Brian Garfield: Target Manhattan

“When the Korean War broke out, Craycroft’s Reserve commission was activated and he was shipped out to Japan to supervise repair and maintenance for the American Air Force wings stationed there. Evidently his performance during the first phase of the war was exemplary; but the Air Force was in the process of switching over from the P-51 Mustang (a propeller-driven pursuit craft) to the F-80 and F-86 jet fighters. When one reads between the lines of Craycroft’s service record, one reaches the conclusion that the man had no affinity for jet-powered aircraft. It seems clear he lost interest in the mechanical ingenuities that had made him such a legend; he became, in the words of one veteran who recalls him in his last months in Japan in nineteen fifty-three, ‘kind of a tired old pencil pusher. He was just going through the motions. We all figured he was washed up.’

“One notes that this ‘tired old pencil pusher’ was, at the time, barely thirty-five years old. (He had attained an important World War Two command and the rank of full colonel at the age of twenty-six.)

“Craycroft was rotated back to California before the end of the Korean War. In Los Angeles he stayed with his sister and his brother-in-law, who had left Lockheed and gone to work for a stunt and special-effects organization which specialized in helicopter and airplane work for motion pictures.

“Craycroft resigned his commission at this time in protest against the replacement of piston planes by jets. ‘He never could abide the jets,’ one pilot recalls. ‘He was like a sailboat man sneering at power boats. Always called them stinkpots.’”

Obviously that had something to do with his choice of an antique propeller-driven bomber for this attack on New York. Is there anything in his background up to this point which suggests his later derangement?

Well, he was always an odd bird, that’s obvious from the word “go.” But he wasn’t a violent man. I mean his military service record is remarkable for the opposite reason. There were no black marks at all. No escapades. His formal efficiency reports praised his efficiency and initiative, but there isn’t a damn thing in them that could give you any clue to his character at all.

Perhaps the fact that he was such an unusually colorless person is a clue in itself. People who bottle things up too tightly sometimes tend to explode.

Well, one thing you learn when you make a study of criminal psychology is that there are certain kinds of cases that are easy to predict and certain kinds that are damn well impossible to predict. I mean, you take a standard case of a kid who grows up in urban poverty, in an atmosphere of drugs and street violence and maybe a family with no father and all the usual ghetto aspects that the ivory-tower types call you a bigot for mentioning. You take a case like that and you know it’s advisable to keep an eye on somebody from that background because the chances are he’s more likely to turn to crime than a well-educated kid from a solid home in some small town in New England. But, hell, you can’t take a background like Craycroft’s and make predictions from that. A lot of people with similar backgrounds are airline pilots or vice-presidents of aircraft companies or bank presidents.

Nothing at all in his attitudes or behavior at that time suggested he might go off the deep end?

We’ve all got our private demons, I guess. We’ve all got pressures. But Craycroft’s didn’t show. Not according to anybody I’ve talked to… Well, I’ll go on, all right?

(Reading) “The middle and late nineteen fifties were a period of big-budget Hollywood dedication to the Second World War. Ryterband and Craycroft worked initially as maintenance mechanics and gadget designers for planes which mounted aerial cameras, but soon Craycroft saw opportunity in the movies’ great interest in airplanes as subject matter rather than as flying camera platforms. In nineteen fifty-four Craycroft and Ryterband formed the only corporation of their checkered career that enjoyed financial success. It was given the name of Air Corps Associates, Incorporated, a company chartered in the state of Arizona for the purpose of ‘aircraft restoration and reconstruction.’

“Air Corps Associates had an interesting premise, and Craycroft was the ideal man to run it. The purpose for which the company had been organized was the restoration of World War Two airplanes for use in war movies. By nineteen fifty-five the U.S. Air Force had a combat flight line of jet aircraft; the designs of the war had been phased out and the surviving airplanes had been put in mothballs. Tens of thousands of aircraft stood parked in rows on a reservation in the desert of northwestern Arizona near the town of Kingman. For a time in the late nineteen forties the Air Force had made some pretense of keeping these planes in repair, as a reserve fleet; but the changeover to jets had rendered the old planes obsolete. The result was that the huge collection of warplanes had rusted, corroded, been pitted by desert sandstorms, ruined in all their ‘soft’ parts (rubber, canvas, wiring, tires), and generally rendered totally unserviceable. Desert packrats and rattlesnakes made nests in the cockpits. Seats rotted away. Glass windows and windshields were shattered by violent desert hailstorms; afterward rainwater seeped into the instrument panels and engine cowlings. By nineteen fifty-five the mothball fleet had been sitting on its flat tires for a full decade, and it was the rare plane that could be restored to airworthy condition with anything less than a complete rebuilding job from nose-hub to tailfin.

“In nineteen fifty-four the reserve fleet was designated ‘war surplus’ and the way was opened for civilian purchase of the planes. The initial purpose of this action, spurred by a Congressional economy drive, was to recoup some of the country’s enormous war-construction debt. But it soon became apparent that nobody had much interest in paying good money for rusted shells. (In many cases the engines had been removed from the airplanes for use in parts-replacement programs for training planes, and even for use in motorboats.) Tens of thousands of once-proud airplanes went begging for buyers.

“For once in their lives, Craycroft and Ryterband were the right men in the right place at the right time. They went to the Air Force with an offer of fractions of a penny on the dollar. It had cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build a B-17 Flying Fortress; Air Corps Associates managed to buy these aircraft from the mothball fleet for prices ranging from ten thousand dollars down to seven hundred and fifty dollars, depending on condition.

“But that would have done no good without Craycroft’s genius for mechanical repair, redesign, and restoration. Other potential buyers-representatives of foreign governments, scouts for feeder airlines, hobbyists interested in air-racing-had looked over the bargain-basement airplanes at Kingman and had passed them up. To them it had appeared insurmountably expensive to get any of the corroded hulks back into flying trim. To Craycroft and Ryterband, evidently, the same challenge acted as a spur to their ingenuity.

“The result was that by nineteen fifty-six Air Corps Associates had equipped itself with an air force of considerable proportions. Starting from scratch in nineteen fifty-four with a capital investment of forty thousand dollars (most of the money put up by motion-picture producers), Craycroft and Ryterband had pyramided their operation within two years to a sixty-three-plane Luftwaffe; and of that inventory, according to company records dated twelve September nineteen fifty-six, fully forty-eight airplanes were in flying condition-including a full squadron of P-40 Warhawks and a ‘flight’ (six planes) of B-17 Flying Fortresses.