Bombs Away (5 page)

This is truly a team, each member responsible to the whole and the whole responsible to the members. And only with its teamlike quality can the bomber successfully function. Here is no commander with subordinates, but a group of responsible individuals functioning as a unit while each member exercises individual judgment and foresight and care.

This is the kind of an organization that Americans above all others are best capable of maintaining. The bomber team is truly a democratic organization. No single man can give all the orders to make a bomber effective. The effectiveness of its mission rests on the initiative and judgment of each one of its members. Not everyone on a football team insists on being quarterback. He plays the position he is best fitted to play. The best football team is one where every member plays his own particular game as a part of the team. The best bomber team is the one where each man plays for the success of the mission.

Thus, because of the foresight of the leaders of our Air Force, a change is coming over the attitude of the young men who are joining. There was a time when a navigator was a pilot who had failed and had taken second choice, when a bombardier was a navigator who had failed and had taken second choice. That is no longer true. A pilot is one kind of man, having one kind of qualities. He might not make a good navigator. A navigator might not make a good pilot nor a good bombardier, while a bombardier requires certain physical and mental traits which are different from those required by either navigator or pilot.

So that each man will do the work he is best fitted to do, the Air Force has devised a series of tests, mental, manual, and physical, which strongly indicate the position in the bomber each applicant should take.

America is building two kinds of long-range bombers for its rapidly developing bomber crews, while other kinds of ships are being built and tested. It is probable that the B-17, popularly known as the Flying Fortress, and the B-24, which the British call the Liberator and for which we have no name yet, will be the nucleus and the backbone of the Air Force striking power. Both are four-engined ships capable of great cruising range and of large bomb-carrying capacity, and although they do not look alike at all they seem to be about equal in effective-ness. But such are the loyalties of Americans toward their tools and their weapons that a Flying Fortress crew will spend a night arguing for the Flying Fortress, while a B-24 crew defends its ship with some heat. The B-17, or Flying Fortress, is the best known and better publicized of the two ships. Its name has struck a responsive chord in the public mind, in spite of the fact that its name does not describe it at all. It is in no sense a fortress, it is an attack ship. Its purpose is to carry the war to an enemy, not to sit still and repel attack. Such has been the appeal of its name that all large bombers are known in the press and in the public mind as Flying Fortresses.

The B-17 has long wings and a graceful and serene flight. It is so large that it does not seem to fly very fast. It is a graceful and beautiful ship, capable of great altitude.

The B-24, on the other hand, is an earnest, deadly-looking ship—pugnacious, stubby. Its wings having a different air foil from that of the B-17 seem short and stubby by comparison. On the ground, sitting on its tricycle landing gear, its tail in the air, it looks like an
Anopheles
mosquito. Looked at from the side, it seems thick and clumsy, but head on it is lean and streamlined. Its bomb bays slide up its side like the top of a rolled-top desk and it takes the air with a roar of menace. The crews of the B-24 defend it valiantly against the aspersion that the B-17 is better.

Actually, these two ships seem to be about equal in performance, although they are so different in appearance. The tradition originated by truck drivers is carried out in these ships. They are given names by their crews and the names painted on the sides, Little Eva, Elsie, Alice, are in line with the American trait of establishing a kind of affectionate relationship with his machine, of endowing it with life and with personality. And airplanes do have, in common with boats, certain personal traits—no two fly quite alike, each one has its little quirks and crankinesses, its excellencies and failings.

Both B-17 and B-24 bristle with defensive machine guns, in the nose, in top, in belly turrets, and in the tail so that every inch of it is covered against attack. American assembly lines are turning out these two planes in great numbers for the Army Air Forces. The huge bomber production plants swarm with men and women working 24 hours a day in shifts which keep the assembly line moving all the time. In the parts plants, wings, tails, parts of fuselage are welded and riveted. Engine plants build and test the motive power, instruments and electrical wiring are assembled and made ready; the noise of lathes and stamps and little riveting machines is deafening, and all these parts move toward the assembly line. And then to the first station come fuselage and center wing structure and all are braced together, fitted and riveted and made strong, and the assembly moves on a track to the next station. At each station are crews trained to do specific things and as the line moves from station to station, the plane takes shape; engines and supercharges are installed, wiring and wing tips and flaps, de-icers and turrets and guns, from station to station, growing and inspected—radios, propellers, and armor plates, landing gear and wheels and giant tires. The ship grows from parts and pieces, built by station crews who know their work so well that they do not even seem to hurry. The great planes move down the line until they reach the end and roll away—finished.

