School for Bombers

SCHOOL FOR BOMBERS DAVIS-MONTHAN FIELD, ARMY AIR FORCES' HEAVY BOMBARDMENT BASE AT TUCSON, TURNS OUT IN INCREASING NUMBERS SKILLED BOMBING CREWS. THEY ARE TAUGHT TO FLY AND FIGHT IN B-24 LIBERATORS, AND THEY HAVE ALREADY STRUCK THE TARGETS HARD IN VARIOUS THEATERS OF WORLD WAR II. OFFICIAL U. S. ARMY AIR FORCE PHOTOS

IGHT and day B-24 Liberators are bombing Southern Arizona. No one seems to mind. The incidents never make page one of newspapers. Citizens hardly lift their secure heads when the bombers circle Tucson and swoop down to land at Davis-Monthan Field. The whole situation is accepted as a matter of course, quite as it should be.

Yet what has been happening in Southern Arizona for more than two years was preparation for engagements in Sicily, New Guinea,China, Germany, France, North Africa and Burma, which have made the headlines. The Liberators that today skim over giant saguaros, cacti, mesquite and palo verde trees on the desert are tomorrow casting shadows on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean. The practice bombs of today are grimly intentioned ones tomorrow as they fall on Thanbyuzayat, Hamburg, Reggio Calabria, Wewak, Spezia and Schweinfurt. Range cattle and coyotes may be startled today, but tomorrow there is no pre-tense when bombs hit Axis factories, oil plants, submarine spawning grounds, railroads, and military objectives.

tense when bombs hit Axis factories, oil plants, submarine spawning grounds, railroads, and military objectives.

Newspaper dispatches speak of 500 bombers flying 1,500 or 2,000 miles to an enemy objective quite as if they did it all by themselves. But there are men in those planes and many were trained at Davis-Monthan Field. It is they who animate those giants that climb the lofts of heaven to lay their eggs, they who bring to life a thousand sensitive mechanisms, While the Air Forces are primarily concerned with those functions peculiar to the flying branch of the Army, the things purely military are likewise stressed. Here the men of Davis-Monthan Field pass in review. When they train at Davis-Monthan they learn first to be good soldiers.

and say when propellers shall hum, bomb bays open, and machine guns spit death from between their teeth.

Where did they come from, those thousands of American airmen? They came from your house and that of your neighbors' from Maine to Oregon. Who trained them to such precision that bombs were laid on Rome's railroad tracks and not on the Temples of God? The United States Army's Second Air Force, which is responsible for all heavy bombardment training in this nation. Where were they trained? In camps, schools, fields and bases from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Canadian to the Mexican border.

Arizona has several of these air training schools, but Davis-Monthan Field is its only heavy bombardment operational training base. It is rated America's best. Its graduates, after completing additional phases of their training at other fields, are today making those headlines over accounts from world battlefronts.

That field is a big and important part in the amazing training program which the Second Air Force, now the largest of all air forces, has underway. Its program has been

Dear Mae, Well, I arrived here today after a trip clear across the country. It sure is hot here, but the climate is dry and the country is beautiful, especially from the air. God knows I don't know how long I will be here. One thing, I will still be flying Liberator Bombers and will start getting my crew and start training them to act as a combat team. This is only the first phase of such training with lots more to follow. When I do leave here I will have up a swell crew consisting of copilot, bombardier, navigator, two engineers, two radio men and two gunners. I sure hope these gunners are good for they are the boys that will have to take over of the enemy pursuits. Don't worry though, for the training up here will receive before going across will equip us to take on all comers. I am flying the best ships in the world and have the best training possible to get. These Liberators sure are some ship as you probably have read a number of times in the paper.

I can't think of anything else to say now, Mae, except that I am well and hope you and the rest are the same.

Airborne . . . in its native element . . . The great B-24 Liberator bombers drone ceaselessly through Southern Arizona skies. Behind these training flights lie countless hours of ground training, of carefully and precisely coordinated implantation of the world's finest training of fighting airmen.

set up to meet and anticipate the needs of a global war. Training was never more fluid, adjustable, adaptable. Theory is based on this minute's fact from the battle front and tomorrow's anticipated needs. Textbooks are often the engraved memories of men who have known the sweat of fear as death came at them in Messerschmitts, Junkers and FockeWulfs, or from anti-aircraft guns and a dead engine in their own plane.

