Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (6 page)

“No, no lecture, but you are both at a dangerous time in your careers. How much military flying time do you have, Tom?”

“About four hundred and fifty hours.”

“And Harry?”

“Maybe five hundred.”

Vance went on. “Well, that’s the dangerous time. You are proficient, and you are feeling your oats. That’s when most accidents happen. But now, with the war coming on, you’ve got to really live up to your responsibilities. You can’t be fooling around, buzzing, rat racing, doing low-level acrobatics, not when you are going to be needed in combat.”

Both boys laughed. They knew exactly what their father was doing and loved him for it.

“Dad, we’ll be good. We promise.”

July 21, 1941, fifteen miles due west of Marine Base, Naval Air Station, San Diego

Cruising at 7,000 feet, Harry Shannon closed the canopy of his P-40, cinched his seat belt and shoulder harness tight, and watched the tiny speck on the horizon hurtle toward him, growing larger by the second until a gorgeous gray Grumman Wildcat pulled up on his wing, flown by his brother, Tom, a big grin on his face.

They flew for a moment, wing to wing, each drinking in the other’s airplane; if there had been a way to exchange seats they would have done it in an instant. They had always been competitors, from fighting for positions on the high school football team, to shooting baskets in the backyard, to seeing who could get the fastest times out of their dad’s cars. But this was the ultimate competition, each one flying fifty thousand dollars of hot machinery provided by Uncle Sam.

The brothers had briefed each other that morning in the Marine Base flight operations room. Harry could afford to spend only about fifteen minutes out here before cutting up to Hamilton Field. If the winds were good, he’d have no problem—if they were not, he would have some explaining to do.

They planned for about ten minutes of mock dogfighting before breaking off to return to base. Once in the air, they couldn’t talk to each other—the frequencies of their radios were not compatible. They wouldn’t have done it anyway, because what they were doing was officially forbidden, if unofficially condoned, and someone might pick up their transmissions.

Tom saluted, closed his canopy, and kicked his Grumman into a vertical bank, pulling away for the first encounter. Harry turned in the opposite direction, applying power cautiously to the P-40, letting his speed build slowly. His engine was brand-new and the last thing he wanted was an engine failure fifteen miles off the coast. Yet his airplane had at least a 20 mph speed advantage over his brother’s, and Harry intended to use it.

The two fighters roared at each other again, thin black streams of exhaust coming from their engines; as they passed, Tom pulled up sharply, then rolled back down on the P-40’s tail. Harry dove steeply and at 300 mph jerked his P-40 into a sharp turn that Tom promptly matched. Harry rolled on his back and dove again.

Horror-stricken, Tom pulled back on his power, leveling
off and banking sharply to watch as Harry’s P-40 plunged toward the Pacific. Yelling, “Pull out; pull out,” he pounded the canopy with his fist.

Inside the P-40, Harry trying desperately to do just that, with the throttle back, his feet on the control panel, both hands pulling back on the stick, the huge blue ocean racing up to engulf him, the altimeter unwinding, he counted the seconds he had to live as the nose slowly began to creep forward toward the horizon. With the g-forces slamming his body back into his seat, Harry struggled, hooking the stick back in the crook of his right arm and rolling in full-up elevator trim. As the nose came toward level, he blacked out, his vision collapsing inward, his hands falling from the stick, the excess speed now working on the elevator trim to hurl the plane skyward.

Above, Tom’s scream of rage turned gradually into a prayer of hope as the black triangle of the P-40’s tail slowly transformed into a pointed nose, and then the wings and fuselage, flattening out, started a climb. He dove toward the P-40 as Harry’s consciousness returned first and then his vision, followed by a sense of overwhelming relief at his sheer good luck. If the dive had lasted another ten seconds, he would have been forty fathoms deep right now.

The two fighters leveled out in loose formation, Harry trying to regain composure. Tom rolled his Wildcat around the P-40 in a loose arc, checking it for damage. They closed again, both opening their canopies. Tom shook his head while a white-faced Harry grinned, happy to be alive and knowing that his brother would never let him live this down. To try a split S in a P-40 at low altitude. It was suicidal.

Tom flew in a shallow bank to a heading that would lead Harry roughly to Hamilton Field, located a few miles north of San Francisco. Harry shook his head, pointed straight back to the coastline; he had had enough of over-ocean flying and would find his way up the coast.

That night, Harry called the bar at the Officers Club at San Diego Naval Air Station, where, as he suspected, Tom was holding forth on his death-defying morning combat. Over the din of the bar, they exchanged some small talk, with Harry signing off. “You know, right now Dad’s Lecture twenty-nine makes a lot of sense. You take care of yourself, and don’t bust your ass doing something as stupid as I did.”

Tom’s answer sounded flippant but was sincere: “I won’t if you won’t.”

• THE PASSING SCENE •

Italians repelled in invasion of Greece; Germany conquers Balkans, Greece, Crete; HMS
Hood
and
Bismarck
sunk; Germany invades Soviet Union; back-and-forth fighting in North Africa; Churchill and Roosevelt sign Atlantic Charter; plutonium discovered; Lou Gehrig dies.

CHAPTER THREE

August 3, 1941, Ladywood, United Kingdom

“Young Whittle there is very even tempered. Always angry.”

It was the wrong thing to say to Stanley Hooker, whose genius with supercharger designs had improved the performance of the Hurricane and the Spitfire to the point that they could win the Battle of Britain. Hooker imperiously drew himself up to his full six-foot, two-inch height, his mouth compressed into a hard slit. Visibly restraining himself, he speared the hapless Ministry of Aircraft Production bureaucrat with eyes crackling fire.

