Word: airings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...July 8th he was in Palestine. He went directly into action. Chief air opposition came from the Egyjtians flying Italian fighters and British Spitfires, and the single Arab group with a respectable air force. The Israelis flew planes bought through an agreement with the Czech government, procuring Messerschmits which were manufactured at a Scoda plant outside of Prague and flown in bigger planes to Palestine. The Israell also operated several Piper cubs, and increased their air power even further when a group of Beaufighters which were to provide the melodrama in an English movie disappeared from their British field...
Conditions in the Israeli air corps were technically primitive. At first the planes had no radios or oxygen. The fields were poor and the mechanics skilled only in automobile repairing. Besides a single fighter squadron which never had more than 11 planes or 16 pilots there were only a few bombers. Never were more than four planes were off the ground, and some days not even one could be put in the air...
...pilots were top-notch Canadian, English, American and South African World War II veterans who used English as the official Air Corps language. Like the Israel Army, the air corps had no ranks but positions. Unlike the Army, the Air Corps depended heavily on outside volunteers and paid a higher wage to induce flyers to enter the country...
...spite of these handicaps few men were killed; the Israell air corps did considerably better than the Egyptians, shooting down 24 of the enemy and executing several bombing raids on Damascus, Cairo, and El Arish, which lowered Arab moral. Mr. Augarten who found the Czoch Messerschmits an inferier successer to the Garman model destroyed four Egyptians, two better than his total score over Germany...
...vague air of triangle is developed in the obvious ways. The singing is exploited by an interminable series of shots in which Douglas cracks various glass objects with his baritone fortissimo, and the final scene when he breaks up an opera by getting drunk on potions designed to calm him down before his entrance. This latter episode gets its effect by his drunken degradation--a type of humor that is not attractive. Finally there are several subplots to bolster the obvious inadequacies of the main story: Douglas is the proprietor of a failing wreckage business; his father...