Bombs Away (13 page)

The work on the ground continued, firing of flexible guns on the gunnery range at a moving target, the firing of the cannon and the skeet shooting, but now every day there was aerial training. Every day the silver training ships went up with student gunners in the cockpits. Al fired at the towed target from every angle, from below, from above, and from the sides. He went into high altitudes to attack the target and he wore oxygen mask and heavy sheepskin clothing and gloves; and when the ships landed after firing he went over the target, looking for the marks which would be his hits, and he was graded on the number of his hits.

In the classroom he learned group attack and formation attack on tail and on nose. He fired from the five standard installations, nose, tail, blister, waist turret, and open port, and every day he had his athletics and calisthenics, and every day squad ron drill and squadron ceremony. Al had gained confidence in himself now and in his weapon. He was becoming a gunner. He knew every part and symptom of his gun. His eye could calculate the speed of moving objects. His hands on the guiding levers of the turret moved instinctively.

With so much to do and so much to learn, the weeks moved quickly by. It seemed only a little time until the five weeks were out. Al had qualified as an aerial gunner with a high score. His record had been so good that he might easily have applied for and been accepted as a gunnery instructor, but he had joined the Air Force to fight and he did not make his application. He was assigned to bomber training center and one day, with his orders in his pocket, he climbed on a train to go to the place where bomber crews are assembled and trained as a unit. And it seemed to him very long ago that he had mixed chocolate sodas and poured caramel syrup over dishes of ice cream for giggling girls. He didn’t seem the same young man who had done these things, and the fact of the matter was that he was not the same young man. He had none of the great words of the news-papers and the propagandists on his tongue. Probably he could not have put into words the urge he felt, but it was an urge toward action. Like a hunter he wanted to see live game in his sight, and when his work was done he wanted to see the smoke of a destroyed enemy trailing behind a falling ship. He was the hunter of the air, the stinger in the tail of the long range bomber, and he wanted to join his group.

THE NAVIGATOR

The purpose of a long-range bomber is to fly to a given target and to drop its bombs. That is the simple statement of it and its complication arises in the technique of getting the bomber to the target and getting it home again. The bombardier is there to drop the bombs on the target. The pilot will guide and control the ship. The crew chief will see to the engines. The gunner protects the plane from attack and the radio operator keeps up communication with ground and other planes. But bombers, given a pin point to go to, must have navigators to tell them how to get there. A plane cannot fly by sight over seas and deserts or at night or in clouds and arrive at its destination, any more than a ship can.

The aerial navigator is a very necessary member of a bomber crew. The word navigation, referring as it does to the sea, is misused, but apparently it is going to continue to be misused. An attempt was made to change aerial navigation to avigation with practically no success at all, for navigation seems to have lost its exclusive reference to the sea and will refer to any directed travel by instrument and map. Aerial navigation is not much different from marine navigation except that things happen more quickly. The basic instruments are the same, the compass to tell the direction in which you are going and the sextant and chronometer to tell you where you are. Other instruments—air-speed indicators, drift meters, etc.—are more recent inventions and their use is limited to airplanes. The basic instruments are very ancient. The compass has only changed in accuracy since early Chinese seamen placed a little lodestone bar on a chip of wood and floated the chip in a saucer.

The modern compass is a marvel of accuracy, but its principle is that of the lodestone on a chip—that a magnet will point toward magnetic North. Gioja’s refinement in the fourteenth century was only followed by a long series of refinements and corrections, and the principle of crossed staff and astrolabe is carried through in the marvelously accurate modern sextant and octant.

The modern radio time signal is the completely accurate grandchild of the well-built and protected chronometer, and the aerial navigator is the child of the sea captain who shot sun and star from his quarter-deck and brought his ship over the curve of the earth to an unseen port. The aerial navigator, of all members of a bomber crew, except possibly the gunner, practices an ancient profession, and of all the members of the crew the navigator needs more technical education and training. The ideal candidate for commission as aerial navigator in the Army Air Force will have some background in mathematics and in astronomy. Engineers make good navigators because, in addition to the basic knowledge, they have acquired the method of thinking and studying which is required at Army Air Force Navigation Schools. Such engineering training, however, is not required.

The navigator enters the Army Air Force in the same way as do the bombardier and pilot. He makes application and is sent to an induction center where he is tested physically and mentally before he is assigned to Navigation School. The navigator candidate will have a different temperament from pilot and bombardier. He is rather more studious and more a perfectionist in his work. There is no “fairly close” in navigation. The point indicated must be found exactly. For example, a squadron of bombers rarely takes off from the same place. Individual planes may leave from different stations with orders to rendezvous at a given place and at a given time. In each plane it will be the navigator’s job to get his ship to that place in the sky at a given moment. His work must be exact, else his ship will not be in its place in the flight.

