rattled on, “it _will_ be obsolete, just as Mitchell claims. Without
an air force, the fleet would be a sitting duck. Mitchell knows
that, and his game is to concentrate all aviation in a separate and
independent air force under his command. With that setup he can
emasculate naval aviation just like the British Air Ministry is doing
in England. Meanwhile I am taking advantage of that to catch up with
our own carriers. Give me a little time and we’ll leave them in the
ruck.” A flush had crept up around his ears.
“So that’s why I had to create this Bureau—and why I had you ordered
here. We’ve got a fight on our hands to keep Mitchell from sinking
the Navy, and the country along with it.” He paused to cock his eye
at me.
“Of course,” he said, “if you don’t like a nice knockdown, drag-out
fight, I can send you back to General Service.”
My thoughts flashed back to my last night aboard the old
_Bridgeport_, a Caribbean night beneath the stars when the crew had
given me a farewell “happy hour.” Floodlights had glowed on the
boxing ring, rigged on Number Three hatch. Brown-faced, white-shirted
sailormen had looked up at the two gloved lads in boxing trunks
whom the referee had called to the center of the ring for final
instructions. And then as he had sent them back to their comers with
a slap on each back he called after them, “Remember, now: break clean
and come up fightin’. It’s anybody’s fight.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Power Plant, the Heart of an Airplane
Down on the second deck of the third wing, I looked through the
doorway into a long room that housed my new billet, the Engine
Section. Three flat-topped desks stood deployed as a line of
skirmishers; two typewriter desks closed the blank files. At these
desks secretaries had begun to tap out their daily stints of paper
work. Around three of the peeled walls, battered tables sagged under
a load of assorted aircraft-engine parts—dusty, oily, and, for
the most part, heat-blackened examples of unfortunate mechanical
failures, some of which, no doubt, had led to loss of life.
Across the near side of the room, on either side of two doors, stood
three engines on wooden horses. The bigger one was a Liberty, the
smaller a Hispano-Suiza, and the third a new star-shaped contraption
on which hung a label, “Lawrance J-1, single-row, air-cooled radial.”
The first two I recognized as war surplus, but the third I suspected
to be the pride and joy, the hope and fear, of the Engine Section of
BUAERO. Here was the Navy’s first promising postwar development, a
project destined to exercise a controlling influence on the future of
aviation.
Around the room, marred woodwork and grease-spotted floors joined
with a musty smell to give the room the down-at-the-heel appearance
of all those temporary wartime structures, themselves so expressive
of the popular hope that war itself is but temporary. Drab enough at
best, the old tenements had deteriorated swiftly with the slashing
of appropriations for defense. Now as I stood in the doorway,
someone slapped me on the back and I turned to find Lt. Comdr. B. G.
Leighton, retiring Chief of the Section, greeting me like a long-lost
brother.
“Am I glad to see you,” he whooped, saluting me with an exaggerated
flourish. Under his enthusiasm the drabness faded out like a
morning fog under a warm sun. Waving an airy hand at each of his
secretaries, Leighton introduced me to them with, “Ladies, meet your
new boss.”
Tossing an armful of homework on the right-hand desk, and waving
me to a battered chair, he slid into a swivel-seated one behind
it. There he sat grinning like an ape, peering at me around three
mountains of paper work heaped up in trays marked, “Incoming,”
“Outgoing,” and “Hold.” Though still in his early thirties, Leighton
had gray splashes around his temples with laugh wrinkles twinkling
at the corners of his eyes—those early-bird aviators tended toward
premature grayness. Now, clasping his hands behind his head and
hoisting long legs so as to rest his feet on the battered old desk,
he grinned his pleasure.
“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” he quoted, “but now that I’ve
finally got you here, I hardly know where to begin.”
“Begin at the beginning,” I countered. “It’s all Greek to me.”
“Well, in the beginning of power-driven flight,” he commenced,
“before the Wrights could take the hurdle from the glider to the
airplane, they had first to find an engine whose weight was light
enough, in proportion to its power, to get the contraption into the
air. And since nothing suitable existed, they had to design and build
their own. Thus from the beginning,” he went on, “the power plant
has been the heart of the airplane. Subsequent progress has been
almost entirely a matter of getting more horsepower for less weight.
