One day that summer Antheil walked to the Manhattan Beach post office, two miles away, and found a single letter in his box. “It was from my dead brother Henry’s estate and contained a check for $450 [$7,000 today]. ‘O.K., Henry,’ I said into the air, ‘I’m not so dumb but that I can’t get this. You want me to go on with my work, and I’m going on.’” Boski’s response to the gift was Hungarian. “His arm out of the grave!” she exulted.
Henry’s gift added to the Antheils’ reserve from a film George had worked on that spring, he told Bullitt in late July: “I have just finished a very large motion picture score for which I have made the producers pay three times what it was worth; consequently I am able this summer and early autumn to do nothing but my own work, and am turning back again to musical composition. I am just finishing my fourth string quartet.”
Hedy was finally busy again at the beginning of August, playing the female lead opposite Robert Young in the film version of John P. Marquand’s best-selling novel H. M. Pulham, Esq. For once she was cast not as a remote beauty but as a complex, vital woman, a New York advertising executive in love with a Back Bay Bostonian too proper to give up his settled marriage for love; later she would call it her favorite role. By now she had made seven major American films and was a certified Hollywood star—a superstar, we would say today.
At the end of September, for reasons of its own, the National Inventors Council leaked the story of Hedy’s inventive gifts, omitting Antheil entirely:
HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Sept. 30—Hedy Lamarr, screen actress, was revealed today in a new role, that of an inventor. So vital is her discovery to national defense that government officials will not allow publication of its details.
Colonel L. B. Lent, chief engineer of the National Inventors Council, classed Miss Lamarr’s invention as in the “red hot” category. The only inkling of what it might be was the announcement that it was related to remote control of apparatus employed in warfare.
By then Hedy and George’s Secret Communication System had passed to the Navy for evaluation, which means it had cleared two layers of council examiners. Antheil told Bullitt that it “actually reached [Charles F.] Kettering, who was very enthusiastic about it and recommended it to the Navy.” Kettering’s enthusiasm may have prompted the announcement that the New York Times picked up.
The invention reached the Navy at a bad time. War with Japan was in the air in the autumn and early winter of 1941. On 3 November, the same day the United States began evacuating military and civilian dependents from the islands of Guam, Midway, and Wake, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, cabled Secretary of State Cordell Hull warning of the possibility of war:
[In State Department paraphrase:] The Ambassador said it was his purpose to insure against the United States becoming involved in war with Japan through any misconception of Japanese capacity to plunge into a “suicidal struggle” with us…. It would be short-sighted to underestimate the obvious preparations of Japan; it would be short-sighted also if our policy were based on a belief that these preparations amounted merely to saber rattling. Finally, he warned of the possibility of Japan’s adopting measures with dramatic and dangerous suddenness which might make inevitable a war with the United States.
Japan did adopt those “measures”; at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, 7 December 1941, a flight of 353 Japanese carrier-based light bombers and other aircraft attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, where a large part of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was anchored. Japanese bombs and aerial torpedoes sank or destroyed four American battleships; four others were hit and damaged. Three cruisers were also hit and damaged and three destroyers. The battleship Arizona was devastated by an eight-hundred-kilogram armor-piercing bomb; the bomb started an oil fire forward that initiated a chain of explosions culminating in the explosion of the ship’s main magazine. Everyone belowdecks died: 1,177 men, the largest death toll on a Navy ship in U.S. history.
A seaman on the battleship California, Eddie Jones, described the devastation on the Pacific Fleet’s flagship:
When that big bomb blew up and they put the fire out, I looked down in that big hole that went down three or four decks. I saw men all blown up, men with no legs on, men burned to death, men drowned in oil, with oil coming out of their eyes and their mouth and their ears. You couldn’t believe it was happening. You could see it in front of your eyes, but you couldn’t believe it. Here it was, a beautiful day—a beautiful Sunday morning—and you see everything blowing up and ships sinking and men in the water. And you think, we’re at peace with the world. This can’t be happening.
The next day, 8 December, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to a grim assembly of both houses of Congress. “Yesterday,” he began, “December Seventh, Nineteen Forty-One, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” He called for a declaration of war, which Congress immediately voted and he signed the same day.
Two days later, on 10 December, the Japanese invaded the Philippines. The United States had few ships in the area other than submarines and torpedo boats; these were deployed to patrol the region and attack Japanese shipping. “In the weeks and months that followed,” write two American naval historians, “U.S. submariners began to realize that there was something wrong with their torpedoes. More often than not success against Japanese ships was denied by torpedoes that ran too deep, exploded too soon, did not explode at all, or did not have enough explosive power to sink a ship when they did engage and detonate.” In 1942, 60 percent of U.S. torpedoes were duds. Japanese ships steamed into port with unexploded torpedoes stuck in their hulls like arrows.
It took the submarine service eighteen months to push past Navy bureaucracy, skepticism, and hostility to determine what was wrong with its torpedoes. The answer was, almost everything. In the years between the world wars, torpedo research and development at the Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island, had withered on an annual budget of only $90,000. Because Newport saved money by testing its torpedoes’ depth meters with lighter practice torpedoes in still water, the weapons ran too deep, missing their targets entirely. Newport’s secret magnetic exploder, which was supposed to serve as a proximity fuse, failed to detect an enemy ship more often than it succeeded, and frequently triggered an explosion soon after the torpedo had left its submarine. These and other problems, including the torpedo station’s bitter and prolonged labor troubles, gave way only slowly to the determined assault of frustrated submarine commanders in the field.
Under the circumstances, the Navy had no interest whatsoever in developing a new torpedo with a complicated guidance mechanism; it would be happy simply to see its old-fashioned unguided torpedoes occasionally both hit their marks and explode.
Hedy and George heard of the decision months before their patent was allowed—in late January or early February 1942. “After considering our torpedo for a long while,” Antheil wrote to Bullitt on 5 February, “(during which period it seems that it was almost accepted) the government declined our torpedo, saying that it was excellently worked out, but still somewhat too heavy. Miss Lamarr now insists that we get to work and lighten it.”