Bombs Away (8 page)

When Bill was ten his mother got him started with piano lessons. These continued for two years and came to nothing, but they laid an important groundwork for Bill. In high school he took up the trumpet to the horror of his whole neighborhood, but before long he played well. He organized a little dance orchestra and played for country dances, and when he went to college he was able to make his own way playing in a dance band. In high school Bill’s scholastic record was not wonderful but his grades were adequate and could have been better if he had wished, but he was having a series of soul-rocking love affairs and hadn’t really time for grades. His favorite subjects were physics and chemistry. He played a good forward on his basketball team and he graduated nicely and without honors.

In the American tradition he took two years then to roam about working at what he could get. He played in a barnstorm ing orchestra and worked on a hay bailer, but the depression was on and even odd jobs were not easy to get. At length he went to college like many other American boys, to mark time until the depression was over. There was a sense that at least at school one wasn’t standing completely still. Bill borrowed a little money to get started and he was lucky about getting into the orchestra. And again his grades were not remarkable but they kept him in school. Bill was entering his fourth year when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He and his friends had wondered vaguely what they would do when they graduated, go on W.P.A. or try to keep the orchestra going, and then Pearl Harbor was attacked and war was declared.

There was a long train trip to the induction center and the ride on the truck and the examinations and tests, and now Bill was ready to begin his training as a bombardier. He was not very tall—5 ft. 7 in. His face was square and firm and his hair sandy. He had cultivated a manner of good-humored taciturnity not very unlike his father’s manner. “When you get the feel of it,” his father wrote, “I’d like to come down and see what kind of an Air Force we’ve got.”

During the first days, sometimes Bill was a little panicky. He had thought of himself as being pretty hard but now new, sore muscles soon showed him he was not. If he had not been so tired those first few days the constant supervision would have frightened him, but when he was finally released he dropped on his cot and went to sleep. He wrote an occasional post card home. At first he had thought of writing long, descriptive letters to a girl he knew, but he soon gave that up. Things were happening to him too fast for description. He took his aptitude test in a half-bewildered state and he was assigned to a bombardier school. He was to learn a complicated trade and technique in twelve weeks. The program was exact; it went as follows:

And at the bottom of the program it said, “The hours prescribed herein per phase of instruction represent the time required for the average student to accomplish the objective.”

These were the things he had to learn in twelve weeks. Bill, with a number of others from his induction center, were moved to a bombing school. In the barracks he had his own cot now and a little domain about him. He began to make friends and gradually what had seemed like anarchy to him began to iron out. Drill and athletics went on constantly and Bill’s shoulders were back now and he began to fit his uniform. At night he was not as tired as he had been at first.

At first he had disliked the formations, but as he became precise in his step and carriage he grew to like them; the beat of the step, the numbers of men all acting in precise unison, became a satisfying thing to him. He discovered something he had not learned, which the directionless depression had not permitted him to learn—the simple truth that concerted action of a group of men produces a good feeling in all of them. In formation he with the others shouted the step count at the top of his lungs and they all felt good about it. When his unit was good enough so that every rifle grounded with one sound, they felt good about that too. They took pride in their unison.

The days were balanced for them, formation to breakfast, and classroom and athletics, then application of the classroom work and more drill and lunch, then back to classroom, out to the formation and practice with appliances. There was so much to do that the days raced by.

The study began in the classroom. There was a discussion of the reason of training, what it aimed toward, and what the duties and the responsibilities of a bombardier are—and his responsibilities are very sharp. He must not only have in his possession many confidential documents, but also he must guard and protect and in a final emergency destroy the secret bombsight. This bombsight has become the symbol of responsibility. It is never left unguarded for a moment. On the ground it is kept in a safe and under constant guard. It is taken out of its safe only by a bombardier on mission and he never leaves it. He is responsible not only for its safety but for its secrecy. And finally, should his ship be shot down, he has been instructed how quickly and effectively to destroy it. The bombardier goes always armed when he has the sight. His mission starts at the moment when he receives the sight from the safe. Instructions for protecting the bombsight are so exact that they amount to a ritual. Discussion of the sight with an unauthorized person is forbidden and no unauthorized person is ever permitted to see it. Packed in its canvas case, it is never even opened except in a guarded classroom, a trainer center, or in the nose of a bomber.

These things were explained on that first day in class and then, after a searching questionnaire, Bill and the others signed certificates of responsibility and were issued their secret textbooks and their equipment.

Now the work was given to them quickly. They discussed the theory of falling bodies, speed, trajectory, and the variables which affect the fall of a bomb, such as drift of plane and wind. Range problems were given to the class and immediately problems were set down to be worked out by the cadets in the light of their growing knowledge, for no principle is ever given without an immediate application. Thus, the discussion of trajectories is immediately demonstrated with models.

