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SLIPSTREAM
Books by Eugene E. Wilson
AIR POWER FOR PEACE
SLIPSTREAM
_The Autobiography of an Air Craftsman_
[Illustration:
_John Haley_
EUGENE E. WILSON]
SLIPSTREAM
_THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
AN AIR CRAFTSMAN_
_by_
EUGENE E. WILSON
Whittlesey House
MCGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY, INC.
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO
SLIPSTREAM
Copyright, 1950, by the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. All rights in
this book are reserved. It may not be used for dramatic, motion-,
or talking-picture purposes without written authorization from
the holder of these rights. Nor may the book or parts thereof be
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing,
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles
and reviews. For information, address Whittlesey House, 330 West 42d
Street, New York 18, New York.
PUBLISHED BY WHITTLESEY HOUSE
A division of the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
_Printed in the United States of America_
_To
my wife_
Preface
To the world at large, Berlin Airlift headlines only highlighted
another crisis in the “cold war.” Yet behind those headlines lay an
epochal event: commercial air transports—not combat aircraft—had
become the spearhead of United States foreign policy.
This dramatic incident brought renewed hope to air craftsmen who,
nearly a half century earlier, had embarked on a starry-eyed crusade
to utilize the airplane for the benefit of mankind. In World War I,
they had helped smash the German Kaiser, only to find Hitler rising
phoenixlike in his boots. Two decades later, they had strafed Hitler
to earth, only to discover a colossal portrait of Joseph Stalin
looming beyond a smoke curtain. Still later, as atomic bombs and
lethal bacteria became weapons, they were asking themselves, “what
next?” when the Berlin Airlift came up with the answer: air cargo,
air commerce, air industry, air finance—air power for peace!
In December, 1943, we air craftsmen had our frustrations dramatized
at a banquet staged in honor of the Wright brothers on the fortieth
anniversary of Kittyhawk. Orville Wright, mouselike in a dinner
jacket and obviously uncomfortable, had sat through a barrage of
clichés microphoned by air power advocates. When finally called on
to respond, he refused point-blank. Later, in an anteroom off the
banquet hall, he gave vent to intense bitterness: evil men had seized
upon the airplane to make it the most lethal weapon in history; he
hated everything about the airplane; he rued the day he and his
brother had invented the thing.
We manufacturers, who had engineered their fantastic contraption
into a decisive instrument of World War II, echoed Orville Wright’s
concern. Our lives had been a kaleidoscopic drama of “the five
Ms”: men, management, money, materials, machines. Across our stage
had walked the big names of a bloody quarter century involving two
world wars. The setting had been fogged by haze from smoke-filled
Washington hotel rooms and highlighted by klieg lights in
Congressional investigating committees. Sucked by our own slipstream
into the maelstrom of politics, we had all but lost sight of the
dim off-stage shape of One World being remorselessly forged by air
transport. Whether this should be a world of peace in our time, or
whether it must wait on centuries of slavery, would depend on what we
Americans did with the airplanes we had created.
Following the 1918 Armistice, we had carelessly taken a wrong
turning. After the Italian General Douhet in his book _Command of
the Air_ had extolled the virtues of the air bombardment of civil
populations, Brig. Gen. William Mitchell raised the air power banner
at home. Later Alexander P. de Seversky, a former Russian combat
pilot, spread the Douhet gospel in a best seller, _Victory Through
Airpower_. When the American press followed this lead, air force in
war became the major role of the airplane.
This Douhet doctrine is, of course, the negation of the philosophy
expressed in the great body of international law which developed
following the Dark Ages. Chivalry, a concept devised by Christendom
to protect civilization from destruction by the Four Horsemen,
had introduced the era in which differences were resolved through
conflicts between military forces, rather than the destruction of
civil populations. Behind the morality of the principle lay the
practical consideration that it spared the conqueror the expense
of rebuilding establishments which he himself might otherwise have
battered down.
If Douhet, in our time, mistook air force for the foundation of air
power, our British cousins, in the Elizabethan Era, had not failed
to look at sea power through the correct end of the telescope. After
fifteenth-century geographic discoveries had placed Britain at the
crossroads of maritime commerce to America, Asia, and Africa, her
merchants and mariners recognized freedom to trade as the guarantee
of prosperity. The basic requirement for freedom to trade was a
superior fleet, utilized to guarantee, hopefully through measures
short of war, the right of all and sundry to proceed upon their
lawful occasions. Having seen the vision, the English mustered the
courage and enterprise to seize control of the sea and employ it
to build Pax Britannica, a period of spiritual as well as material
progress, motivated by the Christian ideal, such as the world had
not hitherto known.
In the early 1930’s, after American commercial air transport had
revealed its potentialities, we Americans likewise stood at a
crossroads. Had we but recognized our opportunity and displayed
the courage and enterprise to foster a forward-looking air policy,
we might have so directed our superior technology in the air as
to match Pax Britannica with Pax Aeronautica. History discloses
that the peaceful progress of civilization has always been paced
by discoveries in transport. Had we recognized the revolutionary
character of air transport, we might have removed enough of the
causes of war to have avoided World War II. Instead, we hamstrung our
own air power and provided our enemies with a favorable opportunity
to seize control of the air.
