Did you get hit?
A couple of bits of shrapnel in the fuselage, but nothing compared to what some of the other planes took. One of them had one of the booms – the P-38s had twin booms – torn right in half. Went into a spin. Crashed. Killed. Anyhow, the flight gave me some idea of what was expected of a recon plane at low altitude. You understand, I’m not telling this story to make myself out a hero. Our American boys and those English and Polish pilots flew hundreds of thousands of missions. I only flew three, and I didn’t do it to be a hero. I’m telling it because it was a part of my life and it had repercussions.
A few days later we went out again. This time we were mapping in Normandy near Ste.-Mère-Eglise. They were already building up for D-day and they wanted checks on the German defensive measures. This time we flew much higher. If one of those Focke-Wulfs came down at you, you were a sitting duck. We were too fast for an escort. The motto of the squadron was, ‘Get ‘em, got ‘em, gone.’ I gave the plane a real workout this time, took her up to damn near 30,000 feet. Now I had been briefed that the plane couldn’t operate very effectively over 20,000 feet – it was supposed to, but it couldn’t. I did it because I had the instincts of a test pilot. And that’s why I was there, to find out how these aircraft behaved. And I got back all right.
When I landed at Mount Farm, I noticed a couple of pilots out there sandpapering the hulls of their ships. I spoke to one of them about it and he explained that if they got it smooth enough they could pick up as much as ten knots in speed. And I smiled, because that was my own thinking when I devised the flush riveting on my H-1. The Japanese went even further – they used an oriental method of lacquering their planes, and one very thin coat of paint on their Zeros, slick as ice.
And the entire time you were in England, the men never realized that you were Howard Hughes? They thought your first name was Henry?
The men didn’t, but I suspect the C.O. knew. I had to show him my pass from President Roosevelt. Paul Cullen was a bright and much-loved man. No discipline in the old-fashioned sense that he kept aloof from his men. He was one of the guys sandpapering the plane. He’d go out with the boys in the squadron, pick up the English girls, and he was a hell of a man. He reminded me – well, he was my age – but he made me think my father would have been like that in a similar position. He was one of the boys, which I’ve never been. I don’t think I spoke more than two words to men in the BOQ, the Bachelor Officer Quarters, where I stayed.
You always say you weren’t one of the boys, not even then, in England. But that was an opportunity where you really could have been one of them. It was wartime, you were eating with these guys, flying with them…
No, I wasn’t eating with them. I ate in town on a park bench. And I brought my own milk and things back to the BOQ. The English milk was delicious, very fresh. Their milk bottles looked far more scrubbed than our American bottles.
But that’s not the point. You were comrades in arms. If you wanted to be one of the boys all you had to do was to make the effort.
I didn’t know how. I told you I was shy. I don’t tell dirty jokes. I didn’t chase after women. If I wanted to be with the men, I would have had to lie to them about myself, make up some story, and in those circumstances I don’t think it would have worked.
I was in England maybe just a week. I could never talk about it because it had been done in such a way, through my personal contact with Mr. Roosevelt, that I just didn’t want to get him in any trouble. And certainly when it came time to be up there before the Senate investigation committee, I had to keep it quiet. I was scared to death it would come up, because they had tried to subpoena some of the President’s private papers. He was dead by then, and the papers were up in Hyde Park. I remember thinking, hell, if they get hold of those, then they’re really going to make a scandal out of this. Not that there was anything to make a scandal of, but it would have been said that Roosevelt and Hughes were bosom buddies, and that would have given them just that much more ammunition to shoot me down in 1947 – to try and shoot me down.
The Krauts couldn’t shoot me down during the war. It took the United States Senate and the Republican Party to have a really good crack at it.
12
THE FLYING BOAT has been a running theme throughout my life. In a sense it was Henry Kaiser who conceived it, but Henry dropped out and never implemented the idea in any way. Let’s call him the oyster and me the pearl. He gave me the grain of sand around which I built the Hercules, which is what I called it. That idea has been incorporated at least in part in all the big jets that are flying today – the Boeing 747, the C-5A, and so on.
Henry Kaiser first came to visit me around 1941, just before the war began for the United States, and I think he had a very poor impression of me. He came up to my hotel room in San Francisco, at the Mark Hopkins. I was in bed recovering from pneumonia and I had blankets piled on top of me. I hadn’t told people I was sick and he thought it was simply another eccentricity on my part, for which I was already famous at the age of thirty-six.
But he didn’t seem to care. He had already talked to Jesse Jones, who was head of the RFC, the wartime Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Jesse was a Texan and he had been a friend of my father’s.
Henry Kaiser said to him: ‘Tell me about Howard Hughes.’
‘Mr. Kaiser,’ Jesse said, ‘I’ve known that boy all my life. He’s a man you can trust.’ He called me a genius. He said, ‘I wholeheartedly recommend that you and young Howard work together. All I suggest is that because of Howard’s methods of work, his concentration, and his attention to details, you leave him alone when he does the building.’
Kaiser sat by my bed at the Mark Hopkins. ‘Well, Howard, how about some way to lick those goddamn German U-boats that are chewing up our shipping?’
I asked him what he had in mind.
‘I have in mind,’ Henry said, ‘a flying cargo ship. Something big enough to carry a battalion of troops and all their gear right over the Atlantic.’
I was speechless. I don’t want to detract from Henry’s inspiration, but something of the sort had been buzzing around in the back of my head for some time, and Henry’s words crystallized it for me. Right then and there I had the vision of what is commonly known as the Hercules, or HK-1, or the Spruce Goose, as it was later nicknamed.
I immediately got interested. The only thing, I told him, was that I didn’t know if I could mass-produce a ship of such scope and size.
He said, ‘That’s my specialty, Howard. You just design and develop it.’
I said okay, and we shook hands.
Literally?
Oh, I was half dead with pneumonia, practically a one-man germ factory, and it couldn’t have made any difference if I’d shaken hands with a crap-smeared ape in the zoo. It was Henry who took the risk that time, not me.
We set up a nonprofit paper corporation, and put up a few thousand dollars apiece. Henry was very useful to me, not only because of his knowhow, but because he got along much better with those guys in Washington. They already had me on their shitlist for that little incident at Wright Field. I let Henry handle all the socializing, and I set my mind to figuring out what we were going to build and how we were going to build it.