In New York, during World War II, the state-sponsored snatching of children from adoptive parents of German ancestry (the great calamity that turned R. J. MacCready increasingly toward solitude when we meet him at Waller Field) was a little-known but actual occurrence. In the family of one of the author’s friends, this happened to Emily H., an adoptive mother who was indeed called “Führer” during a decision that turned out to be anything but a fair hearing. Emily H. survived, as did the real Brigitte, though just barely. Emily’s husband, Will, an American World War I veteran doomed by mustard gas exposure, spent his last days barely able to speak, poking an index finger against a photograph of little Brigitte and begging to see her again.
The “Sparrow” seen perfecting a pan drum in Trinidad is based on “Mighty Sparrow,” an influential calypsonian (born Slinger Francisco, in 1935) who actually made his professional debut in the 1950s. In 1956, Sparrow won the first Calypso King competition with his song “Jean and Dinah.” The Allied base at Waller Field is described as it existed in 1944. World War II for the Trinidadians ushered in American soldiers, their dollars, and their refuse—most notably, fifty-five-gallon oil drums that offered local musicians a large surface area that could produce a far greater range of notes than the paint cans and biscuit tins they had been experimenting with since the 1930s. And while we’re on the topic of music, “Junk Ain’t Junk No More” was a real jingle—part of a series of public service announcements related to the use of junk and scrap metal for the war effort. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaD161ENV10.
The downgrading of the fictional Bob Thorne’s academic credentials, essentially for being Jewish, came at a time when such actions were common abroad and even in some institutions in the United States. The Manhattan Project was full of Jewish scientists whose degrees had to be reverified under the authority of what later became known as the Atomic Energy Commission. A major New York City university was among the American institutions that, near the start of World War II, downgraded the degrees of Jewish students and limited the numbers of Jewish students who could be admitted. One of those students, Isaac Asimov, would become a famed author. In the first volume of his autobiography, the 1938 graduate recorded that a year later the same metropolitan university announced officially that it would accept no more Jewish students from New York. While moving to Boston Medical School, Asimov discovered that he and other Jewish students had their credentials downgraded to second-class degrees. Asimov wrote: “The thought that even in graduation I was pettily discriminated against irritated me mightily” (Asimov, 1979), and he swore that the only thing the perpetrators would ever be remembered for was what he wrote about them in his autobiography. Additionally, the conversation related by Voorhees to Wolff, between Asimov and Harold Urey, also occurred. Whatever the source of Urey’s difficulties with Asimov, they stood apart from religious persecutions of World War II, for until his death in 1981, Urey respected people of all faiths. The problem appears to have been strictly a conflict of personalities, arising from Asimov (a teenage student at the time), who made some dangerously good guesses about what was evolving behind closed doors (with Urey) into the Manhattan Project—and who began publishing science fiction stories with such alarming titles as “Source of Power,” “Super-Neutron,” and “The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use.”
The reality behind the I-400 names: Nostromo was the title of a 1904 novel by Joseph Conrad as well as the name of the spacecraft in director Ridley Scott’s film Alien. The name of the second submarine goes back to the mythical daughter of Kronos and Rhea—and the mother (with Zeus) of Persephone. In his novel Dracula, Bram Stoker named his ill-fated ship (which ran aground and was found “mostly” abandoned) Demeter. The I-400 submarines themselves were in fact built, as described in this novel. They were undersea aircraft carriers, able to launch a trio of single-engine bombers stored in their enormous hangars.