He did far more than consult the index. Glaring at me with eyes popped wide open, he must have pressed a signal button, because I was quickly surrounded by two men who whisked me off to a private room for interrogation: ‘Why did you ask for that particular story?’ ‘Are you entitled to wear that uniform?’ ‘But if your duty station is in Washington, why would you be in this library in New York?’ And most pressing: ‘What do you know about heavy water?’
It was a grueling session, because I was able to give only a garbled explanation of why I was there. I will not review the steps I had to take to establish my innocence of wrongdoing and deny any affiliation with a foreign government, especially German or Russian, but in time my interrogators accepted the fact that I was in naval aviation, I was entitled to my uniform, and I was simply a geography nut who had been able to put two and two together when exotic foreign places like Peenemünde were involved.
Later, I learned that the Times article and its reprint in The Saturday Evening Post had set alarm bells ringing throughout Washington, for it had revealed, as I saw immediately, data of the most sensitive nature on a problem of vital importance to the whole world: the possibility of producing an atomic bomb. I was convinced that such a bomb was going to be developed, by either our scientists or Hitler’s, and it was a terrifying prospect.
I also learned that directives had been flashed to all agencies that no comment of any kind could be published about the articles, nor any editorial speculation, nor any follow-up of any kind. Libraries were alerted to detain any reader who might ask for those editions of the Times or the Post, and it was this precaution that had trapped me. My interrogation, even though guarded, revealed enough information to reinforce all that I had suspected, so during my tour of duty in the South Pacific I carried with me the heavy realization that my world might explode at any moment. When it did, over Hiroshima, I was not surprised.
In 1955 I was in India awaiting an appointment with Jawaharlal Nehru, then head of state, and his office suggested that since he would not be able to see me for a few days I might like to make the colorful trip from New Delhi up into the mountains where the British had maintained their summer capital at Simla. In the days of the Raj, in the middle of spring, each department of government would move all its people and important papers the hundred and eighty miles north to find refuge in the cool mountain air.
I enjoyed Simla, having come there with an old friend, Sohan Lal, an Indian publisher of sorts and a wonderful bon vivant who knew Paris and New York as well as he did Delhi and the mountains. When his son married, shortly after my departure, he hired four trains to take the entire wedding party from Delhi up to Simla, and the schedule of festivities covered an entire week.
Thanks to Sohan’s hospitality, I caught a glimpse of what Simla must have been like in the past, in the time of Rudyard Kipling. One day I was walking with my wife far from Simla on a road that had led to the lower approaches to Tibet. As we neared the border, which was marked by a small wooden sign that said in several languages PROCEED NO FARTHER, I heard a clicking sound I thought must be coming from some animals or insects. But as we turned the corner we saw on a double lane leading to the frontier a huge number of women, perhaps a thousand, all on their knees banging small hammers against rocks to break them into fragments, which other women were placing by hand in the roadbed, with each little piece positioned to fit properly and then tapped gently to make it secure. I had never before seen such a concentration of manual labor, and I thought of the building of the pyramids or the great temples at Angkor Wat, which had been achieved in this painstaking way. The difference between those ancient structures and the roadway was that the latter did not require such labor-intensive methods of construction. One good bulldozer could have accomplished in an hour all the work on which these many women spent that entire day. It was an unacceptable waste of human effort, and I became so engrossed that when my wife decided to head back to our hotel I remained to analyze this mammoth project.
I saw how the larger stones were unloaded from trucks that brought them in from the distant rail terminal and how each stone had to be lifted down, since there were no dump trucks. The man who did the lifting dropped the stone at the most convenient point, from which another man lifted it, taking it closer to the roadbed, where still another and another carried it farther until finally it reached the women working with their hammers. I counted some eleven transfers of each stone until it reached the spot where its fragments were embedded in the roadbed.
‘My God!’ I cried. ‘They’re building a gigantic jigsaw puzzle,’ and that’s what it was.
When Sohan Lal came to fetch me hours later I asked him about those teeming thousands laboring to make a road: ‘Why don’t they get a bulldozer?’
‘Oh, no! When you have an unlimited population, you must do something to keep the people busy.’
‘But it’s such wasted effort. A bulldozer could build what I saw out there in a morning, if it had six good trucks bringing in the rocks and dumping them.’
‘James! I’m surprised at you! If the government brought dump trucks and a bulldozer in here tomorrow morning, those men and women you saw would destroy the trucks by noon and maybe kill the drivers, too. For taking away their livelihood.’
‘But if the trucks built the road, those thousands would be freed to work on projects that made more sense.’
‘What projects? And how could they be sure of getting on the new work the tiny wages they earn on the road?’ And then he added the comment: ‘Besides, the government pays them almost nothing. They’re such a bargain we can afford to use thousands.’
