Piano by James Barron

Author:James Barron [Barron, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805078787
Published: 2006-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

A year after closing the foundry, Steinway stopped making more than plates: It all but stopped making pianos. The government would not allow nonessential products like pianos to be manufactured in wartime, at least not with the wood that was stacked outside William’s plant—wood that had been bought and delivered before America entered World War II. The way Henry Z. Steinway remembers it, the government inspector rejected what Steinway had on hand, saying, “Your wood is not good enough, you have to buy according to government specifications.” Steinway did the only thing it knew to do: “We went back to the same wood suppliers we always used,” he recalled, “and said, ‘Can you sell us wood according to government specifications?’”

Even after taking delivery on government-certified wood, Steinway needed to find something to do besides finish the pianos that had been working their way through the factory. It found two things. One was to make wooden parts for stubby-looking gliders like the ones used in the Normandy invasion. Steinway arranged a subcontract with one of the prime contractors responsible for delivering the gliders yesterday if not sooner. They were strange looking, these motorless aircraft with fuselages of fabric-covered steel tubing and teardrop-shaped wings that measured eighty-three feet from tip to tip. “The Air Force has never owned anything as ugly,” one aviation historian wrote, “or as efficient.”

The CG-4A, as the gliders were known, carried the tools of battle—howitzers, jeeps loaded with ammunition, and a handful of gunners and drivers. They were designed to fly at the end of a three-hundred-foot-long rope. At the other end was a cargo plane that would pull the CG-4A almost to its destination, release the towline, and let the pilots aboard the glider figure out how to touch down. The result was what one military historian called “controlled crash landings.” Only a handful of gliders survived the war undamaged; most were abandoned where they came to a stop. John E. Pike, a defense consultant who directed a number of research projects for the Federation of American Scientists, noted that they were “unavoidably unpopular” with soldiers but were the “best of a bunch of bad options” for generals planning an attack. According to Pike, “you were either going to kill a small number of soldiers in glider accidents or a larger number of soldiers because they were scattered all over the place, one parachute at a time.”

Steinway was responsible for making all the wooden parts for the CG-4A—the wings, the tail surfaces, the nose in which the pilot sat, the benches for crew members, and what Henry Z. Steinway remembers as “an elaborate floor.” As production of the gliders began in 1942, Steinway handed over its third plant to the prime contractor, which had nowhere else to marry Steinway’s wings to fuselages that were made elsewhere. Steinway had a more immediate problem. It had to translate the armyapproved blueprints into patterns and the patterns into wings. The clock was ticking toward the deadline, but despite nine decades of experience in sawing and shaping wood, Steinway could not figure out what needed to be done.

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