Bombs Away (11 page)

Having been tested, accepted, and assigned, the candidate will be sent to gunnery school. There in five weeks he will be taught his trade and from there he will be assigned to his permanent bomber crew. He will take his place on the team.

The weapons of a long-range bomber are .50-caliber machine guns, mounted in pairs about three feet apart and controlled and fired in unison so that not one line of bullets but two spray at an enemy. While the gunner will be trained to handle the lighter .30-caliber guns, and the heavy 20 mm. and 37 mm. cannon, if he is to be bomber man, the .50-caliber double-barreled flexible guns will be his babies. These are mounted in flexible turrets in the transparent blisters on top of the bomber, in the belly blister under the ship, and in the tail. There is a gun in the nose of the ship, but the bombardier takes care of that.

The gunners are responsible for attack from above, from below, and from the rear. The power-driven turrets move around at a guiding touch of the fingers and the twin guns move up and down with a very light touch. A squeeze on the trigger and the heavy armor-piercing bullets pour out. The whole turret, gunner and all, swings around to face the target.

The training of the gunner in his five weeks is direct. He must learn to fire the various Air Force weapons with accuracy and effectiveness, and he must learn the parts of his guns, how to care for them and how to repair them. He must learn theory and method of fire and ballistics. In addition, he must learn his enemies, the kinds of planes the enemy flies and the methods of attack. He must recognize an enemy plane by its shape and size, for he cannot permit it to come close enough to see its insignia. During his five weeks’ training he will fire a great many shots at a great many kinds of targets.

It takes five weeks to train a gunner for a bomber crew. His training will be as it should be—guns and shooting, theory of sighting and lead, but shooting all the time, practice with many different kinds of arms on many kinds of targets, so that the candidate emerges a shooting man who knows and loves and handles his guns. He must be very good, for when his crew finally climbs into a big ship and taxies off to its mission, the belly and back and tail of the ship are in the gunner’s hands. On his accurate eye and steady hand depend the lives of the crew, the safety of the ship, and, most of all, the success of the mission.

If a man has loved hunting where he pitted himself, his will, his nerve, and his marksmanship against big game, he could not ask for better sport, for in his shining blister on the back of a bomber he will be hunting the biggest game in the world—the Zeros, the Stukas, the Heinkels, and the Messerschmitts. Aerial gunners are the number one sportsmen of our time, and Al is a typical member of this select circle.

Al was a tough little man from a small town in the Middle West. He was twenty-one years old, five feet five inches tall, weighed 138 pounds, and he was lean and wiry. He had played forward on his high school basketball team and shortstop for the baseball team. He boxed as an amateur and a good many people had told him he should go professional and make some money at it. He had cold, blue eyes and a pitcher’s face. He had light hair and a perpetual cowlick.

The times had been hard on him and on his family. When war broke out Al was jerking sodas in a candy store and not too happy about it. He joined the Army because it seemed silly to him to wait to be drafted and he joined the Air Force because it offered the kind of action he felt he wanted. The soda fountain had put a brand on him, because he thought of himself as a man of action. His reading was dominated by adventure stories and hunting stories. Before the war, his ideal dream future had been going to the Aleutian Islands and hunting Ko diak bears.

Al was proud of his speed in action and of his strength for his size. He could beat a straight pin-ball game, and when he worked at the soda fountain he kept himself in condition with a set of bar bells. He liked to astonish people, who, seeing how small he was, thought he was also weak.

In the Air Force he went through his preliminary training, and when he heard about the openings for aerial gunners he did not hesitate for a moment. It seemed to him his kind of a job. He was gunner material. He was small, he was tough, and he wanted action.

Ground service did not appeal to him. He wanted to fly and he wanted to shoot.

After his application and examination, his commanding officer felt the same way about it. He recommended Al for gunnery and the assignment came through and Al was sent to an Army Air Force gunnery school.

It was a big school where Al went. The newly built barracks stretched out in all directions and it was in a desolate place, in desert country; for with so much firing, it is just as well if not much civil population lives in the area. Projectiles from .50-caliber, 20 mm. and 37 mm. guns travel a long distance. The districts near the ranges were restricted to Army personnel.