The performance of air transport in the war revealed that the air is
like an ocean that affords uninterrupted access to any spot on land
or sea. Experience proves that the airplane, contrary to widespread
belief, is inherently an economical vehicle. It demands no costly
investment in fixed rights of way; its right of way is the air, which
is free and infinitely flexible. Since the speed of the airplane
permits it to transport goods a maximum of ton-miles for a minimum
of initial investment, airline ownership of property of any kind is
at a minimum. During the thirty-year life of air-mail service, the
United States Post Office Department has recovered through sales of
air-mail stamps alone more than it has paid out to the airlines for
carrying the mails. While segments of the airline transport system
have been subsidized in the interests of national security, the
system as a whole has proved self-sustaining. The Postmaster General
regards air mail not as an expense but as an investment. He recently
stated publicly, “Probably no investment made by this government
ever returned greater national benefits in commercial and cultural
progress, and national security.”
It therefore seems a pity that, at the moment when providence has
placed in American hands the instrument with which to speed world
recovery, we should lack the wit to recognize the opportunity, and
the initiative, courage, and enterprise to exploit it. Where the
mission of the Air Force is to enforce the peace, the major role
of the airplane is in air commerce, the key to world recovery.
Responsibility for utilizing air power for peace resides with the
people of the United States.
To air craftsmen, Orville Wright’s reaction served to emphasize the
fact that all of us had been sucked up by the slipstream of our own
propellers and whirled about like withered leaves or bits of waste
paper. Yet underneath we knew that this apparently confused and
wasteful process had accelerated progress. As engineers, we realized
that when an airplane is earthbound with its engine revving up, the
engine’s power is all wasted in noise and heat. In free flight, on
the other hand, an airscrew converts upward of 80 per cent of its
power into “effective forward thrust,” leaving but 20 per cent as
“slip.” Our slipstream is therefore an efficient machine measured
by any standard. To permit aviation to soar to new heights we must
cast off its shackles. To this end we must needs understand its
fundamental import.
My own thinking along this line began one November day in 1918,
while watching the vaunted German High Seas Fleet surrender to the
famed British Grand Fleet. At that time I was chief engineer of the
battleship _Arkansas_, one of five American vessels that comprised
Adm. Hugh Rodman’s Sixth Battle Squadron of Sir David Beatty’s Grand
Fleet. Beatty had a secret weapon, a force of aircraft carriers. Some
observers ascribed the German surrender to knowledge of this fact,
yet Beatty himself realized that victory had been won, not by the
ironclads which, since Jutland had not come into decisive action, but
by the battered nine-knot tramps, the doughty drifters and trawlers,
the troop-carrying liners and the wallowing tankers—merchantmen that
had been keeping the life blood coursing through the Empire’s veins.
Watching this triumph of sea power, even as the shadow of an airplane
flitted across the gun turrets of the Grand Fleet, I had sought to
draw an analogy between sea power and air power but had dismissed
the idea because there had been no such thing then as commercial air
transport.
The war over, Rear Adm. William Adger Moffett, founder and
first Chief of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, called me in from
general service to specialize in aircraft engine production and,
incidentally, to lend him a hand in his fight with Brig. Gen.
William Mitchell, Assistant Chief, U.S. Army Air Service. This
conflict between belligerent giants was more than a revival of the
old Army-Navy Game. To the admiral, an inspiring leader and astute
politician, the task was to prevent Mitchell, a brilliant pilot and
ardent air enthusiast, from monopolizing all aviation—commercial,
naval, and military—under an administrative setup resembling the new
British Air Ministry. This separate and independent department, in
the opinion of the admiral, had already begun to wreck British naval
aviation and thus undermine British sea power.
Amid the rough and tumble of interdepartmental politics, I discovered
the fundamental precepts of aeronautic technology: the power
plant was the heart of the airplane; progress in its development
could be measured in terms of “pounds per horsepower”; the key
to technological progress was competition within the private
manufacturing and transport industries; under pressure of free
competition, the “impossible” got done today—the fantastic took a
little longer. It was no accident that the airplane had been invented
in America or that it had here attained its maximum development.
Technological leadership stemmed directly from the concept under
which our government had been created, the creative idea of the
dignity of the individual and his innate right to liberty under just
law.
In Washington, the struggle over the separate air force climaxed
in the summer of 1925. The big Navy rigid airship _Shenandoah_,
barnstorming over western country fairs, was destroyed in Ohio by
a line squall. General Mitchell, previously exiled to San Antonio,
Texas, seized upon the crash as a favorable moment for hurling
charges at both the Army and the Navy of their treasonable neglect of
aviation. President Calvin Coolidge, in order to sift the charges,
convened a public inquiry by a board of distinguished citizens under
the chairmanship of Dwight W. Morrow. Testifying before the Board,
Admiral Moffett took sharp issue with Mitchell on the question of
the independent air force, but took advantage of the opportunity to
outline the basis of a constructive national air policy.
