Section was set up, was headed by a grand old man of aviation, Capt.
H. C. Richardson. “Captain Dick,” one of the early pilots, a member
of the crew of one of the NC boats of 1919 transatlantic fame, and
a skilled engineer, had inherited Design from “Jerry” Hunsaker, a
classmate of mine, when Jerry resigned from the Construction Corps
to go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor. Jerry
had founded the Design Group, and had built up a large drafting room
and staff with which to carry on naval aviation design. His designs
were to be built experimentally at the Naval Aircraft Factory at
Philadelphia and then farmed out to the factory, or perhaps to some
willing private manufacturer.
It was right at this point that Leighton stressed a difference
between the Engine Section and the Design Section. There were but a
handful of people all told in the Engine Section: Leighton himself;
his assistant, Lt. Frank Maile, who had once served with me on the
_Old Ark_; Lt. Ricco Botta, a former Reserve officer and a skilled
engineer; Lt. (jg) Ralph M. Parsons, a former student under Dr. Lucke
and my assistant at the Aviation Mechanics Schools at Great Lakes;
and two secretaries. The senior secretary was Miss Alma Quisenberry,
a quiet, soft-spoken young woman from Nashville, Tennessee. And this
handful of people not only had no desire to design or build its own
engines but had a clear conviction that the hope for the future lay
in the Bureau’s placing its dependence for design, development, and
production entirely upon private industry.
In this respect, the Engine Section now stood quite alone. After
the Armistice, the Army Air Service had devised a plan for setting
up a great government production center at McCook Field, near
Dayton, Ohio. Army aircraft were to be designed by brain trusters in
government employ. The institution would be surrounded by a complex
of interested private manufacturers who would produce aircraft to
Army design and specification. The plan had fallen through, largely
because ambitious young men had preferred to risk their futures in
chancey private industry rather than rest secure in the dead end of
a government establishment. But the idea still persisted, and many
in both Army and Navy were still sold on nationalization for the
aircraft industry.
I could tell from Leighton’s development of this knotty problem that
he was still uncertain as to where I stood. Conceivably I might be
one who would want to build up a great engine-design group in BUAERO
and another big production group at the Philadelphia Aircraft Factory
and thus establish for myself quite a respectable empire. However,
I had developed a few positive ideas of my own on the subject,
and, curiously enough they had come out of the old rifle shooting
competitions. I now relieved Leighton on this subject, obviously so
close to his heart.
Under the rules for the national rifle matches, it was mandatory
for military competitors to use government-issue cartridges, which,
at the time, were produced solely by the government at Frankfort
Arsenal. In quality this ammunition was reminiscent of Chinese
firecrackers—many were complete duds, and of those that finally
went off, many more were just “fizzlers.” As to accuracy, there
were so many “droppers” in each bandoleer that the element of skill
was largely neutralized by the element of chance, thus undermining
the foundation of competition. And worse still, there seemed to
be nothing we could do about it. Army Ordnance, entrenched in its
monopoly, turned a deaf ear to all complaints.
Meanwhile the quality of the ammunition provided by competing
commercial companies for civilian matches had improved to the point
where Frankfort Arsenal had become a public scandal among the
shooting fraternity. At this point the National Rifle Association
had raised such a furor that the Ordnance Department was forced
down off its lofty perch and obliged to bring Frankfort into direct
competition with the private trade. Improvement at Frankfort was
immediate, but more important still, seeds were planted for a new
government-industry cooperation in ordnance that has since paid off
in two wars.
And so, having acquired my convictions at an early age and out of the
hard school of experience, I now set Leighton right on my position as
to the place of government in production. His relief was immediate,
though he felt that the situation in aviation was less critical.
“We have the saving grace,” he said, “of having strong competition
within the government. As long as the rivalry between BUAERO and the
Army Air Service continues keen, both of us will keep on our toes to
press development.”
My thoughts drifted back to the interview with Admiral Moffett
earlier in the day.
“But,” I countered, “suppose your friend Billy Mitchell should sell
his independent-air-force idea to the Congress and take over the
whole shebang, then what would become of your interservice rivalry?”
