by Alan Bristow
The squadron wanted basic training to be switched to France, so I called Henry Boris and made my peace. He apologised for the ‘misunderstanding’ over the air fare and happily agreed to let me train Normandy Squadron pilots at Pontoise. Louis Santini went there, and Valérie André learned to fly; eventually she was to win the Legion d’Honneur, the Croix de Guerre and the American Legion of Merit evacuating wounded soldiers by helicopter, notably from the disastrous siege of Dien Bien Phu. I was to remain in Saigon, assemble and test-fly the helicopters, and run the operation. Soon, qualified pilots began returning from Pontoise, and the Hiller squadron became an indispensable part of the military operation until the French cut their losses and quit Indo-China in 1954.
After a while I began to hear rumbles of discontent about having a civilian running the show, and an English civilian at that. Boris sought to solve the problem by arranging for me to be offered French citizenship, with six months to decide whether to take it up or not, but running a medical evacuation squadron on a mercenary’s pay was not the job for me. One day in 1950 I went on leave to Europe, and just never went back. Valérie André married Louis Santini, rose to the rank of General, the first Frenchwoman to do so, and I didn’t hear from her again for sixty years.
CHAPTER 11
With Onassis to Antarctica
Wolfgang was a Nazi, but he didn’t like to talk about it. Every SS paratrooper had political instruction, he said, nobody took it seriously. Besides, his life as a storm trooper and a mercenary was behind him; now he was following his older brother Gunther into the peaceful profession of whaling. Gunther had made a lot of money before the war as a flenser, stripping blubber from whales on a factory ship. Dark, scrawny and hard as nails, the pair of them looked a far cry from the Aryan ideal, but they both had striking blue eyes.
After a hard night’s drinking on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg Gunther took me to Kiel, where he promised to introduce me to a man who knew everything about whalers and whaling, a man who could tell me how to put into practice my plan to use helicopters to spot whales. In the Germania shipyard a 16,500-ton Henry Kaiser T2 tanker called Herman F. Whiton was being converted into a whale factory ship under the name of Olympic Challenger.We went aboard an old Canadian corvette that was being busily transformed into a whale catcher, one of the fast ships that chased down and harpooned the whales for the factory ship to process. On deck Gunther introduced me to a man who, it transpired, was in charge of fitting out a dozen such whale catchers to join Olympic Challenger on an expedition to the Antarctic, working for Aristotle Onassis. His name was Kurt Reiter and he’d been part of Admiral Doenitz’s U-boat administration during the war, working miracles to build submarines under constant attack. Reiter listened to my story and asked a few brief questions. He seemed to be quite well informed about helicopters, and told me later of the collapsible autogyros that had been tried out aboard the U-boats with limited effect. He promised to give the idea some thought, and Gunther assured me that if Reiter said he would pursue the matter, he could be relied on to do so.
I enjoyed Hamburg while I awaited his word. I was not without funds; my wife and daughter had moved into a new home in Yeovil and were well provided for. I had the sales commission from eight Hiller helicopters sitting in Switzerland, together with the management contract income from the training operation. The rebuilding of Hamburg, funded by the American Marshall Plan, was well under way and there was a sense of purpose and a positive feeling about the place. Two days later, Gunther came to my hotel to tell me Reiter wanted to see me. At Kiel I was told I should go immediately to the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, where Mr Onassis was expecting me.
Even then, Aristotle Onassis was a business legend. He’d made a fortune when he cornered the market in Argentine tobacco and finagled a monopoly to sell it in Greece, and he’d doubled and tripled it in shipping. I flew to Nice and hired a car for the drive along the Corniche, reporting as instructed to the Hotel de Paris at 7 pm for dinner. A large man in a sombre suit took me into a darkened private dining room where the diminutive Onassis sat in a grey suit, wearing dark glasses despite the gloom. The large man hovered close by as we spoke.
‘Mr Bristow,’ Onassis said. ‘It’s very good of you to come and see me.’ He stretched out a hand, but didn’t get up. I sat across the table from him, and dishes I had not ordered began to arrive.
