Share this story Part 2 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Part 1 followed the physics revolution to Leo Szilard’s traffic-light epiphany. This part is about the men who carried the idea to America — and the regime that made them refugees....
Share this story Some aircraft are remembered for what they did. The McDonnell XP-67 is remembered for how it looked. Sleek, sculpted, every line flowing into the next, it was one of the most beautiful fighters of the Second World War — and one of the most...
Share this story On a clear summer morning in 1956, two airliners climbed out of Los Angeles minutes apart, each carrying dozens of people east across the desert. Somewhere over the Grand Canyon, in a sky so vast it should have held them both a thousand times over,...
Share this story In the winter of 1942, the odds facing an American bomber crew over Europe were close to a coin toss. The Eighth Air Force flew its heavy bombers by daylight, without enough fighter escort, straight into the teeth of German flak and fighters....
Share this story By the summer of 1944, Charles Lindbergh was the most famous pilot alive and one of the most controversial men in America. He had crossed the Atlantic alone in 1927 and been adored for it. Then he had campaigned to keep the United States out of the...
Share this story On the morning of December 8, 1941, the same Japanese offensive that had just shattered Pearl Harbor reached a speck of coral 2,000 miles to the west. Wake Island was barely three low islets around a lagoon — a refuelling stop with an airstrip,...
Share this story On the morning of 4 June 1942, forty-one obsolete torpedo bombers lumbered off three American carriers toward the Japanese fleet. Their aircraft were too slow, their torpedoes barely worked, and most of them had no fighter escort. Within an hour, all...
Share this story He was a brawler, a drinker, a man who forged his own name to get into flight school and punched a superior officer on his way out of one. He was also, when strapped into the cockpit of a bent-wing Corsair over the Solomon Islands, one of the finest...
Share this story On the morning of 17 January 1966, the people of Palomares were tending tomato fields under a clear Andalusian sky when the war they had never joined fell out of the heavens. Two American aircraft, tangled together seven miles up, came apart in a ball...
Share this story Everyone remembers Charles Lindbergh. Almost nobody remembers the three men who, a year later, flew the Atlantic the hard way — against the wind, from Europe to America — and nearly died doing it. Their aircraft was called the Bremen, and...
Share this story In August 1944, a young Minnesotan named Ken Dahlberg shot down three German aircraft in a single swirling dogfight, took a bullet through his oil system, and bailed out into the clouds over occupied France. Sheltered by the Resistance and — by...
Share this story On 17 May 1935, the man who would later write The Little Prince climbed aboard the largest aircraft on Earth. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in Moscow reporting for a French newspaper, was the only foreigner allowed onto the Tupolev ANT-20 “Maxim...
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