by Phil Patton
When the jet contract arrived, Johnson had to build his own secret team. All of Lockheed’s production capacity, all of its engineers and workers, were so pressed to meet normal wartime contracts for the P-38, for B-17 bombers for the Army, sub hunters for the Navy, and Hudson Bombers for the British, that Johnson had to scrounge a staff of twenty-three engineers and about twice as many mechanics, fabricators, and clericals.
Johnson would often fix or construct some part himself. He was proud of the strength he had acquired putting up lath as a teenager. He had been the seventh of nine children from a poor Swedish American family in Michigan and baptized Clarence, taking the name Kelly when his classmates deemed his sometimes violent streak more Irish than Swedish.
Johnson grew up reading Tom Swift and the Rover Boys in the local Carnegie library in Ishpeming, Michigan, a mining town that sent its ore to Carnegie’s mills. He built dozens of model planes, and by the time he was twelve he knew he wanted to be an aircraft designer. He put himself through the University of Michigan by washing dishes and putting up the plaster lath, and had been at Lockheed since 1933, when he was hired at a salary of thirty-three dollars a week. His first achievement was pointing out a serious aerodynamic flaw in the prototype Model 10 Electra, on which the firm’s entire fortunes rode, and then figuring out how to fix it.
At just thirty-three, Kelly Johnson was already one of the top aircraft designers in the world. He met Amelia Earhart and prepared her Electra for her record flights as well as for her last, fatal journey. He had worked for Howard Hughes on the Constellation airliner that had flown for the first time almost exactly a year before, as the C-69, and already gone into service for the military.
During work on the Constellation, Johnson met often with Hughes, huddling with the billionaire in one of his bungalows. A pilot whose fame had grown from a record round-the-world flight during the 1930s, Hughes tested the plane himself. Once when he took the wheel of the prototype, Johnson and others in the plane were overcome with terror as Hughes attempted to stall the airplane to test its stability. When the airspeed indicator read dead zero, Johnson forced Hughes away from the controls.
Johnson’s methods were instinctive and highly practical. He demanded whenever possible that stock parts be used or adapted, and he administered by emotional economy as well: by temper and fear. But he could exhibit flashes of kindness, too.
Bison recalled that “Johnson could be intimidating and brutal, but at our parties he was delightful. When I had to go to Kelly’s office, I was in fear, but in the end I was always amazed at his knowledge of the most detailed things.” The key to Skunk Works speed was efficient administration. “The main thing was that Johnson cut the paperwork. We drew things upstairs, then walked down and told the mechanic, ‘Build the damn thing,’ and then you helped him do it.”
Johnson and his staff had already been looking ahead to jets. They had proposed a design called the L-133, a stainless steel vision of the future, with a jet engine of Lockheed’s own design, a long fuselage, and canards promising a top speed of 650 miles per hour. On May 17, 1943, when Johnson was on a visit to Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base, a general took him aside and told him of the XP-59A, that hapless Bell jet, kept secret at Muroc with a fake propeller on its nose. He wanted Johnson to do something better. On the airliner home, his ulcer working overtime, he jotted down the ideas for a jet fighter he thought could be built in six months, something that could be a war winner.
The spaces where the engineers set up their drawing boards and the shops downstairs were cobbled together around a machine shop beside Lockheed’s wind tunnel, housed in a leaky addition built from the old wooden crates in which Wright engines had been shipped, the roof made from a rented circus tent.
Working ten-hour days, six days a week, the group put the jet in the air just 143 days after formal signing of the contract. The smell of chemicals seeped into the crude buildings from a factory next door, and an engineer named Irv Culver picked up the phone one day and spoke the immortal words, “Skunk Works.” Inspired by Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, Skunk Works is named after the still where a character named Injun Joe brewed up a foul moonshine called Kickapoo Joy Juice. And the question Culver and the others kept being asked but could not answer was “What’s Kelly brewing up in there?”
The name was born of secrecy. There was no official designation, so those inside had to dream one up.
