Father, Son & Co.

by Thomas J. Watson

  By our next stop, Hartford, I had decided that I’d follow the general everywhere unless he told me not to, and that I’d write him a complete summary of each inspection. In these reports I discussed the officers we met, supplies that were needed, and my own recommendations about operations. I noted right away that part of the bomber-delay problem was psychological. The longer a bomber group stayed at an airport in the U.S., the longer they wanted to stay. If they moved directly through New England and out to Gander in Newfoundland or Goose Bay, Labrador, they’d go on and finish the trip in a week. But if there was not constant pressure on the group to move, move, move, the delays piled up. That was the sort of observation I’d write. On these reports Bradley would often scrawl, “Thank you very much” and sometimes “Excellent” or even “Splendid”—small compliments that drove me to do an even better and more vigorous job. My months with Bradley were among the most important of my life because he showed me that I had an orderly mind and an unusual ability to focus on what was important and put it across to others.

  After only a couple of weeks, Bradley took me to Washington. When I asked what we were doing, he said we were going to get me promoted to captain. He knew how much this meant to me: after finishing the paperwork, he walked me to the PX in the old Munitions Building, bought captain’s bars, and pinned them on me himself.

  In early summer Bradley was ordered to Moscow to oversee a much more ticklish transport problem: getting airplanes to Stalin. Russia was in desperate need of weapons and supplies from the U.S.: the Germans had Leningrad under siege in the north and were closing in on Stalingrad and the oilfields near Baku in the south. One of the biggest headaches was how to deliver P-39 and P-40 fighters and A-20 light bombers. Because of their short range, the only possible way to deliver large numbers of these planes quickly and safely was to fly them to Alaska and then, in short hops, five thousand miles across Siberia. Bradley’s job was to get this ferry route set up—a matter of great strategic importance. When he asked if I would come along, my immediate reply was: “Nothing would please me more.” But in fact I was filled with dread. The war had reached its grimmest point, with the Axis powers dominant on every front, and I was committing myself to an indefinite stay abroad, possibly for years. Olive and I spent sleepless nights wondering what was going to happen and how she was going to get through her pregnancy alone. At that point I couldn’t even tell her where I was going—we’d been ordered to refer to our destination only as “Plainfield.”

  Getting ready for that trip was the biggest job I’d ever undertaken. Bradley said we might be in Moscow as long as eight months, and that we’d be lucky to get food and housing. Everything else we might need had to be brought along. I spent three hot weeks working in an IBM apartment in a Washington hotel, writing directives for each of our ten crew members and lists of supplies—arctic kits, materials to coldproof an airplane, recreational reading material, and so on. Anything that was forgotten was going to be my fault. We drew a brand new B-24, the “most advanced heavy bomber, and Bradley hand-picked the crew, including Lee Fiegel, an experienced bomber man, for pilot. Even though I’d organized the trip, Bradley demoted me to copilot because I had no experience in four-engine planes. I have to admit that the B-24 awed me. Before the service I’d flown nothing but little puddle jumpers and navigated with a road map. In the National Guard we still had single-engine planes, and it was big stuff to fly from Alabama to New York-seven hundred miles, or about three hours. Now suddenly I was flying one of the biggest airplanes in the world—a gross weight of twenty-eight tons, a crew of eight, gun ports, and a range of twenty-six hundred miles when equipped with extra fuel tanks. Lee spent a lot of time showing me how things worked and we became lifelong friends. Two days before we left, my parents and sisters visited; Dick would have been there too but he had enlisted in the Army himself and was stationed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Bradley let me take Mother up in the bomber. She’d never been flying before, but she seemed to enjoy it while Dad stood by nervously on the ground.

  Even in a B-24 the wartime flight to Moscow was a tremendous undertaking. Getting there took ten days. We had to go south to Brazil, cross to Africa, and then wend our way up avoiding the colonial territory controlled by the Vichy government. Then north via Cairo, Palestine, and Teheran, and over the Caucasus mountains into Russia. Like many aviators in those days, I was very nervous about flying over water, far from any airfield in case we had trouble.

