Bombs Away Read Online Free PDF

by a bullet his life is over, and if he doesn’t, he is still alive.
    The development of our Air Force has been so rapid and the men who have designed it have been so busy that so far there has not been time to issue in a book the process whereby a young American boy becomes a pilot, a bombardier, a navigator, or a gunner. Young men may be a trifle apprehensive entering on a training the process and technique of which they do not understand. It is the intention of this book to set down in simple terms the nature and mission of a bomber crew and the technique and training of each member of it. For the bomber crew will have a great part in defending this country and in attacking its enemies. It is the greatest team in the world.

THE BOMBER
    Of all branches of the Service, the Air Force must act with the least precedent, the least tradition. Nearly all tactics and formations of infantry have been tested over ten thousand years. Even tanks, although they operate at a high rate of speed, make use of tactics which were developed first by chariot and then by cavalry.
    But the Air Force has no centuries of trial and error to study; it must feel its way, making its errors and correcting them. The whole technique of aerial fighting has a history of less than twenty years. While to some extent this lack of experience is limiting, in another sense, it allows the Air Force a freedom of action not quite possible in other branches of the Service; for armies, like other organizations, have a tendency to rely on tradition and to hold to traditional techniques after their efficacy has passed. The Air Force must make its way in a new field where there are no precedents, where there are few rules to fall back on. During the last war, military airplanes were used largely for observation. The heroic dog fights which took place over the lines in Europe were usually the result of one plane trying to keep another from seeing what was going on behind the line.
    It was only toward the very end of the war that bombers began to be built and bombing tactics developed. During the period between the two wars, most of the nations of the world experimented expensively with airplanes. The world at large was so tired of war, so sick with war that it hoped it might never have to use these experiments. Of all the nations of the world, only Germany knew what it was going to do and where it was going with its aircraft. Germany, and the dark Aryans of Italy and the yellow Aryans of Japan developed air forces. The purpose was to blast and maim and kill. They knew exactly what they were going to do. They developed plane types for specific purposes and they watched the rest of the world for the uncorrelated experiments which they might devote to their purposes. Thus when the United States Navy developed the principle of dive-bombing, Germany took the principle and welded it into its air tactics and later used it overwhelmingly on the nations it attacked.
    Japan studied the intricacies of the American supercharger and incorporated it in its Zero fighter. The Axis developed and took and bought and stole the unrelated air inventions of the whole world and gathered them together into a destructive design, and when the Axis struck at Europe with this carefully designed unit of destruction it found Europe unprepared to meet it. The Axis had been practicing with its new weapon in Ethiopia, in Spain, and in China, and the rest of the world took little notice. Wild Ethiopian horsemen had been bombed and machine gunned on the ground to teach young Mussolinis how to use their weapons. The people of Guernica were cut down, Madrid was bombed, Barcelona destroyed, to train the Axis how to use its weapons. China defended itself with a wall of men against a wall of metal. And only after Europe was attacked and half beaten did the people of the world awake to the fact that air power can only be beaten with air power. If the German plan had worked we would have been lost, for the Axis