But the Adhesives section supervisors didn’t see anything out of the ordinary about the situation, anything mitigating at all. BuAer had made its request and that was that. Their job was to accommodate BuAer. Heinlein tried to explain it patiently but found himself getting angry. Somehow, the “discussion” got out of control and degenerated into a shouting argument—with no practical results at all. He found himself shaking and dizzy—and alarmed at the intensity of the emotions he was experiencing. 12
Heinlein’s stress had mounted to the point where he was losing control, and he couldn’t afford to lose control—not for himself, not for Leslyn, not for the war effort. He went immediately to his local internist and asked for an evaluation.13
The doctor examined him and decided the problem was less mental in this case than physical. He prescribed a mild sedative, “a pleasant mixture of vitamins and barbiturate called (as I recollect) ‘Elixir E,’ or some such. Either his reassurances or the joy juice or both quieted me down.”14 Heinlein also made further restrictions in his lifestyle to reduce the demands on his time, and with additional rest and the help of the mildly narcotic sedative, he found he could maintain an even strain.
But he had to deal with the immediate problem. Heinlein knew how to handle this—the Navy way: when you can’t avoid illegal or irrational orders, he told Gerstenfeld, the thing to do is not to refuse them, but to ask for them in writing. That way, your own ass is covered, and any repercussions would go to the person who put his orders in writing. In the constipated bureaucratic environment of Snafu Manor, that took care of the problem.
Heinlein might not be enraged any more, but Huddick and his superior had wakened in him a determination to fix this one thing that was within his power to fix here and now; he “taught [Gerstenfeld] how she could trip our chief engineer even more effectively by a two-stage action that was strictly regulation.” 15 Leslyn, when she heard about it, told him that she had run into similar incidents, and they bothered her, too, because it meant soldiers would be killed by the stuff coming out of the Naval Aircraft Factory. It was a systemic problem, and the whole of the Navy, Robert came to see, was rotten with it:
It took a war and the unusual experience of serving in the Navy as a civilian to open my eyes to just how abysmal our shortcomings, as an officer class, are. The class as a whole is so self-satisfied, so shot through with complacent belief in their own natural superiority, that I doubt if the Young Turks in the outfit can have any real effect on it, toward reform … . They are a dying breed, like the dinosaurs. The epitaph should read, “Dead through arrogance, ignorance, stupidity, and inability to adapt to a changing world.16
The taking of Iwo Jima on March 26, 1945—650 miles south of Tokyo—brought Allied positions within striking range of the Japanese home islands (Iwo Jima was in fact considered one of the home islands, heavily fortified and garrisoned), and the war in the Pacific entered its concluding phase. The Japanese garrison had been told that they would not be reinforced and that they were the last defense of the divine emperor. They were to resist to the last man, and they did—fiercely, desperately, insanely. In February 1945 there were about 21,000 Imperial Japanese soldiers on the island; 20,000 were killed outright and 1,083 taken prisoner.
The raising of the American flag on the heights of Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi on the morning of February 23, captured in an iconic photograph by Joe Rosenthal, issued later in 1945 as a U.S. postage stamp, and later memorialized by sculptor Felix W. de Weldon.
It was also a moment of critical cusp for the entire remaining history of the twentieth century: on the basis of the battle statistics from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the General Staff estimated that a conventional island-to-island campaign to invade and conquer the Japanese home islands could result in a range of 250,000 to an inconceivable one million Allied casualties.17 It was a horrifying prospect, from which there was no possibility of escape unless the Japanese could be brought to surrender.
Cal Laning was out of harm’s way for the moment—and possibly for the duration. Hutchins had dropped him in San Francisco, and he wrote cheerfully of his continuing psychic experiments, with his wife, Mickey, acting as a medium for an appropriately military “spirit-guide.”