The Morrow Board, while disapproving the Mitchell proposal for
the time being, did recommend a separate air corps status in the
Army for military aviation. It took strong exception to the idea
of including air transport in any military establishment and urged
instead its orderly development under civil authority and preferably
by competitive private industry. The Board’s recommendations were
approved by the President and transmitted to Congress where they were
quickly implemented by the Air Corps Act of 1926 and the Air Commerce
Act of the same year. These acts fixed responsibility for aeronautic
development upon the several government agencies concerned.
General Mitchell was convicted by an Army court-martial of “conduct
unbecoming,” but was permitted to resign. He died ten years later,
having become firmly established in the public mind as a man of
vision martyred by reactionaries. Admiral Moffett followed up
the Morrow Board findings with a recommendation for legislation
establishing a five-year development program for naval aviation. The
Army followed suit. The Post Office inaugurated contract air mail. In
the favorable climate induced by the Morrow Board policy, American
aviation attained the world leadership which it held until after the
air-mail contracts were canceled in the middle 1930’s.
Having become interested in naval aviation as a career, I qualified
as a naval aviator and later became Chief of Staff to Rear Adm.
Joseph M. Reeves, Commander, Aircraft Squadrons, Battle Fleet.
There I helped commission the new aircraft carriers _Saratoga_ and
_Lexington_, equipping their air squadrons with the new aircraft we
had created in the Bureau of Aeronautics. During fleet maneuvers we
developed the new tactical concept of the carrier task force, and in
January, 1929, by delivering a successful attack on the Panama Canal
from a point 150 miles at sea, we demonstrated the revolutionary
strategy of a mobile-based, long-range, naval air striking force,
the first American strategic air force. Yet while we succeeded in
our demonstration, we failed to impress upon the high command the
revolutionary character of the idea. Twelve years later at Pearl
Harbor, the Japanese did a better job of selling. Paradoxically
enough, Admiral Reeves, as a member of the Roberts Board, went out to
Honolulu to investigate the wartime effectiveness of his peacetime
concept.
Meanwhile, in January, 1930, I resigned from the Navy to accept
a position as chief executive of a subsidiary of the United
Aircraft and Transport Corporation, the Hamilton-Standard Propeller
Corporation. Within a year I found myself responsible for two
additional subsidiaries, Sikorsky and Chance Vought, the one a
builder of large flying boats, the other a producer of shipboard
aircraft. In private industry, I enlarged my experience in the
so-called “aviation game.”
When in the middle 1930’s the air-mail contracts were suddenly
canceled, American aviation received a body blow. Repercussions
from the punitive Congressional investigations sponsored by
Senators Gerald P. Nye and Hugo Black—now Mr. Justice Black of
the United States Supreme Court—interfered with both military and
commercial development and halted progress. While American aviation
was being kicked around as a political football, Messrs. Hitler,
Mussolini, Hirohito, and Stalin seized the favorable opportunity, so
unexpectedly handed them, to inaugurate their bids for world dominion
under the Douhet doctrine of victory through air force.
The American aircraft manufacturing industry, its domestic market
impaired by the abandonment of the Morrow Board policy, was forced
to fall back on foreign sales. For a while we existed by selling
our superior commercial air transports abroad, and in our frantic
struggle to survive, each manufacturer risked everything to develop
improved types of possible interest to our government. Early in 1939,
when many companies were all but out on their feet, orders from
France and England arrived in the nick of time. It was thanks to
those orders that when the American aircraft-expansion program was
finally undertaken we were able to expand swiftly.
However, this shot in the arm was all but neutralized by the workings
of our own Arms Embargo Act. In order to deny France or England
access to American arms, Hitler had only to make them belligerents—in
other words declare war on them. After he had done so, we repealed
the act, and still later President Roosevelt called for 50,000
airplanes. The first news we aircraft manufacturers had of this
decision came by way of a radio fireside chat. This released a flood
of production, the magic of which surprised us as much as anyone
else—a flood on which American air power reversed the tide from sure
defeat to certain victory.
Upon our entry into the war, I found myself president of United
Aircraft Corporation. In the razzle-dazzle of the wartime Washington
merry-go-round, I watched the expansion of air transport until it
became a decisive factor in the war. Hurdling the Himalayan Hump and
leapfrogging submarine-infested sea lanes, it delivered important
persons and critical cargoes to decisive points inaccessible to other
forms of transportation. Believing that this performance presaged the
advent of expanding air commerce, we manufacturers began investing
our earnings in bigger and better transports.
One day Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal sent for me. At the time
when some critics were still harping their cry, “too little and too
late,” he gave me private instructions to cut back production. His
problem had become “too much and too soon.” The cutback brought us
face to face with the nightmare that had haunted our dreams since the
outbreak of war. Following the Armistice of 1918, our government had
so ruthlessly canceled war contracts that the aircraft industry had
been all but destroyed. When I pointed out this danger, the secretary
suggested the only possible solution: the aircraft industry must take
its story to the public. He advised that I undertake to lead the
industry in our campaign for survival.
