Reviewing Day, a new novel by A.L. Kennedy about an R.A.F. tailgunner in World War II, David Lodge notes that a tour of duty for British airmen consisted of 30 missions, and that the survival rate for a single raid was around 95%. (On any single mission, there was a 1-in-20 chance of being killed.) Part of the way Day works apparently concerns the psychological effects on the individual airmen as their number of missions flown mounted--morale would start high, on account of patriotism and ignorance, then descend rapidly to a "crack-up point" in the low teens, which, if survived, would usually be followed by a slight upward trend until, in the low-twenties, it would irrecoverably plunge, the "bomber crews' preoccupation with their own chances of survival tend[ing] to dissipate the chivalric spirit in which they had volunteered" (in the words of Len Deighton, in Bomber, quoted by Lodge).
What exactly were their chances of survival? Well, if there is a 95% chance of something happening (like surviving a bombing raid), the chance of it happening thirty times in a row is given by 0.95 to the thirtieth power, which is slightly under 0.22. So your chance of surviving a tour of duty was about the same as that of a light-hitting utility infielder delivering a base hit. Brutal. The plot of Day is probably not very plausible, actuarially speaking, for the likelihood of an individual airman even reaching "the crack-up point," around the twelfth mission, is barely better than fifty-fifty. To be true to life, the novel would have to fizzle out, exhausted by death, before it could reach the high pitch planned by the literary author.
Comments