Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  But Laning’s “extraordinary heroism”—“in keeping with the highest traditions of the Navy”47—was not his main contribution to this battle. In addition to commending his “indefatigable energy and inflexible purpose,” Laning’s Legion of Merit citation makes special note of “expeditious development of certain doctrine and organization” which “materially shortened the period necessary for full utilization in combat. In addition he evolved a considerable portion of the special techniques and training facilities thus further contributing to its marked success.” This oblique language circumspectly refers to Laning’s work since 1942 in modernizing the Combat Information Center (CIC), which collects and evaluates and redistributes information about the engagement (“field intelligence”) while it is going on, to organize the battle plans in real time. Hutchins had been refitted with the newest CIC equipment in its last overhaul at Pearl Harbor. Laning acknowledged to Heinlein drawing on years of reading science fiction and the speculative bull sessions they had in their Academy days. “And it works and sinks and shoots down Japs,” he wrote to Heinlein.48 Although histories of World War II naval engagements pay scant attention to the improvements in CIC during the war, integrating field intelligence from the new technologies of radar (one of Laning’s specializations) and sonar with visual data, they do remark often on the surprisingly aggressive—and successful—behavior of destroyers in the Battle of Surigao Strait, one of the four major engagements in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Laning’s innovative work with CIC put him in the forefront of CIC development, and he repeatedly acknowledged the role Heinlein’s fiction had played in the accomplishment, urging his friend, “Save yourself for some super-stories.”49

  Even if Scoles’s experiment at NAES never produced anything particularly useful, science fiction had justified its existence in World War II.

  Heinlein continued to work in a state of quiet exhaustion. Ginny Gerstenfeld remarked once that they seemed to have cut the day in half since the start of the war, and he quipped it must be a shortage of materials50—and the work doubled and then tripled, taking up all his time, even on Sundays. He did not stint on entertaining friends in the service who passed through Philadelphia. Jack Williamson had been accepted for the Army and was training in weather reporting. He was passing through Philadelphia early in December 1944 and took the Heinleins, the de Camps, the Asimovs, and L. Ron Hubbard to a steak dinner—a welcome relief, as meat was still rationed. By that time, also, the financial strain was becoming acute: Heinlein and Leslyn were supporting six people in three households—he and Leslyn in Philadelphia, Keith and the two boys in Laguna Beach, with Skipper in her own setup nearby. They also had a new source of anxiety: a rumor reached them from the Philippines that Mark Hubbard, Leslyn’s brother-in-law, might still be alive, caught by the Japanese at last, after twenty-nine months of guerrilla resistance in the bush.

  The work was exhausting and overwhelming, and it continued to increase. In addition to his regular work, Heinlein took on a special “crash priority” project for Captain—now Fleet Admiral and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO)—King.51 Nearly simultaneously, he got a request through back channels for some high-priority input from his science-fiction colleagues on a strategic problem intractable by conventional means. The Japanese kamikaze program was a serious annoyance to Naval operations.

  In the First Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944—sometimes known as the “Marianas Turkey Shoot”—Japanese naval air support capability was severely crippled. There were essentially no aircraft carrier forces available. The Japanese high command had devised a strategy that struck many people inside the Japanese government as a corruption and perversion of Bushido: the “divine wind” kamikazes (named for typhoons in the thirteenth century that fortuitously drove off invading Mongolian fleets) would crash their ships into targets—the WWII version of suicide bombers. Some of the kamikaze pilots were as young as fourteen. Some were bolted into their cockpits so they could not escape their fate. The first regular use of kamikazes took place in the Battle for Leyte Gulf—the day after Laning’s night engagement in Surigao Strait.

  In theory, the demonstration of Japanese fighting spirit would break the Americans’ will to fight. It didn’t happen that way. For the most part, the Americans were simply horrified—and it only confirmed the general opinion that the Japanese were moral monsters who had to be crushed out of existence.

