I was running around town yesterday going through antique shops and found these two books.  They're both war time books as first is printed in 1942 and the second is printed in 1943!  

 

 

The interesting thing about the second one is one of the peculiarities in the illustrations inside.

 

 

It's one of the first illustrations and it clearly depicts a P-39 taking a high angle lead shot on a German plane that, while an inline engined fighter, is clearly not a Bf-109.  I thought that was kind of odd that with all of the war time pictures of planes on both sides it should have been easy to draw up an actual Luftwaffe fighter if they were going to go through the hassle of drawing real allied planes.  But then I turned the page...

 

 

That's not a Bf-109 or a Fw-190, but an He 112!  I got hit with the realization that a squadron of He 112s was sent on a propaganda tour with photos of the planes at various bases in France being taken to make it look like they had numbers of these planes operational even though they never really saw combat with any military, least of all the Luftwaffe.  One of the side effects of that tour may have been it being included in this book instead of the Luftwaffe's actual workhorse in the Bf-109!

Cool find! Hopefully the burners on the stove were off...   .

He-112 by as I recall, was a good performer but was considered too complex to build in mass production. Kinda like the Spit vs Hurricane but I'm glad they decided to build the Spit anyway. Wonder how the He-112 would have fared if it was produced.

That's a pretty awesome summation, Barton! Pretty neat how public opinion can be shaped by a little misdirection, planned or not.

That's really cool!

 

The He 100 and He 112 were both wonderful aircraft that, for whatever reason, never made it to full scale production.  But the Germans definitely used them for propaganda, sometimes calling them He 113s.  Mostly to make the Allies think that there were large numbers of them in elite squadrons.

The Romanians were supposed to buy a bunch of them but they tested them next to the IAR 80 and found it to be inferior in almost every way, so they cancelled the order.