Leighton tossed both hands in the air in a gesture of helplessness.
“Do you know the gentleman?” he asked.
I had met the general at Great Lakes back in 1920 when he had come up
on a flying tour of inspection of the Aviation Mechanics’ Schools.
He arrived at the wheel of a roaring Stutz Bearcat touring car, with
the top down, the cutouts open, and a white-faced sergeant hanging
onto the seat beside him. He’d broken all records on the run up from
Chicago. Later the sergeant informed one of our CPOs that he had long
ago exceeded his life expectancy and was now on borrowed time.
At that time, our schools, organized as they had been by Dr. Lucke,
were going like a house afire, while the nearby Army schools,
at Rantoul, Illinois, were dragging bottom. At the close of the
inspection, the general had remarked, without the quiver of an
eyelid, “Keep working, Commander, and some day you may catch up with
the Army.”
As I opened my mouth to retort, he blimped the throttle and jammed
the words down my throat, with the roar of his exhaust. The last I
saw of him was a cloud of dust as he whirled away in the direction of
the main gate, his sergeant hanging on with both hands.
Subsequently, Mitchell had kept up a running fire against the Navy
until he finally badgered the Department into anchoring some obsolete
vessels in Chesapeake Bay, close to the Army air base at Langley
Field, Virginia. In a masterly display of showmanship for the benefit
of the newsmen, Mitchell had delivered a mast-high attack on the
undefended targets at short range. One phosphorous bomb dropped on
the fighting top of the old _Alabama_, where an alert photographer
snapped a dramatic picture of pyrotechnics that made the front page
with a convincing smash.
All this had come along with the drive for reduction in armaments
that had already set the Navy back on its haunches. Navy top brass,
fighting hard for survival, had recognized in Billy Mitchell another
Brutus, and some had even suspected Billy Moffett of a lean and
hungry look. An old walrus over in Naval Operations had been heard to
remark that Moffett was probably jealous of Mitchell for having first
thought of the separate air force. In any event, the Old Navy had
come to hate its own aviation almost as much at it hated Mitchell and
the Army.
“Mitchell,” I remarked, “is able, impetuous, and dynamic. He has an
attractive personality and is long on the qualities that keep men
willing to ride with him, hell for leather.”
Leighton shook his head. “He takes a lot for granted. The time
may come when airplanes will do the things he foresees, but first
some of us slaves will have to solve a lot of the impossible
technical problems that he now brushes off as unimportant. And one
thing is sure,” he added, “under the sort of department Mitchell
advocates, they just won’t get solved. Give him his autocratic
control, and he’ll set up an airtight government monopoly of
research, development, and production that will lay the dead hand of
bureaucracy on our new art and paralyze its glowing young spirit.”
All the smile had gone out of Leighton’s voice and deadly earnestness
replaced the half-banter with which he had discussed his job.
“Well,” he sighed, “there’s just one man standing between Mitchell
and the attainment of his personal ambition for power.” He paused.
“And that man,” he concluded, “is William Adger Moffett.”
“Do you think he’s got what it takes?” I asked. Leighton nodded.
“He’s got a mind like a steel trap. And believe me, he’s no
counter-puncher—he bores in like Old Battling Burroughs, the fleet
champion, and keeps leading all the time, though never with his
chin...”
“He’s our catalyst,” Leighton continued, “the mysterious reagent that
keeps all our atoms and molecules in a state of constant, frenzied
excitement. He’s the ignition system of BUAERO. We chiefs of section
are the explosive mixtures and when the admiral sparks us, we give
the pistons a wallop and they start the connecting rods oscillating.
That rotates the cranks, of which I am one,” he added with a grin,
“and the whole thing turns over like an aircraft engine—high-strung
parts whipping back and forth, between clearances the width of
a gnat’s eyebrow. And, to complete our power-plant picture,” he
concluded, “the whole thing would burn out except for the admiral’s
other function; he’s the lubricant, a high-grade product of some
refinery that created him and then threw away the formula. It all
looks a bit hectic and confused but, amazingly enough, it produces
results.”
“But,” I asked, “what if the Congress is more impressed by the
dynamic leader with all the right answers?”
