Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (11 page)

A collective moan went up when the next photo was flashed on the screen.

“Yes, this is the American jet—the Bell XP-59A. I can tell from your groans that the word has gotten around. It’s a nice-flying airplane, but it is too slow. Look at the wings—they are huge! Just too much drag for the two engines, which are General Electric–built versions of the
Whittle, putting out about twelve hundred fifty pounds of thrust each.”

The overhead projector light was turned off, and Harry went on.

“So this is the situation. The Germans may have two jet fighters in production, and the British have one that is supposed to fly next year. We’ve got the XP-59A, which looks like it will have to be used as a trainer, since a P-51 or a P-38 can outfly it. Any questions?”

There was a barrage of shouts and it took a minute for Harry to get them quieted down. The first one, from the brigadier general sitting near Vance, was, “What kind of engines does the Messerschmitt jet have, and how much thrust do they produce?”

“We don’t know, but our engineers estimate, from the size of the airplane, and the size of the engine intakes, that it has to be in the sixteen-to-eighteen-hundred-pounds-of-thrust range. They could be manufactured by Heinkel, but probably not. More probably they are from BMW or Junkers.”

The next question was, “What engines will the new Gloster fighter have?”

“I don’t know. They have three to choose from, the Whittle engine, another by de Havilland, and another from Rolls-Royce. Both de Havilland and Rolls-Royce have benefited from Whittle’s pioneering, thanks to the British government handing out his information. They’ll be in the fifteen-to-seventeen-hundred-pound class, whichever they choose.”

A tall colonel stood up in the back of the room. Vance was surprised to see that it was Ray Crawford; he hadn’t heard from him in months and had assumed he was off on a special assignment.

“Major Shannon, a couple of years ago, Lockheed was experimenting with a jet engine and a plane. Kelly Johnson and Nate Price worked together on it. Whatever happened to it?”

Harry flushed. Crawford knew damn well what had happened to it.

“Colonel Crawford, I think Wright Field dropped the ball. We didn’t see the need for it, and the airframe looked too advanced for the time. Right now we are going to work with developing the Power Jet engine, and perhaps the de Havilland engine. As you all know, General Electric has the responsibility, and they have made phenomenal progress.”

Crawford spoke again. “Well, Major, if I were you, I’d be going right back to Kelly and Lockheed and tasking them to come up with a new fighter. I don’t believe in taking British hand-me-downs. We went through that when the war started, but we shouldn’t be doing it now. It’s bad enough that we have to use their engine until we can develop one of our own.”

There was general applause; it was clear the group wanted an American fighter, even if it had to use an engine from Great Britain.

Crawford had resumed his seat, but he sat up again. “And somebody better get Pratt & Whitney and Curtiss-Wright in on the act. This is the biggest thing since they put a self-starter on a Cadillac. If General Electric takes as long on this one as they did on the supercharger, the whole goddamn war will be over before we get a jet into combat.”

This time the applause was mixed with laughter. Harry fielded a few more questions, then broke the meeting down into four working groups, assigning tasks to each one. He had chosen the groups in the same way that he had sent out invitations to the meeting—on the expertise of the individuals. The first team was to estimate German jet production, the second was to formulate design criteria for a new American fighter, the third was to see what other companies could be brought into jet engine development, and the fourth was to establish a curriculum for training jet pilots, using the Bell P-59 as a trainer. He had put his dad in the second group.

Two hours later, the meeting began to break up as the teams turned in their handwritten reports to Harry for collation. He met with his father later that afternoon in the golf-course bar of the Officers Club. The jukebox was playing “Paper Doll” loud enough to foil any eavesdropper, but Harry looked around carefully, even taking the trouble to check their table for listening devices before whispering the results to his dad. The estimates for German jet production ranged from three hundred to three thousand per month. Either number would be fatal to the Eighth Air Force bombers. The design criteria for a new American fighter specified a top speed of 600 mph, a range of 600 miles, and delivery in a year. Almost everyone agreed that Lockheed should be given the contract. Besides General Electric, they had selected Westinghouse and Allison to begin developing jets. Finally, they estimated that a six-week course in jet aircraft would be adequate for veteran fighter pilots, with ten weeks for cadets coming right out of flying school.

