(That amount, at least, was the estimate of the rival Air Force Association. The theme was picked up by the Navy League, which spent $500,000 trashing the mega-bomber. The document condemned the B-36 as "an obsolete and unsuccessful aircraft" and charged that the Air Force had acquired it only after Convair had contributed $6.5 million to various Democratic politicians. It came in the form of a nine-page memo for the Navy's internal use (though he admitted giving copies to three members of Congress and to aircraft manufacturer Glenn Martin). The first shot in the battle was fired by Cedric Worth, a civilian assistant to Navy Undersecretary Dan Kimball for "special study and research," as he later described his duties under oath. Now it was a year later, and matters were coming to a head. The spat that followed cancellation of the United States became known as "the revolt of the admirals," and it pitted the Navy's aircraft carrier against the Air Force's strategic bombing force-more specifically, Convair's monster six-engine bomber, the B-36, which had entered service in the summer of 1948. Now the Navy viewed the postwar creation of the Air Force and the Department of Defense as twin political threats to its primacy as the defender of U.S. coast, and World War II had only sharpened their rivalry. Relations between the Army and Navy had first soured in the 1920s over which service should defend the U.S. Johnson's order, though only two sentences long, set off an interservice squabble the likes of which the nation had rarely seen. Carrying aircraft able to deliver atomic bombs to a target 1,000 miles away, the United States would have projected naval air power across the world's oceans, just the mission the Air Force wanted for its land-based bombers. But the carrier was the linchpin of the Navy's plan to equip itself for the strategic nuclear mission. When President Harry Truman ordered Johnson to economize, he obliged in April by canceling the 65,000-ton super-carrier United States, the keel of which had been laid only a week before. Who knew more about weapons than the men who built them? That last connection, which today would seem a scandal worthy of a special prosecutor, was common at the time. In the spring of 1949, the country got a new secretary of defense: Louis Johnson, a wealthy lawyer, aspiring politician, and former official with the Convair Corporation, which was a longtime supplier of U.S. But there were challenges at home as well: from the Navy, which viewed those in the new uniforms as rivals for diminishing defense funds and from within, as the Air Force struggled to introduce jet-powered aircraft into operational service. There was the threat from a new adversary, the Soviet Union. The new service faced daunting challenges. In 1947 the United States Air Force became an independent service, carved from the Army and placed under the control of the newly created National Military Establishment.
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