Bombs away: the story of a bomber team - By John Steinbeck Page 0,1

use, propaganda carried a positive or neutral sense of ‘distributing information;’ . . . Since about 1930, however, the connotations have become increasingly negative” (417). This definition better demonstrates the politically benign purpose Steinbeck was pursuing, as well as illustrates the complexity of the term itself. The fact that he was commissioned by the Army Air Forces, which had a clear ideological or bureaucratic purpose in mind, almost automatically categorizes Bombs Away as a mild propaganda work, though only as a recruitment tool. However, the book’s laudatory purpose, that of encouraging Americans to accept this new war machine, the bomber, makes the effort a positive one. America needed the bomber and needed large numbers of its citizens to fight in it to defeat the evil of fascism. Even democracies sometimes need a push by their governments to do the right thing. So to be clear, Bombs Away should under no circumstances be equated with other propaganda during that period, such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. This type of work by the Nazis is what gave propaganda a negative connotation after the 1930s.

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