Davis-Monthan Field is a sample of this nation's answer to our enemies who threatened to bomb our rocks and rills, our templed hills. It is a part of the vast University which the army has set up and a segment of the campus that is as wide and long as this nation. Its students are young men, full of hell and laughter, daring and courage, who have left desks, counters, ticker tapes, and plumbers' tools to learn new tasks which deal with death and self-protection. They get such training in Never far from their airplane when she is on the ground are key members of the ground crew. To each crew, their airplane is the greatest and best in the world; more than an inanimate piece of complex mechanism, she is something to be wooed and attended and cared for 24 hours a day such an intensive, learning program as they never before knew in all their jitterbugging, luxury-loving lives. And they like it! And the one thing they want is to be graduated into combat duty.

It is rather suitable that such an outstand ing base with such a vital work regime should be in Tucson, for that city was founded in 1776 by the Spaniards as a fort and military headquarters. Tucson, also, established the first municipal airport in the United States, in 1919, and was on the first air and mail routes across the southern portion of this nation. It is also suitable that the commanding officer of this base should be Col. Lowell H. Smith. He landed his Douglas Army biplane at the Tucson field September 21, 1924, while on his round-the-world flight and en route to Seattle and the completion of that epoch-making "first" in aviation history.

The field is named in honor and memory of Samuel Howard Davis and Oscar Monthan both reared in Tucson. The first was a World War I pilot and was killed in a flying accident at Carlstrom Field, Arcadia, Florida, December 28, 1921. The second was a ground officer in World War I who took up flying in the Air Corps in 1919 and became an outstanding aircraft engineering officer. He was killed in a bomber crash at Honolulu, T. H., March 27, 1924.

In September 1924, the then Lieut. Lowell H. Smith nearing completion of the Army Round-the-World flight, landed his Douglas bi-plane at the primitive Tucson municipal airport, en route to Seattle, Wash., and the finish line. Front center is Dr. Andrew Elliott Douglass, of the U. of A. Picture was taken by Godfrey Sykes, Tucson, Ariz.

The base today bears no resemblance to the pocket handkerchief of cleared desert land which was Tucson Municipal Airport in 1919 or even in 1925 when the farsighted, proud 20,000 citizens looked upon the 1,280 acres at the port as a big field. The United States Army Air Corps indicated its interest in the airport by spending $55,000 in 1931 for a steel and concrete hangar and operations building. Modern paved runways and taxi strips were installed through federal relief projects in Arizona between 1934 and 1937. Then, in 1940, Davis-Monthan Field was designated as a U. S. Army Air Corps Base and assigned to the First Bombardment Wing, which was then located at March Field, California. In the fall of 1940 a huge expansion program, which is still underway, was begun and the wing ocThe field is an integral part of Second Air Force, Major Gen. Davenport Johnson, commanding, and its program of forming, training and sending into action America's heavy bombardment crews. It is one of the many fields in the Force's XX Bomber Command, which operates bases from the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico, from Denver through the Mississippi valley.

While Davis-Monthan Field is a heavy bombardment operational training base, Colonel Smith commanding, it is also headquarters for the Operational Training Wing which is commanded by Col. Walter R. Agee and which has bases in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado and Nebraska.

Since Pearl Harbor shook this nation out of its illusory blanket of isolationism and let a cold draft of realism blow down its neck, the field has grown constantly and the training program, particularly in the past year and a half, has been tremendously expanded and accelerated. Under this increased tempo the Tucson base maintains a record for the output of trained crews for bombers which still stands unchallanged by other fields, both from the standpoint of quality and quantity. In fact, Davis-Monthan Field is today larger than the entire United States Air Force four years ago and its monthly flight hours exceed annual numbers of not many years ago. The task of Second Air Force and, therefore, of Davis-Monthan Field is the production of smoothly operating, perfectly co-ordinated teams of ten men to fly those four-engine bombers that make the news under the daily headlines.

