HOUDINI AT WAR

Gassing up a Curtiss Jenny to chase Pancho Villa. Was this Houdini's plane?

On his delightful blog Wild About Houdini, our friend John Cox is commemorating Houdini's first trip to Texas, which took place exactly 100 years ago.

In January 1916, Harry did his first show in San Antonio. One of the highlights of that performance was the presence in the audience  of active duty military personnel from nearby Ft. Sam Houston.

At the time, Kelly Field at Ft. Sam was the headquarters of the First Aero Squadron, the nucleus of what is now the U.S. Air Force. Houdini's friend and flight engineer, Montraville Wood, had been working at Ft. Sam since 1911 installing gyroscopes onto the fleet of Curtiss Jennys used by the Army flying corps. 

When Harry performed in San Antonio he was one of the most experienced aviators in the world, and his close flyer friend was working right there at Ft. Sam.

There is anecdotal evidence that suggests Houdini may have actually even flown during his stay in San Antonio. In a Providence newspaper, Houdini is credited as being "... last but not least an aviator of the United States Army." Around the same time ... Houdini told the noted Boston reporter Ira Mitchell Chappelle, "... I'm an aviator, and in case there's war, will surely be a member of the aviation corps."

        - - Kalush & Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini

This forms the background for our second Houdini historical novel, Houdini At War. (Our first, The Secret Notebooks of Harry Houdini, is forthcoming later this year, God willing!) 

In Houdini At War, Harry is once again enlisted as a spy by his old pal, former President Theodore Roosevelt, now commander of a secret agency known as the Federal Scouts.  Here's an excerpt, told in Harry's own voice:

With a smile the size of San Francisco, Colonel Roosevelt met me at the Code Room. Surrounded by a team of cryptographers fighting a secret war in secret codes and secret inks, he was like a kid in a playground. 

“Welcome to the Black Chamber,” he said. “That’s what the French call their cipher bureau, the cabinet noir. We’ve decoded a letter written in secret ink,” the Colonel told me proudly, then left me in the care of the reigning genius of the Black Chamber, a slender, pipe-smoking captain named Yardley.  

The letter appeared perfectly ordinary. It was handwritten in English, addressed to someone named Madame Victorica, and appeared to be asking noncommittal questions about her health, about whether she had yet met with a certain “Rev. Father,” and the like. 

“Quite innocuous, isn’t it?” Yardley said. “But when we brush kalium iodide over this letter, it becomes something quite different.” 

Using a fine paintbrush, he traced minute amounts of a chemical over the stationery, and a second letter magically appeared, written at right angles to the first. This one was in German. And it was far from innocuous. 

“Advise immediately where U-boat material sacks can be sunk on American coast,” it read. “Position must be free of currents… Water depth not more than twenty meters. Can a messenger be landed there? The marking of sinking positions with buoys is successfully carried out in Spain….” 

Since the sinking of the Lusitania, Germany’s policy of “unrestricted submarine warfare” had completely terrorized the open seas. German submarines appeared as if by magic thousands of miles from Europe; until this letter was deciphered, no one understood how the subs could have such an unbelievably long cruising radius. This letter proved the Germans maintained submarine bases off the coast of Spain, and were now seeking to build them off the American coasts. The U.S. was a whisker away from being surrounded and attacked.  

“Houdini, the Colonel needs you to help us catch this Madame Victorica,” Yardley said. “We don't know her real identity or her nationality, but this letter and some others convince us that she is the chief agent of the German secret service in this country. We've got agents working on locating her. Until then, we want you to start patrolling the coast for these sub bases.” 

Which is how I found myself flying a Curtiss Jenny over the Gulf of Mexico a few weeks later.  

It seems hard to believe today, but before the War the Army only had one aircraft and one pilot, a fellow named Ben Foulois, who had trained at the controls with Wilbur Wright, but had never learned how to land a plane. I’m not kidding - he took command of the First Aero squadron with about three hours of flying time. When I arrived in Texas in 1916, there were only 11 people in the country who knew how to fly, and two of them were the Wright Brothers. I had more flying time than the entire Army flying corps combined!  

I had begun flying in France in 1908, bought and practiced  diligently with my own plane, a Voisin, in France and Germany in 1908 and 1909. In 1910 I became the first man in Australia to fly an airplane. My mechanic during this whole period was the indomitable Montraville Wood, a brilliant inventor who had been Thomas Edison’s right-hand man. As it happened, though a civilian, Monty was also pressed into service at Fort Sam Houston, the headquarters of the First Aero Squadron. Capt. Foulois and eight other green pilots flew a wing of Jennys from Oklahoma to Fort Sam, where we all rendezvoused.

