Coming to Greif; or, The Power of Bad Ideas

When I was in law enforcement I had many occasions to wonder at the stupidity of human beings. This wonderment was later expanded to include human organizations, not excluding law enforcement itself. It struck me as grotesque, though undeniable, that in any bureacracy, there is a paralyzing inertia surrounding common sense, while stupidity -- manifesting in the form of bad decisions -- seems to possess irresistable momentum. When I began to work in the entertainment industry here in Los Angeles, I saw many examples of this in the form of inexplicably awful movies and television shows which had been produced at the expense of much better ideas. The cry of "How did this get made?" is not one uttered merely by audiences appalled by the stream of trash flowing out of Hollywood; it is heard over and over again by the people actually involved in producing that trash.

One can find hundreds of historical examples in any field which would prove the terrible, hypnotic fascination that bad ideas seem to hold for humans and human agencies. Everything from America's foreign policy to pug-fugly fashion trends like the man-bun owe their existence to this phenomenon, but there is one example in particular which not only exemplifies it, but offers insight as to how it may be avoided in our personal and professional lives.

In 1936, the Air Ministry of Nazi Germany issued an order for the development of a long range heavy bomber. Such bombers already existed in the air forces of Britain and America, and now Germany, which was rearming at a furious pace and developing a highly sophisticated and powerful air force under the cold and watchful eye of Adolf Hitler, wanted in on the fun. Competing companies bid on the project, and the contract was awarded to the Heinkel aeronatutics firm. Heinkel had no shortage of brains in its trust and perhaps the foremost of these, a man named Siegfried Günter, came up with a knife-edge design for what officially named the He 177 Grief (Griffin). The choice to name the big bomber after a mythological beast composed of several different animals was no accident, for Günter had combined a number of technological innovations in his design, including remote-control defensive armament and a surface evaporation cooling system. The conception was daring. Whether it was also good remained to be seen.

One of the key figures in the development of the Luftwaffe (air force) was General Ernst Udet. Udet was a remarkable man, a WWI fighter ace who'd spent the interwar years as a barnstormer and actor, and who'd been tapped by his old buddy Hermann Goering to take a key role in the development of the new German air force Hitler had created in 1935. Udet's vision for this air force was very different, however, than that of his opposite numbers in Britain and America, who believed in the power of heavy bombers to win wars. Instead, Udet was somewhat obsessed with smaller bombers -- much faster, much lighter aircraft with shorter range and smaller payloads, which, instead of attacking large fixed targets like factories, shipyards, and railways, would hover over the battlefield and serve as a kind of "flying artillery" for the army. Udet was particularly enamored by dive-bombers, and began to insist that every bomber Germany manufactured, regardless of size, possess the ability to dive so as to increase its accuracy. This was to apply even to the Griffin, which was so massive that there were already concerns that no existing set of engines in the German arsenal could actually get it off the ground. Indeed, the directive to make the Griffin capable of diving attacks required a strengthening of the airframe which increased the aircraft's weight still further, which in turn exacerbated the power problem. A vicious cycle had been initiated, and led to the second sign that the Greif would come to grief; trouble with the engines.

The Germans are rightly famous for their engines, whether mounted in aircraft, motorcycle or automobile, and they had some very good ones, made by Daimler-Benz, which would have been perfectly suited for the Griffin -- so long as the aircraft bombed from a horizontal position. Pressed into the dive-bombing role they would not work nearly as well, and burdened by Udet's directive, the designers offered a compromise. Instead of the conventional arrangement for a heavy bomber -- four engines driving four propellers -- they decided to use four engines to drive only two propellers. This was accomplished by welding the engines together and attaching them to a single drive shaft, which had the theoretical advantage of reducing the drag coeficient in a dive. It seemed fiendishly clever idea, but as with anything growing from a flawed concept, it turned out to be merely fiendish. The twinned engines were not only difficult to service mechanically, they had a nasty tendency to catch fire while in flight -- so much so that their unhappy crews soon dubbed the Griffin "the Luftwaffe Lighter," or, even more pointedly, "The Flying Coffin." And the vicious cycle got more vicious yet. The innovative surface evaporation system designed by Günter turned out to be insufficient to cool the troublesome engines, which necessitated the installation of conventional radiators which, in turn, added to the weight of the aircraft...which placed more strain on the engines, which caused yet more fires. But immolation while airborne was only one of the possible self-inflicted ends for such men. Because its structual issues had never been entirely resolved, rough handling of the Griffin could lead to disintegration of the aircraft while in flight even if the engines didn't catch fire. "Somehow the He 177 always conveyed an impression of fragility despite its size," noted an Allied test pilot who flew a captured model. Thus, the bomber which Udet had intended to be rugged enough to survive dives at a sixty-degree angle had to be flown even more gingerly than a conventional, level-flying bomber. The whole was considerably less than the sum of its parts.

