Bombs Away

by John Steinbeck

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Preface

  THE BOMBER

  THE BOMBARDIER

  THE AERIAL GUNNER

  THE NAVIGATOR

  THE PILOT

  THE AERIAL ENGINEER—CREW CHIEF

  THE RADIO ENGINEER

  THE BOMBER TEAM

  MISSIONS

  BOMBS AWAY

  Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, JOHN STEINBECK grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific coast—and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing classes until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years, he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City and then as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, California, he published two California fictions, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), the experimental drama Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the “Sea of Cortez” (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, Elaine, with whom he traveled widely. Later books included Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The “East of Eden” Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of “The Grapes of Wrath” (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

  JAMES H. MEREDITH is a former lieutenant colonel and professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy. He has served on several literary-society boards and has written about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, and Joseph Heller, as well as about Theodore Roosevelt, the American Civil War, and World War II. He is the author of Understanding the Literature of World War II (Greenwood Press, 1999) and Understanding the Literature of World War I (Greenwood Press, 2004), and is the co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays, War in Hemingway’s Time (Kent State University Press, 2010). Currently, Professor Meredith is president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and teaches American literature for Troy University’s Global Campus.

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  First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1942

  This edition with an introduction by James H. Meredith published in Penguin Books 2009

  Copyright John Steinbeck, 1942

  Copyright renewed Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck and John Steinbeck IV, 1970

  Introduction copyright © James H. Meredith, 2009

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  Introduction

  Ernest Hemingway once said he “would rather have cut three fingers off his throwing hand” than to have written such a book as Bombs Away (Baker 371). Besides the book’s obvious propagandistic qualities, what possibly bothered him more than anything else about Bombs Away was the fact that rather than emphasizing the emergence of an individual, as Hemingway would have done, Steinbeck instead focused on the development of a team or group. Steinbeck, who was at the time much more socially oriented than Hemingway, had been throughout his career emphasizing the united effort of Americans to overcome the economic and concomitant social woes of the 1930s’ Great Depression. At the same time, Hemingway wrote and published To Have and Have Not (1937), a novel about how one man attempts not only to overcome the economic downturn but to triumph over the New Deal bureaucratic functionaries as well. Now, with the advent of America’s involvement in another massive social problem, the global conflict against fascism, Steinbeck was willing to do his part in the war effort by writing a book about how the U.S. Army Air Forces recruited and developed a bomber team, a story that seemingly appealed to his literary sensibility. By the mid-1930s, fascism and military dictatorships had taken control over the governments of Italy, Japan, Germany, and Spain, and by September 1939 they had thrown the world into the most destructive war in history. America, of course, would join the fray after Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Steinbeck began writing this book in 1942.

  In general, war was not necessarily Steinbeck’s literary terrain, whereas it most assuredly was Hemingway’s. Hemingway, in all of his writings about war, whether fiction or nonfiction, always emphasized individualistic heroism and the personal alienation and despair from mechanized modern warfare and the new technological instruments of terror. His was the stuff of modernism. On the other hand, Steinbeck’s literary sensibility in such works as Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden seemed to prefer group or composite portraits of diverse characters, which seemed to perfectly coincide with the Army Air Forces’ strategy of bringing together men from across a broad cross section of America and training them to work together for a common purpose as a bomber team.

  John Steinbeck was a rather complicated man and writer. How else could one reconcile the fact that he would, in the middle of his career, write what can only be described as a propaganda piece for the United States government?
Calling it propaganda, however, should not diminish Bombs Away in any way or suggest that the book is not an important work; it most assuredly is, especially as a significant artifact of a pivotal time in U.S. history. This book is successful primarily because it would indeed do, whether or not many Americans ever read the book, what it proposes to do, and that is make some Americans feel at ease about sending their sons to war in a modern flying machine; because it would provide a coherent glimpse at how the U.S. military was training for modern war; and because it put a uniquely American face on what would turn out to be one of the most destructive military strategic campaigns in history.