During my absence a Navy wife introduced Micky to automatic writing and the principal “spirit” talking to Micky was one “Charles Hammond,” formerly a U.S. sailor. H[ammond] predicted the date of my return to the states 5 months ahead of time, to 2 days inaccuracy. He has missed many other predictions. He is valued by Micky and myself mostly for his humorous conversation. We communicate by using two people on a pencil. I enclose part of his scribblings of the night I phoned you, with our translation. 18
Perhaps this struck Heinlein as a frivolous occupation for a soldier in time of war, but this is not a criticism he would make of a genuine hero like Killer Cal Laning. Heinlein replied that he had given up those experiments, “for much the same reasons I gave up fooling with hypnosis—did not understand how it worked and had reason to feel that there were unknown dangers with no compensating results.”19 And he no longer had time for anything but results.
That was only on his end, though: Leslyn practiced “white witchcraft” to ward and protect all their distant friends. Ted Carnell wrote—half (but only half) teasing—to thank her for his and his wife Irene’s numerous narrow escapes on duty and during the bombing of London.20 Leslyn was perfectly serious about her warding and other magical practices: “Swanson, by the way, is one of the victims of my getting cross. He annoyed me once—and a couple of years later he was dead-as-dead.”21
Laning was called to Washington, D.C., to work on implementing the radar project for Search and Detection. On the way to Washington, he made a side trip to Philadelphia to visit with Robert and Leslyn. It was not the renewing experience Robert had hoped it would be: “Cal was quite definitely surprised and disappointed in me that, after 3 years I was not running the place—lack of stripes and civil service [illegible] he brushed aside—I should at least be mayor of the palace.”22
Even worse, he brushed aside their concerns about the quite literally deadly bureaucratic snarl at Snafu Manor. “What I’m cross about,” Leslyn wrote Laning,
is that we tried to tell you that there is near sabotage going on up here on the part of the brass hats … And, Cal, your remark to Bob about being “disappointed” in him for not “coping with the situation” and “ultimately dominating the problem” was as silly as criticizing a cripple for not being able to make a championship broad-jump … What you were doing—whether you knew it or not—was cruelly rubbing Bob’s nose in the face that he is just a p.f.c—“a poor f—civilian.”23
Some “poor f—civilian”s were better off than others: the intense fighting on Iwo Jima and Okinawa sent the first wave of wounded and disabled back to stateside hospitals, and Leslyn found herself with a novel problem in personnel administration: retraining the disabled—particularly the blind—for jobs in war industry. Working through their depression was the hardest part. She set up a special program for disabled veterans using a secret weapon, a personnel blockbuster in the person of Robert’s blind machinist friend, Tony Damico. Robert had met Damico in 1943 and tried out on him a story idea he had been kicking around for a couple of years by then—about “Rhysling, the blind singer of the spaceways.” He had an idea that a blind man “sees” more beauty than a sighted man. “Tony agreed emphatically and gave me details to back it up.”24 As Heinlein talked with Damico, he found himself forgetting that Damico was blind, and having to remind himself to speak loudly and clearly before he got too close to the power tools in operation. He did not need to identify himself: Heinlein’s voice was as fixed in Damico’s mind as his face was to his sighted colleagues.25
Damico’s production was up to shop average, and his safety record was perfect—unusual, even for a sighted machinist. Leslyn brought Damico to the reorientation classes, and the disabled veterans responded to him almost instantly. He got through to them in a
way nobody else could. “It was amazing, miraculous—and enough to tear your heart out.”26
April 1945 was a very eventful month for Heinlein and his circle, as well as for the war. Early in April, John and Doña Campbell’s second child was born. They named her Leslyn, and there was no shilly-shallying about godparenting this time: the Heinleins were her godparents. Also in April, L. Ron Hubbard—across the continent in Los Angeles—took up Heinlein’s suggestion to meet Jack Parsons.
Parsons was a rocket engineer working at Cal Tech—one of the most brilliant and creative of the scientists and engineers there, in fact. Heinlein and Parsons might have met in many ways, as they had science fiction and esoteric philosophy, among other things, as common interests—both fields involving relatively small circles of acquaintance in Los Angeles. But as it happens, they met through rocketry, as members of the American Rocket Society. The Sunday Los Angeles Times had run an article about Parsons and his coworkers Frank Malina and Edward Forman at GALCIT (the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Cal Tech) in November 1939, shortly after Parsons’s paper on powder rocket fuels had been published in Astronautics.
