Word: stukas
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Germany's Stuka is an ugly, husky, single-motored monoplane with an upswept and backswept wing. Under its glass solarium are seats for pilot and gunner in tandem. On the wing's leading edge are two fixed machine guns, firing aft is another on a swivel mount, all primarily used for protection from enemy pursuit. The machine-gun sight in front of the pilot is also his bomb sight and, with no more complicated sighting equipment than that, he is able to make dive bombing as accurate as the U. S. Navy and its Curtis, O2C Hell Diver...
...ungainly, single-motored Junkers Ju.87s were on the go from dawn to dusk, dropping out of the dazzling sun in near-vertical dives on docks, factories, ammunition dumps, railroad bridges-any target that could be knocked out with a hit from a heavy bomb. In news dispatches the word "Stuka" (Nazi elision for Sturzkampf-flugzeug-dive fighter) took on the connotation of "Cossack" in Tsarist days...
Some correspondents, recounting raids by machine gun and light bomb on roads crowded with refugees and military transport, charged them to Stuka squadrons because the name had grown pregnant with implications of Nazi frightfulness. These were, in most cases, raids by low-flying attack bombers which swept roads with machine-gun fire and bombs, depended on firepower, speed and whole sale demoralization for their getaway with a minimum of trouble from anti-aircraft fire...
...different kind of bird is the Stuka. Whereas attack bombers work on long targets over which they whisk at high speed-such as roads, crowded river fords, lines of marching men-dive bombers work on pinpoint objectives. Attack bombers rely on surprise and a paralyzing quick blow to cut down anti-aircraft resistance. Stuka pilots rely on their swift descent to avoid anti-aircraft shells, on quick pullouts and fast getaways to save their skins from machine-gun fire...