Every portion of the physical plant of that base and every phase of its personnel's life is dedicated to that training program. It is a serious business, but it does not eliminate laughter, good times, and all the normal expressions of human beings, including the soldier's right to gripe.

That base is a city in itself. Its corporate limits are miles in extent. Within its closely guarded boundaries lie what might be called the urban section with its headquarters build. ings, mess halls, hospital, barracks, theaters, classrooms and laboratories, shops and warehouses, stores and club rooms, churches and post office, parade grounds and recreation centers. The great runways that pattern the base also tie together the suburban areas such as the gunnery range and fire control school. Actually, however, the base is not confined to those exact boundaries where guards patrol the limits on starless nights and listen to coyotes bark. The entire valley and its encircling rim of jagged mountain ranges are a vast classroom where men march on maneuvers or engage in simulated war problems. They learn the art of camouflage so whole troops of men and mechanized equipment can be hidden in the sparse desert cover of cholla, saguaro, and prickly pear.

The valley floor and mountain ranges are not the limits of the field. The whole of Southern Arizona is its laboratory and class room in the skies. The bombers that take off and land day and night, seven days of every week, circle the wide valley in which Tucson lies and wing off in every direction on missions. Among these will be to bomb specific portions which are designated bomber ranges set aside for Air Corps use. Some of these ranges are so cut off from the base and other contacts with civilization that the ground crews stationed there call themselves "The Foreign Legion of Davis-Monthan." They ease their isolation and loneliness by collecting Arizona wildlife for menageries rattlesnakes not included and make a sport of betting on the expert marksmanship of favorite bomber crews.

Life in this military city is comparable with that of any other town. However, it would be expected that the intensive training program there would lead to a frenzied speed about everything at the base. That is not so. The pace is almost leisurely, but with studied and intelligent use of energy and man-hours. There is no haste that makes waste with men's lives and millions of dollars worth of fine equipment.

A walk down the city's streets past the barracks and squadron day rooms brings to ear radio broadcasts or the strains of a Beethoven symphony or of a rumboogie tune. These are faintly heard under the drone of bombers overhead or the screech of some machine in the sub-depot. Groups of men march to or from maneuvers or duties on the base, looking unromantic in overalls and rather envying some chap who is using his time off to cultivate a little garden around his barracks. Under the blistering summer sun pilots in electrically heated flight suits look ludicrous, but in an hour they will be in sub-zero temperatures 30,000 feet above the base.

All there is to know about the calibre .50 machine gun, armament of B-24 Liberator bombers, is taught neophyte aerial gunners at the gunnery school at Davis-Monthan Field. Here classmen study the nomenclature of the calibre .50 machine gun and learn it by heart.