“So might you be if you had seen a stupid government sit on a war-winning invention for almost a decade, then proceed to rob you at gunpoint of the value of your brainchild.”

Hooker spun on his heel and strode toward the deep blue Rolls-Royce Phantom II waiting by the hangar doors. Slipping inside the Rolls, still fuming, he waved off the proffered stainless-steel flask of tea and opened the inlaid
walnut door to the bar. He raised his eyebrows and pointed to the whiskey in invitation, but his guests all shook their heads.

“Bloody idiots. They have no idea of what they cost the country. If they had given Frank”—he nodded out the window to where the always dapper Squadron Leader Frank Whittle was hectoring a group of workers from Rover—“some support, we would have had squadrons of jet fighters by 1938, and there might never have been a war.”

Hooker poured himself a splash of Scotch, waved his glass again in invitation, poured another splash, then downed it.

The three Americans, who had been admiring the utter luxury of the Rolls, waited for him to continue. Hooker had been utterly forthright so far, and they wanted all the information they could get from him.

Hooker waved the empty glass in the air. “We did the same thing to Frank that the French did to the Wright brothers! They ignored all the Wrights had done, called them ‘liars, not fliers’—until Wilbur came over to Le Mans in 1908 and showed them what real flying was. Then they jolly well stole their ideas! Blériot would never have flown the Channel in 1909 if he had not seen Wilbur Wright in 1908!” He reached for the whiskey bottle again, shook his head, carefully wiped his glass with an immaculate linen napkin, and closed the door to the bar. “We did the same thing to poor Frank, ignored him; then when it is bloody obvious that he was right, we take his ideas and parcel them out to other companies. It’s unforgivable!”

Stunned by the outburst, the three Americans waited cautiously. Then, very tentatively, Colonel Ray Crawford asked, “Can you tell us about it? We’ll have our own problems, I’m sure.” The other two, William Owen, a plant manager from General Electric, and Vance Shannon, General Arnold’s special representative, instinctively leaned forward.

Little need, for Hooker spoke loudly in a crisp but aggrieved tone, as if he felt the pain that Whittle had suffered.

“Frank Whittle invented the turbine-jet engine in the early 1930s. Patented it in 1932, when he was twenty-five years old. Oddly enough, we are the same age.” The last sentence was said rather more softly, and Hooker paused for a moment, running his hand over his bulging brow as if astounded by their coincidence in age. Then he went on. “The government ignored him. Industry ignored him. They should not have; Frank Whittle is brilliant, a genius, even if he can be a bit abrasive. If they had the brains to give him even a little funding, we could have had a production version of his jet by 1937, and squadrons of jet fighters by 1938. Hitler would not have dared move against Czechoslovakia, and perhaps some sensible German might have shot him by now, saving us the trouble of this bloody war. And then the government robbed Frank.”

Owen asked, “When did he finally get some backing?”

“In dribs and drabs from 1936 on, never more than a few thousand pounds and mostly from private people who believed in him. If you know him, you cannot help believing in him—he’s a remarkable man. A trifle sharp, perhaps, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but brilliant in theory and in practice. I thought I knew something about turbines, from my supercharger experience, until I talked to Frank. He is a master of the subject.”

Crawford, unlike most Army Air Force colonels, was at fifty a little old for his rank, having spent years with Pratt & Whitney before getting a direct commission in 1940. “You mentioned that they robbed him. Isn’t he a serving officer? Wouldn’t his invention have belonged to the government, anyway?”

“By no means. He developed the engine on his own time, with private money. He signed all the proper papers, telling him how many hours a week he could work
on the project, and giving the government an interest in it. Then the government thanks him by forcing him to give away his ideas to competitors in the industry.” He shivered with indignation and spat out, “They even allowed Rover to build his engines.” The word “Rover” rolled off his lips as if he’d bitten into a bad oyster.

Owen shot a quick smile to his colleagues. All three men knew that Rolls-Royce regarded the Rover company as a mere tin bender, whose automobiles were not worthy to be on the same road as Rolls-Royces were, and Hooker obviously subscribed to the theory.

Hooker gestured out the window. “It looks like he has a moment free. Let me introduce you to him. You will be doing a lot of work with him in the future.”

Shannon, always wishing to know as much as possible before engaging in a conversation, asked, “How does he feel about shipping his engine to the United States?”

“Whittle is a patriot, first and foremost. He knows that a lot of people who scorned him are going to make a great deal of money from his invention. But he is intent on winning this war. As we all are.”

The four men moved across the grass, dry in the unusual August heat, and Hooker made the introductions. Of less than medium height, Whittle had a polite manner that belied the volcanic intensity of his eyes, which pierced each man in turn. His jaw twitched nervously and his movements were abrupt. It was obvious that he was torn between his being put out by being taken from his work and his desire to learn what American intentions were.

“Gentlemen, I hope you’ll understand when I say that I’m both surprised and pleased that General Electric is going to manufacture my engine.”

Shannon answered, “I can understand your surprise—GE is hardly a household name in aircraft engines. And I’m glad that you are pleased, but may I ask why?”

“Pratt & Whitney and Wright make wonderful reciprocating
engines, but their engineers and their management would be threatened by my engine. It’s too radical and it goes whistling round and round rather than pounding up and down!” Whittle’s arms and hands comically matched his words, flying round and round and then pounding up and down—the little byplay was totally out of character with his previous demeanor.