The work was given to them very rapidly. It was poured on, in fact—discussion and demonstration of gyroscopes and finally the bombsights themselves. From classroom they went to drill, from drill to athletics, and always they ate hugely. Now, the bombsights were brought into the classroom and taken apart so that the cadets knew every piece and how it worked, and what they learned cannot be told.

Bill’s class had not been off the ground yet, but it was beginning to study the ships. They were taught how to use the oxygen equipment in high altitudes, how to use parachutes. They went into the bombers and learned about the emergency exits and the fire extinguishers.

Bill wrote to his father saying, “I don’t know how we are going to do it all in twelve weeks. It seems like a mountain ahead, but the others did it so I guess we can. But don’t come down here now,” he went on; “I don’t know whether I could get a moment to see you.”

The others not only had done it, but were doing it. There were classes in all degrees of completeness and one class finishing every week. Going to his classrooms, Bill could see the advanced students marching to the training planes—the AT-11’s—to fly on practice bombing missions, and at night the planes roared overhead on night missions. The whole field was alive with energy but Bill’s class had come to the use of the ground trainer. This was a fascinating gadget, a three-wheel carriage, very tall. It had three seats on the top of it twelve feet above the floor. There were two seats ahead and one behind. The cadet sat in the left-hand seat and his instructor beside him, while the pilot who steered the carriage sat behind. A bombsight was mounted in front of the cadet. Ahead of the carriage, on the floor, a tiny little wagon moved and it had on its flat top a paper target. It was called a bug. It crawled in any set direction. The big carriage moved slowly ahead and the bug moved sideways, but the speed of the carriage was, in relation to the bug, what a bomber’s speed would be at high altitudes. The sideways-moving bug simulated the side drift of the plane. Bill sat in his seat looking through the bombsight and he directed the pilot as he would in a plane. He found his target in the bombsight, turned his knobs, correcting for speed and drift, and when he had set the sight to release the bombs his instructor checked his work. Now the carriage was moving over the bug. The sight was set and if Bill’s work had been accurate, a plunger in the bottom of the carriage sprang down and punched a hole in the target. After each run the score that Bill made was tabulated on his record. The trainer simulated exactly the conditions of bombing, except for one thing—the trainer did not bounce and buck the way a bomber does in rough air, but it allowed constant use and practice with the bombsight in the reading of dials and scales. With every run over the bug, Bill’s scores grew better and he came consistently closer to the bull’s eye. Every day he put in an hour on the trainer. His hands were finding the knobs without his looking and his eyes were going automatically to the proper dials. And every day the work in the classroom continued and the drill continued and the athletics continued. In class he was learning bombsighting technique and he was studying the mechanism of the bomb rack. Daily the problems grew more difficult but what seemed impossible of mastery on looking ahead in the textbook, fell into place when he came to it.

Up to this time he had been studying only equipment and the use of it. But now he began to learn his duties in relation to other members of the crew—the nature of the bombing mission, his relation to the pilot, and his co-ordination with the other members of the crew. And he was learning the use of other instruments besides the bombsight, the instruments and their calibration, the air-speed indicator, altimeter, compass, and free-air thermometer. He learned their errors and the corrections. It was not until the twentieth day of his training that he went into the air.

On the morning of Bill’s twentieth day, his echelon went to class and learned about low-altitude bombing procedure and how it is different from high-altitude bombing. Every member of the class was excited. The sound of the planes warming up on the flying lines had a new meaning to them. Bill had flown before in commercial ships but there is something very different in an Army ship. The commercial airliner, padded, sound-proofed, uses only straight and level flight. The closed and locked doors of the pilot’s compartment, the low, level flying, with gum to chew and aspirin and Amytal for air sickness, the little windows, the leisurely speed, these are not like Army flying. Here is no padding or soundproofing. The AT-11’s are noisy. The little seats have no backs. You sit on your parachute and if you are sick, you clean it up yourself.

The orders for Bill’s echelon said “Dry Run,” that is, they were to run over the target, use the bombsight, but drop no bombs. The instructors would know within a margin how accurate the sighting was. After their lunch Bill’s echelon marched out to the flight line. They were only to go to seven thousand feet, so they did not need sheepskins. They were dressed in the flight coveralls and their little caps. The parachutes were issued and each man adjusted the harness to fit him and all of them pretended at nonchalance. Bill leaned against the wall by the Operations Office, his face a little stern. He wasn’t frightened but his heart ticked with excitement and his breathing was a little short, but he wasn’t going to let the others know because he didn’t know they all felt the same way.