Bombs Away

by John Steinbeck

  The ship is a pin point hovering over a globe with sun and stars swinging over it and the navigator must know every moment exactly where he is in relation to all space. Allan’s class moved through its course, working and studying too hard even to know they were working hard. Armed with their figures and their facts and their instruments they made practice flights and were a little surprised to find that the formulae worked, that the ship went to the spot on the earth which was the spot on the map. Navigation is good clean work and there is a great satisfaction in plotting the course of a flight and carrying it out.

  Someone once described navigation as being broken up into three phases—(1) determining a place to go, (2) determining how to get there, and (3) determining that you get there. Navigation is work for a perfectionist. It is not enough to come close to a given spot. A closeness is as worthless as a great miss. Three planes take off at different times and at night. Their mission is to meet at a spot over the world which is not marked and to meet in the dark at a given moment. The basic instruments are stars and time to which man-made instruments are applied by the prime instrument of all, the navigator. If he misses his unmarked place by even a mile or gets there inaccurately in point of time, the rendezvous will not be made.

  Navigators should be able to navigate by dead reckoning means with a maximum course error of one degree and maximum E.T.A. (estimated time of arrival) error of 1½ minutes per hour of flight since the last landmark or fix. They must be able to navigate during daylight by celestial means to within 25 miles of objective over distances approximating the full tactical range of aircraft; while during darkness they must be able to navigate by celestial means to within 15 miles of objective over distances approximating full tactical range of aircraft. And finally they must be able to locate reasonable objectives at night under blackout conditions from a definite landpoint 25 to 50 miles away from the objective with pilot taking evasive action.

  Practical navigation in flight

  Allan’s class made its maps and its flight plans. Allan was becoming a navigator. He felt the pleasure of directing the ship by his observation. Every day there was a new mission, its object to put to use the recently learned lesson. They flew in all weather, day and night. The weeks went on and the graduation flight came into preparation.

  This is numbered Mission 20. It is a long celestial flight and is described as follows: “This mission will be the graduation flight and consists of three flights of at least four hours’ duration. This mission should simulate a tactical mission to complete the transition necessary for the student to apply all the technique he has learned to the tactical navigational requirements. It should be in daylight and in darkness, the daylight portion to be over water. All methods of navigation will be practiced.” It was a tactical mission, but it was much more than that. They would be navigators when they came back from it. The flight plans were made several days in advance. No two ships were taking quite the same course, yet all of them would fly the legs of a huge triangle and the two points away from camp were near cities. Further it was rumored that the cadets would be entertained at the two stops. For fourteen weeks the class had not rested. They had hardened on drill ground and athletic field. Civilian flesh had melted away and its place was taken by harder flesh, disciplined flesh. The cadet did not get so tired now, but sleep was still the most desirable thing in the world. There never was enough of that.

  They drew up the flight plans for Mission 20 with great care and all of the class shaved extra close and had new haircuts for the flight. They checked their sextants for error and went over their little cases of instruments. The silver ships were warming up on the line. The navigation cadets drew their parachutes and lounged in the squadron room waiting for their time, and then they lined up and the squadron leader spoke to them shortly. The formation marched out to the line where the engines of the AT-7’s were idling now. They broke up and three cadets went to each plane. Each one sat at a little desk and adjusted his head set and plugged in on the communication system. They laid out their maps on the desks and studied them. The metal doors slammed shut. The ships moved out one by one to the runway. The pilot looked back at the three cadets bent over their desks. He smiled for a moment. He picked up his microphone and his voice was in the ears of his students. “Here we go,” he said, and he switched the speaker to the tower. Safety belts were fastened, parachutes buckled over legs, and the shoulder harness over the seat backs where it could easily be reached.

  Through the top turret of the training plane a navigation cadet takes a night shot with his octant

  From the tower the take-off instructions blasted in their ears. “Roger,” the pilot said and put his two throttles ahead.

  It was afternoon when the flight started. The silver ships leaped up into the air one after another and circled once for altitude. Allan could see the fields below with the lines of barracks, with the parade ground and the columns of young men drilling. The work had been so hard that he had not seen it in the whole before, but now this phase of his training was over and at each of the stops they would be met by local people. They would go to dances and be fed, and when they came back they would be commissioned and assigned.

  Last minute instructions before a night cross-country flight

  Through his window, Allan could see another plane shimmering in the sun beside him. He had not had time to think in the top of his mind about anything but navigation. His eye went to the altimeter, 3,000 feet. He wondered where he would be assigned as an instructor; his grades had been good but he didn’t want to be an instructor. Perhaps he would navigate one of the big transports with food and supplies to the fighting world, but there were older men who could do that. No, he hoped he would go out on one of the big ships with a belly full of bombs. He hoped an electric plant or a factory would rise in a red roar because of his navigation. Or best of all he hoped he might find an invasion fleet as the big ships did at Midway and help to strew the ocean with the hopes of conquerors. That was the best of all. But mostly he hoped to be on a fighting ship that carried bombs. He looked at his compass and then up at the altimeter again. The needle slid to 5,000 feet. He picked his mike from the clamp on the wall and pressed the button and he spoke the course into the pilot’s ears. The pilot nodded. “Wilco,” he said. The ship banked and leveled out again. Alan looked down at his compass. The ship was on his course.

