Bombs Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

stomach. He didn’t know much about them. But from everything he’d heard, the best way to live through one was not to be there when it went off.
    “We will take whatever steps the wise Comrade Stalin decides we have to take,” Captain Gurevich replied, so he didn’t know, either. Chances were no one did, except the longtime leader of the Soviet Union.
    Something else occurred to Morozov: “If our tanks head west and go over the border, will the Americans drop one of these bombs on us? Or more than one?”
One will be all it takes,
he thought unhappily.
    “We will not go forward alone if we get the order to liberate the American zone,” Gurevich said. “The Red Air Force will move with us, and will give us the air support we need.”
    “I serve the Soviet Union!” Konstantin said once more. That was more polite than
You’ve got to be out of your goddamn mind, sir,
even if, here, it meant the same thing. By the way Captain Gurevich turned red, he understood the words behind the words. That could be good. Maybe he wasn’t a total dope after all.
    —
    An Air Force base was like a little bit of the Midwest plopped down in whatever foreign country happened to hold it. First Lieutenant Bill Staley had been born and raised in Nebraska before moving to Washington state. He knew the Midwest when he ran into it, even if he ran into it in South Korea near the port of Pusan.
    Scrambled eggs. Fried eggs. Bacon. Coffee with cream and sugar. Hash browns. Toast with butter and jam. Ham sandwiches. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Fried chicken. Steak. Baked potatoes. Canned string beans. Canned peas. Apple pie. Canned fruit salad.
    Movies. Touch football in the snow. If there was barbed wire around the perimeter, if guards with grease guns kept North Korean infiltrators from getting too close, you didn’t have to think about that. You also didn’t have to remember that your Aunt Susie would have hanged herself for shame at the miserable mattresses on the cots in the barracks.
    The one un-Midwestern thing about the base that you couldn’t ignore was the B-29s. Without them, after all, the base wouldn’t have been there to begin with.
    They were also too damn big to ignore, sitting there like a herd of four-engined dinosaurs at the end of the snow-dappled runway. The trouble was, they were like dinosaurs in more than just size. In a world of quick, nimble biting mammals, the hulking brutes got more obsolete by the day.
    They’d flattened Japan. They’d had the Japs on their knees even before the A-bombs that cooked Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Second World War. But what the generals who gave orders in Korea hadn’t understood was that Japan was already staggering even before the B-29s zoomed in to finish the job.
    Day bombing raids against air defenses that hadn’t been smashed? Against guns and planes and radar tougher and more modern than any the Japs had had? Those didn’t work so well. The American commanders took longer than they should have to figure that out. A lot of four-engined dinosaurs and a lot of good aircrews got lost teaching them the lesson.
    Bill thanked heaven he hadn’t gone down in flames or had to hit the silk over North Korea. Night missions gave the Superforts the chance to come back and try again. Even with fighter escorts, though, they were no piece of cake. He assumed Russian pilots flew the enemy’s night fighters. The North Koreans were brave, but they didn’t have the sophisticated training that kind of mission took.
    When the Russians got in trouble, they scooted back across the Yalu into Red China. American planes weren’t allowed to follow them. The Russian pilots had a sanctuary on the other side of the river. Chinese troops? Same story.
    No wonder they were kicking our tails in North Korea. Letting them have free rein till they crossed the Yalu made no military sense. None. Zero. Zip. You didn’t have to be General of the Army Douglas MacArthur to see that. It was as clear as