Special Collections

“The Story of a Bomber Team”: John Steinbeck’s Bombs Away

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) usually isn’t thought of as a wartime writer; rather, his name is synonymous with depictions of oppressed migrant farm workers and California coastal ne’er-do-wells. Though usually lumped in with contemporary authors such as Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner, Steinbeck was born just a few years too late to experience the defining moment of the modernist period—the First World War. When we think of early-to mid-century war literature, other American names that come to mind before Steinbeck’s include E. E. Cummings, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, James Jones, and even Willa Cather and Edith Wharton.   

So where does the author of The Grapes of Wrath fit in with his modernist colleagues? Truthfully, not very high in relation to the American chroniclers of war. Consider Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921), Cummings’ The Enormous Room (1922), Cather’s One of Ours (1922), Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay (1926), and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). But again, Steinbeck was born in 1903, so he was only eleven when the First World War started, whereas Hemingway was fifteen, and Wharton was fifty-two. Steinbeck’s war was World War II, but as most critics argue, his greatest works were already behind him by then.

Steinbeck’s career reached its high point in 1939 with the publication of his seventh novel, The Grapes of Wrath. He had written a few classics by then, including Tortilla Flat (1935) and Of Mice and Men (1937), but nothing would compare to Grapes. In fact, many critics have suggested that his writing during World War II marked the beginning of the end of Steinbeck as an artist. That’s not to say that he wasn’t still prolific; during the war years alone, he published The Forgotten Village (1941), Sea of Cortez (1941), The Moon is Down (1942)—both as a novel and a play—Bombs Away (1942), and Cannery Row (1945).

By 1941, Germany had already conquered France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. In October of ‘41, two things occurred in Steinbeck’s life related to the war: (1) he was approached by the Foreign Information Service to write war propaganda broadcasts; and (2), he began writing what would become his wartime novel, The Moon is Down, which was published in March the following year. The play version of The Moon is Down opened the following month, and the Hollywood film was released in 1943. That same year, Steinbeck was hired by the New York Herald Tribune as a war correspondent. His reporting, which has a kind of literary anecdotal tenor to it, was collected and published by Viking Press in book form in 1958 as Once There Was a War, which can also be found in Moffett’s Special Collection, as can a first edition copy of The Moon is Down.

Written as part of an effort to increase Army Air Force recruitment and morale, the month-long hands-on research for what would quickly become Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team found Steinbeck and photographer John Swope paired up and travelling together more than 20,000 miles back-and-forth across the US, including stops in Texas, Louisiana, California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida, Illinois and New York in just about every type of plane used by the Army Air Force. Steinbeck also trained, ate, bunked, and cavorted alongside countless trainees across the country. The brief and intense period between being approached about writing the book and its publication seven months later has been well-explored in several scholarly books and articles; if you are interested in learning more about this interesting time in the author’s life and our nation’s history, see the bibliography that follows.                                               

Bombs Away was published by Viking in November 1942 in a blue cloth binding stamped on the front cover in black and white with a stylized plane wing, two small clouds, and four stars that thematically speak back to the roundel insignia on the wing. A similar, more realistic version of the same image appears on the front cover of the illustrated yellow, blue, white, and black dust jacket. Along with the original purchase price of $2.50 printed on the inside top flap of the dust jacket, the brief jacket copy highlights the fact that Steinbeck and John Swope donated their royalties and publishing profits related to the project to the Air Forces Aid Society Trust Fund. Likewise, “[p]roceeds from the motion picture, already sold for $250,000, also go to the Trust Fund.” Steinbeck was adamant that he did not want to profit from his wartime efforts, nor was he comfortable with the thought that his words might lead young men to their deaths. At the bottom of the inside flap is a wartime message encouraging people to “Send this book to a boy in the armed forces anywhere for only 6¢ postage.” The inside back flap carries an advertisement for Russell Whelan’s book, The Flying Tigers. Throughout the book, there are sixty black and white photographs taken by Swope, some of them quite iconic, which help Steinbeck’s words tell the story.