  THE PILOT

  The pilot is still in the public mind the darling of the Air Force. To the Air Force, however, he is only one of a number of specialists highly trained to carry out a military mission. But the public, led on by fiction and newspapers, still considers the pilot the overshadowing officer in an airplane. The reason for this is not far to seek. In early airplanes the pilot was all alone and, more, in the experimental period of heavier-than-air craft, the pilot was usually the man who had built and powered the plane he flew. Further, he was the only man in the world who knew the tricks of his ship well enough to fly it. A pilot did not change planes then. When one was crashed, he built another one. During the last war the airplane was used almost exclusively as an observation instrument. The ship flying over enemy lines came back and reported positions of enemy troops and artillery. But as soon as a ship went over your lines, you sent up ships to intercept him. And thus both ships came to be armed. Out of these observation missions, and their repulse, grew the romantic and courageous dogfights of the last war when individual pilots carried insignia and gained reputations like medieval knights. Then it became simply a matter of individual shooting down individual plane. Then names like Richthofen and Rickenbacker became the symbols of everything young men wanted to be. Later in the war, group flights to protect the observation planes were undertaken. And still there were the dogfights, but a new member had been added—the observer. While the ships were fighting, his job was to take photographs of enemy positions.

  Single-seater planes had learned to fly low by then, spraying ground troops with their machine guns, and camouflage had deve
loped to conceal guns and supplies. It was only toward the end of the war that the bomber came to be used and it was an inaccurate arm which actually threw high-explosive rocks at an enemy; and bombing did not develop colorfully enough to overshadow in the public mind those silver knights who met in single combat over the line while men looked on and cheered the victor and buried with full honors the vanquished, whether he was friend or enemy, and set his propeller over his grave. It was the ultimate in romantic combat, complete with trappings and roaring steeds and audience. Missions were fairly lax then and it was more important to have the marks of dead enemies on your ship than to have taken fine photographs. At least this was so with the public. The pilot was the king.

  Cadet starts his training to be a pilot

  It was after the war that the complicated tactics of air warfare were developed. Then the mission became more important than the game. Then air forces became integrated groups waging warfare of attacks on ground objectives. Then fighter and pursuit ships became supplemental to the bomber. The bomber did the damage. It was the striking weapon. Pursuits and interceptors then were assigned to protect their own bombers and to attack the bombers of the enemy.

  The development of the bomber required the addition of new kinds of air fighters; gunners, to protect the mission; bombardiers, to drop explosives accurately on a target; navigators, unerringly to find the target. And the targets changed too. Whereas the first bombs were aimed only at munitions dumps and troop concentrations and roads, the new targets were more profoundly far-reaching. The bombs sought the factories where munitions were made, the dynamos which created the power to run the plants, the rail lines and highways over which the tools of war were transported. Douhet wrote and Goering and Mus solini believed that if enough bombs were dropped on a civil population, nerves would break and the will to resist would disappear. It may be that this is true. It has been tried in Spain, in Poland, and in England and it has not succeeded yet, but that may be because not enough bombs were dropped. Ten times the number might have done the job. The number dropped so far have only succeeded in making peoples angry and resistant and vengeful. What does work, however, is the destruction of plants, shipyards, docks, ships, and transportation systems, and these have become the new targets for the bombers, just as the bombers have become the main weapons of the Air Force. With the development of the importance of the bomber, the pilot too has changed his status. He is no longer individually the most important man in the Air Force. Just as the ship is a highly complicated unit, so the air crew is considered as a unit, each member of which is equally important. The newspapers still to a certain extent dwell lovingly on the pilot, but the Air Force itself knows that the eye at the bombsight and the finger on the trigger of the blister guns are equally important. This does not mean that individual heroism is finished. On the contrary, it has increased, but a pilot can no longer go to death and glory alone. His crew and his mission put brakes on his knight er rantry, and to the pursuit pilot the mission is of more importance than the shooting down of enemies too. Indeed, in England the refusal of the Royal Air Force to rise up in single combat, although they were taunted and reviled, was probably the saving, not only of their Air Force, but of England too. For, by refusing to fight individually, they later were able to drive the German bombers out of the English skies.

  A cadet receives instruction about the design and construction of airplanes

  A man in the control tower directs the primary planes with a red and green light

  Air Force tactics have definitely become group tactics where men and machines work together toward an objective. And under this system the pilot has changed his status. He is only one part of the functioning unit, but far from making him less highly trained, he has become more so. It is more difficult to fly as one ship in a formation than as one ship in the sky.