  We crossed the South Atlantic on a full-moon night, with cumulus clouds billowing up in ghostly pillars. Halfway across, I made a routine check on the crew. I climbed down from the flight deck into the nose where the navigator worked. We didn’t have the experienced man Bradley had picked for the job, but a last-minute substitute. He was almost completely bald, and I could see his head slumped down on the big navigating table in front of him. I touched him on the shoulder and he jumped. “How’s it going, Bill?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I just can’t get started.”

  I looked on the floor and there were about twenty little balls of crumpled-up paper. “What’s all this?”

  “I can’t get any of the sights to work out.”

  “What do you mean! We’re in the middle of the Atlantic!”

  “Yeah, but this is the Southern Hemisphere—I really don’t know these stars.”

  I went back up and said to Lee, “I think it’s too late to do anything but stay on the course this guy has set, but he says he doesn’t know where we are!”

  Lee went down and talked to him for a while. There was no point in bawling him out so we didn’t do that. We were heading in the right general direction but it was impossible to tell exactly where we were. At dawn we started looking anxiously for land and didn’t see any until an hour after we were supposed to. By the time we finally put down at Accra in what is now Ghana, the gas gauges were at zero.

  That wasn’t our only close call on the trip. A few days later, when we crossed into Russia and were about to stop for fuel at Baku on the Caspian Sea, I climbed down into the belly of the plane directly beneath the flight deck to check the nose wheel before landing. I was still in the middle of this routine when Lee absentmindedly pushed the landing-gear control to the “down” position. It was totally out of character for him to make a mistake like that, but this time he did. To my horror the giant wheel I was inspecting began ponderously to drop through the ever widening opening in the floor of the compartment. I leaped toward the navigator’s deck and almost made it, but one of my legs got pinned. I screamed at the navigator to give me his headphones, and forced myself not to panic as I described my situation to Lee: “I’m caught—one leg between the landing-gear door and the side of the aircraft, and the other side of the door is resting on top of the nose-wheel strut. If you land now, the travel of the nose wheel will cause that door to cut my leg off.” I was spread-eagled over the open door with the oilfields of Baku a thousand feet below. The radio operator came down, took a look at my situation, became faint, and had to be pulled back into the safety of the bomb bay. Then General Bradley came down wearing his pince-nez. He took a long look and called for a hacksaw. Within five minutes he sawed through the hinge at the rear of the landing-gear door and it fell loose, freeing my leg.

  When we reached Moscow in August the tide of the war was about to turn, but that was not discernible to the Russians or to us. Hitler’s best armies were hammering at them for the second year, and the casualties at places like Leningrad and Sevastopol must have been appalling even to Stalin; already millions of Russians were dead of wounds and starvation, and millions more had been captured. The year before, the Nazis had come so close to Moscow that they could be seen from the towers of the Kremlin. Most of the government, along with the Allied embassies, pulled back to the town of Kuybyshev, five hundred miles to the rear. The Russian winter and the courage of the Red Army had thrown the Nazis back, but when we got there Moscow was still officially in a state of siege. We moved into the
National Hotel overlooking Red Square. In the moat next to the Kremlin, which was visible from our rooms, there was a fleet of small trucks loaded with file cases. Those were the archives of the Russian nation, ready to be evacuated if the Nazis reached the gates again. All day long clerks would come out to the trucks, pick out files, and run back inside. The people you’d see on the street showed obvious signs of malnutrition—red eyelids, sunken cheeks, and fat bellies from eating nothing but bread. They were so poor and transport was so short that mourners on the way to funerals carried their dead, wrapped in sacking, in their arms.

  Scarcely a week after we got to Moscow, Winston Churchill flew in. Stalin had been pushing for an immediate invasion of Europe by England and the U.S., and Churchill came to tell him face-to-face that this wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. In his memoir Churchill compared this to “delivering a large lump of ice to the North Pole.” It took him three days to calm the Russians down, and when he took off for Cairo on the morning of the fourth day, we were his armed escort as far as Teheran. The night before I’d had the great experience of attending a diplomatic reception and shaking the prime minister’s hand.

