The Last Heroes (Men at War 1)

PROLOGUE

In January 1939, Professor Niels Bohr, a German physicist who had fled Germany and was then living in Copenhagen, traveled to the United States and visited with Professor Albert Einstein, a German mathematician who had also fled Germany and was then living in Princeton, New Jersey.

Among other things, they discussed an interesting phenomenon observed when uranium, a natural element, was bombarded with neutrons: barium and krypton were formed, indicating that the uranium atom had been split into two nearly equal fragments.

Professor Bohr further discussed this phenomenon, which he called fission, with a number of other eminent scientists. Among these was Professor Enrico Fermi (then of the University of Chicago). At a conference in Washington, D.C., on January 26, 1939, Fermi suggested that neutrons might be released during fission, and if this were the case, a continuous disintegration—a ‘‘chain reaction’’—might be possible. Fermi believed that such a chain reaction might release energy of a rather stunning magnitude.

The first contact between the scientific community and the government concerning nuclear fission took place in March 1939, when Professor George B. Pegram of Columbia University arranged for Fermi to discuss the matter with certain officers of the U.S. Navy.

Energy yields were of considerable importance to the U.S. Navy, whose engineers were constantly striving to extract a few more British thermal units from each gallon of bunker fuel oil and aviation gasoline. An increase of fifty percent in energy yield would give whoever owned the secret a tremendous advantage over his enemy, and these respectable scientists were talking of greater than tenfold or even hundredfold energy increases.

And even if there were technical drawbacks that would keep the Navy’s fuel tanks from getting a sudden miracle energy boost, perhaps there was something in this mysterious process that would work for ammunition. Increasing the power of a cannon shell was always a welcome possibility.

Professor Fermi told the naval officers that though he didn’t have any precise figures, still, as an educated guess, fission of one hundred pounds of uranium 235 would probably release as much energy as twenty thousand tons of an explosive like, say, trinitrotoluene, commonly called TNT.

The Navy found that fascinating and asked if there was much interest in this sort of thing in Europe. Professor Fermi said there was. The Germans seemed curious about the subject. And there were uraninite mines in Germany.

The Navy inquired if mining and refining this new explosive was difficult.

Professor Fermi sadly indicated that it was, since not just any uranium would do. The kind of uranium required for a chain reaction, uranium 235, was an isotope, one part in 140. The current total world’s supply of pure uranium 235, he told them, was 0.000001 pound.

In the summer of 1939, Alexander Sachs presented the views of Einstein and others to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Approximately six months later, Roosevelt made funds available to look further into the matter. The scientists thought they could do everything that had to be done for six thousand dollars, and that is how much the President gave them.

How much money naval intelligence spent looking for a source of uraninite ore somewhere outside the borders of Nazi Germany has never been revealed, but it is known that by December 6, 1941, when the atomic fission project was put under the direction of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Navy knew there were several hundred tons of uraninite ore in Kolwezi, a small mining town in Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo.

ONE

Annapolis, Maryland 1330 Hours 4 June 1941

The United States Naval Academy class of 1941, having more or less patiently endured the more or less predictably inspiring remarks of the secretary of the Navy, formed a line according to academic rank and moved across the platform to receive their diplomas and handshakes. As they walked back to their seats, they glanced toward the sky. The next item on the program was a flyover of Navy fighter aircraft.

The commandant of the Naval Academy had not been enthusiastic about the flyover when it had been proposed to him. So far as he was concerned, the graduation exercises should not be turned into an air show. Indeed he privately believed that the Navy did not need combat aircraft at all, that the battleship remained the ultimate weapon of naval power, and that the Navy needed airplanes only in order to locate the enemy fleet. The notion of bright young ensigns applying for flight training offended him. They should be learning their profession aboard battleships and cruisers.

An assistant secretary of the Navy, however, ‘‘asked’’ the commandant to change his mind. Fox Movietone News, as well as the press, would be attending; and it was entirely possible, the assistant secretary added, that if there were to be a flyover, The March of Time would also send a motion-picture newsreel crew. Between Fox Movietone News and The March of Time, a newsreel sequence of the graduation ceremonies would be in every movie theater in the country. It was a public-relations opportunity that should not be ignored.

Thus the commandant ‘‘decided’’ that a squadron of Grumman F3F-1 fighters would be permitted to fly over the Academy immediately before the brand-new ensigns, in keeping with long tradition, threw their hats in the air.

The Grumman F3F-1, a biplane, was then the standard Navy fighter aircraft. It was powered by a 950-horsepower Wright Cyclone engine, which gave it a maximum speed of just about 230 miles per hour. And it was armed with one .50-caliber and one .30-caliber machine gun.

On schedule, the first V of three F3F-1s passed over the campus. They were flying at their maximum speed at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, the minimum altitude permitted over populated areas by naval and Federal Aviation Administration regulations.

Even at that altitude, the roar of their engines was impressive, and it seemed to last much longer than was actually the case, for six more Vs of three F3F-1s followed the first at thirty-second intervals. Even the commandant somewhat reluctantly admitted it was an impressive exhibition of naval might.

