Visits in Germany

[Mikael Olrog]

Another source of information relating to foreign visits to aircraft manufacturers are of course the company magazines that were published. Apart from that I guess the best option would be to search archives of the different nations that you're interested in since the parties making the visits would of course file a report. I've seen several such reports in Sweden, both from visits made to aircraft manufacturers and to Luftwaffe units. Since it was intelligence gathering missions they did making drawings of interesting things, buildings etc, most likely because it wouldn't have been polite to pull out a camera and take the photos... :-)

I don't think that it was covered in the general press as you are possibly suggesting, since it wasn't really anything that you would make public.
/Mike

[John Beaman]

Not a military pilot, but don't forget Charles Lindberg visited Germany and was given the royal tour by Goering himself and others. He came back to the US convinced the Luftwaffe would beat everybody and said so. He was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer and even spoke to the American Bund at a rally. He was not, of course, but was villified by Roosevelt and the pro-war Democrats, for this and it took him many years to put that behind him. This was part of the reason he went on those "civilian" missions in the South Pacific to teach P-28 pilots how to maximize their range.