This made it necessary for me to relinquish the presidency of my
company and accept the chairmanship of the board of governors of our
trade association. The first step was to decide on an industry policy
and obtain agreement on a program. Out of the history of aviation
I drew the analogy between sea power and air power and formulated
a program of peace through air power. We took for our objective
the appointment of a new Presidential advisory commission to hear
testimony in public and recommend a new air policy revised to conform
with technological developments. As the basis for our operations we
covenanted to cooperate with one another in the public interest in
matters pertaining to policy but to continue to compete vigorously in
our business operations.
In an effort to crystallize aeronautic opinion, I published a book
called _Air Power for Peace_. This study, an objective technical
treatise, patterned on Adm. A. T. Mahan’s _The Influence of Sea Power
upon History_, disclosed that, despite spectacular war performances
by Army and Navy air forces, the Mahan doctrine still prevailed:
victory had again rested with those who had secured to themselves—and
denied to their enemies—freedom of communication by sea. No overseas
assault could have been mounted nor could our own supply lines have
been secured without first subduing German submarines in the Atlantic
and sweeping Japanese sea power from the Pacific. Yet in both actions
an important new strategic factor had developed: command of the
air over the sea had become vital to command of the sea itself.
It was the carrier task forces that had proved to be the decisive
instruments in both oceans. Furthermore, brilliant, though limited,
success by military air transports had disclosed that air power was
an integration of air force, air transport, aircraft production, and
in fact all that went to make us strong in the air. Yet, until air
transport could assume the full burden of overseas trade, victory
in war and prosperity in peace must still rest with him who is
strong enough—and wise enough—to retain command of the sea. Russia’s
submarine fleet later gave added strength to this conclusion.
Meanwhile, as spokesman for the aircraft manufacturers, I addressed
organizations of all kinds, seeking to interest the molders of public
opinion in the air power problem. Our association and our members
participated in a nationwide program of public information. The key
to our effort was our endeavor to promote the public interest as the
means of serving our own enlightened self-interest.
Yet for all our effort, we were unable to get full cooperation from
the two other elements of integrated air power, air transport and
the armed forces. The Army Air Force, fighting for its autonomy,
tangled with naval aviation in a jurisdictional dispute. The airline
transport operators, jockeying for individual advantage under the
policy of so-called “reasonable regulation,” split wide open on such
questions as “the chosen instrument.” Government agencies, fearful of
the possible loss of their prerogatives, gave less than enthusiastic
support to our plea for a public policy-forming board. The
appointment of the commission therefore lagged, while both airline
transport and aircraft manufacturing suffered crippling losses.
Convinced that this situation called for a new book on aviation, a
sort of bible of air-power, or at least its gospel, I decided to
write _Slipstream_. In December, 1946, in order to gain freedom to
express my personal points of view without compromising my company, I
resigned from United Aircraft.
While it was Mahan, the historian, who first revealed to the world
the decisive influence of sea power upon history, it was Richard
Hakluyt, author of _The English Voyages_, who inspired Englishmen
to exploit sea power to their commercial advantage. By collecting
the journals of the world’s leading merchants and the adventure
narratives of its greatest navigators, and by editing them so as both
to entertain his readers and stimulate them to seek their fortunes
on the high seas, he influenced the course of history. There are no
such journals and narratives of contemporary aviation. Although the
whole record is comprised in the lifetimes of a single generation of
still-active men so that no protracted research is needed to reveal
the intimate background, much of it already tends to become dim, even
in the minds of men who wrote the record. Unless it be set down now
it may be forever lost, and that would be a pity, for the fantastic
story holds lessons that apply equally well to other technological
developments such as atomic energy. In undertaking to set forth the
intimate narrative of events which, in the last quarter century,
have helped shape the destiny of American aviation, I am impelled
to proceed partly because of deep convictions and partly because my
unusually varied experience gives me a somewhat broader point of view
from which to judge the impact of events.
While engaged on this task, I was disturbed to note that matters
were going from bad to worse. In the summer of 1948, however,
help came from an unexpected source. The Russians imposed their
blockade on Berlin. The American public, aroused now to the need for
preserving American air power, clamored for action. The Republican
Congress voted a Congressional Aviation Policy Board; President
Truman countered with his own Air Policy Commission. Before this
latter organization, known as the “Finletter Board,” the aircraft
manufacturers presented a well-prepared case. The airline transport
operators, having suffered disastrous losses, were demoralized almost
to the point where they were willing to accept a subsidy such as
that long paid to the merchant marine. The Air Force, having earlier
won its autonomy, made a vigorous plea for funds to provide a strong
strategic air force.
Under the circumstances, the Finletter Board, whose report was
published under the title, “Survival in the Air Age,” naturally gave
priority to the military aspects of aviation. The Congressional
Aviation Policy Board supported a long list of recommendations made
by the Finletter Board and recommended legislative action, little
of which has been forthcoming. But military appropriations, easily
the immediate answer to the air power problem, were passed largely
because the public had been convinced that this country must maintain
a technically superior aircraft-manufacturing establishment under
private management. Thanks to these appropriations, the aircraft
industry has survived the ordeal of reconversion.
Meanwhile, bureaucratic muddling had all but wrecked the airline
transport industry when, in the summer of 1949, Senator Edwin C.
