Lieutenant-Colonel E. J. Hall, two of the most brilliant automotive
engineers in America, shut themselves in a room of the New Willard Hotel
in Washington. When they left that room again on the afternoon of the
31st, though haggard from lack of sleep, they had in their hands the
completed assembly drawings of an entirely new airplane engine. Thus was
born the famous Liberty engine, about which hundreds of speeches have
been made and thousands of columns have been written in scepticism, in
criticism, and in praise. As the result of the enthusiastic co-operation
of some ten manufacturers, each of whom produced those parts for which
his factory was best fitted, the first Liberty, an 8-cylinder, was built
in thirty days. The first 12-cylinder engine completed its official
endurance test eighty-two days from the time the order for samples was
given, the unqualified success of this test removing the Liberty from the
realm of experimentation to that of established reputation. In just one
year from the day that Lieutenant-Colonels Hall and Vincent pushed the
thumb-tacks into their drawing-boards in the hotel room, 1,100 Liberty
“twelves” were produced—a remarkable illustration of the ability and
ingenuity of American engineers and the energy and resourcefulness of
American manufacturers. Thanks to the energetic co-operation of many
manufacturers, more than 14,000 Liberty engines had been completed
when the Armistice was signed. There are few finer passages in the
history of America’s participation in the war than the story of how our
manufacturers put aside their private interests and their commercial
rivalries and threw themselves and their organizations, heart and soul,
into the work of building an airplane that would make America mistress of
the skies.
When the signing of the Armistice brought our efforts to an abrupt
conclusion, there had been developed, tested, and adopted by the army
four types of airplanes, production of which would have started early
in 1919. They were the Lepere, or L. U. S. A. C. II, a two-seated
fighting-plane equipped with a Liberty engine; the U. S. De Havilland
9-A, a day-bombing and reconnaissance plane also fitted with the Liberty
engine; the huge Martin bomber, with a gross weight of nearly 5 tons,
driven by two Liberty engines; and the Loening, a two-seated combat plane
fitted with the 300 horse-power Hispano-Suiza engine.
A striking illustration of the new problems and extraordinary
ramifications incident to this great new industry which so suddenly
came into existence in the United States is the fact that it was found
necessary to despatch an agricultural expert post-haste to India to
purchase enormous quantities of castor-beans, as it was at first believed
that castor-oil was the only satisfactory lubricant for these new types
of high-speed, high-power engines. India’s stock of castor-beans being
quickly exhausted by the immensity of our demands, more than 100,000
acres of the bean were planted in the United States. Meanwhile, research
work with mineral oils was carried on intensively, a lubricant eventually
being developed which proved satisfactory in practically every airplane
engine except the rotary type, for which castor-oil is still preferred.
But the aircraft problem was by no means solved with the development
and production of the Liberty engine. Far from it. To build airplanes
requires wood; the best timber in the world is none too good; and of
suitable timber there was a comparatively limited supply. The best wood
known for airplane construction is the Sitka spruce, which combines the
required qualities of strength, resiliency, and lightness. This spruce
grows mostly in the Pacific Northwest, along the tide-lands of Washington
and Oregon, at a low elevation. But not all the planes were built of
spruce, fir, as it grows in the Northwest, being largely used for the
heavier wing-beams. Port Orford cedar was eagerly utilized whenever it
could be obtained. It is of somewhat smaller growth than spruce or fir,
but a straighter-grained wood, harder and more dense than either of the
others. Of this splendid wood there is, however, only a comparatively
small quantity, 2,000,000,000 feet, perhaps, anywhere in the world,
mostly near Coos Bay, on the coast of Oregon. Being less affected by
water than any of the other woods, it was reserved for use in seaplanes.
The government commandeered the entire supply of Port Orford cedar for
aircraft production, but released it upon the signing of the armistice.
