In wartime, combat units are obliged to inform the press of their accomplishments, so that the folks back home can learn of the progress of the war. But military press releases tend to be loaded with so many euphemisms, elaborations, and aggressive improvements on the truth that if placed in any body of water, they would sink immediately to the bottom. By contrast, consider a press release from December of 1944, personally dictated by Hansell from his headquarters on Guam. He wrote: “We have not put all our bombs exactly where we wanted to put them, and therefore we are not by any means satisfied with what we have done so far. We are still in our early experimental stages. We have much to learn and many operational and technical problems to solve.”
We have much to learn. That’s Hansell: unflinchingly honest, a little naive, but fundamentally a romantic, with all that implies. Once, while posted at Langley Field, in Virginia, he passed by a young woman in the lobby of a hotel—Miss Dorothy Rogers of Waco, Texas. Hansell immediately took his own date home, returned to the hotel, and invited himself to join the young woman and her aunt for dinner. Dorothy Rogers found him tiresome. He found her delightful. She returned to Texas. He wrote her every day for the better part of a year. She answered two, maybe three of his letters. They were married in 1932.
It stands to reason that Hansell’s favorite book was Don Quixote. Don Quixote is the gallant knight distinguished by his ceaseless, courageous crusade to revive chivalry. Don Quixote tilted at windmills, suffered endless deprivations, battled imaginary enemies. Don Quixote would have written a woman he barely knew hundreds of times, even as she all but ignored him. But Quixote is a strange choice for a military man, isn’t he? The don holds to an ideal, but that ideal is never realized. It’s based on an illusion. He thinks he is making the world a better place, but he actually isn’t. Consider this passage from Don Quixote, which Haywood Hansell, in his long years of retirement after the humiliation of Guam, may well have read—and winced in self-recognition:
In short, [Don Quixote] became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it.
There’s more than a little bit of Haywood Hansell in that.
In 1931, as a young Army lieutenant, Hansell was assigned to Maxwell Field. He was appointed an instructor at the Air Corps Tactical School in 1935 and distinguished himself quickly as one of the sharpest minds in the entire school. When Ira Eaker was looking for someone to defend the doctrine of high-altitude daylight precision bombing against the skepticism of the British, there was no question whom he would pick. That was a job for Haywood Hansell, the truest of the true believers.
2.
In a talk he gave in 1967, Hansell described the first problem he faced: “The selection of the targets themselves was a pretty complicated affair, an effort to gauge the effect of the destruction of a particular industry upon the war-making capacity of Germany.”
Hansell needed to find a target the American bombers in England could easily reach and easily destroy. Something so critical to the Nazi war effort that the Germans would suffer if they lost it. And it had to be something specific. It wouldn’t make any sense to target, say, railway bridges over the Rhine, the central waterway of Germany. There are dozens and dozens of railway bridges over the Rhine, spread out over hundreds of miles. Trying to hit them all would be a logistical nightmare.
Then Hansell heard about what happened after the Germans bombed a Rolls-Royce aircraft engine plant in the English city of Coventry. The attack was only partially successful, but it blew out the building’s skylights, opening the factory floor to the elements. As he described it, “There was a rain, and thousands of trays of ball bearings were rusted and they couldn’t be used. Engine production stopped at a time when it was desperately needed. It became quite apparent that the rotating machinery was extremely sensitive to the ball-bearing industry.”
Hansell wondered whether ball bearings might be the Achilles’ heel of Germany.
Why ball bearings, specifically? Because they are at the heart of any mechanical device. Tiny metal balls covered in grease and encased in a steel ring. Inside the axle of a bicycle, for example, there are perhaps a dozen ball bearings, acting as mini steel rollers that allow the bicycle wheel to turn freely. A good road bicycle can cost thousands of dollars and includes some extraordinarily sophisticated space-age materials. But without two or three dollars’ worth of quarter-inch-diameter ball bearings, the bike won’t work. It literally won’t move. Same is true for the engine in your car. Or virtually any mechanical object that involves a rotating part.