.ARSON UNDER THE SEAS
U-boat warfare, a menace now, will become even more brutal with this flame-throwing sub!
by Captain James Poole
A NEW refinement—if that’s the word-on that deadly menace, the submarine, in which the U-boat is enabled to come to the surface and destroy whole fleets of enemy craft with a sheet of all-enveloping flame, has been perfected and tested in California by John Edwin Hogg, a frequent contributor to Mechanix Illustrated on military and naval subjects.
.THEY’RE HERE! NEW ’62 FORD TRUCKS
Get full-time economy that only starts with Ford’s low price!
Meet the trucks that make saving money a full-time business—the new ’62 Fords!
In a selection of over 600 models there’s a truck that’s right for your job, whatever your job. . . trucks that you can buy and operate at lower cost. . . trucks that can save you money mile after mile, load after load, year after year!
.NEW in SCIENCE
Glass Boat is a Fiberglas-reinforced plastic assault craft which the Army is putting through rigid tests at Fort Belvoir. It weighs less than 300 pounds and carries 15 men. A World War II plywood craft of the same type weighed over 400 pounds and carried only 12 men. The propulsion unit of this new attack weapon is a neat 33-hp outboard engine.
.TOM McCAHILL SAYS: “We Can Stop the Highway Slaughter!”
MI’s famed automotive authority proposes a gutsy, double-barreled safety program which would make a lot of people mad—but also save a lot of lives.
SPEED, illegal speed, is the Number One cause of highway deaths, according to the majority of the high-tinkling brass in the safety business. To this I say, “Phooey.” Speed is a cause of highway deaths—but then, so is slow-driving. As I see it, there are four primary causes of our annual roadway slaughter: obsolete highways, Stone Age police practices, bad drivers and unsafe automobiles.
.New Car Steers at Both Front and Rear
THE new European car illustrated above, and shown in diagram at the left, is quite trim in its lines, and incorporates an interesting departure. The motor is at the rear, behind the wheels it drives; while the steering wheels are at the two ends of the machine, giving considerable leverage for rapid maneuvering. The weight is concentrated, as will be seen by the driving wheels.
The more modern prismatic version is a bit handier and doesn’t involve driving around with a mirror point out the front of your car. The current auto-dimming mirrors are even better.
.Two-Faced Mirror for Day or Night Motoring
One side of a reversible rear-view mirror for automobiles has a crystal-clear face for daytime driving, and the other side is a jet black glareproof mirror that kills the blinding reflections during night driving. Either side provides clear vision of the road to the rear. The mirror is turned and locked in position either way by a simple twist of the wrist, and it can also be held in a vertical position for use as a vanity glass.
.Why GAMBLE with DEATH?
By H. W. Magee
THERE’S one law which, sooner or later, is going to stop every reckless or careless driver. That’s the law of averages. And when this law of averages is applied to traffic accidents today, the rows of cold figures scream a grim warning which every sane motorist should heed because you can’t break this law without eventually breaking your neck.
.ROLL OUT THE: BURLAP!
by Gilbert Paust,
Mi’s Aviation EditorThe “stamplicker” rolls out long strips of coated burlap to form the latest in synthetic airstrips, the U.S. Army’s “Hessian Mat.”
A FACTOR in Allied victories on the Western Front has been the availability of airstrips for our fighters directly behind the battle lines.
Thanks to a new type of mat which resembles tar paper, Army engineers have been able to lay these emergency fields in record- breaking time.
.Plankton- Blue Plate Special
Found! — A New Food From The Sea That May Mean The Difference Between Victory and Defeat For The Democracies.
by Elon Jessup
CARE for a dish of plankton?
No?
Well, you’d better not turn up your nose at it. If this war really gets tough, the chances are great that you and I and the guy next door may soon have to eat plankton instead of steaks, chops, turkey and candied sweets. As a matter of fact, I think you’d rather like this new table delicacy.
.NEW PT BOAT- Navy’s Baby Battleship
THE Navy’s PT (patrol torpedo) boats created an unexpected niche for themselves in WWII. In the Pacific, they were used almost entirely as gunboats, doing much damage to Japanese coastal supply lines. Consequently, now the Navy is thinking of them as torpedo-gunboats with torpedoes which can be replaced speedily with guns.
