grinned. “You can get yours in before the admiral gets back. Meet
me Monday morning down at the West Beach and we’ll put you over the
jumps.”
Not too many pilots had qualified for deck landings back there in
1927. The _Langley_ could make only twelve knots, and her deck was
so narrow a pilot could not see it behind the engine. He could
barely see the signalman out on his platform, and even with a good
landing, failures of the airplane or the arresting gear could make
him trouble. We used Vought UO’s with arresting hooks hung under
their tails to catch the crosswires, and cross-axle hooks, long since
abandoned, to catch the fore and aft wires.
Three of us constituted the next class. After three days of
preliminary instruction on a simulated flight deck at Ream Field,
primarily to familiarize us with the flag signals, we went aboard.
On the way down the bay, a flock of sea gulls followed in our wake,
beady eyes alight for possible garbage, and since they constituted a
flight hazard, Emile Chourré, a veteran carrier pilot, perched aft
on the signal platform to practice his antiaircraft marksmanship by
working on the gulls with a BB gun.
Outside Point Loma the first pilot off—a youngster who had been as
hot as a firecracker at Ream Field—went haywire, and after washing
out his landing gear was ordered back to the air station where he
made a safe belly landing in a shower of sand while surrounded by
crash trucks, fire engines, and ambulances. My place was second in
the line and, as I scrambled into the cockpit and looked down into
the nettings where the whole ship’s company had assembled in the hope
of seeing a brass hat roll over the side, I thanked my stars that
the one thing I could do well with an airplane was to set it gently
back on the ground. And so closely did I concentrate on the business
in hand that I lost track of my landings and came to only when Tiny
Sullivan, a 300-pound chief and an old friend, shook hands with
himself as I jolted aboard for the tenth and final landing. Climbing
from the cockpit I thumbed my nose at Bobby Moulton and waddled
triumphantly toward the disappointed sailormen in the nettings.
While waiting for Admiral Reeves to return from Denver and his
Navy Day speech, I familiarized myself with the local setup. The
Aircraft Squadrons, Battle Fleet, was a part of the battle-fleet
organization whose backbone was a dozen battleships that based behind
the breakwater ninety miles farther north at San Pedro or Long Beach,
and exercised in the open sea nearby. Duty in the organization
constituted “sea duty” but the aircraft squadrons were based on shore
at the San Diego Air Station. Nominally assigned to the _Langley_
for duty, Admiral Reeves and his small staff were given working
quarters in a wing of the Administration Building. All save the
admiral lived ashore, either in Coronado or San Diego; the admiral,
during Mrs. Reeves’s absence in Switzerland, lived in a room off
the corner office assigned to him. My office was next to his in the
opposite corner of the wing. The air station, built to conform to
local architecture, was surrounded by pleasant lawns and attractive
plantings. It provided operating facilities and repair shops for
FLEET AIR, and while under a separate command, had established
a reputation for cheerful cooperation, a circumstance not often
encountered in the naval establishment.
The admiral had built up his staff from among the personnel of his
squadrons. His operations officer, Frank D. Wagner, more commonly
known as “Honus,” had come up from Fighting One, the swank combat
squadron with a reputation for high hat that one day gave it a
replica of a top hat for its squadron insignia. Frank had dragged his
feet on leaving Fighting One, but had brought to the staff a unique
appreciation of the squadron point of view. Under Admiral Reeves’s
watchful eye, he had conducted the tactical exercises of the summer
concentration, and evolved some advanced tactical concepts for air
combat. The admiral’s flag secretary was Seth Warner; his flag
lieutenant, Les Arnold; and his radio officer, Gordon Rowe. I, as his
chief of staff, would supervise the administrative functions and have
general charge of matériel.
The aircraft squadrons themselves were in the process of
organization. The twelve battle wagons at San Pedro operated
three Voughts apiece, and since the battleships constituted three
divisions, their aircraft formed three squadrons of the observation
wing. There were no facilities at San Pedro for aircraft operations,
so the observation wing based at San Diego except when needed aboard
their ships for gunnery or the monthly fleet tactical exercises.
During the summer months, when personnel shifts took place, all
aircraft based at San Diego for the summer concentration period,
where they broke in new crews and tried out new air tactics under
Wagner.
