By Andrew A. Rooney, Stars and Stripes Staff Writer
February 3, 1943

A U.S. BOMBER STATION, England, Feb. 2 — The nerve center of any airfield is its control tower. No ship can take off or land without an OK from the tower, which directs traffic by remote control; and Broadway and 42nd without a cop or traffic light wouldn't be half the mess an airfield would be without a control tower.

It's a clearing house for all information that has anything to do with planes taking off or landing. The officer in charge has a map of the field and keeps track of exactly where every ship on the field is located with colored pins on the map. He knows what ships are fit for action and what ships aren't.

The "met" men have their weather forecast equipment and offices in the control tower, so that the officer in the tower can have wind velocity, direction and ceiling information always up to date and at his fingertips.

Everything on the field centers around the square three-story tower. Outside, awaiting orders from within, on night and day watches, are the flare path crew, the crash wagon outfit, and the "meat wagon" with two pill rollers in attendance.

The men in the tower are experts at their jobs. And the three officers attached permanently to the tower are highly trained men picked for ability to think in split seconds.

School for Tower Men

The British Air Ministry conducts a six-week school for Allied control tower men, and each of the three men have attended that school and passed the stiff test given at the end of the course. After that they serve time as apprentices in RAF control towers until they are thoroughly familiar with English technique in the tower.

Fifty per cent of the officers in charge of the control towers are pilots who have been grounded for one reason or another. These men are slowly taking over the jobs left by RAF experts who stayed on at the control towers in advisory capacities, long after their RAF units had left the stations.

Most of the excitement in the control tower comes when they have to bring in a lost ship, or a ship that is being forced to land. The darker the night, or the dirtier the weather, the tougher the job.

The men in the tower can do just about everything for a pilot except unroll the runway under his wheels.

The greatest single aid for the pilot is a radio beam which can bring ships properly equipped into a blind landing safely.

A supplementary system of colored lights also can be used to help a plane down in soupy weather.

Another device used every day is the constant sound beacon that is sent up over each field so that pilots can make certain that it is their own field. Any prearranged Morse characteristic is suitable.

Still another guide to the pilot making a blind landing is the flare path crew. As soon as the tower men hear that a plane is trying to locate their field they switch on the circle of lights surrounding the field and get word to the flare path crew that there is a job. The crew hops to action and roars to the end of the runway the plane is to come in on and shoots its beam down the track.

Precautions have to be taken at every step to make sure that there are no German intruders around, and that the pilot asking questions about how to get in is a friendly one.

Alert on the Bridge

On the "bridge" of the control tower men stand with flares and a Very gun ready for use. One holds a flashlight in the form of a pistol. Along the top is a telescopic sight. By aiming the flash gun at the pilot through the sight and then pulling the trigger, which flicks a shutter over the red light, any message can be sent in code to the pilot in night or daylight.

The most important single job in the tower is the radio operator's. Typical of the hand-picked men is Sgt. Harry A. McClellan, Norfolk, Va., who knows what the men up above him are up against because he is a veteran of several bombing raids over enemy territory himself. Then he was not only a radio man but a gunner in his spare time.

Night and day the monotonous calls come in over the radio amplifier, code words representing plane and field.

"Kokomo to Bugle. Kokomo to Bugle."

"Another station calling us," Sgt. McClellan explains, picking up the microphone.

"Bugle to Kokomo. Bugle to Kokomo. Go ahead Bramble."

That goes on all day, and even if the message is the first news of the raid on Germany, for example, it is repeated in the same uninspired tone that sounds like an elevator operator in a department store listing the items on each floor.

When the ships are coming in the radio operator is on the tower balcony with a mike on an extension cord.

The Airman-of-the-Watch is another important man in the tower. That name, as much of the equipment, was taken over along with the tower from the RAF. Cpl. Louis Damaso, Pittsburgh, holds down one of the three shifts at this job at this bomber field, and it is his job to see that every plane that takes off is recorded in the log book.

He is the authority on the number of ships in the air from his field, and when they come back from a raid he is the one who knows how many ships took off, how many had to peel off and turn back before they got over the target, and how many returned in formation.

No one else at the field ever seems to know exactly.

"It was either 20 or 21," one of the ground crew will remark when he sees the black specks in the distance that mean the bombers are returning. There is always someone to argue with him.

"Yeah, but one came in half an hour after it took off."

Airman-of-the-Watch Knows

Consequently, when they start counting the planes as they circle the field after a show, there always are speculations ranging from "five missing" to "we got two more than when we took off." But the Airman-of-the-Watch knows; exactly.

Typical of the well-trained men in charge of the shifts in the control tower is 2nd Lt. James Nagle, Boston. He graduated from Harvard in 1934, and later studied aeronautics at MIT.

He went through the Air Ministry's course, and, after passing the test, he spent six months at various English fields, flying in every kind of weather in every type of ship. He knows what it is like at both ends.

U.S. personnel almost completely staff the towers now, but even though capable men like Lt. Robert Resta, Los Angeles, and Capt. Louis Hartsell. Anaconda, Mon., and Lt. Nagle take a lot of the responsibility, there is still an RAF man who is the boss.

The non-coms under S /Sgt. Fred Martin, Manasquan, N.J., are all GIs but Flt. Lt. Frank Roe is still the head min at the American bomber stations control tower. One more reverse lease loan by the British.