“Then,” Leighton replied with finality, “the country will be lost.
Lost,” he repeated, quoting the punch line of an old Navy yarn about
the sailor man weaving his way back to the boat landing through a
line of telephone poles, “lost in an impenetrable forest.”
After returning to our hotel that evening, I reviewed the day’s
disclosures with my wife. We had both found that this was beneficial,
on general principles, and besides, since a Navy wife is nearly as
much subject to Navy Regulations as her husband, it seemed no more
than fair.
Apparently this Army-Navy dogfight absorbed every waking hour of
the combatants. Since the power plant is clearly the heart of the
airplane, then it followed that the Engine Section was a decisive
front in a major campaign. The technical issue of air-cooled versus
liquid-cooled involved the ancient conflict of government monopoly
versus private industry. And there was no question where Admiral
Moffett might stand on that. Though armed with authority, he showed
the wisdom to use it sparingly. With faith in the processes of
nature, he had the guts to let nature take her course. In this
respect he was the direct opposite of General Mitchell. Their
conflict went right down to bedrock.
As my job in the struggle, the admiral had assigned me the task
of creating a new line of engines. This I would do through fair
competition and in private industry. The problem was tough because
the industry was flat on its back. On the other hand, it was exciting
because the admiral’s convictions were my convictions, and well worth
fighting for. Maybe that was the reason he had reached down into the
Caribbean for me.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Backward Art
By the time the Japanese cherry blossoms had come and gone around
the Tidal Basin, my wife and I had settled in our apartment at 2301
Connecticut Avenue, and joined the social whirl—cocktail parties on
bathtub gin, formal dinners at home or abroad, evenings of bridge,
or just plain conversation. And wherever friends gathered, their one
and only topic of conversation was “shop.” While this was true of all
Navy parties, it was especially so in aviation circles. The burning
zeal these young pilots displayed for their profession was a constant
source of wonderment to us. In what they affectionately characterized
as their “old crates”—a description often all too accurate—they found
the beginning and end of everything. And if the airplane itself was
the object of their veneration, the “Aviation Game,” as they fondly
called it, was their religion. This seemed the more remarkable,
for the airplane was ever a jealous mistress, one that brooked
no liberties, a fact well known to the aviators who had solemnly
escorted all too many friends off to their last resting place, across
the river in Arlington.
Take young Hersey Conant, for one example out of many. Hersey, a
delightfully gay young bachelor, had gained the distinction of
coining a popular phrase, so to speak. At an afternoon cocktail
party, where the gin had just been lifted almost steaming off the
kitchen stove, Hersey had mixed it solemnly with orange juice and ice
and then held his glass aloft for a toast. Pausing before tossing
it off, he had said quite simply, “Let it age a second!” Here, it
seemed, was a suggestion the whole Aviation Game might take to heart;
but it didn’t.
For the very next day, Hersey had blithely taken off in one of the
fast Schneider-Cup seaplane racers for a short practice spin, and had
hedgehopped his way toward Norfolk, flying right down on the water.
Somewhere along the way, he stubbed his toe on one of the many fish
traps and pitched headlong into shallow water. When a crane salvaged
the wreck it was all wrapped up in a ball.
Old Navy families looked with jaundiced eyes upon the heedless
carryings on of the aviators. At a dinner party one night my wife sat
next to Capt. Claude C. Bloch, then Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance,
and one of the most promising of the younger captains. The day would
come when, as Commandant of the Naval District at Pearl Harbor on
December 7, 1941, he would receive a visit from the little yellow
men, but back there in the middle ’twenties, his promising career
still lay before him. Then, addressing my wife earnestly, he gave her
the benefit of his advice.
“Tell that husband of yours,” he said, “to keep out of the side
shows and get back under the main tent.” Well, I’d tried to become a
gunnery officer but fate had made a Kiwi of me.
And down in BUAERO, Leighton continued day by day to unfold to me the
fantastic story of naval aviation.
