Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (15 page)

Carroll’s office, like everything about him, was simple and efficient. The walls were a varnished yellow pine, his desk the simplest government-issue oak—but highly polished. He sat in his swivel chair, listening to what he fondly called the father-and-son team brief him on his next scheduled meeting. Lieutenant Colonel Harry Shannon and his father, Vance, had been working with the industry, implementing the suggestions that Harry had derived from their conference the previous October.

“General, I have Kelly Johnson and Hall Hibbard waiting down the hall. They have a proposal I think will be of interest to you.”

Carroll looked pained. “It’s not that project that Kelly and Nate Price were pushing a few months ago, is it?”

“No, sir, this one is intended to use the de Havilland Halford engine. It is putting out three thousand pounds of thrust, and looks like the ticket for our next fighter.”

The de Havilland engine had been designed by a veteran of piston engine construction, Frank Halford, using data on Whittle’s engine furnished by the British government. In peacetime it would have been a blatant violation of copyright; in war it was simple expediency.

Carroll spoke again. “Vance, I know that you, Kelly,
and Hall are old friends, and let me tell you that no one appreciates Kelly more than I do. You’ve heard the old statement that Tony Fokker designed good airplanes because he could ‘see the air’; well, Kelly sees more than the air—he sees the heat, the strength, the fatigue, even the shape of projects almost as soon as you define the requirements. But he is a stubborn man! He wants to tell you what you need rather than listen to what you want. You’ve got to control that. I’m not giving Lockheed a contract for an airplane to find out that Kelly has improved it to the point that it won’t get produced!”

Vance Shannon nodded. Carroll was right on the money. Johnson was a genius and he reigned supreme at Lockheed, barely held in check by Hall Hibbard, who acted as a go-between for Robert Gross. Gross admired Kelly immensely but found him too loud and too strong willed to work with in person. Hibbard now saw himself as a middleman, able to calm and direct Kelly as no one else could and thus do more for Lockheed than anyone else.

Vance knew he was not a good closer—he respected the opinions and feelings of other people too much to impose his will on them just to make a deal. But this was an exception. He had to sell this to Carroll, because there was no real alternative. Summoning up his brightest smile, slapping Harry on the back, Vance leaned forward and said, “He’ll produce your airplane, sir, and it will be on schedule and under budget—but the Army has to let him do it his way. If we try to ride herd on him through plant representatives, meetings, and the usual things we do, he’ll rebel. And that we cannot afford,” Vance said.

Carroll signaled to his aide, and Hibbard and Johnson came in, carrying two briefcases filled with drawings. Shannon had briefed Johnson on his demeanor, and Hibbard had reinforced it; all three men knew what was at stake. Johnson went through the drawings quickly, quietly,
answering all the questions Carroll asked that he could. The questions he could not answer he noted down in his daily logbook, writing with such uniform precision that the words looked as if they were typed.

Hibbard was beginning to relax as the meeting wore on; Kelly had evidently taken Shannon’s words to heart and was behaving beautifully.

After a final survey of the drawings, Carroll nodded and said, “When can you give me a definite proposal?”

Johnson consulted briefly with Hibbard and answered, “June 1, sir.”

Carroll replied, “I’ll handle the paperwork on this end myself, and I’ll get you a response in two weeks or less. How long will it take you to build the prototype?”

Johnson spoke. “If we do it the Army way, General Carroll, twelve months, minimum. If we do it my way, I’ll roll your prototype out in one hundred and eighty days from the date you issue the contract.”

Hibbard started to speak, but Carroll raised his hand. “And what is your way, Mr. Johnson?”

“My way is to make this a special project; I’ll pull together a small team of the best engineers and workers Lockheed has. I’ll contract with Vance, here, to come in with us. We’ll sequester the project and work night and day. The Army can have one officer on hand for inspection. No one, not even you, gets in without my approval. No visiting dignitaries. No change proposals. Just leave us alone and we’ll deliver you a first-class jet fighter in one hundred and eighty days—or less.”

Hibbard shrank back and Carroll began his tittering laugh, rocking back and forth in his chair. Vance and Harry were appalled. Kelly had blown the deal with his outrageous requirements.

