SATURDAY AFTERNOON MATINEE: GOD BLESS AMERICA
The Man Behind the Stuka (and the A-10 Warthog)
Before: A pissed-off American After: Tons of smoked Japanese Of all the weapons of the Second World War, the dive bomber is among the most iconic and significant of them. The Japanese used them to great effect in the attack on Pearl Harbor and their subsequent more-or-less simultaneous offensives elsewhere in Asia, and the U.S. Navy used them to even greater effect during the Battle of Midway, where dive bombers sunk four Japanese aircraft carriers and essentially turned the tide of the war in the Pacific. On their way to war However, it was a trio of a certain type of dive bomber that took off in the early morning hours of September 1, 1939 with the mission of severing the wires of explosive charges attached to the Dirschau bridge over the Vistula River that the dive bomber would achieve a singularly unique infamy. The Red Baron in black-and-white Manfred Freiherr von Richtofen, who was an actual aristocrat (Freiherr roughly translat...
