SLIPSTREAM

Books by Eugene E. Wilson

AIR POWER FOR PEACE
SLIPSTREAM
The Autobiography of an Air Craftsman

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

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.

“If the Navy doesn’t hurry and build up its own air force,” he 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.

The Design Section of the Matériel Division, under which the Engine 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.

From Boston we moved out to the Army Engineering Division, then at McCook Field, Dayton, Ohio, one of those government arsenal-type establishments and about as far apart from Warren Noble as it was possible to get while still remaining on the same planet. The chief of the Engine Branch out there was Ed Jones, a former Air Service major, now in civilian clothes, and a good solid citizen. He displayed none of the usual Air Service antagonism to naval aviation, and received us warmly.

His assistant, Sam Herron, was, like Chilton, a clever Englishman, one who had done highly useful research in air-cooled cylinders under Professor Gibson, in England, then the outstanding man in his field. Sam Herron was probably better informed on this important subject than anyone in this country and had done some good work even under the handicaps of a government establishment like McCook Field. Among other things “The Field,” as it was called by the Air Service, had designed a 300-hp air-cooled radial engine which it had turned over to the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company, of Buffalo, after competitive bidding, for construction of the first experimental model.

Leighton expressed lack of confidence in this procedure, which had carried over from the war. When disorderly reconversion had forced the automotive people out of aircraft production, “The Field” had determined to establish a great engineering division at Dayton, and to undertake its own design. After the government wizards had dreamed up their pet projects, a manufacturer would do the rest. Leighton argued that this procedure just divided the responsibility for a development between the government and the industry.

“The government,” he remarked, “will claim all the credit for everything that turns out well, and will hang the contractor for all mistakes, especially its own.” That, he insisted, was not the road to success.

“The only way to get progress,” he added, “is to put a good engineer in a tight place where he will have to fight to survive. When it’s ‘root, hog, or die,’” he concluded, “they always do the impossible.”

A run over to Detroit brought us to the Packard Motor Car Company, and another kind of setup. Here was one of the few remaining automotive companies with a continuing interest in aviation. This had probably resulted from the fact that Col. Jesse G. Vincent, a Packard vice-president, had been one of the designers of the original Liberty, and Capt. Lionel Woolson, Packard experimental engineer, still retained his interest in aircraft. The company felt that much of the aviation experimental work could be used in the automotive engines and was willing to continue to participate as a public service. In another emergency, in which the automotive industry must again convert to aircraft production, they could do a better job at it, against a background of continuing experience with aviation. The one drawback to this picture was the air-cooled engine; Packard could hardly be expected to show much enthusiasm for this.

Meanwhile, there was another consideration involved in continuing the automotive industry on a stand-by basis with respect to aircraft.

“Automobile prices,” Leighton explained, “demand low-cost volume production, a requirement that is just incompatible with the high-quality, high-precision production required in aircraft. When your automobile breaks down,” he added, quoting the old darky of the ancient wheeze, “why there yo’ is. But when yo’ airplane engine quits, where is yo’?”

And now as we moved on to Buffalo, Leighton gave me a quick preview of the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company. Here was one of the “old-line” aircraft organizations. Though it had bid in the Army air-cooled radial project, now called the “Curtiss Radial 1454,” its heart lay in the liquid-cooled development. The Curtiss D-12 was now one of the best in the world; both the Army and the Navy were using it in fair quantities. Curtiss, he thought, was one of the smartest engine builders in the country—sometimes he had wondered if they weren’t a little too smart for their own good.

When we saw the R-1454, we were impressed. Herron’s cylinder was an advance over anything we had seen at Wright. The valve-gear rocker boxes enclosed the valves and provided forced lubrication for them in place of the old Alemite fittings of our P-1. And the Curtiss had a single carburetor in place of the triple type on the Wright, an improvement made possible partly by the use of a gear-driven blower that sucked the mixture from the carburetor and pushed it up to the cylinders. This was geared low for rotary induction, and gave fine distribution; someday it could be geared high for supercharging.

That evening we were dinner guests of the company at a hotel overlooking Niagara Falls. Afterward, Arthur Nutt, chief engineer, gave us a sales talk on the D-12. Roy Keyes, president of the company, expressed no fear of competition from the air-cooled radials. Curtiss, he confided in us, had bid in the Army 1454 just to keep it under their control. He considered it unlikely that any radial rock crusher could replace the D-12; in fact, he had no intention of letting it.

