As war clouds gathered over Europe
in the 1930s a small but dedicated handful of men occupied senior leadership
positions in the United States Army Air Corps, most of them students of the influential
and revered General Billy Mitchell and the doctrine of strategic air power he
had loudly proclaimed, much to the annoyance of Army Generals and Navy
Admirals. They included such “true believers” and powerful voices as Henry (Hap)Arnold, Ira Eaker,
Karl “Tooey” Spaatz, Curtis Lemay and Frederick Anderson, each of whom would
soon play key roles in shaping military aviation history. American planners
were forced to think in strategic rather than just tactical terms given the
great distances involved in confronting any foreign aggressor. The same
considerations coming into play when forecasting the growth of commercial air
transport, U.S airframe and power plant manufacturers were far ahead in
multi-engine thinking and design with Boeing Corporation, Douglas and
Consolidated Aircraft all investing in designing and tooling up for what they
saw coming. At the same time Henry Ford’s production line technology and Shell
Oil’s development of newer more powerful 100 octane aviation fuel (at the
urging of civilian Jimmy Doolittle,) gave a giant boost to the changing palette
of industrial applications to fit changing needs. (Shell’s aviation fuel turned
out to be magic for Rolls-Royce’s Merlin engine!)
Boeing’s B-17 “Flying Fortress” and
Consolidated’s B-24 “Liberator” four-engine bombers were virtually the very
incarnation of Billy Mitchell’s “Ideal”, and teamed with Britain’s Lancasters
would carry the air War against Germany and her occupied territories for the
next four years. The concept behind the idea of precision day-light bombing was first of all, a bomber specifically
armed with the firepower to protect itself from every direction and angle of
air attack, and to become a part of a flying “box formation” with other such
ships capable of the same protective screen on a mutual and combined scale,
so that a squadron of 12 bombers, a group of 36 or larger missions of
multiple groups or wings would build
on the idea of a self-defending “box.” The further idea of accuracy made
possible by the new and revolutionary Norden
bombsight added to the American war doctrine of bombing
military/industrial/transportation targets while minimizing the impact on
civilian populations. The RAF’s nighttime “carpet bombing” of cities and
population centers, while less costly in bombers and crews was in contrast to
the U.S. preference, although everyone knew civilians were dying both ways.
Either of the two U.S. 4-engine
bombers called for a basic crew of ten: 4 commissioned officers (pilots,
navigator and bombardier) and 6 enlisted sergeants (radio man, engineer and
gunners.) After initial training in their specialties (most navigators and
bombardiers were drawn from unsuccessful pilot candidates,) they were organized
and then trained together as crews. Crew integrity was at the center of life
and survival, and a bomber crew was as close to a real “family” as any military
organism I can think of. They trained together, lived together, laughed (if at
all) together, fought and often died together. They watched out for each other’s
oxygen, patched up wounds, helped each other out of burning planes and shared
secrets nobody else even knew. They had discovered and were practitioners of
real “love”.
The most “helpless” and vulnerable
crew member in a WWII B-17 was the belly gunner, usually chosen because of his
small size and tolerance of claustrophobia. Sealed into his tiny, circulating,
cramped glass bubble, sighting his twin .50 caliber machine guns between his
folded knees after take-off for long “exhilarating” hours at a time, without
his parachute for which there was no room, his was the loneliest but most
important “outpost.” To escape from his “nest” an electric motor had to turn
and align his small bubble with an aperture in the fuselage deck. With an
electrical failure there was no escape, and in a forced landing, the exposed
turret is the first casualty. I know of one bomber crew in which the two waist
gunners made a pledge to their belly gunner friend that in such an event, they
would remain behind to die together, When their B-17 was afire and falling,
they removed their chutes and huddled near their friend’s turret while the rest
of the crew jumped.
They were ordinary American “boys”
doing what the times and their oaths demanded of them at 25,000 feet above a
world torn apart by war.
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