That walk may include watching a formal ceremony "on the line" to welcome some military diplomatic or governmental dignitary of this or other nations. Or, perhaps, it is a parade and review attending the awarding of a Distinguished Flying Cross to one of the staff members who is temporarily relieved from combat duty so he may rest as he instructs bomber crews in the newest tactical methods he learned at some far-off battlefront where he did valiant service for his nation. There are the low monotones of classroom lecturers and the lusty laughter of a group which has just heard a ribald story. There are snatches of conversations heard as a walk is taken through the base, bits about this one's bride, that one's new baby, about a leave or a dance or a sick spell or "how in hell could I have missed that target?" And one hears scraps from a letter a mother has written or a grumbling beef because a pilot is grounded with a cold or a touch of sinus. Heard, too, are congratulations extended to someone who has received a promotion in rank or condolences because a favorite staff member has been transferred to a less desired base. There are women in that military city, women in WAC uniforms and those of army nurses, women in overalls smeared with grease rubbed off a bomber engine they are repairing or from a lathe in the machine shop, and women in trim suits who wear also the efficient air of secretaries which interferes not in the least with their giving answering smiles to men they know and a cold stare to some "freshie." Yes, it is just as any other town. It has its own police and fire fighting forces, its own courts and relief agencies, its own churches and newspaper. It has civic committees that look after rationing, scrap metal and war bond drives, tennis or boxing tournaments, observances of Mothers' day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and Memorial Day, and committees to get more books for the library, furniture for the men's day rooms or phonograph records for the WAC's recreation room. It has its own traffic problems with 1,200 cars enter-ing and leaving the base daily under strict surveillance to prevent waste of gasoline or rubber. Many civilians do not realize that the same rationing of gasoline, tires, sugar, shoes, and all other controlled items applies also to such military camps as Davis-Monthan Field. All the shortages housewives feel are reflected to some extent at the base where wooden bunks do in place of metal ones, where plastic nozzles are on showers, and where rigid economy is practiced in the handling and consumption of food. It is true that more food than was needed to feed Napoleon's army is consumed at the base, but no man dares take more than he can consume without a reprimand from his fellows. "Taking More Food Than You Can Eat Helps the Axis" reads one sign in a mess hall. No one grumbles on meatless days any more than was done over the one-cup-of-coffee period. And the field has its civic pride. It may justly boast of the numbers who buy war bonds and its contributions to war bond drives by way of band concerts and displays of military equipment, such as that April 24, 1943 when $1,220,000 worth of bonds were sold during the program given at the University of Arizona stadium by Davis-Monthan Field men. It is proud, too, of securing the maximum use of every piece of clothing and equipment and of conversion uses or salvaging of what is left. An example of that salvage work and civic pride is the post office for the recruit training center. It cost $4, but the salvage dump supplied all the materials and the recruits gave their labor, building it in five days. Only leisure time was used. Bent nails were straightened and cast-off lengths of boards were neatly spliced. The compact post office is capable of handling 700 pounds of mail a day-mail from folks back home. A similar achievement of another group of men was the post exchange, which they built for $10, which was spent on cement, metal and fixtures, all other materials coming from the salvage dump. Davis-Monthan Field has a cosmopolitan population and one that shifts in segments rather rapidly. It is a cross-section of the nation, regionally, racially, religiously, socially One of Davis-Monthan Field's proudest developments is its gunnery school, where aerial gunners are polished and trained in a post-graduate course which includes the latest lessons learned in theatres of combat. Here is a demonstration in the tail turret.

and professionally. The butcher, baker and candlestick maker are there with artists, mu-sicians, writers, lecturers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, merchants and even thieves.

PAGE NINE

These young men have spent long months in basic training, learning to drill, to keep fit and to know all the ins and outs of army life.

They may have gone to an Air Corps cadet school, an infantry camp, or an artillery school, but somewhere along the line they showed special aptitudes needed by the Air Corps.

Negro soldiers train in every phase of engineering peculiar to the needs of the Air Forces at Davis-Monthan Field, where an Engineer Regiment (Aviation) is usually busily training.

It requires four flying officers and six enlisted men to make up a B-24 crew and to operate the bomber during combat. The officers include the pilot, co-pilot, bombardier and navigator. The enlisted men are engineer, assistant engineer, rear gunner, armorer-gunner, radio operator and assistant. All ten men have been graduated from aerial gunnery schools and can operate any gun or turret position in the plane. But, in addition, the pilot and co-pilot have had about five months of pre-flight and nine months of basic flight training before they report at Davis-Monthan Field. The bombardier and navigator have had approximately six months of specialized training and the enlisted men have had basic military training and technical instruction usually for at least six months before they are sent to the field.

The important duty of all training officers is to see that these men, coming from all parts of the nation, all types of schools, and with as diverse a set of human traits as may be found in any cross-section of mankind, are welded together into efficient, scientifically trained crews. Shifts are made from group to group, if necessary, until exactly the right combination of personalities is found.record within Second Air Force. Quite a byproduct is the success of those teams when they reach combat spheres and news dispatches begin to record the completion of missions around the world. The field staff reads those accounts, feels a moment of pride, and then turns resolutely to the task of producing more and yet more teams. The number must never diminish until victory is won.

Teamwork has been found to be the secret of successful performance of heavy bombardment missions. If one member of the crew fails the mission may fail. If the mission fails, if the four-engine bomber does not get home, an incalculable loss of men, money and priceless experience has been suffered. Heavy bombardment training, therefore, presupposes foreign service as the heavy bomber never fights at home.

