calling them "foo-fighters."
What they could not know was that these objects were occupied by enemy pilots, the cream of the German Luftwaffe, desperately trying to find some means for their mysterious craft to destroy our planes.
The foo-fighters were in fact the Kugelblitz, a strange new form of aircraft invented by a crazed German genius, Dr. Eng. A. P. Taschenbrot.
They were powered by a form of atomic energy that also covered the rounded craft with an envelope of glowing force that repelled all objects, making it invulnerable to all weapons, and also to the forces of high speeds and violent aerial maneuvers - called "G-forces" by pilots.
Fortunately for our boys, this atomic envelope also made it impossible for the Kugleblitz to fire weapons at our aircraft - mere bullets could not penetrate the wall of atomic energy, and in fact would be deflected harmlessly around it - unless fired from inside, when the results were catastropic!
The deranged dictator of Nazi Germany was intensely frustrated to have an invincible weapon that could not be used against the bombers destroying the Thousand-Year Reich, and threatened Dr. Taschenbrot with death if he could not make the Kugleblitz an effective defense against Allied aircraft.
The shrewd inventor insisted he must have the facilities of a certain captured factory in occupied France to work on his project - perhaps calculating that if worse came to worst, he might escape to the Allied side when the inevitable invasion began.
Dr. Taschenbrot knew that he must find some way to make the atomic envelope flicker rapidly on and off, so that machinegun bullets
might pass through it during the split-seconds when the way was clear, or else invent some entirely new weapon, perhaps a "death-ray," that was not affected by the atomic barrier.
In April of 1944 he was able to announce success - and the delighted Hitler sent a huge Nazi transport plane, called the "Giant," to transport the inventor and three of his prototype Kuglebitzes back to Berlin. Once let mass production begin, he knew, and the Allied forces were doomed, even at this late stage of the war.
But at this critical stage, fate - and love - took a hand.
High in the ranks of the German Secret Service was a beautiful, blonde young woman - a veritable Ayran goddess - who was one of the Third Reich's most formidable spies. Her name was Hildur von Glenhauser.
Coolly using her astonishing beauty, her high intelligence, her perfect mastery of English and her outstanding skills in espionage, she had delivered many valuable Allied secrets to her Nazi overlords.
In the early spring of 1944 she was in England, to determine just how much the Allies had learned about the Kugleblitz during their admittedly indecisive encounters with it. She was gathering information around American air bases. And there, in a British pub near the Kings Cliffe Army Air Force Base, near London, a remarkable thing happened.
The spy queen fell in love.
The man she met was just an ordinary American Joe, a clear-eyed, straight-talking young fellow from Chicago. He was Captain Jerry Selznik, a fighter pilot, and an ace.
They spent a passionate weekend together - and then Hildur, her woman's heart overflow