Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (21 page)

Prandtl’s directions had been good, although the quality of the road declined as they approached the forest where the institute was hidden. It appeared at last, a collection of almost sixty buildings, all shaded by enormous trees to be invisible not only from the air but from one another. A few had been built to resemble farmhouses; others were the typical bunkers that studded Germany. A cleverly camouflaged runway ran the length of the facility. Some buildings were destroyed, not by bombs but apparently by local people salvaging material to repair their shattered homes.

Only a few Germans were present. Kármán sought out the first one and gave him the name of an old assistant, Rudolph Kochel, whom he had known at Aachen. The man nodded and led Kármán’s group to a building that had been perfectly concealed by being partially buried in the ground, then having trees planted directly onto its roof.

Inside, Kochel was working at a desk. When Kármán entered he stood up and said, “Ah, Professor. It is so good to see you,” as if they had parted just weeks before. Kármán immediately began questioning him about the highspeed wind tunnel and swept wing research. Kochel was nervous; switching alternately from German to quite good English, he pretended that he knew nothing about the experiments, insisting that all of the engineering information had been carried off by the Luftwaffe personnel, weeks before.

Harry Shannon walked to a bookcase, where there
was a tiny metal model, no more than three inches in span, of the Me 262. He whirled on Kochel and said, “One of these nearly killed me. I demand that you show me its drawings.”

Vance Shannon was almost as frightened as Kochel was by Harry’s rough tone. The German slumped in his chair behind the desk, waved his hand weakly, then said, “Come; I will show you.”

Kochel led them through the back of the building, unlocking a series of doors as they progressed. Each room was filled with filing cabinets, and the Americans longed to stop each time and examine them. The last door opened to a courtyard, where there was a covered well. Kochel said nothing, just pointed to it.

Harry grabbed an ancient rusted mattock and pried the wooden top off. He looked in at an endless heap of reports, documents, and plans that filled the well to its very top. Reaching in, he pulled out several, passing them to his American companions.

Schairer spoke. “This is the mother lode. These confirm their experiments with the swept wing.”

Harry arranged with his soldiers to guard the site, promising them relief by morning. On the ride back to Göttingen, the men were absorbed in the documents they were able to bring with them, scarcely speaking except to erupt with howls of joy at some newly discovered insight. Once Kármán reached forward and shook Schairer’s shoulder, yelling, “This vindicates Bob Jones.” Schairer nodded back. Robert T. Jones had advocated the swept wing to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, but his argument had been rejected as unsound.

The group was under no restrictions about the dissemination of information they discovered to U.S. industry. That night two of the group wrote letters home. George Schairer advised Boeing to drop the currently proposed straight wing configuration for their new multi-jet bomber
and adopt a thirty-five-degree swept wing. Vance Shannon, under contract to North American, gave the same advice for their new jet fighter.

March 31, 1947, Wright Field, Ohio

Two atomic bombs had brought the war to a close in the Pacific, a mere four months after Germany’s surrender in Europe. The surprisingly rapid end to the war stunned the United States just as it was gearing up for a long campaign culminating in the invasion of Japan. The September 2 surrender found Tom Shannon en route to join his Corsair squadron in San Diego, Harry Shannon learning to fly a B-29 at Randolph Field, and their father contemplating which job he wanted to take from among the four that were currently offered him. The first two were from the Army, with one calling for him to tour the scientific facilities in Japan, as he had done in Germany. The second Army offer would take him to Wright Field, where he would work with the German scientists and equipment that had been picked up in the closing months of the war in what became known as Operation Paperclip.

The civilian offers were more attractive financially. George Schairer had prodded Boeing to invite Vance to work in Seattle, where he would serve directly under Ed Wells on two new secret programs, one a bomber and one a civilian transport. The other was from Vance’s old friend Bob Gross, who asked that he come to Lockheed and, as Gross put it, “ride shotgun on Kelly Johnson” as they developed their line of jet fighters.