Johnson of Colorado, chairman of the Senate Interstate and Foreign
Commerce Committee, commenced hearings to inquire into its ills. Out
of the welter of testimony before this committee—evidence replete
with inconsistencies and strongly flavored by self-interest—someone
familiar with the intimate history of aviation could crystallize
his convictions as to what must be done to make American air power
a force for peace. Believing that these convictions should be
expressed, even though they might prove distasteful to some of
the customers of the aircraft manufacturers, and desiring to avoid
embarrassment to my former associates, I resigned the chairmanship
of the board of governors of the Aircraft Industries Association and
severed my last connection with the industry. Now, I should at least
be able to view the whole subject of air power objectively.
Out of the twisting and turning of our slipstream, air policy
is revealed, not as so many believe, as a code book of detailed
administrative procedures, but as a course of public conduct. It is
no technical complexity of materials, money, management, or machines,
but rather a simple expression of the spirit of men, one that can be
stated in words of one syllable, “Air Power For Peace.”
Contents
PREFACE. vii
CHAPTER
ONE. It’s Anybody’s Fight 1
TWO. The Power Plant, the Heart of an Airplane 12
THREE. Its Vital Spark 19
FOUR. A Backward Art 28
FIVE. Toil and Trouble 38
SIX. What the Doctor Ordered 47
SEVEN. Calvin Coolidge’s Town Meeting 58
EIGHT. Dwight Morrow Advances the Throttle 71
NINE. The Gospel According to Aunt Lucy 82
TEN. The Take-off 93
ELEVEN. A Lone Eagle Sets the Standard 102
TWELVE. A Change in Status 109
THIRTEEN. A Salt’s Solution 115
FOURTEEN. Germ of a Big Idea 121
FIFTEEN. Creation of Strategic Concept 129
SIXTEEN. Maneuver for Position 135
SEVENTEEN. Frigate Birds 144
EIGHTEEN. Another Turning 149
NINETEEN. Necessity, the Mother of Creation 160
TWENTY. Igor Sikorsky Spans Two Gaps 172
TWENTY-ONE. The Courage of Conviction 185
TWENTY-TWO. Review of Some Fundamentals 196
TWENTY-THREE. A Yankee Peddler 204
TWENTY-FOUR. A Chill Sets In 213
TWENTY-FIVE. An Unfavorable Climate 224
TWENTY-SIX. A Spark Is Struck 229
TWENTY-SEVEN. For What Is a Man Profited? 237
TWENTY-EIGHT. Off the Beam 247
TWENTY-NINE. For Survival 260
THIRTY. Toward Public Inquiry 271
THIRTY-ONE. Before the Bar of Public Opinion 290
THIRTY-TWO. The Hand on the Stick 296
INDEX. 311
SLIPSTREAM
CHAPTER ONE
It’s Anybody’s Fight
It was a day in March of 1924 when I first stepped across the
threshold of the anteroom to the office of Rear Adm. William
Adger Moffett, Chief of the new Bureau of Aeronautics in the Navy
Department at Washington. The anteroom lay at the center of the
extreme after end of the top deck of the third wing of the temporary
frame structure which then housed, and in fact still houses, the Navy
Department. Through the windows I could see the greening lawns of
the Mall and the budding cherry blossoms along the rim of the Tidal
Basin. Directly below, the Reflecting Pool, a square-cut sapphire,
mirrored the tip of the Washington Monument and the cottony clouds of
a blustery day. I handed my orders to the admiral’s secretary and, as
she disappeared through a door to the left, I glanced around.
To the right of the secretary’s desk, a latticed, swinging half door
of the type once common to saloons of the preprohibition era bore a
gilt-lettered sign reading “Assistant Chief of Bureau.” To the left,
on a similar door, the letters spelled “Chief of Bureau.” As it swung
open, the secretary waved me toward a stiff-backed chair and said,
“The admiral will see you in a few minutes, sir.”
Lifting my sword off its hook, I stripped the white lisle gloves from
my hands, dusted a bit of lint off my two and a half gilt stripes,
and sat down in the chair. Most young officers bearing such orders as
mine would have thrilled at the thought of duty in Washington, but I
was vaguely uneasy. That sword, standing on the tip of its scabbard
between my knees, seemed, in a way, to point up my doubts. Forged
into its blade was a quotation from one of Teddy Roosevelt’s slogans,
“The only shots that count are the shots that hit.” Judged by that
standard, I had not scored too well since graduation from Annapolis
in 1908. Having set out on a career in gunnery, I had let myself be
diverted from it.
I had been appointed to the Naval Academy from the state of
Washington and had been admitted at the age of sixteen. Having
grown up in the Pacific Northwest, where I enjoyed the great
outdoors, hunting and fishing with my father, I had drifted onto
the Naval Academy rifle team, where I found fun in competition
that made a sport out of a branch of my profession. Rifle shooting
had intensified my interest in gunnery and had helped me to win my
sword. The opposite side of its blade carried the words, “Class of
1871 prize for excellence in practical and theoretical ordnance
and gunnery.” It was out of this background that I had determined
to specialize in gunnery, but circumstances had deflected me into
engineering.
