Bombs Away Read Online Free PDF

clear could be to First Lieutenant Bill Staley, and to any American private on the ground up there—any the Chinks hadn’t killed or captured, anyhow.
    So far, Harry Truman had said it made political sense. The President hadn’t wanted to get the United States into a big Asian war. Bill Staley could see that, too. The logistics of a war like that would have to get a lot better to reach merely terrible.
    But not getting into a big Asian land war didn’t mean losing the smaller Asian land war the USA was already in. Or it had damn well better not, anyway. The horrible things the Chinese had done to the American ground forces up near the Yalu—and to the British and other UN troops that fought at their side—made losing the war and the peninsula seem much too possible.
    By all the signs, losing the smaller war wasn’t going to happen, not if Truman had anything to say about it. Just that morning, a convoy from Pusan had entered the air base. Columns of trucks bringing in food and fuel and ordnance came in all the time. Bill hardly even noticed them.
    This one was…different. Trucks full of chicken pieces or crates of .50-caliber ammo, tanker trucks full of avgas, were usually escorted by nothing more than halftracks or jeeps. This convoy was only three or four trucks long. It had halftracks riding shotgun fore and aft, sure, and clearing a path through the snow. And it had four top-of-the-line Pershing tanks in front of the trucks and four more behind.
    Whatever that convoy was bringing in, the people who’d sent it wanted to keep it safe till it got where it was going. Those people sure as hell knew how to get what they wanted, too.
    Bill Staley suspected he knew what the trucks were carrying. He wasn’t sure. He could easily have been wrong. He kept telling himself how easily he could be wrong. He hoped like anything he was.
    Two days later, Brigadier General Matt Harrison, the base commander, summoned all the B-29 crews to a meeting. Some of the men—even some of the officers who sat in the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs—wondered out loud what was going on. Maybe they hadn’t seen the convoy coming in, though even a dead man should have had trouble missing it. Maybe they just had trouble adding two and two. Bill didn’t, and not just because he was a bookkeeper in the civilian world. He was pretty sure he knew why Harrison had called the meeting, no matter how he wished he didn’t. Ignorance really would have been bliss.
    Harrison was in his late forties. Among the ribbons on his chest was one for the Distinguished Service Cross. The only higher decoration was the Medal of Honor. He’d done something special in the last war.
    He whapped the lectern he stood behind with a pointer. It wasn’t quite a judge using his gavel, but it came close enough. Harrison drew all eyes to himself.
    “Some of you will be wondering what came into the base the other day,” he said. “Well, I’ll tell you. Our A-bombs now have pits. We can use them. If the President gives the order, we will use them.”
    A few of the men—the clueless ones—exclaimed in surprise. Bill Staley only sighed and nodded; that was what he’d expected. The pit looked like an hourglass outline in steel. It had radioactives where the sand would have run from one side of the glass to the other. The bombardier manually inserted it into the bulky casing of an atomic bomb while the bomber was on its way to the target. Without it, the bomb wouldn’t vaporize a city. With it in place, hell could literally come forth on earth.
    “The Chinese and Russians may think they’re safe on the other side of the Yalu,” Harrison went on. “They have been, but they aren’t any more. Or they won’t be after the President gives the word. They think they can get away with slaughtering our troops and shooting down our planes and hiding where we won’t go after them. We haven’t yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t or we can’t. When the order comes,