Peeper & Bomber

Frenchmen are still submitting to the "peeping" of German planes coasting along their secretly built frontier defenses (TIME, May 6), but six Italian pursuit planes rocketed up last week when a German ship tried to peep at Benito Mussolini's so-called "Air Gibraltar," the great military airport on Italy's northern frontier near Sesto Calende.

After the maneuver airmen call a "dog fight," Il Duce's diving, threatening, corner-cutting planes scared the Nazi pilot into a forced landing, seized two German long-range telescopic cameras. While several Milan correspondents vouched for this news, the Dictator's official press bureau blandly announced that there had been no such incident, the theory of Benito Mussolini being that when Nazis have to be curbed by their own strong-arm methods, the less said about it the better.

Few days later, pained Parisians did nothing when a German plane, which alighted after covering the 542 mi. from Berlin in 3 hr. 52 min., was discovered to be carrying baggage in a space fitted with the latest equipment for releasing bombs.

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