The book opens with a 1 ½-page preface by the author, followed by a brief introduction. The first chapter, titled “The Bomber,” provides readers with some general background on the development of this massive new flying technology, the bomber, which itself becomes the book’s overarching symbol as the arena in which highly-trained individuals come together to form a cohesive unit that at the same time enables each player to retain their individual autonomy while also operating as an integrated, democratic, organic whole. The bomber, then, is a stand-in for what Steinbeck saw as America’s democratic potential (and what got him labeled a communist just a few years earlier with the publication of Grapes and his 1936 novel In Dubious Battle).

"Consolidated B-24, commonly known as the Liberator" (p.25)

The opening chapter also highlights the fact that new Army Air Force inductees are comprised of common yet exceptional young men from small towns and rural areas from around the nation. They tend, for example, to have been raised playing team sports, are hunters or fishermen, and tinkerers of engines and other equipment found around the farmyard. He even tells us they are all handsome and that, as “healthy young men, they will like girls very well indeed.”

As a work of nationalistic propaganda written to entice young recruits, not to mention reassure parents of their offspring's supremacy, one could easily change a few place names and other minor details and translate this chapter into either Russian or German, and pass it off as a piece of Axis propaganda. That’s not to diminish what Steinbeck says or does in Bombs Away, nor to be dismissive of American patriotism; rather, it’s just to point out that the book had one purpose—to entice young men to sign up to fight for their country. Bombs Away was a military recruiting tool and morale-booster similar to those brief recruiting reels that ran before movies in every theatre in the US in the 1940s, such as the series titled “Attention Young Men” produced by the Department of Defense in 1947 to get young men interested in joining the US Army Air Corps.      
         The bulk of Bombs Away is made up of six chapters, each focusing on one member of a bomber crew—the bombardier, the aerial gunner, the navigator, the pilot, the aerial engineer or crew chief, and the radio engineer. To add a sense of narrative continuity and put names to faces, Steinbeck created composite characters for each crew position from the hundreds of young recruits he met, distilling them down into individual types for readers to follow through the training process. Allan, for example, appears in the chapter titled “The Navigator.” His background includes a “degree in Civil Engineering” with “two months in postgraduate work for an electrical engineering degree when the war broke out. His father is a country engineer in central Indiana and had been for twenty years,” whereas Bill the bombardier was born in Idaho to a well-respected railroad engineer father and “Bill’s mother belonged to the Altar Guild of the Episcopal Church and was a permanent member of the local Red Cross.” In short, the recruits were pure products of Americana.                                                                         "Falling bomb and the plane's shadow approaches the target" (p.62)

It’s interesting to note that Steinbeck doesn’t privilege Joe the pilot by introducing him first. Again, his goal was to show how all these men work together on a level playing field; without one, the cohesiveness of the crew as an organic whole would crumble. This also included the assembly line workers who built the planes and the ground crews who maintained them. As Steinbeck points out in the introduction, the Army Air Force, which was established in 1941, was the newest branch of the military and had not yet had time to become entrenched in a vertical system of authority like the more established branches of the army and navy had developed over decades. Still finding its way, according to Steinbeck, it operated on a much more horizontal and thus democratic axis. 

The last two chapters, “The Bomber Team” and “Missions,” bring the men we met in the preceding chapters together for the first time once their individualized training at various posts around the nation was completed. Steinbeck reminds us again at the onset of the penultimate chapter that the overarching theme of the book is the concept of “group man,” which he introduced in In Dubious Battle, when Doc says to Mac, “You might be an expression of group-man, a cell endowed with a special function, like an eye-cell, drawing your force from group-man.” And again, when Jim Casey says in Grapes that all men and women are “a little piece of a great big soul.” While he doesn’t use the term group man here, he says of the new crew that a “weak link cannot be permitted in the chain for the chain is too interrelated.” In the following paragraph, he adds that their discipline is “the result of the wills of a number of intelligent men all going the same way.”

