Army & Navy: Block Buster

High up, the plane was a tiny object in the sky, but the handful of Army officers watching it from their steel-&-concrete tower could hear its voice from 10,000 ft. up:

“Hello, bombing field, this is b23. We have a 2,000-lb. bomb to drop.” Before the plane came over the 20-ft. white X on the pock-marked ground a mile from the observers, its bomb doors opened. The bomb flopped out. The men in the tower could see it, a short pencil line hanging horizontal for a fraction of a second. Then its nose jerked down as the tail fins caught the air.

The bomb arched earthward in a wide parabola. Twenty-six seconds passed. At last the men in the tower saw it strike the target, saw a puny, firecracker flash of flame, followed by a pipe-smoker’s puff of smoke. An instant later came hell. The ground erupted like a volcano. A halo of yellow flame flared from the spot. Even from a mile away it was blinding. Black smoke, blasted wood, little trees poured upward for a hundred feet, like a Niagara running backward.

All this, but at the concrete bastion there had not yet been a sound. Then came the concussion. Even a mile away behind walls of concrete, there was a jerk, a jar and the observers felt as if Paul Bunyan had slapped them on the back.

Those who had not been through it before thought that was all, but it wasn’t. Now, last of all, came the sound, no shriek of the bomb falling, but the sudden, shocking, dull, booming blast of the explosion.

That is what it is like to be inside a sturdy observation tower a mile from the exploding block busters which the Army is now testing at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. But the observers don’t go through it for the sensation. The craters are measured, the radius of destruction noted (everything within 100 yards is destroyed and a man might be killed at even greater distances). Of primary interest to Army Ordnance is the weapon itself—the number and shape of the fragments from the exploded bomb, the action of the powder charge. All this data is filed so that the science of destruction can be improved.

The Army got around to making public last week something that its Aviation Cadets had known for months: its maximum dimensions for fighter pilots are 5 ft. 9 in. in bare feet, 170 Ib. on the scale. The Air Forces prefer candidates for fighter training who are a little smaller to start with. Fighter cockpits are built for nothing bigger.