That night, Leighton and I sat on the edges of our twin beds in the hotel room and, smoking a last cigarette together, sized up the situation. Curtiss, a good manufacturer, had a fine engine but was keeping it under wraps. Wright, also a competent producer, had an inferior engine and no enthusiasm for air-cooling as such. The problem was to get the best features of the Herron-designed 1454 into the second engine of our P-series at Wright. If we could sell them on that and build up their enthusiasm, we might put a new set of valves in the heart of the airplane and even build up its muscles. That called for another visit to Paterson.

But when we returned to Wright Aero we found that a change had taken place. Fred Rentschler had resigned from the presidency, leaving Charles Lanier Lawrance, the daddy of the American air-cooled radial, in his place. There was nothing left to worry about on the score of air-cooled enthusiasm, though the company had lost an able executive. Guy Vaughan, a dynamic and personable fellow, had moved up from quality manager to factory manager. A former automobile racing driver, Guy had plenty of zing. With George Mead to do a finished engineering job, we could release the P-2 engine with all the latest wrinkles in it.

Back at BUAERO, Bruce Leighton wound up his affairs in the Engine Section. For three and a half years he had fought and bled there, stacking up brief moments of triumph against hours of grief. As a matter of fact, aircraft engines were one big pain in the neck. Reports of poor performance in service streamed in under the heading “Trouble Report.” If by some chance they performed well, that was only as it should be and certainly not a subject for comment. The art was still young, and even the best equipment could hardly be classified as safe to fly. In the face of disheartening problems, Bruce Leighton had never let his enthusiasm slacken; his heart and soul were all wrapped up in what he himself characterized as “these funny damned airplanes.” He had pioneered air-cooled engines in the face of universal resistance; he had stood by private industry when everyone else had plumped for government ownership. Now he was “off to sea.”

CHAPTER FIVE
Toil and Trouble

The summer of 1925, like most summers in the nation’s capital, was almost unbearably hot and sultry. Even after one of those violent electrical storms had whirled up the Potomac and deluged the blistered asphalt with a tropical downpour, its passing left the whole town sweltering in a steaming heat, even more prostrating than before the storm. It was sticky enough in the permanent buildings, but in our temporary shack on Constitution Avenue, work became quite impossible, and we often sent the Bureau staff home in the early afternoons. And before that fateful summer could pass, lightning struck twice in the same place—BUAERO.

When Bruce Leighton had passed out to sea, most of his small staff went with him, having already overstayed their allotted period of duty on shore. Luckily, Ricco Botta, a lieutenant who had come in by way of the Naval Reserve, held over with me. A pilot, an engineer, and a skilled mechanic he had now become the practical wheelhorse of the Engine Section. Later on, Henry Mullinix joined up, bringing just the right qualities to balance out our little organization. Henry had been honor man in his class at Annapolis, had later led his flight class at Pensacola, and had finally completed the aviation postgraduate course at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with top honors. And along with his intellect, Henry had a fine personality and an admirable character. Our organization was rounded out by young Lt. (jg) Ralph Parsons, who now handled the highly technical liaison with the Aero Engine Laboratory at the Naval Aircraft Factory, Philadelphia, while Henry, Ricco, and I concentrated on the task of cleaning up the bugs in the engines and accessories under our cognizance.

Take, for instance, the Lawrance J-1 air-cooled radial engine, that coffee grinder on which all our hopes were based. It was so rickety that Lt. C. C. Champion, a rising young West Coast pilot, formally reported to BUAERO that, when embarking on a fifteen-mile cross-country flight from the Naval Air Station at North Island, near San Diego, to an emergency airport at Ream Field, down near the Mexican border, his squadron always carried a whole “quiverful” of spare push rods to replace those sure to be sprayed along the beach of the Coronado Silver Strand. Our treatment for this sort of trouble was to call in Charlie Lawrance or Guy Vaughan of Wright Aero and give them a session of plain and fancy kidding, with just the right amount of sting in it.