Squadrons were also being assembled for the carriers. _Langley_
units based full-time at San Diego and carried out their protracted
gunnery schedules over nearby areas. Some _Lexington_ squadrons
were being gradually assembled at the Naval Air Station at Norfolk,
Virginia, while the _Saratoga_ units were being brought together at
San Diego. These squadrons would be equipped with the new air-cooled
fighters and torpedo bombers we had been developing at BUAERO and
manned with new pilots then under training at Pensacola. The whole
organization, under the leadership of Admiral Reeves, must be rounded
out and trained during the next few years.
The admiral had always been “Bull” Reeves to his contemporaries,
from the day when he had created the first football headgear so
that he might get into the Army-Navy football game after a serious
head injury. His juniors in aviation now called him “Billy Goat”
because he wore one of the few beards then extant in the Navy. This
beard was a lovely gray Vandyke which, with the admiral’s shell-pink
complexion, gave him an air of grave distinction that quite belied an
uproarious sense of humor. He had a deep, vibrant voice and he spoke
with great eloquence—a fact he ascribed to his having once studied
for the ministry. Standing before an assembly of his brother officers
he could expound the weightiest tactical or strategic doctrines in
an entertaining and enlightening manner, speaking always with the
obvious relish of a man engaged in an undertaking at which he knows
he is competent. He differed from Admiral Moffett in almost every
characteristic, but especially in his logical, measured approach to a
problem. Though trained as an engineer, he had specialized in tactics
and strategy and had brought to these subjects an orderly but very
active mind. Even as I slid into the routine of my new job, I looked
forward with impatience to the Old Man’s return.
On the first morning that we faced each other across the desk in his
bare office, Admiral Reeves raised the question of the _Langley’s_
reluctance to expand her operating complement. Entertaining as he did
a high regard for Captain Towers both as a seaman and as a leader,
and having in mind the initiative with which Jack had pioneered
naval aviation, the admiral surmised that the long list of casualties
among pilots had tended to overemphasize the hazards of flying off
carriers. The fleet problem that was scheduled for the coming spring
would offer an opportunity for an air attack on Pearl Harbor. In
light of the probable arrival of the big carriers the following year
he wanted to try out some of his ideas on the _Langley_, if only on
a small scale. However, the scale proposed by that vessel was too
small for any use at all. Our job was to find some way around the
difficulty.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Germ of a Big Idea
When later the Commander in Chief, Adm. Louis R. de Steiguer, once my
captain on the _Old Ark_, finally released his statement of the fleet
problem, the attention of all hands was focused on the forthcoming
Hawaiian cruise. In April the following year, 1928, the fleet
would rendezvous at San Francisco to sail from there for the joint
Army-Navy exercises. In preparation for the maneuvers, each unit
commander was called upon to submit his own “estimate of the military
situation” and to formulate his own decisions and his operation
orders. The fleet staff, after analyzing the several solutions, would
promulgate the commander in chief’s orders. In FLEET AIR, as the
Aircraft Squadrons, Battle Fleet, were locally known, we planned to
close the first phase of the exercises with a dawn attack on Pearl
Harbor by planes launched from the _Langley_.
Appreciating that a dozen tiny fighters in competition with the great
guns of the ponderous battle wagons would make little impression on
Pearl Harbor, the admiral undertook to expand greatly the number
of aircraft to be flown off the _Langley_. To provide living
accommodations for their crews he instructed Captain Towers to
request the Mare Island Navy Yard to undertake alterations to the
vessel during her forthcoming annual overhaul. To increase the fire
power of our embryonic air force, presently confined to a pair of
thirty-caliber machine guns each, we started our squadrons training
in a new tactic.
Dive bombing, first tested against Nicaraguan rebels by the United
States Marines, had been further developed against naval targets
by Fighting Five, a _Lexington_ squadron then being assembled at
Norfolk, Virginia. Admiral Reeves waxed enthusiastic over this idea,
primarily because it concentrated the attack upon objectives located
at the surface, instead of wasting energy on the usual dogfights
between knights of the air. Frank Wagner, after scurrying around to
lease all suitable training areas in the vicinity, soon had airplanes
diving all over the San Diego hinterland.