After the close of the national rifle matches at Camp Perry in 1909,
during which the Navy rifle team had won the military championship,
I had been assigned to duty on a four-piper, a coal-burning
torpedo-boat destroyer, the _Hull_, then attached to the Pacific
Torpedo Flotilla based on San Diego, California. Just before I had
reported to the ship, there had been an accident to one of the
boilers; and since, up to that time, it had not been customary to
assign officers to the engine room of destroyers, the subsequent
court of inquiry had not been able to hang an officer for the
explosion. Until the case could be reported as completed, the Navy
Department could find no way to close its file, thus leaving an
annoying piece of unfinished business. To guard against future lapses
of this kind, someone had to be made Chief Engineer, and since I, a
passed midshipman, was the junior officer aboard the _Hull_, I was
handed the accolade.
Early in 1911, my Annapolis June Week Girl, Genevieve Speer,
and I had been married at her home in Joliet, Illinois. We had
later commuted between the Hotel del Coronado and less commodious
accommodations in the Navy Yard town of Vallejo, California, until
the summer of 1913, when we had been ordered back to our beloved
Annapolis for duty, in compliance with my request for instruction in
the new postgraduate engineering school, which had just been opened.
The course included a year at Annapolis and another in New York at
Columbia University, and was directed by Dr. Charles Edward Lucke,
Dean of Mechanical Engineering and a pioneer in his profession.
Dr. Lucke, who had just published his monumental work _Engineering
Thermodynamics_, found his Navy charges none too susceptible to
his teaching techniques. Finally one day he discovered the reason;
we were, to use his expression, “an aggregation of photographic
memorizers.” And so far as I was concerned he was probably right—to
win my sword I had memorized all the textbooks on ordnance and
gunnery. The doctor had now to start from scratch to teach us “to
reason from a set of facts to a logical solution.”
This was an era in which college professors made a mystery of
science; it gave them a feeling of superiority over the practical
man. The latter similarly looked down their noses at the theorists.
The term “engineer” was used to designate the driver of a railway
locomotive or, in New York City, the superintendent of an apartment
house. Dr. Lucke was of the opinion that, if the time ever came
when the practical man and the theorist combined their talents as
professional engineers, they would set the world on fire.
“As engineers,” he stated for the opening gun of his new approach,
“we deal with the application of combustion to industrial purposes.”
And having thus stated the role of the engineer he went on to develop
the fundamental requirements for combustion:
“The fuel and oxygen,” he advised, “must be present in the
proportions necessary to chemical combination; they must be
intimately mixed; they must be brought to the ignition temperature
and retained there until combustion is complete.”
And having expounded this truth he went on into one of his excursions
into philosophy:
“That,” he said, “might be taken as a prescription for life. And
remember,” he warned, “that whereas material things respond always
in the same way to the same stimuli, that is not true of the human
spirit. As engineers you will deal quite as frequently with the
spiritual as with the material and must understand both.”
The doctor, who exercised a strong influence on some of us, inspired
us to do creative work. My first opportunity came shortly after
graduation from Columbia in 1915, with my assignment as Chief
Engineer of the battleship _Arkansas_. The “_Old Ark_” had been
commissioned three years earlier with Comdr. William Adger Moffett
as her Executive Officer, and still retained the marks of his
leadership. In fleet athletics and in the gunnery competitions she
had won honors. In engineering, however, she had, like other ships
with the new turbines then replacing reciprocating engines, earned
a reputation as a “coal hog.” To overcome this, I had worked out
a scheme for using the waste heat of auxiliary exhaust steam for
distilling sea water, thus saving about one-third of the daily port
consumption. For this development I had narrowly escaped being
disciplined because I had not previously obtained permission from the
Bureau of Engineering.
After our entry into World War I, the _Arkansas_ was assigned to the
Sixth Battle Squadron of the British Grand Fleet and had been present
at the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet. It was there, on the
afternoon of November 21, 1918, that the shadow of the airplane had
first fallen across my path.
The Sixth Battle Squadron had returned to its anchorage east of the
great Forth Bridge. Adm. Sir David Beatty, Commander in Chief of the
Grand Fleet, on his flagship _Queen Elizabeth_, had swept through
the American Squadron. And as the “_Q.E._” passed us, so close
aboard that one could have heaved a spud onto her decks, Beatty had
stood on his bridge, gold-visored cap cocked over his right eye,
bulldog chin jutting out over the bridge screen, hand raised to his
visor in acknowledgment of our cheers. As these died away, _Q.E._’s
searchlights had begun flashing a bridge signal that burned itself on
my memory:
FROM: COMMANDER IN CHIEF GRAND FLEET
TO: BRITISH EMPIRE
BRITAIN HAS THIS DAY WITNESSED A DEMONSTRATION OF SEA POWER WHICH
SHE WILL FORGET AT HER PERIL
Then as the flagship had slid by, her turrets topped by fighter
aircraft poised for take-off, she had uncovered to our view the loom
of a hulk lying down toward May Island. It was the aircraft carrier
_Argus_, latest addition to the world’s one and only carrier force.
And I had thought that, even as British sea power had triumphed, the
shadow of air power was darkening the fleet.
