Bombs Away (2 page)

Despite his sense of duty and patriotism and his faith in the American government at the time, Steinbeck—as his biographer Jackson Benson describes the situation—was nonetheless still conflicted about writing
Bombs Away.
Benson writes, “On the one hand his instincts were largely pacifistic and he viewed war as intellectually futile—a biological racial spasm generated out of the subconscious. . . . On the other hand, he had a very strong sense of duty.” Besides, “he wanted to know what it felt like to fly in a bomber” (Benson 505). Soon after meeting with President Roosevelt, who Steinbeck claims personally talked him into writing the book (Benson 508), and General “Hap” Arnold in Washington, D.C., Steinbeck and the project photographer, John Swope, began their arduous journey. This trip would take them to bases and airfields of the Army Air Forces from coast to coast, also taking them along the way to such places as Texas, Louisiana, California, Illinois, and Florida, and finally back home to New York (Benson 505), where Steinbeck was currently living with Gwyn Conger, his second wife. As one could easily imagine, the trip was both physically demanding and at the same time mentally tedious. In other words, it was as if Steinbeck had, for a while at least, actually joined the military. His daily regimen consisted of waking up at 5:00 A.M. to begin the training routine of the flight crews, including flying in the cockpit with the pilots, and then he would stay up at night drinking with the crews in local honky-tonks and roadhouses.

Although the path to writing this book was complicated, rigorous, and exhausting, if not at times intoxicating, Steinbeck’s depiction of the training of a B-17E bomber team is simple, direct, and, one could say, classically elegant in that he is unified in aim, is noticeably restrained in form and diction, and has organized the book proportionally. Each member of the bomber team, for example, has his own chapter. Besides the preface and the introduction, there are nine chapters in the book: “The Bomber,” “The Bombardier,” “The Aerial Gunner,” “The Navigator,” “The Pilot,” “The Aerial Engineer-Crew Chief,” “The Radio Engineer,” “The Bomber Team,” and “Missions.” The “Bomber” chapter describes the basic capabilities of the B-17E “Flying Fortress” and the differences between that airplane and the other long-range bomber in the U.S. Army Air Forces inventory at the time, the Consolidated B-24 “Liberator.” The next seven chapters describe the different personality types and the various training methods of the individual members of the bomber team. Finally, the last chapter speculates about how the team will work in future missions.

As a novelist who possessed a broad and sympathetic understanding of the United States’ character, Steinbeck sensed America’s reluctance to wage war, but he also knew that, once provoked, his country would be a formidable foe. Despite all that talk about America’s moral ability to wage a just war, one can easily discern Steinbeck’s innate pacifistic tendencies as well: “In all history, probably no nation has tried more passionately or more thoughtfully to avoid fighting than the United States had tried to avoid the present war against Japan and Germany” (xxix). However, Steinbeck clearly understands that by finally having been provoked into war, the United States was particularly well positioned to win the conflict: “If we ourselves had chosen the kind of war to be fought, we could not have found one more suitable to our national genius. For this is a war of transport, of machines, of mass production . . . and in each of these fields we have been pioneers if not actual inventors” (xxx). “In short, this is the kind of war that Americans are probably more capable of fighting and fighting better than any other people in the world” (xxxi). With these observations Steinbeck is clearly trying to link this book with the work he had been doing about America in the previous decade, in such books as
The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men,
and
In Dubious Battle.
In these novels, Steinbeck conveys how a team works best in combating forces that threaten survival, in these cases the survival of common laborers. The same is true for nations as a whole. Therefore, despite the idea that this book would not ever be the centerpiece of a novelist’s career,
Bombs Away
in retrospect turns out arguably to be a book at the moral center of America’s most significant war contribution and the war’s most controversial issue.
Bombs Away
depicts the building of a single team that will soon develop enough skill not only to fly the airplane but eventually to deliver a sizable payload to its intended target. Multiply this team by thousands and the bomb payload by hundreds of thousands, and eventually by millions, and one can start to see how the American war effort became not only a major deciding factor in the war effort but the most destructive military force in history. Metaphorically, it began with only one team. This is how a technological democracy builds up the moral steam to divert from the quotidian and become an extraordinary arsenal of war with almost unlimited destructive power in a relatively short period of time.

The United States strategically bombed the major urban centers and the most populated cities of Italy, Japan, and Germany throughout the war, and the B-17 was the major weapon system of that campaign. The long-range bomber and the strategic bombing campaigns turned out to be extremely costly operations during World War II in terms of people and resources, of course, but, more important, in terms of lasting moral capital. The B-17 “Flying Fortress” dropped astronomical amounts of conventional ordnance, primarily on the manufacturing and industrial infrastructure of the Axis countries, and yes, this long-range bomber also directly attacked the basic fabric of civilization of these nations. The B-17 likewise established much of the operational and psychological groundwork for the eventual explosion of nuclear weapons over Japan in 1945. Otherwise peaceful, democratic nations where the government’s actions have to be justified to the electorate, such as the United States, do not ordinarily begin the wholesale bombing of civilian populations without justification, precedents, and a moral foundation to build upon. In other words, the buildup to the eventual dropping of the atomic bomb required incremental action. The B-17 “Flying Fortress” helped establish the technological and moral foundation for the eventual destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a consequence of that action, the United States remains today the only country to have exploded a nuclear weapon in any war. In the beginning, Americans needed to feel at ease about sending their sons to fight in the bomber; then, they had to feel at ease about what those bombers did. It is the way democracy works in time of total war. When we look backward, the course of history seems inevitable, but actually it is not. If the U.S. electorate becomes restless about the way its government is prosecuting a war, it can make a dramatic change. It is rare, but it does happen. So while America might have been reluctant to enter the war in the beginning, in the end the United States proved more than willing to end the conflict at any price, primarily by demonstrating that it was willing and able to demolish the enemy’s homeland.

