The navigator passed a note with their position indicated, but Harry Shannon had flown too long not to keep his own map at his side. The route southeast from Hannover had carried them across devastated city after another, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Cologne. In each one, the gutted buildings stood like tombstones, swaying without roof or windows, obscuring the life that stirred below in cellars and makeshift hovels, as families tried to survive in the bitter aftermath of defeat. Aachen was the next major city. He looked back and signaled to his relief pilot, Captain Ron Clendenning. It was his turn to make a landing, and Harry wanted to go back and visit with his father a bit.
“Ron, make a couple of circuits of the city, please, before you land. They will want to get a good look before we set down. Some of them went to school, or even taught here.”
He glanced out the windows as he walked back to his father’s seat. Most German cities had a familiar pattern of destruction; from a distance, they looked like a burst egg, oval and burned black on the western approaches because Allied bombers had a tendency to walk their bombs back from the aiming points, increasing the tonnage dropped on the western sides of cities. Aachen looked different, somehow, the destruction more evenly arrayed, blackened all around but a gray-brown jumble inside. Then he remembered that Aachen had twice been pummeled by artillery fire—first by the Americans when they seized the city in October, then by the Germans when they tried to take it back in January.
He was talking with his father, thanking him again for getting him this plum assignment, when a hand reached up and grabbed his sleeve.
“Come here, please, both of you. I want to show you something.” Theodore von Kármán’s rich Hungarian accent was choked with emotion. “Down there, that’s my city. Look what we have done to my university, my wind tunnel. Gone. All gone.” He made no attempt to wipe the tears coursing down his face. “What of the people? What will we find of the people?”
Both men felt sorry for him, but not for the people he sought. Kármán had seen what was coming and left. Those who stayed behind and worked for Nazi Germany deserved what they got. Harry’s mind flashed back to his last raid on Germany, just over a month ago, when the swift, predatory Messerschmitt 262 jet fighters had slashed through his formation, firing their rockets first, then closing to hammer the B-17s with 30mm cannon. He still remembered the black smoke boiling from their jet engines and how their arrow-like gray-green swept wings looked like arrows hurtling by. The German jets had destroyed four of his squadron in a single pass, shooting up his own airplane so badly that he had to make an emergency wheels-up landing at a tiny fighter strip in France. As he pulled his wounded copilot from the smoking wreckage he swore that in the next war he was going to be in fighters doing the shooting and not in a bomber being shot at. The jet engines and swept wings of those Messerschmitts had come from the geniuses resident in places such as Aachen and Göttingen.
His father patted Kármán on the back. Vance idolized the man who had taken him under his wing when he was doing contract work for the Air Corps at Cal Tech. There, in beautiful Pasadena, Kármán had taught him many things, from aerodynamics and the potential of rocket power to the pleasure of sipping big tumblers of Jack Daniel’s bourbon as a way to cut the richness of the paprika dishes that flowed from his kitchen. But Vance could feel no sympathy for Kármán’s former German colleagues or for the destruction meted out to German cities.
George Schairer from Boeing joined them, and Kármán repeated his query. Schairer shrugged. There was no answer to Kármán’s question. The devastation was dreadful, but it could have been stopped at any moment if Germany had done the inevitable and surrendered. Somehow a relatively small clique of desperate men had used fear to control the German people until the very end. Then, when surrender finally occurred on May 8, the entire Nazi apparatus had seemed to wither and die like a punctured balloon, all the swagger and hatred replaced by groveling pleas for American understanding of the need to follow orders.
Their visit in Aachen was uneventful. Kármán toured them around in the lead jeep, showing them where he had lived and taught. But the feeling of animosity was intensified two days later when they visited Nordhausen, the hellhole the SS had created in the Harz Mountains, some fifty miles south of Braunschweig. Nordhausen was a huge underground factory carved out of the region’s soft limestone where the Nazis had used slave labor to build jet engines and V-2 rockets. Quite by chance, Kármán had run into one of his many former students, a Frenchman, Charles Sadron, at Nordhausen.