I had learned details of the _Argus_ from an enthusiastic naval
aviator, Godfrey de Courcelles de Chevalier, class of 1909, one of
our big boat pilots from the Northern Bombing Base, who, detailed
to observe carrier operations, had been billeted on the _Ark_.
The British Admiralty, fearful lest the Hun decoy Beatty into the
Skagerrak and hit him below the armor belt with torpedoes carried by
shore-based aircraft, had mounted fighters on every available ship,
and had augmented this defense with aircraft carriers. Most of these
had been converted from old battle cruisers and, like other vessels,
could only launch aircraft. Their fighting planes were expected to
return to prepared air fields on shore, such as the Grand Fleet base
at Turnhouse, whence they would be lightered off to their vessels.
But the _Argus_, originally built for the Italian Line as the _Conte
de Savoia_, had been the first flattop capable of receiving aircraft
aboard as well as launching them. And she had carried torpedoplanes
with which to hit the Hun below his own belt. This force had been
Beatty’s “secret weapon,” and, some thought, had helped persuade the
Hun to surrender without firing a shot.
After the German surrender, the _Ark_ had been ordered home, and
I had been assigned to the Naval Training Station, Great Lakes,
Illinois, as Officer in Charge, Aviation Mechanics Schools. Here
again I was to encounter Dr. Lucke and Capt. William Adger Moffett.
During the war, Captain Moffett had commanded the training station
and used it to show the Navy’s colors to the Middle West. One of
those rare personalities, a naval officer with a flair for public
relations, he had made many friends on the North Shore, but after the
Armistice, was sent to the Pacific in command of the _Mississippi_,
one of the few battleships with an airplane catapult aboard. Dr.
Lucke had offered his services to the Navy upon the outbreak of
the war and had established a chain of aviation mechanics schools,
operated on the new principle of line production in education. One of
these had been located at Great Lakes and, at the end of the war,
Captain Moffett had succeeded in consolidating them all there.
When, after the Armistice, Dr. Lucke had sought a regular officer
as his relief, he had recommended me to the Navy Department. I had
accepted the appointment with enthusiasm because the station was near
my wife’s former home in Joliet. After we had been there on duty a
year or so, Captain Moffett had returned for a visit with his friends
and had surprised me one morning by calling on me in my office.
He had completed his tour of duty at sea and was headed for
Washington on a new project. As Captain of the _Mississippi_, he
had been hampered in his catapult work by the lack of direction
in Washington. Aviation activities were scattered all over the
Department: engines in the Bureau of Engineering; airplanes in the
Bureau of Construction and Repair; guns in the Bureau of Ordnance;
and Operations in a branch of the Office of Naval Operations. Moffett
had decided to go before Congress with a proposal to create a new
Bureau of Aeronautics in the Navy Department and expected to be made
its first Chief.
And that morning at Great Lakes he had asked me point-blank if I
would accept duty in his new bureau in charge of the Engine Section.
I had first shied away from the idea, but he brushed my objection
aside. He would have me ordered to sea duty in aviation, he said,
and then bring me ashore to his bureau. Accordingly, in 1921 I was
ordered to New York to put the seaplane tender and kite-balloon
ship _Wright_ into commission, with duty as Chief Engineer, a job
which had turned out to be that of wet nurse for a lot of dizzy,
heavier-than-air and lighter-than-air pilots. As a “Kiwi,” the
current name for a nonflying officer, I had found my young charges
willing to concede me all the responsibilities of the organization,
provided no one interfered with their authorities.
Our first “cruise,” nominally to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, strewed
aircraft all along the Atlantic Coast after forced landings, with
dense concentrations at Palm Beach. All failures in this outfit were
classified as “mechanical”; the term “cockpit failure” had not yet
been created. On analysis, I had discovered that practically all
forced landings and delayed starts were chargeable to a few pilots.
But when I posted the figures on the wardroom bulletin board, this
act had been considered hardly cricket. Fed up with the vagaries of
this school of aviation thought, I had looked around for a change of
duty, and found it during the summer of 1922.
That year, the National Rifle Association of America had decided to
enter a team in the international free rifle matches at Milan, Italy,
and extended me an invitation to compete for the squad. Here was
an opportunity to escape the razzle-dazzle of naval aviation into
something I knew about. Better still, it afforded an opportunity for
my wife and me to make a joint European tour. At Milan, our team won
the championship of the world. By that time, my wife had obtained
tickets to the last performance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau,
an event destined to shape my outlook.
We had been billeted in the home of Antone Lang, the Christus of the
play, and had been stirred by the devout spirit shining in the faces
of the villagers. The play, too, had moved us deeply as a revelation
of the fundamental tenets of our Christian faith. Though spoken
wholly in German it had remained for us a vital religious experience.
During the evening following the performance we had talked with
Antone Lang in his parlor and obtained his autograph on a photograph
of himself in his role. And when we had come to settle with Frau Lang
for our lodgings, we had been astonished to find them so absurdly
cheap. Upon our offer to contribute to a local charity—this at a time
when inflation had put the exchange rate up to several thousand marks
to the dollar—Frau Lang had set a limit of twenty-five marks. At my
exclamation of surprise she had hurried to explain, “We need honest
work, not charity. Today there is nothing that money can buy!” I had
left with a deep impression of the disaster of inflation and the
folly of war.
