by Neil Sheehan
Simon Ramo would, in effect, become chief engineer and chief scientist of the enterprise. Except for the hydrogen bomb itself, which Los Alamos would build and test, the Ramo-Wooldridge task force under him would oversee the design of virtually everything else, such as the guidance and control mechanism, and the warhead, or reentry vehicle as it was called, which would house the bomb. The actual manufacture of these subsystems would then be done by organizations the Ramo-Wooldridge and WDD teams would have worked with in the design and prototype phases. These would often be subsidiaries of larger firms, but they would have already established a reputation in a specialized field and would be selected for their expertise. Convair was not among the candidates. (To avoid conflict of interest, Ramo-Wooldridge would be forbidden under its contract with the Air Force to manufacture any ICBM components. Dean Wooldridge was in the process of exiting the scene in order to seek and manage separately other non-ICBM business for the firm.) If Schriever’s newfangled approach prevailed, Convair stood to lose a great deal of money, hundreds of millions and possibly even billions of dollars in business, on a program with the potential of the ICBM. Bennie had no alternative if he was to succeed, but he had been warned that the course he was taking would ensnare him in a nasty power struggle right at the outset of his venture.
38.
THE GURU OF ROCKETS
In the meantime, Schriever had been recruiting his own missile-building task force. Because Atlas had been given the Air Force’s highest priority, he could pick whomever he wished and their commands had to release them. To give Bennie’s team continuity, Gardner had also arranged with White and Twining that once an officer was selected, unless Bennie subsequently relinquished or fired him, he was assigned to WDD for the duration.
No missile could fly without rocket engines. It was thus understandable that the first name on a list Bennie had been compiling was that of Lieutenant Colonel Edward Hall, the expert on rocket propulsion at the laboratories of the Air Development Center at Wright-Patterson. Hall had been the man who had briefed the Tea Pot Committee on rocket engines. Schriever and Ed Hall could not savor the irony involved when Schriever summoned Hall to a meeting at his office in the Pentagon that July of 1954, explained the project to him, and invited him to become WDD’s chief of propulsion. At the time, neither knew that Ed Hall’s younger brother, Ted, had been, along with Klaus Fuchs, one of the Soviet Union’s two invaluable physicist spies at Los Alamos.
Edward Nathaniel Hall was, in fact, considerably more than an expert on rocket engines. He was the U.S. Air Force’s guru on rocketry. He was also well known to devotees of the subject outside the Air Force. In the following year, 1955, his achievement in improving liquid rocket fuel was to earn him the American Rocket Society’s Robert H. Goddard Memorial Award, commemorating the American rocket pioneer who had first attempted to interest the Army in the military utility of rockets near the close of the First World War in 1918. While Ed Hall did not share Ted’s politics, he did share the brilliance of mind and the largeness of ego of the brother who was his junior by eleven years. He also had a trait distinctly his own that would serve him ill—a flash-pan temper.
His road to recognition as a rocketeer had not been an easy one. Born Edward Nathaniel Holtzberg in New York City on August 4, 1914, three days after the First World War broke out, his sense of security had not been improved by the socioeconomic roller coaster on which his father, Barney Holtzberg, had taken the family in the rise and crash of his fur business. That sterling quality in Jewish culture, the sense by both parents and child of the value of an education, had been Ed Hall’s salvation. He won his way into Townsend Harris, one of New York’s elite high schools, where entrance was by competitive examination, and went on to the City College of New York. Tuition at CCNY was free in the 1930s. In 1935, he acquired a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and then, to improve his chances in the job-scarce environment of the Depression, took a professional degree, the equivalent of a Ph.D. without the thesis, in the subject the following year.