There is plenty of suitable airplane timber—spruce, cedar, and fir—in the
Far Nor’west—miles and miles and miles of it. The mountain-slopes are
as solid a black with the evergreens as though a giant had painted them
with soot. “Massed in their black battalions stand the bleak, barbarian
pines.” Foolish men have tried to destroy these forests. Twenty years
ago a colony of Poles settled amid the virgin forests of the Olympic
Peninsula—a portion of the United States which to this day remains
virtually unexplored. Timber was not worth a dollar a million feet
then. On the chance that the ground might be tilled if the timber could
be cleared off, the settlers started a fire that burned over ten square
miles and destroyed timber which, at prevailing prices, would be worth
close to half a million dollars. The great area of blackened waste which
remains is still known as “The Polander Burn.”
Now spruce, curiously enough, had not been considered a valuable wood
for the ordinary lumber trade; the lumbermen held it a doubtful asset
that was hardly worth the cutting. As a result of this condition, the
commercial supply was neither large enough nor well enough selected and
prepared to meet our aircraft requirements when the declaration of war
suddenly made it one of the most desired and most valuable woods in
existence. Thus it came about that, the lumbermen being unable to supply
the demand, the army had to go instantly into the business of producing
this wood in theretofore undreamed-of quantities. The work of getting out
the spruce fell, rather oddly, to the men who had been among the first
to volunteer for extrahazardous service in France. Before the war, when
airplanes were looked on merely as toys of the rich, the supervision of
military aeronautics was assigned to the Signal Corps, on the assumption
that if flying had any part in warfare it would probably be that of
signalling, for which reason, and the more potent one that no other
branch of the service knew what to do with it, it had to be wished on
some one. And of all the branches of the army, possibly none save the
Flying Section of the Signal Corps—as the Air Service was then known—had
a more adventurous and devil-may-care personnel. The Signal Corps made
its original appeal to the men who wanted to get out and do things: to
be in front, to wave the little red-and-white flags under shell-fire,
to sound the long yell, to see the enemy first, to be the eyes and ears
and nerves of the whole army. But, as I have already explained, the army
had to have the spruce in order to carry out its aviation programme,
and aviation was under the Signal Corps, and it was from the Signal
Corps, therefore, that the men were drawn to go out to the Northwest and
get the spruce. Thus it came about that the boys who enlisted at the
very beginning in order that they might have the danger and excitement
of laying the field telegraphs and telephones, of dashing madly along
shell-swept roads on roaring motorcycles, of wig-wagging and semaphoring
word of the enemy’s movements from in front of the armies, were shipped
westward instead of eastward, were given axes instead of Enfields and
peaveys instead of pistols, and fought their share of the war in the
gloomy depths of the primeval forest, or on the logging railroads and in
the sawmills which they built in bitter cold and driving rain.
Labor conditions were undeniably bad in the Northwest at the beginning
of the war. There is an old proverb that “A farm lease is a conspiracy
on the part of the tenant and the absentee landlord to rob the land.”
Lumbering was almost as bad. The owners were avaricious and arrogant, the
men stubborn and defiant. The owners would not make camp improvements
because “the men would not stay on the job,” and the men would not stay
because “the owners didn’t make things decent.” And, to make things
worse, the paid German propaganda was rampant, unchecked in the woods,
for the Wilhelmstrasse fully realized how vital it was to cripple
the American air programme. Germany knew better than we did the war
possibilities of the Pacific Northwest. She couldn’t buy spruce there
for her planes, but she could mobilize her spies and trouble-makers and
hinder the production for and the delivery of spruce to the United States
and her allies. And she did her worst. Some day there will be told the
story, the “inside” story, of the campaign waged in the Great Woods by
the secret forces of Germany—a campaign consisting of strikes, I. W. W.
demonstrations, forest-fires, railway wrecks, dynamited bridges, damaged
machinery, infernal machines, shootings, systematic intimidation, and
all the other deviltries of a vicious and unscrupulous enemy. The spies
and secret agents which Germany planted in the forests of the Northwest
formed a part of the vast army of which the Kaiser boasted to Ambassador
Gerard. But the Hun made a miscalculation. There were not enough spies;
there were too many Americans.