Parsons was preoccupied with Aleister Crowley’s newly founded religion of Thelema and an adept of Crowley’s system of sex magic.27
Parsons knew Hubbard’s science-fiction writing and found him a compatibly offbeat personality. (When Parsons inherited a mansion in Pasadena in 1942, he had advertised in a local newspaper for boarders to share the house, specifying he was looking for “atheists and those of a Bohemian disposition.”) 28 “Mundane souls,” science-fiction fan and resident in the mansion Alva Rogers recalled in a memoir, “were unceremoniously rejected as tenants.” 29
On April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, Georgia, of a cerebral hemorrhage.
That immense presence, guiding the war, was suddenly gone. The news flashed around the country, and hundreds of thousands of Americans knew grief greater than any war news had brought them. The “backup President” the Democrats had nominated less than a year earlier was summoned to the White House to take the oath. Finding Eleanor Roosevelt there, Harry S. Truman civilly asked if there were anything he could do for her. Mrs. Roosevelt blinked owlishly at him: “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.” Prophetic words: the Russian army was approaching Berlin; Harry Truman was left to make the unmakeable peace.
The news hit NAES in the last hour of the day shift. Even those who hated Roosevelt were stunned by it. The others grieved. The next day, Robert and Leslyn wore black armbands to mark their mourning. Mourning was nearly universal, and intense. The death of a sitting President is always psychically traumatic for Americans, but this was special, even so:
Isaac Asimov came to my desk, and in telling me how he felt, said “You see, I’ve never lost a member of my family before.” He made it as a perfectly straight remark, quite unaware that his statement, emotionally true, was not literally correct. Our presidents do not usually inspire such personal feeling, but Mr. Roosevelt did—most loved him, some hated him, none were indifferent to him.30
And all the work of the war accelerated as President Truman took office. As the American and Russian armies advanced on Berlin, the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated (April 11, 1945—the day before President Roosevelt’s death), and all the rumors too horrible to be believed were confirmed:
The bodies of human beings were stacked like cord wood … . All of them stripped … . The bottom layer of the bodies had a north/south orientation, the next layer went east/west, and they continued alternating. The stack was about five feet high and extended down the hill … for fifty to seventy-five feet. Human bodies neatly stacked … [a] n occasional limb dangled oddly … . There was an aisle, … and more stacks. The Lord only knows how many there were.31
On April 20, 1945, the day Hitler celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday in his Berlin bunker, President Truman met with Rabbi Stephen Wise, chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, to discuss resettlement of Europe’s surviving Jews in Palestine. President Roosevelt had tried to set the postwar shape of Europe in February, at the Yalta Conference, naïvely confident of Stalin’s good will, but that agreement was already coming apart: Ambassador Harriman warned that Stalin would not honor the Yalta agreements. The peace had just become much more difficult—yet its momentum was unstoppable. There was no question, even, of buying time: on the day that the United Nations Conference on International Organization met for the first time in San Francisco, April 25, 1945, to begin the process of creating the Charter of the United Nations (one of the terms of the Yalta agreement), Secretary of War Stimson was joined in the Oval Office by General Leslie Groves, to brief President Truman on the existence of the greatest, most closely held secret of World War II, the Manhattan Engineer District and its work on the atomic bomb. This weapon could make an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands—with its anticipated one million Allied casualties—unnecessary. Three days later, Mussolini was torn to pieces by a mob in a small town near Lake Como and his broken body hung from a lamppost in Milan. The Russian army entered Berlin on April 30; Hitler—or his body—had disappeared. The Nazi “Thousand-Year Reich” was gone, and the German war machine took only a week to make unconditional surrender. V-E Day—Victory in Europe!
Heinlein had always been apprehensive about winning the war in Europe—up to the very day of the capitulation. “I think we made a Garrison finish and that we were damned lucky to win.”32 Indeed, as the cleanup of the German government proceeded, reports appeared in American newspapers of the superweapons still in preparation, among them a “stratosphere rocket bomb”—an intercontinental ballistic missile that could bomb New York or D.C. from launch sites in Nazi Europe. That one was to have been ready by November 1945.33
It would take a real world government to keep this from being just another interlude between wars.
