Gunners' Assembly Line

Near the fringes of the Everglades, where Army engineers have ripped pines from the white sand and replaced them with unlovely cantonment buildings, a column of bronzed troops swung crisply from a company street. A band fell in at the head of the column, flashed back the bright Florida sun from its burnished instruments as it thumped the Army Air Corps march. Its song rose and fell against a discordant background: the muffled thud of shotguns, the crisp crack of .30-caliber machine guns, the sulky bark of .50s.

It was graduation day at the Air Forces Flexible Gunnery School at Fort Myers. But it was no red-letter day: in its speeded-up program to man Army warcraft, the Air Forces Training Command turns out a class once a week, repeats the performance at five other schools.

Short for Turrets. Headed for gunners' wings and immediate transfer to combat outfits, the new graduates marched past Fort Myers' lean, brown-eyed commander, Colonel Delmar T. Spivey, and a party of visitors. There were a few tall men among them, but most of the new gunners were undersized, were stretching their legs to the limit to make a regulation pace. "Good for these tight turrets," observed Del Spivey. "They can shoot, too, I'll guarantee that."

Basis of his guarantee is the Air Forces' gunnery course. It has been so successful that men full of combat experience are being sent back to the schools for improvement by learning methodically what they had to pick up at heavy cost. They are sowed in among recruits, 80% of whom wreck an American legend every week by announcing that they have never fired a gun.

In a five-week course, seven days a week, gunner students learn shooting from the first rudiments of sighting, which they learn to do with both eyes open, using the sighting*, or master, eye to put the gun on the target.

Sport for Deflection. While the student learns his guns in the classroom, he also learns to shoot with real weapons from his first week, usually becomes so enamored of his subject that he never wants to go to town, always calls himself "gunner." Shooting begins against fixed targets with .22-caliber rifles. But this is just to check fundamentals. For the rest of the course, Gunner Doe fires at targets on the wing. In an aircraft, almost all his shooting will be at fleeting targets, and the emphasis in training must be on "deflection" shooting, i.e., leading a target so that machine-gun burst and target will arrive at the same place at the same time.

For ground training at deflection shooting, Fort Myers' gunners first fire compressed-air BB machine guns at moving model planes, soon move on to the skeet range. There, under the instruction of onetime civilian skeet-shooters, they learn how to lead the sailing birds from the traps. But the schools' ranges have modifications no gun club ever had.

Movement for Perfection. At some of them, gunners swing fixed shotguns in turrets just like the ones they will use in bombers. At others they fire from a truck going 30 miles an hour around an elliptical track while birds sail past at every angle. In the fourth week, having learned to service machine guns and repair stoppages, they go on to ground machine-gun practice, firing .30s and .50s at targets carried over an irregular, baffling course by mechanically controlled jeeps.

In their last week they take to the air, fire from the kind of turrets they will use in combat at a target towed by an airplane over the Gulf of Mexico. In this climax to a gunner's dream of a five-week holiday, all must qualify. Few fail, and many win experts' badges. Most are surprised at how they have come on in five weeks. But not Del Spivey. For producing gunners as if from an assembly line, the Training Command has broken down shooting into its tiniest rudiments. Says West Pointer Spivey: "If they'll just listen to the instructors they'll make good shots--there isn't a damn chance of failure." The rising curve of Air Forces gunnery is his proof.

* To determine the master eye, look with both eyes through a pencil-sized hole in a cardboard at an object across the room, e.g., the light switch. Without moving the cardboard, squint first one eye, then the other. Only one eye will see the switch. That is the "sighting" eye.

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