Part 11
     March 10, 1943. Fourteenth Air Force is formed under the command
 of Maj. Gen. Claire L. Chennault.
     March 19, 1943. Lt. Gen. H.H. Arnold is promoted to four-star
 rank, a first for the Army Air Forces.
     April 4, 1943. The B-24 Lady Be Good, returning from a bombing
 mission, overshoots its base at Soluch, Libya, and is not heard from
 again. In 1959, the wreckage will be found by an oil exploration
 party 440 miles into the Libyan desert.
     April 18, 1943. P-38 pilots from Henderson Field, Guadalcanal,
 intercept and shoot down two Mitsubishi "Betty" bombers over Bou-
 gainville. The aerial ambush kills Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto,
 who planned the Pearl Harbor attack.
     May 30, 1943. All organized Japanese resistance ceases on Attu
 in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska. Attu was recaptured by American
 forces at a fearful cost in lives; all but twenty-eight members of
 the Japanese garrison sacrificed themselves.
     June 15, 1943. The 58th Bombardment Wing, the Army Air Forces'
 first B-29 unit, is established at Marietta, Ga.
     June 15, 1943. The world's first operational jet bomber, the
 German Arado Ar-234V-1 Blitz, makes its first flight.
     July 2, 1943. Lt. Charles Hall shoots down a German FW-190 over
 Sicily, becoming the first black US flyer to down an Axis plane.
     July 19, 1943. Rome is bombed for the first time. Flying from
 Benghazi, Libya, 158 B-17 crews and 112 B-24 crews carry out a
 morning raid. A second attack is staged in the afternoon.
     August 1, 1943. Staging from Benghazi, 177 Ninth Air Force B-24s
 drop 311 tons of bombs from low level on the oil refineries at
 Ploesti during Operation Tidal Wave. Forty-nine aircraft are lost,
 and seven others land in Turkey. This is the first large-scale,
 minimum-altitude attack by AAF heavy bombers on a strongly defended
 target. It is also the longest major bombing mission to date in
 terms of distance from base to target. Four officers, Col. Leon W.
 Johnson, Col. John R. Kane, Maj. John L. Jerstad, and 2d Lt. Lloyd
 H. Hughes, would be awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions.
 More Air Force Medals of Honor were awarded for this mission than
 any other in the service's history.
     August 17, 1943. Eighth Air Force bombers attack the Messer-
 schmitt works at Regensburg, Germany, and ball-bearing plants at
 Schweinfurt in a massive daylight raid. German fighters down sixty
 of the 376 American aircraft.
     August 31, 1943. The Grumman F6F Hellcat goes into operational
 use with VF-5 off USS Yorktown (CV-10) in an attack on Marcus
 Island, 700 miles south of Japan. Hellcat pilots will account for
 nearly three-fourths of all Navy air-to-air victories in World War
 II.
    September 12, 1943. German commandos, led by Capt. Otto Skorzeny,
 help Italian dictator Benito Mussolini break out of a hotel in Gran
 Sasso where he is being held prisoner. Captain Skorzeny and Il Duce
 escape in a Fieseler Fi-156 Storch observation plane.
     September 27, 1943. P-47s with belly tanks go the whole distance
 with Eighth Air Force bombers for a raid on Emden, Germany.
     October 14, 1943. Eighth Air Force conducts the second raid on
 the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt, Germany. As a result, the
 Germans will disperse their ball-bearing manufacturing, but the cost
 of the raid is high; sixty of the 291 B-17s launched do not return,
 and 138 more are damaged.
     October 31, 1943. Over New Georgia in the Solomon Islands, a
 Chance Vought F4U-2 Corsair aviator accomplishes the Navy's first
 successful radar-guided interception.
     November 22-26, 1943. At the Cairo Conference, Roosevelt and
 Churchill, along with Chiang Kai-Shek, agree that B-29s will be
 based in the China-Burma-India theater for strikes on the Japanese
 home islands.
     December 5, 1943. P-51 pilots begin escorting US bombers to
 European targets. Ninth Air Force begins Operation Crossbow raids
 against German bases where secret weapons are being developed.
     December 24, 1943. First major Eighth Air Force assault on
 German V-weapon sites is made when 670 B-17s and B-24s bomb the
 Pas de Calais area of France.
     January 8, 1944. Developed in only 143 days, the prototype Lock-
 heed XP-80 Shooting Star, Lulu Belle, makes its first flight at
 Muroc Dry Lake (later Edwards AFB), Calif., with Milo Burcham at the
 controls. It is the first American fighter to exceed 500 mph in
 level flight.
     January 11, 1944. The first US use of forward-firing rockets is
 made by Navy TBF-1C Avenger crews against a German submarine.
     January 22, 1944. Mediterranean Allied Air Forces fly 1,200
 sorties in support of Operation Shingle, the amphibious landings
 at Anzio, Italy.
     February 15, 1944. The Nazi-occupied Abbey of Monte Cassino,
 Italy, is destroyed by 254 American B-17, B-25, and B-26 crews
 attacking in two waves. The ruins of the abbey will not be captured
 by Fifth Army until May 18, 1944.
     February 20, 1944. The first mission of "Big Week"--six days of
 strikes by Eighth Air Force (based in England) and Fifteenth Air
 Force (based in Italy) against German aircraft plants--is flown.
     March 4, 1944. B-17s of the Eighth Air Force conduct the first
 daylight bombing raid on Berlin.
     March 5, 1944. British Brig. Gen. Orde Wingate's Raiders, pop-
 ularly known as Chindits, land at "Broadway," a site near Indaw,
 Burma, in a daring night operation. General Wingate will be killed
 nineteen days later in an airplane crash.
     March 6, 1944. In the first major USAAF attack on Berlin, 660
 heavy bombers unload 1,600 tons of bombs.
     March 16, 1944. NACA proposes that a jet-propelled transonic
 research airplane be developed. This ultimately leads to the Bell
 X-1.
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