I'm not at home right now and so can't double-check this, but I believe you will find that that second personage is not an officer, he's Winston Churchill. Which puts a slightly different angle on his talking over Air Chief Marshal Dowding (IIRC). :)

>The only thing about this story that is making me wonder, though, is
>the patent -silliness- of Richtenberg (I know I am misspelling his
>name in SOME way, dangit)

A bit, yes. It's "Reichenberg". Technically it's von Reichenberg, but Hannelore is very subtly dissing him by omitting it throughout her remarks. A mentioned in the annotations, he's named not for a Historical Personage, but rather the manned suicide-missile version of the V-1 flying bomb, which was officially the Fieseler Fi 130 Reichenberg. (It's a town in Bavaria, IIRC. The name literally translates to something like "imperial mountain".)

>The witches are effective not because they can fly, and not
>because they have guns...
>
>It's because they have -shields-.
>
>Mundane soldiers in mundane aircraft simply have no answer to the
>Neuroi plasma weapon.

That is true, but on the other hand, a man with a rocket pack is a much smaller and (theoretically) more elusive target than a man in a Messerschmitt. (General von Reichenberg does not specifically know this, but Gryphon didn't have any equivalent to a witch's shield in 1943, and he survived. :)

<I'm assuming Richtenberg is not a dumbkopf, he
>has to have a plan in place to deal with that.

Well, the first part is not necessarily in evidence so far, but the second... oh yes. General von Reichenberg has many plans, and we will see one in the next episode. It may provide a bit of a hint as to the nature of that plan, to a certain stripe of WWII weird aviation buff, if I tell you that Episode 05 is entitled "Operation Grass-Snake" (in Karlsländisch, Natter-Einsatz).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.