  Purposefully written in the vernacular, to appeal to mothers and fathers throughout the country, Bombs Away, in the tradition of Walt Whitman during the American Civil War, is a contribution to American literature because it cogently conveys, in almost mythopoeic simplicity, the vital democratic regeneration of the United States in the face of a real and grave danger. Steinbeck writes, “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.” This is where Steinbeck truly verges on the propagandistic: “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.” Propaganda, as defined by The New Oxford American Dictionary, is “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” Taking the strictest sense of this definition, one could argue that Steinbeck was not writing propaganda because his information was not intentionally biased or misleading. According to A Handbook to Literature, propaganda is “material propagated for the purpose of advocating a political or ideological position. . . . Earlier in European use, propaganda carried a positive or neutral sense of ‘distributing information;’ . . . Since about 1930, however, the connotations have become increasingly negative” (417). This definition better demonstrates the politically benign purpose Steinbeck was pursuing, as well as illustrates the complexity of the term itself. The fact that he was commissioned by the Army Air Forces, which had a clear ideological or bureaucratic purpose in mind, almost automatically categorizes Bombs Away as a mild propaganda work, though only as a recruitment tool. However, the book’s laudatory purpose, that of encouraging Americans to accept this new war machine, the bomber, makes the effort a positive one. America needed the bomber and needed large numbers of its citizens to fight in it to defeat the evil of fascism. Even democracies sometimes need a push by their governments to do the right thing. So to be clear, Bombs Away should under no circumstances be equated with other propaganda during that period, such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. This type of work by the Nazis is what gave propaganda a negative connotation after the 1930s.

  Despite his sense of duty and patriotism and his faith in the American government at the time, Steinbeck—as his biographer Jackson Benson describes the situation—was nonetheless still conflicted about writing Bombs Away. Benson writes, “On the one hand his instincts were largely pacifistic and he viewed war as intellectually futile—a biological racial spasm generated out of the subconscious. . . . On the other hand, he had a very strong sense of duty.” Besides, “he wanted to know what it felt like to fly in a bomber” (Benson 505). Soon after meeting with President Roosevelt, who Steinbeck claims personally talked him into writing the book (Benson 508), and General “Hap” Arnold in Washington, D.C., Steinbeck and the project photographer, John Swope, began their arduous journey. This trip would take them to bases and airfields of the Army Air Forces from coast to coast, also taking them along the way to such places as Texas, Louisiana, California, Illinois, and Florida, and finally back home to New York (Benson 505), where Steinbeck was currently living with Gwyn Conger, his second wife. As one could easily imagine, the trip was both physically demanding and at the same time mentally tedious. In other words, it was as if Steinbeck had, for a while at least, actually joined the military. His daily regimen consisted of waking up at 5:00 A.M. to begin the training routine of the flight crews, including flying in the cockpit with the pilots, and then he would stay up at night drinking with the crews in local honky-tonks and roadhouses.

  Although the path to writing this book was complicated, rigorous, and exhausting, if not at times intoxicating, Steinbeck’s depiction of the training of a B-17E bomber team is simple, direct, and, one could say, classically elegant in that he is unified in aim, is noticeably restrained in form and diction, and has organized the book proportionally. Each member of the bomber team, for example, has his own chapter. Besides the preface and the introduction, there are nine chapters in the book: “The Bomber,” “The Bombardier,” “The Aerial Gunner,” “The Navigator,” “The Pilot,” “The Aerial Engineer-Crew Chief,” “The Radio Engineer,” “The Bomber Team,” and “Missions.” The “Bomber” chapter describes the basic capabilities of the B-17E “Flying Fortress” and the differences between that airplane and the other long-range bomber in the U.S. Army Air Forces inventory at the time, the Consolidated B-24 “Liberator.” The next seven chapters describe the different personality types and the various training methods of the individual members of the bomber team. Finally, the last chapter speculates about how the team will work in future missions.