  The Navy was taking more combat casualties due to kamikazes than were the Army and the Marines ashore. The conventional response—improved detection and defense—wasn’t working well enough. Heinlein was asked by OpNav-23 to come up with some unconventional responses.52

  Even though the kamikaze program was not, by itself, a great impediment to the war in the Pacific, it was one more symptom of a problem that was becoming central, so far as Heinlein was concerned: Germany and Japan now had to be obliterated as cultures: “This is not revenge,” he explained, “this is pragmatic necessity. This murderous damn foolishness has got to stop.”53

  Early in the fall of 1944, Heinlein started a science-fiction think tank among his colleagues scattered around the Atlantic northeast—Campbell and his assistant, L. Jerome Stanton, from New York, and Stanton’s roommate, Theodore Sturgeon; George O. Smith and L. Ron Hubbard came with that group, too, by train every weekend, to the Heinleins’ apartment.

  Heinlein threw himself into the kamikaze project.54 This, at least, gave him the satisfaction of something concrete that could be accomplished and not blocked by senseless bureaucracy.

  OpNav-23 used to come to my apartment on Sundays to get the latest work ahead of channels and discuss it—and if he liked it, he could start the breadboarding that same night and have it flown out and tested at sea by Ingram’s special force off Hampton Roads that same week long before the paperwork could pass through several hands.55

  There were, however, certain inconveniences associated with the project: there were no hotel accommodations available in wartime Philadelphia, and nearly everyone needed to stay overnight. Some slept on the floor in the Heinleins’ hallway; others slept overnight with Henry Sang.

  This gave the Heinleins a chance to become better acquainted with L. Ron Hubbard, and they found him a fascinating person. He was in Princeton in September 1944,56 and Campbell roped him in for the think tank. Both the Heinleins found him very compatible, though Sprague de Camp and Jack Williamson were both suspicious of him. Heinlein was fascinated by Hubbard’s larger-than-life quality—and by the number of wounds he had already taken in his country’s service.57 He was a prime talker, the kind of conversationalist who could draw people out. He was also good story material. One evening at the Heinleins’ apartment, Robert remarked on a persistent dust devil hanging around the odd cornices of the building, and Hubbard glanced over and said, “Oh, that’s just Kitten,” and went back to his conversation with someone else. Robert excused himself and immediately made a note of the remark. 58 Three years later it would become a short story, “Our Fair City.”59

  Soon after starting up the kamikaze think tank, Heinlein was then handed yet another “crash priority” project to discover how to build nonmetallic “radomes”—aerodynamic blister on the underside of an aircraft—to house newly invented, ultrasecret radar equipment.

  Radar—Radio Detection and Ranging—was the great secret of World War II, after the Norden bombsight (a mechanical analog computer that facilitated precision, high-altitude bombing); multiple groups were working on radar in the United States and in Britain (Arthur C. Clarke among them). E. J. King, Heinlein’s old captain on the Lexington, had been advanced by President Roosevelt to Chief of Naval Operations, and he personally supervised this project and another crash project dealing with radar proximity fuses. Admiral King wanted reports on his desk by 8 A.M. each Monday, and Heinlein made sure to get the latest results by Saturday night, plus special reports for breakthroughs. Heinlein tagged his most dependable engineer to help out with this project—Ginny Gerstenfeld.

