Word: airings
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...their staffs on French soil last week. The English Channel was closed south of the Downs by a minefield. Across it into France, General Sir Edmund delivered some 100,000 British troops to the land forces operating under General Gamelin's supreme command. At the same time the air chiefs met, Sir Cyril L. N. Newall and General Joseph Vuillemin. In the air the Briton is the boss, but in this War, land and air forces are integrated more closely than ever before. All the generals concentrated on a problem for which neither nation had primarily fashioned its arms...
...already crushed. Perhaps Marshal Smigly-Rydz was to blame, for having his generals resist too long; perhaps the speed and power of the German advance surpassed even German calculations; perhaps the weather made the difference, staying dry and leaving the roads passable for motorized advance; perhaps the German air-power exceeded all expectations, breaking Poland's wings before they left the ground, smashing defensive positions before they could be organized. Certainly all these factors combined to make half Poland a shambles and her stand at Warsaw a desperate siege, as ghastly as Madrid...
...cloudy afternoon Dutchmen heard the drumming of war engines as a big flight of bombers sped east across The Netherlands, safe from anti-aircraft fire above a thick overcast. From their course, air-wise Dutchmen (who protested this violation of their neutrality) concluded they were headed for three Nazi naval bases (Wilhelmshaven, Cuxhaven, Brunsbüttel), clustered in a 50-mile circle around the North Sea mouth of the Kiel Canal. They were right...
Before German pursuit could get into the air the raiders had crawled back into the overcast and headed for home, after a lively half hour or so with every machine gun and anti-aircraft cannon in the area whanging away at them. Next day Britain announced that severe damage had been done to a battleship lying alongside the mole at Brunsbüttel, that hits had been made on a second man-of-war off Wilhelmshaven. Few days later an unconfirmed dispatch from Switzerland said the 26,000-ton Gneisenau had been sunk. Germany denied it, said its anti-aircraft...
...Other air activities of the week summarized thus...