Bombs away: the story of a bomber team - By John Steinbeck Page 0,3

in combat commands. The number of men lost in air action was 79,265 Americans and 79,281 British. . . . More than 18,000 American and 22,000 British planes were lost or damaged beyond repair. (U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey 1)

As these figures indicate, the casualty rates for bomber flying missions were exceedingly high. The fact is that a bomber air-man had a better chance of becoming a combat casualty than did the grunt in the foxhole or any other type of World War II combatant. To put it simply, bomber duty was very dangerous—and very destructive:In Germany, 3,600,000 dwelling units, approximately 20% of the total, were destroyed or heavily damaged. Survey estimates show some 300,000 civilians killed and 780,000 wounded. The number made homeless aggregates 7,500,000. The principal German cities have been largely reduced to hollow walls and piles of rubble. German industry is bruised and temporarily paralyzed. These are the scars across the face of the enemy, the preface to the victory that followed. (U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey 1)

With these significant numbers of noncombatant casualties and the enormous amount of destruction, the Survey notes, as one would imagine, that “the morale of the German people deteriorated under aerial attack,” especially after night raids (U.S. Strategic Bombing Strategic Survey 4). The Survey goes on to state that the German people “lost faith in the prospect of victory, in their leaders and in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected. Most of all, they wanted the war to end. . . . If they had been at liberty to vote themselves out of the war, they would have done so well before the final surrender. . . . However dissatisfied they were with the war, the German people lacked either the will or the means to make their dissatisfaction evident” (U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey 4).

The Survey here has pointed out one of the great moral dilemmas of this strategic bomber campaign, and that is the Allies attacked large numbers of noncombatants who actually could not do much about the war’s outcome. The Allies continued to drop incendiary bomb after bomb on the citizens of a government that did not even seem to try to defend them against bombing attacks. The German Nazi government, a well-documented police state, was much more concerned about protecting strategic military resources than it was ever concerned about its own citizenry. Of course, John Steinbeck knew nothing about any of these issues back in 1942 when he started writing Bombs Away. While the point is not in any way to blame Steinbeck for strategic bombing and all this subsequent destruction of civilization, it is rather to show that Steinbeck was a part of the strategic bombing team. He used his immense talents to induce many other Americans to become a part of that team as well, without any firm grasp of the overall consequences, of which there obviously have turned out to be many. Another famous but altogether different writer, Joseph Heller, in Catch-22 (1961), would later satirize the experiences of flying in a U.S. Air Army Air Forces bomber, but that was in hindsight after the war was over and in a much difference political climate than 1942. During his time, Steinbeck is not alone, because it is arguable that the rest of America has never fully comprehended how much destructive force this nation has ravaged upon the rest of the world in the twentieth century and, frankly, on into the twenty-first.

In defense of Steinbeck, unlike many other writers at that time and since, he took a hard stand in support of American democracy as a model for the rest of the world to emulate. Steinbeck, if anything, was staunchly patriotic. And this would not be the last time he would be considered prowar, as Steinbeck would later be branded a “hawk” for his support of Lyndon Johnson’s failed Vietnam War policy in the late 1960s.

As one would imagine about a book that has been tagged as propagandistic, the academic scholarship concerning Bombs Away is not all that extensive: Warren French, in John Steinbeck, writes that the book was “not the success” of his “recent novels” (26), but he does go on to note that it was “worth $250,000 to Hollywood and to the Air Force Aid Society, to which Steinbeck turned over all his royalties” (26). A few other important scholars have written about Bombs Away as well: Roy S. Simmons, in John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939- 1945; John Ditsky, in “Steinbeck’s Bombs