Bombs Away (12 page)

The trapshooting experts of the country are enthusiastic about this training technique and the gunners improve every day. It is their improvement which demonstrates whether they are gunners or not. Al’s first trip on the course gave him two hits out of sixteen, his second day, five hits; and then he settled down to a good consistent eleven out of sixteen which is championship shooting. He felt that he had found his place. There was no word here about his smallness. He was the ideal size for a gunner and he had the eye and nerve and cockiness of a gunner.

At work his uniform was the loose one-piece coverall of the Air Force and a small cap with a long visor like a baseball cap, which pilots also use because it shades the eyes without getting in the way and because you can wear ear phones over it.

In the classroom they studied tactical firing and controlled fire and they learned the gunner’s responsibility to the ship, the crew, and the mission. And now models and silhouettes of the airplanes of the world were brought out and the class was taught through practice to recognize the ships by length and shape of wing, by engine mount, and from every possible angle. This recognition is very important. One must know as far off as possible whether a ship is friend or enemy and if one makes a mistake it may be too late. The class memorized the plane types so that they could call out nationality and type after a one-second look at the silhouette.

And now they knew the guns, and they began to study the gun sights, to know sighting errors and how to correct them. And they studied relative movement and where to fire if a target is coming toward you or crossing or moving away. They worked with a camera gun, learning to estimate speed and relative speed. At last they were ready to fire the machine guns from fixed mounts. Trucks carried the class out to the firing range where the guns were set up on standards. The first training was fire at a fixed target at 200 yards and at 500 yards.

The scoring method was ingenious. Cartridge tips are dipped in colored paint, blue or red or green or yellow. Each man has his own color, and where the bullet hits the target it leaves a little of the paint so that each man can find the hits he has made.

The next problem was firing at a moving target. Ahead of the gun there is an embankment about eight feet high and behind it lies a railroad track which runs in a large triangle. On this track a car runs carrying a cloth target on a rigging. From the guns the car cannot be seen nor hit, but the target slips along in sight. By running around the triangles the target presents different angles for the guns and thus different speeds in relation to the guns. Thus if it is traveling at an angle away from the fire, its speed in relation to the gun will be less than when it travels at right angles to the line of fire. To get the men used to firing at a moving target they first used .22 automatic rifles, but soon they graduated to .30-caliber machine guns and to .50-caliber machine guns.

It is the tendency of most novices to fire great numbers of shots, perhaps hoping that one will hit the target, and it is a matter of discipline to fire short bursts—in a word, to shoot a machine gun like a rifle and not like a fire hose.

It was hot on the firing range, but under a tented cover were cans of water, kept cool by wet cloths wrapped around them. Each man was assigned a certain number of shells to fire at the target under different circumstances every day.

On the firing range, Al loaded a belt of cartridges into the .30-caliber machine gun as he had been taught in class. The very tips of his bullets had been dipped in red paint. He took the gun in his hands and felt for the trigger. His instructor stood close behind him, looking over his shoulder. Al looked through the rear ring sight and found the front sight in the circle, and he braced himself for the firing of the gun.

His instructor said, “Look, you have been shooting a shotgun, you expect this thing to kick. Well, it won’t. The recoil action takes up all of the kick. Now, get your eye closer to that sight or you can’t see your target.” Al leaned close to his sight and put his front sight on the white target 500 yards away. The trigger had a long pull. He squeezed it gently and the rattle of .30-caliber bullets poured out of the gun. In spite of instruction he had braced so hard that on his first burst he missed the target. The empty brass cases rattled out of the right-hand side of the gun and it didn’t kick. He drew another bead on the target and this time he didn’t flinch. The first time you fire a machine gun, you have the feeling that it has got away from you and you can’t stop it; but gradually you learn to release pressure on the trigger almost as soon as you have made contact, thus causing the gun to fire in little short bursts of five to ten shots. All down the line of the range other gunners were firing at the same target. They had all stuffed cotton in their ears, not be-cause the noise is so loud but because it becomes irritating after a while. Each man fired 200 rounds at the fixed target and then they went out and brought in the big square of cloth, laid it on the ground, and found that there were colored holes in the fabric where each bullet had left a little ring of paint around each hit. Some were green and some were red, some were blue, and in this way each man could see the shots he had put in the target.

On the second day on the firing range they did not flinch from the guns any more but they fired at the moving target, the streamer carried by the little car on the triangular track. The target moved straight across their line of fire, then turned and made a run at an angle away from them, turned again and angled in, and behind each man his instructor gave him advice on how far to lead the moving target. Every fifth bullet was a tracer and even in the broad day they could see it drive toward the target. A tracer bullet has a small hole in the rear of the projectile. This hole is filled with calcium which ignites when the bullet is fired so that a brilliant calcium flare shoots from the gun. With tracer bullets you can see how you are shooting and correct your aim. The gunnery class was not very accurate at first, but under the constant supervision of its instructors its scores day by day grew better. Now they were using the principles they had learned on the trapshooting range. You cannot be told how far to lead a moving target, you must simply do it until you know.

