Inevitable Wastage

The vast and horrifyingly incidental cost of war was underlined last week in a report by the Army Air Forces. Since Pearl Harbor 11,000 Army airmen have been killed in the U.S., most of them before they ever saw a battlefront.

The A.A.F. called it the "inevitable wastage of war." On the other side of the ledger were: 1) the 76,780,000 hours flown in the U.S. in that time; 2) the 226,346 pilots and crewmen who were successfully trained; 3) the incalculable number of men who survived the test of battle because of the "frankly dangerous" training they got before they went into combat.

Two of every 100 men trained by the Air Forces were killed before their student days were over. But the A.A.F. did not give the percentage of fatalities in the U.S. which occurred after training, in routine operations such as ferrying planes and transporting cargo and personnel--operational accidents which probably accounted for more than half the 11,000 fatalities.

Factors involved in these and training accidents included bad weather, youthful recklessness, carelessness and plain dumb flying--enemies against which the A.A.F. Office of Flying Safely has waged a long, persistent campaign, probing crackups, preaching sermons, dinning lessons. This is wastage which the A.A.F. has tried to cut down -- even by court-martialing of fenders against prudence -- and with some success. High as it was, the accident rate in August 1944 was less than half what it was in the confused December of 1941. Considering the wartime speedup, plus the added toughness of training, it was probably not notably out of scale with the peacetime accident rate for military flying training, which is never completely healthy even when every precaution can be taken.

One Million Tons. Meanwhile the A.A.F. had fought a successful war. It had lost 72,000 men and 14,600 aircraft in actual combat; lost 5,300 men and 9,900 aircraft from other causes overseas, where makeshift airfields, fatigue, emergency missions, and overworked planes* are bound to make operational losses high. On the other hand-the A.A.F. had:

P: Destroyed 27,000 enemy planes, probably destroyed 6,000, damaged 10,000.

P: Dropped one million tons of bombs on enemy targets (the one-millionth mark was reached during a raid on an oil refinery in Merseburg-Leuna on Sept. 28). The rate for one "recent" month was 4,400 tons per day, or three tons a minute.

P: Flown 1,350,000 sorties against the enemy, 958,000 of them in the first nine months of 1944.

It was to this impressive power that the A.A.F. pointed with special pride. A.A.F. personnel overseas now totals 1,082,000--airmen and ground crews--who keep 48,000 combat and transport planes flying against the enemy. It is this tremendous strength which makes the "inevitable wastage" of 11,000 men seem, to A.A.F. officials, small.

* One verse of a parody of Casey Jones which China-Burma-India pilots sing: Old 87 was a pile of junk After too many hours over the Hump With her flap handle busted And her gear stove in And a great big dent in her vertical fin.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.