When the navigation cadet has passed the physical and mental tests, the manual aptitude tests, and so forth, he will be assigned to a school. The school and the course will be described as follows. Its objective is to qualify students as navigator members of a combat crew. Its scope—qualification as precision, dead-reckoning, and celestial navigators and qualification as junior officer members of the combat crew. The duration of the course is fifteen weeks. The course is divided into two parts, flying training and ground school, and in this particular school there will be more ground work than flying work for the navigator has a great deal to learn.

In ground school he will learn dead-reckoning navigation. He will learn instruments, maps and charts, radio navigation. In celestial navigation he will learn the general theory, time and hour angle, instruments, star identification, and astronomical triangles. In meteorology he will learn the theory and principles of weather analysis, the interpretation of weather maps, the discussion of forecasts. He will learn the meteorology of the ocean, of thunderstorms, tornadoes, and icing conditions, and on top of all of it, as in every other Air Force school, he will have constant athletic and military training.

When he finishes the course he will be able to take a ship or a plane to any given point. During his school the work will be hard and constant, but if the student has the fortitude, the mind, and the body, and can take it, he will emerge from his school an essential part of the bomber team. In his hands will lie responsibility for direction, for knowing the winds and the drift, for knowing the earth and the currents of the air. On the navigator’s direction, the pilot will find the enemy whether it be an invading ship near Midway Island, a submarine base in the Aleutians, or a tank factory in Europe. When the target is found, his work will be over while bombardier releases his bombs, and then, again, the navigator must take the direction of the ship, must find the way home, must find the little point of land with the runways where the bomber will come to rest. The success of the bombing mission, a great part of it, is very definitely in the navigator’s hands. He is an indispensable member of the bomber team.

Allan had got his degree in Civil Engineering and was two months in postgraduate work for an electrical engineering degree when the war broke out. His father was county engineer in a central Indiana county and had been for twenty years. Allan knew he was fit for the Army and would eventually be in the Army. He thought of applying for the Engineers Corps, but the Air Force seemed to him the more interesting Service. Like every other young man in the country, he thought he would like to be a pilot. That was natural enough. When uninstructed people thought of the Air Force, they used to think only of pilots. The great organization of ground crews and air crews rarely occurred to them. They have read only of pilots. The heroes in their magazine stories have been pilots. Newspapers have spoken almost exclusively of pilots, yet the pilot is actually only one part of the functioning Air Force.

It cannot be successfully argued that without the pilots the planes do not fly, for without any part of the Air Force the ships do not fly, without weather men and mechanics, without commanders and enlisted men. An error by a grease monkey will bring down a plane as surely as an error by a pilot. It is a force of split responsibility. No one position is more important than another. It is true that the pilot is most in evidence and has been treated most romantically in the press, but the pilot himself knows as well as any, and better than most, how much he must rely on the ground maintenance crew, on navigator and radio man. An Army pilot knows that he is not the fair-haired boy of the Air Force. There isn’t any fair-haired boy. The force must function as a unit. One might as well say that the controls of a plane are more important and necessary than the engine or that the air foil is more important than the propellers. The plane does not take the air unless every part functions successfully and the Air Force does not function unless all of its men do their jobs. This is very well known in the Air Force. It is only civilians who think of the pilot as separate and more important and romantic than his brothers. But Allan had read the usual things and he, like many others, thought of the Air Force as a group of lordly officers who were pilots with valets to service their planes. He made application for training and was accepted on his scholastic record, for in engineering school he had a background of mathematics, a training in the use of instruments, several courses in astronomy, the controlled thinking that goes with mathematics and the discipline toward exactness that goes with engineering. His application was accepted and he was sent to an induction center and there his hair was clipped with all the others. He drew his work clothes and his neat khaki uniform. He was given the intelligence test and the aptitude test, the interviews and physical examinations, and finally Allan was called to a private interview with an officer. He stood nervously waiting for the unknown. The officer said quietly, “At ease, sit down there.” He had a report on the desk in front of him. He glanced down at the papers and then up at Allan. “You have a good rating here,” he said. “There is nothing in this report to indicate that you would not make a good pilot. Some difficulty might show up in training, but it isn’t likely. Physical and mental reports are both good.” Allan began to breathe again. “Thank you, sir,” he said.