Air Crew: Combat Crew, 1943/44 - Introduction
"One word explains how we got through the hell over Europe 25 times-and back home without a casualty," leaning forward, Captain Bob Morgan, who piloted Old Undentable, the famed Memphis Belle, through 20,000 miles of the world's most shell punctured atmosphere, punched it hard - "TEAMWORK!"
Teamwork is what you are going to get in the 2nd Air Force. By the time you reach here you have had many months of training in the techniques and skills that make pilots, navigators, bombardiers, flight engineers, radio operators, and gunners. This Air Force's job is to put these highly trained individuals into a heavy bomber, polish each man until he is a master of his specialty, and weld the whole into a "Combat Team". A team which, like one of Knute Rockne's great football outfits, clicks as if every man was functioning from a single brain.
The members of the team already know their individual jobs. The big job is to master those jobs so they will be performed, without fail, under combat conditions. The only answer is to develop "Combat Habits".
The training mission of the 2nd Air Force is a success when it sends heavy bombardment combat crews into action equipped to do a maximum of damage at a minimum cost. That means pilots, bombardiers, gunners, radio men, navigators, and engineers must be drilled to the point where ten pairs of eyes, hands, and feet work automatically, work right, work the first time - and work together. Teamwork, discipline and combat habits are the key to successful heavy bombardment-and this Air Force believes that heavy bombardment is the key to a successful wind-up of this war.
Probably most of you are a bit puzzled as to how the 2nd Air Force functions, what is going to happen to you personally - and why. You will spend about four months in the 2nd Air Force. You will be shipped from here to an air base, probably be located in rugged western, or mid-western country. Heavy bombers need plenty of room.
There you meet, for the first time, the gang who will make up your combat crew. It's your permanent outfit. From now on you work together, live together-and some day fight together.
lt may he an old story, "One for all, and all for one", but that's the way it is with a combat crew. You have been going to school most of your life - kindergartens, colleges, army techs, flight schools - and up to now, if you flopped it was your personal headache. From now on it is different. Ten or more lives are going to hang by the thin threads of your individual skills and alertness. It is a grim, certain fact that a day will come in combat when every life in the plane will depend on your knowing your job. If you let yourself down-you cut the throats of your crew. It is up to the whole crew to see that no one lets it down.
Any man who reaches this stage of training is a picked man. Literally, the one in a hundred who is qualified mentally and physically to be a member of a combat crew. You wouldn't be here if you didn't have the stuff to make the grade. Keep one point in mind - you're playing for keeps.
At the start there is a heavy program of ground work, some of it along advanced, but still familiar lines. Other classes, such as combat intelligence, camouflage, ditching and air-sea emergency procedures, may be new.
There is plenty of flying - about 60 hours in the bombers. lt is the same type of ship you fly in combat. Flights are short, with stress on combat gunnery and bombing practice. Toward the end of the phase there is formation flying.
When the crew is shipped to another base for more advanced work all training is stepped up. Flights are longer and carried out under conditions close to actual combat flying. lntelligence and reconnaissance missions are flown. Particular emphasis is put on night flying and formation tactics. At the end of four weeks you go into even more advanced training.
This comes close-very, very close-to the real thing. Everything will he thrown at you except lead. Actual combat conditions are simulated. Long practice bombing missions are flown in formation and cross country. The ships go through all the motions of a real raid. Anti-aircraft areas must be dodged, searchlights sweep the skies, pursuit ships swoop on the formation. The target may be a thousand miles from the base-a huge plane factory, shipyard, or railroad junction.
Last step is the Staging Phase. Here the crew gets its own plane, a grim, murderous, streamlined air monster, fresh from the assembly line-built to take it-and dish it out. Plane and crew go through a complete series of check-ups. Special equipment is issued. A last physical is given. The crew gets a complete briefing from Intelligence. Every factor that a crew faces in the theater of war is outlined.
Pilot, navigator, and radio operator get a special briefing, as to the route they will fly to combat-charts, codes, and navigational aids are furnished.
Crews get last minute brush-ups in all phases of training. Almost every crew member suddenly discovers that there is some point on which he is shaky--radio operators may be uneasy about the frequency meter-bombardiers want a final check of AFCE (automatic flight control equipment) -pilots want to be sure what the ship can do under certain stresses. These are the days when combat looms very close and very big. Many a crew member begins to wish he had "sweated out" the last months of training more grimly.
About ten days in the staging area-and then the six hour alert. THAT'S lT!
2nd Air Force training is based on actual combat experience. Not from the last war, or last year-but combat lessons brought up-to-date, day after day, by first-hand information from the theaters of war. These combat lessons have been paid for, in blood and planes, by British and American heavy bombardment air crews. How well you learn, in the air and in the classroom, is eventually going to be put to the final test-combat.
The biggest favor a new combat crew can do themselves is to sit down and have a good bull session with men who have been through the works." The advice comes from a gunner who wears nine of those little ribbons. ln 25 missions over Europe I've seen too many men learn the hard way. Try the easy way-and take some tips from the guys who pick them up the hard way."
That is what 2nd Air Force training is-tips from men who have been through it. Many instructors are veterans who, a few weeks back, were flying combat missions.
In these pages some of those men, in bull session style, will pass on a few tips. You might remember, in this business learning the hard way is likely to be just a bit too hard, and too late, for real comfort.
So meet:
