That was exceptionally fast, you realize. It was the fastest thing around. But it needed modifications. There are a lot of kinks in a ship at that stage. The military saw the certified results of those tests. They were finally impressed and they said, ‘We don’t need another fighter, but we do need a photo-reconnaissance plane. If you can make the D-5 into the F-11, we’ll buy it.’
How did we get from DX-2 to D-5?
X means experimental. By then we’d worked up several new models and the last one happened to be the fifth, so it was the D-5. We dropped the X when the plane was finished. The F-11 – F stands for photo-reconnaissance – was the XF-11 at the beginning, because it was experimental. Got it?
The only difference was that they bullied me into making the F-11 out of metal. I was willing, since the plane wasn’t going to carry armament and had to be pretty tough. I was also willing because for the first time the sons of bitches were going to make metal available to me, which they hadn’t been willing to do before that – I suppose they thought I might wake up one day in a bad mood and use their aluminum to make experimental yo-yos. After all, how can you trust a man who wears pajamas under his suit?
I received a contract for a hundred planes. They were pretty specific about what they wanted in a reconnaissance plane. It had to fly a minimum of four thousand miles without adding any fuel tanks. They wanted external tanks so that it could go another thousand miles. They wanted a plane that could cruise at 30,000 feet, because as I later found out, the stuff they were flying then, those converted P-38s, had a lot of trouble above 18,000 feet. They wanted a ship that could fly 450 miles an hour. Naturally they had to have reasonable protection for the crew, which meant armor plating and positioning of two men so they were less vulnerable to machine gun fire and flak. And no armament on the ship.
This is a hell of an assignment, but I was willing to do it. I felt I had the basic plane in the D-5. However, it’s one thing to have the specifications laid out on paper for you, and it’s another thing to have the experience in the kind of flying that this plane was required to do. I had flown the hottest planes in the world of my own design. But I had never flown a recon plane, and I had certainly never flown one in combat.
The first thing that occurred to me was, I don’t know what the hell it’s like up there, I don’t know what this ship has to do in actual combat conditions. So I decided to get a firsthand look at how things were in combat – to try the available planes and see what they were lacking and what my plane would need to have to justify its existence.
I went to General Benny Meyers, a friend of mine. Benny couldn’t do anything. Even Elliot Roosevelt, while obviously well placed, couldn’t open the right doors for me. But his father could. So I called Jesse Jones and told him I wanted to see the President, although I didn’t tell him why.
You went straight up to FDR?
He was the Commander-in-Chief, the boss, just like me. What he said, went. I’m not a Democrat, but neither am I a Republican. In fact I have no use for party lines. But Roosevelt was a horse of another color. He was an intellectual, a brilliant man, and he pulled the country out of the worst hole it’s ever been in, at any rate since I can remember.
He gave me a few minutes of his time after a White House dinner reception for a visiting Russian, between the rubber chicken and Eleanor’s apple pie. He was amused at my request, but he tried to talk me out of it. He said, ‘Howard, you’re a lunatic. It’s a mistake for a man in your position to expose himself. We need generals as much as front-line troops, and you’re in the general class.’
I said, ‘From what I’ve seen of your generals, Mr. President, you need them like a dog needs fleas in August.’ And I talked him into it. I was pretty stubborn and I think Franklin always liked me. He had given me a medal years before – we had a private lunch following my round-the-world flight – and I guess he had a paternal attitude toward me, which certainly manifested itself when I showed up in Washington in 1944 and said I wanted to fly some missions.
He passed the word down. Several of the TWA stratoliners had been commandeered by the Army, and within a few days it was arranged for me to fly one of them to England. Oral orders were issued by Roosevelt himself, and I had a high priority pass. I was carrying OSS men, all destined for parachute missions in Europe.
The base I landed at was north of London somewhere, near Oxford – it was called Mount Farm – and it was the 7th Reconnaissance Group with the 8th Air Force. Never been so cold in my life. The sun shone about ten minutes a day, on a good day. It was even colder indoors. I don’t drink, I don’t even drink coffee or stimulants, but I must have put away a gallon of tea every day while I was there, just to keep my insides warm.
I was in uniform but I had no rank, just one of those olive-drab uniforms with some kind of insignia patch on the shoulder. But that was enough, with my presidential pass. I wasn’t used to wearing a uniform and I hadn’t worn a tie in years, except when I absolutely had to. I walked into the officers’ mess the first day, and I was still wearing the same pants I’d worn flying across the Atlantic, and my shirt was rumpled, and I wore an old tattered sweater over it, and earmuffs.
A kid marched up to me and said, ‘Who the hell are you?’
I said, ‘I’m Major Henry Hughes.’ That shook him up, and he just stammered something and left. But pretty soon the commanding officer, Colonel Paul Cullen, marched up to me and said, ‘Listen, Major, this isn’t a spit-and-polish outfit, but we do expect our officers to walk around in something other than a sweater with torn elbows, and you might have those pants pressed, and take off those red earmuffs.’
I said, ‘My ears are cold.’
‘Take them off. That’s an order, Major.’
‘Yes sir, I’ll do that, sir,’ I said, finally, because I didn’t want to make any waves.
I went up to Oxford and got my things cleaned and pressed and bought a new beige cashmere sweater, and for the rest of the time I was just as beautifully turned out as any of the brass around there. But I wasn’t there long. I didn’t have any time to fool around – I got out on the first clear day, the first recon mission since I’d arrived.
I was flying a modified P-38, called an F-5B. Good plane, but no match for the Kraut pursuit planes, because they crapped out too low, about 22,000 feet, and weren’t fast enough. Any higher than that and you were likely to throw a rod. At that, they were an improvement over the F-4s, the unmodified P-38s, which threw rods as low as 17,000 feet. Elliot Roosevelt told me they lost a lot of pilots that way, especially in Africa.
But the F-5B had one big advantage: two engines, so if one was shot out you could limp home on the other. I was familiar with the P-38. Frankly, I think, and I have often said, that I designed the P-38 myself. I proposed the basic design to the Army and they turned it down. And then by some strange coincidence, as often happens in industry, they gave the contract to build the plane to Lockheed. And sure enough, when it came out, the P-38 had all the earmarks of my design. I didn’t squawk too loudly about this – it wouldn’t have got me the contract by then – but anyhow, I was familiar with the plane.
After a few days we got a little break in the weather and the squadron went out on a dicing mission. That’s a low altitude flight, using a nose oblique camera. We were flying along the channel coast of France, on the Cherbourg peninsula, photographing the Kraut defenses. The air was full of flying metal – no flight for a sane man to be on.
Were you scared?
Are you kidding? I’d never been in combat before. I thought maybe I knew what it would be like, from Hell’s Angels, but it’s not the same at all. You can’t duplicate that on a movie set. I was petrified.