But he couldn’t find a steady job as an engineer. Hall knew that the difficulty was not simply the lack of opportunity posed by the Depression. When an opportunity did come along, someone else less able was hired and he was turned down because of the anti-Semitism that was also so prevalent at the time. His more advanced degree in chemical engineering didn’t help, nor did a disguise he sought to adopt by filing court papers to change Holtzberg to Hall. A tall, husky man with an aquiline nose, deep-set brown eyes, a high forehead, and dark curly hair, Ed Hall looked much too East European to pass for an Anglo-Saxon. He had to be satisfied bouncing about earning his living as an auto mechanic, a steamfitter, a plumber, an electrician, a radio repairman, whatever he could scrounge. And so he finally gave up on the civilian world. In September 1939, as Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and the Second World War began, Hall joined the U.S. Army Air Corps as an enlisted man. The Air Corps was not yet awarding commissions to engineers. A man had to become a pilot first and then go into engineering, but Hall reasoned that this would change with the world situation becoming more perilous and the Air Corps thus bound to grow. He opted for the mechanics school at Chanute Field south of Chicago. Familiarizing himself with the service’s flying machines seemed the obvious way to get started.
At his first posts—March Field, California, where, not that many years before, Bennie Schriever had served his initial stint as a novice pilot under Hap Arnold, and then at a new airfield in Alaska, Elmendorf, near Anchorage—Hall’s skill at repairing aircraft and correcting the mistakes of the ordinary mechanics gained him quick promotion to sergeant. He succeeded so well at Elmendorf that he became a captive there. In 1941, with war approaching and the Air Corps on the edge of a breakneck expansion into the Army Air Forces, Arnold realized that he would require a lot of competent engineer officers to keep his planes in the air. An announcement went out that enlisted men with the requisite qualifications could apply for commissions. Hall immediately did. The airfield commander had no intention of losing him. He threw Hall’s application for a commission into his wastebasket. A fellow sergeant who ran the Elmendorf radio shack rescued him, surreptitiously transmitting the application to Sacramento, where it was routinely forwarded to Washington.
Hall entered the war as a freshly commissioned second lieutenant right after Pearl Harbor. It was a measure of his capacity to get himself into jams and to irritate people that despite membership in a burgeoning organization where promotions came faster than paymasters could keep track of them, and his heroic contributions as an aircraft repair and engineering fireman for the air forces in England, he managed to finish the war in 1945 just four grades up. (And passage from second to first lieutenant is, barring serious misconduct, virtually automatic, not really counting as a promotion.) He did not make major until June 1, 1945, after Germany had surrendered and Japan was two and a half months from collapse.
At the beginning of 1943, when Hall was given his first emergency assignment, he was up one grade to first lieutenant. His task was to organize and operate a mobile repair service for B-17s that had crash-landed at airfields, in meadows, and in other open spaces all over southern England and the Midlands after being shot up on bombing raids into the Nazi-occupied continent. Squadron mechanics were qualified for routine maintenance; major fixes were beyond most of them. The original scheme for handling seriously damaged bombers had been to dismantle them and send them to a central depot for repair, but this had proven impractical. The brigadier general in charge of the maintenance and repair division of the Eighth Air Force’s service command came up with the mobile repair idea as a way to attack the problem. With losses to the Luftwaffe’s fighters and German flak rising and promised replacement bombers being diverted to the campaign in North Africa, the need to get these wounded Boeing warriors fit for the air once more was literally desperate. Hall was chosen for the job because of the reputation for energy and effectiveness he had established while engineer officer for a
transport group that supplied the way station airfields built at Goose Bay, Labrador, and on Greenland and Iceland to ferry aircraft to Britain.
