JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 262
These four images represent some common, popular distribution of
information to the general population, the sets of two working at cross
purposes. (I’ve written several posts here about the Nazi use of maps as a propaganda tool; if you search this blog under those terms you’ll find several entries.) The British images were issued just after the start of WWII
(30 September 1939) and then again just after the end of the Battle of
Britain (November 1, 1941), respectively. The first (“The Tremendous
Range of RAF Bombers Pictorially Shown”), illustrates the range
capacity of its long range bombers for WWI and for 1939, showing how
far they could strike into the heart of Africa. I’m not so sure why
Africa was chosen as the target, as nothing at all was happening there,
militarily speaking, at this early stage of the war; why this didn’t
show the planes screaming their way to the east is a mystery to me.
The Home Office was busy showing how far the Wellington bomber could
reach (3,240 mles), as well as the long shadows cast by the Hampden,
Sunderland and Wellesley. The second British image, “The Speed and
Power of Fighter Craft, Comparisons of Range” displays aircraft of the
principle RAF and Luftwaffe fighters and bombers.
The first German image, printed as a small inset map in a general propaganda piece in the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzg), for November 1940, depicted the capacity of the Luftwaffe to reach, threaten and bomb any region in the British Isles from bases in Calais (France) and Norway, having secured the positions in their attacks against the two countries in Fall Gelb and Operation Weserubung respectively. Britain was effectively half-surrounded from these positions from the Brittany to the Norwegian coasts.
The second German map (and the fourth presented here) is another interesting fiction coming from the propaganda offices in 1938, showing how Germany was threatened by attack from the air forces of its neighbors. Particularly pungent in this portrayal was the threat from Checoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Poland.
Now what was going on in this display–appearing in the Illustrated London News on 8 September 1928–was the idea that a group of soldiers (14 in this case) could be seated in a cushioned/springed box which would be parachuted onto a battlefield. The idea of getting troops into a tight or difficult spot by a parachute is a very good one, a brilliant step forward really in the history of military strategy–but doing it in this fashion, by these means, was just not correct. First of all the whole thing looks way too heavy for the aircraft to leave the ground to begin with, at least with those engines; then it looks too heavy for the chute to pull it out of the plane (and looks as though it would act as an airbrake more than anything else, as the chute seems to be gigantic, fully half the width of an already-wide aircraft. I reckon that given space for seven seated men that the cabin would have to be at least 25′ long, meaning that the parachute seems to be 10 cabin-widths in the larger image, or 250′ in diameter…in the smaller image the chute is only 4 times the length of the cabin or so, meaning it is a hundred feet across.). The intention was for the chute to be deployed and for it to somehow lift the big box up and out of the plane, without dragging into or across the tail and etc. Then there’s the issue of landing, which, springs or shock absorbers or not, looks to be very problematical. 