When you want to lift yourself up by the bootstraps,” he added with
a grin, “you start reducing, and begin exercising your muscles.
The history of aviation can be measured by that ratio, pounds per
horsepower.”
At the turn of the century, Leighton pointed out, gasoline engines
were just coming into use. The Wrights, in designing their little
20-hp 4-cylinder model, had naturally followed the current automotive
practice. They had arranged the cylinders in line and had cooled the
engine with circulating water.
“It is only now,” Leighton explained, waving a hand in the direction
of the Lawrance air-cooled radial near the door, “that we are
spreading our cylinders like the petals of a daisy and cooling them
directly by air. And this section,” he added with obvious pride, “is
the foster parent of an innovation but recently classified by the
engineering intelligentsia as ‘impossible.’ As for that obsolete
term,” he went on, “we have a saying in the Section that goes like
this: ‘The impossible we do today; the fantastic may take a little
longer.’” He grinned as he watched me for the effect of another one
of his phrases.
Leighton went on to point out, however, that back in 1914, the year
the war broke out in Europe, this country had practically no military
aircraft engines. The Wrights had not thought of the airplane as a
weapon carrier. Over in Europe, however, where men had long been
accustomed to look at things through military binoculars, the
Germans, the French, the Italians, and the British had concentrated
on military power plants. In the commercial field, the United States
had a fair-to-middling engine in the Curtiss OXX, rated at less than
90 horsepower. This one later went into wide war use in the Curtiss
Jenny training planes. But when, in April, 1917, the war had engulfed
the United States, it caught us with our britches down around our
ankles. We had no high-powered military engines of any kind, nor had
we any designs for them. And even had we had the designs, there were
no production facilities in this country nor the know-how for using
them.
Quite undismayed by this, we had indulged in our usual penchant
for adopting slogans as substitutes for elementary strategy. Our
politicians boldly declared their intent to “darken the skies over
Germany with clouds of aircraft.” The headline figure had been 25,000
planes. But if anyone had any idea what we expected to do with them,
other than darkening the skies, such information had been kept
secret. There was a suspicion in some quarters that our bold brag had
been designed to screen the simple citizens from the unhappy fact
that we had no power plants with which to fly those clouds into the
air.
That had been a period of childlike faith in the magic of mass
production. Then the government, in a frantic effort to buy time,
had called in the automotive industry. A handful of citizens, whose
heads contained all that was known in this country about high-powered
engines of any kind, had been locked in a smoke-filled room of the
Willard Hotel in Washington, and there held incommunicado, until they
gave birth to the Liberty engine.
The Liberty, conceived in a crisis, and literally bulldozed into
production, had proved surprisingly effective in postwar flying,
especially after the usual bugs had been engineered out of it.
Actually, few if any engines had been used in front-line combat. Yet,
keeping in mind the fact that we had only remained in the war twenty
months, and that it usually takes at least two years to construct
and test an experimental model, the production of several thousand
engines had been little less than magic.
The Liberty had been rated at 400 horsepower on a dry weight of some
835 pounds, or at the rate of a little over 2 pounds per horsepower,
a striking advance over contemporary practice. And although under
the interallied agreement, we had been denied the right to build
front-line planes of our own design, we had installed the Liberty in
the British de Havilland observation plane and made quite a job out
of it. Dubbed “flying coffins” until after correction of the bugs,
these had passed through the initial stage of unpopularity, to become
“the good old DH,” and pretty much the standard for “cross-country”
airplanes.
But during the war, failure by the automotive industry to meet the
fantastic goals set by politicians had aroused a storm of criticism
in the United States. Hardly had the ink dried on the Armistice
before the government, convinced that “munitions racketeers” had
profited out of the war, had turned its wrath upon “malefactors of
great wealth” by ruthlessly canceling war contracts, with little
regard for its contractural obligations. Having now made the world
safe for democracy, it felt at liberty to destroy its expensive
and unnecessary war industry, venting its spite meanwhile on the
industrialists.