"With a model plane, the instructor demonstrates maneuvers to his students" (p.124)

          It feels a bit contrived, but from a narratological perspective, it makes sense that it just so happens that Bill, Allan, Joe, and the other men we’ve been reading about have finished their training at the same time and ended up being assigned together to form a crew at their final training stop in Florida. Also a bit contrived, they happen upon an enemy sub on their very first navigational training mission as a crew, which they easily blow out of the Gulf of Mexico less than one hundred miles offshore. Bombs Away ends with the crew getting their orders to disembark in “Baby,” the name they’ve given to their new ship, to a destination unknown. “This cross section, these men from all over the country,” Steinbeck tells us, “had become one thing—a bomber crew. They were changed, but they had not lost what they were; they were still individuals.”

"A bomber crew learns how to identify all types of airplanes" (p.169)

           With Bombs Away, Steinbeck certainly didn’t set out to write a work of literature nor a historical work of lasting cultural import—who could in so short a time and under such circumstances? As he told his friend Toby Street in a letter dated 8/17/42, the book “isn’t very good... but it is the only thing of its kind and with the time they gave me it was the best I could do.” That said, he did give us an interesting text that merits consideration on its own terms. Even with Steinbeck’s admission, it’s not surprising that amidst the fervor of wartime patriotism, nearly all the initial reviews were positive, even when critics like Clifton Fadiman of the New Yorker said that it was “pointless to say that Steinbeck has written better books” than Bombs Away because it “is not a ‘book’ in the book reviewer’s narrow sense at all.” Instead, according to Fadiman, Steinbeck produced “an extraordinarily fine job of recruiting propaganda which achieves its effect by telling the truth in words that have life in them.” Similarly, A. C. Spectorsky of the Chicago Sun homed in on the fact that the bomber crew “is symbolic of the democracy for which the bombers fight.” The only negative review appearing in John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews is a brief unattributed New Republic piece which states that in trying to reach a broad audience, Steinbeck “simplified his style to the point where it reads like a parody of Hemingway; reduces his characters, the hypothetical fliers, to the baldest stock types; and debased his ideas to a rather dangerous level.” The book, the reviewer concludes, “bears about the same relationship to literature that a recruiting poster does to art.”

While there is a lot of truth in this author’s negative assessment, as several later Steinbeck scholars would likewise testify, when placed in its historical moment—whether it was written by one of our great American authors or some nameless Defense Department public relations officer—Bombs Away is in fact a unique cultural artifact for those interested not only in militaria, but also mid-century American history, sociology, and literature. Indeed, in our current age of social and political division, not to mention the rapid dismantling of decades of gender and diversity programs in the military, Bombs Away sheds a telling light not only on the tenor of Steinbeck’s time but on that of our own as well.  

(p.185)

The books under discussion here—as well as first editions of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden—are available for students, faculty, visiting scholars, and the public to explore in person at Special Collections on the second floor of Moffett Library, Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. For more information, contact the Special Collections Librarian at alissa.russell@msutexas.edu.

Works Consulted

Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. Viking, 1984.

Brown, Alan. “From Artist to Craftsman: Steinbeck’s Bombs Away.” The Steinbeck

Question: New Essays in Criticism, edited by Donald R. Noble, Whitston, 1993, pp. 214-222.

Coers, Donald V. John Steinbeck as Propagandist: The Moon is Down Goes to War. U

of Alabama Press, 1991.

McElrath, Joseph R., Jr., et al., editors. John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews.

Cambridge UP, 1996.

Morsberger, Robert E. “Steinbeck’s War.” The Steinbeck Question: New Essays in

Criticism, edited by Donald R. Noble, Whitston, 1993, pp. 183-212.

Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck. Henry Holt & Co., 1995.

Price, Rodney. “Group Man Goes to War: Elements of Propaganda in John Steinbeck’s

Bomb’s Away.” War, Literature, and Art, Vol. 14, Nos. 1-2, pp. 178-193.

Simmonds, Roy. John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939-1945. Bucknell UP, 1996.

---. “Steinbeck and World War II: The Moon Goes Down.” Steinbeck Quarterly, Vol. XVII,

Nos. 1– 2, Winter-Spring 1984, pp. 14-34.

Souder, William. Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck. W. W. Norton & Co., 2020.