Vance sensed Kármán’s embarrassment. At Cal Tech, Sadron had weighed more than two hundred pounds; now he was down to half of that.
“Dear Charles, how good to see you.” Kármán handed him a Hershey bar and looked away as Sadron wolfed it down. In the thin sun that bathed the outbuildings of Nordhausen, the two old friends sat down on an abandoned packing crate, Kármán with his arm around Sadron’s frail shoulders. Vance listened carefully. Out of courtesy to him, the two men spoke in a fractured English when both would have been more comfortable speaking French. The words tumbled out. Shannon knew he was missing much but could not interrupt.
“We built rockets here; you called them V-2s. We were all slave labor.”
Kármán nodded, listening intently.
“It was a work camp and a death camp. You came in, they assigned you so many months to live, based on how fat you were.”
“You were heavy at Cal Tech, I remember—about one hundred kilos?”
“Yes, not when I got here, of course, I was down to about eighty kilos, but that was enough for them to give me six months to live. Others got less; if they were thin, maybe they’d schedule them only for three months’ work, or even less, two months, one month . . . it all depended on how much fat you were carrying. The more fat, the longer they thought they could work you.”
Kármán shook his head. “What did they do at the end of your schedule? Put you in the gas chamber?”
Sadron laughed and Vance winced; it was painful to watch Sadron’s poor thin body shake. “No, that was the beauty of it. SS efficiency. When your date expired, they cut your rations until you starved to death. I had just a few days to go before the Americans came.”
Kármán’s face was white with shock and rage. Sadron turned his head and vomited. Kármán, his arm still around Sadron’s shoulder, offered a handkerchief. Sadron looked at it in amazement—the simple clean white cotton cloth was a luxury beyond his imagination. “Sorry. The chocolate was too rich—and I ate too much of it. What a waste.”
Shannon caught Kármán’s glance and understood; he left to make arrangements with the local commander for Sadron to be hospitalized. They didn’t speak again until they were airborne, on their way to the next stop on their itinerary, Göttingen. The ancient university town was the very birthplace of German aerodynamics. Here Ludwig Prandtl, the most famous name in aerodynamics, lived and worked. Prandtl had been Kármán’s professor, then his somewhat grudging mentor, and later his rival, the rivalry tinged with Prandtl’s contempt for Kármán’s Jewish origins. Not by accident, the U.S. military governor had assigned Kármán the university office that Prandtl once occupied as professor.
“Now Vance, you and your son just stand there and listen. How’s your German?”
“Doctor, you know I can barely understand you when you speak English, so I don’t expect to understand your German.” Kármán smiled, the first time he had done so since leaving Sadron’s side at Nordhausen. It seemed to promise that he would make short work of Prandtl.
When Prandtl came in he was nervous, bowing obsequiously to Kármán, who was dressed in the uniform of a major general, his simulated rank for the mission. Prandtl looked nervously at the other men in the room, then seemed to bristle.
“You are sitting at my desk!”
Kármán merely nodded, then got briskly down to business, pinning Prandtl down on details of advanced German engineering. To the Shannons’ surprise, they could follow the conversation closely,
realizing that Prandtl was spilling his guts on all he knew on jet engines, swept wings, and rocket technology. He wasn’t just giving engineering details; he was doing more, telling who the primary engineers were, where they were located, who could be trusted. Kármán’s hand flew across the tablet, noting in his cramped handwriting everything Prandtl said, occasionally glancing up at them to see if they understood the import of what was happening.
Harry Shannon understood all too well; he had seen the Messerschmitt 262s’ swept wings in the sky, and now he was going to get the engineering details straight from the source. At the end, as if exhausted from talking, Prandtl said, “Now you must go to Volkenrode, near Braunschweig. Most of the papers relating to high-speed aerodynamics are there—or were there.”
Vance Shannon looked at Kármán. No one had mentioned Volkenrode as a scientific source before.