By 1942 it was clear the Griffin had been an expensive failure. Nevertheless, the Luftwaffe's supreme commander, Hermann Goering, believed the project to be salvageable. He withdrew Udet's edict that the aircraft had to be capable of dive-bombing, and the engineers and designers at Heinkel dutifully reconfigured the entire aircraft and all of its systems. Substantial improvements were in fact made, if only slowly, but now something interesting else happened, something which demonstrates that there is perhaps no amount of elbow-grease which can salvage a bad idea, even after its worst elements have been surgically removed.

The point of a heavy bomber is, as earlier stated, to attack large fixed targets -- in other words, to cripple or destroy the enemy's capacity for war production. Failing that, it can be used as a weapon of terror, via the mass bombing of enemy cities. But after 1942, which was the year the Griffin went into mass production, Germany all but abandoned mass bombing by aeroplane, whether for military or psychological purposes. A shortage of trained aircrew, spare parts, and aviation gasoline, coupled with an increasing emphasis on fighter production -- to stop enemy air raids on Germany -- had led to a corresponding decrease in the use of bombers. And those bombers the Luftwaffe did tend to employ were the proven, reliable ones -- not the notoriously cranky Griffins. The truth was, after 1942 there was scarcely a need for Germany to manufacture any heavy bombers at all, much less ones which boasted a nickname like "Flying Coffin." Nevertheless, in that same year of 1942, some 166 Griffins rolled off production lines, and in 1943 that total rose to 415. In 1944, the last year in which figures are available, 565 more Griffins were manufactured. Not many of these monsters saw combat. Indeed, when Hitler briefly tried to resume massed bombing attacks against London in January of 1944, less than ten percent of the 600 aircraft ultimately employed were Griffins, and the operational performance of those that did participate was extremely poor -- on one mission alone, eight of fourteen bombers returned to base after suffering spontaneous engine fires. But the fact was that even if the Heinkel 177 had been a world-beater, by 1944 there simply wasn't enough fuel available to keep them in the air. In June of that year, all Griffin squadrons were withdrawn from Russia for lack of fuel, yet they continued to roll off the production lines. Albert Speer, Germany's minister of armaments and munitions, noted wryly in his memoirs that the insistence on manfacturing heavy bombers long after Germany had lost the ability to use them led to the grotquesque sight of freshly-manufactured aircraft being destroyed in the same factories which they were built, simply because there was no place to put them and no one to fly them.

All this demands a question: why, in a land of shortages like Germany, was so much time, money, manpower and material used on aircraft which served no purpose, which could not contribute to victory and which, in a sense, were actively contributing to defeat by robbing other, more successful weapons of those resources? Why wasn't the project simply terminated in 1942, when it became clear that the Greif caused nothing but grief? Why were almost 1,200 of these feckless beasts created, when a superb aircraft like the Heinkel 219, which had the potential to alter the air war in Germany's favor, reached a pathetic production total of only 294 units?

The answer as to why this is the case lies not within the complex tangle of the Nazi bureacracy but within human nature itself. For this example is one of thousands I might have given from any aspect of human affairs. Who among us hasn't doubled down on a bad bet, fought to stay in a dying relationship, slapped more coats of paint on an irredeemably ugly house, stuck it out an unsatisfying job, or poured still more money into a four-wheeled lemon when what we really needed to do was buy a new car? And there is no aspect of life, not even the largest-scale affairs, which are not subject to this strange tendency to stick with bad ideas to the bitter end. Why did John Travolta, at the height of his success in Hollywood, throw it all away by staking it all on an abysmal film like BATTLEFIELD EARTH? Why did the border state slave owners refuse Lincoln's offer of compensated emancipation in 1862, when it must have been obvious to the dullest among them that the only other alternative was an uncompensated abolition that would have -- and did -- ruin them financially? Why did a succession of American presidents dig us deeper and deeper into the morass of Vietnam when it was plain to anyone with a functioning brain that the underlying strategy for the war was faulty? Why did Mao cling to agricultural reforms that caused 20 million people to starve to death in a single year? Why did I once remain in an unhappy relationship for years when I knew not only that it had no future, but that its present was intolerable?

