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Show j AMERICA IN ACTION ' i r FLIGHT OF A GERMAN BOMBER TO U. S. In a guarded hangar of one of the army air forces experimental stations at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, stands a new German Ju 88 bomber. Behind it, the war department depart-ment disclosed, is one of the strangest strang-est tales of the war. It began last September when a 28-year-old Nazi pilot stationed in the Balkans decided he had had enough of war. He walked to the flight line one morning, selected the newest Nazi aircraft he could find and took off. After flying for two hours, the Nazi set his plane down on an Allied airfield in the Mediterranean. The German bomber was flown first to an African airfield, where two American officers arranged to have it assigned to the AAF. At the same time, two other AAF officers arrived to board a transport plane for the United States. They sighted the Nazi bomber and changed their plans, obtaining permission per-mission to fly it across the Atlantic to its ultimate destination. An American radio compass had been installed. Nazi swastikas had been replaced by AAF insignia on wings and fuselage, and American flags were painted on the top and bottom of the plane. Ample fuel, emergency rations for two weeks, two emergency kits and navigation equipment also were aboard. The plane landed safely on its first stop, and the next day took off on the second leg of the journey, jour-ney, a long haul across the desert and jungles of Africa. It was without with-out incident, but during the third leg the ship ran into a flight of A-20's being ferried to the combat zones. One swooped threateningly over the Ju 88, but flew off after its crew was satisfied the strange plane was piloted by friendly airmen. The next leg, a flight of 900 miles, was made in less than four hours so fast that operations officers at the point of arrival were doubtful, and for a time refused permission for the plane to land. On an evening in mid-October, the bomber landed at Wright Field after less than a week of travel across mountains, desert, jungles, and the Atlantic ocean. It had been flown more than 12,000 miles. Before the plane landed at its first American base, aircraft spotters frantically reported sighting a German Ger-man plane. Three accurately identified iden-tified it as a German Ju 88. Today, at the Wright Field experimental experi-mental station, mechanics and research re-search engineers swarm over the ship almost constantly, jotting down every detail of design and construction. construc-tion. From the microscopic probing prob-ing may come new ideas for America's Ameri-ca's own aircraft Released by Western Newspaper Union. |