Manufacturers, who before final accounting had anticipated profits,
now found themselves facing losses instead. Some, the less
well-financed, had gone into bankruptcy; others had reorganized and
kept in business. Overall, it was estimated that representative
suppliers of war goods had taken a write-down of nearly a billion
dollars, or about one-half their “apparent” net worth. The automotive
industry, licking its wounds, had gone back to do private business
with its individual customers, resolved to leave future government
business to the naïve.
Judged in retrospect, the venture had proved a fiasco. It would have
been bad enough had industry earned its reputation for profiteering,
but to have gained the reputation after losing its shirt must be
counted a public-relations failure of the first magnitude.
Meanwhile, the giant aircraft industry had just withered on the
vine. A handful of the hardier “old-line” aircraft manufacturers,
pioneers still obsessed by undiminished zeal for aviation, still held
on. Among such engine builders had been the Curtiss Airplane and
Motor Company, of Buffalo, New York, and the Wright Martin Aircraft
Corporation, of New Brunswick, New Jersey, now reorganized as the
Wright Aeronautical Corporation, of Paterson, New Jersey. Of the
automotive industry, Packard alone kept a finger in the pie.
During the war, Wright Martin had followed the other alternative to
engine construction; they had bought a license to manufacture the
famed French Hispano-Suiza engine. And although this procedure had
been advanced as promising quicker returns, wartime experience had
developed the complexities of putting foreign models into production.
Designed around the European idea of handwork by skilled craftsmen,
they had to be redesigned to conform to the American technique of
machine-tool production. And so experience had demonstrated the
necessity for having domestic types in production and ready for
expansion.
After the Armistice, the new Wright Aeronautical Corporation
continued to develop the Hispano type, under the aegis of the Navy
Department. Using the method of “run’em, bust’em, fix’em, and run’em
again,” financed by the Engine Section, Wright had developed its
temperamental wartime Hispano into a rugged, 200-hp Model E-4. Wright
had also developed a 300-and later a 500-hp-model Hispano, but since
Congress had appropriated limited funds, and on a hand-to-mouth basis
rather than for a long-term program, they had found the going rough.
As long as the surplus of wartime Liberties and Hispanos hung over
the market, manufacture bogged down.
And to add a further complication, Leighton had shown a lively
interest in the new air-cooled engine developed by Charles Lanier
Lawrance. Charlie, while a student in Paris, had discovered the new
3-cylinder 60-hp Clerget, a fixed radial engine designed to overcome
the deficiencies of the old Gnome-Rhone types with their rotating
cylinders and gyroscopic effects. The Navy had at that time a demand
for 180- to 200-hp engines, and suggested that Lawrance consolidate
three of the 3-cylinder engines into a single 9-cylinder type.
Lawrance, with no production facilities of his own, had enlisted
those of the de la Verne Machine Company, in New Jersey, and had
begun his own development under the “run’em and bust’em” technique.
In this he had looked for guidance to Capt. A. K. Atkins and Lt.
Comdr. S. M. Kraus, of the Bureau of Engineering. When, later,
Admiral Moffett created BUAERO, he placed Kraus in charge of
Procurement and assigned Leighton as Chief of the Engine Section.
Meanwhile, Chance Vought, a clever airplane manufacturer
in Long Island City, had built a smart little, two-seater,
catapult-observation plane around the new engine, a craft that
carried as much load as the Army DH using the Liberty engine, yet
took up half as much space. And space was a critical factor within
the narrow confines of a battleship or a cruiser’s decks.
With this increased demand, the Bureau was confronted with the need
for bringing in an experienced aircraft manufacturer to fabricate
the Lawrance engines, and had selected Wright. But since the new
Lawrance was a direct competitor with Wright’s own Hispano E-4,
Leighton had been obliged to bring pressure to bear and had finally
forced consolidation of what he deemed the best design with what he
considered the ablest manufacturer. Wright’s purchase of Lawrance
had but recently taken place and I was to have the job of making the
marriage productive. This, according to Leighton, was the big project
of the Engine Section, if not, indeed, of BUAERO.
Meanwhile, he discussed other assorted possibilities, like the
Aeromarine Airplane and Motor Corporation, of Keyport, New Jersey,
and the Kinney Manufacturing Company, in Boston. Of the automotive
people, only Packard retained an interest in aero engines. Leighton
admitted that mine was a slender reed on which to lean. “The heart of
the airplane,” he summed up, “has damaged muscles and leaky valves.”