  As a novelist who possessed a broad and sympathetic understanding of the United States’ character, Steinbeck sensed America’s reluctance to wage war, but he also knew that, once provoked, his country would be a formidable foe. Despite all that talk about America’s moral ability to wage a just war, one can easily discern Steinbeck’s innate pacifistic tendencies as well: “In all history, probably no nation has tried more passionately or more thoughtfully to avoid fighting than the United States had tried to avoid the present war against Japan and Germany” (xxix). However, Steinbeck clearly understands that by finally having been provoked into war, the United States was particularly well positioned to win the conflict: “If we ourselves had chosen the kind of war to be fought, we could not have found one more suitable to our national genius. For this is a war of transport, of machines, of mass production . . . and in each of these fields we have been pioneers if not actual inventors” (xxx). “In short, this is the kind of war that Americans are probably more capable of fighting and fighting better than any other people in the world” (xxxi). With these observations Steinbeck is clearly trying to link this book with the work he had been doing about America in the previous decade, in such books as The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and In Dubious Battle. In these novels, Steinbeck conveys how a team works best in combating forces that threaten survival, in these cases the survival of common laborers. The same is true for nations as a whole. Therefore, despite the idea that this book would not ever be the centerpiece of a novelist’s career, Bombs Away in retrospect turns out arguably to be a book at the moral center of America’s most significant war contribution and the war’s most controversial issue. Bombs Away depicts the building of a single team that will soon develop enough skill not only to fly the airplane but eventually to deliver a sizable payload to its intended target. Multiply this team by thousands and the bomb payload by hundreds of thousands, and eventually by millions, and one can start to see how the American war effort became not only a major deciding factor in the war effort but the most destructive military force in history. Metaphorically, it began with only one team. This is how a technological democracy builds up the moral steam to divert from the quotidian and become an extraordinary arsenal of war with almost unlimited destructive power in a relatively short period of time.

  The United States strategically bombed the major urban centers and the most populated cities of Italy, Japan, and Germany throughout the war, and the B-17 was the major weapon system of that campaign. The long-range bomber and the strategic bombing campaigns turned out to be extremely costly operations during World War II in terms of people and resources, of course, but, more important, in terms of lasting moral
capital. The B-17 “Flying Fortress” dropped astronomical amounts of conventional ordnance, primarily on the manufacturing and industrial infrastructure of the Axis countries, and yes, this long-range bomber also directly attacked the basic fabric of civilization of these nations. The B-17 likewise established much of the operational and psychological groundwork for the eventual explosion of nuclear weapons over Japan in 1945. Otherwise peaceful, democratic nations where the government’s actions have to be justified to the electorate, such as the United States, do not ordinarily begin the wholesale bombing of civilian populations without justification, precedents, and a moral foundation to build upon. In other words, the buildup to the eventual dropping of the atomic bomb required incremental action. The B-17 “Flying Fortress” helped establish the technological and moral foundation for the eventual destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a consequence of that action, the United States remains today the only country to have exploded a nuclear weapon in any war. In the beginning, Americans needed to feel at ease about sending their sons to fight in the bomber; then, they had to feel at ease about what those bombers did. It is the way democracy works in time of total war. When we look backward, the course of history seems inevitable, but actually it is not. If the U.S. electorate becomes restless about the way its government is prosecuting a war, it can make a dramatic change. It is rare, but it does happen. So while America might have been reluctant to enter the war in the beginning, in the end the United States proved more than willing to end the conflict at any price, primarily by demonstrating that it was willing and able to demolish the enemy’s homeland.

  On November 3, 1944, the U.S. secretary of war formed a commission to start compiling extensive reports, which eventually became The U.S. Strategic Bombing Surveys, on the overall extent of the damage and the effectiveness of these bombing campaigns during World War II. The report from the European campaign provides stunning statistics of the destruction:In the attack by Allied air power, almost 2,700,000 tons of bombs were dropped, more than 1,440,000 bomber sorties and 2,680,000 fighter sorties were flown. The number of combat planes reached a peak of some 28,000 and at the maximum, 1,300,000 men were in combat commands. The number of men lost in air action was 79,265 Americans and 79,281 British. . . . More than 18,000 American and 22,000 British planes were lost or damaged beyond repair. (U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey 1)