The Balloon Man

It was a damp March morning in 1943 when we were informed by the barracks pa system, in its usual lugubrious voice, that we were going floating that day, not flying—we were going up in balloons. Balloons? At this stage? A few months earlier we would have welcomed the news: balloons would have been at least a diversion. But now? Within a few days of graduation? We had been in training to be blimp pilots for six months, and we now had nothing in mind but to get our wings and get out of there, pilots at last, cadets into ensigns, and off to whatever war awaited us. And it was not far out there. Not fifty miles from Lakehurst, the war was raging. There had been so many sinkings of merchant vessels off the Atlantic coast in 1941 and 1942 that there was hardly room for any more red pins on the operations map, and we had been told again and again in the last six months how important blimps were to the war effort—that, so long as a convoy or ship had been escorted by a blimp, it had never been attacked by a U–boat. Stopping now for balloon hops seemed silly, a trivialization of what we were doing, and seemed to be a needless risk of trained bodies in a war already short of them. We were not eager warriors, and gas bags were not romantic weapons, but we wanted to get on with it—and to play with balloons at this juncture seemed, whatever the military arguments might be, goofy—if not, if the word were even allowed in the U.S. Navy, in bad taste.

My friend Horse, short for Horace Pynchon, with whom I agreed on most things, had some strong opinions on how he thought the navy should be run. He had long bristled at the navy adage claiming "there's a right way and a wrong way and a navy way." To him it was a simple dodge for buck-passers and a way of doing dumb things and calling them good. Here we go again. We had already spent dozens of hours in blimps, but now, in the navy's deep wisdom, we couldn't know how to fly blimps without first knowing how to fly balloons, the blimp's primitive original, sans engines, sans rudder, sans anything. So back to the beginning! Back with Montgolfier, forget the progress of centuries, and get our aerostatics straight without any admixture of aerodynamics. It was, Horse pointed out, like sending a guy a hundred miles east of San Francisco and asking him to walk west, just to get the feel of a pioneer.

"Grappelhorn's behind this!" fumed Horse as we walked to the balloon hangar. Grappelhorn was Horse's special name for Lieutenant Commander Baumgartner, so given because of that officer's presumed celibacy. "Grappelhorn and his precious east wind!"

That was obviously part of the truth. We had waited six months for an east wind, and finally in this nick of time it came, and to a passionate aeronaut like Baumgartner it was unthinkable to waste it. He reverenced the east wind, a gift from on high, and he even saw it as a gift to cadets. As he solicitously put it: "Without an east wind you'd get your cadet asses blown out to sea instead of over the Jersey flats, and we wouldn't want that, would we?"

* * *

Baumgartner lived for balloons, and it is probably fair to say that he loved balloons in the exact proportion that he hated cadets. (If I have fictionalized his name and some other things, it is only to keep my distance.) Cadets had spoiled the war for him, at least spoiled his navy, swarming like maggots over a base that in the Depression navy had been a more-or-less exclusive lighter-than-air club. In those days, Baumgartner reminded us, there was some professionalism in lighter-than-air. You didn't get to be a blimp pilot in any fucking six months. He'd sweated three years in blimps...