The War Department has rarely shown greater wisdom than when it gave
a colonel’s commission to Brice P. Disque, an ex-captain of Regulars
who had left the army to accept the wardenship of the Michigan State
Prison, and put him in charge of spruce production. Captain Disque had
his blanket-roll packed and aboard ship for service in France when he
was called to Washington, just as the transport was setting sail, and
ordered to go to the Northwest and investigate lumbering conditions. His
report showed that the right man had been found to direct the Titanic
job of getting out the spruce; he was commissioned a colonel and later a
brigadier-general, and the story of the spruce production tells the rest.
To the tact and vision of General Disque is due the creation of that
remarkable organization known as the Loyal Legion of Loggers and
Lumbermen, an association conceived to bring capital and labor together
in one mighty machine driven solely by patriotism. Under the inspiration
thus provided, both sides agreed to submit their differences to the
United States Army, as represented in the person of General Disque,
as final arbiter. The eight-hour day was agreed to; camp sanitation
and better living conditions of every kind were demanded; a uniformly
liberal wage-scale for all classes of labor was adopted; a standard mess
was arranged to check the inordinate waste of food in the lumber-camps;
the owners were given profitable prices for their output under the new
conditions, and the small men were assured of receiving a square deal
from their powerful corporate rivals. Some of these questions were
settled through regular military channels, but most of them through the
medium of the L. L. L. L. Once a matter could be shown to be reasonable
and fair to every one concerned, it was officially adopted, as by a
majority vote, and business as well as patriotic reasons demanded that
every one should cheerfully acquiesce in the decision. The Loyal Legion
works—for it has been made permanent—through its local assemblies; any
local disagreement is taken to the district council—which is formed
from local representatives of both employer and employees, there being
eight of these district councils in the Coast Division and four in the
Inland Empire. Any question which cannot be settled by a district council
goes to the Central Council, composed of one employer and one employee
from each district; while General Disque, as the head of the Legion,
has been the final arbitrator in such questions as the Central Council
could not settle. Since this plan was definitely adopted, however, so
strong a spirit of patriotic fairness has been developed on both sides
that nothing has gone to him for settlement or revision. Nothing could
more strongly emphasize the success of the Legion, which now has a
membership of nearly 130,000, than the fact that at a mass convention,
held shortly after the signing of the Armistice, at which more than 900
local councils were represented, it was voted almost unanimously to
perpetuate the organization, to continue the publication of its official
bulletin, and to invite General Disque to continue as the Legion’s head.
Were the people of the Pacific Northwest to receive no other reward
for their sacrifices in the war, they have reason to feel amply repaid
by the creation of the Loyal Legion and the resultant ending of the
long-standing feud between capital and labor, the expulsion of the I. W.
W.’s and similar discordant and dangerous elements, the betterment of
working and living conditions for the lumbermen, and the commencement of
an era of peace and prosperity in the Great Woods.
* * * * *
Unless you have been in the Northwest during the rainy season you can
have no adequate conception of the difficulties under which the spruce
squadrons labored. The coastal districts of Oregon and Washington have
one of the heaviest rainfalls recorded anywhere on earth. Unkind people
have said of the Pacific Northwest that it has but two seasons—the rainy
season and August. But that is an exaggeration. The local newspapers
alternately boast of and apologize for the reputed 180 inches, or
15 feet, of annual precipitation. With that as a basis for one’s
calculations, the old man who sold the town site of Simescarey, the
terminus of the spruce road which the government has built into the
Olympic Peninsula, has had 450 feet of water descend upon his head—for
the inhabitants of that region scorn umbrellas—in the thirty years that
he has resided there. After a winter spent in the Northwest—and having
passed one there, I know whereof I speak—one might easily believe that
the sentry at an Oregon spruce-camp was not joking when he came in to the
commanding officer to report the damages done by the rain.
