PLANES IN AUSTRIA

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 39, 14 August 1940, Page 7

PLANES IN AUSTRIA

WOMEN BUILD THEM

VIENNA PLANT VISITED

Women are helping to fashion Germany's warplanes, says an Associated Press message from Vienna to the American newspapers.

Apparently they are drawn from every adult age class. Some of them have families, one of the first groups of foreign correspondents to be taken through a German aeroplane factory since the outbreak of war last September 1 disclosed.

In the Neustadt factory outside, Vienna the main assembly room was about as large as a middle-size dance hall, perhaps 100 x 200 feet. Approximately three dozen planes were in production in three parallel lines in progressive stages of completion. Fully a third of the workers were women, a few young but at least an equal number evidently with families. They operated lathes, light drills, and small air-driven riveting machines. With fingers nimbler than the men they inserted rivets and braced the riveting anvil.

Some of the women pulled on broadbeamed trousers over their dresses but others worked in ordinary dresses and jackets or sweaters of a design familiar to Americans.

The number of men of military age

at work was noticeably small but the proportion of these increased as the operation advanced towards the technical wiring and engine-fitting stages. AROUND THE CLOCK. The plant operates in three shifts around the clock. At night blankets are drawn across the skylights to effect a moderate blackout, but outside the lights are kept on throughout the dark hours because the plant is being expanded and more and larger quarters are being built. Rigid German discipline distinguishes the pilot and mechanic training routine from that in American schools. The tightly controlled Reich can take its students from where it chooses. i It takes some for mechanics and some to be pilots and officers, and the lads who are chosen for such jobs are about such youngsters as you would find in groups chosen for mechanics and officers in the United States. The course of study also is similar, but the atmosphere is different.

At the call of the instructor, the German lads bounce to their feet, tense. They are taught to speak loudly to instructors and superiors and the practice follows them through their army careers. A colonel making a formal statement to a general standing two feet from him will shout as if he should be heard fifty yards away. But another special note distinguishes training of German pilots from lads of the United States. They have photographs and scale models of every type of ship in the British Navy. They study how they look from the top, from one side, from fore and aft. The models and pictures are projected upon a screen. While we were there a student quickly identified the Rodney, the Hood, and a smaller vessel whose name we didn't catch.