The dream hatched back at Maxwell Field in the 1930s and brought to life by the genius of Carl Norden had run up against an unstoppable force in the skies over Japan.
This is not the same kind of obstacle as the Bomber Mafia faced over Schweinfurt and Regensburg. There, Hansell could justify to himself that the problem was solvable, that the first raid was a learning experience, that the raids could get better and more accurate. Every revolutionary understands that the path to radical transformation is never smooth. Software programmers have a beta version, and then a 1.0 and then a 2.0, because they realize that they can never get it right the first time.
But in the case of the jet stream over Japan, there was no 2.0 version, no revision that Hansell could use to bolster his faith. High-altitude precision bombing in the midst of a jet stream is impossible.
The dreams of revolutionaries go awry when they are forced to confront an unanticipated obstacle—not a rational obstacle such as inexperience or haste or miscalculation, but something immovable. And in that moment of vulnerability and frustration, with his dream in pieces all around him, Haywood Hansell, like Jesus in the wilderness, was presented with a temptation. As it says in the Bible:
And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by the devil.
And what did the devil do? He led Jesus to the top of a high mountain—in legend, the peak on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho—and offered him power over everything he could see.
And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”
You can have everything. Victory over your enemies. Dominion over all you can see from twenty thousand feet. All you have to do is walk away from your faith.
Footnotes
i While the exact death toll remains unknown, it’s estimated that more than fourteen thousand Americans were killed, wounded, or listed as missing in action by the end of the Marianas campaign. Nearly all the Japanese forces stationed on the islands, around thirty thousand men, were wiped out. Today, 5,204 names are inscribed on a memorial on the island of Saipan, overlooking Tanapag Harbor.
ii One problem with the earliest versions of the Superfortress was that the engines easily overheated. If you were a B-29 pilot in those days, your biggest worry was the enemy shooting at you. Your second-biggest worry was that your engines would catch fire.
iii Needless to say, when LeMay arrived, he remained impervious to these less-than-ideal conditions. In fact, he described the dismal features of the island to his wife with almost comical optimism: “The beach here isn’t too bad. Not much coral and what there is [is] mostly rotten, so you don’t get cut up on it. There are quite a few sea slugs around, but they don’t bother you. This just blew off on the floor, so you will see some of the same red dirt that we had in Hawaii.”
iv Weather balloons are still used by meteorologists today. Twice a day, hydrogen-or helium-filled balloons are released simultaneously from around nine hundred locations worldwide. An instrument attached to the balloon, called a radiosonde, measures atmospheric pressure, temperature, and humidity and transmits the information back to tracking equipment on the ground.
v A few others encountered the jet stream after Ooishi. In the 1930s, a Swedish meteorologist named Carl-Gustaf Rossby identified and characterized both the jet stream and the type of atmospheric waves that would later be named Rossby waves. In 1935, the American pilot Wiley Post became the first to experience the jet stream directly. Post was famous for his daring flight experiments and discovered the strong winds of the jet stream during one of his high-altitude transcontinental flight attempts. The term jet stream wasn’t coined until a German meteorologist described the strong winds as strahlstr?mung, which translates literally to “jet stream.”
Chapter Seven
“If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”
1.
Haywood Hansell’s temptation requires a detour, just for this chapter, away from airplanes and bombing runs and high winds over Japan to a meeting. A secret meeting, early in the war, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The president of MIT was there, along with, among others, a Nobel Prize winner, the president of the Standard Oil Development Company, and two professors—Louis Fieser of Harvard and Hoyt Hottel from MIT, a giant in his field who would later become the group’s chairman and spiritual leader.