Bombs Away (10 page)

On the bombing range he worked in formations of planes. The missions became more exact and the tactical problems more complex. He studied gunnery and went out to the firing range to shoot at moving targets with a machine gun, for the bombardier must operate the gun in the nose of his ship and protect that area from attack. Every day the work in the classroom became more technical. His echelon learned to recognize surface ships, battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers. With models they learned what Japanese ships looked like and Italian and German ships. They studied depth bombs and how they are used on submarines, and the newspaper reports of bombing raids began to have a new meaning. Bill knew now the problems involved in sending five hundred bombers over Germany, the complicated supply, the rendezvous, the split-second arrival over the target, and the dispersal to little fields again. And when a Japanese fleet was attacked and beaten at Midway Island by bombers which had come a long way, Bill could see in the light of his training how it had been done.

He was still flying in training ships. His experience in the big ships, the Fortresses and the B-24’s, would come when he became bombardier of a permanent crew. As the cadets hardened physically and became more disciplined mentally, the work was given to them more and more quickly. On the sixty-sixth day of their training the squadron marched to inspection. They were not much like the sprawling boys who had stumbled off the trucks at the induction center.

In Bill’s echelon they had talked of what they would do when they graduated, of the tremendous party they would have. They thought of the time when the eagle would be on their caps and the bars on their shoulders and the weight of the bombardier’s wings over the left-hand breast pocket. One or two of them had uniform catalogues, all marked up. That was going to be the great time when they graduated and were commissioned. They had planned for it very carefully, and on the seventy-second day of their training it happened. In spite of their planning it crept up on them. The squadron was graduated. They were bombardiers in the Army Air Force.

Bill had planned to ask his father to come down for it, but he hadn’t. There was too much work to do. There is a sense of hurry over everything. The nation is at war. There isn’t time for ceremony and parade. This isn’t a war of flags and marching. It is a war of finding the target in the cross hairs of the bombsight and setting the release, and it isn’t a war of speeches and frothy hatred. It is a technical job, a surgeon’s job. There is only time for hatred among civilians. Hatred does not operate a bombsight.

Bill did not invite his father to his graduation. He was to go to a camp where the bomber crews are assembled and trained as units and he had a week’s leave. He went home. And out of some kind of diffidence he didn’t even tell his father and mother he was coming. Instead, he got off the train at two in the afternoon and he walked to his home. His father looked at him and then looked quickly away. “We’ve always been a fighting family,” he said. His mother asked “How much time have you?” “A week,” said Bill. And his father said, “Bill, would you like to go fishing, would you?”

THE AERIAL GUNNER

The gunners of the United States Army Air Force will go into our military history with a tradition for toughness and versatility and courage. The aerial gunner of a bomber should be small because the turrets and the tail section where he takes his post are small. The pony express riders were about the only comparable group that we know. The riders too had to be small so that they could carry more mail and at the same time protect their horses. The aerial gunner at his best, is a slender, short, wiry young man with stringy muscles, a deadly eye, and no nerves. His trade is one of the few in the world where a good little man is a great deal better than a good big man.

Sitting in the turret of a bomber, with his hands on the controls of his turret and on the trigger of his two .50-caliber machine guns, the gunner is bigger than anything he can hit. Of aerial gunnery, General Arnold says in
Winged Warfare,
“This is strictly a military specialty. There is no civil counterpart. It appeals to the old soldier type who likes a trigger in his hand and who likes to feel the power and effect of the whistle of the machine gun bullet and the smooth operation of the machine gun or cannon.

“The machine gunner is a combat crew member on multiple speedy fighters, observation and reconnaissance aircraft and he is of special importance on all types of bombardment, light, medium and heavy. Some gunners will operate .30- or .50-caliber guns, each firing at the rate of over six hundred rounds per minute. Others will operate the slower firing 20 mm. and 37 mm. guns with a bigger kick. Upon the shoulders of this air specialist rides the safety of the plane while in flight in areas infested by hostile pursuit. In combat, the skill, coolness and courage of the aerial gunner spell the safety of the big bomber and may provide the sole means of saving this quarter million dollar vessel and its valuable human cargo from destruction and ensure the completion of its mission.”

There are advantages in a small man beyond his ability to fit comfortably in the turret. A small man is usually quicker than a big man. In the ring a bantamweight fighter moves faster than a heavyweight, but in the ring the little man can rarely deliver a knockout punch to a big man. In a bomber, with the .50-caliber guns under his hand, the little man suffers no such deficiency. He can knock anything out of the air that flies, big or little. Like the pony express rider, great responsibility is in his hands. In a bomber the gunner’s position is said to be defensive and it is true that the gunner rarely moves to attack, but it is hard to see how shooting Zeros out of the air could be called defensive. Perhaps it could be said that the gunner attacks defensively.

In our young Air Force the aerial gunner has already become a legendary figure. The stories told about him are very many. The most recent one is of a tail gunner who did not report shooting down three Japanese planes because he had not had orders to fire.

