Reach for the Skies

by Richard Branson

  Sadly, Hughes, like Orville Wright, lived out his later years in constant pain, after being involved in a near-fatal air accident. On July 7, 1946, his XF-11—an experimental U.S. Army Air Force reconnaissance aircraft—suffered engine failure during a test flight. Hughes crashed through three houses in Beverly Hills before his plane buried itself in a fourth and burst into flame. Burned and immobilized, Hughes required large amounts of highly addictive pain medication. His notorious “eccentricity” in later years—subsisting on chocolate bars and milk, walled in by Kleenex boxes—was almost certainly exacerbated by his lifetime reliance on painkillers.

  Even during his decline, Hughes wielded huge influence. He was the largest private employer in Nevada and spent about $300 million on his many properties in Las Vegas. Throughout the sixties and up until his death from kidney failure on April 5, 1976, Hughes’s executives acted as though he were still lucid and still pulling the strings of his many business interests, from airlines to gambling to hotels and real estate. The truth is, he spent half his days watching thrillers, the other half in the bathroom. It is hard to imagine a crueler fate for such a major figure—and such a courageous individual.

  Howard Hughes at the controls of the world’s largest cargo plane, the H-4 “Spruce Goose.”

  Douglas Bader, my greatest childhood inspiration, also lived his entire adult life in constant pain. He had a wide and generous definition of what a fool was, and he didn’t suffer them gladly.

  This irascible old man was also one of the funniest and most generous a child could know. His example gave me my confidence. He also gave me and my generation one of the best pieces of business advice ever formulated.

  Rules, he once said, were for the guidance of wise men—and for the obedience of fools.

  His life story proves his point. Born in 1910, Bader was 20 when he visited Reading Aero Club, performed acrobatic tricks in a Bulldog to fellow RAF pilots—and drove his left wing into a plowed field. His logbook for that day reads: “Crashed slow-rolling near ground. Bad show.” He wasn’t kidding: he had lost both legs.

  Though the RAF retired him in 1933, Douglas kept on flying. By 1940 he was back in uniform, operating Hurricanes and Spitfires. He shot down several enemy aircraft over Dunkirk, argued strategy with his elders and betters, and dropped 11 enemy aircraft during the Battle of Britain. In August 1941, during a fighter sweep over Europe, he was forced to bail out over Le Touquet, in German-occupied France.

  He went one way, and one of his tin legs, still jammed in the cockpit, went the other. Stranded in almost the very spot where his father, a sapper in the Royal Engineers, had been fatally wounded in 1917, he was quickly picked up and imprisoned. The German authorities asked the British to air-drop their captive a spare leg. A British plane dropped him a leg, all right—and then rejoined its fellows on the way to bomb Gosnay power station, near Béthune; only bad weather saved their target from being destroyed.

  That discourtesy soon paled in insignificance compared with the trouble Douglas caused his captors. Treated well, visited and entertained by just about every experienced Luftwaffe officer who happened by, Douglas devoted himself to mischief and escape. He succeeded, too—not once but many times, until an exasperated prison official threatened to take away his legs. The threat had no effect, and eventually Douglas was packed off to Colditz. Released by the First U.S. Army in April 1945, he traveled to Paris and immediately requested a Spitfire. He was refused.

  five

  “A Great River of Air”

  Practically the moment their first manned balloon left the ground in 1793, Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier were proposing to drop 14 tons of explosives on the occupied city of Toulon.

  Depressing as it is to report, by the time manned flight became a reality, the theory of war from the air had already been worked out. Detailed speculative accounts of aerial bombing date from the early seventeenth century. The advent of real balloons merely added detail and local color to the picture. In 1842, in the poem “Locksley Hall,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote of the “ghastly dew / From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue,” and he didn’t have long to see his vision realized. Seven years later, during the siege of Venice, an Austrian artillery lieutenant called Franz von Uchatius bombarded the city with montgolfières made of paper.

  This, the world’s first air raid, was not a success. According to an eyewitness, “the balloons . . . exploded in mid-air or fell into the water . . . Venetians, abandoning their homes, crowded into the streets and squares to enjoy the strange spectacle . . . Applause was greatest when the balloons blew over the Austrian forces and exploded.”

  War is hell: air battles dominate Albert Robida’s 1908 adventure serial.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, it was generally accepted that future wars would be air wars. There’s a reason Jules Verne was a bestseller: titles like Robur the Conqueror (1886) and its sequel Master of the World (1904) captured the fears of a generation. By the turn of the century, it was increasingly clear that in the airplane, the world possessed a weapon capable of destroying civilization.

  A few minutes after midday on August 30, 1914, on the eve of the Battle of the Marne, a German Taube warplane appeared in the skies above the Gare de l’Est in Paris and dropped a handful of explosives onto the railway station, killing one woman. Another 50 Parisians fell victim to the “five o’clock Taube” before the war was over.

  The practice of targeting civilians was not new. The fact that the attack came from the air, however, was extremely worrying. In the air, all bets were off. There were no rules of engagement; there were no precedents. As the war progressed and the technology improved, one German general observed that “the distinction between combatant and noncombatant began to blur.”