As the last three-plane V of F3F-1s passed over and began to gain altitude, and just as the commandant was about to step to the microphone again, there came the sound of another—and much noisier—aircraft engine. It was louder both because t

he airplane was flying only at about five hundred feet and because the Wright supercharged 1200-hp engine, which powered the Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat fighter, gave off a mighty roar as it propelled the stubby silver-bodied monoplane. The aircraft approached more quickly than had the F3F-1s a moment before. The Wildcat, with its throttle pushed to full military power, had a maximum speed of 330 miles per hour, 100 miles faster than the F3F-1.

The not yet wholly accepted F4F-3 would eventually replace the F3F-1 as the standard Navy fighter. It was so new that none of the people participating in the graduating exercise had yet seen one.

With one notable exception. On the reviewing stand was a vice admiral, whose uniform bore the golden wings of a naval aviator. The second, unscheduled flyby had been his idea. He had reasoned that if getting F3F-1 Navy fighters into the newsreels was good, getting the new, greatly superior F4F-3 was better. He had also reasoned that if he suggested this, he would be turned down. Only a few Wildcats had come off the production line, and these were occupied with testing. They could not be spared for a showy display like this one, it would have been argued.

The admiral beamed as the first F4F-3 did a barrel roll at 330 knots and then climbed out. Instantly another Wildcat came, also made a barrel roll at 330 knots, and then disappeared. Then came a third and final one. By the time it had passed over, the audience, including the secretary of the Navy, had broken into applause.

The band began to play ‘‘Anchors Aweigh!’’

The commandant was smiling. He had no other choice. The battleship bastard could hardly scream about broken regulations and unauthorized flybys to a secretary of the Navy who was smiling like a proud father.

Anacostia Naval Air Station Washington, D.C. 1355 Hours 4 June 1941

Anacostia Tower cleared Navy zero zero three—a flight of three F4F-3 aircraft—to land singly, at sixty-second intervals, on runway two zero. Commander J. K. Hawes, USN, flying the first F4F-3, broke off from the formation over the District of Columbia jail and General Hospital, and made a steep descending turn to the left. He passed over the Sousa Bridge, at the Washington Navy Yard, came in low over the Anacostia River, and touched down. A Follow Me truck waited for him.

Sixty seconds later, Lieutenant (j.g.) Edwin H. Bitter, USN, landed the second F4F-3, and sixty seconds after that, Lieutenant (j.g.) Richard L. Canidy, USNR, landed the third.

Commander Hawes was forty-three, a veteran naval aviator, and an Academy graduate. He was the F4F-3 project officer stationed at the Grumman factory at Bethpage, Long Island.

Lieutenants Bitter and Canidy, each twenty-four years old, had been selected from the large pool of naval aviators at Naval Air Station, Pensacola, where they were both instructor pilots. The requirement had been for two pilots who had more than the usual capacity to guide the aircraft. These two had to have something extra—the talent really to fly. They also had to be bright enough to understand both the real purpose behind the flyover and the damage they could do to naval aviation if they screwed something up.

Lieutenant Edwin H. Bitter fit the requirement perfectly. He was an earnest, intense-looking young man who had graduated from the Naval Academy with the class of 1938. Though on the small side, he had earned his letter on the football field; and he still exercised regularly—and looked as if he did. In spite of their unorthodox nature, which at other times would have bothered him, Bitter had taken particular pleasure in today’s maneuvers over Annapolis. He considered, correctly, that his selection for the job was an honor.

Lieutenant Bitter was, in other words, the straightest of straight shooters. Lieutenant Richard L. Canidy was another thing entirely. Though if anything he was a better pilot than Bitter, he was not an Academy man, and—more damaging still—his attitude disturbed more than a few people who counted. All too often, when his name came up, one would hear words like cocky, blasé, arrogant, or defiant. Canidy was thought to cut too many corners. He was even thought by some not to be ‘‘serious.’’ The trouble with Canidy, it was generally agreed, was that he was too smart for his own good. Not smart-ass smart, really smart. He had received (cum laude) a Bachelor of Science, Aeronautical Engineering, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1938.

Canidy was dark-eyed, dark-haired, and quick to smile. He was tall—nearly a head taller than Bitter—and moved with fluid grace, but he was not really good-looking. This deficiency, however, in no way hindered the frequency or the (mutual) pleasure of his encounters with more than usually beautiful and attractive members of the opposite sex. In fact, he was often said to have the same talent for women that Alexander the Great had for territory.

And Canidy was also a magnificent pilot. When he had entered the Navy, he was already a skilled airman with a commercial pilot’s license, an instrument ticket, and 350 hours of solo time. And his skills had steadily improved. An easy way up the Navy ladder was open to him, if he wanted to go that way. He didn’t. He had lost no time letting it be known that while he would, to the best of his ability, do whatever the Navy asked of him, he was not planning to become an admiral.

A Navy scholarship, in exchange for four years of post-graduation service, had gotten him through MIT. That four years would be up in June of 1942. At the moment Canidy intended to swap his gold stripe-and-a-half for an engineer’s slipstick. The Boeing Aircraft Company of Seattle, Washington, had made him a very good offer of employment, based just about equally on his B.S., A.E., cum laude; on the opinion held of him by several of his professors; and on his thesis, ‘‘An Hypothesis of Airfoil Tip Vibrations at Speeds in Excess of 400 MPH.’’

In the end, it had been decided that Bitter and Canidy were the best choices to be sent to Bethpage because of their flying skill, and that Canidy’s attitude, though leaving a good deal to be desired, was more than compensated for by his other qualifications.