Text from an advertisement in May 1944 issue of Flying magazine.
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We must some day be able to see enemy targets through the thickest fog and the blackest night... a single American soldier must be made a match for an enemy tank... we must be able to land armies upon every kind of fortified coast... we must send fighter planes seven miles into the sky, if need be, to smash enemy bombers from above.
Thus read the notebooks of military strategy, not so long ago, listing things of war that were out of this world... the "impossibles" of the peacetime Sunday supplements.
But war is a relentless taskmaster. And so today we have a parade of "impossibles" of amazing variety– radar, the bazooka, unique troop landing craft... and an airplane that fights seven miles up, dives at speeds approaching the speed of sound, spits out more then ten pounds of steel projectile per second!
That airplane is the Thunderbolt– the joint product of an Army Air Force Materiel Command that knew what it wanted... and a corps of Republic engineers who knew it could be done. It is out of many such combinations that this nation is becoming invincibly armed... and its aerial supremacy made secure for the future.
Not the least "impossible" aspect of the Thunderbolt was its production. How could so intricate and elaborate a machine every reach "quantity production?"
Yet, in a recent month, more planes came off the Republic Thunderbolt assembly lines than came from the assembly lines of any other company in America producing fighter aircraft.
Republic, along with every other war material manufacturer, working hand in hand with the Army Air Forces, is ready for still more "impossibles". Republic Aviation Corporation, Farmingdale, Long Island, New York, USA, and Evansville, Indiana, USA.
Republic firsts in way point to firsts in peace.
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