  Unfortunately the flight with Churchill was the occasion of a major blow-up between me and our crew. We’d only been away from home three weeks, but already a pattern was developing: every time we really needed these men, some of them were drunk. It was my job to collect the crew on mornings we had to fly. If we were supposed to take off at 8:00 A.M., I’d get up at 5:00 and go into their rooms and drag them out. On the morning we were supposed to fly with Churchill, I found the master sergeant and the crew chief playing strip poker with a bunch of Russian babes. On the way out I jumped all over the sergeant: “God damn it, you don’t have to fly more than once every few days, and every time we fly you’re loaded!” He claimed he was doing more card playing than drinking, but I didn’t believe it. When we got to the plane he had to inspect the engines, and he forgot to screw the covers back on after checking the oil. So just as we broke ground on the runway, sections of cowling flew up on all four engines and eventually tore away. I’m sure Churchill’s pilots saw that and wondered what the hell was happening to our airplane. I really bored in on the sergeant for that.

  General Bradley’s discussions with the Soviets didn’t go any more smoothly than Churchill’s. I wasn’t in on the meetings, but among my other duties I was the mission’s code clerk and saw all the messages that went out. The behavior of both sides was pretty disillusioning. The Russians were as annoying as they sometimes are today; we were trying to do them and ourselves a favor, bringing airplanes across Siberia, and they were giving Bradley guff about the type of rubber in the tires. Bradley had to have interminable discussions with them about the airplanes’ specifications, the schedule on which they’d be available, the number of pilots the U.S. would use to deliver them, and so on. Even then, the Russians were convinced we mainly wanted to spy, so they decided to use their own pilots to fly the planes across Siberia. Now it was the War Department’s turn to be intransigent. When it heard that Russia wasn’t going to let U.S. pilots in, it cut from forty to ten the number of transport planes being offered to bring pilots back to Alaska on the return leg of the ferry route. That was very hard for me to accept as fair. There was no question about the qualifications of the Russian pilots, so how could we justify making it hard for them to do their job?

  This tedious debate went on and on, and I spent many hours sliding small strips of paper back and forth in metal racks, which was the method we used for coding and decoding telegrams. If nothing else, I demonstrated to Bradley that I had a certain evenness of temper and an ability to work in a sustained way. Before long the general started turning to me when he had a decision to hash out. In retrospect, I think that he may have seen me as sort of a son. His own boy had been killed demonstrating a B-17 over England before we got into the war.

  There was another bond between us: We were both unhappy because we weren’t getting any letters from our wives. I missed Olive desperately and our first baby was on the way, but unluckily for me, she and Mrs. Bradley had become friends. Mrs. Bradley was famous for getting “inside information” that was wrong. I had told Olive exactly how to address her letters to me, but Mrs. Bradley said, “Oh, no, that’s wrong, here’s the way you write them.” As a result Bradley and I didn’t get any mail while everybody else in the crew was getting letters every week. Homesickness and longing for my wife hit me in waves. I was never without these emotions, but sometimes I’d feel as if there were a knife twisting in my chest. At those moments I’d damn Hitler and Hirohito and dream of settling down to married life in a home of my own.

  Life in Moscow got pretty slow during the three months it took Bradley to settle things with the Russians. The heavy autumn rains that slowed down Hitler’s armies came and went, and then the temperature dropped well below zero. The Russians had kept their ballet and opera companies going in spite of the war, and we saw some good performances; a number of us even took Russian lessons. Periodically we’d be sent down to Teheran, where you could buy anything, and we’d come back with the bomb bay full of food and other necessities for the embassy staff. Llewellyn Thompson rode along on one of those trips, and became my friend—he was a junior diplomat then, but went on to become perhaps the greatest U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. I was also friendly with some of the foreign correspondents like Eddie Gilmore, Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune, Henry Shapiro, and Ben Robertson. Our primary source of news was the BBC, which carried reliable war coverage every afternoon. I was eager to hear about the battle for North Africa, because I was convinced that the fight against Rommel would foretell the outcome of the war. The British made slow progress at first, but when they beat the Germans at El Alamein, and when the Americans landed in Algeria and Morocco a few days later, the mood brightened considerably at our nightly poker games.