Johnson continued to call the base Muroc for years after the name was officially changed to Edwards Air Force Base, after Glen Edwards, a test pilot killed in a crash. But by 1955, when the Skunk Works was looking for a place to test the U-2, Edwards was no longer private enough. Like some wild species that needed lots of range or whose environment was changed by the advance of civilization, the engineers who built secret aircraft had to flee farther and farther into the wilderness.
The Skunk Works would create the airplanes that made Dreamland necessary, and its legend grew up along with the secret base. It developed a far-flung fan club of buffs as devoted and dogmatic as any group of Roswell believers or saucer conspiracists. It even emerged as a business model, a method to get things done in a lean and mean way, after the management guru Tom Peters wrote approvingly of it. The Skunk Works, the buffs believed, had done nothing less than save the world several times. The U-2 and the Blackbirds had prevented World War III; the Stealth fighter had won the Gulf War.
One day I drove to Burbank to visit one of the Skunk Works’ most devoted buffs and see the original site. My guide was a local man named R. C. “Chappy” Czapiewski. Chappy was proof of the power of the legend: He had never worked at the Skunk Works or served in the branches of the military that flew its airplanes, but was simply a citizen who appreciated its achievements and was caught up in its history and lore.
We met in downtown Burbank, which contrary to all of Johnny Carson’s jokes struck me as a pleasant place: an inoffensive mall, a new media center, and a series of elegant Modern-style public buildings. The soaring lobby of its city hall was a WPA-era fantasy, painted with romantic murals of thirties aircraft and heroic images of movie cameras—icons of the leading local industries.
A querulous man who spoke with an edge of outrage, Chappy appeared something of a pain in the ass to the local city councilmen. I had to like him right away. Over a Japanese lunch he agreed to take me on a tour. He gave me a yellow-green button that read SOS: SAVE OUR SKUNK WORKS.
He was trying to muster the citizenry of Burbank to save the original Skunk Works buildings from destruction and turn at least one of them into a museum dedicated to the airplanes designed here, from the P-38 to the Stealth fighter.
The organization most opposed to this plan, he told me, was Lockheed itself. The local airport authority coveted the land on which the hangars stood for a planned expansion, and Lockheed had agreed to sell it.
“This was historic,” Chappy lamented, “and now it’s being forgotten. It was secret, but we—all of us living here—knew what was happening. The U-2, the Blackbird, the Stealth—they won the Cold War. Kids today don’t remember the Cold War. They think U-2 is a rock band.”2
We wandered among the hangars. Crape myrtle trees dotted the avenue in front of them, their pinks and greens virtually the only touch of color across expanses of gray pavement, gray chain-link.
Lockheed had painted the hangars a soft yellow, the yellow of crème brûlée or the yellow rose of Texas. They had chosen the same color out at Helendale in the secret RCS complex.
We could see building number 360 with its complex system of window panels. This, Chappy pointed out, is where they did the F-104—“the Starfighter,” “the missile with a man in it”—developed to counter the superiority of the MiG-15s American pilots encountered in Korea. Stubby-winged, with a downward-firing ejection seat, it would be a hot rod, but also a widowmaker, with no more glide in it than a bathtub pushed off a roof.
Here, Kelly and his boys created the U-2, and turned back over to the U.S. government
—your tax dollars at work—$2 million of the $26 million he had agreed to accept and a tossed-in half dozen extra airplanes to boot. There, first for the CIA and then for the Strategic Air Command, they built the Blackbirds, the A-12 and the YF-12, then the SR-71, pioneering whole new technologies such as extruding titanium to create a plane that, through the millennium, will be the fastest and highest-flying.
“Beside those hangars,” Chappy said, “is where they set up the first Stealth prototype between two tractor-trailer trucks with camou net covering the ends and fired up the engine.”
There, the Stealth fighter grew from a mere footnote in a Soviet scientific journal into a black-faceted body. Appearing hacked, chopped, with every corner cut, its shape was the very embodiment of the Skunk Works philosophy, a treatise on the theme of cutting away all excess. “Keep It Simple, Stupid” was the motto—KISS. “Simplificate and add lightness.”
