And at the heart of it all are Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay, who squared off in the jungles of Guam. One was sent home. One stayed on, with a result that would lead to the darkest night of the Second World War. Consider their story and ask yourself—What would I have done? Which side would I have been on?
Part One
The Dream
Chapter One
“Mr. Norden was content to pass his time in the shop.”
1.
Back when the war that would consume the world was a worry but not yet a fact, a remarkable man came to the attention of the US military.
His name was Carl L. Norden. Throughout his life, Norden shunned the limelight. He worked alone—sometimes returning to Europe during crucial periods to tinker and dream at his mother’s kitchen table. He built a business with hundreds of employees. Then when the war was over, he left it all behind. There are no full-length biographies of Norden. No profile pieces.i No statues in his honor. Not in his native Holland; not in Switzerland, where he lived out his days; and not in downtown Manhattan, where he did his most important work. Norden influenced the course of a war and sparked a dream that would last the remainder of the century. It does not seem possible that someone could have left as much of a mark on his world as Norden did and then disappear from sight. Yet he did. In one 352-page technical book about Norden’s invention, there is a single sentence devoted to him: “Mr. Norden was content to pass his time in the shop, which sometimes was an eighteen-hour day.”
That’s it.
So before we start in on Norden’s dream and its consequences—the effect Norden would have on an entire generation—let us start with Norden himself. I asked Professor Stephen L. McFarland, one of the few historians—maybe the only historian—who has really dug into the story of Carl Norden, why there’s so little documentary record about the inventor. The professor replied that it is “primarily because he demanded absolute secrecy.” He went on to describe the man: “Well, he was extremely prickly. His ego was greater than [that of] any person I’ve never met. And I said ‘never met’ because of course I never met Norden.”
Norden was Dutch. He was born in what is now Indonesia, then a Dutch colony. He spent three years apprenticing in a Swiss machine shop, then got an engineering degree from Zurich’s prestigious Federal Polytechnic School, where one of his classmates was Vladimir Lenin. Norden was trim, dapper. He wore a three-piece suit. Had short white hair with a little cowlick, a thriving mustache, and heavy-lidded eyes underwritten with deep lines, as if he hadn’t slept in years. His nickname was Old Man Dynamite. He drank coffee by the gallon. Lived on steak.
As McFarland explained,
He truly believed in a very biological sense that sun created stupidity. And so you would never see him outside without a big hat on. His family always was forced to wear hats outside. He was, as a young boy, stationed in the Dutch East Indies, and yet he and his family always wore hats because the sun caused stupidity.
McFarland wrote that Norden “read Dickens avidly for revelations on the lives of the disadvantaged and Thoreau for the discussion of the simple life.” He hated paying taxes. He thought Franklin Roosevelt was the devil.
McFarland described how cranky Norden could be:
There’s a famous story where he was looking over a technician’s shoulder and the technician got a little bit nervous and tried to strike up a conversation, looking at him and saying, “Perhaps you could explain why we’re making this part this way.” And Norden screamed at the top of his lungs at him, after he yanked the cigar out of his mouth, and said, “There’s a hundred thousand reasons why I designed that part that way. And none of it is your damn business.” So that’s how he treated all his employees. He was truly an Old Man Dynamite.
McFarland went on to explain Norden’s perfectionism:
Expense didn’t matter—it was “Make it as perfect as possible.” I’d seen how engineers know what they know and how they do what they do, but all of them talked about the importance of studying what had been done before. Norden’s attitude was, “I don’t want to hear about it.” All he wanted was blank sheets of paper, a pencil, and a couple of engineering books that were filled with formulas about how to calculate certain mathematical problems. He was a true believer in blank slate, and this reveals his ego. He said, “I don’t want to know the mistakes other people made. I don’t want to know what they did right. I’m going to develop what’s right myself.”