I concluded that it would have ceased beating entirely save for the
grim courage of B. G. Leighton and his Engine Section.
“The air-cooled engine,” Leighton asserted, “is the Navy’s white
hope. There is less sense in liquid-cooling an aircraft engine than
in air-cooling a submarine. The weight of the Liberty radiator, water
pump, plumbing, and water runs about three-quarters of a pound per
horsepower, or say 300 pounds. Now there’s an old design adage that
says ‘it takes a pound to carry a pound.’ In other words, each of
those plumbing pounds takes another pound of wings and tail to lug it
around. But with the air-cooled engine we can throw away the plumbing
and convert that dead weight into pay load, with a smaller airplane.
On board ship, you’ve got to keep ’em small or leave ’em off.”
By the end of my first day in the Engine Section, I was a bit
groggy. Leighton had tossed engineering terms around with complete
abandon, terms that I must pause to translate, even as he moved on
into new flights of technical verbiage. Yet from that first day’s
talk I gleaned the fact that the power plant is the heart of an
airplane, that aeronautical progress is paced by an engine’s “pounds
per horsepower,” and that the air-cooled engine, as yet quite
undeveloped, offered the greatest promise of usefulness to the Navy.
Meanwhile, with the Engine Section as the focus of that development,
no dull moments loomed on the horizon.
CHAPTER THREE
Its Vital Spark
Next morning we resumed my indoctrination, as we did on subsequent
mornings. Leighton began by expounding the advantages of air-cooled
over liquid-cooled engines, especially from the viewpoint of naval
aviation. The Army could, of course, spread out all over the
prairies, but the Navy must ride on the “backs of the fleet.”
“If,” I interposed, “it is as clear-cut as that, what has been
retarding the development?” Leighton heaved a sigh.
“Inertia and politics,” he replied. “If you have gained an impression
that engine development is all engineering, you are in for a shock.
All the engineers in the industry insist that, theoretically,
it is impossible to build an air-cooled engine to compete with
liquid-cooled, and their politicians keep busy making the prediction
come true.”
“Politicians?” I inquired.
“Some of them,” Leighton replied, “are right here in the Bureau, but
they are influenced by the liquid-cooled engine builders, and it is
easy to understand the position of these fellows. They’ve already got
a big stake in liquid-cooling: production facilities, engineering,
and know-how—especially know-how. Naturally they aren’t scrambling to
obsolete their own designs.” Leighton paused.
“Before you finish your shore cruise,” he added, “you’ll get a
bellyful of engineering politics.”
It developed that when Admiral Moffett had first created the Bureau,
he expected to bring under his wing all aviation functions such
as personnel, matériel, and operations, but vested interests had
thwarted him. The Bureau of Navigation (“BUNAV,” it was called)
charged with responsibility for personnel had hung on for grim death
to its prerogatives with respect to naval aviators. While conceding
to BUAERO the privilege of recommending assignments, it reserved to
itself the authority to turn BUAERO down whenever Admiral Moffett
seemed to be getting a little too big for his britches. Again,
Naval Operations (OPNAV) had held strict control of all aviation
operations. As a concession, they had detailed naval aviators to
liaison jobs in BUNAV, OPNAV, and on flag duty in the fleet—where
they had carefully preserved the functions of these young specialists
in the formaldehyde of an “advisory” capacity.
But Admiral Moffett had proved a match for most of them. The only
high-ranking officer in the Navy Department with a flair for public
relations, and the one man trained from boyhood in a school of
practical politics, Admiral Moffett had shown a knack for getting
aviation appropriations from Congress. Not too long on logic, the
admiral had demonstrated a native intelligence and a knack with
phrases that had netted him dividends. “Of course the country
needs an air force,” he had said before a naval affairs committee,
“but let’s make it a naval air force, one that isn’t anchored to a
land base but can go to sea—on the backs of the fleet.” And that
expression “on the backs of the fleet” had become a byword in BUAERO.
From Leighton’s thumbnail sketch of BUAERO I noted that there was
little system or organization to it. Leighton conceded as much.