The brigadier gave Hall a letter authorizing him to take charge of any battle-damaged aircraft anywhere in the British Isles and carte blanche to organize his repair teams. He interviewed other junior engineer officers until he found six he thought reasonably competent. They in turn each rounded up four or five enlisted mechanics for their teams. Even though he was repairing aircraft manufactured by a competitor, civilian engineers from the Lockheed company stationed over in Northern Ireland were kind enough to ship him half a dozen trucks. Hall outfitted them as on-the-road machine shops with drills, riveting equipment, and other tools and spare parts. The Lockheed group also sent him some of their expert civilian aircraft mechanics to train his men and tackle the really complicated jobs. He finagled a Ford station wagon that had once belonged to the British to transport himself around. It had the RAF’s roundel insignia on one side and the American star on the other, allowing Hall to gas up at any fuel point run by either service. He also requisitioned enough radio equipment to set up a network that kept him in touch with all of his teams and enabled him to receive warnings of where downed aircraft were located. As soon as he got a report, Hall would whisk to the scene in the station wagon, write up a repair plan for the aircraft, and dispatch a team. He and his men were soon reviving “splashed down” bombers, the English euphemism for a crash landing, hither and yon.
Then one day he was notified of a B-17 down in bad condition at an airfield under LeMay’s command. He arrived to discover a mechanic from an English civilian repair crew on a ladder making what the Englishman seemed to think was an acceptable fix to a spar, the main support for the span of a wing. The spar had been shot nearly in two at a point where it bore a particularly heavy load. Hall looked at the repair the English mechanic was attempting and asked where his foreman was. Hall found the foreman and asked him who had designed this fix. “Oh, it was done by Boeing,” the foreman replied. Hall could see that this had to be false. Under the proposed repair the wing would have snapped in two under the stress of flight. He told the English foreman to cease work. “Go to wherever you live or whoever runs you, but no more work on this airplane,” Hall said. “Oh, I can’t do that. We are under contract,” the foreman said. “Contract, bontract! Get out of here,” Hall shouted. He gestured at the .45 caliber semiautomatic service pistol he carried in a holster on his hip. “Look, I have a gun here,” he said. “I am going to take it out, point it at you, and count to five,” and proceeded to do just that. The Englishman, as Hall told the story, “took off like a scared cat,” his mechanics with him.
Not long afterward, while Hall was inspecting the B-17 for more battle damage, he was called to the telephone. In the hurly-burly of the buildup, the usual had occurred—incompetents had snookered their way into rank and place. The caller was a colonel at the central depot. Hall had run across him in earlier years and knew that he had sparse engineer training. The man had somehow convinced the authorities otherwise, been given a colonel’s eagles, and put in charge of the depot’s engineering section. He had then apparently hired some Englishman with a crew of self-styled aviation mechanics to repair bombers. The colonel said he understood Hall had dismissed the crew from a job and ordered Hall to put them back on it right away. Hall refused and said the colonel’s hired mechanics had no idea what they were about. “What they were doing would have guaranteed that the airplane would have crashed,” Hall said. The colonel asked by whose authority Hall was acting. Hall read him the letter of blanket authorization from the brigadier general commanding the maintenance and repair division. “It doesn’t make any difference,” the colonel said. He once again ordered Hall to put his English crew back on the job. Instead of simply hanging up, informing the brigadier of what was going on, and taking satisfaction as the brigadier brought his heel down on the colonel, Hall did something that he subsequently reflected “wasn’t very wise.” He let loose the spring of his temper. “You son of a bitch!” he yelled into the phone. “I’m not about to put anybody back and kill people and ruin airplanes.” And then he hung up.
A couple of weeks later he received a notice to report for a court-martial hearing at Eighth Air Force headquarters at Bushy Park, up the Thames from London, near Hampton Court Palace, where Henry VIII had held sway. When he arrived at the appointed office, a major sitting behind a desk read him a charge sheet the colonel had sworn out against Hall. To Hall’s further anger and insult, the colonel did not accuse him of insubordination or conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. Rather, he charged Hall with gross technical incompetence in the performance of his duties as an engineer. The major handed Hall a copy and instructed him to return in two days with a response. Hall went immediately to the Boeing office in London. He knew the engineers there because he had been consulting regularly with them on how best to repair the B-17s. He told them what had happened, showed them the charge sheet, and asked if they would write a letter affirming his competence. They were happy to oblige. The letter said that not only was Hall an extremely accomplished engineer, his mobile group was far better at repairing B-17s than any other organization in the United Kingdom and its disbandment would be a disaster.
