Bombs Away

by John Steinbeck

  The aerial navigator is a very necessary member of a bomber crew. The word navigation, referring as it does to the sea, is misused, but apparently it is going to continue to be misused. An attempt was made to change aerial navigation to avigation with practically no success at all, for navigation seems to have lost its exclusive reference to the sea and will refer to any directed travel by instrument and map. Aerial navigation is not much different from marine navigation except that things happen more quickly. The basic instruments are the same, the compass to tell the direction in which you are going and the sextant and chronometer to tell you where you are. Other instruments—air-speed indicators, drift meters, etc.—are more recent inventions and their use is limited to airplanes. The basic instruments are very ancient. The compass has only changed in accuracy since early Chinese seamen placed a little lodestone bar on a chip of wood and floated the chip in a saucer.

  The modern compass is a marvel of accuracy, but its principle is that of the lodestone on a chip—that a magnet will point toward magnetic North. Gioja’s refinement in the fourteenth century was only followed by a long series of refinements and corrections, and the principle of crossed staff and astrolabe is carried through in the marvelously accurate modern sextant and octant.

  The modern radio time signal is the completely accurate grandchild of the well-built and protected chronometer, and the aerial navigator is the child of the sea captain who shot sun and star from his quarter-deck and brought his ship over the curve of the earth to an unseen port. The aerial navigator, of all members of a bomber crew, except possibly the gunner, practices an ancient profession, and of all the members of the crew the navigator needs more technical education and training. The ideal candidate for commission as aerial navigator in the Army Air Force will have some background in mathematics and in astronomy. Engineers make good navigators because, in addition to the basic knowledge, they have acquired the method of thinking and studying which is required at Army Air Force Navigation Schools. Such engineering training, however, is not required.

  The navigator enters the Army Air Force in the same way as do the bombardier and pilot. He makes application and is sent to an induction center where he is tested physically and mentally before he is assigned to Navigation School. The navigator candidate will have a different temperament from pilot and bombardier. He is rather more studious and more a perfectionist in his work. There is no “fairly close” in navigation. The point indicated must be found exactly. For example, a squadron of bombers rarely takes off from the same place. Individual planes may leave from different stations with orders to rendezvous at a given place and at a given time. In each plane it will be the navigator’s job to get his ship to that place in the sky at a given moment. His work must be exact, else his ship will not be in its place in the flight.

  When the navigation cadet has passed the physical and mental tests, the manual aptitude tests, and so forth, he will be assigned to a school. The school and the course will be described as follows. Its objective is to qualify students as navigator members of a combat crew. Its scope—qualification as precision, dead-reckoning, and celestial navigators and qualification as junior officer members of the combat crew. The duration of the course is fifteen weeks. The course is divided into two parts, flying training and ground school, and in this particular school there will be more ground work than flying work for the navigator has a great deal to learn.

  In ground school he will learn dead-reckoning navigation. He will learn instruments, maps and charts, radio navigation. In celestial navigation he will learn the general theory, time and hour angle, instruments, star identification, and astronomical triangles. In meteorology he will learn the theory and principles of weather analysis, the interpretation of weather maps, the discussion of forecasts. He will learn the meteorology of the ocean, of thunderstorms, tornadoes, and icing conditions, and on top of all of it, as in every other Air Force school, he will have constant athletic and military training.

  Navigation classroom

  When he finishes the course he will be able to take a ship or a plane to any given point. During his school the work will be hard and constant, but if the student has the fortitude, the mind, and the body, and can take it, he will emerge from his school an essential part of the bomber team. In his hands will lie responsibility for direction, for knowing the winds and the drift, for knowing the earth and the currents of the air. On the navigator’s direction, the pilot will find the enemy whether it be an invading ship near Midway Island, a submarine base in the Aleutians, or a tank factory in Europe. When the target is found, his work will be over while bombardier releases his bombs, and then, again, the navigator must take the direction of the ship, must find the way home, must find the little point of land with the runways where the bomber will come to rest. The success of the bombing mission, a great part of it, is very definitely in the navigator’s hands. He is an indispensable member of the bomber team.

  Allan had got his degree in Civil Engineering and was two months in postgraduate work for an electrical engineering degree when the war broke out. His father was county engineer in a central Indiana county and had been for twenty years. Allan knew he was fit for the Army and would eventually be in the Army. He thought of applying for the Engineers Corps, but the Air Force seemed to him the more interesting Service. Like every other young man in the country, he thought he would like to be a pilot. That was natural enough. When uninstructed people thought of the Air Force, they used to think only of pilots. The great organization of ground crews and air crews rarely occurred to them. They have read only of pilots. The heroes in their magazine stories have been pilots. Newspapers have spoken almost exclusively of pilots, yet the pilot is actually only one part of the functioning Air Force.

