Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman Read Free Book Online Page A

destiny.
    After all, it had been his dream when he first landed in Washington in the summer of 1940. 30 Then came the Liberty ship contract, andKaiser got distracted. But in 1941 he was thinking in that direction again, this time about cargo planes—airborne versions of the Liberty ship. All he needed was a partner who knew something about planes, and by September 1942—the same month the Maritime Commission announced the Liberty ship program had built 488 vessels in a single year—he thought he’d found him: Howard Hughes.
    Hollywood tycoon and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes would later become an American icon, a symbol of wealth gone wrong. But in 1942 he was a well-known private aviator and head of Hughes Tool Company, a California-based concern that had racked up a number of important defense contracts. The Navy Aeronautics Board’s George Spangenberg, who met Hughes in early 1944, found him “a very competent engineer” with a wide-ranging knowledge of aeronautics as well as practical flying. 31 Like Kaiser, Hughes was a maverick, and like Kaiser, he was a man who dreamed big. And if Kaiser saw in Hughes an expert aviation industry insider whose brain he could pick while finding a project begging for joint investment, Hughes saw in Kaiser the man who could bankroll his most cherished project: building the biggest airplane in the world.
    Boeing had shown the way with its four-engined bombers, first the B-17 and then the biggest and most complex of all, the B-29. Together with Consolidated’s B-24, they ruled the skies of Asia and Europe as offensive weapons. Donald Douglas had made the big cargo plane a reality, first with his twin-engined C-47, the most ubiquitous airplane of the Second World War, and then his four-engined C-54 Skymaster, of which twelve hundred were made for the Army Air Forces and the Navy. 32
    Glenn Martin had carried the concept a step further with the JRM-3 Mars, a gigantic flying boat that could carry almost 100,000 pounds of cargo across the Atlantic Ocean—far above the reach of German U-boats. The Mars had its maiden flight on November 5, 1941, and seemed to be the last word on cargo-carrying megaplanes. †
    Hughes, however, intended to outdo them all. He envisioned a plane with not four or even six but
eight
Pratt and Whitney R-4360 4000-horsepower engines and a wingspan of 320 feet—an entire footballfield. Taking off from water like a seaplane, the Hercules (as he dubbed it) would carry one hundred tons of cargo, or 750 men or a Sherman tank, over a transoceanic distance at 20,000 feet—nothing less than a flying Liberty ship, in effect.
    To Kaiser, the image was irresistible. There had been some talk at the War Production Board of giving him a contract to build the Martin plane, but he jumped instead at Hughes’s plane. “These ships could land 500,000 fully equipped men in England in a single day,” he enthused to
Time
. “The next day they could fly over again with 70,000 tons of fresh milk, beefsteaks, sugar and bombs.” 33 He learned that General Hap Arnold had turned Hughes’s superplane down flat—but then, Arnold had turned down Kaiser once as well. He heard aviation executives like Donald Douglas and Jack Northrop tell him the idea was insane—but then, traditional shipbuilders had said the same thing when he set out to build Liberty ships. ‡
    He declared that he and Hughes could have five thousand megaplanes in the air inside of two years, even though Consolidated’s master of mass production, Harry Woodhead, warned him it couldn’t be done in less than four. 34 And so, despite the misgivings of the aviation industry and the Air Force brass, the Defense Plant Corporation gave Kaiser and Hughes an $18 million contract to build three of their cargo planes under Hughes’s direct supervision. There would be no fees; Kaiser and Hughes would be doing the entire thing for free. Kaiser was less than pleased. “Every builder knows,” he protested, “that a