Word: parachutist
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What does a country doctor do when, on his rounds, he encounters a Nazi parachutist? In the British Lancet which reached the U.S. last week, an anonymous doctor told what he had done. He had just left a farmhouse after delivering a baby. As he stuck his forceps in his hip pocket, he saw an airplane "crashing to earth and the ... pilot . . . floating gracefully from the sky." The doctor dashed back to the farm, snatched up a pitchfork, went after the parachutist, whom he found in the garden, still tangled in his harness...
Ruefully rubbing his backside, the shaken doctor put some highly technical questions to the parachutist, to his amazement received accurate answers. At that point the informal medical examination was interrupted by the arrival of Home Guards, who congratulated the doctor on his capture, bore the invader off. The doctor never saw him again...
...times the claims and counter-claims bordered on the ridiculous. The British announced that the ex-world's champion heavyweight boxer Max Schmeling, who though a little overage and a lot overweight had volunteered as a parachutist, had been killed; the Germans replied that he was ill of a "tropical disease" in an Air Force hospital and quoted him ironically: "Many of the Tommies showed true soldierly spirit even toward their German prisoners. A British Army sergeant captured by us promptly assisted us in treating our wounded." As a sort of reprisal the Germans announced that Major General Bernard...
...British still had not got their Hess story straight last week. From somewhere in Scotland a U.S. newsman cabled that he could watch Rudolf Hess as the No. 1 Nazi Abroad gazed from his hospital window across the highland heather. Parachutist Hess, he heard, was a cheery fellow, ready at talk with the nurses, quick in praise of the mountain scenery...
...attackers used officers with phony papers, parachutists, soldiers in mufti, even pretty girls to spy, to confuse the defenders, to carry out specific missions. ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) glamor girls gathered in hotel lounges and went to work on officers-and reported back to headquarters indiscretions both by "Nazis" and by defenders. Home Guardsmen were so good at catching Fifth Columnists that invaders avoided Home Guard road blocks like poison, sometimes detouring for miles in order to escape detection. One officer with a phony pass, who was finally caught by the Home Guard, had previously got through two regular Army...