Onassis was polite and courteous and spoke very good English. He was fascinated, he said, by the idea of using helicopters for whaling. Every blue whale ‘equivalent’ was worth more than ten thousand dollars to him, but the catchers spent most of their time in fruitless hunts for whales. Increased efficiency was the key to profitability. He was full of questions about helicopters. How fast did they go? How many people did they carry? How far could they fly?
I told him about the Hiller 360A, its crop-spraying hoppers replaced by long-range fuel tanks, ranging 100 miles or more from the mother ship and covering in a few hours more sea than his entire catcher fleet could search in three days, reporting by HF radio the positions of whale pods for the catchers to hunt down.
What other helicopters were available? Onassis wanted to know. Companies like Bell, Sikorsky and Piasecki had aircraft that might be suitable for the job, I said, but I had spoken of the Hiller because it was tried, tested and reliable and would be easy to maintain aboard ship if the right spares were available.
Onassis gestured to his man, who held his chair as he got up. ‘Come, Mr Bristow. We will continue this discussion.’
Aristotle Onassis had a thing about breasts. We sat in the back of his chauffeured Hispano-Suiza with his bodyguard in the front and were driven to two excellent topless shows. At each one he was fawned over like the generous and regular customer he was, and no matter how dim the lights were in the nightclub, he never took off his dark glasses. It would have been enjoyable had I not been so keen for him to accept the concept of using a helicopter to find whales. I tried to steer the conversation back to helicopters. Whaling, I said, was a great industry with a bright future.
Onassis shook his head. ‘Mineral oil, Mr Bristow,’ he said. ‘That is where the future lies. Put your money in oil tankers.’
I couldn’t give a stuff about oil tankers, I thought – I had bigger fish to fry. But by the end of the night Onassis had made his decision. ‘I will try the helicopter, and you will fly it for me. But I must be sure to have the best helicopter, and I want to be satisfied on that score. Be sure to find me the right helicopter.’
Onassis sent me to New York with instructions to meet Mr Konialidis at his company’s American headquarters on Broadway. Constantinos ‘Niko’ Konialidis was Onassis’s cousin and functioned as his fixer in America. A stocky man with heavy eyebrows, he bore a noticeable family resemblance to Onassis. ‘Be sure to find the right helicopter,’ Mr Konialidis repeated. ‘Don’t buy the first one you see. Take six months. See them all, choose the right one.’
I was paid a generous daily rate and was given an expense account and a Lincoln Continental car, a great barge of an automobile covered in gleaming chrome in which I crossed America in comfort. These were the great pioneering days of helicopter development and I met many of the great inventors and business brains in the industry. In the course of my research, at this and other times I flew helicopters few people today have heard of – Platt-Le Page, Kellett, Bendix – as well as some that are not widely recognised, like Piasecki and Kaman. I thought the Platt-Le Page was a good design but it never got the finance it deserved, and I had a lot of time for Frank Piasecki, who got screwed when Boeing took his company off him. So many of these projects were one-man bands, and there was always a serious risk that they’d never see maturity. No matter who I talked to, I kept coming back to the three main contenders – Sikorsky’s S51, the Bell 47G Series, and the Hiller 360.
I was already well known at Sikorsky, where Ralph Alex, the chief designer, was a friend. I’d met Igor several times. He was a shy man until he got up on a podium to speak; he
could command a roomful of people better than he could conduct a one-on-one conversation. He mangled English almost as badly as did Jimmy Viner. He spoke of ‘heelicopters’ and laid a special emphasis on the ‘ed’ suffix in his words. Igor was a genius and his position as the father of the helicopter is unquestioned, but the S51 wasn’t my first choice. It was too large to land on a small deck, and it was too complex for a helicopter that would have to be maintained out of doors in all Antarctic weathers. In Fort Worth I got to know Bart Kelley and flew the Bell 47G2 with their demonstration pilot Joe Mashman. There was very little to choose between the G2 and the Hiller in terms of speed, size and reliability. The payload-range performances were identical but of the two, the Hiller could be trimmed to fly hands-off. I judged this to be a deciding factor, which would enable me to maintain an accurate dead reckoning plot. And so I graduated towards Palo Alto, California, and my original first choice.