Young enough themselves to understand the young men with whom they must deal are the officers in charge of the actual training program. Major Charles A. Watt commands the parent heavy bombardment group. He is 38 and has a flying career that dates from 1926. He has rolled up more than 7,000 hours in the air.

So the men who report for training are on their way to foreign duty, if they successfully complete this first phase at Davis-Monthan Field and two more phases at other fields with in Second Air Force. In this vast University of the army, the three final phases of heavy bombardment training are comparable with earning an advanced degree. Every man hasEvery man who reaches heavy bombardment training has been hand-picked and represents the top 30 per cent in the school from which he came. Care must be taken. As one officer expressed it: "It is the difference between being captain of the Queen Mary and captain of a tug boat when you change front single engine planes to four-engine bombers. Responsibilities for the number of men's lives, the cost of the equipment to be handled, and the importance of the mission increases in just that ratio of the two boat captains. These young men, therefore, have to grow up, come of age, and they do. They are watched as closely as an all-star football team and as carefully trained."

The men grow up rapidly at Davis-Monthan Field. They begin to feel the pressures upon them, which will increase during their second and third training phases at other fields. A new earnestness overtakes them for ahead lie the rugged realities of combat duty, which they desire more than anything else. The complexity of their tasks absorbs their minds during waking and even sleeping hours. Their conversations are more about their crew members, their plane, their last mission and less about food, dates, leaves and pay-day sprees.

The key to this crew training is discipline and stern subservience of individualism to teamwork. Sgt. Donald Brown, a cowboy accustomed to the lone prairie where he worked alone and did as he pleased, puts it this way: "I've learned not only the technical side of my job as a bomber crew member, but also team work for the benefit of everyone in the crew."

The hours spent in classroom and laboratories, in field maneuvers and on flight missions are designed to condition men to automatically react under given stimuli, but at the same time initiative to meet unforeseen emergencies must not be stifled. They must be disciplined, but not robots; they must be "fluid", but not foolish in meeting tactical changes on the part of the enemy. They must know how to play the game as a team within a bomber and also as a member of a squadron of bombers on a mission, but left on their own, the team must know how to outsmart the enemy and get the ship home, or how to protect themselves and get back to a home base, if grounded.

"Day and night those teams or crewspractice," said a Second Air Force officer. "The pilots will get in flying hours under all sorts of conditions; the bombardiers will get used to handling the bombsight in flight; the navigators will miscalculate and then go back and do better next time; and gunners will learn what their high-powered weapons can do, and how to make them do it.

"But over all that training must be the spirit and efficiency of teamwork. Many men never reach the second phase of heavy bom

Radio Operators

bardment training. Most failures, it has been found, are due to the lack of ability to get along with their crewmates and lack of ability to adapt themselves to precision teamwork.

But that zeal and earnestness carries a high percentage through. The pilots beg for extra hours of night flying. Navigators have night-mares about being lost over Tokyo, so study harder than ever. Gunners are satisfied with nothing but bullseyes. When the crew isn't in the air it is out at the gunnery range firing .50 caliber machine guns at a moving target from Flexible Mounts, Martin, Consolidated and Sperry Turrets. They dis-assemble and reassemble those machine guns blindfolded and they practice intra-plane communication and celestial navigation.

There is simply so much to learn, such necessary information that must be acquired and known so well that it becomes a fixed habit. Whether in the arctic or the jungle. the men must know how to take care of themselves, they must be able to manage parachutes and life rafts, "walk-around" oxygen bottles and bombs, shackles, fuses, bombracks, releases, controls and loading equipment. They must know the stars to guide them home and how to use a first aid kit. They must have some knowledge of camouflage so they may protect themselves on a snowtopped mountain. in the jungle, or on the sere desert. Every muscle must be pliant, but touch and courage must be reinforced with disciplined wills to tide over those moments of fear that all men know.

These are not supermen at Davis-Monthan Field, but just healthy, normal Americans. Nor are they models of decorum. They get in and out of trouble, have lax moments and are sometimes absent-minded, but not for long or more than once. But when they realize that their officer-instructor is some veteran with three rows of ribbons on his blouse and medals he always forgets to wear except at formal reviews, they begin to wonder if perhaps they, too, couldn't do that well or maybe betterif given a chance.

