Good Good Planes

Tough little Harry S. Truman, tillerman on the Senate Committee investigating the war effort, made move No. 2 last week to get at the heart of the controversy over the quality of U.S. war planes. Move No. 1 was his blast on Sept. 14 at their inferior performance in some weight and type categories. Now he called Lieut. General Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, for questioning.

Hap Arnold was on the spot. U.S. fighter pilots in England had damned the present production models of U.S. fighting planes (Curtiss P-40, Bell Airacobra P-39) in no uncertain terms only a fortnight after the top air general had described all U.S.-built military aircraft in syrupy language (TIME, Aug. 31).

The Truman Committee had a name for such procedure. "I regret to say," said its chairman, "that some Government officials do their best to conceal the inefficiencies and whitewash the failures of the contractors."

If Truman finds Arnold guilty of misrepresenting the facts to the people by omission or commission, he will have to lodge a lot of others in the same bed with him. E. V. Rickenbacker, leading U.S. ace in World War I, said early this month during a tour of air combat training centers that the U.S. was superior both in aircraft production and design. Secretary Stimson refrained from commenting on "the reported inferiority of our planes because I have been waiting for a well-founded complaint." Two Army majors sagely told the Society of Automotive Engineers in New York that while "it may be admitted that for altitude work we have not yet been able to match the best fighters of Britain, Germany and Japan," the P-40 and P39 were doing a creditable job "in the lower [altitude] levels." Then they praised the qualities of two new fighting planes (Lockheed P-38, Republic P-47) which have yet to be tested in combat. All this argument did not make U.S. planes any better or worse than they have been all along. The U.S. bombers as a group still are excellent ships, the U.S. fighters which have so far seen action still have acute limitations.

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