BOMBS AWAY – Story of a Bomber Crew

Joe, the pilot, comes from South Carolina. Bill, the bombardier, from Idaho, Allan, the navigator is from Indiana, Al, the gunner, from the Midwest, Abner the mechanic is from California. In all, there are nine young men, in their twenties, characters from the book Bombs Away – previously unpublished in France – by John Steinbeck.

Gathered in 1942 on an American base, they will learn, like so many others, to tame a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, the flying monster aboard which they will soon go and raze Germany. Nearly 80,000 of them would die in the skies, one of the highest casualty rates in the American army. To board with these young airmen, to bear witness to their encounters, their origins and their training — John Steinbeck accepted at once when Roosevelt himself proposed that he play the propagandist.

« We were all part of the war effort. We marched with it, we made ourselves its accomplices», the Nobel Prize laureate would testify at the end of his life. He is forty years old in 1942, the year that finally sees the war swing in favour of the Allies, with military successes at Midway, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and soon in North Africa. Steinbeck would crisscross the skies of America with these young men for several weeks. 20,000 kilometres spent in the belly of the throbbing beast, accompanied by his photographer, John Swope of Life magazine, who immortalised the daily life of the airmen and whose superb black-and-white photographs illustrate this work.

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