  The training of a bomber pilot is a long and difficult matter. He must know a great deal and he must be perfectly fitted for his job, but he is no longer the apex of the Air Force pyramid. After he has mastered his machines the pilot will be constantly trained in teamwork. He must have initiative, but it must be subordinated to and used for the group; and it is this ability of Americans, exemplified in their team sports of being both individuals and units in a group at the same time, which makes them both the finest team players and the finest flyers in the world. Each quality alone would be ineffective—together they are unbeatable. It might have been thought that the relaxing of the college requirement for pilot cadets would result in a lower standard among pilots. But this has not been true, either in effect, or in intention. It was realized that some of our brightest, best-informed boys have not gone to college. They have studied at home, have taken correspondence courses, or have read and tinkered extensively. It is not possible for all of our young people capable of college training to go to college. The removal of the college requirement by the Air Force, by removing an artificial hurdle, tapped a large group of Americans who were not able to go to college but who kept up anyway. The quality of mind and body is not changed. The examinations are not relaxed. They eliminate the college man as well as the non-college man if he is unfit for the Service, and we have too many eminent examples of noncollege men to overlook this rich pool of potential flyers. The alert, strong, the well-co-ordinated and interested young men of the country are the proper candidates for pilots. The work they do will test deeply every part of them. They will emerge from their wartime service with an honorable record and a profession. They will have seen action where there is any action. The wings they wear will make them for all time a part of the brotherhood of the air. They will have space and speed in the palms of their hands but they must deliver the goods if these things are to be theirs.

  In the Air Force you must deliver the goods from the moment you enter. Step by step, you must deliver the goods and there is no second chance, a man is only washed out when he cannot perform. It would be ridiculous for him to have another chance for it is not a matter of chance. From the moment he enters his first primary training plane to the time when he graduates from four-motor school, the training pilot works like a dog. But he comes out a magnificent pilot. At any point he may have failed. If he finishes, he is as good a pilot as it is possible to produce. Muscles and nerves and discipline will be hard. He will know ships and men. He will be a flying officer in the Army Air Force and that’s as good a man as you can be in any army.

  On the flight line

  The ship will be in his finger tips and in his knowledge. As with the other members of a bomber crew, the Air Force has the pick of the country. It selects only the best in mind and body, and in spite of the growing need of our sky-rocketing Air Force the country can produce the material. The young man wishing to be a pilot makes his application just as bombardier and navigator have and if he is accepted, on his past record, he goes to the induction center just as they do. There he is put through the same tests. Perhaps he wanted to be a pilot and he is told that he will be a better bombardier, or perhaps the tests have shown that he has the qualifications for a pilot; but he will have been tested to his limit and the officers who recommend his branch will know all about him from the records they have made in the tests. If he has shown qualifications as a pilot he will become immediately an aviation cadet, and he will be assigned to a primary school to get his first training in flying an airplane.

  Joe was a big, slow-talking boy from South Carolina. He was a farmer by birth and by tradition. He came out of the university knowing more about scientific farming than his father did and more than his father would admit. Joe’s two younger brothers were pretty confused because their father told them one thing and then Joe took them aside and told them another. Joe had his head full of phosphates and blooded cattle and things were shaping up for a fight on the farm, for Joe’s father was a strong-willed man. And then the war came along and solved everything. Joe decided to let fertilizers and Holsteins go until the war was over.

  He applied for entrance into the Air
Force, and when he was accepted he left a pile of text books for his father; and the old man read them and got pretty excited about them once it wasn’t a simple matter of disobedience on Joe’s part. Joe was hardly off the place before his father bought a fine Holstein heifer. One of the young brothers wrote to Joe about it and told him not to mention it.

  Primary cadets in their barracks after a hard day’s flying

  Meanwhile, at the induction center, Joe went through his tests and his interviews and it was discovered that his big, unhurried hand and his slow speech were by no means indications of a slow mind. When his tests were finished he was ticketed a cadet pilot and sent to one of the many civilian schools which, under Army control, give pilots their primary training. Class and drill and life was all Army but the instructors were civilians and the field was a civilian field. Perhaps this may not always be—perhaps, for that matter, by the time this is printed it will not be; but in the time when the Air Force must expand with almost explosive speed, every facility for training must be used. Civilian instructors are available and they undertake the first flying training of the cadet.

  Joe landed in the camp and was assigned to his barracks and he was assigned to his instructor, a moth-eaten flying man who had barnstormed crates and raced for small purses and learned to fly by flying for twenty years. The name of Joe’s instructor was Wilmer and he had a crooked leg and a broken nose. Wilmer didn’t waste any time. He took the students to the small primary trainers standing on the line and they walked around the little ship. Wilmer explained the rudder, the elevators, the ailerons, the principle of air foil. They leaned into the plane and he showed them the instruments, the controls, the throttle. He showed them how to start and stop the engine and then he turned to Joe and said, “Get in that rear seat and plug in the speaking tube.”