Air Fronts: Theaters of Operation - European Theater of Operation: Target Germany - Men, Mud and Machines

"We will simply move into China," said the armchair strategist, "base our British and American bomber forces there and ..."

BEHIND EVERY BOMBER is an airdrome from which it sets out and to which it must return. Behind every airdrome is a base that houses the men who work on the airdrome from which the bomber flies. Behind every base lie months of planning, thousands of man-hours of labor, and millions of dollars of material and equipment--all of which must be expended before the men can move into the base and the base can run the airdrome and the airdrome can put the bomber into the air.

And so to be able to bomb you first have to build. In the European Theater the heavy-bomber base covers several hundred acres of farmland. The core of each base is the airdrome, crisscrossed by 150-foot-wide concrete runways. A perimeter track, for moving planes around the field, skirts the inner border, and concrete dispersal points on which the bombers are parked between missions dot the fringes of the area. Scattered around the airdrome are the "sites" on which the personnel is housed. On the edge of the field proper are placed the administration buildings, the shops, and one or two large hangars for heavy repair work. Dovetailing into the irregular outline of the area are the neighboring farms.

Such a station may serve as a base for approximately fifty heavy bombers. Twenty-five hundred officers and men fly, service, and repair the planes and carry on the administrative tasks of the station. The sum of the materials and labor which go into the construction of this combination town, factory, and transport terminus is a factor which looms large in the development of any bombing program.

To Bomber Command's engineers this problem presents itself in terms of war schedules, material priorities, and weather. It is also a problem of multiplication : of the fifty airplanes on each station, twenty may be dispatched on each mission, the others being held in reserve. Thus it takes fifteen bases to supply the bombers for a 300-plane raid and fifty bases to implement a 1000-plane attack. It takes 1,500,000 man-hours and $5,000,000 worth of construction to prepare each bomber base for combat operations. It takes 640,000 square yards of concrete slab to construct the runways, the perimeter tracks, and the foundations for some 400 buildings which must be erected on one station—this concrete would form a road eighteen feet wide and sixty miles long. It takes bulldozers and trucks and concrete mixers and wheelbarrows and shovels and picks and sand and gravel and tar and tractors; it takes transits and tarvia, levels and steam shovels, brick and glass and mortar and wire and pipe; it means telephones and drainage tile, paint and roofing paper, Nissen huts and bathtubs, flood lights and tele-phone poles; it demands laborers--who must be too young or too old for military service--and electricians and shovel operators and plumbers and carpenters and draftsmen and strong young girls to drive the laden trucks. Hundreds of tons of rubble are required for subgrade foundations--rubble formed when Germans bombed British cities. Warehouses, theaters, churches, barracks, offices, and machine shops have to be built. Water, electrical, and sewage systems must be laid down, and all this must be multiplied by ten or twenty or fifty, depending upon the size of the bomber fleet.

This vast construction program must be carried on despite the ceaseless attacks by the war-time engineer's two main enemies--priorities and mud. Air bases rank high on the list of England's military "musts." In three and a half years of war, the island has become a checker-board of landing fields. But with the steady growth of the RAF and the U. S. Air Force the demand for space has exceeded the supply, and the problem of apportioning the materials, the transportation space, and the construction equipment has been a major factor in meeting the schedules.

Repair: U. S. Engineers patch worn-out runways.

The American bomber force in England started life with one great advantage. The British, though pressed for space themselves, moved out and turned over dozens of airdromes to Fortress groups during the first year of American operations. Certain modifications, in each case, had to be made, but the essential installations were there and ready for use. In the construction of new fields, British plans, British materials, and British labor--all a product of Reverse Lend-Lease--were largely used. Without this help, the American share of the combined air attack on Germany would have been delayed at least a year.

The first airdrome built by U. S. Army Engineers in England was completed in ten months. The field covers two square miles of farmland. The engineer aviation battalions and signal-construction company on the job worked with their guns at their sides.

One enemy the engineers cannot arm themselves against is weather. And weather--particularly the rain of the English winter--plus farm-land plus construction all adds up to mud. Roads of mud, rivers of mud, and lakes of mud plague construction crews and operating personnel alike. Fortresses, if they stray from the runways, bog down in it hub-deep; trucks sink to their axles, small pfc's go down to their hip pockets. English mud is infinite in its variety and ranges from watery slop to a gelatinous mass with all the properties of quick-setting cement. Grizzled veterans swear they have never seen anything like it--since the last war. One infamous station had a living site known as Mudville--its Nissen huts rose like lonely islands from a two-acre lake of watery mud which was eight inches deep.