“Now that you are well fouled up in the slipstream of BUAERO,” he
remarked one June morning, “it is about time you looked over the
trade. If,” he went on, “you are going to risk your future on the
creative capacity of competition, then you ought to look over your
new tools. Frankly,” he added, “they aren’t too hot.” So Leighton
asked Captain Johnson, Assistant Chief, for permission to make the
trip in a cross-country DH, but the captain turned him down. Later
on he advised me in confidence that engineers were too scarce to be
risked unnecessarily in those flying coffins. And so we took off by
train.
At Paterson, New Jersey, we sought out the multistoried loft building
that housed Wright Aeronautical Corporation. President Frederick B.
Rentschler received us in his office, sitting solemnly behind his
desk. He looked to be a cool customer, a man of great singleness of
purpose. Facing him across the table, Bruce Leighton exuded buoyant
enthusiasm against a background of equal determination. Not having
previously learned from Leighton the sharp differences in opinion
between these two, I was unprepared for the sparring match that
followed.
Leighton led off with an inquiry as to progress with the new
J-3 model of the Lawrance air-cooled radial, which Rentschler
fended off with a report on the splendid dependability shown by
the liquid-cooled Hispano E-4 in its endurance tests. He had in
mind that if Leighton would recommend another production order of
Hispanos, Wright could use the time to get the Lawrance ready for
the next production order. A flush spread up around Leighton’s
ears as he rather testily replied that the Bureau was already
definitely committed to air-cooled engines in the 200-horsepower
size, and that it was Wright’s job to speed developments to meet
Bureau requirements. Rentschler seemed to have a quiet knack of
automatically tuning out any wave length he did not care to listen
in on. Now he passed up the Hispano-Lawrance issue momentarily to
develop the basic difference of opinion. He clearly felt that with
all Wright’s accumulated experience in liquid-cooled, they could
expect to make more rapid progress with them than with Lawrance
air-cooled.
Leighton let a smile flicker across his lips and redirected the
discussion toward air-cooling. On the way up to Paterson, he had told
me about a contract Wright had with the Navy for the development of
a new 400-hp air-cooled radial called “P-1.” Intended as an out and
out replacement for the Liberty, the engine promised to save a lot of
weight although it was just an overgrown Lawrance as to design. Now
he asked Rentschler for a report on its progress.
Rentschler shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of hopelessness and
reported that George Mead and Andy Willgoos, the Wright engineers,
had encountered serious difficulties with piston scuffing. They were
struggling with the usual cut-and-try “fixes” but so far with little
positive success. Leighton thought that under the criticism of the
liquid-cooled partisans he might have specified too small a diameter
for the engine and suggested that if I agreed I might modify the
requirements if absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, however, he was
determined to push the new engine to the limit.
Rentschler shook his head in disagreement. He thought the problem
went deeper than Leighton had indicated. He had a tendency to
probe for fundamentals and it was his considered opinion that,
for Wright at least, liquid-cooling offered the better course of
engine development. Air-cooling, even though it might have inherent
advantages in weight saving, suffered a handicap from the point
of view of timing, and he doubted if these could be overcome. He
preferred undertaking a completely new design by Wright to trying to
get the bugs out of the Lawrance.
Leighton twisted in his chair as the flush spread up his neck and
flooded through the gray at his temples. He had detected a note
of arrogance in Rentschler’s suave statement—an inference of sure
judgment on the part of the civilian as opposed to the immaturity
of the naval officer. I made a note of this fundamental conflict as
Leighton set his jaw.
The Navy didn’t propose to let anything stand in its way in realizing
on the inherent superiority of air-cooling. Aside from the potential
weight saving there was the vital factor of dependability. One-third
of all Navy power-plant failures could be charged to liquid-cooled
plumbing—leaky water jackets, leaky hose connections, and what have
you.
“In other words,” he summed up, “in addition to saving the weight
of the plumbing we can eliminate the majority of engine failures by
going to air-cooled engines. We’re your customers,” he added, “and
that’s our position.”
Rentschler’s face was a mask. The muscles of his jaw flexed as he
faced Leighton. The latter broke the tension.
“What do you say,” he queried, “to our taking a look at the new
air-cooled engines?”