Finally Carroll spoke: “OK, Mr. Johnson, have it your way. But if you don’t fulfill your promises, Lockheed will never get another contract from the Army. You can bet on it.” And he began laughing again.

November 26, 1943, Insterburg, Germany

The Messerschmitt Me 262 program had become a monster, devouring man-hours, materials, and resources on an ever-increasing basis—and still only a few of the jets were flying. One of them, the first pre-production aircraft, Me 262V6, was vastly improved, with more streamlined nacelles and the badly needed tricycle undercarriage. Adolf Hitler continued to prod
Reichsmarschall
Göring about 262 production, and he in turn nudged Milch, who tried to galvanize the industry. Committees were formed, meetings were held, but nothing could change two cold hard facts. The first was that the ill-fated American bombing raid on Regensburg on August 17 had destroyed the fuselage jigs for the 262 and set back airframe production by months. The second was that shortages of nickel and chrome were holding up the production of turbine blades for the Junkers Jumo 004B engines.

Now a scowling Hitler was walking down the flight line, lips pursed. He had been to other displays of Luftwaffe aircraft in years past. They had shown him aircraft like the Heinkel He 177 four-engine bomber and the Messerschmitt Me 210, which were going to win the war. Both were colossal failures and none of the other airplanes, not one, had delivered on their promises. Göring, subdued as he always was in Hitler’s company, walked behind him to the flight line. There the veteran test pilot Gerd Lindner was already seated in the cockpit of the Messerschmitt V6, marked VI + AA. It had the new tricycle undercarriage and many other improvements.

Hitler nodded impatiently and Lindner went through the engine start, with everyone familiar with the aircraft praying that there was no fire. Lindner taxied out, took off, and put the 262 through a dazzling display that showed the aircraft to its full advantage, combining its blinding speed with a remarkable maneuverability.

Lindner had just touched down when Hitler turned and
signaled for his car. He left the field without comment, leaving Göring, Willy Messerschmitt, and others dumbfounded.

“What does it mean,
Herr Reichsmarschall?
Did the Führer approve? What are we to do?”

Göring shook his head. He was in an impossible situation, his lack of authority evident to all. Finally, as his own Mercedes drove up, he said, “I will talk to the Führer this evening. And I will have someone call you with the results.”

Gerd Lindner walked up as Messerschmitt stood watching as the second Mercedes sped off. “Dr. Messerschmitt, how was the demonstration?”

Messerschmitt turned to the young pilot. “Herr Lindner, if our leaders were as competent leading as you are flying, we would have won the war a year ago.”

The next day Messerschmitt received a personal call from Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments. The Me 262 was to receive top production priority, and the Führer was to receive bimonthly reports on the production of the aircraft as a fighter-bomber.

January 8, 1944, Muroc Army Air Base, California

Vance Shannon had worked hard before, but never for so long or so unremittingly as he had since the $515,018.40 contract for the XP-80 had been signed. When they started the new program in Burbank, Kelly Johnson had relented on the seven-day workweek. Instead he worked his team ten hours a day six days a week, and they were still on the point of exhaustion.

Happily, Vance had another drain on his energy—Madeline. When she visited him in Burbank their already tempestuous sex life reached new heights. His appearance became so wan that Kelly had pulled him aside and insisted that he see a doctor to treat his exhaustion. He
couldn’t believe it himself, but occasionally he had actually resorted to telling Madeline that he had a headache, to get a little respite.

He missed her now, though. When Vance went with the XP-80 to Muroc, he knew that he would have no time to spare, not even on weekends, and she decided she would not try to commute from her job with Consolidated in San Diego. It turned out to be a good thing, for Harry had been sent out as General Carroll’s personal representative. At Madeline’s request, Vance still had not told his boys about his intention to marry her. Having her drop in for the Sunday day off at Muroc would have been awkward.

The XP-80 program had been arduous, but Kelly had kept all his promises. He had chosen well from the Lockheed workforce, assembling a team of 128 specialists. In Burbank, they had worked in a closely guarded scrap-wood and canvas temporary shack located next to the main factory building. The work had proceeded smoothly, and the XP-80 was delivered exactly 178 days after the contract had been signed. On the day it rolled out, Kelly picked up Vance in a bear hug and said, “What did I tell Carroll? One hundred and eighty days! We beat that by two days! And what do you say to that, Mr. Shannon?” Shannon, his lungs compressed and his ribs aching, couldn’t say anything, but he gave Kelly the thumbs-up and scurried out of his way.