  It cannot be successfully argued that without the pilots the planes do not fly, for without any part of the Air Force the ships do not fly, without weather men and mechanics, without commanders and enlisted men. An error by a grease monkey will bring down a plane as surely as an error by a pilot. It is a force of split responsibility. No one position is more important than another. It is true that the pilot is most in evidence and has been treated most romantically in the press, but the pilot himself knows as well as any, and better than most, how much he must rely on the ground maintenance crew, on navigator and radio man. An Army pilot knows that he is not the fair-haired boy of the Air Force. There isn’t any fair-haired boy. The force must function as a unit. One might as well say that the controls of a plane are more important and necessary than the engine or that the air foil is more important than the propellers. The plane does not take the air unless every part functions successfully and the Air Force does not function unless all of its men do their jobs. This is very well known in the Air Force. It is only civilians who think of the pilot as separate and more important and romantic than his brothers. But Allan had read the usual things and he, like many others, thought of the Air Force as a group of lordly officers who were pilots with valets to service their planes. He made application for training and was accepted on his scholastic record, for in engineering school he had a background of mathematics, a training in the use of instruments, several courses in astronomy, the controlled thinking that goes with mathematics and the discipline toward exactness that goes with engineering. His application was accepted and he was sent to an induction center and there his hair was clipped with all the others. He drew his work clothes and his neat khaki uniform. He was given the intelligence test and the aptitude test, the interviews and physical examinations, and finally Allan was called to a private interview with an officer. He stood nervously waiting for the unknown. The officer said quietly, “At ease, sit down there.” He had a report on the desk in front of him. He glanced down at the papers and then up at Allan. “You have a good rating here,” he said. “There is nothing in this report to indicate that you would not make a good pilot. Some difficulty might show up in training, but it isn’t likely. Physical and mental reports are both good.” Allan
began to breathe again. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  “There is something in this background and report I want to talk about,” the officer went on. “You should be a good pilot, but with your engineering background you should make an even better navigator.” Allan leaned forward in his chair. “I thought I’d like to be a pilot,” he said. “Everyone wants to be a pilot,” the officer said, “but we need navigators as much as we need pilots. The ships have to get to the targets and back. It isn’t a second-choice job. On your record, I would like to recommend you for navigation school. After fifteen weeks, if you pass, you will be commissioned a second lieutenant. Your ground pay and your flying pay will be the same as a pilot and rank and promotion are on the same basis. And you must understand that a navigator is not a washed-out pilot. He is a specialist in his own line and your background qualifies you particularly. Think it over and report to me tomorrow morning.”

  Allan sat in the induction center post exchange, drinking Cokes and thinking it over. His mind was quick to grasp implications. The specialty he was offered was work for all his life. He knew that when the war is over a great part of the commerce of the world will be air-borne, that great ships and possibly strings of towed gliders will carry the people and the produce of the world from place to place. He knew that, except for short hauls, the old methods of transportation, ships and rails and trucks, were going to disappear because they were slower and more expensive and less efficient than air transportation. In college he had talked often with students and instructors about the future of air commerce, and all of these ships would need navigators and the route plotters and dispatchers would be navigators. It was a whole life work that was being offered him, and it seemed to him a better and more interesting life than a civil engineering job which, during his memory at least, had been precarious.

  He went to the counter and got another Coke and sat down again. The war was going on. It had to be fought and won. If he wanted action, he would have it. A bomber doesn’t hide its head, even its defensive work is attack. He would see all the action he wanted and would take a definite and important part in it and when the war was won, he had a profession which would continue to be action. Allan had always done his own thinking. He went over the question carefully. Pilots would be necessary too after the war, but there would be a great many more pilots than aerial navigators. There would be all the combat pilots and the copilots, all the thousands of civil pilots. Navigators would be very definitely in demand. In the middle of his third Coke, he thought with some guilt how he was considering a future in peace and was selfishly figuring what he would gain. It was true, the future of the navigator, and it was to be considered. And now that he had considered it, he shut it out of his head. There was a war to be fought, and he was very tired of Coke. As he walked back to his quarters he thought how he would see the world at war and would see it at peace, all of the world, the cities and peoples of the Orient and of South America. He would help to carry food to the new-born peoples of Europe when the German locust was killed and driven out. Probably the seed which would make Europe fruitful again would be carried through the air. If he wanted to see the life of his planet during his own time he could not want a better profession.

  The next morning, after a second interview, he was assigned to an aerial navigation school.