Vance paused to consider how fortunate he had been to have his engineering career coincide with an almost continuous series of advances in aviation. And how privileged he was to have been able to work with men like Johnson at Lockheed, Schairer at Boeing, and Laddon at Consolidated. If Vance had worked at just one of the big
companies, he would have been overshadowed by the geniuses who presided over their engineering departments. But as a consultant, he got to rub elbows with all of them and, perhaps most important, do some engineering cross-fertilization, bringing ideas and outlooks from one company to another, without violating any confidences.

The welcome Japanese surrender had immediately affected everyone, and the ensuing two years saw a complete collapse of the greatest, strongest, most effective armed forces the world had ever seen. Vance Shannon had watched in disbelief as the Army Air Forces declined in just eighteen months from a highly trained force operating more than seventy thousand aircraft manned by more than 2 million personnel to a skeleton force of three hundred thousand people with fewer than ten thousand operational aircraft. The Army and the Navy went through a similar convulsion, laying down arms indiscriminately in the laudable but laughable headlong rush to get the troops back home.

As welcome as peace was, it disrupted the American economy. The aviation industry had been producing aircraft at the rate of one hundred thousand per year in 1944. In 1946, fewer than seven hundred aircraft were purchased by the Army.

For the Shannon family, peace brought a thousand blessings. Neither Harry nor Tom would have to fly combat again, and both were going to be released from service soon. Tom had contemplated making a career of the Marines but had been disillusioned by the rapid demobilization. For his part, Vance was nearly exhausted by the continuous traveling that had carried him almost continually from one theater to another. Now, at last, he would be able to stay at home with Madeline.

The peace did have a downside and the first was Madeline’s continuing to refuse to marry him, despite her wartime promises. He understood her reasons well enough—the age difference was there and would always
be there, growing worse in the next years as she moved toward a sexual peak. He was already well beyond his, and Madeline was an intensely passionate woman. And then there were the boys, young men now, accomplished war heroes, and still not willing to accept his relationship with Madeline. It wasn’t that they wanted him to marry her, far from it. Neither boy was a prude, and as unconventional as it was, they accepted that he was living with a woman who was not his wife. It was simply that they had disliked Madeline from the start and their few meetings had not changed things.

Nor did the coming of peace help things on the financial side. Three of Vance’s job prospects had dried up and the fourth, working at Wright Field with the German scientists, was now clearly a temporary position.

In many ways this was a relief. Vance had always enjoyed being a freelance contractor, working the entire industry as a busy bee might work a field of flowers, going from one tempting job to the next. The industry was bound to recover, for jets had revolutionized aviation, and there would soon be competition for new generations of jet fighters and bombers and even, if his contacts in Boeing were correct, jet airliners. He saw jet aviation at being at about the same point automobiles were when Henry Ford introduced the Model T. There would be no shortage of work in the future, once the production lines got rolling. Or so he hoped.

Vance glanced at the standard government wall clock, found in almost every room in every government building and rarely displaying the correct time. In fifteen minutes he was going to meet with the newest arrival from Germany, Dr. von Ohain, the man who had invented the jet engine in Germany almost simultaneously as Frank Whittle had invented it in Great Britain. Vance wasn’t looking forward to the interview. The last two men he had interviewed, scientists from Peenemünde, had complained continuously about the poor food, inadequate
pay, and drafty quarters. He wondered how much thought they had given to the quarters they had made drafty in England as a result of their work on the V-1 and V-2.

Yet he knew they had a point. They were not paid their salaries directly. Instead the money was paid into an account in Germany, so that their families could benefit. They did receive six dollars a day per diem, which more than covered the twenty-three hundred calories of mess-hall food allocated to them. Most saved enough from their per diem to send packages of food and clothing back to Germany. Their quarters were austere, just the standard two-story barracks that some 16 million American GIs had endured, cold in winter, hot in summer, with open bathrooms and no privacy. But even so, Vance did not take kindly to their complaints. They were living better by far than the families they had left behind in Germany, many of whom still camped in bombed-out ruins. He hoped von Ohain might be different.