At the end of the flight line was the big hangar, where stealth watchers had seen shadowy tarpaulin-covered payloads moving into huge cargo planes—things on flatbed rail cars.
“They were flying something on a big C5A out of here in 1991 and 1992. They would shut the airport down when sensitive cargo was being loaded,” Chappy recalled. “They stopped all airport traffic at eleven-thirty on Friday for it.”
After a Japanese sub surfaced off the coast of California in 1941, Lockheed put in a desperate call to the Disney studios. Their best artists came in to hide the factory under camouflage. They created an artificial, subscale village atop the factory buildings and airport terminal, a model of the very American way of life they were designing and building airplanes to save, the American dream trumpeted in magazine ads and radio serials. Workers inside turned out P-38 fighters and B-17 bombers, then went home to little bungalows very like the little Monopoly houses above their heads.
From the air, you couldn’t tell where the roof stopped and actual houses started. Huge poles held up the netting and camouflage, done in chicken feathers, and the real buildings beneath were painted in similar mottled vegetable shapes. “Someone who worked here,” Chappy said, “told me that when it rained the chicken feathers stank to high heaven.”
The Skunk Works was the best argument for black projects, but it was always a gamble. There had been failures: the Saturn commercial transport, the F-90 fighter, the weird tail-landing XFV-1 Salmon (named for Herm “Fish” Salmon, the test pilot and only man crazy enough to ever fly the damn thing). The D-21 drone, a secret for decades. Suntan, the liquid hydrogen–powered superplane of the late fifties that cost $2 billion before someone stopped to consider the expense of building bases with cryogenic facilities to keep it fueled. Even the successes were close enough to failures, like the A-12, the Blackbird, which by rights should never have worked and reminded you that this was gambling at very high stakes.
But as I rode around with Chappy, I found the sense of the legend beginning to wilt. I wondered if now, perhaps, the darkness was too great and the gambles no longer paid off.
I kept thinking about a talk I had had with Ben Rich, the last head of the Skunk Works to preside over the Burbank facility, and I remembered his tone. He had written a book, but when he submitted it for review, two chapters had been rejected by the CIA and the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). It still irked him. Why, they had made him lock up his coffee mug, the one that read MACH 3 PLUS with a picture of the SR-71. But that speed had never been officially released to the public; the information was still classified. So each evening the mug went into a safe, and each morning it came out again so Rich could sip his decaf.
Only one other group of people irked Rich as much as the security people: the EPA bureaucrats, who threatened to shut down his program if it didn’t comply with regulations. To him, the concern for information leaks and leaks of chemicals into the water table were somehow equivalent. I often wondered if secrecy itself hadn’t become a toxin, extremely powerful and useful in controlled amounts, but treacherous and poisonous if misused or overused.
We drove out of the hangar area past a range of Dumpsters. Suddenly, a big plastic bag flew up in front of the car. “UFO!” Chappy cried.
The original site of the Skunk Works was now flat and bare, loosely covered with rubble like a site ready for construction. Across the street, bougainvillea climbed concrete walls in front of quiet, well-kept homes. In a cruel irony, the Skunk Works had lived up to its name, pumping PCBs and other pollutants into the surrounding aquifer, and the company had become the object of massive litigation. Lockheed had recently settled with a group of local residents for about $130 million. A huge piping works called a vapor extraction system would pump steam into the ground and pump the toxins out—a grotesque distillery.
To those imbued with the Skunk Works legend, like Chappy, this rubble-strewn field was akin to the fields of Gettysburg or Yorktown or Agincourt and should be preserved in the same ways. But the Skunk Works headed out to Palmdale, closer to their desert test base. What they left was wreckage.
Driving away from the dark and gory ground of the original Skunk Works, I passed the Disney complex on the freeway.
While some of his artists were sent to the nearby Lockheed factory to camouflage it, Disney set others to work creating the alluring myth of airpower—one of the great myths that was to propel Dreamland.
