But in taking this kind of decision we were not alone. Out in Seattle, Boeing had staked its future on the conviction of the Young Turks of the Army that a long-range heavy bomber would one day become the backbone of air power, no matter who said it would not. Farther down the West Coast, Don Douglas risked everything on the future of a new four-engined transport to be called the “DC-4” at a time when the Army remained cold to all transport and the airlines were doing very well, thank you, with the DC-3. Across the city, Bob Gross, at Lockheed, took his chances with a new twin-engined liquid-cooled fighter to be called the “Lightning,” at a time when the predominance of opinion was against such craft. Nearby, Dutch Kindleberger of North American, always crazy like a fox, dreamed up a single-seat liquid-cooled fighter around the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, a fighter which was to be called the “Mustang,” that would one day become a long-range escort for bombers over Europe. Down at San Diego, Reuben Fleet plugged along with flying boats and amphibians, long after the smart money was all on carrier planes. His Consolidated’s Catalinas would one day fight the world over for all our allies. And down Baltimore way the Old Master, Glenn Martin, rode his own hobby of light, fast bombers for ground attack at the very moment when the “Young Turks” seemed about to prevail in their battle for heavy bombardment. Out at Farmingdale, Long Island, the brilliant engineer Kartveli was forging his Thunderbolts, intended as fighters but destined for use in the invasion of Europe as the long-range fighter bombers that broke Hermann Goering’s heart because he was sure we couldn’t build such planes. These are but a few of many that come readily to mind. The fact was, no one could guess whom we would fight, to say nothing of how or when. Without a foreign policy, we could shape no military policy, and without a military policy who could guess what airplanes might be called upon to do? But our saving grace lay in the fact that this was a free country where any man might risk his money, or even his neck, in backing his pet idea. When the chips were finally down, Uncle Sam, who hadn’t killed his air craftsmen with kindness, found they had supplied him with a wide variety of combat types from which to choose, a variety that made it possible for him to go out and win. In a postwar interview, Hermann Goering was reported to have said that the one thing the Germans had envied us was our flexible system of individual initiative and enterprise. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Review of Some Fundamentals