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Prologue
The B-24 was built like a 1930s Mack truck, except that it had an aluminum skin that could
be cut with a knife. It could carry a heavy load far and fast but it had no refinements.
Steering the four-engine airplane was difficult and exhausting, as there was no power
except the pilot's muscles. It had no windshield wipers, so the pilot had to stick his
head out the side window to see during a rain. Breathing was possible only by wearing an
oxygen mask -- cold and clammy, smelling of rubber and sweat -- above 10,000 feet in
altitude. There was no heat, despite temperatures that at 20,000 feet and higher got as
low as 40 or even 50 degrees below zero. The wind blew through the airplane like fury,
especially from the waist gunners' windows and whenever the bomb bay doors were open. The
oxygen mask often froze to the wearer's face. If the men at the waist touched their
machine guns with bare hands, the skin froze to the metal.
There were no bathrooms. To urinate there were two small relief tubes, one forward and one
aft, which were almost impossible to use without spilling because of the heavy layers of
clothing the men wore. Plus which the tubes were often clogged with frozen urine.
Defecating could be done only in a receptacle lined with a wax paper bag. A man had to be
desperate to use it because of the difficulty of removing enough clothing and exposing
bare skin to the arctic cold. The bags were dropped out of the waist windows or through
the open bomb bay doors. There were no kitchen facilities, no way to warm up food or
coffee, but anyway there was no food unless a crew member had packed in a C ration or a
sandwich. With no pressurization, pockets of gas in a man's intestinal tract could swell
like balloons and cause him to double over in pain.
There was no aisle to walk down, only the eight-inch-wide catwalk running beside the bombs
and over the bomb bay doors used to move forward and aft. It had to be done with care, as
the aluminum doors, which rolled up into the fuselage instead of opening outward on a
hinge, had only a 100-pound capacity, so if a man slipped he would break through. The
seats were not padded, could not be reclined, and were cramped into so small a space that
a man had almost no chance to stretch and none whatsoever to relax. Absolutely nothing was
done to make it comfortable for the pilot, the co-pilot, or the other eight men in the
crew, even though most flights lasted for eight hours, sometimes ten or more, seldom less
than six. The plane existed and was flown for one purpose only, to carry 500 or 1,000
pound bombs and drop them accurately over enemy targets.
It was called a Liberator. That was a perhaps unusual name for a plane designed to drop
high explosives on the enemy well behind the front lines, but it was nevertheless the
perfect name. Consolidated Aircraft Corporation first made it, with the initial flight in
1939. When a few went over to England in 1940, the British Air Ministry wanted to know
what it was called. Reuben Fleet of Consolidated answered, "Liberator." He
added, "We chose the name Liberator because this airplane can carry destruction to
the heart of the Hun, and thus help you and us to liberate those millions temporarily
finding themselves under Hitler's yoke."
Consolidated, along with the Ford Motor Company, Douglas Aircraft Company, and North
American Aviation -- together called the Liberator Production Pool -- made more than
18,300 Liberators, about 5,000 more than the total number of B-17s. The Liberator was not
operational before World War II and was not operational after the war (nearly every B-24
was cut up into pieces of scrap in 1945 and 1946, or left to rot on Pacific islands). The
number of people involved in making it, in servicing it, and in flying the B-24
outnumbered those involved with any other airplane, in any country, in any time. There
were more B-24s than any other American airplane ever built.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the B-24 won the war for the Allies. But don't ask
how they could have won the war without it.
The Army Air Forces needed thousands of pilots, and tens of thousands of crew members, to
fly the B-24s. It needed to gather them and train them and supply them and service the
planes from a country in which only a relatively small number of men knew anything at all
about how to fly even a single-engine airplane, or fix it. From whence came such men?
Excerpted from WILD BLUE © Copyright 2001 by Stephen E. Ambrose. Reprinted with permission by Touchstone Books. All rights reserved.
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