PRODUCTION
At Bethpage, Long Island, a trim new plane raced down the runway, lifted, climbed up, up, up almost beyond hearing, then peeled off into a grinding power-dive. Fresh off the assembly line, another Grumman Avenger, the Navy's new, deadly torpedo plane, was in the torturing rigors of its shakedown flight.
On the other side of the world, in the shell-blasted smoke-haze of the Battle of the Coral Sea (see p. 18), swarms of bee-bodied Navy fighter planes had just proved prime factors in the United Nations' decisive victory. The planes were Grumman Wildcats,...