Storage: An English thicket conceals American bombs.

Fortunately, the lake had a hard bottom. For one entire winter the site's citizens lived in mud-caked galoshes.

And so it was that the end of a year of operations found the VIII Bomber Command with the bases from which to fly the constantly growing fleet of its planes. Infinite labor, careful planning, British co-operation, and the generosity of the RAF in handing over completed installations all helped to conquer the labor problem, material shortages, and that greatest enemy, weather.

. with the bases established, we set up supply lines," continued the armchair strategist, "and then we ..."

If 500 American heavy bombers attack a group of enemy targets, they will ordinarily represent less than half the total operational force at the Command's disposal--approximately 750 bombers being held either in reserve or under repair. Each of these 1250 bombers has its combat crew of ten men and its ground crew of five mechanics. Each station participating in the attack also has its corps of specialists--radio experts, armorers, refueling teams, ordnance and armament men and engineering officers--who work directly on the flying equipment. This specialist group, for a force of 1250 planes, might represent another 24,000 officers and men. Thus the 500 bombers over the target are immediately dependent on an army of more than 30,000 highly trained specialists.

But this attack must be planned, co-ordinated, and controlled, the combat crews must be briefed, the resultant damage assessed, and the bases from which the planes fly must be administered, defended and supplied. Weather officers

Construction: British labor works on a field for Forts.

and truck drivers, cooks and clerks, parachute packers and turret experts, flight controllers and photographic technicians, chaplains and dentists and doctors, signals officers and interrogators, security officers and bomb-sight repair-men, welders and transportation experts, trial judges and public-relations representatives, military police—all these workers perform services essential to the success of the ultimate task, the bombing of the Nazi target. This secondary army numbers around 32,500. The labor and the skills of some 75,000 officers and men are thus joined in the effort necessary to put 500 heavy bombers over an enemy target.

Feeding and clothing this army and providing it with the materials and equipment necessary for its work—paper clips, wrenches, chewing gum, shoes, typewriters, dishes, bomb trolleys, cigarettes, hymn-books, shovels, microphones, sealing wax, soap, blankets, and axes are all on the endless list--are the function of Supply. So is procuring the gas and the oil, the tires, the bombs, the ammunition, and the spare parts to keep the bombers running. An extractor spring for a machine gun or a fuse for a bomb may be as important to the success of a particular mission as the engine of one of the planes. Nothing can be left to chance. The procurement of each one of these items, in many cases thousands of miles from the source of supply, is a minor triumph of organization and planning--the stocking of hundreds or thousands of each is a gigantic and complex task.

If one man eats six pounds of food a day (and he does on a bomber station), 75,000 men eat 225 tons of food a day. If one man consumes one-half pound of cigarettes and candy a day (and he does on a bomber station), 75,000 men will require more than eighteen tons a day.

Supply: Spare parts for bombers are big and small.

If one man needs three ounces of soap a day to keep himself, his socks, and his dishes clean (and he does on a bomber station), 75,000 men will need more than eight tons of soap a day. This nightmare of multiplication can be extended almost indefinitely, as each of the agencies involved in running a bomber force has its own list of necessities.

The Army's housekeeper, the Service Forces, is responsible for the procurement of most of this material and its transportation to the theater of war. Air Corps Supply does the same job for planes, engines, aviation gasoline, and specialized flying equipment. Air Service Command distributes the commodities and equipment, takes care of major repairs and replacements, and services the combat units. Like the line on a football team, Air Service Command does much of the unspectacular work while Fighter and Bomber Commands run with the ball.

One of the most satisfying discoveries made by the American Air Force in England was that there is some truth in the old fabrication that two can live as cheaply as one. Reverse Lend-Lease and Anglo-American ingenuity saved more than 500,000 tons of shipping space during the first year of the Vlll Bomber Command's operations. Sixty-eight per cent of the food consumed by the American forces in England now comes from British sources—meat and canned goods being the principal items imported from the U. S. Typewriters, blankets, telephone equipment, furniture, bicycles, oxygen, flying suits, radio apparatus, and pyrotechnics are among the hundreds of other British-made products that find their way into the American organization.

A force of 500 heavy bombers consumes 80 tank cars of aviation gasoline on an average mission, requires 300 tons of equipment to maintain and overhaul its engines, and drags an invisible anchor of 7500 tons of parts and materiel for general plane repair. The bulk of this materiel must cross great arcs of earth and water to reach the bombers' bases.

"... we pour in men and materiel, and blast Japan to bits," concludes the armchair strategist. "It's just as simple as that."