The magnetos for our air-cooled engines were something to write home about. Here was the instrument that provided the vital spark so essential to keep the engine ticking over, yet it had proved the least dependable of the parts of the high-strung mechanism behind which pilots risked their lives. And when we looked around for more promising sources of supply, none was to be found. The Delco Company, producers of the wartime Liberty battery-generator ignition systems, could not be interested in a new development; the volume to be expected was too small. The manufacturer of cheap truck magnetos, to whom we now looked, was willing to brighten up the outside finish but was unwilling to go further for the same reason—no volume. The board of directors of the great General Electric Company had, we were advised, studied the problem with ponderous care and finally concluded there was more money in electric light bulbs. A small privately owned company was willing to help, but lacked know-how. It looked like a stalemate until the Army Engineering Division at McCook Field discovered Scintilla.

Scintilla magnetos proved to be the answer to a maiden’s prayer. Made in Soleure, Switzerland, they could be bought through Tom Fagan, of New York, and at a reasonable price. However, since we could not place full dependence on a foreign source that might be cut off in time of war, we investigated the possibility of creating an American source. The Swiss company had an excess of machinery and personnel and was willing to export them, but the red tape surrounding such a transaction, even back there in the days when the United States government had faith in private enterprise, tied us hand and foot. To cut through the tangle involved so many risks that we should have been completely discouraged save that the other alternative was to accept responsibility for the deaths of youngsters who daily risked their lives in the air.

In dilemmas of this kind, resort might be had to what was politely called “memoranda for file” but known privately as “the cover-up.” A letter was prepared for the file covering the details of the proposed transaction and carried through the whole system to be finally approved by the Secretary of the Navy himself. Then, after the Great Seal of the Navy Department had been attached, and the author had privately retained a copy for his own use, the document was carefully filed away against the day when some Congressional investigation might be looking for a noteworthy scalp. When the spirit of cover-up gets into a business organization, the evil finally shows up in the financial results; in government it is just absorbed by the taxpayer.

It was through such a time-consuming process that we finally succeeded in transporting a part of the Swiss company bodily to the town of Sidney, New York, where it continued to be this country’s source of dependable magnetos. And the time even came when I had to flash the Great Seal of the Navy Department to keep from being crucified for bringing it here. Later, when Charles A. Lindbergh arrived in London, after having flown the Atlantic behind a Scintilla magneto, it turned out that the General Electric Company had all along had the license to manufacture the British Thompson Houston Company’s magneto, but no one in Schenectady had recalled the fact.

Meanwhile, in addition to concentrating on the job of keeping engines running, we had not neglected the other task of getting them started. The Aeromarine Inertia Starter, created by Chilton under Leighton’s initiative, though employing a quite novel principle—the utilization of energy stored in a flywheel—had developed into the most dependable and efficient device in our gear locker. When, therefore, Messrs. Charles Marcus and Raymond P. Lansing of the Eclipse Machine Company called on us with a view to interesting us in a line of electric starters they had developed for the Army, we presented them with an affable but none the less impenetrable front. Things electric not only involved heavy lead storage batteries, heavy copper motors, and everything else designed around “base metals,” but they always proved undependable and difficult to maintain. My years as engineer officer on a man-of-war had generated in me a sales resistance of many ohms.

On the day when we were honored with the visit from Charles Marcus and Ray Lansing, I bolstered my disinterest with a glowing and somewhat detailed account of the virtues of the Chilton starter and was somewhat taken aback by Charles Marcus’s suave remark that Aeromarine had infringed an Eclipse patent involving the fundamentals of the Bendix drive. Marcus doubted that Eclipse could let Aeromarine live at all, and his inference was that I should shift my enthusiasm over to the Army-type starter.

Patents, I now pointed out, were outside the jurisdiction of the Engine Section. If Eclipse elected to make trouble for us, that was their privilege. If, however, they wanted to make our kind of starters, that was also their privilege. The patent matter could be left to the courts. I noticed an intent expression on Charley Marcus’s face.

“Commander,” he said quietly, “your approach is new to us and we may find it difficult to conform at first, but from the point of view of development and the public interest, it looks so sound to us, we’ll play the game your way.”

The Eclipse Machine Company did play the game our way. They developed a new starter for the Lawrance radial, and when, on its first installation down at Pensacola, it developed the usual bugs, the company moved most of its shopmen down to the air station and campaigned the trouble so enthusiastically that they made more character out of their defects than Aeromarine gained out of its satisfactory equipment.