But the war was not over; they had only hit a—welcomed!—cadence: “On V-E day … There was very little excitement. In my section I took down the war map of Europe which Isaac Asimov had been keeping, and replaced it with one of the Pacific. For us this is the end of the first act.”34
As the war shifted to the Pacific—the Navy’s War—the Heinleins finally received word about the death of Mark Hubbard, Leslyn’s brother-in-law. The full story was deeply moving: he had been on a geological research expedition on the southern tip of Luzon island when the Philippines were overrun on December 10, 1941, and he could not get back to his family in Manila. He dynamited the gold mines he owned, to keep them out of Japanese hands. He made sure that his rolling stock went to the Resistance, then “faded into the bush” and moved from island to island, “using his practical engineering knowledge to set up bush radios and power them with alcoholdriven generators, having also set up the stills to make the alcohol.”35
Late in 1944, he contracted malaria and, down to less than a hundred pounds, was betrayed into Japanese hands. He endured torture for months, and then, on Christmas Day in 1944, he was shot and burned alive at Bilibid prison, during the Japanese retreat from Manila. Though he was physically disqualified from the draft—“so cross-eyed he stared into his own ears”36—he was retroactively enlisted as a “First Lieutenant Infantry (Irregular)” and awarded a posthumous Purple Heart. Keith and the boys received the award and forty-two months’ back pay.
Heinlein tallied the war’s attrition on his own class at the Naval Academy: the class had mustered in, in June 1925, with 478 members. By July 1, 1945, Heinlein counted 118 left alive and in the Navy.37 He had lost many friends in the Pacific already.38
Nevertheless, the end of the war was clearly in sight, and even the war industries were starting to readjust for a peacetime economy. NAES went back to a five-day workweek and began releasing staff. Heinlein had to take up the slack, taking on the duties of a second engineer. “I expect to drown in a sea of laboratory instructions between now and V-J Day,” he wrote to the Campbells.39
&
nbsp; Even so, Heinlein began to think seriously about going back to writing for a living40—not complaining this time, not the result of discouragement. He had developed a permanent case of sinusitis, for which he needed to spend time in a desert climate, away from “Filthydelphia” (as he called the city),41 baking out the infection. Health issues aside, there were prospects that made a resumption of writing a practical possibility—taking up an actual career, not just a temporary expedient to pay bills. That spring, he had been approached by Westminster Press to write a book for boys. Westminster’s Juvenile editor, William Heyliger, had a rough idea of the kind of book he wanted to see—a Jules Verne–esque exploration of what small-town American boys’ lives might be like in the future, twenty years or so.42 The idea was tempting, and Heinlein thought seriously about it. Just before Pearl Harbor he had intended to raise his sights from pulps to the slick magazines and book publication, 43 which pretty much implied then that he would leave science fiction behind. But science-fiction publishing had begun to branch out during the war. Although boys’ books did not have any literary prestige, this would be a book publication, and in a field in which he was well read.
But he did not move on it then: there was a war on, and the practical results were daily experiences for Robert and Leslyn Heinlein, reinforced by the art and the music of the war era.
Since late in 1944, Nelson Eddy’s recording of “The Ballad of Rodger Young” had been playing on the radio, and that song became intensely meaningful to Heinlein.
Young, an infantry private, had been killed on July 31, 1943, in the campaign for the Solomon Islands. He had been a runt—five feet two inches—and so nearly deaf that he had given up leadership of his squad and asked to be demoted to private because he feared missing an order in battle that would get his squad killed. He was wounded when his squad was pinned down by a hidden Japanese machine gun nest protecting the Munda airstrip on the island of New Georgia, and a second time when his return fire pinpointed his position. He had crept forward and begun to throw hand grenades, covering his squad’s withdrawal. He was shot a third time and killed. This was the “finest traditions” of the infantry. When Private First Class Frank Loesser heard about the posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor awarded Rodger Young in January 1944, he had written the song. It was released later that year. For Heinlein, “The Ballad of Rodger Young” was symbolic of the war and of what even he, sheltered and sequestered in the Philadelphia Navy Yard, experienced on a daily basis.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 44