On November 3, 1944, the U.S. secretary of war formed a commission to start compiling extensive reports, which eventually became
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey
s, on the overall extent of the damage and the effectiveness of these bombing campaigns during World War II. The report from the European campaign provides stunning statistics of the destruction:

As these figures indicate, the casualty rates for bomber flying missions were exceedingly high. The fact is that a bomber air-man had a better chance of becoming a combat casualty than did the grunt in the foxhole or any other type of World War II combatant. To put it simply, bomber duty was very dangerous—and very destructive:

With these significant numbers of noncombatant casualties and the enormous amount of destruction, the
Survey
notes, as one would imagine, that “the morale of the German people deteriorated under aerial attack,” especially after night raids (
U.S. Strategic Bombing Strategic Survey
4). The
Survey
goes on to state that the German people “lost faith in the prospect of victory, in their leaders and in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected. Most of all, they wanted the war to end. . . . If they had been at liberty to vote themselves out of the war, they would have done so well before the final surrender. . . . However dissatisfied they were with the war, the German people lacked either the will or the means to make their dissatisfaction evident” (
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey
4).

The
Survey
here has pointed out one of the great moral dilemmas of this strategic bomber campaign, and that is the Allies attacked large numbers of noncombatants who actually could not do much about the war’s outcome. The Allies continued to drop incendiary bomb after bomb on the citizens of a government that did not even seem to try to defend them against bombing attacks. The German Nazi government, a well-documented police state, was much more concerned about protecting strategic military resources than it was ever concerned about its own citizenry. Of course, John Steinbeck knew nothing about any of these issues back in 1942 when he started writing
Bombs Away.
While the point is not in any way to blame Steinbeck for strategic bombing and all this subsequent destruction of civilization, it is rather to show that Steinbeck was a part of the strategic bombing
team.
He used his immense talents to induce many other Americans to become a part of that team as well, without any firm grasp of the overall consequences, of which there obviously have turned out to be many. Another famous but altogether different writer, Joseph Heller, in
Catch-22
(1961), would later satirize the experiences of flying in a U.S. Air Army Air Forces bomber, but that was in hindsight after the war was over and in a much difference political climate than 1942. During his time, Steinbeck is not alone, because it is arguable that the rest of America has never fully comprehended how much destructive force this nation has ravaged upon the rest of the world in the twentieth century and, frankly, on into the twenty-first.

In defense of Steinbeck, unlike many other writers at that time and since, he took a hard stand in support of American democracy as a model for the rest of the world to emulate. Steinbeck, if anything, was staunchly patriotic. And this would not be the last time he would be considered prowar, as Steinbeck would later be branded a “hawk” for his support of Lyndon Johnson’s failed Vietnam War policy in the late 1960s.

As one would imagine about a book that has been tagged as propagandistic, the academic scholarship concerning
Bombs Away
is not all that extensive: Warren French, in
John Steinbeck,
writes that the book was “not the success” of his “recent novels” (26), but he does go on to note that it was “worth $250,000 to Hollywood and to the Air Force Aid Society, to which Steinbeck turned over all his royalties” (26). A few other important scholars have written about
Bombs Away
as well: Roy S. Simmons, in
John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939- 1945;
John Ditsky, in “Steinbeck’s
Bombs Away:
The Group-man in the Wild Blue Yonder”; and Robert Morsberger, in “Steinbeck’s War,” are three of the most prominent. Jay Parini, in
John Steinbeck: A Biography,
writes that “
Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team
was a solid piece of journalism” (268-269). Instead of merely dismissing the book as simply a propaganda piece, Rodney Rice, in “Group Man Goes to War: Elements of Propaganda in John Steinbeck’s
Bombs Away,
” clarifies how propaganda quite possibly works in it. Rice observes that by “using simplified characters, careful arrangement of materials, and photographs, Steinbeck was thus able to manipulate forms and organizations so as to sharply outline the rhetorical focus of his training scenario” (187). Rice argues that Steinbeck uses these techniques in such a way as to bait or seduce the audience, to induce them to see what he wants them to see. Rice comments that “the second chapter is obviously devised in order to introduce the central symbol, the bomber, which embodies not only group effort, but also a host of other democratic values including vitality, integrity, hard work, faith, and practicality” (187). More often than not, critics have construed propaganda in a negative way, and possibly for good reasons in some cases, yet these “democratic values” are paradoxically the same ones Steinbeck conveys in
The Grapes of Wrath,
which was widely praised as a book of deep humanity. These values, which ultimately coalesce around a sense of community, helped the Joads and other Okies at least survive the devastations of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression and migrate to California as a team, despite their individual differences. Steinbeck thought that propaganda can also be a positive, if it is done for the right cause—and he steadfastly believed in the rightness of America in this war—but it also had to be done in the right way. Steinbeck clearly thought that he was doing his patriotic duty with this book.