Perhaps the unseen hand and its collaborators had come to the conclusion that the quiet endurance of the West Computers was a force better engaged than antagonized, for if there was one thing the war had required over the last three years, and one thing Negroes had in abundance, it was endurance. Those forecasting a swift and tidy end to the war had been numerous but wrong. The fight slogged on, requiring more people, more money, more planes and technology. Someday the war would end, but it didn’t look to be happening tomorrow. The tide of the war might be turning, but there were many battles ahead to win, and victory would require perseverance.
Not everyone could take the long hours and high stakes of working at Langley, but most of the women in West Computing felt that if they didn’t stand up to the pressure, they’d forfeit their opportunity, and maybe opportunity for the women who would come after them. They had more riding on the jobs at Langley than most. The relationships begun in those early days in West Computing would blossom into friendships that extended throughout the women’s lifetimes and beyond, into the lives of their children. Dorothy Vaughan, Miriam Mann, and Kathryn Peddrew were becoming a band of sisters in and out of work, each day bringing them closer to each other and tethering them to the place that was transforming them as they helped to transform it.
Dorothy listened carefully as Marge Hannah took her through the ropes of the job, taking care to note the expectations with the same exacting eye she herself had applied to grading her students at Moton: Accuracy of operations. Skill in the application of techniques and procedures. Accuracy of judgments or decisions. Dependability. Initiative. Even if the job lasted only six months, she was going to make the most of this chance. For an ambitious young mathematical mind—or even one not so young—there wasn’t a better seat in the world.
CHAPTER SIX
War Birds
Readers of black newspapers around the country followed the exploits of the Tuskegee airmen with an intensity that bordered on the obsessive. Who said a Negro couldn’t fly! Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. and the 332nd Fighter Group took the war to the Axis powers from thirty thousand feet. The papers sent special correspondents to shadow the pilots as they served in the skies over Europe, each dispatch from the European front producing shivers of delight. Flyers Help Smash Nazis! Negro Pilots Sink Nazi Warship! 332nd Bags 25 Enemy Planes, Breaks Record in Weekend Victories! No radio serial could compete with the real-life exploits of the men who were the very embodiment of the Double V.
The “Tan Yanks,” as the black press dubbed the black GIs fighting overseas, loved their planes as passionately as any other American pilots. Their lives, and those of the bomber crews they escorted, depended on knowing the plane’s every strength and weakness, its peccadillos and eccentricities, on coaxing it and coercing it and waltzing with it through the sky. Initially serving in Bell P-39 Airacobras, they moved on to Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, and by the summer of 1944 the 332nd was flying North American P-51 Mustangs. “The assignment of the terrific P-51 Mustang plane to all of the Negro pilots foreshadows important missions and sweeps ahead for them as the war enters its decisive stage,” wrote the Norfolk Journal and Guide.
“It’s best described as a ‘pilot’s airplane,’?” said an American military official in a front-page article in the Washington Post. “It’s very fast and handles beautifully at high speeds. Fliers feel that they have always known how to fly the plane after they’ve been in it only a few moments.” With a big four-blade propeller and a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, the Mustang sped into the sky like a champion racehorse. Once aloft, it soared for an eternity, pushing up against 400 miles per hour with the ease of a family sedan out for a Sunday drive. And it was a damn fierce contender in a dogfight. As far as the Tuskegee airmen were concerned, it was the best plane in the world.
“I will get you up in the air, let you do your job, and bring you back to earth safely,” promised the Mustang, and it delivered. Exactly how it did that wasn’t the pilot’s concern, but making good on that pledge was now Dorothy Vaughan’s full-time job.
“Laboratories at war!” shouted Air Scoop. The NACA sought nothing less than to crush Germany by air, destroying its production machine and interrupting the technological developments that could hand it a military advantage. Langley was one of the United States’ most powerful offensive weapons—a secret weapon, or nearly secret, hidden in plain sight in a small southern town.
Certainly the Tan Yanks would have marveled to know that supporting the performance of their beloved Mustang was a group of Colored Computers. But whereas every maneuver executed by the 332nd in their red-tailed Mustangs fed the headlines, the daily work of the West Computers and the rest of the laboratory employees was sensitive, confidential, or secret. Henry Reid advised employees to stay on the lookout for spies disguised as Langley Field soldiers and warned of fifth column plants who might coax valuable research from unwitting laboratory employees. Managers upbraided a group of messenger boys overheard dishing office dirt at a local diner, and engineers caught having a loud, detailed work conversation at the Industrial USO were called on the carpet. Air Scoop sounded the alarm: “You tell it to someone who repeats it to someone who’s overheard by someone in Axis pay, so SOMEONE you know . . . may die!” Employees learned to keep mum on the work front even at the family dinner table. But even if they wanted to share the particulars of the day’s toil, finding someone outside of Langley who understood what they were talking about would have been well nigh impossible.
In the twenty-four years since the Langley laboratory had started operation, the glitterati of the aeronautical world had made pilgrimages to Hampton. Orville Wright and Charles Lindbergh served on the NACA’s executive committee. Amelia Earhart nearly lost her raccoon coat to a wind tunnel’s giant turbine while touring the lab. Tycoon Howard Hughes made an appearance at the lab’s 1934 research conference, and Hollywood showed up at the airfield to shoot the 1938 movie Test Pilot, starring Clark Gable, Spencer Tracey, and Myrna Loy. The people the famous came to see—Eastman Jacobs, Max Munk, Robert Jones, Theodore Theodorsen—were the best minds in a thrilling new discipline. Even so, most locals were oblivious to how they and their colleagues spent their days; and to be frank, they found them more than a little peculiar. Their ways and accents often marked them as Californians, Europeans, Yankees, even, God forbid, “New York Jews.” They donned rumpled shirts with no ties and wore sandals; some of them sported beards. Locals dubbed them “brain busters” or “NACA nuts”; the less polite called them “weirdos.”
Asked about their jobs, they demurred. Around town, they confused and horrified residents by doing things like dismantling a toaster with a screwdriver at the local department store to make sure the heating coil would toast the bread just so. One employee brought a pressure gauge from the lab into a store to test the suction capabilities of a vacuum cleaner model. Local car salesmen wanted to roll over and play dead when one of the Langley fellas pulled into the lot, fearing a barrage of nonsensical and unanswerable technical questions. They drove to work with books on their steering wheels. The NACA nuts always thought they had a better way to do anything—everything—and didn’t hesitate to tell the locals so. Eastman Jacobs’ legendary attempt to launch a car attached to a glider plane using Hampton’s tony Chesapeake Avenue as a runway only confirmed the Hamptonians’ feelings that the good Lord didn’t always see fit to give book sense and common sense to the same individual.