  If the First World War ushered in the era of the warplane, no one had any doubt that Europe’s next war would usher in the purpose-built bomber—and European governments were under no illusions about what that would be like. One of the most influential pundits of the period was General Giulio Douhet, an Italian military theorist whose book Air Power was translated into many European languages and became a bestseller. The really frightening thing about reading Douhet now is that he was mostly right. He wrote, “The brutal but inescapable conclusion we must draw is this, the strongest army we can deploy in the Alps and the strongest navy we can dispose on our seas will prove no effective defense against determined efforts of the enemy to bomb our cities.”

  In 1933, H. G. Wells, Douhet’s English contemporary, published The Shape of Things to Come—a political speculation couched as a history written at a date far in the future. Wells, along with everybody else, believed that the next war would be primarily an air war, and that it would destroy civilization. He had already written as much 26 years earlier. His potboiler War in the Air (serialized in 1907) ends with humanity reduced to a brute, feudal existence.

  The Shape of Things to Come predicts the Second World War with uncanny accuracy. Though by the 1930s Wells the writer was past his prime, he still has the ability to raise the hairs on the back of the reader’s neck, with his talk of Polish airplanes dropping gas bombs on Berlin, Italians “administering the same treatment to Belgrade,” and his description of “a line of Permanent Death Gas across East Brandenburg.”

  The British government’s estimate of how people would cope under aerial bombardment was no less bleak. Medical analysts reporting to Whitehall believed the experience would send the survivors mad. In the early days of the war, hospitals surrounding the capital sent home their nonurgent cases and got their beds ready for tens of thousands of “nervous cases.” Following an air attack, it was assumed that survivors who made it into the city’s tunnels would simply refuse to come out again. At the beginning of the war, London’s Underground stations were locked at night to keep people out.

  America, entering the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, believed itself immune from such terrors. Japan, its ne
arest enemy, simply didn’t have the means to attack the U.S. mainland from the air. That, anyway, was the assumption.

  On May 5, 1945, a minister and his wife took some children on a fishing trip in southern Oregon, east of the Cascades. They came upon a curious device tangled up in some trees. When 13-year-old Joan Patzke attempted to pull the balloon free, it blew up in her face, killing her, four other children, and the pastor’s wife.

  The firebombs—reports were coming in thick and fast now—mystified the U.S. authorities. They couldn’t see how the balloons could have traveled all the way from Japan. The alternative explanations were even sillier: were they being launched from U.S. beaches by Japanese landing parties? Were they being secretly manufactured by interned Japanese Americans?

  Finally an Army fighter managed to nudge one of the balloons to the ground intact, and the unbelievable truth emerged: these were extremely sophisticated weapons, and—yes—they bore all the hallmarks of Japanese manufacture.

  It was one of the stranger episodes of the air war: beginning in November 1944, Japanese schoolchildren from 80 schools labored to construct 10,000 balloons, each carrying a bomb meant for the U.S. mainland. Sumo halls, sound stages, and theaters were commandeered for the work. The rubberized silk of conventional balloons leaked too much to sustain the 33-foot-wide balloons on their voyage over the Pacific, so an alternative material was found: washi, a paper made from mulberry bushes, impermeable and very tough. Manufacturers of washi paper could only produce the stuff in small batches, and squares, each no bigger than a road map, had to be glued together using vegetable paste. The workers—most of them schoolgirls just into their teens—were told to wear gloves, keep their fingernails short, and not use hairpins. They volunteered for this, but they were not treated very well. Living conditions were worsening as the war in the Pacific turned against Japan, and hungry workers stole the paste to eat it.

  Once stuck together, each envelope segment was drawn across a light box. Inch by inch, the papers were checked and tears or weak spots reinforced with paper. Once the envelope was assembled, it was filled with air and lacquered, then deflated, boxed, and sent to the project’s launch site. Japan released the first of its bomb-bearing balloons on November 3, 1944.

  The project—effectively the building of the world’s very first intercontinental ballistic missiles—was the brainchild of Major General Sueyoshi Kusaba, who assembled the best scientists from all over Japan to develop his secret weapon. The balloons were meant to start forest fires and cause explosions. They may have had a darker purpose, too. Chemical weapons including mustard gas and lewisite had been manufactured on the island of Okuno under the direct control of the army since 1929, and Okuno also happens to be one of the places where the balloons were being made.

  So much for the payloads. The balloons are worth mentioning not because of what they carried but because of how they traveled. Japan’s fire balloons were built to cross the Pacific Ocean in just three days, borne by fierce, barely understood high-altitude winds. That no one but the Japanese authorities knew about these winds is one of aviation history’s great ironies. They were first studied by Wasaburo Oishi, a committed internationalist and pacifist whose European studies (at Berlin’s Lindenberg Aerological Observatory) had convinced him of the importance of international collaboration. Returning to Japan, Oishi set up his own upper-air observatory at Tateno, a barren, flat expanse 100 miles northwest of Mount Fuji. It was from this unprepossessing spot that Oishi released balloons and tracked them with a theodolite (a surveying instrument with a rotating telescope for measuring angles) as they shot suddenly away, snatched by the mysterious high-level winds.