Logic would dictate that in life, successful behavior would be self-perpetuating while failure, on the other hand, would be repulsive. In practice however the exact opposite situation tends to obtain: success is seldom exploited, but failure is almost always reinforced, in a pattern of behavior we often refer to as "throwing good money after bad." We don't abandon ideas when we realize they won't work; in fact, it is at the precise moment we realize they aren't working that we begin to fully embrace them.

I have studied this problem from all angles and the nearest thing I can come to in regards to an answer is that human beings seem to have an innate need, a sort of genertic predisposition, to get returns on their investments. If a person spends X amount of sweat, blood, tears, time or money on a project -- any project -- they expect a proportionate reward, and if they do not get it, instead of calling the entire project a loss and chalking it up to a lesson learned, they redouble their efforts. The deeper the hole, the harder the digging. This applies everywhere, from romantic relationships to business investments to governmental policy to the practice of warfare. And what is truly grotesque is that by the same token, good ideas are seldom backed by anywhere near this much effort. As I noted above, the Heinkel firm produced a superlative twin-engined fighter aircraft, the He 219 "Eagle Owl," at the same time it was making the Griffin; yet in the year 1944, nearly three Griffins were produced for every Eagle Owl, and in the end the ratio of Griffins to Eagle Owls in the Luftwaffe was 4 -1. It seems that in a sense, success is its own worst enemy, for when a project is successful it requires no justification to continue, no extra resources or emergency meetings, no frantic burning of midnight oil. Human beings thrive on stress, and indeed -- as Sebastian Junger pointed out in his book TRIBE, though the moral has always been plain to anyone who has lived in demanding or dangerous physical conditions for any length of time -- that both depression and suicide rates plummet in times of crisis, because it is crisis that we find our métier. There is something about the possibility of disaster which spurs human beings to prodigies of effort, which is, of course, why our species has survived all of its trevails to date; but when possibility of disaster is replaced by the mere possibility of failure, of being shown up or embarrassed or proven wrong, the same instinct seems to prevail. Thus a good idea can starve while a bad one chokes on the fat of the land.

It seems to me that the only way to break this particular cycle is through twinned methods. The first is to train ourselves to recognize when an idea is fatally bad, which is not always as easy as it sounds, since most bad ideas come dressed as good ones. We can do this by understanding that a bad idea is full of dusty details, and the worse the idea, the worse the metaphorical dust. Thus, the more small problems we tackle, the less aware we tend to be of the larger problems, which are obscured by that dust. It is possible to appear to be making progress via a series of petty victories, when in fact those victories amount to nothing more than tightening bolts on a sinking ship. The crucial step lies in finding time to take the longer view. Extending my nautical metaphor, I would put it this way: tinkering with the boiler may be necessary, but unless someone is in the pilothouse, steering the ship, the possibility of reaching the destination is slim, while possibility of smashing into an iceberg is large. A fatally flawed idea is often easily spotted...provided someone is up there with spyglass in hand, looking for the damned thing.

The second, trickier yet, is to disengage from the bad idea once it is recognized as such, which is actually much harder than it sounds, since it entails overcoming both our ego, which refuses to recognize defeat, and our genetic instinct to draw a dividend from our labors. Because it is easier to recognize a bad idea than to abandon it, we must be constantly aware of our level of investment, so that we never reach the point where abandonment becomes emotionally impossible for us. The key word here is "aware." In our society awareness, and to some extent even consciousness, are increasingly difficult states of being to occupy. The flood of information and of noise which constantly batters our brains makes organization of thought extremely difficult. As I said above, the devil is really in the details -- rather, the devil is in making the details, the day-to-day, our only reality. Taking that long, spyglass-view of life requires very deliberate effort; acting on the knowledge the view gives us takes ten times as much. But it can be done.

The art of cutting losses is just that: an art, and like all arts it begins as a craft, a trade, something which requires study and practice and self-effacement. Elsewise, as with all those before us who were crushed by the power of bad ideas, we will ultimately come to Greif.

Note: in writing this blog I used a number of sources, including Captain D.H. Brown's WINGS OF THE LUFTWAFFE, Munson's GERMAN AIRCRAFT OF WW2, and John Killen's A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LUFTWAFFE, among others.