The next morning, Hall presented the letter to the major. He could see the man’s face color with anger as he read it. He asked Hall if there were any other copies and, if so, to hand them to him. Hall replied that that was impossible because he had mailed the copies to friends in the United States, with instructions to give the letter to their local newspapers if they did not hear from Hall within two weeks. The major ordered Hall to take a seat and strode off, letter in hand. About fifteen minutes later, a general appeared. Hall subsequently decided that the bestarred figure was probably Ira Eaker. It may well have been, as Eaker was then commanding the Eighth while Carl Spaatz was off in the North African theater as Eisenhower’s deputy for air. The general grinned at Hall as he rose from the chair where he had been sitting, shook his hand, slapped him on the back, and said, “Ed, get out of here and keep them flying,” which was what Hall did. He kept his teams at it until, as more trained engineering personnel arrived from the United States and more and better repair depots were established, they worked themselves out of a job and were disbanded.
(Hall’s quickness to reach for his pistol was not limited to professional crises. Shortly after his arrival in England in late 1942, while he was briefly stationed at Oxford, Hall met a young Englishwoman named Edith Shawcross. She was a niece of a prominent English jurist, Hartley Shawcross, later awarded a life peerage as Baron Shawcross of Friston for his accomplishments as senior British prosecutor at the war crimes trial of the leading Nazis at Nuremberg in 1945–46. An independent woman with a will that was strong, if not quite as strong as Hall’s, Edith was an honors graduate in botany from St. Hilda’s, one of the women’s colleges at the university. She had joined the Civil Defence Corps and in 1942 was driving an ambulance in Oxford. While she was standing in line to buy a drink at a hotel bar there one evening, an American officer walked up and asked if she would step aside so that he could pass through. Thinking he was trying to jump the line, she said, “No, I was here first.” Hall pointed to a bartender farther down the bar who had gone unnoticed. There was no line in front of him. “That’s all right, baby,” Hall said, “I’ll buy you a drink.” He did and they were married nine months later.
In early 1944, while Hall was momentarily stationed near Bournemouth on the south coast, he received a phone call that Edith was giving birth to their first child and having an extremely troublesome time. He tore up the roads to Oxford in the Ford station wagon he had not yet surrendered. At the hospital there, Edith’s obstetrician told him that she had been in labor for about fifty hours, that the heart of the child still within her was weakening, and that she was also failing rapidly. The obstetrician seemed confused, as if he had lost his nerve, and, in any case, Hall decided, time
was critical if either mother or child or both were to survive. He drew his .45, pressed the muzzle into the doctor’s chest, and ordered him to deliver the baby immediately. This the obstetrician, who seemed relieved at being forced to take action, did in a procedure using a forceps. Edith rallied. As an infant, the child was weak from the almost certain deprivation of oxygen he had suffered during his prolonged birth, but he lived. The Halls named him David and he went on to gain a Ph.D. in physics from Cal-tech.)
Hall’s achievement with his mobile repair teams should have brought him immediate promotion to captain. In March 1943, the brigadier in charge of maintenance and repair presented him with a letter of commendation praising his “intelligence, initiative and industry” and his “quick grasp of the requirements of field maintenance” for the success of the project. The letter was endorsed by the major general heading the entire Service Command and a copy was filed in Hall’s records. Furthermore, he received a Legion of Merit for his next major accomplishment between May and August 1943, while still a first lieutenant: keeping the bombers flying during that critical year when the Eighth Air Force was so beleaguered. The citation praised the “long hours and untiring efforts” he had devoted “to the invention and development of special tools” that made it possible to repair the fuselages of damaged bombers much more rapidly. The award of such a high decoration to a man at the bottom of the officer ranks was a rarity and spoke for the importance of Hall’s contribution. But he had to wait until mid-October 1943 for his captaincy.