Shannon knew his days at Dayton were numbered, and as he waited behind his battered oak desk, he experimented with names for the new company he was forming. His first choice was still “Aviation consultants, Incorporated,” but Madeline was insisting that he should take advantage of his reputation by naming the company after him. He jotted down a series of names, including “Vance Shannon and Sons, Aviation consultants,” “The Shannon Group,” and “Vance Shannon Aviation,” but all of them struck him as pushy. The right people would soon know who was behind “Aviation consultants, Incorporated,” and for the rest it didn’t matter.

What did matter was somehow getting his sons to accept Madeline. They were still resistant, and he hoped forming the new company might help, with himself as president, Tom and Harry as vice presidents, and Madeline as secretary-treasurer. She had been such a source of strength for the past two years, enduring his long absences and following him to the cramped apartment in Dayton
with never a complaint. As helpful as ever, Madeline worked at home for him and was far more efficient than any secretary he had ever employed. She had an amazing ability to help him decide who to turn to for help on a contract. Never much on filing, and a terrible typist, Vance relished the way Madeline turned out his work, professionally, with never a mistake. And nothing was ever lost—if he needed a paper, a contract, she could pull it out for him in an instant. Once or twice she tried to instruct him in her methods, but it was too intricate. He preferred just to give things to her, confident that when he needed something she would have it. They could discuss any problem, and she was showing a greater grasp of technical matters than many of the engineers he worked with. Usually she would quickly understand the problem, going right to the heart of the matter with a point that he might have overlooked or felt was not sufficiently pertinent. How she put up with him he didn’t know, but she remained as loving as ever, more tolerant of his weakening desires than he might have expected, given the ardor of their early years.

Classified material was different, of course. He kept everything at work in the standard filing cabinets, with their bar locks, and only took things home to work on when something had to be ready the following day.

Tom and Harry had never seen this side of Madeline, her competence, her dedication. Their meetings had always been almost formal, at dinners or at company receptions. Once they got to know her, when they were actively working together in the company, Vance hoped they would understand—at least in part—her fascination for him. Then they would come to accept her. Or so he dreamed.

Precisely at three o’clock there was a knock and he hastened to open the door to his office. A slender man, impossibly young to have invented the jet engine, stood in the hallway, smiling diffidently, his hands nervously twirling his fedora.

“Come in, Dr. von Ohain. I’m very pleased to meet you.”

Von Ohain extended his hand, then withdrew it as if afraid that Shannon would refuse to shake it. Shannon reached forward, seized his hand, and pumped it. Von Ohain’s first words were, “My English is not yet good.”

And Shannon smilingly replied, “And neither is mine. We will get along well.”

They spent the next hour talking about engineering matters, with von Ohain detailing, step-by-step, the progress that in just three years had led him from an idea to the first jet flight in the world. It took him longer to explain the ensuing years, when changes of programs, and unexpected technical problems, had delayed completion of his larger, more sophisticated engines.

The German scientist was excited to learn that Shannon had known Frank Whittle and had participated in the transfer of Whittle’s engine technology to the United States. When Shannon mentioned that Whittle had not received backing from the British government, von Ohain was quick to understand. He shook his head, saying, “What a shame. If his people had backed him as Dr. Heinkel had backed me, there might never have been a war! England could have had jet planes in 1938, and we might have been able to get rid of Hitler.”

Von Ohain paused for a minute. It was obvious that his comment about Hitler was spontaneous, but it was equally obvious that he did not wish to appear to be currying favor. After a moment he went on.

“Dr. Heinkel was not always the easiest man to work for—he wanted results in a hurry. He had to have them, or all the work would have gone to Messerschmitt. The engine that we made for the first jet flight was no more than a working model. Then he wanted me to develop a larger engine than the Junkers 004, so we had the usual development problems.” Then, proudly, he added, “But jet engines are still more easily developed than piston engines.”