hing-Moment Parameters for Full-Span Trailing-Edge Flaps on Lifting Surfaces with or Without Sweepback," whihc is a theoretical analysis of a limited set of . . . those things I just wrote down. There's also one on the lift, pitch and span load of wings at low speed as affected by variations in sweep and aspect ratio, an experimental study from the 7ft wind tunnel, and an analytical and experimental investigation of the twist effect of vibrations in cantilever beams. 

W. H. Duckfield and H. Z. Schofield, "Rocket Linings" is a study of ceramic linings in rocket chambers. This is a precise of a paper given at the ASME session in Toronto in June and is an extensive study of various linings to find failure points and figure out how to fix them with dimensional modifications, insulation, supports, and so on. They also looked at graphite, which might work even better. The Avro crew at the Jetliner, who don't seem to have much else to do other than tinker, have come up with an aircraft ac fault analyser that can find the points of failure in an ac circuit while airborne. 

Production has Rudolf Modley, "Tax Hazards of Plant Expansion," which I think I will skip, important as it is to boring things like  making aircraft.  

"Fasteners Checked in Factory Tests" is a thrilling advertorial from the desck of theElastic Stop Nut Corporation. Boeing needs 1000 more engineers, Curtiss Wright has bought out a subcontractor that makes plastic parts. Glenn L. Martin is making magnesium trailers for some reason. 

Equipment has George L. Christian, "Constant Speed for Airborne Generators," which is a constant speed transmission for accessory drive pads on turbojets, which are just like the ones people have been making for years, only presumably they tolerate higher input speeds, and, more importantly, are from Sundstrand, which wants to tell us ALL about them. 

"Low-Cost Computer for Small Business" The Computer Corporation of America's Ida (for Integro-Differential Analyzer) is available on a 60 day delivery schedule for just $8000. Just write to tell the company what equations you want solved, and along it comes. Output is to an oscillograph, though. You get what you pay for.

New Aviation Products has a "High Output Refuelling Truck" from Esso, which UAL is using at LaGuardia.  Resistoflex has Flouroflex "C" protective insulation for electrical wiring. It has a good temperature range, is not very flammable, resists acids, alkalies, gasoline, oil and water, and retains good dielectric properties under all this mistreatment. Highside Chemicals has "Leak Lock," a joint-sealing compound that prevents jet fuel leaks at high temperatures without "locking" the joint. Dodd Chemical's Surf-Pro is a spray-on transparent plastic coating for protecting metal and surface fabrics. Dr. Thomas Dodd assures readers that it is the fruit of three years of hard research and joins other Dodd products such as the Surf-Pro Degreaser, Solvent, Remover and Thinner. 

Under airlines, National Airport has gone to all radar control and UAL is putting televisions on its Hawaiian services. Canadian Pacific expects to save buckets of money with the Comet, and the technical staff of the Air Navigation Development Board has delocalised and conformed to a glidepath leading to private business. I'm sorry, this reader is not upset to have them beyond visual range! May instruments control your ground approach. 

What's New is thrilled with  Alan Pope's Basic Wing and Airfoil Theory and Howard Roberts' Mechanical Measurements by Electrical Methods, but J. B. Mohler's Electroplating For the Metallurgist, Engineer and Chemist isn't quite so good, as it lacks theory. 

Robert C. Wood is on the Editorial trail with a look at "fishy press releases," and, you know, for all the times I make fun of you Mr. Woods, I want you to preach this one up a stemwinder! He singles out two bad press release from a particular airline and wants us to know that Aviation Week didn't use either. One celebrated their "contribution" to the Pacific airlift, which in reality consisted of them giving the Navy back their planes when the Navy said they had to, the other noted a record time between two terminals that was only a record for that airline.  Then he makes fun of the Air Force, which is always citing "security" for not giving out basic details. Now the observer at the May Day flyby won't give precise details on Russian planes there. Security! Finally, he asks, "Where are the Flying Saucers?" Aviation Week won't cover our mysterious (malevolent?) visitors from outer space, but the small magazines are, and now Harper Brothers has Gerald Heard's Is Another World Watching? So Wood asked the Air Force what happened to their Project Flying Saucer, but the Air Force says it was cancelled. Are the wire services on the lookout for flying saucer stories? They aren't, but they're not getting them, either. There have been no sightings since February. "We are open-minded. But the next move seems to be up to the Saucers."