Greenhorns by Richard Slotkin

Author:Richard Slotkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2018-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

Children, Drunks and the United States of America

In the summer of 1944 I was stationed at an Air Corps base in West Texas, in an endless plain of mesquite. The field was built to train air-crew for the B-29 Superfort, the new bomber designed to replace the B-17 Flying Fortress for long-range missions.

The Superforts were gorgeous: huge shining steel and plexiglass Death Angels, their wide graceful wingspan muscled up with four big engines, able to fly twice as far and half again as fast as the B-17, bearing unbelievable bomb-loads, complete catastrophe delivered right on target.

But there was something wrong with them. Although the engineers swore that they’d done the math, somehow the engines didn’t have enough power to reliably lift a loaded Superfort into the air. If it was peacetime they’d have experimented till they got the aerodynamics adjusted or the engines properly souped up, but now there was no time to be careful. In the Pacific sailors and infantry had been dying in thousands to capture islands from which bombers could fly, and Japan was still beyond the range of the B-17. We had to have the Superforts, couldn’t stop the assembly lines till they were perfected.

So they built the planes and sent them down to our base in West Texas to try out ways of getting them airborne: monkey with the afterburners, put baffles on the propellers to increase airflow, stretch the runway, change the angle of attack, fly tree-tops for the first two hundred miles to build speed and then start your climb. Half the test planes crashed in the mesquite, but it was so flat out there the pilots usually walked away. Since these test flights were also their training missions, the survivors got their ticket stamped and were shipped out to the Pacific. The Air Corps figured they knew at least one trick not to try when they started their taxi down the runway at Chungking or Saipan.

Meanwhile the engineers and photographers on our base would swarm out to photograph and diagram the ruins. We’d fire the pictures back to the factory, company engineers would adjust the machines while the assembly line was cranking along, and when the next batch dropped off the line they’d send some of them to West Texas so we could crash them into the mesquite.

It was the American way to fight a war: keep on building and smashing and building, throw everything into the fight, even the kitchen sink—especially the kitchen sink. We would expend vast energies, incalculable sums, oceans of blood and treasure, to save humanity from the murderous sneak-attacking Japanese and that maniac Hitler and his brood of cannibal supermen. Compared to our war aims, Woodrow Wilson’s “Make the world safe for democracy” was the ambition of a beat cop. We were going to tear the world down and build it again in our own image—an American paradise, freedom and canned goods and cars for everybody from the little brown men in the jungle to the Frenchmen in Paris and the Swedes in Stockholm.

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