 These boys were true gold. Far from my usual companions of artists, producers, politicians and merchants, these men spoke clearly, frankly, and not in whispers. They lived for their jobs. We all felt harnessed to an immense task of protecting the present and giving birth to the future, a task best carried out in overalls, with Spalding track shorts for underwear. The talk was all world records, altitude, longitude and horsepower. Always horsepower. They risked their lives every day. I was truly among my people! 

I’m the only civilian flyer in this First Aero squadron, commanded by Foulois. I’m here undercover, performing publicly in the evenings and flying secretly during the day. The others are all Army lieutenants, flying over the Mexican border looking for Pancho Villa. 

They were hunting Villa because a few weeks earlier, at the behest of the Germans, he had attacked a U.S. Army fort in New Mexico and, to the Army’s shame, killed 27 soldiers and burned down the town of Columbus. But I have my own orders: I'm staying on this side of the border, cruising over the Gulf  looking for suspicious buoys near the coast. 

And that’s how I found myself zooming along remote beaches off the coast of Texas looking for still inlets and any peculiar buoys. Whenever I saw a human being I tried to put the plane between the sun and the subject, casting a shadow directly over the landlubber. They always looked up and I could not resist giving them a little air show, making my graceful, fragile machine wheel and curve, spiral up and corkscrew down like a falling leaf, now on one wing, now on the other, recovering, looping the loop and finally disappearing in a glory of light. My only regret was that they did not know they were getting a free performance from the famous Houdini!

Then one day I saw it. It seemed like a trick of the light at first. Simply a circle in the surf. But as I dropped to 100 feet altitude, I realized it was like a barrelhead floating on the water. American marker buoys are made to be seen. This was made to be concealed. I took careful note of the location. Free of the laws of gravity, seemingly fast as light itself, I flew back to base.

The airfield was nothing more than the back end of a lonely prairie, lined by a few shacks. Broken wings served as a fence. Bits of framework, struts, perforated chunks of wood lay scattered in the scrub like bones in a graveyard. Dented jerry-cans, old tins, packing cloth and used tires bordered the runway. The earth had been leveled off with garbage from the city of San Antonio; the whole plain glittered from the sun, shining on bits of glass shards and chunks of scrap iron.

“The strut-buster returns,” said Monty, who was hard at work rebuilding an old machine. It was patched and dirty. One wheel was missing from the landing gear. Some of the struts were broken. The numerous rips in the fuselage were mended with tape. There was no floor beneath the cockpit. Black oil pissed from the motor. The joints in the fuel line were bound with string. The propeller had been taken off. One of Wood’s gyroscopes was mounted behind the cockpit.

The gyroscope warmed my heart. It was I who had given Monty the idea, by once describing P.T. Selbit’s “Giant Wrestling Cheese” act. Selbit used a gyroscope painted to look like a round of cheese, and the little 18-pound whirly-wheel was easily able to throw two or three professional wrestlers. Monty had seized on this idea and it was now revolutionizing aviation and naval warfare. Imagine - little Houdini, with no education, inspiring one of the world’s great inventors!

“She’s almost in perfect shape now,” Monty said. “Just a bit more tinkering. Nearly killed myself in her, twice.”

I walked around Monty’s yellow biplane into the hangar. It was littered with tools and spare parts. A second plane was under construction inside, with its motor on a bench. An iron bed stood in the corner, a hammock hung behind the stove. There was a little forge at the back and a large lathe and workbench at the window.

 A tall man with a neatly trimmed mustache stood at the bench, intent on tracing guide marks on a wooden propeller. This was Capt. Foulois. Seeing a commanding officer working at manual labor warmed my soul.

“Aviator Houdini reporting, Sir,” I said. 

“Report, then.” 

“Sir, I believe I’ve found one of the German submarine positions.” I described the buoy and drew a map of the location. 

“Good work, Houdini,” he said. “I’ll relay this to Col. Roosevelt. Now off to your other job.”

“How’s it going with Villa, Sir?”

“Not good. We can’t get these damned planes high enough to fly over the mountains. Villa can beat us with burros at this rate.”

[Images from First Aero Squadron Foundation.]




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