Berliner Tageblatt – July 14, 1918
“A New Enemy Bird of Prey?”
On the Western Front yesterday, our brave aviators of the Luftstreitkräfte reported the appearance of a most unusual enemy machine. Descriptions are conflicting, but all agree: the aircraft bore the silhouette of no known type, with strange bent wings and a noise like thunder.
According to Oberleutnant Franz Müller, a decorated ace with over twenty victories, the machine descended upon both British and German patrols alike with speed hitherto unseen in the annals of aviation. Witnesses claim it moved “as fast as a shell,” overtaking our swiftest Fokker D.VIIs with ease.
More troubling still, it was said to be armed not with the customary pair of machine-guns, but with six heavy weapons that spat fire in such volume that entire enemy aircraft were destroyed in a single instant. Infantrymen at the front report the machine could also discharge strange projectiles leaving trails of smoke, followed by explosions of enormous force.
At one crossroads, two violent detonations were observed — each one larger than the heaviest shells fired by our 42-cm siege mortars. The surrounding trenches were obliterated. Some soldiers described the sound as “like the end of the world.”
Though no one has identified the machine’s exact origin, rumor spreads that it may be a secret weapon of the Americans, who recently joined the war. Others whisper that it is not of this earth at all, but a phantom aircraft, sent to terrify the Kaiser’s soldiers.
Military command has urged calm. In an official statement, General Headquarters reminds all men that no machine, no matter how powerful, can win a war alone. “We have faced British tanks, French poison gas, and countless artillery barrages,” the statement read. “This new terror in the sky will be met with the same iron resolve.”
Yet in the trenches, the men speak in hushed tones of the “Schwarzer Todesvogel” — the Black Bird of Death.