Simla boasted two famous features that perplexed me, considering its altitude and coldness in winter: a wealth of lovely bamboo groves and a great number of monkeys of a special breed adapted to cold weather and called Simlas. They were a naughty crowd, and as I walked alone among the bamboos and greeted them, the chattering beasts kept me company, with some old fellows growing quite bold and rebuking me for not having brought them something to eat. They would run at me, stop short and thrust out their lower jaw as if daring me to strike them, and if I did raise my hand, they became even bolder and came quite close, still jutting out their pugnacious jaws.
On this day I ignored them because I wanted to reflect on what I had seen that morning, those automatons building that road, and slowly a thought began to form in my mind: One of the most expensive commodities a nation can have is a cheap labor force. From this a host of consequences leaped forth as inevitable.
—If you get labor for almost nothing, you have no incentive to buy expensive tools and the quality of your product will lag behind that of nations who do use the best tools on the market.
—If you keep your labor occupied on menial tasks that are best suited for machines, your work force never develops those skills that would earn you more income.
—If you employ ten to do the work of one, none of the ten will work to maximum efficiency because each will realize that what he or she does isn’t significant.
—If you don’t pay your labor good wages, how can they ever afford to buy what you make? You limit your potential market by 50 percent at least, and if every employer in the region pays the same low wages, your market can vanish altogether.
—A nation’s wealth is generated when the money from wages is quickly spread around because this causes more goods to be produced, and real wealth consists in the making and interchange of goods.
And then I made the discovery: ‘Ricardo was wrong. There is no fixed quantum of money in the world, or in any nation. The rich man doesn’t suffer deprivation when labor gets a bigger share, for that larger amount means a bigger total for him.
My final conviction was this: ‘Labor should get the highest wage possible and then be taxed heavily to pay for the hospitals, museums, libraries, schools, roads and all the other things that make human life safer, better and more enjoyable.’
One of the truly enlightening days I’ve had in m
y life came at the end of World War II when I worked in Japan and saw a country that had been almost totally destroyed. Taken to one of the few surviving steel plants, I expected the manager, a bright fellow trained in Sweden, to tell me how gratified he was that his plant had escaped the American bombers. Not at all! As we stood watching hundreds of his capable workmen with long tongs working in intense heat to guide the emerging ribbon of red-hot steel to the area where it would be cut into usable portions, he said: ‘We’re in desperate trouble here. All our competitors had their old plants destroyed by your bombs. Now they’ll rebuild using the latest heavy machinery from Sweden and Canada. Rationalize. No more of this hand-labor nonsense,’ and he pointed to his men lifting the steel. ‘If we let those others get a head start with everything new, we may never catch up.’ He shook his head sadly and said: ‘Much better if your planes had bombed this plant. Then we’d have to start from the beginning with fresh concepts.’
‘But,’ I asked him, ‘haven’t you enjoyed a great advantage by having your plant in operation now when they don’t have theirs? Not having to rebuild, haven’t you saved a great deal of money?’ And he replied: ‘For the present, yes, but when I travel through Tokyo and see the opposition building their new plants, I am terrified.’
His statement was phenomenally on target: ‘It is often more sensible to scrap old ways even at great expense so that you start afresh with new procedures; if you cling tenaciously to the old, you will become as outmoded as the decrepit plant you’re nursing along.’
I am ashamed to confess that I witnessed an economic miracle in Japan but failed at the time to appreciate its significance. When I landed there after the war, taxicabs were Rube Goldberg affairs at which we Americans laughed: crude, beat-up bundles of junk carrying a load of charcoal in the back and a small round stove in which to burn it so that the gases would propel the taxi. Later there were the famous sixty-yen cabs (basic fare sixteen cents), which were no bigger than a child’s pram. Made by Toyota, they were called Toyopets and were both dangerous and ridiculous.
But as soon as practicable after the war Toyota produced a car—mostly tin, it seemed—that did provide space and run smoothly, but had someone told me then: ‘Jim, in a few years these Toyotas are going to drive Detroit right into the ground,’ I would have had him certified as a nut. I failed to anticipate the economic miracle that the Japanese automobile industry was about to create. I had not fully realized that hard work, inventive genius and skilled management could produce reliable products that all the world would want to purchase. But I am also famous among my friends as the man who confidently predicted that pizza would never gain a foothold in America: ‘Too much dough, not enough goodies on it, and who in his right mind would go for anchovies?’
Ideas! Ideas! They are the fuel that keeps a brain functioning at a high level, and fortunately one does not have to invent one’s own; choice ideas from the past are easily available in any good library or university or on the job, if one looks. Ideas have been the joy of my life and in my ninth decade I am still striving to understand those that lie beyond my grasp while finding great comfort in those I do understand.