  Aerial navigation is a technical job. It is learned in the classroom and the laboratory, and for that matter the laboratory, the training plane AT-7, is a classroom itself. In each ship there are three desks and three sets of instruments so that three students may work at the same time. Classrooms in the training centers look like any classrooms. They are long and the desks are arranged in line. At the front is the instructor’s stand with a blackboard behind it, while on the instructor’s table and on his stand is the demonstration equipment he uses as he lectures to his class. The room looks like other schoolrooms, but there its similarity stops. In the cadet classrooms are no sleepy students slopping in their seats, no whispering or writing of notes, no horseplay. There isn’t time for it. The class marches to its desks. Each man stands at attention until he is ordered to be seated. He sits up at his desk with his eyes forward on the demonstrable assumption that an alert posture is concomitant of an alert mind.

  In the navigation school a great deal must be learned in a very short time. The work has been designed to be as much as a very good man can stand. A second-rate man cannot stand it at all, but with the initial testing a second-rate man rarely gets into navigation school.

  Allan marched to his desk and stood stiffly until the class was ordered to be seated. The instructor did not waste any time. He went quickly into the definitions of navigation. On the sphere before him, which represented the earth’s surface, he explained the system of co-ordinates, meridians and parallels, latitude and longitude. He explained the great circles and small circles, the difference between a great circle course and the Mercator course. He spoke of the statute mile and the nautical mile. In the first classes the different projections of maps were discussed, the Lambert-Conformal Conic projection and the Mercator projection, gnomonic, stereographic, and other projections, and the methods of measuring course and distance on each. Definition was immediately followed by application in every case. And after each set of definitions there was a quick questioning of the class not only to find out how much the individuals had learned, but to set in their minds what they had learned.

  But the navigation school was not solely class work. Their military drill and formation was as rigid and continuous as that of any other school in the Air Force; and from class they went to the athletic fields where they played the active games the Air Force encourages, football and basketball, volleyball and baseball, obstacle races, running and jumping. After the hours in the classroom they needed the playing fields to shake the kinks out of their backs. They hadn’t really time to get tired and after the class work and the athletics were done and the formations were done and they had eaten their dinner, it was still a good idea to get out the textbooks and to study what had gone on during the day. For the work goes very rapidly and it is difficult to go back and pick up.

  The training ships for navigators are AT-7’s, twin-engine, all-metal ships equipped really as flying classrooms in navigation. Along the right-hand side of the plane are three desks for three cadets and beside each desk is a drift meter and a compass. In back of the pilot, and in sight of all the desks, there is an auxiliary instrument board with dials showing altitude and air speed and air temperature—in fact, all the information that is needed for a navigator to do his work. In the roof of the ship there is a turret through which the navigator can shoot the sun or a star to find his position. The driftmeter is really a simple instrument: a glass, through which one can look down through the floor of the plane, on which are parallel lines. A knob allows one to rotate the field of the glass. Looking down through it the navigator finds an object on the ground, a tree or a house, and catches it in the parallel lines of the glass. Then, by rotating his glass, he makes the object stay within the parallel lines and not slide across them. Having done this, a relation is established in the figures on the side of his instrument which gives him the amount of his side drift. At night he drops a flare to use as an object.

  Navigation class practicing with the octant

  Navigation cadet looks through the driftmeter

  In these flying classrooms each student plots the course, takes position, each without consulting the other. It is in this way that immediate application of the lessons of the classroom is obtained.

  In the beginning the cadets use their octants outside the classroom until they become familiar with the use of the instrument. In the classroom Allan learned the use of the plotting sheet. He prepared plans for flights he would later fly, by plotting in the locations of airports, lighthouses, and other actual objects in the immediate area. He learned map symbols and how to do pilotage.

  The class studied the magnetic compass and its variations and deviations
. The other instruments used by the navigator were studied, altimeters and air-speed meters, air-temperature thermometers, the airplane clock, directional gyro, the artificial horizon, bank and turn indicators, rate-of-climb indicators, and automatic pilots. Study and practice were constant and simultaneous. They studied the celestial sphere and practiced in identifying stars, estimating their declination and hour angle. They learned the names of constellations and of the navigational stars. They committed to memory the pattern of each constellation and the names of the navigational stars in each constellation, and finally all of the accumulated knowledge was put into the practice navigation plan. Here was the study of the mission to be accomplished, the rate and alternate routes, the weather forecasts for the area, and emergency landing fields along the route were chosen, each student for himself.

  The physical aids to navigation were filled in the plan, radio stations, light beacons, prominent landmarks. The plan for observation was included, data on celestial bodies to be observed. The navigation plan considered all circumstances and all accidents and deviations so that the mission would surely be carried out.

  Throughout all the work the mission is of first importance. Now all the apparently unrelated lessons began to fall into place. Of the whole bomber crew the work of the navigator is the most intellectual. He does not handle any control of the plane. His work is committed to paper. He makes a map of what the ship will do and where it will go, and when his map is made he guides the ship through his figures to its objective and home again.