In the class they began to study the mechanism and action of the standard gun mount, the waist turret, the bomber turret, the open port mount, the tail gun mount, the tourelle mount, and when they had learned the mechanism of the turret each man was put in to learn to work it. You sit in a small iron seat in a bomber turret, bracing your feet against the foot plate, and there are bars for your hands not unlike the handle bars of a bicycle. Under your urging the whole turret turns either way. The mechanism is driven by an electric battery. A pressure to the right turns the turret to the right. You can make it turn slowly or very rapidly. A slight pressure down on the handle raises the guns and a pressure upward lowers it. The trigger is under your right finger. It is not a technique to be learned easily or quickly. Only practice makes a man proficient. But when he is practiced he can find a target and keep his sight on it as it moves across the sky. Co-ordination of hand and eye must be very acute if one is to operate a turret well. The guns project to right and left on either side of you but your sight is in the middle, cross hairs on a standing glass. It is in the turret that the need for small men as gunners becomes apparent, for the space is crowded. You are surrounded with magazines of ammunition and with the machinery of the turret itself. Over your head is a dome of clear plastic through which you can see in all directions. The turret is a delicate and complex instrument and the mechanics of it are a military secret.

As in all Air Force training, the time at the gunnery school went very quickly. The students were gun-minded young men. They fired on the ranges and they talked firing in the post exchange. In the daily papers they looked for any reference to aerial gunnery in action in Europe, in Australia, or in China; the students were aware of the increasing importance of aerial gunnery. The spirit of their place in the Air Force was beginning to take hold of them. In the barracks Al tried to read his usual adventure stories, but they didn’t hold him any more. There was nothing in the magazine that would take the place of the things in his head. He wanted to be a gunner on a long-range bomber, a B-17E or a B-24, and although he didn’t tell anyone about it there was a story going on in his head about Al the Gunner over Tokyo or over Berlin. In his mind at night he could see his tracers find the vitals of attacking enemy fighters. He knew what it would look like, for he had seen moving pictures of the way a ship staggers when it is killed and noses over and leaps down until it blows up with a puff of black smoke. And in his mind it was Al’s guns that were doing these things. It was much better than the stories he had read.

In the classroom they studied tactics of air offense and defense. They learned where an enemy plane attacks from, the angles it will fly at, and they learned where they must fire to bring it down. On moving models the class saw the course a bullet describes between two moving planes, how the bullet curves forward if the planes are parallel and backward if they are flying opposite. They had studied from silhouettes and models the shapes of friend and enemy planes, and now with models and silhouettes they studied the shapes of enemy ships, models of Japanese aircraft carriers, models of Japanese and Italian cruisers. On the firing range they began to work with a .50-caliber machine gun. These guns fire more slowly than the .30’s but they have great range and great penetrating quality. The projectile will pierce an inch of armor plate. They look like the .30-caliber guns but they are just bigger all over—bigger and faster.

Al’s class went on the range at night and fired tracer bullets at a lighted target and the night was slashed with the lines of the bullets; and all the time the trapshooting went on and the trapshooting from the moving trucks. Eye and hand and judgement were in constant use. They had fired from a fixed base at moving targets now, they had worked the turret and the flexible gun, and at last it was time for them to go into the air. The practice firing would be with a flexible machine gun from an open cockpit plane. The students had learned to load their own belts of ammunition, to take care of their guns. They had learned to repair them when they were broken, how to get them quickly in action when they were jammed, but they had been ground gunners up to now.

On Al’s first day in the air he took his gun and mounted it in the plane as he had been taught to do. He was to fire at a target towed by another airplane. He wore goggles and a helmet, for he would have to lean into the fierce wind to fire, and as he settled himself in the rear cockpit he felt strangely competent, for he knew his weapon very well and his firing score had been consistently good.

Before he had got into the plane he had trued his sight, that is, he had laid his guns in a permanent rack and sighted through his sight at a permanent mark. If the sights were not true it would have showed there. As he had walked out to the plane carrying his gun he had seen a reflection of himself in a window and he had wished that the owner of the candy store where he had jerked sodas could see him now. He felt that everything he had wanted to be was justified. He was a competent little man with a competent big gun. The tow plane took off ahead of him and Al’s plane followed. They flew twenty miles to a firing range. Al had his orders and he was to attack, paralleling the target which is called a beam attack. He was to fire at it from various angles coming and going. On the range the tow plane let out the target on its spool until it dragged far behind. The air was not easy. Al’s plane jerked and jumped.

Al saw now that it was a great deal more difficult to fire from a moving plane than from a steady place on the ground.