“Sir,” he apologized, “I don’t like to be a pessimist, but things
ain’t going right to-day. Most of the fish in the lake are dead since
last night’s rain. The lake raised so fast that some of ’em got beyond
their depth and was just naturally drowned; the rest couldn’t swim up
fast enough, and bein’ surface fish and not used to much depth, their
bladders busted and there ain’t a fit fish left in the whole bunch. Every
duck but one is dead, too; the rain beat their heads into a mush—all but
the one that got caught in a steel trap set for a muskrat and that saved
his life—he stayed under water where it was dry. Believe me, sir, that
was the wettest rain last night I ever see.”
* * * * *
Because, as I have already explained, the lumbermen did not consider
spruce a profitable wood to handle, few of the spruce forests had been
penetrated by railroads. So Disque and his Legionaries set out to build
railways themselves—13 lines with more than 300 miles of trackage.
The forests tapped by these new lines and their branches have, it is
estimated, an ultimate production of 33,000,000,000 feet of lumber, a
quantity almost beyond the comprehension of the human brain. In order to
visualize it, it must be translated into commonplace, every-day terms.
Let us assume that it requires 20,000 feet of lumber to build an average
5 or 6 room house. Taking this as a basis, the railways built by Disque
and his spruce squadrons have brought within the reach of commerce enough
timber to build almost 2,000,000 of these comfortable American homes,
with sufficient waste wood to keep them heated for a generation. When
the war ended, 174,000,000 feet of aircraft lumber had been cut and
shipped—enough to build dwellings for the inhabitants of a good-sized
city.
The government planned to have all the airplane stock from the Northwest
cut at the one great cut-up plant at Vancouver, near Portland. This
huge mill, the largest in the world, was built by the army in forty-five
days and has handled more than a million and a half feet of lumber in
twenty-four hours. But with the extension of the airplane programme,
whereby the Spruce Division was called upon to furnish stock for all
the Allies, more capacity was required and three other great plants of
almost equal size were planned, one being ready for opening, one almost
completed, and one projected when the Armistice was signed. These four
huge mills would, it is estimated, have furnished the United States and
her allies with close to 100,000,000 feet of airplane lumber a month.
The silent, peaceful forests of the Northwest seemed separated from the
war by a million miles, a score of generations. But when the word was
flashed from Washington to Disque to “Go ahead,” the primeval silence
of the woods was suddenly shattered by a million bellowing echoes of
battle. The war had come to America. Almost overnight the battle-front
moved 6,000 miles westward—from the forests of the Argonne to the forests
of Oregon. The trucks were brought in—endless caravans of grunting,
straining monsters; the soldiers came, 30,000 in all; the loggers,
graders, hard-rock men, sawyers, surveyors, engineers; the pile-drivers,
the donkey-engines, the steam-shovels perched on wheels, the train-loads
of food and tools and powder; the patient, sweating horses and the
creaking wagons, thousands upon thousands of them. The wood roads were
black with traffic; they fairly smoked with the fierce fight for speed.
The highways were dust in the early fall, where the 5 or 15 ton loads
ground the roads to powder. Then the wet weather came—fogs, mists,
drizzles, showers, floods—the rainy season that grows the incomparable
forests of the Northwest.
They splashed through it all, soldiers and Legionaries alike; they waded,
they swam, they shivered and swore, and beat their hands over the brush
fires—but the stream of supplies never stopped nor checked. The railway
gangs, following close on the heels of the axemen, laid their twin lines
of steel through the dripping forest faster than Kitchener laid down his
desert railway to Khartoum, the locomotives crawling one mile, two miles,
deeper into the wilderness each night. Night and day the forest trails
were busy. Shuttling back and forth, loaded both ways with materials
and men, teams and trucks and trains struggled for speed. Headlights,
lanterns, shouted warnings, guided the night traffic along the sombre,
shut-in ways. Clankings, clatterings, gasoline coughings, the honk of
horns and the hoot of locomotives filled the air. The silent forest
became a bedlam of sound, of action.
The spruce! The fir! The wings of victory! Berlin heard it, saw it first.