  The jet stream carried Japan’s fire balloons over mainland America.

  Convinced that scientific work should be held in common for the world’s advancement, Oishi ensured that his findings would be read by the greatest number of people in the greatest possible number of countries. He wrote them up in Esperanto. Oishi’s optimism and idealism—his belief that world understanding was just around the corner, borne on the world’s fastest-growing “auxiliary” language—were, to say the least, misplaced. Nobody read him. Nobody could read him. In his desire to communicate with the world, Oishi had effectively made his work a state secret!

  The Japanese military assumed control of Oishi’s observatory in the early 1930s, and toward the end of the Second World War, it was his data that made the balloon bombing of America a reality. About 9,300 balloon bombs were released from Japan in the direction of the United States. They were ingenious. They were automated, laden with weights, altimeters, and timers, strung together so that they would drop sandbags at night to compensate for the shrinking of the hydrogen inside their envelopes. If the balloon rose too high, an altimeter opened a valve to vent hydrogen. As the project leaders had expected, only one in ten made it across the ocean. Of those, 285 caused damage, but it was never very significant. One bomb fell on a power line in Hanford, Washington, and shut down the reactor making plutonium for the Nagasaki A-bomb; but power was restored a few seconds later.

  The bombs were more effective as terror weapons. They could appear anywhere. One even got as far as Michigan. The randomness of the threat was its strength. The U.S. War Department, concerned about what news of this and other balloon incidents would do to civilian morale, forbade all mention of the balloons in the press. On several occasions, officials claimed that bombs had accidentally fallen off planes belonging to the Royal Canadian Air Force!

  Once the scale of the threat was appreciated, the race was on to disable the Japanese project before balloons arrived on U.S. soil carrying something far more deadly than a few incendiaries. The Military Geology Unit of the U.S. Geological Survey hit upon a plan. They set about studying the sand in the ballast bags. They thought it unlikely that the Japanese would go to all the trouble of shipping sand long distances, merely to use it as ballast. More than likely, the bags were being filled from a beach near to the balloon factories. Studying the microscopic creatures contained in the sand, they traced the ballast to specific Japanese beaches— and America’s B-29s took to the air. Two of the three hydrogen plants supplying gas to the Japanese balloon project were destroyed, and Major General Kusaba’s project was canceled.

  Still, the mystery remained: how on earth had the balloons traveled so far, so fast?

  The Second World War had taught the Allied powers something about these high-level winds, but in a disorganized, piecemeal way, from the reports of mystified pilots. American B-29 aircrews returned from bombing raids on Japan full of wild and wonderful stories: of tailwinds of 150 miles per hour and westerlies topping 200 miles per hour. In Europe, bomber squadrons flying between 30,000 and 35,000 feet were the most likely to be affected. In some regions, they found a high wind propelling them to their targets. In others, the jet stream really ruined their day. In 1943, an English bomber squadron met headwinds of nearly 240 miles per hour as it returned from a raid over Gironde, on the west coast of France. The crews had no choice but to parachute from their aircraft, which had run out of fuel, and they were picked up and interned by the German army.

  These winds were so fast, so narrow, and so seemingly fixed in their courses that the Swedish American meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby coined the name “jet stream” to describe them. What makes a jet stream?

  The earth is constantly heating the air, like an electric ring under a pan of water; and when warm air rises, it sucks cold air in after it. This is where winds come from. If the earth did not spin like a top, winds would blow smoothly and regularly. On a planet that did not spin, warm air would rise at the equator, cool as it moved toward the poles, sink to near ground level, and roll back toward the equator. The earth, however, spins really fast, from west to east. This means that the warm, high winds moving away from the equator move a little bit east as they go; and cool, wetter winds moving toward the equator move a little bit west.

  This isn’t the end of the story. Because the earth is a bal
l, the farther you move away from the equator, the slower your movement from west to east. Stand on the equator and you’ll be zipping along at around 1,038 miles per hour. At the poles, it’s possible to spin on the spot. London spins at 656 miles per hour. So winds leaving and approaching the equator don’t just veer off in straight lines. They curl in on themselves, so that the nice, single circulation I just described is broken up into three independent circulations. This curling is important to our story, and it has a handy name: the Coriolis effect.

  This cross-section of the earth’s atmosphere shows the way the winds blow.

  In the tropics, and in the far north and far south, bands of roiling air circulate with a certain regularity. Sandwiched in between these circulations, however, are what we optimistically call the “temperate” zones. Here the air tends to blow from west to east and from east to west, doing absolutely nothing to even out the temperature difference between the equator and the poles. Where these large bodies of warm air and cold air meet, naturally the cold air wants to rush in and fill the vacuum created by the warm air. But it can’t: the Coriolis effect means that the cold air, instead of rushing in, ends up curling around the warm air. This is where cyclones come from.