  I was the only one of our crew who had been in Moscow before, during the summer of 1937 after graduating from Brown, and I was tremendously curious to see how the city had changed. Whenever I got loose, I’d find another crew member and walk for five or ten miles. Women constantly introduced themselves to us. We figured they were informers, but we’d have gone stir-crazy not talking to anybody but each other for three months. Mostly the married men stayed straight, but things got pretty complicated for some of the crew. At one point three of them were all seeing the same girl, whose name was Ludmilla and who claimed to be a ballerina. I made friends with a nurse called Tanya who somehow got my name and telephoned me at our little office. We talked with the aid of two dictionaries and spent a fair amount of time together, although the relationship was platonic. After a few weeks we were able to communicate pretty well, and she took me to visit her apartment. There were three different families living there. Tanya had what looked like the maid’s room, next to the kitchen, but each of the other rooms housed a whole family. They owned almost nothing. I asked Tanya to show me what she had to wear and she opened her wardrobe. Inside were a winter dress, a summer dress, a big padded overcoat and some clumsy high felt boots, a pair of flat shoes, a pair of high heels, a sweater, and some blouses and underwear. That was it. Whenever I went down to Teheran I’d bring back stockings or shoes or some such for Tanya and other Russians I’d gotten to know.

  By early November airplanes from the U.S. were finally flying in across Siberia, and we packed up to leave. Bradley thought we’d be back in Russia soon, since Americans would be needed to help oversee the transport operation. The Russians were pleased enough that they gave us permission to fly home by the route that best suited our needs—southeastward into China, where Bradley had to confer with another U.S. general, then across Siberia to Alaska. This was a great privilege—as it turned out, we were one of the few American military crews to fly eastbound across Siberia during the war. To celebrate our bond with the Russians, Bradley named our airplane the Muscovite and had it painted on the nose in Cyrillic characters.

  I w
as terribly excited to see China again, especially when our flight path paralleled the Great Wall in Kansu province. When I realized that I’d seen a part of this same wall near Peking in 1937, I was amazed. Peking was about a thousand miles away. We landed at the ancient city of Ch’eng-tu, near Chiang Kaishek’s wartime capital of Chunking, and got rooms at a little hostel called the Society for Moral Endeavor near the airfield. It was clean and neat and my room overlooked a very pretty garden. Everywhere I could see the charm that made me want to return to China again and again.

  We lay over for a few days to get the airplane ready for flying in the Siberian winter. Bradley put me in charge, and I sorted out the tasks and assigned them to the men. Toward the end of the first day I mentioned to them that we’d almost certainly have another mission to Russia. To my surprise the men said, “Don’t count on us,” and bluntly told me that they’d rather have combat assignments than go through another trip with me.

  It was one of the rudest shocks I’ve ever experienced. Here I was, well into my Air Force career, the son of a famous manager, and I still hadn’t learned how to handle the men working for me. By being so eager to please Bradley, I had antagonized everybody below. They complained I was too demanding, never relaxed the pace, and insisted on getting every job done perfectly. They thought I was petty, and they were right: petty criticism is not useful if people are doing a reasonably good job. If their energy level is high and their aim is fairly close to the target, it’s better to let things jog along.

  I said to myself, “I can’t get anywhere if I can’t manage these men.” I decided to do what I could to win them over. For starters, I drove them twenty-four miles into Ch’eng-tu where I bought them the best dinner I could find and thanked them for all they’d done. On the next leg of our flight, I tried to ask each man how his spirits were and whether he’d gotten any mail while we were in China. I also presented the crew with little pieces of pewter I’d bought in Ch’eng-tu. The men’s morale was improving because we were on our way home; there was no way to tell if my efforts were having any effect.