Stanley Hiller was an astute businessmen as well as an outstandingly talented designer. Stan was a very hard taskmaster, a good athlete, an accomplished tennis player and an aficionado of motor-boats. Like many of the original helicopter pioneers, he was young – a year younger than me, in fact. Charlie Kaman was only two years older than Stan, and Frank Piasecki was the same age as Charlie. But Stan Hiller’s management organisation was excellent and his support for operators was a factor one could rely on when spare parts were needed in a hurry. No matter how well your helicopter flies, it’s a dead asset if you can’t get spares. Hiller guaranteed to deliver a 360A within my tight schedule, and to furnish an engineer familiar with the type to sail with the whaling fleet. My well-established relationship with the company counted for nothing in making the decision – Hiller won entirely because of its hands-off capability to fly straight ahead. Three months after I left New York I was again standing in Mr Konialidis’s office urging him to wire money to Bill Vincent. Because I hadn’t taken a full six months to complete the market survey, he was most suspicious. ‘Are you sure you have the right helicopter?’ he asked. I left no stone unturned, I said. The payment of my salary was arranged through Onassis’s office in Paris, with cash deposited in an account in Lausanne monthly in arrears. There was no cash incentive to fly, and there was no bonus on every whale spotted. I didn’t have the experience to negotiate such matters. I was just glad to be working.
It may seem strange today, but there was no public antipathy to whaling at that time. With the wreckage of war all around, fifty-five million people dead and a hundred million more starving, there seemed to be more pressing problems to worry about. If the whaling industry made money, provided work and could contribute to the reconstruction of a damaged world, everyone was in favour. Perhaps when those times come again, men will look on matters differently. Certainly in 1950 there seemed to be no difference between fishing for whales and fishing for anything else.
I went back to Hamburg to sketch out my requirements for Kurt Reiter. I needed a helideck abaft Olympic Challenger’s four funnels, with a turntable on which the helicopter could be rotated through 360 degrees so that it would always be possible when the ship was stationary to fly off into wind, and to stop the rotor blades with the tail boom into the wind, removing the problem of having the rotor blades smash off the boom as they rotated slowly after stopping the engine. Quick tie-down points on the turntable ensured that the helicopter remained firmly attached to the deck. In addition, Reiter made up some padded blade clamps of my own design, which would hold the blades rigid on stanchions in very strong winds and rough seas, eliminating the chance of damage to the rotor head. Reiter had neither the room nor the time to provide a hangar, so the helicopter would be permanently out in the open and would need all the protection it could get.
I next caught up with the Olympic Challenger in September 1951 in Montevideo, where I discovered Reiter had followed my instructions to the letter and had done a magnificent job. The turntable ran on tracks and ballbearings and was very easy to move. Once again, Onassis had put me up in the finest hotel and had given me a Lincoln Continental and an expense account. While the ship was bunkering I was taken to meet the captain, William Reichert, and the expedition leader, Lars Andersen. His crews called him ‘Fanden’ – the name means ‘devil’ in Norwegian, and was apt. He was six foot four and had fists like legs of mutton, and had in his time been acknowledged as the world’s best harpoon gunner. In 1937 he had been signed up by the Germans, the world’s biggest users of whale oil, on a three-year contract at a reputed $125,000 a season – unheard-of riches even in the world of whaling. His German connections had done him no favours after the war, and he was unable to return to Norway. Fanden Andersen ruled over a piratical army of crewmen, mostly German and Norwegian with a few Shetland Islanders thrown in. Among the Norwegians were said to be a number of quislings, Nazi sympathisers who had backed the wrong horse and who like Andersen were unable to go home; others had been banished from Norway for the peculiarly Norwegian crime of having worked for a foreign whaling company. Those who had worked for the Germans, in particular, were persona non grata; Norway had looked on Germany’s expansion of its whaling fleet in the 1930s with jealousy, and any of its countrymen who joined the Germans was banished. But money dictated the game; whale oil was so valuable and so vital for everything from foodstuffs to lubricating watches that even in February 1940, the Germans and the British concluded a de facto agreement to allow the Norwegians to export whale oil to both sides. With the war over everything had changed except the pressing need for whale oil, and these men were there to provide it.
