Oklahoma, or in these States, who were in similar circumstances. It
was the war, and the war work, and those circumstances wouldn’t last
forever, but just on this night Prosper seemed unable to remember or
imagine any others.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “Don’t cry, Connie.”
These crutches. Look at the slight dog-leg each one took in heading
for the ground, each different for his different legs. These crutches
were, what, they were angelic, they were spiritual in their weightless
strength and their quick helpful patience. God bless them. His own
invention. He tried not to show it, in the circumstances, but he couldn’t
help thinking that in a lot of ways he was a lucky man.
PART ONE
1
For a time after the war began, the West Coast would go dark every
night in expectation of air attacks. Who knew, now, how far the
Japs could reach, what damage they might be able to inflict? We
mounted citizen patrols that went up and down and made people
draw their shades, put out their lamps. The stores and bars along the
boardwalks and arcades that faced the ocean had to be equipped with
light traps, extra doors to keep the light inside. In cities all along the
Pacific we looked up from the darkened streets and saw for the first
time in years the stars, all unchanged. But every once in a while, star-
tled by some report or rumor, the great searchlights of the coastal bat-
teries—eight hundred million candlepower they said, whatever that
could mean—would come on and stare for a time out at the empty sea.
Then go off again.
Van Damme Aero was already in the business of building warplanes
before hostilities commenced, and after Pearl Harbor their West Coast
plant was fulfilling government contracts worth millions, with more
signed every month. A mile-square array of tethered balloons was sus-
pended just over Van Damme Aero’s ramifying works and its workers
like darkening thunderclouds, a summer storm perpetually hovering,
so that from above, from the viewpoint of a reconnaissance plane or a
bomber, the plant was effectually invisible. More than that: the sheds
16 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
and yards and hangars not only seemed not to be there, they also
seemed to be something, or somewhere, else: for the topsides of all
those balloons had been painted as a landscape, soft rolling hills of
green and yellow, with here and there a silver lakelet and the brown
furrows of farmland, even (so they said down under it, who would
never see it and went on rumors) the roofs of a village, spire of a church,
red barns and a silo. A pastorale, under which round the clock the A-
21 Sword bombers were riveted and welded and fitted with engines and
wings, and the huge Robur cargo seaplanes were given birth to like
monster whales. Even when the danger of an invasion of the mainland
seemed to have passed (leaving us still jumpy and unsettled but at least
not cowering, not always looking to the sky at the whine of every Cub
or Jenny), every day the Van Damme Aero workers coming to work
dove under that landscape and it was hard not to laugh about it.
From the Van Damme shop floor where Al and Sal Mass then
worked with a thousand others you could see, if you knew where to
look, a bank of broad high dark windows behind which were the con-
ference and meeting rooms of the Van Damme directors. Guests (Army
Air Corps generals, government officials, union bosses) brought into
that wide low-ceilinged space, to look down upon the ceaseless activity
below—the windows faced the length of the shop, which seemed almost
to recede into infinite working distance—could feel superb, in com-
mand, and they would be awed as well, as they were intended to be.
On a day in the spring of 1942 the only persons assembled up in
there were the engineering and employment vice presidents and their
assistants, and Henry and Julius Van Damme. On a streamlined plinth
in the middle of the room was a model of a proposed long-range heavy
bomber that Van Damme Aero and the rest of the air industry and the
appropriate government agencies were trying to bring forth. Julius Van
Damme kept his back to the model, not wanting to be influenced
unduly by its illusory facticity, the very quality of it that kept his
brother Henry’s eyes on it. It was canted into the air, as though in the
process of taking a tight rising turn at full power. It wasn’t the largest
heavier-than-air flying thing ever conceived, but it would be the largest
built to date, if it were built, maybe excepting a few tremendous Van
Damme cargo seaplanes on the drawing boards; anyway it wasn’t a
tubby lumbering cargo plane but a long slim bomber, designed to inflict
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 17
harm anywhere in the world from bases in the continental United
States. It had been conceived even before December 1941, back when
Britain was expected to fall and there would be no forward bases any
closer to Germany than Goose Bay from which to run bombers. The
plane was designated (at the moment) XB-30, the X for experimental
or in plan. B-30 would be its model number in the complex rubric of
the American air forces. As yet it had no name. The Model Committee
was making a preliminary presentation of the latest mock-up and
specs. It was somewhat dim in the huge dark-brown room, the
brilliantly lit shop floor below giving more light than the torchères of
the office.
“In this configuration, six pusher twenty-six-cylinder R-400 Bee
air-cooled radials, each to drive a seventeen-and-a-half-foot three-
bladed propeller.” The chief of engineering made dashes at the model,
ticking off the features, his long black pencil like a sorcerer’s wand sum-
moning the B-30 into existence. “Wingspan’s increased now to 225 feet
with an area of, well, just a hair over 4,000 square feet, depending.”
“Depending on what?” Julius said, picking up a slide rule.
“I’ll be making that clear. The wing, as you see, a certain degree of
sweepback. Fuel tanks within the wings, here, here, each with a capac-
ity of 21,000 gallons. Wing roots are over seven feet thick and give
access to the engines for maintenance in flight.”
Julius unrolled the next broad blue sheet.
“Twin fin-and-rudder format, like our A-21 and the Boeing Domi-
nator now in plan, though lots bigger naturally, thirty-five-foot overall
height.” Here the engineer swallowed, as though he had told a lie, and
his eyes swept the faces of the others, Julius’s still bent over the sheets.
“Sixty-foot fuselage, circular cross section as you can see. Four bomb
bays with a maximum capacity of 40,000 pounds in this bottom
bumpout that runs nearly the length of the fuselage. Forward crew
compartment pressurized, and also the gunners’ weapons sighting
station compartment behind the bomb bay. A pressurized tube runs
over the bomb bays to connect the forward crew compartment to the
rear gunners’ compartment.”
“How big a tube?” Henry Van Damme asked.
“Just over two feet in diameter.”
Henry, who was claustrophobic, shuddered.
18 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Crew has a sort of wheeled truck they can slide on to go from one
end to the other,” said the engineer.
For a while they gazed at it, the paper version and the model still
climbing. The dome of the forward crew compartment, pierced with a