I don't think the timer on any 1941 design would have been a dethermalizer. Much more likely, it killed the ignition engine, since by then they were engine run limited.

The first public mention of the dethermalizer was in the September 1943 issue of Model Airplane New in an article called "Bring them down safely" written by Carl Goldberg. Goldberg was quite an innovator, since he also introduced polyhedral wings and pylon mounting of the wing into free flight.

The pop-up tail was investigated by NASA in a report on "Ultra Deep Stall Descent" back in March, 1981 where they used a 1/6 scale model of a Piper Tomahawk.