The splitting blasts that showered the forest lakes with stones, the
shouting, heaving din of the construction-camps, the crash of the trees
as they fell before the axe and saw of the woodsmen, the whine of the
cables through the sheaves as the huge logs were snaked into position for
loading, the rumble and roar of the heavy-laden log-trains, the shriek
of the giant saws in the mills—all these sounds fell upon the listening
ears at German Great Headquarters with a growing menace, as ominous as
the tattoo of the machine-guns, as the thunderous blast of the great
Allied cannon, as the victorious cheers of the charging Yanks. They meant
that the spruce was coming! The planes were coming! A few months more and
the boasted Hindenburg Line would be a joke. The Germans knew that they
could not build trenches in the clouds. That was the real reason why they
were attacked by yellow fever in the fall of 1918.
* * * * *
The engines and the planes themselves being in production, the next
problem to be solved by the War Department was to provide our new aerial
navy with armament in the form of machine-guns. Fighting in the air,
it should be remembered, is entirely a development of the Great War,
the adaptation of machine-guns for airplane use having practically all
taken place since 1914. Though the records show that a machine-gun was
successfully fired from an airplane in this country in 1912, and though
the French had a few heavy planes fitted with mitrailleuses at the
outbreak of the war, it was not until 1915 that machine-guns were carried
by planes on active service. Prior to that time aviators depended on
service and automatic rifles, pistols, shotguns shooting large shot held
together by wires—miniature editions of the chain-shot used by early
sea-fighters—and also carried darts and grenades to drop on the enemy.
As a matter of fact, in one of the first aerial combats of the war,
which took place on the Eastern Front between a Russian aviator and an
Austrian, weapons were not used at all. The Russian determined to wreck
his adversary and, in pursuance of this plan, so manœuvred his plane
that the tips of his wings were just beneath the wings of the Austrian.
He then suddenly elevated that end of his plane, hoping to upset the
Austrian, but the result was that both machines collided and fell to
the ground. Major Eric T. Bradley, formerly in the British Army but now
an officer of the American Air Service, tells of having flown over the
lines in 1915 armed with a twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun loaded with
buckshot tied together with wire, which swished through the air like the
lash of a whip and occasionally hit something—usually by chance.
The development of methods for controlling machine-guns so that they
can be fired through the area traversed by the propeller has had a vast
effect on aerial combat, and an understanding of the problems involved
is necessary in order to appreciate the difficulties which had to be
overcome. The various devices which have been developed for controlling
the fire of a machine-gun so as to cause the bullets to miss the blades
of the propeller are commonly known as synchronizing or interrupter
gears. These terms are, however, somewhat inaccurate, as it is only
occasionally that the speed of the propeller is equal to the rate of fire
of the gun, which is the condition of synchronization; moreover, the gun
is not interrupted, but is caused to fire at the proper moment so that
the bullet will miss the propeller-blade. “Gun control” would be a more
descriptive name for the device.
Tractor airplanes—those which have the engine and propeller in front—were
early found to be better suited to combat work than planes of the
“pusher” type, which have the propeller behind, because they possess
greater manœuvring powers and are better able to defend themselves. With
these planes was developed the fixed aircraft machine-gun. This gun is
fixed rigidly to the plane, pointing straight ahead, parallel to the
line of flight. The first fixed guns were mounted on the upper plane so
as to shoot over the arc described by the propeller, but these were not
satisfactory owing to the difficulty in reloading the gun. To overcome
this very obvious disadvantage the gun was lowered, which brought its
line of fire inside the arc described by the propeller blades. Thus arose
the difficulty caused by shooting into the propeller, to solve which
countless experiments were made and numerous expedients tried. At first
the blades were armored at the points where the bullets would strike,
with steel of a shape calculated to cause the bullets to glance off,
but this system was never satisfactory. Then the experiment was tried
of wrapping the propeller with linen to keep it from splintering, as it
was found that several bullets could be fired through a propeller thus
treated without causing it to break. Throughout the summer of 1915 all of
the Nieuport fighting-planes used by the French were fitted with fixed
guns shooting through the propeller—if a bullet hit the propeller it
either went through it or it wrecked it.