Bombs Away (3 page)

Interestingly enough, the story of the Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortress” is as complex as the story of Steinbeck’s writing of
Bombs Away.
According to
Jane’s Vintage Aircraft Recognition Guide
, the prototype B-17 was designed and developed by the Boeing Corporation based on the specifications developed in the 1930s by the United States Army Air Corps (1926), which later became the Army Air Forces (1941). The first B-17 flew on July 28, 1935. The B-17E, the particular model that Steinbeck describes in
Bombs Away,
was the product of prior operations with the British Royal Air Forces and became the first mass-production model for the USAAF (Holmes 127). Improvements found in the B-17E over previous models included more armor, extra machine guns, and self-sealing fuel tanks. But the most significant upgrade was the more powerful radial engines (Holmes 127). In the end, 512 B-17E airplanes were built by Boeing before being upgraded to the B-17Fs and finally to the G models, the very last of the B-17s produced (Holmes 127).

For its time the B-17 was a formidable war machine. It flew at a maximum speed of 287 miles per hour, powered by four Wright Cyclone R-1820-97 engines, which generated 4,800 horsepower (Holmes 127). The airplane had a range of two thousand miles, fully loaded with a payload of 12,800 pounds (Holmes 127). To defend itself, the B-17 had four twin-barreled .50-caliber Browning machine guns (in the chin, dorsal, ball, and tail turrets) and two single-barreled .50-caliber Browning machine guns (in the nose radio compartment and waist position). The first E model of the B-17s was flown on September 5, 1941. The E model was not only the first B-17 to be mass-produced; it was also the first bomber of any type to be manufactured in large numbers. In order to get significant quantities of these bombers manufactured quickly, Boeing had to develop a complicated production scheme that involved several other airplane-manufacturing companies, with somewhat humorous consequences:

The rest, as they say, is history.

 

In June 1943, a year after publishing
Bombs Away,
John Steinbeck left his home in New York and sailed to England to begin his work as a war correspondent for the New York
Herald Tribune.
In July 1943, Steinbeck wrote a dispatch called “Waiting,” in which he describes a formation of B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers returning from a combat sortie:

Steinbeck describes this apprehensive scene with the tools of his novelist’s trade. In particular he uses a human-interest perspective, which especially includes the quaint little dog that belongs to one of the bomber crews. And he, by carefully revealing only one fact at a time, uses narrative detail to build up the tension. For example, we find out that the bomber
Mary Ruth,
which—to give it a stamp of “humanity”—probably has the caricature of a beautiful woman painted on the front fuselage, has successfully landed. It is not complicated stuff, but nonetheless the writing is performed with great skill. One should not forget, then, that Steinbeck’s writing, as it had done in
Bombs Away,
is here to likewise stamp a distinctly human face on the great machinery of contemporary war.

Since the beginning of the real modern technological age of warfare, particularly in the later years of the American Civil War, the United States has often been put into the difficult position of having to defend its vastly destructive way of waging war. From the spring of 1864 until Lee’s surrender at Appo mattox in April 1865, Northern technological advances and industrial superiority actually started transforming the battlefield and the battlefield began to resemble what it would once again look like during World War I—an enormous wasteland. During the U.S. Civil War, the Union leadership—primarily Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, but Abraham Lincoln as well—began to recognize that the right strategy supported by the right technology, when also applied with persistent and sustained action, would in the end trump Lee’s superior battlefield tactics, which had utterly baffled them for several years. The Union leadership soon also learned that the outcome of this modern marriage of strategy and technology quite often produced brutal and destructive results that betrayed long-cherished and often romantic concepts of civilized behavior. The horrendous battlefield casualties of 1864, in such battles as the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and Spotsylvania, which almost cost Lincoln his reelection, and Sherman’s “March to the Sea,” which has made him a reviled villain in the American South ever since, are two such examples. As a consequence this Union leadership, especially Lincoln, understood that democratic governments needed to make the case that in certain untenable situations the ends do justify the means.

While all of this history may seem esoteric, it most certainly is not: the point is that in many ways Steinbeck and
Bombs Away
are also a part of that noble and pragmatic American wartime tradition of justifying, if not tempering, the means to the ends. And it is vital for American democracy to continually look back at how we have fought our wars. The crux of the problem has been how to know exactly which means and which ends are correct policies to follow. In some cases only history and the victorious are able tell in the end. No matter what exact purpose it ended up serving, Steinbeck’s
Bombs Away: The Making of a Bomber Team
is not alone in support of American wartime means. Although Steinbeck did not know the future consequences of the United States’ strategic bombing campaign during World War II, and the crucial role the B-17 would play in it, his writing this book for the United States Army Air Forces not only aided the war effort by reassuring the public of the airplane’s acceptability, it also demonstrated the willingness of America’s best literary talent to justify the use of military power to defeat the enemies of democracy. In the end, while Steinbeck was not what might be called a typical war writer in the Stephen Crane tradition, he was an American patriot who used his one great talent to help his country fight a war that threatened democracy all over the world. Steinbeck’s
Bombs Away
reflects the same American values that he saw had helped distressed families throughout the Great Depression—hard work, faith, and the ability to work as a team—and that would also see them through yet another threat to their survival as a people.