At each station they have been inspected rigorously and when at last they are pulled to the flight line, they are given a final inspection. The engines are started, tested, and proved, and every working part is checked, and finally the test pilots take their places. A new ship roars down the runway and takes to the air, to be given as violent a testing as it is possible to devise. Then it is brought to the ground and checked again and only then is it accepted by the Army Air Forces. These are the ships of the line, these are the champions, these are the weapons and tools of the bomber crew. They are as good as or better than anything like them in the world.

What ingenuity can contrive in metal and instrument has been contrived. While the ships were being built, bomber crews were being trained all over the country to be assembled at last for their missions. The long-range bomber is an intricate and marvelous machine capable of climbing to great altitude, capable of tremendous range, capable of carrying great bomb loads; but it is still only as good as its bomber crew. It is only a machine. It can only fly as well as its pilot can fly it and only arrive at the point toward which its navigator can direct it.

Marvelous and accurate as the American bombsight is, it still must rely upon the steadiness and judgment of the bombardier, while the sleek sides of the bomber and the lives of the bomber crew are dependent upon the marksmanship and the coolness and the judgment of the aerial gunners. We know that our long-range bombers are as good as, or better than, any like planes in the world; and we believe that in the raw material of the young men of the United States we have potential bomber crews which are better than anything in the world. This is not vain hope nor wishful thinking, but is rooted in the background and home training of the young men who will make up the bomber crews of the future. The boys, who in school are making intricate little models of balsa wood, are the flyers of the future. Even now, the recognition models being used by the Army for the training of observers are being built in the high schools. But beyond the making of models and the association with airplanes, our young men have in their backgrounds associations and trainings which make them ideal crews for bombers. For example, a fine horseman usually makes a fine pilot. The association between man and animal is very like that of association between pilot and machine. The ideal pilot does not push his machine about, but urges it, becomes almost a part of it, and the analogy is even closer than that. In basic training planes, the co-ordination between feet and hands on stick and rudder is very like the same co-ordination of pressure on stirrup and reins of a horseman. Beyond this, our boys and young men of the towns and farms have machinery in their souls. Two generations of young men have couped up their cut-down Fords, have kept them going with spit and wire long after they should have gone on the junk heap, have torn them down and rebuilt them, until they know every polished surface, every scarred and worn bearing, every pitted cylinder. Keeping their crazy cars going, they have learned motors more completely than they could have in any other way. Experimenting to get every last ounce of speed out of their aging motors, tinkering their carburetors to get every last possible mile out of their gasoline, these boys in high schools and on the farms know motors as few people in the world know them; and Army instructors say that these young men make the best possible flyers—the farm boys who have kept the old tractors pounding over the land after they were worn out.

And we may be thankful that frightened civil authorities and specific Ladies Clubs have not managed to eradicate from the country the tradition of the possession and use of firearms, that profound and almost instinctive tradition of Americans. For one does not really learn to shoot a rifle or a machine gun in a few weeks. Army gunnery instructors have thus described a perfect machine gunner: When he was six years old, his father gave him a .22 rifle and taught him to respect it as a dangerous weapon, and taught him to shoot it at a target. At nine, the boy ranged the hills and the woods, hunting squirrels, until the pointing of his rifle was as natural to him as the pointing of his finger. At twelve, the boy was given his first shotgun and taken duck hunting, quail hunting, and grouse hunting; and where, with the rifle, he had learned accuracy in pointing, he now learned the principle of leading a moving target, learned instinctively that you do not fire
at
the moving target, but ahead of it, and learned particularly that his gun is a deadly weapon, always to be respected and cared for. When such a boy enters the Air Force, he has the whole background of aerial gunnery in him before he starts, and he has only to learn the mechanism of a new weapon, for the principles of shooting down enemy airplanes are exactly those of shooting duck. Such a boy, with such a background, makes the ideal aerial gunner, and there are hundreds of thousands of them in America. Luckily for us, our tradition of bearing arms has not gone from the country, and the tradition is so deep and so dear to us that it is one of the most treasured parts of the Bill of Rights—the right of all Americans to bear arms, with the implication that they will know how to use them.