During the ensuing three days we saw plenty of it, and finally went through the procedure of inspecting and testing two more Martins. By this time the Martin factory was under heavy guard. The Martins being vitally important—in fact, indispensable—for the conduct of the bombing tests, the company was under a heavy forfeit clause in the contract for twenty thereof, and the mere idea that there was dirty work at the cross-roads struck them with panic.
Detectives were rounding up the discharged and discredited employees little by little and each by each. So far no confession had been third-degreed out of the men. The first lot all had alibis.
Believe me, though, we inspected the ships from stem to stern and from rudder to nose again the next morning before we started on our way. Our route lay over the flat Ohio fields, almost due south to McCook Field at Dayton. There we gassed up, and set sail eastward to Boundville, which is a West Virginia village right on the bank of the Ohio River in that little sliver of West Virginia which hides coyly between Ohio and Pennsylvania. At Boundville the government maintains a little way-station on the Washington-Dayton airway. It’s just a field with a few spare parts and some gas and oil available.
It was a nice trip.
In case you don’t know a Martin, let me elucidate a bit for thee. The ship weighs four tons, and has about seventy feet of wingspread. On each wing, just far enough from the cockpit to allow the propellers to whirl without hitting anything, a Liberty motor is set in a maze of huge, trunklike struts which hold it up and in and down; in fact, keep it safely anchored.
The pilot’s cockpit, with two seats side by side in it, is set a bit forward of the wings, about on a line with the two propellers in front of the motors. Ahead of the pilot’s cockpit, in the very nose of the ship, is an observer’s cockpit, equipped with bomb-sights, glass in the flooring to look down through, bomb releases, and about a thousand other things with technical names as long as your arm, or even as long as mine, which is considerably lengthy.
Directly in back of the pilot’s cockpit, in the fore part of the huge fuselage, is the hollow bomb compartment, with bomb racks which can carry two tons of bombs, ranging from a swarm of little twenty-five pounders up through three hundreds, six hundreds, two one-thousand pounders or one two-thousand baby.
In back of this compartment, about half way to the tail surfaces, there is a cockpit for the mechanic or radio operator. The tail surfaces consist of elevators, vertical fin and stabilizer, each very large, but otherwise the same as in any ship, and it has two big rudders, both worked by the same rudder bar.
Les and I, like fleas on elephants’ backs, set our course from Dayton to a bit south of the airline to make sure. When we sighted the wide, sluggish-looking Ohio we simply flew up the stream until the field at Boundville came in sight.
It’s somewhat of a trick to land a Martin, because you’ve got two motors to handle, the ship is so heavy that it settles rapidly, and the pilot’s cockpit is about ten feet above the ground. That makes leveling off a foot above the ground a bit difficult, at first. I made it the first try by bull luck in that small field, and Les did it with nonchalant ease, of course.