AIR: Vertical Sharpshooter

Bombardier Mike Arpaia yelled “Bombs away!” over the interphone, and followed it with a sigh of relief that came all the way from his fleece-lined boots. The Flying Fortress Mischief Maker was riding 20,000 feet over Reims airdrome and, even as Mike’s bombs were thundering into the hangars and repair shops crammed with German planes, heavy gray clouds were closing in and blotting out the field.

A gap in the thick overcast had opened up just in time to let Arpaia do his act. Even that miracle would have been wasted except for the quick efficiency of the bombardier, his teammate Navigator Dick Davisson, and their pilot, Captain Vernon Iverson. Arpaia, Davisson and Iverson are one of the crack teams that guide the massed Fortress flights over Europe. Such teams are used sparingly; on them depends the mission’s success, for under the new bombing system only the bombardier of the lead Fortress and a few others scattered through the formation do the actual sighting; at their signal the other planes drop their bombs.

One-Man Job. On the Reims raid Navigator Davisson had plotted his course by dead reckoning; he and Pilot Iverson had only one objective—to bring their close-packed bomber formation to a predetermined spot called the I.P. (Initial Point). Then the bombardier took over.

Alert, black-haired Arpaia opened the bomb-bay doors. Now he was actually bombardier, pilot and navigator rolled into one, flying the plane through the autopilot system controls while he searched for the target in the eyepiece of his bomb sight. Bombardiers in the other planes watched sharply—a sighting run may last only 20 or 30 seconds, almost never more than one minute.

Air speed, altitude and trail (air and ground lag) had already been set on the sight indicators. As the target came in view, Arpaia’s problem was to calculate in a flash the correct dropping angle, make this final adjustment. Then he hunched tensely over the rubber-padded sight telescope, deftly fingering the control knobs. The target crawled across the sight until the two cross hairs were directly on it; at that moment Arpaia engaged the synchronizer and the sight did the rest. A string of white-painted bombs hurtled from Mischief Maker’s belly. As they saw the lead plane’s bombs go, bombardiers in the other Forts tripped the switches and toggled their own bombs. Arpaia turned control back to Iverson with a laconic “You’ve got it,” and that was that.

Precision and Punch. Reconnaissance photos later showed a well-pocked target, testified anew to the effectiveness of this combination of U.S. precision bombing with the heavy destructive punch of mass-formation pattern bombing.

European weather had always been a substantial obstacle to attainment of the U.S. ideal of pinpoint sighting by each plane; as the Fort raids grew in size and the big ships had to keep tight formation for protection, it became obvious that not all the ships in a group could get a straight run over the target. As a solution, the Air Forces tried the technique of letting one specially selected and trained bombardier do the aiming for a group—first of three planes, then six, now 18. As a check against personal or mechanical failure, other expert bombardiers are spaced through the bomber formations; if their observation indicates that a lead bombardier’s sighting is haywire, they can call signals off and do the aiming for their own formations.

Statistics tell the method’s success story: before last January only 5.5% of all bombs dropped from heights of 20,000 to 25,000 ft. landed within 1,000 ft. of the target. Now the average for outfits doing group bombing has gone up to 24.8%, and in one good month it was 35.8%.

Vipers

Traffic is heavy at Payne Field, the new Cairo, Egypt base of the U.S. Air Transport Command. In the operations room, a soldier keeps track of schedules on a blackboard. Lately, the letters “VIP” have been chalked after many a plane number.

Meaning: “Very Important Personage.” By last week, “Vipers” was good local usage for the big names going through the Cairo crossroads of the air. Recent Vipers : Hull, Harriman, Hurley, Eden, Wavell.