I never saw the potency of an idea better exemplified than in a medical situation I observed in World War II when I landed on a tropical island infested with malaria and dengue. At first the index per thousand of infection by these disabling and sometimes deadly diseases was 1500.00, meaning that everyone could expect one and a half attacks, a fearful cost, which could have rendered our occupation of that island and other critical ones untenable. But in years past, medical researchers had studied malaria and dengue and found the answer to this ancient scourge, and one of these geniuses came to our island to supervise the miraculous eradication of the diseases: ‘A team of twenty men will use flamethrowers to burn off the surface of all the water ditches in the area. A team of a hundred will check every square inch of our occupied area, turn over dishes, cans, sagging tarpaulins, so that there is no stagnant water standing anywhere.’ When the island commander asked: ‘And what will that accomplish?’ he received an amazing answer: ‘It will kill all the mosquito eggs, and since we know adults can’t fly more than fifty yards, in a very short time every mosquito in your area will be dead. No more malaria. No more dengue,’ and before the year was out our index was down to 0.003, or three cases per thousand, and we believed that those were men who had wandered into areas that had not been cleansed. The fortuitous fact that in peacetime some bright person had gathered what seemed like useless information about mosquito behavior, conducting the kind of study glib newspapers like to ridicule, helped significantly to win the war.
In accumulating new ideas there was also a strong emotional component. Of all the poetry I have memorized and lived with during my life, none has lived longer in my thinking than a four-line jingle I came upon in 1927 at the end of my sophomore year in college. It was written in 1915 by a woman poet, Sarah Cleghorn, when people were developing social consciences:
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And watch the men at play.
Whenever my moral fervor about decent wages for decent work flagged, I recited those lines, and they reminded me of the childhood that I will describe later. But since I cannot help editing almost every printed word I see, in time the last two lines became:
The children sweating at the looms
Can see the men at play.
I was astonished just now when, in looking up the original, I found that I had long lost Miss Cleghorn’s words. Hers are better, but mine tug more at my heart.
This ends my report on my years of travel and reflection. The experience left me with two critical ideas: that all men are brothers and engaged in the same struggle to understand the complexities of life; and that society prospers when its workmen receive proper wages so that goods can be more vigorously exchanged, thus generating more wealth. My third idea would come later, and it would have nothing to do with travel or philosophy or politics.
* * *
* Forty years later I took my wife on an exploration of the Sepik, and we returned to that same village, where they no longer headhunt but where they still tell stories and carve and sing. Now when I ask her: ‘Of all the places we’ve been together, which one would you want to return to?’ she invariably replies: ‘The Sepik.’
† Years later I would read everything in English relating to Peenemünde and use it as a locale for a major portion of one of my novels.
VIII
Writing
Had I been a devout man, I would surely have interpreted my experience on the Tontouta airstrip as a theophany.
In the latter days of World War II I flew back to my headquarters in French New Caledonia in the southwestern Pacific after exciting duty in the Fiji Islands and a tumultuous exploration of Bora Bora. I had been so inspired by my adventures and so eager to get back to my typewriter to report upon them that my senses were very alert. As our plane approached big Tontouta Air Base for a sunset landing, the sky darkened ominously and I had a premonition that this landing was going to be somewhat more dangerous than normal.
My fears were realized when, just as we approached the long strip enclosed at the far end by a range of low mountains, we lost visibility. I remember saying to myself: ‘He’d better go up and around for another shot!’ and to my relief he did just that. The plane dipped its left wing, the engines roared, the nose went high in the air, and we shot upward through the menacing clouds, took a wide sweep to the left to avoid the mountains and went back out to sea to make a second attempt, hoping that in the meantime the clouds would have dissipated.
While we were executing these routine maneuvers for avoiding a hazardous landing, twilight had darkened, and as we made our approach in minimum visibility my nerves tensed, my muscles tightened. No go! Visibility nil! Again the roar of the engines, the sickening swing to the left with the wing dipping almost vertica
lly, and the swerving away from the mountains ahead. Then back out to sea and another wide swing over waves barely visible below for a third approach.
I cannot now recall whether Tontouta had night-landing radar at that time—probably not, but if it did it was undoubtedly insufficient. During the third approach I was extremely tense but not panicked because I had flown thousands of dangerous miles in small planes in the Pacific and had learned to trust Navy pilots. I remember telling myself: It’s got to be this time or we don’t make it, and I did not care to speculate on whether we would have enough fuel to carry us back to Fiji or north to Espiritu Santo.
With skill, nerve and determination our pilot brought his heavy plane into perfect alignment with the barely visible runway and eased it down in a flawless landing. We applauded, but he gave no sign of acknowledgment, because he, better than we, appreciated what a near thing it had been.
That night I had no appetite, for the tenseness in my stomach banished any interest in food, but neither was I ready for bed. In what was to become the turning point of my life, I left the transient quarters where travelers like me stayed until they could get back to their home base, and unaware of where I was wandering, I found myself back on the long, dark airstrip with the mountains at the far end visible whenever the low, scudding clouds separated momentarily to reveal them.
For some hours I walked back and forth on that Tontouta strip without any purpose other than to calm my nerves, but as I did so I began to think about my future life and to face certain problems: What do I want to do with the remainder of my life? What do I stand for? What do I hope to accomplish with the years that will be allowed me? Do I really want to go back to what I was doing before? I spent at least two hours kicking these ideas about.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 35