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August 22, 1972.

Dear Wanda & Co.:

Two of my acquaintances here are veterans of the Air Service from World War II. One of them heard that I had been a flier in the earlier war, and one day he asked me politely what it was like. I started to tell him but quickly gave up. He was not getting the picture. All he really understood was that our planes were smaller, slower and flimsier than those he had worked with. There was no such thing as an observation squadron in his war. It would have taken too long for me to explain to him the particular problems of trench warfare and the primitive means of communication that were available to us. I was reminded of a cartoon that once appeared in the New Yorker. It showed two boys coming out of a theatre. Beside the door were posters advertising a movie about Custer's last [[strikeout]]f[[/strikeout]] fight. Evidently they had just seen that movie, and as they came out one boy was saying to the other "Why didn't he call for air support?"

Consider what a difference one invention, the radio telephone, has made. In WW2 the crew of a plane could talk at will with the crews of the other planes, near by or hundreds of miles away. They could also talk to people on the ground. We had no radio telephone. In a two-seater plane the pilot and observer could talk to each other but to no one else. They conversed through speaking tubes. Two tubes led over the gas tank from the pilot's cockpit to the observer's. You just attached the free end of one tube to the [[strikeout]] earpiece[[/strikeout]] earpiece of your helmet, nad hung the funnel-shaped mouthpiece of the other tube around your neck. A few days after the 88th squadron went to the front with its first planes, Sopwiths, we received a shipment of 18 battery-operated, American-made telephone sets to replace the speaking tubes. I supposed our aviation brass had decided that speaking tubes were just too old-fashioned for Americans to use. Unfortunately the telephones turned out to have been a sad waste of the taxpayers' money. They had a way of going dead at unpredictable and inopportune moments. So they were junked