 
I made Hobson’s choice, as dependable engineers were scarce, most of them being either old civil servants with no other speeds but ahead slow and stop, new wartime civil servants lacking either adequate professional training or experience or both, male reserve officers who weren’t really engineers at all but were devoted to the Navy’s endless paperwork, and female reserve officers some few of whom were graduate engineers but most of them were not. That left me, a mechanical engineer with considerable experience in Navy planes and their problems, and a female reserve lieutenant [Virginia Gerstenfeld], chemist with seven years professional industrial experience before she enlisted and whose service had been BuAer and Mustin field … [sic] and was the only WAVE in her shop who changed from blues to dungarees each morning and got her hands dirty.60

  By late 1944, it was clear that the war in Europe was winding down. The Allied forces had overwhelming numerical superiority and were pushing the Germans back on all fronts. The Italian peninsula had been completely retaken, and the Russians were moving on Germany. Hitler had one last move to make: on December 22, 1944, Germany began a massive push—its last—that came to be known as the “Battle of the Bulge,” because on the hundreds of thousands of pushpin maps people used to follow the European Theater of Operations (ETO) war news as it was reported, Germany’s positions suddenly bulged out in the Ardennes forest. On New Year’s Day, 1945, Hitler threw the entire Luftwaffe into his “Great Blow” operation, bombing Allied airfields in Belgium, Holland, and northern France. But the damage the Luftwaffe took from defenders was devastating. A week later, Hitler ordered a general German withdrawal, and by January 16, all the positions previously held by the Allies had been retaken. The war in Europe was almost at an end. Now came the Navy’s War.

  25

  STABILIZING, SOMEWHAT

  Robert and Leslyn had decided before Thanksgiving 1944 to postpone Christmas for the duration. They were barely scraping by, their two wartime salaries supporting six people in three households. That December, Leslyn’s mother, Skipper, died suddenly—Leslyn cryptically said later of “food fads.”1 That caused their financial crisis to ease a little. They started buying war bonds again for the savings account.

  And on Christmas Day, although they would not find out about it for five months, Mark Hubbard, Leslyn’s brother-in-law, was shot at Bilibid Prison in the Philippines and then set afire while still alive. That December, Leslyn lost most of her immediate family, and she was never the same again.

  Leslyn also had to bear up under the unbearable pressure of her war work, and did it surpassingly well: “Whenever she moves into a shop,” Heinlein wrote friends in England, “she cuts down absenteeism enormously.”

  We have statistics on it; it will be possible, when it is all over, to calculate just how many journeyman mechanics she has been equivalent to, in terms of shop hours saved for military productions. Then I shall recalculate it in terms of bombers. She was very anxious when the war started to make something with her own hands, something that would be directly destructive to the Jerries and the Nips. But this is better; had she stayed on the assembly line, she would have been just one productive worker. By using her really exceptional talents as a personnel troubleshooter, she is equal to at least a dozen highly skilled old hands.2

  Heinlein never talked about their relationship during that time in specifics, except to note that she was sleeping even more than usual for her. But between the lines of what little was said, it can be guessed that her uncontrollable rages became frequent and alarming. She retreated into herself, unreachable—by him. She was reaching out to every individual in her shop even as she withdrew from him. And there seemed to be nothing at all he could do about it but endure.

  There was so much for both of them to endure.

  When L. Ron Hubbard got orders in January 1945 to go to San Francisco, he celebrated by bringing Heinlein a whole box of his favorite candy bars. In sugar-rationed wartime, this was an incredible act of generosity.3 Hubbard would be in and out of Southern California, and Heinlein suggested that he look up another friend of his, Jack Parsons, a brilliant, self-taught rocket engineer and another personality as fascinating in his own way as Hubbard.4

  Heinlein had come to despise his job—the waste, the inefficiency, the absolute rigidity of the bureaucratic red tape that tied everything up in knots and made it nearly impossible to get anything useful done. If he stopped and thought about it, his work environment filled him with disgust and moral revulsion—so he thought about it as little as possible.

  I found here my conception of the navy had been incorrect or at least incomplete … and I began to be ashamed of being a naval officer (yes, ashamed). Presently the heroic exploits of the fleet compensated in part and gradually I began to understand the mechanism which produced, automatically, Snafu Manor. It does not produce bastards but it gives them scope … .