Prandtl, seeing their confusion, said, “It was a completely secret organization, hidden in the woods; I’ve visited there myself only once. But as the enemy . . .” He paused, realizing that he had perhaps insulted them and identified himself as a patriotic German, the last thing he wished to do today. Then he continued, “. . . as the Americans advanced in the south of Germany, much was transferred there. I’ll give you the name of a man you can rely on to take you to the site.”
Vance conferred with Harry. Their C-47 was being refueled and having a tire changed. Braunschweig was only sixty miles away. Harry Shannon asked Kármán and Schairer if they were up to the hazards of a road trip, cautioning them on the possibility of renegade troops holding out and the probable conditions of the road. Both men agreed to go immediately. Shannon arranged to borrow three jeeps from an American armored unit to make the trip, one with three soldiers armed to the teeth for security.
The ride up was a revelation, for while larger towns like Paderborn showed significant damage, there were intervals where entire villages had been spared the bombing—but not the refugees who crowded everywhere, in barns, schools, and open fields. Shannon was struck by the look of passive indifference on most faces. Here and there he would see a flash of resentment, usually by someone still wearing the remnants of an officer’s uniform. Most of them seemed stoically preoccupied with enduring for yet another day.
Prandtl’s directions had been good, although the quality of the road declined as they approached the forest where the institute was hidden. It appeared at last, a collection of almost sixty buildings, all shaded by enormous trees to be invisible not only from the air but from one another. A few had been built to resemble farmhouses; others were the typical bunkers that studded Germany. A cleverly camouflaged runway ran the length of the facility. Some buildings were destroyed, not by bombs but apparently by local people salvaging material to repair their shattered homes.
Only a few Germans were present. Kármán sought out the first one and gave him the name of an old assistant, Rudolph Kochel, whom he had known at Aachen. The man nodded and led Kármán’s group to a building that had been perfectly concealed by being partially buried in the ground, then having trees planted directly onto its roof.
Inside, Kochel was working at a desk. When Kármán entered he stood up and said, “Ah, Professor. It is so good to see you,” as if they had parted just weeks before. Kármán immediately began questioning him about the highspeed wind tunnel and swept wing research. Kochel was nervous; switching alternately from German to quite good English, he pretended that he knew nothing about the experiments, insisting that all of the engineering information had been carried off by the Luftwaffe personnel, weeks before.
Harry Shannon walked to a bookcase, where there was a tiny metal model, no more than three inches in span, of the Me 262. He whirled on Kochel and said, “One of these nearly killed me. I demand that you show me its drawings.”
Vance Shannon was almost as frightened as Kochel was by Harry’s rough tone. The German slumped in his chair behind the desk, waved his hand weakly, then said, “Come; I will show you.”
Kochel led them through the back of the building, unlocking a series of doors as they progressed. Each room was filled with filing cabinets, and the Americans longed to stop each time and examine them. The last door opened to a courtyard, where there was a covered well. Kochel said nothing, just pointed to it.
Harry grabbed an ancient rusted mattock and pried the wooden top off. He looked in at an endless heap of reports, documents, and plans that filled the well to its very top. Reaching in, he pulled out several, passing them to his American companions.
Schairer spoke. “This is the mother lode. These confirm their experiments with the swept wing.”
Harry arranged with his soldiers to guard the site, promising them relief by morning. On the ride back to Göttingen, the men were absorbed in the documents they were able to bring with them, scarcely speaking except to erupt with howls of joy at some newly discovered insight. Once Kármán reached forward and shook Schairer’s shoulder, yelling, “This vindicates Bob Jones.” Schairer nodded back. Robert T. Jones had advocated the swept wing to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, but his argument had been rejected as unsound.
The group was under no restrictions about the dissemination of information they discovered to U.S. industry. That night two of the group wrote letters home. George Schairer advised Boeing to drop the currently proposed straight wing configuration for their new multi-jet bomber and adopt a thirty-five-degree swept wing. Vance Shannon, under contract to North American, gave the same advice for their new jet fighter.
