Wind Blown and Dripping

Wind Blown and Dripping is a play about Dashiell Hammett as the editor of a soldiers newspaper in the Aleutian Islands in World War II. In it, Hammett fights segregation in the U.S. Army and sexual blackmail and comes up against a racist, corrupt mob and his own limitations.

The two-act drama, written by former Alaska newspaper reporter Peter Porco, received its first production Jan. 8-24, 2010, at Cyrano’s Off-Center Playhouse in Anchorage. It was directed by Dick Reichman, the resident playwright of Cyrano’s Theatre Co.

The play is currently in revision.

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Wind Blown and Dripping is a fiction. Several of its principal plot elements and four of its five characters are fabrications. Its context, however, is genuine. The great mystery writer Dashiell Hammett did spend two years in Alaska, most of it in the Aleutians; did edit an Army newspaper, and did integrate his staff when few other units in the Armed Services did so.

Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) is still renowned as author of some of the best crime fiction ever written (The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key and other works). More than anyone, it was Hammett who brought to completely plausible life the coldly analytical, wise-cracking tough guy, the “hard-boiled” private investigator who follows his own code, relies on his own instincts and walks the mean streets without himself being mean (in the formulation of his younger mystery-writer contemporary, Raymond Chandler). The Sam Spade type (Spade being Hammett’s most enduring creation), with all its variations, is now ubiquitous in American, European and Asian popular culture.

Hammett’s  literary career lasted roughly 10 years. After publishing dozens of stories and five novels, he continued to write, but barely, and he finished nothing he cared about. Instead, in the second half of his life, powered by extensive royalties and his fame, he lived as a Hollywood and New York bon vivant and the companion of Lillian Hellman, playing the role of her literary advisor and play doctor, and as a political activist.

When he wasn’t spending time and money on women and drink, Hammett took up anti-fascist causes and carried water for the American Communist Party. The FBI watched him for many years (although they lost track of him for most of the time he was in Alaska). Hammett spent six months in prison in 1951 for refusing to cooperate with a federal court that demanded he give them names of certain contributors to a bail fund of which he was chairman. After his conviction, he lost  his sources of income (mostly from radio dramas based on his work), and the IRS got after him for back taxes. It’s fair to say that the government ran his ass into the ground because he held deeply unpopular beliefs and, being something of a stubborn fool, would not cooperate with them.

Perhaps the least-known segment of his life is the two years he spent as an Army corporal, then a sergeant, in Alaska. Hammett’s biographers call this perhaps the happiest time of his life. He loved Alaska and for a spell seriously contemplated buying a ranch on the island of Kodiak. In the late 1940s he would keep the temperature in his New York apartment lower than normal because, he said, it reminded him of the Aleutians.

Most of his time in Alaska, about 18 months, was spent on Adak Island where the military built one of the largest installations in the Aleutians, Adak Army Air Base. By the time Hammett got there, in September 1943, the fighting in Alaska and much of the North Pacific was finished. The Japanese, who had bombed Dutch Harbor and invaded and took control of the islands of Attu and Kiska in the far western Aleutians in the previous year, had been driven off. Adak-based bombers and a bloody battle on Attu were instrumental.

One of Hammett’s first assignments when he arrived on Adak was to write a brief official history of the Aleutians campaign. Battle of the Aleutians: 1942-1943, researched by Corporal Robert Colodny, the historian and Abraham Lincoln Brigades veteran of the Spanish War who also was stationed on Adak, told the troops based in the Aleutians why they were there—and why they had to stay there.

With no fighting to engage their interest, and having to endure the islands’ ugly weather, their remoteness and isolation, the absence of women and of even a little town to visit now and then, the Aleutians-based troops suffered the worst non-battle-related malaise of World War II.