Upon our return from Europe, I had avoided the Bureau of Aeronautics
and obtained an assignment as Executive Officer of the destroyer
tender _Bridgeport_, a converted former German merchantman. Under
command of Capt. R. Drace White, I had enjoyed a year and a half of
pleasant duty, trying to make a yacht out of a floating machine shop,
and had just begun to feel at ease, when Adm. William Adger Moffett
reached down into the Caribbean to pluck me off my happy home and
install me in his bureau.
Thus it had been that, thanks to Dr. Lucke and the admiral, I was
diverted from gunnery into engineering and then into aviation. Now as
a buzzer sounded, and the admiral’s secretary smiled her signal to
enter the sanctum, I hooked on my sword and pushed open the door, not
with the enthusiasm of an aviator but with the reservations of the
professional seaman.
Inside his sunny corner office, Admiral Moffett leaned against the
old-fashioned high desk at which he stood when signing out papers.
That desk, I thought, was a relic of the days of high stools and
celluloid eyeshades, and must have been dragged out from some old
storeroom by the admiral for the sake of sentiment. He was like that,
a curious mixture of sentimental attachment to the days of sail
and nervous enthusiasm for the airplane. Over his shoulder draped
the silk cord of a pince-nez, poised on the bridge of his nose.
His double-breasted blue-serge civilian suit, cut to look like the
new uniforms, bespoke revolt against the executive order which had
instructed officers on duty in Washington to stow their regimentals
away with moth balls in sea chests.
This order was a manifestation of the “return to normalcy,” under
which slogan, Senator Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge were to
be sledded into the White House and the Vice-Presidency later the
same year. For the American people, disillusioned after their recent
crusade to make the world safe for democracy, had now turned their
backs on Europe to devote themselves to something they knew more
about—how to make money fast. During the existing reaction against
all things military, the Administration deemed it wise to keep
uniforms out of sight as far as possible. They were only permitted to
be worn by officers reporting for duty, as I was at that moment.
The admiral turned to shake hands with me and hand me my signed
orders. His was the aristocratic bearing of the Southern cavalier.
“Glad to see you aboard,” he greeted me warmly. “You are to relieve
Lt. Comdr. B. G. Leighton as Chief of the Engine Section—an important
department. I’m sure you’ll do well at it.” His was the accent of
Charleston, South Carolina, but without the drawl. He clipped his
words like a nervous Yankee.
“Aye, aye, sir,” I replied, acknowledging the order in the
conventional manner, “but what I don’t know about aircraft engines,”
I added, “would overflow the library of Congress.”
“Well,” grinned the admiral, “you have one advantage—you know you
don’t know anything, which is more than I can say for some people in
this Department.” He reached for his pipe and struck a match. (I was
to learn that he smoked more matches than tobacco.) As the pipe went
out he glanced at me.
“Leighton tells me you are not too happy about coming here for duty.”
“It breaks my sea cruise,” I explained, “and I don’t like to give the
Selection Board an excuse to pass me over.”
“The last Board picked you up,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“And a year ahead of time,” he went on.
“Yes, sir.”
“I am not supposed to discuss the proceedings of the Board,” he
continued, “but I was a member of it and, confidentially, I served
notice on them that I would not approve a list that failed to reach
down through you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I needed you here, and you can depend on me to look out for you in
the future.” He fumbled with his pipe.
“There’s a lot going on around Washington,” he volunteered. “That
fellow Billy Mitchell over in the Army Air Service makes a lot of
trouble for me. But back in ’twenty-two at the Limitation of Arms
Conference I set him back on his heels. He tried to take over the
chairmanship of the session on aviation, and the first subject on
the agenda was reparations. This country was scheduled to get one of
the latest German Zeppelins, converted to a merchantman, and I didn’t
intend to let the Army beat me to that punch.” He paused to glance at
a silvery model of a rigid airship, standing on top of his cluttered
desk.
“And so,” he went on, “when Mitchell breezed in with a secretary, all
ready to take the chair, I inquired by what authority he pretended
to assume the chairmanship. He mumbled something about rank. ‘Since
when,’ I demanded, ‘does a one-star brigadier rate a two-star
admiral?’ That stopped him, and the Navy got the _Los Angeles_.”
He moved close to me, tapping me on the forearm with his pipestem.
“It isn’t just the old Army-Navy dogfight, though of course there
is a lot of that in it. But these overzealous knights of the air
actually believe that the airplane has already obsoleted the Navy.
It isn’t their own idea but the nonsense preached by that Italian
General Douhet in a book called _Command of the Air_. And on his
say-so, these wild-eyed enthusiasts want to scrap the Army and Navy,
on no other grounds than their personal opinions, unsupported by
experience or fact.” He paused.
“And the old fogies over in Operations are no help to me, either,” he
added. “They lay themselves wide open to Mitchell. If they had let me
handle the publicity on the bombing off the Virginia Capes, I could
have made a monkey out of him.” He began pacing the room.