Harry and Vance went on to talk earnestly about Tom for more than an hour, assessing his chances. Both talked optimistically; neither felt that way.

Finally Harry asked, “Well, Dad, did I embarrass you today?”

“No, you know you did well. I was surprised at Crawford, though; he should not have tried to trip you up like that. You didn’t have anything to do with rejecting Nate’s engine. You probably would have supported it, since you saw the papers on it back home.”

“Crawford’s angry, Dad, and he has some right to be. He did most of the work on getting the Whittle engine over here, then he didn’t get promoted, and he got assigned to some minor jobs back at Pratt & Whitney as a plant representative. I asked him to the meeting because I value his experience. It was probably a mistake.”

“Well, the advice he gave you is pretty good, and it coincides with the group’s consensus. If you can turn the
project over to Lockheed, I think Kelly Johnson and his team can whip up a fighter that will match the Germans’.”

“I’m sure they can—but not in time. If the Germans get a few hundred Messerschmitt 262s operational by mid-1943, you can kiss the American bombing campaigns good-bye. There’s no way the Fortress or the Liberators could operate against them, even if we get a long-range escort fighter delivered. And they’ll figure out a way to make a night fighter out of it, too, to make it tough on the Royal Air Force.”

Vance nodded. “You’re exactly right. I agree one hundred percent! There’s got to be some way to slow them down; bombing the factories might do it, but they are good at dispersal now and getting better. We’ll have to come up with something to trump their ace.”

They sipped Budweisers together. It was unusual; neither man drank as a rule, and they had not previously drunk together. Vance acknowledged this, saying, “A sign of the times, us drinking beer together. Wish Tom was here to join us.”

Unexpectedly, Harry looked up and said, “Anyone else you’d like to have here, Dad?”

Vance choked on his beer. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

Harry looked uncomfortable and said, “Nothing, just making conversation.”

Vance wondered if Harry was hinting about Madeline. He toyed with the idea of telling Harry all about it but decided against it. There was time enough for that when Tom came back. When, not if.

October 17, 1942, Guadalcanal

“Think, dammit; think.” Lieutenant Tom Shannon, sunburned, dirty, and starving, knew that his time had come. He would either make a break for the beautiful
Consolidated PBY streaming in at wave-top level or die trying. Twenty minutes before, he had signaled the Catalina as it passed overhead. The flying boat had returned his signal, but had then, to his bitter disappointment, flown off directly to the north. Now he saw it low on the horizon, hurtling south toward the island to pick him up.

His dogfight seemed like months ago. A flight of three Zeros had thundered out of the sun, nose guns winking furiously, the wing-mounted cannon burping slow but steady. He had turned into the flight and sawed the lead Zero in half with a single burst, but the enemy fire had smashed his oil cooler. Tom had thrown his Wildcat into a dive as waves of oil covered his canopy to run along the fuselage side. The two Zeros followed him down, snap shooting, when his engine froze. The reduction gear exploded and the prop ran away in a fantastic crescendo of noise. One of the Zeros, accepting the victory, pulled away, but the other edged in and blew his wing off with a closely spaced pattern of 20mm shells.

The rugged Wildcat went into an uncontrollable rolling dive until it broke up at about six thousand feet, throwing Tom out of the cockpit. Shaken but conscious, he delayed opening his parachute until he had fallen to about four hundred feet. The jerk of the parachute opening separated him from his shoes, and he saw that he was dropping straight for a cartoon-like island, a three-hundred-foot-wide circle of sand with a cluster of palm trees in the center. He hit far up the narrow beach, landing without even getting his feet wet.

Tom gathered his parachute and hid in the clutch of palm trees, certain that the fight had been witnessed by the Japanese soldiers in the supply camp three miles away on the southwestern tip of Guadalcanal. He spent the entire day huddled on his parachute canopy before deciding that he must have landed unseen and that the little island held no other interest for the enemy. For the next seven days he had remained almost motionless while it
was light, hiding under the trees, surviving on the handful of coconuts he harvested and the few strange shell-fish he plucked from the rocky coastline at night. These had tasted terrible the first day, better on the second, and, as they grew scarce, downright delicious by the sixth day.

