IRAQ: In the Stork’s Nest

On his seventh birthday morning last week, Iraq’s dark-skinned child King Feisal was told to listen hard to the radio. What he heard sent him tearing to the roof of his Bagdad Palace. There, in a stork’s nest on a chimney, he found what the radio message from London had told him about —a model Hurricane fighter, exact down to rubber tires and glass navigation and landing lights, built for His Majesty by R.A.F. mechanics. On the fuselage was a brass plate bearing birthday greetings. On the engine cowling His Majesty’s name was inscribed in Arabic.

British propaganda had scored a bull’s-eye.