For many of the troops, the Aleutians were a meaningless, inhospitable outpost. It rankled them that other American soldiers—those fighting in the South Pacific, Africa, Europe—got press and were lauded as warriors. Suicide was far too common. If a soldier had a latent mental disease, it was more likely to blossom here. The Aleutians garrisons were known as the sloppiest, dirtiest non-combat troops in the Armed Forces.

14 May 1944, Page 1. The Adakian was mimeographed on 8.5-x-14-inch paper, with print run up to 6,000 copies daily (Peter Porco photo)

The commanding officer of Adak Army Air Base, Brig. Gen. Harry F. Thompson, a fan of mystery stories, gave Hammett permission to create and edit a newspaper for the troops. The Adakian, a 4- to 6-page daily sheet printed by mimeograph and later lithograph, was one of several Hammett-led projects intended to lift the soldiers’ morale. It was first published in January 1944. By April 1945, Hammett had left Adak for Anchorage, but the Adakian continued to publish into 1946.

Among the most popular features of the paper were the cartoons—three and sometimes four each edition. Hammett, who had a tightly wrapped, ironic sense of humor, wrote many of the captions himself in the style of New Yorker cartoons he admired. Just before his good-bye to Adak, he published 150 of the cartoons—50 each by the three principal artists—in a small book whose printing he paid for (perhaps with contributions from the staff). That 1945 booklet, Wind Blown and Dripping, gave me the title for my play.

The Adakian, distributed only on Adak, did not publish exposé journalism, such as the news stories that the character Smokie Londregan writes or prepares to write in the play. The real paper’s primary purpose was—as Hammett wrote in the first dry-run edition (Jan. 19, ’44)—simply “to give the Adak soldier—every morning—a paper that he will like to read and that will keep him as up-to-date as possible on what’s going on in his world.”

Hammett wrote captions for many if not most of the Adakian's cartoons. It's easy to see him writing this one, for a Bernie Anastasia drawing, which was republished in the booklet Wind Blown and Dripping--from which the title of the new play takes its name. Adakian cartoons aimed their barbs at the Aleutians' irritating conditions. (Peter Porco photo)

The staff published news of war developments and political news from the Associated Press and the Army News Service. Shortwave radio reception was exceptional in the Aleutians, and the staff—chiefly Cpl. Colodny, who spoke several languages—took advantage of what the radios picked up by listening to Moscow, Berlin, Rome and other major cities.

Reading The Adakian today, I find it has the charm and directness of the era. It was indeed informative, witty, easy to read and frank—yet within the bounds of what was acceptable at the time. It had no rough edges and nothing of the sarcastic nipping—the “snark”—found,  let’s say, in much opinion journalism today. Its report of Olivia de Havilland’s  March 1944 visit to the islands, for example, treated the screen actress respectfully, even adoringly. Dozens of photos of pages from the newspaper can be viewed online.

Among the 10 Adak soldiers Hammett initially selected for his staff were Bernard Kalb, who went on to fame as a New York Times reporter and a television journalist (NBC, CBS); Bill Glackin, who spent about 50 years as the drama and arts critic for the Sacramento Bee; and Don Miller, a Jamaican-born African American, an Adakian cartoonist and later a successful children’s-book illustrator and the man who created the huge mural in the lobby of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C.

Miller was one of two blacks whom Hammett recruited for the Adakian’s staff. In doing so, Hammett took a bold step. He was consequently among the very first to integrate the American Armed Forces—more than four years before Pres. Harry Truman did so by decree. Hammett was a socialist and an ardent anti-fascist, and he put his principles into concrete action. It is probably because of his left-wing politics that Hammett got assigned to the Aleutians in the first place. That’s where the Army posted many of those it considered undesirable—potential subversives, former communists, right-wing trouble-makers, homosexuals. It is that stew that my play, in part, ladles up.

Dashiell Hammett was nobody’s angel. At bottom, he didn’t like people very much, and most people would not like him. But he believed in our country’s most democratic values, and it is wholly just that, despite the objections of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Hammett (who also served in the first World War) is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

–Peter Porco