Dief had a LOT of help from the smiling guy with the very hard eyes in the White House. Eisenhower only knew one game: hardball. He played it with (against) everyone, INCLUDING his allies. There was only one way: Ike's.
Ike was a politician, first and last. During War 2, he utterly DESPISED his 2I/C Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. Monty had 3 strikes against him from the start: he was British, he was a small man who would NOT eat sh*t and he was a FINE general. Yes, Monty believed in training, training, training, but look at the results: comparatively, his forces took FAR less casualties than did others. The difference: Monty served in the Trenches in War One, Ike in the Artillery, miles from the Front; Monty had seen, first-hand, the results of sloppy generalship. Look at D-Day: Monty's forces were miles and miles inland while the Americans still were on the beach. And yet, even BEFORE the disaster at Slapton Sands (2 weeks before D-Day), Monty had told Ike, face to face, that the Americans were not trained well enough to attempt an invasion of anything. The casualty figures proved Monty was right....... again.
There were two big military alliances in the world: East and West. The Eastern alliance (Warsaw Pact) used the Russian ammunition and a lot of Russian equipmnt. That meant that the Western alliance (NATO) was damn well GOING to use AMERICAN equipment..... and nothing BUT American equipment.
Look at what happened with the EM-2 project: rifle scrapped, ammunition scrapped, AFTER it had proven BETTER than the American development. NATO got a FULL-POWERED cartridge, no matter that the rifles were uncontrollable on the (specified) full-auto fire. AMERICA wanted a .30-cal cartridge, so that was what NATO GOT: the US offered to pull out of NATO if they did not get their way. Twenty years later, the US had pulled away from the NATO cartridge which they had pushed on everybody else, a new competition was held for a small-calibre round..... and the British effort, once again proven better, was trashed.... and NATO ended up with the American cartridge, after the Americans adopted the Belgian bullet.
Eisenhower is remembered today for his parting shot, the warning about the Military-Industrial Complex. Ike knew all about it: he helped invent it.
But Ike was the President and he would brook NO competition to AMERICAN industry, especially from a third-rate dump like Canada, double-especially after the Canadians had put an aircraft into the air which was 2 generations ahead of ANYTHING the US could build.
So the Arrow had to go.
Ike made a special trip to Ottawa and had a conference with Diefenbaker at that time. I don't know if the notes (if any were kept) have ever been released, but I suspect they are still secret. From the results, we know that Ike "laid down the law" regarding military equipment.
The Arrow was scrapped immediately afterwards...... and Canada bought heaps of US-made equipment, including Bomarcs, F-104s, small-arms which are STILL in service and God-alone-knows-what-else.
The threat to the US military aircraft industry was removed..... along with most of my respect for ANY American politicians.
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