“We have no organization chart, let alone a bureau manual. Somebody
is supposed to be working on one but somehow it never gets beyond
the admiral’s desk. His organization is personal rather than
functional—based on loyalties. Every man or woman in this Bureau,” he
asserted with emphasis, “would go to hell and back for good old Billy
Moffett. And loyalty works both ways; the admiral’s most striking
quality is his loyalty to his subordinates. Sometimes I’m not so
sure about it to his seniors; he loves to needle the old whales on
topside.” Leighton smiled as if in recollection of specific instances.
“No,” he went on, “there is never a dull moment in BUAERO. It reminds
me of that old adage handed down from the days of iron men and wooden
ships, ‘When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, yell, and
shout.’ And that, my dear successor,” he concluded, “is BUAERO in a
nutshell—or should I say bombshell?”
The Bureau had set up as its number-one project, the job of “selling
aviation to the fleet,” and a fleet full of sales resistance at that.
The Bureau had designed catapults—big compressed-air guns, for
launching airplanes from the decks of battle wagons at sea. It had
designed or procured new seaplanes to be launched by these catapults.
It had trained aviators to man these planes, and incidentally, to try
to sell them to the ships.
In this they had met hard sledding because those unwieldy catapults
had cluttered up the decks, destroyed the symmetry of the ships’
silhouettes, and shed grease all over the precious teak decks.
However, the aviators had penetrated the cold front by learning how
to spot the fall of shot in long-range battle practice, and how to
signal the ship the correction that would put a salvo on a target.
Ships with planes had thus gained an advantage in the gunnery
competition over those that had none, and besides, their pilots had
been trained for deck duty and could share watches at sea or in port.
Meanwhile, BUAERO had pushed on with its plans to match the British
in carrier aircraft. Under the leadership of Kenneth Whiting, who as
Commander of the Northern Bombing Group at Killingholm, Scotland,
during the war had sent Godfrey de Chevalier down to the Grand
Fleet to observe carrier operations, the old electric-drive collier
_Jupiter_ had been converted to the experimental carrier _Langley_,
and pilots had been trained in deck landings, to gain experience
from which to design new carrier aircraft. Here, too, the air-cooled
engine offered important advantages, provided it could be made
dependable. That job was to become the first order of business for
the new chief of the Engine Section.
As a further extension of this carrier development, Admiral Moffett
had put over a master stroke at the Washington Limitation of Arms
Conference. At a time when the United States was making the fatal
gesture of scrapping all its latest vessels, to bring “peace through
disarmament,” the admiral had salvaged from the scrap heap the giant
battle cruisers _Saratoga_ and _Lexington_, and was now supervising
their conversion into the largest aircraft carriers in the world.
In this he had been greatly aided by Capt. Henry C. Mustin, who
had since died. Mustin, a wise man with a clear understanding of
the principles of war as they might be affected by aviation, had
drawn up a complete plan for the complements of the carriers.
They would have single-seat fighters to gain command of the air,
long-range scouts to obtain information of the enemy, torpedo
bombers for attacking enemy vessels, and rescue craft for recovering
pilots that might be forced down at sea. The larger craft would
demand high-powered engines and since, as yet, we had no air-cooled
engines above 200 horsepower, we must needs speed our high-powered
liquid-cooled development to the limit.
Leighton gave me his own quick estimate of the personalities in the
Bureau other than the admiral. The Assistant Chief was Capt. Alfred
W. Johnson, an old Queenstown destroyer skipper. Brought up in the
old school, he had been my skipper on the notorious Caribbean cruise
of the seaplane tender and kite-balloon ship _Wright_, and I loved
and admired him. We had both fought a losing battle against aviation
extravagance. The skipper, hoping to cut down useless paper work by
refusing to have a yeoman, had answered all his own correspondence
in longhand, expecting thus to shame his correspondents into doing
likewise, but only he had been shamed.
The Chief of the Matériel Division was Capt. Emory S. Land, of the
Corps of Constructors. Unlike so many constructors, Jerry was no
theorist but a thoroughly practical and competent leader. He had
played football at the Academy and still refereed college games. Able
to see both sides of an argument, forthright, and honest, he was an
ideal head for a division like Matériel that contained both naval
constructors and line officers. The old line-staff controversy was
likely to burst out at any moment, and it took a sense of humor to
break it up.