We took a slow-running freight elevator that dropped us to the
basement, where George Mead waited for us in the experimental
department. A solidly built fellow in his early thirties, with dark
bushy eyebrows, George had the serious mein of the well-trained
engineer but he combined this with unusual force and driving power.
No one in the aircraft industry could drive a project to completion
with such remorseless energy. Now he pointed to a large radial engine
mounted on a teardown stand with its ignition wiring partly stripped.
“There she is,” he remarked. The big engine was being torn down after
a full-throttle run. She was up to rated horsepower but still scuffed
her pistons. They were trying one more “fix” and if this one worked,
they intended to go back on an endurance run. No suggestion of doubt
entered Mead’s cheerful voice.
Rentschler stood noncommittal. An engineer must needs be an optimist;
his job is a creative one. Day after day he has to bow his head
against an avalanche of grief, from failures either in his own shop
or the field, yet still press on to correct the faults. There were
no margins for error in this aircraft-engine business; the machinery
was stressed right up to the limit. The trick was to keep it from
going beyond, and the penalty for failure might be somebody’s life.
Management had plenty of worries, too; Rentschler, there, must wangle
the financial problems and try to reconcile the conflicting interests
of the several departments of a complex organization.
Now while Leighton and Mead discussed the teething troubles of
their new baby with all the intense interest of a couple of young
mothers, I tried to pick out the fundamental factors of the situation
at Wright Aeronautical. BUAERO had taken the decision to stake
its future on the trade. Wright Aero was our best bet. We were
committed to air-cooled radials and the management of Wright was
still committed, subconsciously at least, to liquid-cooled in-line.
It wasn’t a matter of sentiment with them; they had a big investment
in their prior art. The big job from the point of view of the Engine
Section was to instill some of our own enthusiasm into Wright Aero,
and this would take some doing. As we left the factory to go to a
hotel for lunch, I realized I had my job cut out for me.
Next day we ran down to Keyport, New Jersey, for a look at
the Aeromarine Airplane and Motor Corporation plant. It was a
discouraging picture, acres of idle machine shops and a powerhouse
smokestack that gave out no smoke. The one bright spot there proved
to be Roland Chilton, the chief engineer, a keen Englishman whom I
mentally clothed in a costume for the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. He
had the inventor’s talent for innovation, with the engineer’s knack
for making ingenious mechanical contrivances work and he had created
for Leighton the new Aeromarine Inertia Starter. This device, which
utilized energy stored in a fast-running flywheel to crank over
obstinate engines, had proved an outstanding success in the limited
quantities Leighton had bought. Leighton had tried to keep Aeromarine
alive in the hope that times might change for the better, but the
air-cooled radials would obsolete the Aeromarine liquid-cooled
in-line engines, just as they had set aside the Wright Hispano E-4.
A train ride to Boston took us to the plant of the Kinney
Manufacturing Company. Their main product was heavy-duty pumps, a far
cry from aircraft engines, but the management had shown a willingness
to gamble on the remarkable ingenuity of its aircraft engineer,
Warren Noble. His forte, like Chilton’s, was a unique capacity for
accomplishing the impossible through little-used mechanical devices
and principles. If anything, he was even more ingenious than Chilton,
but by the same token a little less productive; once he had made some
contraption work, experimentally, he lost interest in it. Production
for profit seemed to bore him. But at Leighton’s request, he had
undertaken to build a tiny, five-cylinder, air-cooled radial engine
for a miniature airplane—one intended to be folded up and parked
in a steel cylinder mounted on the deck of a submarine. The job,
which imposed every known restriction on the already complicated
airplane-design problem, intrigued Noble no end. His engine, with
its oil-operated valve gear, incorporated every other unconventional
device Noble’s fertile brain could conceive, and it ran. Beyond that
point, Noble’s interest faded.
We left Boston stimulated by talking far into the night with Noble,
exploring the realms of engineering fancy, but down in our hearts
we knew the little engine would never get anywhere. After all the
airplane itself was highly experimental and might never fly; the
outlook for quantity production of air scouts for submarines was
not encouraging. But it was worth the trip just to listen to the
conversation of one of the most facile engineering minds in the
business.