When, after several years, the patent matter finally came to trial, the examiner for the court remarked that he could not recall a similar case but thought everyone’s interests had been well served, as a result of the Bureau policy, and especially so the interests of the public.

Another perennial problem was spark plugs. It was almost incredible how sensitive such little things could be. One might think that the manufacturers should long ago have discovered all the secrets of such a simple device, and reduced the product to some degree of standardization. But everything in aviation was so high-strung, every device so sensitive, it seemed that just changing one minor dimension of a standard nut or bolt set in motion a whole chain reaction of troubles. Pressing always for higher power on lower weight, we created more and more troubles for ourselves. In this field we came to lean on the BG plug, and on Roy Hurley, its salesman, who was responsive to our suggestions and worked hard to improve his product. Mr. Goldsmith, the proprietor of the company, and a jewelry manufacturer, had turned to making spark plugs during World War I and now subordinated his other interests to doing a good job for aviation.

And so we fired away, searching for better accessories of every kind—a new fuel pump here, imported from France perhaps by Jimmy Diamond—a new carburetor there, produced by Stromberg under the wise direction of Leonard S. Hobbs—a new fuel developed by competing oil companies and fortified by Ethyl under the direction of Dr. Graham Edgar, of the Ethyl Corporation, and so on to cover the whole field. And in the process we began collecting a little group of sales engineers like Roy Hurley, Luke Hobbs, Tom Fagan, Ray Lansing, and others, men to whom we passed on the demands of the operating squadrons and with whom we connived to beat Old Man Trouble. To facilitate operations, we urged these key technicians to visit the flying units and get the word at first hand. We brought them into close contact with George Mead, of Wright, Arthur Nutt, of Curtiss, and Lionel Woolson, of Packard; and we keyed them in with our competitors out at McCook Field, so that we finally had a team of competitive yet cooperative agents, all working for the cause of dependable and durable power plants.

And behind our day-to-day jobs of trouble shooting on the accessory front, we had the major problem of engine development. Wright Aero, in order to earn the money with which to carry on their own experimental and development work, must first generate a reasonable volume of steady profitable business. This meant that we, and others, must buy enough airplanes to create the demand for new engines. But before we could do this, the airplanes must have been conceived, created, and tested. A number of aircraft had already been built around the air-cooled radial, among them the Chance Vought UO and the Curtiss TS, but the total was hardly impressive. Then Wright got a real break when it found a new home in Reuben Fleet’s Consolidated Army training plane.

Fleet, a former major in the Army Air Service, had created a new company up in Buffalo which he called Consolidated Aircraft, and had designed and built a new type of training plane. Using the welded-steel tubular construction introduced to the United States by Anthony Fokker, the Dutch manufacturer, Fleet had created an airplane that was easy to build, easy to maintain and, more important, extraordinarily safe. His welded-steel fuselages, unlike the old stick-and-wire type of the Army Jenny or its Navy counterpart, the N-9, wouldn’t splinter all to pieces in a crack-up nor punch holes in the ribs of hapless student aviators. The Army had tested the plane extensively and with such outstanding success that Fleet felt impelled to try to sell it to the Navy with obvious advantages to all parties.

This decision in itself was perhaps indicative of the audacity of one of aviation’s immortal enterprisers, for none knew better than Reuben Fleet what the handicaps were; as a former procurement officer at McCook Field, Fleet had played the old Army-Navy game hard. And it took a swashbuckler like Fleet to dare intimate that anything designed for the Army could be worth hell-room to the Navy. And he probably would not have got to first base either, save that he had been smart enough to use the air-cooled radial Wright instead of the war-surplus Hispano engine. The Engine Section, at least, could be expected to favor the adoption of the Army PT, in order to increase the use of the air-cooled engines. And Reuben Fleet was right on that score.