—JAMES H. MEREDITH

Works Cited

Baker, Carlos.
Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story.
New York: Scribners, 1969.

Benson, Jackson J.
The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer.
New York: Penguin, 1984.

“Boeing B-17E Fortress.”
home.att.net/~jbaugher2/|b17_8 .html.

French, Warren.
John Steinbeck.
New York: Twayne, 1961.

Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman.
A Handbook to Literature
. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2006.

Holmes, Tony.
Jane’s Vintage Aircraft Recognition Guide
. New York: Collins, 2005.

New Oxford American Dictionary,
2nd ed. Erin McKean, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Parini, Jay.
John Steinbeck: A Biography.
New York: Henry Holt, 1995.

Rice, Rodney. “Group Man Goes to War: Elements of Propaganda in John Steinbeck’s
Bombs Away.
”
War, Literature, the Arts: A Journal of the Humanities
(2002), 178-93.

Steinbeck, John. “Waiting.” In
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction.
Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson, eds. New York: Viking, 2002, 285-87.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey: Summary Report
(European War). September 30, 1945.
www.anesi.comussbs02.htm
.

Preface

A book should have a dedication, I suppose, but this book is a dedication. It is a dedication to the men who have gone through the hard and rigid training of members of a bomber crew and who have gone away to defend the nation. This book is dedicated to those men, although it is not intended for their reading, for it would be primer work to them. This book is intended for the men of the future bomber teams and for their parents, for the people at home. Nowhere in this book is it indicated that it is easy to be a member of the crew. It is very difficult. But it may be an advantage to the prospective cadet or gunner, to the radio man or crew chief, to know what is in store for him when he makes application for the Air Force; and this book is intended to be read by the mothers and fathers of the prospective Air Force men, to the end that they will have some idea of the training their sons have undertaken. Their sons will not have time to tell about it once the training starts.

And mostly this book intends to tell the whole people of the kind and quality of our Air Force, of the caliber of its men and of the excellence of its equipment. There is one great difficulty in writing such a book as this. So rapid is the growth of the Air Force and so free is it from the strictures of tradition that changes are made every day. Thus by the time the book is finished and printed some of it is bound to be obsolete. That cannot be helped. The world is changing just as rapidly. One thing only does not change. The young men of now are the equals of any young men of our history. The scouts and fighters of our past have their counterparts in the present. The Air Force proves it. The Air Force proves the stupidity of the bewildered Europeans, who, seeing this nation at peace, imagined that it was degenerate, who, seeing that we fought and quarreled in our politics, took this indication of our energy as a sign of our decadence. The fortresses and the B-24’s, the Airacobras, and the P-47’s have by now disillusioned them.

The author wishes to thank the officers and men who helped him and taught him. They will not be thanked by name because that would be breaking an Air Force tradition. Lastly the title “Bombs Away” is taken from the call of the bombardier when the great bombs fall free of the racks and curve down toward the enemy. The bombardier in the transparent nose of the ship lifts his microphone and his voice goes into the ears of every member of the crew and he calls “Bombs Away.” That means that the mission is completed, that means it is time to go home. Someday the call will ring above a broken enemy and then it will be time to go home for good.

Introduction

In all history, probably no nation has tried more passionately or more thoughtfully to avoid fighting than the United States had tried to avoid the present war against Japan and Germany. During the years 1930 to 1940, the nation was preoccupied with internal difficulties, with problems of distribution and production not impossible of solution, but requiring thought and trial and error and some conflict. It is not possible to know whether a solution could have been reached nor how soon it could have been reached. But during that period when a direction had not been set, nor an end established, a generation of young men and young women were kept marking time, not knowing where they were going. In fact, concerned only with keeping alive until some direction was established toward which they could go. Young men coming out of the schools, finding no jobs, no goals, became first despondent and then cynical; a curious and muscling state of mind which was considered intellectual despair, but which was actually the product of mental and physical idleness, descended upon the youth of the country.

The young people were not unlike those clots of boys who hang around the fronts of poolrooms waiting for something to happen. An anarchy of thought and action had in fact settled over the young people of the country. An antidote for the poisons of this idleness and indirection might eventually have been found, some great building program for the betterment of the country (some economic direction or trend to tear away the lethargy). But meanwhile, with one set of certainties gone and no new set established, the country floundered about. Floundered about in fact so convincingly that our enemies considered us to be in a dying condition. Because we were uncertain, we tried to avoid the thought of war and the means of war and the preparation for war. Some of our leaders wished to cut the world in half—to defend this hemisphere against the other—while others thought it would be good business and good thinking to give England the weapon to fight the war for us.