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:
“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—’indoctrination’ we might say—exercised through the mass media.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“I hate to do what everybody else is doing. Why, only last week, on Fifth Avenue and some cross streets, I noticed that every feminine citizen of these United States wore an artificial posy on her coat or gown. I came home and ripped off every one of the really lovely refrigerator blossoms that were sewn on my own bodices.”
—Carolyn Wells (1862–1942)
“We are told to maintain constitutions because they are constitutions, and what is laid down in those constitutions?... Certain great fundamental ideas of right are common to the world, and ... all laws of man’s making which trample on these ideas, are null and void—wrong to obey, right to disobey. The Constitution of the United States recognizes human slavery; and makes the souls of men articles of purchase and of sale.”
—Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842–1932)
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941Ma date that will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)