Kinds of Fighting

THE SHIP -- C. S. Forester -- Litfle, Brown ($2.50).

THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE AIR--Flying Officer X--Knopf ($2).

Both these books are deep-felt, enthusiastic studies of men and machines in battle; both are written by trained, ob servant storytellers. "Flying Officer X" is H. E. Bates, one of Britain's most talented short-story writers (The Poacher, My Uncle Silas). His sketches of life in the R.A.F. are the result of an assignment to Britain's Bomber Command. C. S. Forester (Captain Horatio Hornblower, Riflleman Dodd and The Gun, TIME, March 29), the British Navy's most passionate booster, spent several weeks on a British warship before sitting down to write his story.

Forester's ship is the 5,000-ton light cruiser Artemis. Her job: with the help of four other light cruisers and a dozen destroyers, to escort a convoy to Malta. In the Artemis' crow's nest Ordinary Seaman Quimsby, his padded perch whirling "in prodigious circles against the sky," sees a faint wreath of smoke on the Mediterranean skyline and in a few minutes, "climbing over . . . the curve of the world," come six enemy cruisers, vanguard of an Italian force of battleships and destroyers.

Into the few hours of battle that follow, Author Forester packs enough action to guarantee nonstop reading. But his high points emerge in a fascinating commentary on the cruiser's engineering and human mechanisms.

The captain's short commands, dropped into the speaking tube on the bridge, fall through several decks into the ears of 600 men, each with his special assignment, most of them blind to what is happening outside. To Engine-room Artificer Hen-rose, the presence of Italian dreadnoughts was merely "interesting, just as was the fact that Henry VIII had six wives." Hen-rose's eyes were, as usual, fixed on a test tube, searching for "the slightest trace of the white precipitate of silver chloride which would indicate that there was salt in the boiler water." Chief Petty Officer Cook had turned a valve, and "steam as hot as red-hot iron" had emerged from the ship's boilers at 400-o and heated a 40-gallon cauldron of soup. Chief Petty Officer O'Flaherty was delicately keeping a director sight upon the foremast of the enemy flagship: "With every microscopic variation of the ... sight ... six guns moved too . . . five hundred tons of steel and machinery swaying to each featherweight touch."

Machines Have Innards. From the "rigid line" of the five speeding cruisers, each burning in a few minutes "enough oil fuel to warm the average house for a whole winter," came "five thick cylinders of smoke," blending into a dense screen a quarter of a mile thick. The Artemis' job was continually to whip through the screen, fire her broadsides, whip back into safety. As she burst through the filthy smoke into the sunlight, three human rangefinders glued their instruments to the leading battleship, began to set in motion incredible techniques. One machine averaged the figures of the three rangefinders, one began to reckon the distance between the Artemis and the Italian flagship, others calculated where the flagship would be in a quarter of a minute. Other machines kept tab on the force and direction of the wind, variations in temperature, barometric pressure and the rolling of a beam sea.

It was a shell from the Artemis that decided the battle -- and the fate of Malta and the world, in Forester's enthusiastic opinion. Somewhere in England, that shell had been filled by "women whose skin was stained yellow with picric acid" and whose "hair was bound under caps and their feet encased in felt slippers lest the treacherous material they handled should explode pre maturely." Now: "Come up, you bastard!" said Able Seaman Colquhoun, and heaved the shell into the turret hoist. From the magazine, Steward Harbord thrust the decisive "cardboard-cased cylinders of ex plosive through the flash-tight shutter"; Able Seaman Day "pushed it into a pocket on the endless [elevator] chain." Before they were thrust into the tube, shell and cordite lay for a second in front of Sub lieutenant Coxe -- time enough for him to reflect that loading methods had changed since the days when the gunnery book in structed: "Take about a shovel full of powder." "Shoot!" said the gunnery lieutenant.

"The tubes heated, the charges exploded" and No. 4 shell whistled 9,000 yards and hit just below the steel-guarded feet of Vice-Ammiraglio Nocentini. The admiral had been hesitating as to whether to risk his precious battleships any longer; No. 4 shell made it unnecessary for him to make up his mind.

Readers may smile at Author Forester's decisive shell, may find his officers and rated men akin to Superman in their efficiency and devotion to duty. But they will leave The Ship with a compendium of knowledge about her innards.

Men Have Innards. Herbert Ernest Bates is a much quieter fellow than For ester. He moves through the Bomber Station with a sensitive eye on the human mask that conceals a flyer's feelings, pries gently behind it and devotedly records his findings. He talks about the man who dropped a bomb down a funnel of the Scharnhorst, about the gunner "who tried to shoot out every searchlight for fifty miles along the German coast." But his main interest is in why these men came to be flying the huge Stirlings and how they feel in their most anguished moments.

They are men of many kinds, many nations. The sound of their conversation smacks of "a Russian bazaar," because they come from all corners of the world.

Capek, Czech night fighter, with his dark glasses and snow-white hair, had escaped from Prague to Poland, labored in a Rus sian concentration camp, stubbornly made his way through Turkey, Syria, Aden, Cape Town to England. His state is one of speechlessness, because "he does not know the words for himself and what he has done." "The Young Man from Kalgoorlie" came from' a remote Australian ranch. When his parents heard of the outbreak of war, they pretended to their son that the radio had broken down. They shut off the delivery of newspapers. They intercepted letters that might have told him a war was going on.

It was a year before he went to town and found himself reading the story of the bombing of London. He used to beg his commander to send him out on bombing trips : his conscience could not forgive him that year of negligence.

"Perhaps the finest pilot I ever knew" was insatiably curious. He spent every minute of his life studying his and other flyers' strengths and weaknesses; he al ways brought his Stirling home minutes faster than the rest of the squadron. But long after he had finished a job his curiosity would be roused by some blot on the sea or a feeling that something was up on a certain strip of coast. He always went down to investigate. Intelligence officers were annoyed at this waywardness. He was never decorated. But he got his own satis factions, such as seeing the sun rise twice on the same day, first at 18,000 feet, then again at 10,000.

Bates tells 21 such stories, each with its characteristic human element.

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