Readying for War

Abstract

This chapter chronicles how Keith Ponder and seven other men in shearling aviator suits walked across the tarmac at the Westover Army Air Forces base in Chicopee, Massachusetts, to one of the Curtiss Jenny biplanes. At sixty-seven feet, the B-24 Liberator bomber was the length of a large whale—a comparison made more apt by its tall, blunt nose and broad fluke-like stabilizers. The chapter stresses that it was a “heavy bomber,” the biggest of the planes of its day, weighing thirty-seven thousand pounds, another twenty thousand pounds loaded. The chapter then shifts to discuss the launch of the largest air offensive to date on interior Germany by US Army Air Forces and England's Royal Air Force Bomber Command. Operation Argument—later known simply as Big Week—would target Germany's airplane factories and manufacturing centers. Success counted on AAF reinforcements as quickly as the factories and air bases back home could turn them out. To this end, the frenetic rate of aircraft production in the United States had been outpaced only by recruitment. The chapter argues that the US war effort was nearing its peak when Ponder enlisted a year and some months prior to this day on February 17, 1944. It notes that Ponder and his crew were the merest of specks in the most monumental war mobilization in modern history.