In 1943 they were to make the film Victory Through Air Power, a powerful piece of propaganda, offering a neat, ideological solution to the muddles of war—technology to keep the distant enemies at bay. Filming began only after ten at night, because there was too much noise during the day from the new P-38s and B-17s taking off from Burbank airport.
Disney made the film at his own cost, so enamored was he with its source: the book of the same name by Count Alexander P. de Seversky. A White Russian émigré who had distinguished himself as a naval aviator in World War I, in which he lost a leg, he came to the United States when the Revolution erupted. He allied himself with Billy Mitchell, the maverick general, and after Mitchell died in 1936 Seversky became the leading exponent of the faith that strategic bombing would be the dominant force in all modern wars.
He was the head of Seversky Aircraft Corporation (the forerunner of Republic Aircraft), and his book, a collection of magazine articles, was a huge bestseller and Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It warned Americans that they could no longer rely on the oceans. They were no longer safe in Kansas City or Chicago. But Seversky held out a promise—if Americans built a massive force of bombers and destroyed the distant cities of its enemies first, we could return to our comfortable isolation.
Seversky laid out the rationale for fighting wars with bombs that would lead to the A-bomb. Soon the poet Randall Jarrell, who served in the Air Corps, would write, “In bombers named after girls / We bombed cities we had learned about in school.”
Seversky, called “Sasha,” narrated Victory Through Air Power in his exotic and authoritative Russian accent. The film blended newsreels of Mitchell and his famous demonstration of how to bomb battleships with cartoon explanations of the development of military aviation. Animated maps explained the present situation, and represented Allied airpower as an eagle, fighting the Japanese octopus, destroying its head as the tentacles slowly released their hold.
James Agee, then film critic for Time, found the movie a skillful piece of propaganda, but he noted that it never showed civilians on the ground, never showed the target. And he was disturbed by the climactic battle of the eagle of airpower and the octopus of Japanese aggression and the abstracting of war, with its total absence of images of the victims. It was full, he wrote, of “gay dreams of holocaust.”
Richard Schickel has argued in his history of the Disney studios that Disney liked airpower because it was efficient, clean warfare, in which the corpses are never seen. And airpower especially seemed to have held great appeal to Midwesterners like Disney, Curtis LeMay, and Dwight Eisenhower, who once felt themselves at the greatest remove from foreign influences. Airpower was
in an odd way the flip side of the region’s traditional isolationism, a way to play world power without sending soldiers overseas. And it seemed cheap, too—in lives and in dollars—a feature that would make it especially attractive in the postwar years.
It was not long before Seversky’s and Disney’s dreams of holocaust would be realized. The B-29, the long-range bomber, was being developed in top secrecy at Boeing in Seattle even as the film was being made.
Curtis LeMay, then training at Muroc, would follow the B-29 from bases in India to China, then the Marianas, from which at last the bombers could effectively reach Japan, Disney’s eagle attacking the octopus.
When the first raids aimed at precision failed to strike their intended targets owing to bad weather and bad bombing, LeMay was put in command.
The B-29 was a complement to the A-bomb program. When LeMay took over, crews were training for the A-bomb mission in a godforsaken corner of Utah, near Wendover, living in barracks little better than huts. But the plane had been ineffective in carrying out the high-altitude precision bombing for which it was designed and which was the key tenet of LeMay’s airpower theory. So he tried something new—gambling the lives of his crews. He turned to terror bombing: firebombing whole cities. Now his target problem was simpler: find the areas of cities that were the oldest and had the largest proportion of wooden buildings. The first target was Tokyo’s Shitamichi district.
Stripping the bombers of most of their guns and sending them in low and at night, on March 9, 1945, LeMay dispatched 334 bombers from bases in the Marianas, each carrying about seven tons of incendiary bombs.
The bombs burned more than the sixteen square miles targeted and killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people. In no other six-hour period of human history had so many people lost their lives. The firestorm was so powerful it sent updrafts that tossed the bombers about as their crews breathed the sickening smoke of burning houses and flesh.
