Viewing page 516 of 521

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[newspaper clipping]]
DENVER FLYER PREDICTS 'ATTACK' PLANES WILL PACE INVASION
Instructor Who Fought in Spanish Civil War Stresses Value of Strafing Ground Troops and Supplies——Describes Adventures.

[[image - photograph of man]]
[[caption]] Nazi Blitz Technic Began in Spain
EDWIN LYONS,
Now a Denver flight instructor, who was fighting Germans and Italians over Spain in 1938.  From experience he stresses the devastating punch which ground-scouring, low-flying attack planes will deliver in the launching of a general offensive. [[/caption]]

Draw up an armchair, you livingroom strategists, and get a few authoritative tips on the air tactics of the second front——when it comes——from a Denver pilot who was shooting Germans and Italians over Europe 'way back in the rueful days before Hitler took Austria, while the Chamberlain appeasers were in full flower.

"When the big Allied offensive starts," Edwin Lyons, 32, of 1575 Spruce street says, "You'll naturally expect to hear a lot about the Flying Fortresses, the Liberators, the B-25 and B-26 medium bombers and the fight planes that will provide much of the striking force to the great flying 'fist' which must prepare the way for and cover the invasion forces.

"But don't overlook or underestimate the vital job the klighter and not so well 'attack' airplane will do in carrying out any major offensive.  These are the ships whose strafing machine guns wither the ground troops in advance of their own forces and whose small bombs, blowing up troop trains, communications and supply dumps on thrusts far ahead, close to the ground."

LED SQUADRON FOR SPANISH LOYALISTS.

Lyons knows well how much confusion concerted strafing and light bombing can strike into the heart of an opposing force, because for seven months he commanded a squadron of American and Spanish pilots fighting for the government against the Franco Fascists in the Spanish revolution.

In daytime he and his nine Russian-made planes would lay out a fifty-mile square area and literally comb it for General Franco's ground troops;  at night they would load up with bombs, climb three miles high and dump their loads "to keep the enemy awake," then dive and glide back to their own lines.

For months they dodged from one improvised pasture airfield to another, staying at each such "base" only an average of two days, to keep ahead of the efficient Fascist espionage.

AXIS PRACTICED IN SPANISH WAR.

"It was in Spain," Lyons declares, "that the Germans and Italians put the finishing touches on the blitz technic of combined air and land attack that rocked the world two years later.  Many of the units opposing us on the central front were 85 per cent Germans and Italians, backed up by the best planes, tanks and equipment the dictators could furnish."

Air strafing, which had been much talked of but not proved out in combat before the Spanish war, not only operates with deadly effect, but, surprisingly, is the method safest to planes and pilots involved.

"We would scour a fifty-mile-square area each day, the nine planes cutting loose with a combined spray of 72,000 bullets a minute on any ground troops we saw," Lyons said.  "We carried twenty-five small bombs apiece to be used on any likely objective.  You can do a good job of blowing up a train with ten-kilogram bombs.

"Only one of the Americans in my group was struck in seven months, and I was shot down just once, but managed to land behind our own lines."

BODY OF U. S. FLYER CHOPPED TO BITS.

That was probably very lucky for Lyons, because in describing the savage brutality the Fascists and their African Moor troops were guilty of thru the entire conflict, he related how the body of one American flyer forced down behind the Franco lines was parachuted back to their base airfield in a basket, chopped into bloody bits.  A note was attached, warning the Americans, "This will happen to you if you don't get back to America where you belong."

"I have a photograph of that basket just as a memento of the Germans and Italians and the Moors," Lyons said.

The story of how Lyons, who learned to fly by saving part of his $15 weekly pay in his father's shoe store in New York city, went from this country to Spain, back to New York, to Palestine, and finally wound up teaching instruments flying to prospective army and navy pilots in Denver, is an adventure novel in itself.

PAID OWN PASSAGE TO FIGHT IN SPAIN.

When the Spanish war started in 1936 he was running a flying school at New York.  Since he had "four planes and only two students," the high pay and adventure of the Spanish campaign attracted him and he and four of his friends paid their own passage to France.

After he climbed over the Pyrenees in a strange plane toward Madrid, a sabotaged propeller flew off in the middle of a mile-thick cloud layer and Lyons says he was sure he had struck a "stuffed cloud" (a cloud with a mountain inside).  But he righted the plane, made a forced landing and eventually got back to France and then to Madrid, where he was sent directly to the front.  Another group of eight American pilots was already flying for the government.

"One day, one of the men just back from furlough told me he had seen two American girls whose names he didn't know in Valencia looking for somebody, and thought it might be my wife," he related.  "I flew down there and found her at a hotel."

WIFE FOUND HIM IN VALENCIA HOTEL.

His attractive young wife, whom he had feared to tell of his proposed Spanish adventure beforehand, had learned his whereabouts by newspaper accounts, had gone to France with the wife of another flyer in Lyons' group, walked across the border, and made her way thru Spain.

"One day," Lyons went on, "we caught an Italian troop column of 1,500 men in trucks and motorcycles near Guadalajara.  We timed the attack so as to catch them as they were strung out single file in a bare valley.  We made two passes, over and back, and there was not a thing that moved out of that valley.

"When the government began to see its cause was lost, it ordered us one by one out of the country.  They told us to take our planes and fly out, leaving the planes wherever we landed, so the enemy could not get them."

Later Lyons went to Palestine and with local financing set up a large flying school, the first in the Holy Land, which was taken over by the British at the outbreak of the World war in 1939.

After more than a year at Lincoln, Neb., running another flight school, Lyons was "drafted" to come to Denver as a blind-flying instructor for C. P. T. pilots.  He and his wife and their son, Bobby, 4, find their [[?pr]] life a quiet one by contrast.  Lyons could be off fighting again, but competent instrument-flying instructors are hard to find, and he figures that, for the present at least, he is doing his greatest big toward winning the war right where he is.
[[/newspaper clipping]]

Transcription Notes:
duplicate of page 254