Army & Navy: Numbers Into Names

To make U.S. warplanes popular with the U.S. public, the Army & Navy this week jointly authorized calling their planes by names as well as numbers. Thus, the

PB2Y (patrol plane) may now be officially spoken of as the Coronado, the P-40F (fighter) the Warhawk, the SBD (dive-bomber) the Dauntless. But it was still hard to visualize a dusty, sweaty operations officer telling a pilot to "get in that Skymaster and take some food up to the boys at Buna." (Skymaster—C-54 four-engined transport.)

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