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.
The wing section of a B-24 being lifted into place
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.
Thus we see that we have in America individual young men who will make great members of bomber crews, but we have another tradition and another practice which guarantees that these crews will be able to act as units. From the time of their being able to walk, our boys and girls take part in team playing. From one ol’ cat to basketball, to sand-lot baseball, to football, American boys learn instinctively to react as members of a team. They learn that not everyone can be pitcher or quarterback, but that each team must be a balance of various skills. And in this instinct for team play and team reaction the Air Force finds its material for the greatest team of this emergency—the bomber crew; for the bomber crews are the close-knit teams which will defend our goal posts and drive deep into the territory of the enemy. And it is the training of the individual members of the bomber crew and its final assembling into a close-knit team that this book will discuss.
Mid-section of a B-24 on the assembly line
The Army Air Force is recruiting thousands of young men, and they must be a very special kind of young men. They must, in fact, be the best physical and mental specimens the country produces. A young man making application for the Army Air Force should have very definite qualities. In the first place, he should have parents who are so proud of him and so proud of the country that they will help him to enter the Service and encourage him in entering it. And, if he should be accepted by the Air Force, his parents will have every reason to be proud of him; for his mother to wear the insignia of the Air Forces is to prove beyond any doubt that she has produced a son far above the average in intelligence and physique. It is better if the boy has gone two years to college, but it is not essential. Graduatio
n from high school is sufficient. He should not enter the Service with any martyrish complex about dying for his country. Such German and Japanese inculcations make soldiers good only to a certain point, but they are far from the American tradition. The best soldier in the world is not one who anticipates death with pleasure or with the ecstatic anticipation of Valhalla, honor, and glory, but the one who fights to win and to survive. There is no place in the Air Force for pseudoreligious martyrdom. Further, the young man should enter the Air Force knowing that his service need not end with the end of the war, that he is undertaking, if he wishes, a career for his whole life; for there is little doubt that, at the end of this war, the development of this nation, and of the hemisphere, and of the world, will be very closely tied to the use of the airplane.
If the young man in school has been interested in physics and in mathematics and in general science, it will be easier for him. It would be well if he has driven a car or a boat and has tinkered with motors. While these things are not absolutely necessary, the young man who has them will find that he is two steps ahead of the rest. The applicant should be capable of individual judgment, for the Air Force is not an organization of commander and dull followers. It cannot be. Every member of the Air Force, from ground crew mechanic to squadron commander, must make thousands of personal and individual decisions constantly. The Air Force is much more a collaboration than a command.
It is well if the applicant has played on various teams in his school—basketball, football, water polo, baseball—for in team play the lessons of responsible co-operation are best and most deeply learned. Physically the applicant need not be large. In fact, in some cases it is better if he is small. But he must be very healthy, and he must have no physical disability of any kind. He cannot have defective eyesight or color blindness. But beyond simple physical fitness, he must have other qualities. His manual co-ordination must be above the average. The discipline of limb and muscle must be perfect, and, while he need not be finely trained, he must have a physical system which will respond to the rigid training of the Air Force to emerge a toughened, disciplined soldier.
Beyond these things, the young man should have great faith in his country, in its future and its future greatness, and he should have a sense of his relation to that future and of his responsibility toward his country’s future, for he will emerge from the war in a position of leadership and in the postwar peaceful world he will have a strong hand.
A young man having these qualities should make application to join the United States Army Air Force. He should not specify that he wants to be a pilot or a navigator or a bombardier or a gunner, a radio operator or an engineer. The Air Force will give him tests which will prove definitely which position he is most capable of filling, for a man who is capable of being a good pilot need not at all be a good navigator, while a good navigator need not be a good bombardier. Each one has special qualities, and careful Army psychological and physical tests will prove which qualities the applicant has. Lastly, the young man wishing to enter the Air Force should not for a moment get the idea that he is going into something easy. There is neither time nor room for softness or laziness in the Air Force. The cadet will work harder and longer than he thought he could. He will study harder than he has ever studied in school. He will play violently and eat enormously and he will emerge tough, competent, and sure. He will be a crew mate in the hardest-hitting, most competent team this country has ever produced. This is really the Big League in the toughest game we have ever been up against, with the pennant the survival and future of the whole nation.
If the training of a bomber crew is hard, it is hard for a purpose. For great responsibilities are put into the hands of these young men: the simple responsibility for the expensive and intricate machine that is the bombing plane, responsibility for the secrecy of the bombsight, and beyond these the greatest responsibility of all, for to a large extent the bomber team will be responsible for the safety and survival of the nation.
