World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF EUROPE: It’s Them

Once, like all pixies, the gremlins lived in hollow banks beside rivers and deep pools. Then some of them moved to crags near the seashore and lived on pancakes made of yellow tide-foam. Now they have moved into the air. Last week they were having the time of their lives flying all over the North Atlantic, Britain and Germany in R.A.F. and U.S. planes.

The R.A.F. first learned about the little creatures in 1923 and called them gremlins —probably from the obsolete Old English-transitive verb greme, meaning: to vex. Yet it was not until World War II that the R.A.F. really got to know the gremlins. Then they learned that a female gremlin is a finella and that the babies are widgets. Flyers also learned that gremlins must always be referred to as them; gremlins prefer them to they or it or he and she because them conveys a feeling of the gremlin’s immanence and nameless power.

Moody. Usually gremlins are about a foot high. They wear soft, pointed suede shoes (occasionally spats), tight green breeches, red jackets with a ruffle at the neck and stocking caps or flat-topped tricorn hats with a jaunty feather. They behave fairly well when pilots are flying their planes properly, but become devilish when the plane is not handled to suit them. Sometimes, being creatures of mood and humor, they make life miserable for both bad and good pilots.

The R.A.F. Coastal Command believed at first that the gremlins climbed aboard in mid-air from the wings of sea gulls. It is generally believed now, however, that the gremlins have wings on their shoulders, but, if so, the wings are invisible in photographs (see cut). One school of thought favors vertical-lift propellers on each shoulder. The Coastal Command learned that gremlins love to punch holes in pontoons, jab pilots in the back when they are too busy to scratch, or drink up all the gasoline except just enough to make a landing.

Fighter pilots, more inclined to have trouble with gremlins than other branches of the air services, often are bothered by gremlins who sit on their shoulders and make a noise like a knocking motor when the motor is running smoothly. When a pilot has been flying for a long time through clouds, a gremlin may whisper into the pilot’s ear: “You fathead, you’re flying upside down!” The pilot then hurriedly turns over and flies upside down while the gremlin laughs and laughs, silently. Another favorite gremlin trick is to climb into gun barrels and deflect bullets. (But usually this is done by widgets.) Sometimes a gremlin puts his finger over a carburetor jet and makes the motor sound for a moment as if it were conking out.

Daring. Bomber pilots say that the most annoying gremlins are those which like to play seesaw on the automatic horizon or use the ship’s compass for a merry-go-round while the pilots are trying to fly blind. The most dangerous gremlins are those which delight in covering bombers’ wings with ice. These are a middle-aged breed of gremlin, called spandules, who never bother with planes flying lower than 10,000 feet.

The most daring gremlins are those who walk out on wing tips and make the ailerons flutter, or slide down the radio beam when a plane is making a landing. If they are in an impish mood, the gremlins either jerk away the runways so that the pilot cannot tell where to land, or they tip the nose of the plane down so that a propeller prangs. At other times they can be as nice as can be, even get invited by air-gunners into their turrets for warmth and companionship.

For nearly three years the gremlins devoted themselves exclusively to the R.A.F. But recently Sergeant Gunner Z. E. White of Dallas, Tex. had the guns on “Big Punk,” his Flying Fortress, jam just as he got a German Focke-Wulf 190 in his sights over the North Sea. When White reported what had happened, Pilot Oscar Coen, one of the three original members of the R.A.F.’s Eagle Squadron, nodded his head sagely. A noted gremlinologist, Coen knew then that the gremlins had joined the U.S. Air Forces and that the time had come for their activities to be explained properly to the U.S. public.

Not always good and not always bad, the gremlins show traits of character reaching down through the centuries in fairyland* between the profane and mundane world and the world of the supernatural and religious. The fenodyree (Manx brownie) from the Isle of Man has a diminutive Lincolnshire cousin, Robin-Round-Cap. These little folk are clumsy, hairy and industrious but, like pixies of more personal charm, have often been known to thresh a barnful of wheat for people they liked. The flying fomorians, of Celtic origin, have wings like the gremlins, but are larger and warlike. The hordes of pigmies which in the 2nd Century visited Fergus MacLeite, King of Ulster, are believed to be the ancestors of Swift’s Lilliputians, and possibly the model for the pixyish 14th-Century Robin Hood.

Necessary. Nothing could be more natural than that out of the tradition of Irish, Scottish and English whimsy the gremlin should appear, streamlined for the 20th Century. There is a sociological and psychological necessity in the thinking of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples to conjure up the embodiment of fate in a charming form. Herr Goebbels in Berlin would not understand.

* Gremlins must never be confused with: druids (scholarly Celts who livein wooded groves); dryads (Greek and Roman maidens who live in trees);brownies (wee brown men who haunt old farmhouses); trolls (Scandinaviandwarfs who live in caves by the sea); Nereids (nymphs who live deepunder the sea); kobolds (gnomes inhabiting deserted mines); leprechauns(little men who live where treasure is buried); elves (tiny spirits inhuman form who inhabit bizarre, unfrequented places, but which have nosouls).