  —and I hate such bastards. Not impersonally, and intellectually, but emotionally—I hate ’em—and it is damn well time more naval officers hated ’em and determined to change the situation which gives them power.5

  Perhaps one reason Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers resonated so much with Robert was that it explained how much of the bureaucratic situation was a natural consequence of the prewar organization, and of the conditions of American life in general. Both government hiring policies and the Navy’s internal working methods encouraged safe, conservative thinking, “never taking your finger off your number,” in Navy jargon. But understanding, contrary to the saw, does not beget forgiveness.

  In self-protection, he didn’t think about it, if he could get away with it. He dealt with the problems at hand, one problem at a time. He turned his numerous personal and professional contacts into a support network he could sometimes use to work around the bureaucratic snafu at NAES.

  They needed a special speed-camera for certain tests, for instance, but it would take a bale of paperwork and probably two years of waiting to get it through channels. Because Heinlein talked photography constantly with John Campbell and his group, however, he knew that George O. Smith already had the equipment he needed. One tiny problem at a time could be solved—if you didn’t mind bending the regs.

  But Robert’s and Leslyn’s health—physical, mental, spiritual—continued to deteriorate. It did not pass without notice. When Henry Kuttner was mustered out of the Army in Red Bank, New Jersey, in January 1945, as too invalid even to be used as a typist, he went back to writing there in New Jersey, to raise enough money eventually to get his wife, Catherine, out of the “filthy climate”6 and back to California. The Kuttners visited the Heinleins on February 3, 1945, and were taken to “another science-fiction dinner,” memorialized by Isaac Asimov:

  As was not true of the first dinner party [for L. Ron Hubbard, the previous year], the food and service were horrible. It embarrassed Bob (who was hosting it) extremely.

  The peak moment of embarrassment came when someone tried vainly to get a waiter to bring a fork, and Heinlein, finally, by main force, stopped one in midflight and demanded a fork. The waiter nodded, walked over to another table piled high with dirty plates and assorted garbage, and looked over the scraps for a possible fork. We yelled out, “Never mind,” and the diner who was short a fork made do with his fingers.7

  It was not the dinner that disturbed the Kuttners, though:

  We are rather troubled to realize that both of you seem to be strung on taut wires these days, compared to three years ago … After the tensile strength is exceeded, it’s a damn sight harder to get the resilience back in a hurry. The hypertension’s sneaked up on you both so gradually you’re probably not conscious of it, but it’s certain there, submerged under the surface, and we are worried about it and expect you to blow up presently and suddenly.8

  Others were becoming concerned, as well. Heinlein had to assure John Arwine (with some embarrassment, since Arwine was in service in the South Pacific and actually in physical danger):

  By strict refusal to indulge in late hours a
nd to take on things we couldn’t do, we are now in as good health as we have been at any time since the war started and quite prepared to out last and out work any god damn Jap or German civilian.9

  Early in 1945, Ginny Gerstenfeld came to him with a problem. She had been working on the inflatable life rafts all naval aircraft carried as emergency equipment. Her test sample for a batch of life-raft adhesive had jelled and so, of course, could not be used as an adhesive at all. She put in an order for a replacement test sample when her immediate superior, John Huddick, stopped her. BuAer wanted this batch and wanted it now. Huddick told her to pass it as if it had been tested. Gerstenfeld was astonished—and dismayed: life rafts assembled with this stuff could come apart as they inflated. Her immediate reaction was to refuse the order, but she asked for time to think over the matter and went to Heinlein for advice.10

  She was perfectly correct—and these were orders she could not possibly obey with a clear conscience. But rationality can destroy you in an unsane situation: if she simply refused the order she might be brought up on charges of insubordination and handed a General Court Martial (GCM)—a very serious matter.11 The order to falsify test results was clearly illegal, but in wartime, a GCM might not want to hear mitigating circumstances to insubordination. Heinlein told her to sit on the matter for a while—do nothing yet—while he had a talk with her supervisors, probably thinking he might be able to straighten it out with a politician’s diplomacy.