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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 live in wooded groves); dryads (Greek and Roman maidens who live in trees); brownies (wee brown men who haunt old farmhouses); trolls (Scandinavian dwarfs who live in caves by the sea); Nereids (nymphs who live deep under the sea); kobolds (gnomes inhabiting deserted mines); leprechauns (little men who live where treasure is buried); elves (tiny spirits in human form who inhabit bizarre, unfrequented places, but which have no souls).