But there were formidable obstacles. Naval air training was centered at the Air Station, Pensacola, Florida, where the N-9 seaplane was well established as a local favorite. Nearly every pilot in the Navy had qualified on it and now cherished for it the affection of a kid for his first pony. In order to keep the ancient aircraft flying, the station had built up an assembly and repair department manned entirely by civilians from the town of Pensacola—skilled carpenters, riggers, and fabric workers, fully competent to overhaul the stick-and-wire N-9’s. As a matter of fact, they could build them new from the ground up, and this was where the rub lay. After an airplane had been washed out in a crack-up, it was supposed to be stricken from the list, an action that in due course would have absorbed all the war surplus and led to new construction. But at Pensacola, there were no washouts. In the local jargon, they just “jacked up the number plate and built a new airplane under it.”

And so in addition to the natural reluctance of the old-timers to make a change in type, there was the powerful vested interest of the Pensacola workmen. This fact, however, was never brought into the open. It appeared rather that the Consolidated NY had a nasty flying characteristic, probably inherited from its Army ancestry: it possessed an “abnormal spin” as compared with the N-9. If the “good old N-9” lost flying speed and stalled, it whipped suddenly into a spinning nose dive that would lead to a crash if the pilot did what came naturally and opened his throttle. If, however, he “cut the gun” and dived to regain flying speed, he could recover control. The object of much of the student’s early training was to get him to disobey that impulse and cut the gun in a spin. This, to our old-timers, was a “normal spin.”

The trouble with the Consolidated NY was that it was difficult to make it spin at all, and equally difficult to get it out of a true spin. The old-timers, passing over the obvious advantage of reluctance to spin at all, and the priceless benefit of a fuselage that could not splinter and poke holes in a pilot, now stressed the disadvantages of the new plane; how could you teach a pilot to get out of a spin if you couldn’t get him into one? To combat this argument and get the plane adopted so as to increase production of new Wright air-cooled engines was the task of the Engine Section. And the cockpit for the final contest was Admiral Moffett’s corner office and a meeting of what was called officially a “Bureau conference.” In the course of several contests here, I had begun to learn some of the ins and outs.

As the heads of divisions and chiefs of sections of BUAERO flocked into the admiral’s office that morning, each one took up his position more or less according to rank; that is, with captains and commanders on the admiral’s right. This suited me because I had come to learn that the discussion worked downward according to rank and that sometimes the last fellow to speak might turn the tide, especially if he could present some reasonable compromise. I knew, of course, that every man in the room had previously buttonholed the Old Man in an effort to sell his own bill of goods in advance, but that the admiral, who knew nothing about engineering and wanted to know even less, would now stimulate acrimonious discussion and draw his own conclusions from the discomfiture he saw on one man’s face or the triumph he observed on another.

And as the contest raged this particular morning, everyone knew the real issue, including the admiral, but no one mentioned it. Argument and discussion raged about every irrelevant aspect, but everyone ducked the matter of Pensacola’s vested interest. After a long while the admiral turned to me.

“Hasn’t the Engine Section anything to offer?” he asked, well knowing that of course it had.

“Well, sir,” I replied, “I’m afraid we’re too much an interested party to bear weight here. We think that the adoption of the Consolidated would lead to faster engine development and that this fact alone would justify a favorable decision.” The admiral didn’t bat an eye.

“If you’ve got a suggestion,” he said, “don’t be afraid to let us have it.”

“Well, sir,” I went on, “it seems to me that what this conference must decide is this: what do we really want to do—train pilots, or kill them?” There wasn’t a sound in the room. The admiral glanced from face to face and then stood up.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “if that’s your decision, it’s agreeable to me. But remember now,” he added, “I’ll expect every officer in the Bureau to pitch in and make this Consolidated airplane a success.”

As the conferees filed out through the door, I noticed the admiral watching me and detected the quick jerk of his head that signaled me to lag behind. He struck a match and took two puffs at his pipe.

“There’s a lot going on around here,” he remarked, using the very words with which he had received me the morning I reported to him. “I can’t keep track of all of it,” he added, and then with a grin that drew down the tight corners of his mouth, “keep your eyes open. If you see anything you think needs handling, take care of it, whether or not it comes under your department.”

As we moved toward the door the admiral caught my elbow.

“That fellow Mitchell is on the rampage again,” he said. “The Army has decided to order him to Texas to get him out of Washington. But he’ll break out at the worst time, wherever he is.” He struck another match and took two reflective puffs on his pipe.

“Keep your eye on him,” he concluded, “and be ready to lend a hand with the counterpublicity.”

