STILL VERY GREAT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 October 1942, Page 4

STILL VERY GREAT

GERMAN AIR STRENGTH ACCORDING TO AMERICAN AUTHORITY. ANTICIPATIONS OF COMING CONFLICT. (Received This Day, 1.0 p.m.) WASHINGTON, October 19. “Germany will resume her concentrated bombing of air bases in England, redouble her attacks on American shipping and directly bombard American industrial centres,” predicts Colonel Hugh Knerr, a retired chief of the United States Army Air Corps, in an article in

the “Mercury” magazine. “The Germans at present _ have planes capable of raiding America at any time they choose, and have been testing bombers with a 40,000 feet altitude, equipped with automatic pilots and improved bomb sights,” he adds. “I think the Germans will come from Norway, via the Arctic, and strike at the industrial region between Sault St Marie and Niagara, perhaps as far south as Pittsburgh. The present German air strength is barely holding its own, because they froze their models early in the war, but soon a new series of Messerschmitts and Focke Wulfs will t give her the finest fighting team in the , world. To oppose it, we have the Spitfire, which equals the Messerschmitt in the air-cooled class, and the Republic P 47 —it remains to be seen whether the latter is as good as the Focke Wulf. I do not think we shall knock out the German Air Force before the spring, but it is possible that the United Nations may have mastery of the air over Europe before the spring.- The threat to this is our own Navy, which is attempting to divide Flying Fortress production and to divert hundreds of these planes to Pacific naval bases, under battleship admirals who have no business with land-based bombers, because they do not know how to use them.”