I looked at my various stuff for more info on helicopter development in the 1940s and this is what I found. It's an article (again) dated June 3, 1940 from Time magazine.

Vertical Flight

Big drawback of the airplane for private use is that it must have broad, obstacle-free fields for take-offs and landings. To complete with the automobile, air transport needs a machine that takes off straight up, land straight down, remains under control at any speed or no speed. Beginning with Leonardo da Vinci, air designers have tinkered with vertical-lift machines. They wound up definitely nowhere.
Last week, a shy voluble fringe haired Russian, Igor Sikorsky (now a US citizen) made his first public flight in a helicopter. Sikorsky and his helpers had puttered for months over a strange, spindle-shanked machine across the road from the municipal airport at Bridgeport, Conn. Last week, mechanics trundled it on the field and a crowd gawked at its three-bladed, 14-foot overhead rotor, its spraddle-legged landing ear, its conventional airplane controls. Into the pilot's seat crawled Designer Sikorsky.
The 75-hp engine back of the seat of his pants began to buzz, the rotor began to whilr. Three tiny propellers in an outrigger tail, used for stabilizer rudder and elevators whistled into shimmering discs. Down over his balding head Igor Sikorsky pulled his hat. With his right hand on the control stick, his feet on the rudder pedals, he grasped with his left hand the lever that controls the lift of the motor by varying pitch of the blades.
Mechanics (who had held the helicopter with ropes while Designer Sikorsky learned to fly it) backed away. Sikorsky pulled back the pitch control lever. Into the air jumped his bug. Fifteen to 20 feet off the ground, it came to a stop, hung there. Sikorsky moved the control stick forward, and down the field for about 200 feet, flew the helicopter. It stopped in the air, backed up a few feet, stopped again. Sikorsky looked over the side, chose the spot he wanted to hit, set the ship down, picked it up about a foot, set it down again.
Sikorsky thinks a helicopter could be used for carrying military messages, getting in and out of roads, backyards. Armed with a cannon, it could be used for defense of battleships, ground establishments, would have a good chance of protecting itself against pursuit planes by stopping dead in the air, backing, hopping up to higher altitudes to get out of machine gun fire.

(The helicopter did not really come into its own as a military aircraft until the US began using it as a weapon and attack transport in South Vietnam. In Korea, it was used primarily as an air ambulance.)