There had been problems all along, but Kelly’s team had leaped upon each one and solved it in hours, not days or weeks, as had always been Vance’s experience in the past. The key was Kelly’s insistence on dropping all unnecessary paperwork and getting the engineers and the workmen to bump elbows together, with neither Lockheed management nor the Army interfering. When a solution was reached it was documented, and for that reason the first drawing was often the final one.

The worst crisis came late in the program. The Halford
engine was run up to 8,800 revolutions per minute on a static test when both air ducts leading to the engine collapsed with an explosive roar, the debris cracking the engine’s compressor. After seventy-two hours of uninterrupted work, Shannon directing the effort, the ducts were redesigned and rebuilt. There was a delay until the replacement engine arrived for installation, but Johnson and the Skonk Works, as they called his group, stayed ahead of schedule. The Skonk Works name came from a mythical factory in Al Capp’s famous
Li’l Abner
comic strip.

Aesthetically, the XP-80—the workers named it “Lulu Belle”—was a masterpiece. Where the XP-59 looked bloated with its huge wing and engine combination, the Lockheed fighter had a slim, rapier-like appearance. Its low-aspect ratio laminar flow wing eased out from where the wing-root engine inlets were carefully faired into the narrow fuselage. The pilot sat forward of the wings, under a streamlined bubble canopy. The long, tapering nose housed six .50-caliber machine guns, radios, and navigation equipment, all easily accessed by large swing-out panels. Vance noticed that everyone caressed the airplane as they worked around it, running their hands along its flanks as if it were a thoroughbred racehorse.

Lockheed’s chief test pilot, Milo Burcham, was scheduled to make the first flight. Burcham was more than ready, having shepherded the P-38 through its long and arduous test programs. To get jet experience, he had flown the Bell XP-59A, coming away with a thorough understanding of the jet engine’s slow acceleration characteristics and of the need to handle the throttles with care.

Shannon watched Burcham and laughed to himself, for Milo was so unlike the Hollywood image of test pilots. In an MGM film titled, fittingly enough,
Test Pilot,
Clark Gable played the title role, portraying a brash, bullheaded outsider who defied regulations and trusted to guts and luck when testing airplanes. Oddly enough, Milo slightly
resembled Gable, with his quiet smile and tiny mustache, but he was far more cerebral in his approach to test flying and indeed to life. Burcham was very bright, holding patents on a number of devices, including a burglar alarm that he invented while in high school and sold to pay for his first flying lessons. But he was very cautious, not allowing any of the eighty-plus test pilots who worked for him to take any risks that were not precisely calculated.

Top Lockheed management, including Bob Gross, turned out for the test flight, watching Kelly Johnson fuss around the XP-80 like a mother around a new baby. Wearing a dark overcoat against the desert cold, Johnson went over the airplane inch by inch, doing everything from checking each of the fasteners to clambering up the ladder to the cockpit and polishing out a tiny spot on the canopy with his handkerchief.

Burcham, dressed in a natty two-color sports jacket, his dark hair slicked back, took off at exactly 9:10, climbing to pattern altitude before radioing that he could not get the gear to retract. Six minutes later he landed, to the applause of the crowd. Mechanics swarmed over the gear, quickly found a malfunctioning switch, and repaired it. The fuel tanks were topped off (Bob Gross kidded Kelly by saying, “We’re going to need more range if you have to refuel this often”) and Burcham flew again, a twenty-minute flight that showed both the speed and the maneuverability of the XP-80.

No one felt more relief than the Shannons, father and son. Vance had dozens of high-priority projects that he had deferred to be with Kelly on the XP-80. He needed to get to work on them. And General Carroll had been very fair, telling Harry that when the XP-80 flew he would see that he got an operational assignment, in fighters if possible, in bombers if not.

It was more than time. Tom had returned from the Pacific with nine victories and a smug smile. It had been almost intolerable for Harry, even though Tom only
bragged when they were alone together, when they both knew he was teasing. But teasing or not, it was difficult to suffer.