When I got to Newark I’d broken my own record, and I knew it, and the hell of it was I couldn’t land. There was a United Airline Boeing 247 on the runway having engine trouble. I had to wait until they moved it out of the way. I had no radio, just buzzed the field a few times and waggled my wings so they’d know I wanted to land. That added about twenty minutes to my time, but I still broke the record by about forty minutes.
I put a guard on the Winged Bullet and took a taxi into New York and went to sleep for forty-eight hours. Of course the newspapers found out very quickly I’d broken another record and they were hammering at my door for days.
In many ways I’ve often regretted that I made that flight. The aftermath was disaster. It was one of those absurd events – or nonevent, as it turned out – which nobody could predict or whip up out of their wildest dreams. Even after it happened nobody could realize its importance, but in many ways it was to change the course of my life and bring me more aggravation than if I’d opened the door to a cage of rattlesnakes.
I’d broken all the speed records with the H-1, and naturally the U.S. Army Air Corps was interested. They didn’t have a plane that compared with mine. The speeds I had flown at were nearly double what any of their pursuit planes could fly, and that record stood for eight years, which I think is a record in itself. You can believe that the Army wanted to see that plane.
When I was in New York, a general named Oliver Echols called me and asked me to stop off at Wright Field in Ohio on my way back to California. The Air Corps wanted to look at the plane.
I said, ‘Sure.’ I was pleased.
But it was several days before I left, and I had a lot on my mind, and I was tired from all the preparations, the flight and the aftermath of publicity. I wanted to get back to California. I took off, and the first stop I made was Omaha, to refuel. Then I went right on to California.
What I didn’t know was that Echols had invited all the top brass in Washington to Wright Field in Ohio to inspect the plane. They were standing around waiting while the Winged Bullet and I were up there above the clouds and headed for California. I forgot. I’m human, and I forgot. And they never forgave me.
Naturally the newspapers made as much of it as they could. The generals landed on Echols and blamed him, told him he’d screwed it up and must have got the date wrong. But he hadn’t got it wrong and he could prove it.
The Hate Howard Hughes Club started that day, at Wright Field, and it had repercussions which were endless.
My ship, the H-1, was far better than anything the Air Corps had, but after that incident they wouldn’t buy it, because they figured I’d snubbed them at Wright Field. Until the end of the Second World War they never built a plane to equal it. I was anxious to have that plane produced, but I didn’t have the facilities. It might have made a tremendous difference to us in the Second World War, because that plane – the original, the one I flew, wound up in the Smithsonian – became the Japanese Zero.
Just before the war began, I told Noah to get together with Jesse Jones to find out how I could contribute to the war effort. Jesse took Noah to see General Knudsen, who decided he wanted me to make some accessories for the B-25, struts and cannon barrels. But then, as a part of the chain of command, the red tape rigmarole, Knudsen sent Noah along to General Echols.
‘If Howard Hughes gets any contracts from the Army,’ Echols said to Noah, ‘it’ll be over my dead body.’
Noah told me that, and I got on the phone to Jesse Jones.
‘Jesse, tell the Army to put old grudges aside. This General Echols is screwing up the war effort. I’m not going to make any money out of manufacturing struts and casting cannon barrels, but if it’s necessary, you know I’ll do it. You tell Echols to shove his grudges up his ass.’
Jesse bypassed Echols and we got the contracts. The Aircraft Division of Toolco made the struts and the cannon and six-inch shells during the war. But if Echols had his way, nothing would have happened. It’s a wonder we won the war with people like that in positions of responsibility.
There was another reason why the Army had a grudge against me. This never came out at the Senate hearings in 1947, either, because it would have been too ridiculous to bring up a thing like this, but I happen to know that the Army brass always held this incident against me and it gave them a very poor opinion of me.
It seems that sometime during the war there was a question of whether or not the contract for the HK-1 would be renewed, whether the government would still pump money into the project, because things were going slowly at that point and I couldn’t get the parts and the materials I needed. They wanted me to come to Washington, but eventually the top brass came to see me in California.
I was with Russell Birdwell the night before – he was my publicity man and we were working on The Outlaw – and I was exhausted, rundown, and Birdwell said, ‘Howard, get some sleep. And in the morning you’ve got to shave and put on a suit and tie. You’re going to be put on the spot by the United States Army and you have to make a good impression.’ He was very considerate, anxious for my welfare.
Birdwell left, and I got a few hours sleep, but I overslept. The appointment with Echols and Admiral Towers and the rest of the brass was for an early breakfast at the Ambassador. I was in a terrible hurry – I shaved, as I’d promised, but I dressed very quickly and put my suit and tie on over my pajamas. To this day I don’t know why I did that, but I did.
I gave my progress report at breakfast in the Ambassador to those generals and admirals, eight or nine of them, and it was warm in the room and at some point I loosened my tie and opened my suit jacket. I stood up, and there were my pajamas tops hanging out from under my shirt, and my pajama bottoms sticking out from under my pants cuffs.
I paid no attention. I was involved in trying to explain why there had been delays in the HK-1 and why the ship had to be completed, for the sake of both the Air Corps and the tremendous research we were doing in the field of large-plane design. But that’s another story. The point of this is that all the Army could see was that Howard Hughes hadn’t bothered to take off his pajamas before he put on his suit.
What an insult! What a thing to do! They thought I was making fun of them in their starched uniforms with scrambled eggs and chests full of fruit salad, their campaign ribbons. They also thought this was evidence that I was a little nuts.
That weighed heavily against me for the rest of the war. I was talking business and airplanes and I thought the military was doing the same thing. My sartorial splendor was totally beside the point in the long run, but not for them. For them it was worse than if I’d been Hitler’s secret second cousin. They never forgave me for that. It was constantly brought up whenever they had their conferences about me and what I was building for them. I was told this by Jesse Jones, and at the time he had no reason to lie to me. Their attitude hampered the war effort, and the military has tried to make my life miserable ever since.
Think about it. If they’d bought the H-1 from me, the Japanese wouldn’t have had the Zero. It was the fastest thing around, nearly twice as fast as anything the Air Corps had. After the Air Corps had bitten off its nose to spite its face, I got some little company in the midwest to agree to tool up for producing it. They went broke. But before they went broke, the Japanese sent a delegation of engineers to their plant, studied the modified H-1, went home, and within a year the H-1 had become the Zero, made by Mitsubishi.
Was the Zero an exact copy?
With modifications, naturally, but not so much that you couldn’t recognize the H-1 with the rising sun on her wingtips. The Mitsubishi people had that ship in the air by early 1939. They rounded off the wings a bit, shoved in the armament, put in a 780-horsepower engine where I had a 1050-horsepower Wasp, and they got more than 350 miles per hour maximum speed out of her. That was better than anything this country had at the time. Naturally if any Air Force General admitted this when the war began and those Jap Zeros were buzzing all over the Pacific and kicking the crap out of the Navy, they would have had him personally cleaning out Oliver Echols mink-lined toilet. That was all hushed up. If we had had it in 1941 instead of them, the Japanese might never have attacked Pearl Harbor. Even if they had, we would have whipped their ass a hell of a lot quicker and probably wouldn’t have had to use the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.