Bombs away: the story of a bomber team - By John Steinbeck Page 0,2

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 Surveys, 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:In the attack by Allied air power, almost 2,700,000 tons of bombs were dropped, more than 1,440,000 bomber sorties and 2,680,000 fighter sorties were flown. The number of combat planes reached a peak of some 28,000 and at the maximum, 1,300,000 men were