WAR SECRET REVEALED

Waipa Post, Volume 43, Issue 3376, 17 November 1931, Page 7

WAR SECRET REVEALED

OVER 200 PLANES SMUGGLED.

Some of the most amazing secrets of the war have just been revealed (states the Sunday Chronicle of London).

Herr Anthony Fokker, the mastermind behind the German air iiorce, the famous Dutch aeroplane designer whose fighting planes at one time gave Germany supremacy in the air, has at last broken his silence regarding the remarkable part he played behind the scenes of the great conflict. Probably no single man during the whole of the war had such a strange and adventurous career as Fokker, whose profits out of building aeroplanes for the German Government amounted to more than £1,000,000. Against his will the Germans insisted that he should become a German citizen. He was told peremptorily that he would not be allowed to return, and was informed that his naturalisation as a German had been expedited by military order, and that he was subject to military jurisdiction and discipline.

Not till afterwards did Herr Fokker discover that the Germans had become suspicious of him because their secret service had intercepted and destroyed an offer of £2,000,000 from the British Government if he would go back to Holland and manufacture aeroplanes for the Allies! Herr Fokker makesthese revelations in his life story, " Flying Dutchman." He also discloses the details of a great smuggling plot after the armistice, when the Allies had ordered every Fokker plane to be destroyed, and he smuggled six train loads of aeroplanes, motors, and accessories past the Allied patrol into Holland. By every possible method sufficient railroad cars were gathered together. Then a specially-selected crew of employees working day and night dug up hidden motors and piled them on to the cars. These were then distributed on various sidings. Since it was impossible to run a German locomotive out of the country Dutch locomotives were brought to* the last stop 20 or 30 miles into Germany. Then the Allies were thrown off the scent by a false report that a big smuggling operation was being carried out at another part of the frontier. Finally, the first train was got safely across. Afterwards five trains of sixty cars each were smuggled over the border and the Allies were never any the wiser. " Altogether those 360 cars brought out of Germany over 400 engines, 120 D-7s and at least 60 of the two-seater observation planes, which had never been released for the front, and a score or more of D-Bs." Despite his great war profits, Fokwer emerged with less than one-quar-ter of what he actually accumulated » Berlin bankers," he says, " swindled i me out of two million marks."