Every week in the school a new class started and every week a class finished. As in every other branch of the Air Force, no time was wasted. Classwork started immediately, but it was not technical classwork. An instructor lectured, but there were guns and ammunition in front of him for demonstration. The first things to learn were the standard guns of the Air Force: the flexible .30- and .50-caliber machine gun, that is, the movable guns which are aimed at a moving target by the gunner; and the fixed guns—the 20 mm. and 37 mm. rapid-firing cannon which are rigid in the plane and are aimed by aiming the whole ship.

The instructor lectured to the new class and he demonstrated with the guns. Al learned each part of each gun, what its name is and what its purpose is. He learned to take the guns to pieces and to reassemble them. The lessons included the things which may go wrong with a gun and how to rectify the stoppage of fire. The class learned about magazines, their care and handling and stowage. They learned different types of ammunition, armor-piercing, tracers, high explosives, and what each type is designed for and what it will do, how far and how fast it travels.

The class handled the ammunition and learned to identify each kind, and when they knew the guns they learned how they are installed in the ships and how the ammunition is stowed. At the end of the first phase of training, they knew every part of the gun, had watched the principles of firing and recoil, of loading and ejection, and when each day’s work was done the class had its athletics—volleyball and basketball and baseball.

At a gunnery school there is constant practice. The compressed air BB guns were in use all the time. There is a shooting gallery, only very much larger than any private shooting gallery. Mounted at intervals are little machine guns which operate by compressed air. They fire streams of BB shot at moving targets. The targets are little planes which move rapidly across a blue background but when they are hit, they fall backwards. These guns are in use all the time. The gunners are encouraged to use them whenever they are free, and although the little guns do not fire at very high velocity, nor do the planes move very fast, the constant shooting of these guns develops the shooter’s eye, makes him aware of a moving target and how to lead it. He learns here too not to fire a constant stream and let the plane run into it, but to fire in bursts so that each shot takes effect.

It is said that when the gunnery students go to town they head first for a shooting gallery to shoot at ducks and moving pipes and clown’s heads, that they spend their money on cartridges in private shooting galleries.

Shooting is not only the business of the gunnery school, but its sport too. Even the girls who work in the offices take their places in the shooting galleries. There are other kinds of shooting beyond the use of military weapons. The Air Force has developed an extension of the photo-electric cell shooting which is now in all penny arcades. With these a moving shadow plane is shot down by electricity but the weapon aimed is an actual machine gun. Probably the shotgun training is the best non-military shooting the student gunner has. A man who can hit a moving target with a shotgun, can bring down an enemy plane.

Al’s class started with simple trapshooting. They moved from station to station while the little clay plates flew always in the same direction. But soon they took up skeet shooting and in this they never knew which way the target would fly. But instructors stood behind them, showed them how to stand, how to aim, how far to fire ahead of a cross flying target, a target moving away or rising or falling. The instruction was good but only by constant practice could the class achieve the instant judgment of lead and timing so that they began to break the targets in the air. This was Al’s meat. His scores improved every day. He had the quick eye and fast reaction time of a natural gunner and he had the liking for his work which kept him at it.

Toward the end of their training they were given the sport-ingest trapshooting in the world. This is an invention of the Air Force and has never been used by civilians. The shooter sits in a swivel seat on the back of a truck. The road he travels is purposely rough so that he is jiggled and shaken about. As the truck passes each one of sixteen dugouts a target flies and the marksmen must try to hit it. And not only is the truck moving and bouncing, but no two of the traps throw the target in the same direction, nor at the same level. The man who can break a good score on this course is really a trapshooter. But the course was not established for fun. It is one thing to fire from a fixed and steady base at a moving target and quite another to fire from a moving base, for here are two speeds which must be calculated, your own and the target’s, and if your base is jiggling too, you have three problems. And these are the problems of an aerial gunner flying in rough air and firing at an attacking plane.