P38 Lightning. Gunnery alignment. With four Browning M2 50s and one 20 mm cannon dead ahead of the cockpit, pilots described the p-38 as a "flying buzz saw." This shot helps us see why.

Flying buzz saw

The sudden surrenders of Italy, Germany and Japan caught the U.S. military by surprise.  Millions of GIs wanted to go home - NOW! Impossible, of course, so a method of controlling redeployment was hastily conceived.  Called the Point System, it qualified GIs for discharge according to length of overseas service, family status, military occupational status (MOS), etc. etc.  Highest score (85) meant a fast trip home.  The Ardee News was Fürstenfeldbruck's base newspaper in Ocupied Germany, and then served as the AAF European Redeployment Center (ergo, "R-D News"). affectionately known as a "Repple Depple."  The new policy led to gradual fragmentation of units instead of mass unit discharges, but it also resulted  in the most experienced men and women dropping everything and suddenly leaving as soon as they got orders. Continuity of operations was disrupted and morale sank.  In September of 1945, General George Patton (by then the reluctant Military Governor of Bavaria) wrote home: "Over here we are sloughing away, the Third Army being very much like a person with leprosy, dropping off an arm or a leg or a toe practically every day..." Between Sept. 1 and Dec. 31, 1945, the total U.S. Army strength fell from 8 million to 4.2 million in only four moths, and by the end of 1946 it was only 989,664, split between the Military Occupation forces in Germany, Japan, Austria, Korea -- and the homeland bases, etc.  To top off the disintegration, the American public demanded stopping the military draft.

New Point Scores for Redeployment Home - Jan. 1946

This is a B-17G fitted for testing the advanced VB 10 to 12 "Roc" series of guided “smart” bombs developed by Douglas Aircraft, MIT and the National Defense Research Committee between September 1944 and May 1945. They were fitted with two circular shrouds, the front for directional steering and the back to slow down the bomb to facilitate the tracking and guidance by the bombardier. The VB-10 had a TV camera so that the bombardier could track the bomb via the image on his display set.