In order to remove some of the hazards of operating carrier land
planes over the sea, we began training our two auxiliary vessels,
the former mine planter _Aroostook_ and the sweeper _Teal_ as “plane
guards” for the _Langley_. For protection against losses incident to
distant water landings, we equipped all planes with rubber flotation
bags and gear to inflate them, when necessary, with bottled gas.
Finally we borrowed two fast destroyers from the local squadrons
under command of Adm. Thomas J. Senn. Here, though we little
appreciated it at the time, was the germ of the big idea of the
carrier task force.
With a view to further speeding sea rescue, we asked BUAERO to
undertake for us the development of a single-float amphibian gear,
interchangeable with the seaplane float of the Vought Corsair. To
navigate a single-seater without radio out of sight of the carrier,
to engage in combat and then return to a pin-point contact with a
roving carrier, demanded real skill. In order to provide some sort
of homing device, our radio officer, Gordon Rowe, strung a loop of
wires between the wings of a Corsair, thus utilizing the loop-antenna
feature, then common in home radio sets. Rowe’s device, antedating
radar, was intended to avoid the possible loss of precious pilots and
planes but it also made the Corsair available as a liaison plane for
fighter tactics. With a good carrier-based amphibian we could extend
our control of combat units and, at the same time, release them for
safe long-range operations.
To gain experience from the Hawaiian cruise, Admiral Reeves felt
the _Langley_ should operate at least two eighteen-plane fighter
squadrons as dive bombers together with six Vought Corsair
two-seaters for scouting, rescue, and radio liaison. While the
_Langley_, with the space available in her vast, empty coal bunkers,
could easily provide ample hangar space and crew’s quarters, the
restricted area of her flight deck and the limited capacity of her
plane elevator introduced serious limitations. How to spot forty-two
airplanes on an area believed by _Langley_ officers to be adequate
for but twelve was something of a problem.
While working on this, I proceeded on another project close to my
heart, a recommendation from FLEET AIR for a long-term development
and procurement program that would conform to the one I knew to
be under way in BUAERO. If we could eliminate some of the local
partisanship that frequently obscured the fundamentals of such
problems, we might facilitate engineering progress.
When I submitted my schedule to the admiral he approved all of it
save one critical item, the construction of an experimental two-seat
fighter. The idea had originated in World War I on the Western Front,
where the classic form of attack had been a dive out of the sun onto
the enemy’s tail, to shoot him down when he wasn’t looking. Perhaps
a tail gunner might guard a pilot from such surprise, but Admiral
Reeves would have none of the idea. He thought an alert fighter pilot
could do the job by twisting his neck. If he had to lug an extra
gun and tail gunner, he would impair the combat performance of his
airplane. Besides, during maneuvers, no rear gunner could serve a
gun. This was no snap judgment on his part; he had had Wagner try it
out during tactical exercises, using Voughts to simulate two-seat
fighters. In his judgment there could be no such thing as a two-seat
“fighter.”
Against such logic I could but argue that many officers in the Bureau
favored the project, among them Bruce Leighton, who, having finished
his tour at sea, was now head of the powerful Plans Division. Failure
to include his pet project in our recommendations would stir up such
a controversy as to hazard the entire program. The admiral smiled at
me.
“You’ve been with Moffett so long,” he chuckled, “that you’ve
begun to think like a politician yourself.” It being hopeless to
argue further with this forthright old sea dog, I modified the
letter, knowing full well that Bruce Leighton, who had fostered
the air-cooled engine against bitter opposition, would not readily
abandon his pet two-seat fighter. And so it proved. BUAERO and FLEET
AIR split wide open on this single controversial item with the
result that the rest of the program fell apart. Before long we were
engaged in acrimonious correspondence on almost every subject. Even
engineering needs politics for lubrication.
When the _Langley_ returned from her overhaul, she brought more
trouble in her wake. The alterations for additional crew space had
not been approved. When the admiral learned this from Frank Wagner
his beard bristled and his eyes flashed.
“Instruct Fighting One and Fighting Six to assemble all aircraft on
the _Langley_ dock,” he ordered. “Collect a dozen Vought Corsairs and
advise Captain Towers we will call on him after lunch. We’ll soon
see,” he added ominously, “just how many planes the _Langley_ can be
made to operate.”