It is strange how the tradition of a post takes hold of a man and molds him. The ideal gunner, as has been said, is a small, wiry man of cold courage. The gunners are probably the cocki est group in the whole Army. They walk on their toes and are not offered, nor will they take, any nonsense. They are non-commissioned officers. They draw extra pay, but actually their position and rating in the Air Force has little to do with chevrons or pay. They are respected and needed out of all proportion to their purely military rating. They are the executioners of the air.

They soon get a great sense of their importance in the service, and they carry their importance with dignity. They are a cool, cocky, efficient lot, and it is not a good idea to trifle with a little man who wears the insignia of an aerial gunner. He has been picked for his coolness, speed, and accuracy and spirit. He is the stinger in the tail of the long-range bomber. A crew with good gunners feels itself very fortunate. Of course every member of a bomber crew is trained to operate the guns but the gunner is the true expert. Already the trail of wrecked Japanese fighters is a proof of his efficiency and, although his discipline is rigid, in flight and in combat, the safety of the great ship depends on his judgment and his aim.

The aerial gunner will emerge from this war with a reputation not unlike that of the Texas Ranger, but with this exception—he will be the good little man who is better than the good big man. As with other members of the bomber crew, it is found that Americans with the American tradition are peculiarly apt at becoming good gunners.

Wing Commander C. E. Beamish of the Royal Air Force at Harlingen as liaison officer between British and U. S. aerial forces, in gunnery training, has said about the excellence of American gunners, “The average boy in the States has fired a gun before. He has used a gun a lot compared to the boy in England.”

The use of any kind of gun helps to develop a gunner. The kids with BB guns are developing the gunner’s eye, a sense of lead and trajectory, the almost instinctive technique of gunnery. All the knowledge and reading in the world will not take the place of practice.

In the Air Force there are the best trapshooters in the world acting as instructors in gunnery. These champion shots agree that guns are guns; that a boy who can hit a clay pigeon on a skeet range can knock a Messerschmitt out of the air. And nearly all boys in America have a feeling for firearms fathered by the American tradition and developed by the toys which shoot rubber-tipped arrows, through air rifles, to .22’s and shotguns. Boys with such training make excellent aerial gunners. They know the whole basis of gunnery before they start to work with a flexible machine gun. You do not have to teach such a boy not to fire point-blank at a moving plane. He has learned to lead a moving target shooting duck and quail. He knows the principles of sighting and of deflection and of trajectory, but he doesn’t even know he knows them for he learned them with a single-shot .22 shooting ground squirrels at extreme range.

It is not at all a matter of boasting to say that we are a nation of gunners. It is demonstrated by the speed with which the gunnery schools turn out aerial gunners and the deadly accuracy of those gunners. There are already Paul Bunyans among our gunners and there will be more. Nothing quite like the American aerial gunner has been seen on the face of the earth, but he is a natural descendent of the Kentucky hunter and the Western Indian-fighter. With the tradition of the frontiersman in his blood and a new weapon in his hand the American boy simply changes the nature of his game. Instead of raiding Sioux or Apache, instead of buffalo and antelope, he lays his sights on Zero or Heinkel, on Stuka or Messerschmitt. The weapon is basically the same as that which his father and his grandfather used. It fires a bigger slug faster and farther and more rapidly. His projectile will pierce armor plate, but a gun barrel and human eye and spirit have not much changed since any of them came into being.

Our gunner material is the best there is. It remains only to put it through the training which will make it best able to use the modern weapons.

The candidates for gunner school are either enlisted men or men who enlist in the Air Force giving aerial gunnery as their preference. They must pass the same rigid physical examination cadets do, but they need not have the technical education that cadets must have. But their eyes and nerves and bodies must be perfect. Under tests, their judgment, their sense of distance and of timing must show as excellent, and they must have this recommendation from their squadron commanders, “I would be willing for this man to serve as gunner on the plane which I pilot in combat.” This is a very special kind of recommendation, for it means that the pilot is trusting his blind and vulnerable side to the safekeeping of this particular young man.

The boys who go into the service volunteer for aerial gunnery for only one reason—they want to take part in action, and it is one very sure way of seeing action. A pilot or a navigator might be assigned to Ferrying Command, to freight or passenger carrying, but the gunner has only one purpose—to shoot enemy planes out of existence. Where he goes there is going to be action. Thus his Service attracts the real fighting men of the country, not those who want protection and desk work, but the men with the fighting blood and spirit that have made the country. Your gunner is the real thing. His insignia means action. As one gunner said, “Hell, that is what I got into the——war for.”

There is no doubt about it, gunners are true fighting men—“The type who likes a trigger in his hand.” For a while the rumor went around about how dangerous the gunner’s job is, but it is no more dangerous than the pilot’s job or the bombardier’s job, and the safety, not only of the gunner, but of the pilot and navigator too, are in the gunner’s hands. He has that advantage over them. If he sees danger approaching in the shape of an attacking plane he has the means in his control to eliminate it. His guns will shoot as fast and as far as anything that comes against him and no American could ask for more advantage than that.