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44 Chapter 5 The Crew Hometown, USA It was a monumental task, this training of young men for the business of war. Armed conflicts had been occurring since the Paleolithic era, when bands of early humans clashed violently over territorial rights and hunting privileges. But progressively, the weapons of war had become more lethal, more complicated , as the bow replaced the spear, the muzzle-loading musket rendered obsolete the bow, and the machine gun made a single soldier more deadly than a platoon in armies of the past. This particular war was going to be vastly different than other conflicts, with the advent of the flying machine. The First World War had had its aerial battles—so-called knights of the air dueling at two miles high, and the attacks on London by German Gotha bombers. But in truth, those desperate and deadly struggles were mere sideshows to the main event, the ghastly ground warfare fought savagely in a tangle of barbed wire, muddy trenches, and a hellish fog of mustard gas. The second global conflict began in the air, when Luftwaffe First Lieutenant Bruno Diller and his wingmen launched their Stuka dive bombers against a pair of railroad bridges in Poland on 1 September, 1939. Their early morning strike preceded the ground Blitzkreig that stunned the Poles and left the rest of the world agog.1 But tit for tat, the Royal Air Force and the young pilots of its Fighter Command stymied the German plans for a cross-channel invasion in an epic Battle of Britain; the course of the fierce conflict was marked in contrails in the high summer sky of 1940.2 For Americans, the war came home with the attack by Japanese carrier-based torpedo bombers on the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor at the close of 1941. The daring raid on Tokyo in April 1942 by Jimmy Doolittle and his boys, taking B-25 medium bombers off the deck of the USS Hornet, was the first good news of the war.3 The Battle of Midway, two The Crew 45 months later, resulted in the sinking of four Japanese carriers by hundreds of American Navy fliers, and was possibly the turning point in the Pacific campaign .4 In Europe, raids by hundreds of heavy bombers on German industrial centers brought the horrors of global war to the Third Reich’s homeland, but at a terrible cost: more than 49,000 dead or missing, presumed dead, in the 8th and 9th Army Air Forces alone.5 And the end blow in the war would be administered to two Japanese cities by single bombers carrying but one bomb each. The mushroom cloud would be a symbol of war from above for succeeding generations. For the United States, still struggling to emerge from a worldwide economic depression, the war was something they had hoped to avoid. Nazi Germany was certainly no one’s national ideal, but it was largely Europe’s problem. Still, as the fighting raged and Europe fell before the German war machine country by country, until only England was left, most Americans began to suspect that President Franklin D. Roosevelt might find a way to bring them into the fray. There was Lend Lease, for example, the program that allowed the scrappy Brits to take possession of American-built ships and planes without the U.S. actually violating the technicalities of neutrality laws. Hundreds of young men had gone to Canada to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force while Uncle Sam looked the other way. American navy ships were battling U-boats in the North Atlantic in a fierce unofficial war. And the build-up of the armed services, and programs such as the Civilian Pilot Training Program, convinced many Americans that we would enter the war against Hitler at some point. Of course, few were looking West, and the attack on Pearl Harbor shattered any illusions of peace or of a one-front war. The decision was made very early that the U.S. would commit more technology and less blood to the winning of this war. There was no doubt that the nation geared up its industrial might and cranked out ships, airplanes, bombs, tanks, and guns at a stunning, mind-boggling rate. Whether this decision by the military and industry resulted in less American blood being shed is open to debate. Whether it ultimately won the war, though, is not. Once committed, the entire nation turned its attention to winning...

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