When, after lunch, the admiral with his staff bore down under all
plain sail upon the _Langley_ dock, Captain Towers and his officers
met us at the gangway. The admiral, taking personal charge, soon had
Wagner and me helping the deck crews to spot planes closer and closer
together. When he had finished, he wrung from the _Langley_ officers
their reluctant admission that forty-two airplanes might be operated,
but they expressed their firm conviction that it would be dangerous.
As the admiral swept off the flight deck in triumph, he pointed up
the moral in a strong, resonant voice.
“Most standards,” he said, “are limited by opinion or prejudice.
They break down under pressure. The function of a leader,” he
added, “is to generate the pressure.” Turning to me he continued,
“Please collect all the artificers in FLEET AIR, every carpenter’s
mate, shipfitter, and helper. Go in person aboard the _Langley_ and
construct quarters for the plane crews.”
“Without authority from Construction and Repair?” I queried.
“Upon the authority of COMAIRONS,” he replied, “and,” he added, “on
my responsibility.”
Arriving at San Francisco, we found Chance Vought waiting with a new
Corsair single-float amphibian which he had personally chaperoned all
the way from Long Island City in a baggage car. The Naval Aircraft
Factory at Philadelphia later supplied two more of a somewhat
different design. After testing them, I came in for a good deal
of ribbing from _Langley_ pilots who, like Chance, insisted I had
spoiled good airplanes by overloading them with junk. The craft
may have been “klucks” but they lifted a heavy load from the staff
conscience.
The fleet sailed on schedule with the aircraft squadrons ready in
all respects. Some of our wives, including mine, were to all sail
later on a passenger steamer from Los Angeles. With our convertible
coupe in the ship’s hold and my own recollections of an earlier visit
to Honolulu in the old Armored Cruiser Squadrons in mind, we looked
forward to a pleasant sojourn.
During passage, the fleet passed the steamer at sea, where the wives
got a close-up of the _Langley_ launching and receiving planes.
We had been assigned a fixed station “6,000 yards astern of BAT
DIVS,” an order that irked the admiral no end. To launch and receive
aircraft, the _Langley_ had to leave her station and head into the
wind, a fact that seemed to cause acute distress to those elements of
the fleet accustomed to cruising in precise formation.
On the slow journey westward, daily exercises, morning and afternoon,
developed our flight-deck technique to the ultimate. As a plane
floated in over the ramp, to drop into the gear and be brought up
with a jerk, squads of deck handlers swarmed out of the nettings,
cleared hooks from landing wires, caught wing tips, and hustled the
craft forward of the barrier, just in time to clear the gear for the
next plane, even then floating down the groove. It was Bull Reeves
who pressed always for more speed. Always quick to condemn a miscue
or commend smart action, he finally inspired the _Langley_ officers
until they cut the take-off interval between planes down to ten
seconds and the landing intervals to thirty.
At the crack of dawn, one lovely Sunday morning, we headed into the
wind to launch aircraft for the assault on Pearl Harbor. We had
selected this day in the knowledge that the defenders, after the
usual Saturday night festivities, would be sleeping late.
First across the bow was Gerry Bogan of Fighting One; the rest of
his flock zoomed after him at ten-second intervals. Fighting Six
followed, led by “Injun Joe” Tomlinson. Finally scouts and amphibians
roared into the air, leaving the deserted flight deck a bleak expanse
of silence. After their attack on Pearl Harbor, the squadrons were to
land ashore.
Our striking force, undetected by the defenders, caught Army and Navy
pilots flat on their backs in bed, just as their successors were
destined to be caught some thirteen years later on Sunday, December
7. It now seems likely that the casual Japanese oil tanker that
managed always to find herself in the center of our operating areas
off San Pedro, or those “fishing” sampans that busied themselves off
Honolulu that very morning, later communicated our movements to the
Japanese high command. It was natural for their admiralty to assume
that we understood the import of the new weapons we were exercising.
They could not have believed the intelligence that our own high
command had so discounted the striking power of aerial bombs and
submarine torpedoes that they had neglected to equip their vessels
with adequate gun defenses. Recognizing in FLEET AIR—as they surely
did—a revolutionary instrument of sea power, they sped their own
development and hastened to exploit it in the rapid expansion of
their East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.
