“They were flying something on a big C5A out of here in 1991 and 1992. They would shut the airport down when sensitive cargo was being loaded,” Chappy recalled. “They stopped all airport traffic at eleven-thirty on Friday for it.”
After a Japanese sub surfaced off the coast of California in 1941, Lockheed put in a desperate call to the Disney studios. Their best artists came in to hide the factory under camouflage. They created an artificial, subscale village atop the factory buildings and airport terminal, a model of the very American way of life they were designing and building airplanes to save, the American dream trumpeted in magazine ads and radio serials. Workers inside turned out P-38 fighters and B-17 bombers, then went home to little bungalows very like the little Monopoly houses above their heads.
From the air, you couldn’t tell where the roof stopped and actual houses started. Huge poles held up the netting and camouflage, done in chicken feathers, and the real buildings beneath were painted in similar mottled vegetable shapes. “Someone who worked here,” Chappy said, “told me that when it rained the chicken feathers stank to high heaven.”
The Skunk Works was the best argument for black projects, but it was always a gamble. There had been failures: the Saturn commercial transport, the F-90 fighter, the weird tail-landing XFV-1 Salmon (named for Herm “Fish” Salmon, the test pilot and only man crazy enough to ever fly the damn thing). The D-21 drone, a secret for decades. Suntan, the liquid hydrogen — powered superplane of the late fifties that cost $2 billion before someone stopped to consider the expense of building bases with cryogenic facilities to keep it fueled. Even the successes were close enough to failures, like the A-12, the Blackbird, which by rights should never have worked and reminded you that this was gambling at very high stakes.
But as I rode around with Chappy, I found the sense of the legend beginning to wilt. I wondered if now, perhaps, the darkness was too great and the gambles no longer paid off.
I kept thinking about a talk I had had with Ben Rich, the last head of the Skunk Works to preside over the Burbank facility, and I remembered his tone. He had written a book, but when he submitted it for review, two chapters had been rejected by the CIA and the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). It still irked him. Why, they had made him lock up his coffee mug, the one that read MACH 3 PLUS with a picture of the SR-71. But that speed had never been officially released to the public; the information was still classified. So each evening the mug went into a safe, and each morning it came out again so Rich could sip his decaf.
Only one other group of people irked Rich as much as the security people: the EPA bureaucrats, who threatened to shut down his program if it didn’t comply with regulations. To him, the concern for information leaks and leaks of chemicals into the water table were somehow equivalent. I often wondered if secrecy itself hadn’t become a toxin, extremely powerful and useful in controlled amounts, but treacherous and poisonous if misused or overused.
We drove out of the hangar area past a range of Dumpsters. Suddenly, a big plastic bag flew up in front of the car. “UFO!” Chappy cried.
The original site of the Skunk Works was now flat and bare, loosely covered with rubble like a site ready for construction. Across the street, bougainvillea climbed concrete walls in front of quiet, well-kept homes. In a cruel irony, the Skunk Works had lived up to its name, pumping PCBs and other pollutants into the surrounding aquifer, and the company had become the object of massive litigation. Lockheed had recently settled with a group of local residents for about $130 million. A huge piping works called a vapor extraction system would pump steam into the ground and pump the toxins out — a grotesque distillery.
To those imbued with the Skunk Works legend, like Chappy, this rubble-strewn field was akin to the fields of Gettysburg or Yorktown or Agincourt and should be preserved in the same ways. But the Skunk Works headed out to Palmdale, closer to their desert test base. What they left was wreckage.
Driving away from the dark and gory ground of the original Skunk Works, I passed the Disney complex on the freeway.
While some of his artists were sent to the nearby Lockheed factory to camouflage it, Disney set others to work creating the alluring myth of airpower — one of the great myths that was to propel Dreamland.
In 1943 they were to make the film Victory Through Air Power, a powerful piece of propaganda, offering a neat, ideological solution to the muddles of war — technology to keep the distant enemies at bay. Filming began only after ten at night, because there was too much noise during the day from the new P-38s and B-17s taking off from Burbank airport.
Disney made the film at his own cost, so enamored was he with its source: the book of the same name by Count Alexander P. de Seversky. A White Russian émigré who had distinguished himself as a naval aviator in World War I, in which he lost a leg, he came to the United States when the Revolution erupted. He allied himself with Billy Mitchell, the maverick general, and after Mitchell died in 1936 Seversky became the leading exponent of the faith that strategic bombing would be the dominant force in all modern wars.
He was the head of Seversky Aircraft Corporation (the forerunner of Republic Aircraft), and his book, a collection of magazine articles, was a huge bestseller and Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It warned Americans that they could no longer rely on the oceans. They were no longer safe in Kansas City or Chicago. But Seversky held out a promise — if Americans built a massive force of bombers and destroyed the distant cities of its enemies first, we could return to our comfortable isolation.
Seversky laid out the rationale for fighting wars with bombs that would lead to the A-bomb. Soon the poet Randall Jarrell, who served in the Air Corps, would write, “In bombers named after girls / We bombed cities we had learned about in school.”
Seversky, called “Sasha,” narrated Victory Through Air Power in his exotic and authoritative Russian accent. The film blended newsreels of Mitchell and his famous demonstration of how to bomb battleships with cartoon explanations of the development of military aviation. Animated maps explained the present situation, and represented Allied airpower as an eagle, fighting the Japanese octopus, destroying its head as the tentacles slowly released their hold.
James Agee, then film critic for Time, found the movie a skillful piece of propaganda, but he noted that it never showed civilians on the ground, never showed the target. And he was disturbed by the climactic battle of the eagle of airpower and the octopus of Japanese aggression and the abstracting of war, with its total absence of images of the victims. It was full, he wrote, of “gay dreams of holocaust.”
Richard Schickel has argued in his history of the Disney studios that Disney liked airpower because it was efficient, clean warfare, in which the corpses are never seen. And airpower especially seemed to have held great appeal to Midwesterners like Disney, Curtis LeMay, and Dwight Eisenhower, who once felt themselves at the greatest remove from foreign influences. Airpower was in an odd way the flip side of the region’s traditional isolationism, a way to play world power without sending soldiers overseas. And it seemed cheap, too — in lives and in dollars — a feature that would make it especially attractive in the postwar years.
It was not long before Seversky’s and Disney’s dreams of holocaust would be realized. The B-29, the long-range bomber, was being developed in top secrecy at Boeing in Seattle even as the film was being made.
Curtis LeMay, then training at Muroc, would follow the B-29 from bases in India to China, then the Marianas, from which at last the bombers could effectively reach Japan, Disney’s eagle attacking the octopus.