Word: commandeering
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Transport Command station near London this week, Private Ramon Rodriguez slept all alone. It was the only way the Army could be sure that the rest of the base personnel would get any sleep. Rodriguez snores to wake the dead...
Volunteers. On the day before this crisis, slim, restless Major General Hoyt Sanford Vandenberg, commander of the U.S. Ninth Air Force, had popped into the headquarters of 40-year-old Major General Elwood Ricardo Quesada, head of one of the Ninth's chief components-the IX Tactical Air Command, whose fighter bombers were stationed back of the First Army. "Van" Vandenberg and "Pete" Quesada went over reports, decided that this was the real thing. The immediate task was to muster every fighter bomber into attacks, to impede Rundstedt's armored spearheads. Generals Van and Pete faced hard facts...
...make. But they were also a measure of the power Rundstedt had thrown into the offensive, of the reserves he had massed to keep his drive going. The German power, assembled under the handicap of air inferiority, was also a measure of the failure by the Allied command and by Vandenberg's Ninth (the biggest air force on the Continent) to use air tactics to prevent such an offensive...
...that it was on the loose, the Ninth might turn in a classic of tactical air war. But the man who had speeded it into action was no longer commander of all of it. The German bulge had split Hoyt Vandenberg's rule over it. Two of his three fighter-bomber components-Quesada's and Brigadier General Richard E. Nugent's-had been shifted at least temporarily from Vandenberg's to "Mary" Coningham's command. The switch was a part of the realignment by which Field Marshal Montgomery had taken over command...
Tall (6 ft.), gregarious Hoyt Vandenberg still had a big outfit and able sub-commanders. The XIX Tactical Air Command, headed by quiet, efficient Brigadier General Otto P. ("Opie") Weyland (rhymes with island) was Vandenberg's link to the battlefields of Lieut. General George S. Patton's Third Army. Vandenberg's bomber outfit was a whopper, headed by Brigadier General Samuel E. Anderson, whose Marauders and Havocs had played a big part in pushing the German airfields back from the Atlantic in advance of Dday...