During the remainder of the Hawaiian exercises, we conducted joint
operations with local naval forces and with the Army, polishing our
flight techniques at sea. One day, a shift of wind, sweeping yellow
volcanic dust from an extinct crater, cut our surface visibility to
a dangerous low just after Gerry Bogan, with nine fighter bombers
from Fighting One, had roared over the bow to attack a distant enemy
fleet. Our worried staff found some comfort in the knowledge that one
of our radio-liaison Corsairs was supposed to be plane-guarding the
unit, ready to lead the flock back aboard after its mission had been
completed. But when we radioed the Vought, the pilot reported he had
lost the fighters. After homing the Corsair and taking her aboard,
we began really sweating it out, peering hopefully into the yellow
spaces, looking for Gerry Bogan. Finally at long last came the drone
of engines. One by one the planes lurched into the gear and taxied
forward. The admiral sent his orderly for Bogan.
“Where the hell have you been anyway?” he demanded with unwonted
truculence.
“Fightin’,” replied Gerry.
Years later when I read of Gerry Bogan’s fantastic exploits in the
Pacific, and especially Bill Halsey’s estimate of his courage, I
recalled this laconic yet complete answer—as well as the way it had
parted Bull Reeves’s whiskers in an appreciative grin.
At Pearl Harbor, one day, we got news of the arrival in San Francisco
of the long-awaited _Lexington_. She planned to proceed at once to
Honolulu on a trial run at thirty knots. Day by day we watched her
phenomenal performance, and we admired her from afar as she anchored
in triumph off Waikiki with Diamond Head as a fitting backdrop. There
her captain, Frank D. Berrien, welcomed us warmly as we transferred
aboard.
Whereas on the _Langley_ COMAIRONS staff had perched under the
flight-deck ramp in temporary cubby holes hung as an afterthought
out over the stern, on the “_Big Lex_” the chief of staff rated a
living room, bedroom, and bath, a sumptuous suite in which I rattled
around like a single die in a wardroom dice box. Messing as we did
with the admiral in his big cabin, we luxuriated all the way back
to San Diego. There, anchored in the Roads, we found big “_Sister
Sara_” under the able command of Capt. John Halligan. Bull Reeves’s
two-starred flag floated over the world’s most powerful carrier
force, a smart outfit that already gave signs of great _esprit_ in
the making.
Meanwhile a number of new aircraft and new pilots had been assembling
for the “summer concentration.” Our job now was to whip the force
into shape for the next fleet operation less than a year away.
Captain Towers turned over command of the _Langley_ to Capt. Arthur
B. Cook, another good skipper, and now returned to BUAERO to become
Admiral Moffett’s Assistant Chief. We hoped that the stresses and
strains of the winter might not complicate our affairs, for we
already had a tough problem to solve in the relationship between the
carriers and their squadrons. The admiral held that the squadrons
should base under him at San Diego and should operate under his
command in the monthly fleet tactical exercises; some of the carrier
officers, and singularly enough it was the naval aviators now acting
as ship’s officers, and not the line officers at all, insisted that
the squadrons should function with respect to the carriers just as
a turret crew works on a battleship. Aside from the fact that it
was impractical to base squadrons on carriers and train them there
without keeping the carriers continuously at sea, the introduction of
carrier skippers into the chain of command tended to slow down air
operations.
This was a conflict that raged even more bitterly as time went on
and especially after Capt. E. J. King took over command of the
_Lexington_. It was complicated by the _Langley_ incident and
worse still by a political situation even then developing back in
Washington. Some of the high brass had gone gunning for Admiral
Moffett’s scalp—his term of office would expire in a year—and their
candidate, as yet unbeknownst to Bull Reeves, was Rear Adm. Joseph M.
Reeves.
As the net of complications began to tighten about us, I chafed under
them. To me it seemed that grown men ought to learn to bury their
pet prejudices and to move ahead on the big ideas in an orderly and
cooperative fashion. To Bull Reeves, an older, wiser, and always more
philosophical man, these conflicts all seemed part of a plan that
somehow produced the right answers where the apparently more orderly
processes finally created planned disorder.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Creation of Strategic Concept