This was the second Catalina he had signaled with his handheld mirror. Four days before, a PBY had dipped its wings in recognition and set up a pattern to land when it was struck by a gaggle of Zeros en route back to Rabaul. They blew it up in a single pass, arrogantly doing victory rolls as they climbed away from the smoking debris. Tom felt guilty, for the crew never had a chance. The PBY crews were incredible, flying long missions alone in enemy territory and never failing to attempt to pick up a downed American flyer, no matter what the odds. Now another one was coming for him.

Tom moved out to the water’s edge, hoping that he’d have the strength to swim to the Catalina when it landed. He watched approvingly as the flying boat touched down smoothly, then turned to taxi at high speed toward him. The artillerymen at the Japanese camp suddenly woke up and artillery shells began to explode, a few around the Catalina but most well over his island, as if the gunners could not depress their guns enough to target the PBY. Lighter guns began firing, hitting the PBY almost immediately.

The PBY taxied past him, then turned to bring him up just off the left waist gun blister, its lower Plexiglas visor already raised. A sailor, dressed only in his skivvies, plunged over the side to help him, while another hung out from the blister to pull him in. The first sailor had just placed his head inside the hatch when the pilot applied full power for takeoff.

After a quick check to see if he was wounded, the gunners moved Tom forward through the narrow door separating them from the bunk compartment and on forward
to the navigator’s compartment, where they dumped him unceremoniously on a mound of Mae West life preservers before scurrying back to their guns. He lay there, watching the rest of the crew attending to their duties, the tension high as the long, bouncing takeoff continued. The navigator handed Tom a canteen of water and a sandwich—thick slices of Spam between two rough-cut pieces of GI bakery bread—and Tom had never tasted anything so delicious. The radioman tossed him a headset, so he could listen on the intercom.

The PBY, its twin engines mounted high on the parasol wing, seemed to bounce along the water forever, salt spray slashing over the windscreen. The pilot leaned over the control wheel, visibly forcing the overhead throttles forward, the copilot bending low in his seat, as if bullets wouldn’t pierce the thin aluminum as easily as the Plexiglas windows. Once the navigator looked over and shot Tom a thumbs-up.

After an eternity in which the bounces turned into long skips and finally a tiny dribbling run that seemed to hold the plane to the water with a gossamer spray, the PBY lifted off, just as a Japanese battery at last got the range, the shrapnel punching holes along the length of the fuselage and into the wings. Fuel began leaking immediately, running back in a fine white spray.

The navigator passed Tom a note, written on a crumpled sheet of paper in big black pencil strokes: “Congratulations; we’ll be back at Henderson Field in ten minutes. Drink all the water you want, but slow down on the sandwich—you’ll get sick.”

Tom nodded and put the headset on to listen to the intercom chatter.

“Nav, this is pilot. Is the passenger wounded?”

“No, they checked him when they hauled him in. He’s just hungry as hell.”

A gunner broke in: “Here come two Zeros; the first one is shooting!”

The Catalina shook under an initial barrage of 7.7mm machine-gun fire followed by a massive series of blows from the first Zero’s 20mm cannon. Ten seconds later, the noises were repeated, this time punctuated by the eerie shriek of a runaway propeller.

The pilot yelled, “Feather number two,” and Tom looked up through the copilot’s windscreen to see the two Zeros climbing away. He watched his Catalina pilot boot in hard left rudder and bend the left throttle forward, easing the nose down to keep flying speed.

Grunting, sweating, totally concentrated, the pilot flew on at treetop level, desperate to reach Henderson and plant the Catalina firmly on the ground. Tom couldn’t see all that was going on, but he knew exactly what was going through the pilot’s mind: keep the speed well above the stall, delay putting the gear down until the last minute, don’t put in any flaps until he was sure he was in position to land—and pray that the gear either came down all the way or stayed retracted; the worst thing would be a partial extension.

The navigator motioned Tom to a seat belt fastened to the floor next to the aft bulkhead and pointed his hand down. He had barely strapped in when the Catalina slammed down, bounced, then smashed into the pierced steel planking of the runway again, the Catalina’s gear screeching and flexing but holding together. When they reached the end of the runway, the pilot kicked the rudder, spun the Catalina off the taxiway into the shrapnel-chewed dirt, shut down the engines, and, reverting to his Navy upbringing, yelled, “Abandon ship!” as he rang the alarm bell.