Word: airings
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Masters of ersatz, Germans devised detours, pretenses, camouflages. They built underground factories; used commercial planes to develop military design; laid out airfields planted in alfalfa, made hangars like barns, dressed greaseballs like hayseeds. Thousands of young Germans joined Deutsche Lujtsport Verband (German Air Sports Society) and proceeded to fly their sports planes up & down Germany in tight military formations. Meanwhile civilians took to gliding and soaring...
Prevented by time and the Versailles Treaty from building a great Navy, Germany realized that to rise and fight again she must count on an air force for its long-range striking force. The two men most directly concerned with building the Air Force were one all the world has heard of, Hermann Göring, and one very few have heard of, Erhard Milch. Though he has kept closest surveillance over the Air Force, Göring has in recent months taken over many outside duties, and the real propeller of the force is now Erhard Milch, Inspector-General...
...this Erhard Milch, wartime flier, contributed what is probably the greatest advantage the German Air Force has: rigid standardization. His aviators are as much alike as piston rings, and his piston rings are uniform to the ten-thousandth of an inch. Remotely Jewish, born of a druggist, with experience in bigtime civil aviation, Lieut.-General Milch has such a passion for pattern that when a Berlin squadron leaves its barracks and flies to Königsberg, its men are given identical pajamas in identical rooms in identical barracks, and clean their teeth with duplicate brushes bearing their names...
...Fundamentally bombardment is the core of air attack. Bombers do the damage; other planes simply find and clear the way. Main requirements of bombers are speed, range, capacity. Germany's Dornier Do. 17 and Heinkel He. 111 combine these talents admirably. The slender Do. 17, equipped with two liquid-cooled, streamlined, inverted-V Daimler-Benz engines, can lug one ton of bombs 1,500 miles at nearly 300 miles an hour; and the Heinkel, produced at Germany's model factory at Oranienburg (where duplicate machinery is set up underground, where workers live like prep-school boys), can carry...
...Best indication of the condition of France's Air Force is that she has bought from the U. S. planes which this country had already improved upon. One of France's top fighters is the Curtiss P-36, of which she bought 200. Its 275-300 m. p. h. are not enough. Its air-cooled engine, offering considerable wind resistance ("like running for a trolley car with your overcoat open," says Al Williams), does not streamline as neatly as liquid-cooled power-plants. However, the French have repeatedly expressed themselves satisfied with the P-36, and have claimed...