The officers of this motley rabble were the harpoon gunners and the captains of the twelve catcher boats. All Norwegian, they were rich men who lived in palatial homes in Cape Town or St John’s, men who were either at sea or wishing they were at sea. Alcohol was strictly banned; even the methylated spirits was doled out from the bridge. The ship’s carpenter used to go up there to get some meths to thin out his tin of shellac, and when he got back to his workbench he’d invariably have a moustache of shellac on his top lip. He was an able and dextrous carpenter when sober, despite the fact that he had lost two fingers on his right hand and one on his left in drunken mishaps with his equipment. There was a shop aboard ship, but the boot polish and aftershave would run out after the first two days, and nobody ever polished a boot or put aftershave on his chin. The contents would disappear into the illicit stills that ran somewhere on the ship. Fights were rare, vicious and brief. The job was relentless and exhausting, the weather conditions extreme. It was hard work just staying alive, and more than one crew member, overcome with tedium and desolation, committed suicide. I occasionally wore my Fleet Air Arm officer’s uniform, complete with ribbons, to reinforce my authority.
Fanden Andersen had no time for helicopters and believed Onassis had taken leave of his senses, and some of his gunners shared his sentiments. Andersen made it clear he felt I was supernumerary and the money that had gone into preparing the Olympic Challenger to take the helicopter was wasted. If I’d gone down in the sea I’m not sure he would have stopped to pick me up, but my first problem in Montevideo was Hiller’s engineer. Hiller management had promised me a time-served man who would know every nut and bolt of the helicopter. Instead, I got Joe Soloy. Joe was a terrific guy and was destined to become one of the engineering greats of the aviation world, the founder of the Soloy Corporation, a multi-million-dollar company that created turbine engine conversions for dozens of types of aircraft. As a US Marine Joe had fought on Guadalcanal, and after the war he had applied for a veterans’ maintenance course on helicopters. This got him six weeks’ work experience at the Hiller factory, during which he’d helped attach the tail booms to the bathtub fuselages and made sure they were bolted together properly. He freely admitted he knew the square root of nothing about engines and airframes. I was angry with Bill Vincent for sending me such an inexperienced man, but Bill said they’d tried every other engineer in the factory, and nobody would go. Joe’s son needed an expensive o
peration on his toes, and Joe thought a season’s whaling money would cover the bill. I just had to cope with it. Personally I knew the aircraft inside out, and I figured Joe could learn on the job. Unfortunately, someone of German origin at Palo Alto wrote to Olympic Whaling pointing out that Joe had no experience, and Olympic made a fuss. I told them Joe was right for the job, and anyway, there wasn’t another helicopter engineer for five thousand miles. Joe turned out to be a great asset, capable and willing, and when I was flying off searching for whales I could absolutely rely on him to man the radio for every second of the flight. Joe quickly learned how to change the oil, fill the helicopter with fuel and check the filters and be relied on to do a thorough daily pre-flight inspection.
With a small amount of help from Joe I assembled the 360A at Montevideo airport. As usual the instruction manuals were excellent – even the torque values for every critical bolt were plainly stated. The optional extras included a trailed aerial for the HF transceiver provided by Hiller and an RAF ex-Coastal Command ‘Gibson Girl’, which could transmit SOS signals over a long range thanks to a copper antenna attached to a hydrogen balloon. I also had a rubber survival suit made by a British company called the Frankenstein Rubber Company, whose attempts to interest the Royal Navy in these suits had come to nothing for want of realistic trials. In return for £6,000 I had agreed to test their suit in the Antarctic, wearing the top or bottom half of it at all times and spending at least thirty hours in water in which ice was present. I rigged a float to the ship’s companionway and spent up to ninety minutes at a time fulfilling the requirement, much to the amusement of the deck crew. It was bloody cold, I can tell you. For the whole expedition I wore some piece of the Frankenstein survival suit, which made me smell pretty rank – not that that’s a problem on a whaler. But what had seemed easy money at the outset became very hard work, and I earned every penny of that £6,000. My tests won the company a Navy contract, and later, after they’d sensibly changed their name to the Victoria Rubber Company, they got some business from Bristow Helicopters, too.