Bombs Away (15 page)

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.

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.

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 developed 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.

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.