Veterans from all theaters of this global war are instructors at Davis-Monthan Field. It is the policy of the Air Corps to send these men back from combat duty while still at the peak of their work. This is for two reasons: To save the valuable men from exhaustion and to permit them to impart their priceless experiences to others for there are no text books written that contain some of the things they have learned. Tactical theory becomes vivid fact when one of these men tells the crews in training of Japanese fighting methods, of bombs leaving the plane so quickly "it shook as if in a convulsion" and of strange jungle sounds at night as snipers fired near a foxhole.

Those realities make some of the pilot's early pranks seem a little silly, even to them. For instance this conversation between the control tower and a bomber overhead: Control tower to pilot: "If you receive this message, tip your wings." Pilot to tower: "If you get this reply, tip the tower."

One's work seriously when it is realized that every facet of the field's life is pointed toward the successful training of the bomber crews. Everything revolves around them: ground crews, administrative staffs, those in the quartermasters and medical detachments, air corps supply, engineering, armament, special services, instrument technicians and gunnery specialists.

An officer of the Second Air Force told of a mythical, but typical flight to show how a heavy bombardment crew operates in training: "The crew arises at 2:30 a. m. After an early breakfast they meet in squadron operations building at 3:45 a. m. After the pilot has checked them 'all present', he reports the crew personally to the flight surgeon in group operations. It is 4 a. m. The surgeon questions each man on the state of his health, particularly as to colds, for they are a serious matter at 25,000 feet and reason for grounding a crew member. Any man who reports less than six hours of sleep during the previous twelve hours also is grounded.

"After the physical check the crew reports to the intelligence officer, who briefs them on the mission which is to bomb a selected target. In this case it is a dummy oil refinery on the Sahuarita, Arizona, bombing range, eighteen miles south of Tucson.

"Then the operations officer calls in the weather forecaster with his maps. After this the pilot is given his mission plan, which indicates what each crew member is expected to accomplish during the seven-hour flight.

"The crew is at stations in the plane fifteen minutes before take-off time at 5 a. m. The combat crew has taken over from the ground crew. The engines are started and all equipment checked for proper operations by the use of check sheets.

"At 4:59 a. m. the pilot calls in from the end of the runway that he is ready to take off and he is cleared by the watch tower. The pilot gives Jezebel, the crew's name for the plane, the gun and she roars off climbing over the city of Tucson at 1,000 feet. The co-pilot leans over and shouts in the pilot's ear: 'Think we woke 'em up?' "At 10,000 feet elevation the crew is ordered to put on its oxygen masks. By this time

War Admiral 228 WAR BOND ROLL-CALL The Minute Man WAR BOND ROLL CALL

Really enter into the engrossing routine of Army life and become valuable cogs.

This WAC is a Radio Operator Mechanic assigned to the Base Technical Inspector's office. She inspects, and checks airborne radio equipment aboard B-24 Liberator bombers.

Citizens of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and from counties in North Dakota and Wisconsin purchased this B-24 Liberator bomber, "The Minute Man..., "The mission plan called for instrument flight to the target, so the hood, which shuts off all outside vision, is raised and the ship continues on to 25,000 feet as the navigator keeps correcting the compass course over the interphone to the pilot. The radio operator reports the position of the plane to the field each 30 minutes. The gunners have been operating their turrets and flexible guns. Davis-Monthan Field has set such a record for the number of hours flown each month is the superb maintenance of the planes by the ground crews. The number of planes and excellent weather conditions also contribute so that this Arizona field excels others elsewhere with an equal number of planes and base facilities available.

"When headlines are read about B-24 Liberators and their achievements, one should remember not only the men inside who animate them, but the thousands back of them in the Second Air Force.

"The flight continues until the navigator reports: 'Target ten miles dead ahead.' The hood comes down, the bomb doors open and the bombardier is busy. The oil refinery is still miles away as he calls out: 'Bombs away! The crew watches for the impact, for this is what pays the dividends. Half the load is dropped by individual releases. The mission plan now directs Jezebel to a rendezvous with two other planes at 8:04 a. m. There they practice ship formation flying, making fast turns and taking the evasive action they must when flying through heavy anti-aircraft fire.