March 31, 1947, Wright Field, Ohio
Two atomic bombs had brought the war to a close in the Pacific, a mere four months after Germany’s surrender in Europe. The surprisingly rapid end to the war stunned the United States just as it was gearing up for a long campaign culminating in the invasion of Japan. The September 2 surrender found Tom Shannon en route to join his Corsair squadron in San Diego, Harry Shannon learning to fly a B-29 at Randolph Field, and their father contemplating which job he wanted to take from among the four that were currently offered him. The first two were from the Army, with one calling for him to tour the scientific facilities in Japan, as he had done in Germany. The second Army offer would take him to Wright Field, where he would work with the German scientists and equipment that had been picked up in the closing months of the war in what became known as Operation Paperclip.
The civilian offers were more attractive financially. George Schairer had prodded Boeing to invite Vance to work in Seattle, where he would serve directly under Ed Wells on two new secret programs, one a bomber and one a civilian transport. The other was from Vance’s old friend Bob Gross, who asked that he come to Lockheed and, as Gross put it, “ride shotgun on Kelly Johnson” as they developed their line of jet fighters.
Vance paused to consider how fortunate he had been to have his engineering career coincide with an almost continuous series of advances in aviation. And how privileged he was to have been able to work with men like Johnson at Lockheed, Schairer at Boeing, and Laddon at Consolidated. If Vance had worked at just one of the big companies, he would have been overshadowed by the geniuses who presided over their engineering departments. But as a consultant, he got to rub elbows with all of them and, perhaps most important, do some engineering cross-fertilization, bringing ideas and outlooks from one company to another, without violating any confidences.
The welcome Japanese surrender had immediately affected everyone, and the ensuing two years saw a complete collapse of the greatest, strongest, most effective armed forces the world had ever seen. Vance Shannon had watched in disbelief as the Army Air Forces declined in just eighteen months from a highly trained force operating more than seventy thousand aircraft manned by more than 2 million personnel to a skeleton force of three hundred thousand people with fewer than ten thousand operational aircraft. The Army and the Navy went through a similar convulsion, laying down arms indiscriminately in the laudable but laughable headlong rush to get the troops back home.
As
welcome as peace was, it disrupted the American economy. The aviation industry had been producing aircraft at the rate of one hundred thousand per year in 1944. In 1946, fewer than seven hundred aircraft were purchased by the Army.
For the Shannon family, peace brought a thousand blessings. Neither Harry nor Tom would have to fly combat again, and both were going to be released from service soon. Tom had contemplated making a career of the Marines but had been disillusioned by the rapid demobilization. For his part, Vance was nearly exhausted by the continuous traveling that had carried him almost continually from one theater to another. Now, at last, he would be able to stay at home with Madeline.
The peace did have a downside and the first was Madeline’s continuing to refuse to marry him, despite her wartime promises. He understood her reasons well enough—the age difference was there and would always be there, growing worse in the next years as she moved toward a sexual peak. He was already well beyond his, and Madeline was an intensely passionate woman. And then there were the boys, young men now, accomplished war heroes, and still not willing to accept his relationship with Madeline. It wasn’t that they wanted him to marry her, far from it. Neither boy was a prude, and as unconventional as it was, they accepted that he was living with a woman who was not his wife. It was simply that they had disliked Madeline from the start and their few meetings had not changed things.
Nor did the coming of peace help things on the financial side. Three of Vance’s job prospects had dried up and the fourth, working at Wright Field with the German scientists, was now clearly a temporary position.
In many ways this was a relief. Vance had always enjoyed being a freelance contractor, working the entire industry as a busy bee might work a field of flowers, going from one tempting job to the next. The industry was bound to recover, for jets had revolutionized aviation, and there would soon be competition for new generations of jet fighters and bombers and even, if his contacts in Boeing were correct, jet airliners. He saw jet aviation at being at about the same point automobiles were when Henry Ford introduced the Model T. There would be no shortage of work in the future, once the production lines got rolling. Or so he hoped.
Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age Page 15