The Army Air Force has been given an incredible job to do. Few people on the outside realize the magnitude of its mission. It has been simply ordered to produce the greatest air force in the world and it must do much more than to build fields, train pilots, develop tactics and formations. It must, for example, build thousands of airfields all over the country, training fields and auxiliary fields and emergency landing fields, and these are being leveled, built, and commissioned at an incredible rate of speed. It must establish schools for the various specialists and train instructors to train personnel. The Air Force is different from other military organizations. It must delegate its authority to the ground crew mechanic who is as responsible for the flight of a plane as the pilot. On the airfields barracks are going up. They are hardly completed before they are filled. On some fields the cadets live in tents until their barracks are finished.
The Air Force must inspect and supervise the assembly lines that are turning out the planes, test them and accept them for the Service. It must clear the way for metals and supplies, engines and instruments. There can be no inferior part in an air force. The problems of supply alone are incalculable—supplies of food and uniforms and games, supplies of bombs and practice bombs—and at the same time that it is a training Air Force, it must also be a fighting Air Force. Our bombers and pursuit planes are in action in Australia, in the Orient, in Europe, and in Africa. Every day the papers have accounts of Air Force action in some part of the world, and every day, truckloads of boys who have applied for entrance to the Air Force are picked up at the station and brought to the induction centers to enter the hard and satisfying training of the Air Force. They are di sheveled and tired when they arrive at the induction centers and they are dressed in all manner of clothes, some in overalls, some in sweaters and slacks, and some more fortunate arrive in their own cars and they have suitcases, bundles, and brief cases and those last gifts which doting parents bestow on their sons. Some of them are a little uneasy and a little homesick and nearly all of them are slightly apprehensive because they do not know what is going to happen to them next. It is part of the purpose of this book to tell them in advance what is going to happen to them next, to tell them the process by which they will become members of the Air Force. So far there has been no way for them to find out before induction. Every move has its purpose but until now there has not been time to tell the in ductees in advance the purpose of each move.
Suppose a young farmer from South Carolina and a young graduate of a small college looking for a job and an Idaho trumpet player all have made applications for the Air Force, have been accepted for induction, have been given their orders and their transportation, so that they end up at last with two hundred and fifty others at a railroad station near an induction center. They have ridden a long time and they are tired, dusty, and dispirited. The two hundred and fifty are a long way from home, they haven’t had time to make friends. Their speech has affectual accents of Maine, of the Middle West, of the South, and the Southwest, and each one thinks the rest sound rather funny and each one is a little bit afraid of all the rest and feels that he is among strangers. They get down at the station, carrying their miscellaneous baggage. There they are met by an officer who checks their names against his list, lines them up, and assigns them to trucks, and loaded in the Army trucks they are taken to the induction center.
At the induction center, the cadet master takes them in hand and from now on they will have little time to be lonely or dispirited. Quickly they are lined up and assigned to quarters and then they are marched to the barber shop where they suffer what to a civilian is an indignity—their hair is cut short. These haircuts soon come to be affectionately known by the names of their fields, such as the Randolph Roach or the Kelly Clip. If it is summer, they have abandoned their civilian coats by now and their shirts, and some of them have abandoned their undershirts and they march now to a most searching physical examination.
The medical specialists are arranged by sections. Eyes are rigidly tested not on
ly for weakness, but for color blindness. Ears are examined. Chests are X-rayed for any pulmonary weakness. Bones and feet are examined for any deformity. Blood tests are taken to determine any venereal disease. They sit a time with the psychiatrist who questions them closely to see whether they might not have some fixation which would unfit them for the Service, some fear of heights or closed places, some psychic abnormality. They are questioned about past illnesses, diseases, which might have left a degenerative scar. Quick though it is, few men have ever been more closely inspected, and when it is complete their medical history is compiled and their health background established. If something is wrong with an applicant which can be treated, treatment is prescribed and begun. And when the examinations are complete the inoculations begin, serums for typhoid, yellow fever, for tetanus, small pox—all the preventives known that will save them from future illness.
The medical examination has now been completed. Some of the candidates will go back to the medical center for treatment of minor ailments or dentistry, but their first inspection is done. Now they go to a long office room where each one is interviewed, his insurance papers are made out, and he is given a number by which he will be known during the whole time he is in the Army. Under this number his pay will be issued and under this number his medical and his military career will be filed away. He will wear his number on a tag hung around his neck and he must know his number as well as his name, for in the Army there may be duplications of names but there are no duplications of numbers; and if this seems a little cold and prison-like, at least it is more efficient than the simple use of names. His number is his exact identification.
Bombs Away Page 4