One of those ground crews set a new record for speedy changing of all engines in a B-24 Liberator. The four old motors were taken out of the plane and new ones installed and the ship was in the air within 18 hours. The average change-over time is 36 hours.

The late commanding officer of Second Air Force, General Robert Olds, set the goals it has achieved, just as notably as was his reorganization of the Ferry Command which earned him the Distinguished Service Medal shortly before his death in Tucson. He said the bases should train men so well to outfight "an enemy who has made himself infamous for his brutality and unscrupulous methods" that they can come home to tell about it.

Master Sgt. Joe Howard is a crew chief to end all crew chiefs, according to others in the ground staff at the field, and he knows every bolt, pinion, hinge and wire in the thousandfold parts that make up a bomber. He claims a crew chief is "an engine psychiatrist" and that planes "have emotions and quirks and they go haywire like anybody else. When we hear the engine roar I can tell if my baby is happy or not. If the flaps don't wiggle right, we find out quickly why she is acting up.

"Life in the camps isn't exactly a picnic, but believe me when we send men to the combat zones they are no sissies. They're all he-men and in fighting trim," said General Olds.

"To top off, they return to the bombing range and practice precision pattern bombing with the remaining eggs. The formation breaks up. The pilot finds it is almost 11 a. m., and points the nose of the ship toward home, as the navigator quickly calculates the most direct course to the home base.

"Responsibility is the credo of all crew chiefs," Howard says. "Every time a pilot takes a bomber on a practice or combat mission he must have complete faith that every section of his ship has been checked and re-checked. Every member of my ground crew working on these bombers has the word 'responsibility' pounded into him. You don't exercise any greater care in a battle zone than at a training command. Every time I check a bomber I hold my breath until the boys return."

"After landing, the plane taxis into the line where the ground crew is waiting to take over, to re-service and re-arm this Liberator for the next take-off by another crew at 1 p. m. The crew which has just landed reports to operations again as well as to intelligence, who interrogate the crew on the success of the mission.

But those ground crews lean on the SubDepot, Col. Wilson V. Newhall, Commanding. It stocks 20,000 separate items and its hundreds of civilian employees, a fourth of whom are women, handle that stock and repair or duplicate almost all items in the shops. If anything is lacking it is quickly brought in on cargo ships of the Freight Wing Detachment, which operates a shuttle system to the nation's air bases.

"Just how long this phase of training lasts can never be pre-determined. The weather, equipment, special orders, and many other things control the time element."

It is not, then, just the men receiving heavy bombardment training who are important, nor the glamorous veterans back from Tunisia. Java, the Aleutians, China and Africa. It is hundreds of men and women whose efforts are meshed in a purposeful chain at this military base.

It is a tremendous job to keep those crews in the air. The bombers fly many hours in a day. Each plane has its own ground crew and the moment it lands they swarm over it. Those ground crews follow the planes into action. Each crew believes its plane to be the best.

Those ground crews of 16 men are also highly trained specialists. There are radio, hydraulic and engine men, armorers, and those who look after landing gear, turrets and instrument panels. A large part of the reason

Gunner

Dear Aunt Bernice: August 14, 1943.

Every so often, I guess I'm going to be a good shot, because no one has combined so far. But that's all that I'm capable.

I've been assigned to a crewman. I'm not of the best, but haven't met a bum pilot yet. After we're through flying in hele we'll probably go to another base for more training.

These B-24s are humongous. They look like big humongous. I'm an armorer-gunner, and we get into action I'll be flying from the These planes are pretty well protected, so you don't have to do too much worrying about.

The people of Tucson are plenty friendly, and I have been having a place is plenty okay.

We get at least a hours of flying each day. What I have seen of the day out we'll be flying plenty some.

Tell Dad that the weather is going to do plenty of damage to the crops and what's when I get over there I'll bring him a fur coat from Berlinor my name isn't Sertes. He can bet on that.

I'll write soon again and tell you more about the benefit training we're getting here. Please give my love to everyone at home and rest assured that I am okay.

Your son, Sertes