CHAPTER SIX
What the Doctor Ordered

The “Affair Fleet,” as the celebrated episode of the Consolidated training plane came to be called in BUAERO, not only marked the advancement of the Engine Section from the limited environment of trouble-shooting into the more intricate realms of Bureau politics, but it also forecast our early graduation into the more creative field of aircraft engine development. And this important transition dated from a visit to the Engine Section by an aircraft manufacturer, Chance Milton Vought, president of the Chance Vought Corporation, of Long Island City, New York, a man with a waxed moustache and a fertile brain from which sprang the idea that touched off a chain reaction destined to alter the whole course of aviation.

Chance Vought was perhaps the most colorful of the unique personalities who made up the “airplane trade” as differentiated from the “engine trade.” Unlike Glenn L. Martin, whose tastes then inclined to rather dressy suits, Chance favored the tweedy look. With dark hair and eyebrows and his blond moustache, he was our example of sartorial perfection—except upon certain occasions.

After he had about completed one contract and had begun to feel the pressing need for another, he would make his appearance in the Bureau in a dilapidated tweed suit, under a moth-eaten coonskin coat, wearing a lean and hungry look, and talking very poor. At least he tried to make his look lean and hungry, but behind the façade still shone the dapper first-nighter of Keith’s Palace Theatre. Of course everyone was wise to the act, and since Chance himself was one of the wisest, he knew they were, and the recurrence of the cycle of poverty had become a source of amusement tending to soften up whatever sales resistance might develop.

This was a period of one-man organizations, when a Don Douglas, a Dutch Kindleberger, a Tony Fokker, or an Igor Sikorsky carried under the crown of his hat all there was to know about aircraft engineering. Most of these men dealt with the Design Section, located in larger quarters up the corridor from the Engine Section, but as time passed, and especially after the “Affair Fleet,” others like Claire Egtvedt, of the Boeing Company, out in Seattle, and Chance Vought began filtering into the Engine Section. And now as Chance slid through our door, rigged out in his tramp regalia, the Section gathered around my desk for a little plain and fancy kidding. Although the room was warm, Chance was too much the showman to offer to take off the coat. Instead, he posed his question.

“What’s cooking?” he inquired, biting his waxed moustache.

“Nothing’s cooking,” I countered. “In fact, I can report ‘eight o’clock lights and galley fires out’ like any other good sailor.”

Chance grinned. “I’m running out of work,” he said, “and if I can’t get a new contract soon I’ll have to close up shop.”

Henry Mullinix shook his head as he put in his oar. “Mr. Vought,” he said, “you must know that your little UO, once the sweetest little job in the air, has now become so overloaded it can hardly stagger off a catapult. Surely you don’t expect the Bureau to buy any more trucks like that?”

Chance bristled with indignation. “It’s the Bureau’s own fault,” he snorted. “They’ve added everything to it from automatic toilets to hot and cold running radios.”

Ricco Botta added his salt to the wound. “It’s still a kluck,” he said, “no matter how you alibi it.”

As Chance opened his mouth to retort, I gave him the coup de grâce. “Fact is, you’ve come to the end of your rope. If you want to do more business with this Bureau,” I concluded, “you may as well make up your mind to create something new.”

Chance sat silent, fingering his moustache. “Do you really mean that?” he inquired.

“We’re your friends,” I replied. Chance sat quietly as if debating his next course, and then, having made up his mind, he sprang a bombshell.

“All right, my friends,” he said with a smile, “I’ve got a new airplane on the boards—one that will set the world on fire. But the new airplane calls for a new engine; I want three hundred and fifty real horsepower but on an engine weight of not over 650 pounds. If the Engine Section will give me that, I’ll give the Bureau the world’s best airplane.”

The room became very still; all kidding had fled right out the window. Chance had passed the buck right back to the Engine Section; he’d written the prescription for a new power plant. And furthermore we realized he was absolutely right in his choice of size; the Wright 200 air-cooled, which by now was being called the “Whirlwind,” was only a zephyr. The Wright 400-hp P-2, later named the “Cyclone,” was overweight for Chance. Something about halfway between seemed to be the answer, and Chance had called the turn. The catapults on the battleships and cruisers, together with their hoisting gear and other equipment, had been designed to handle a limited weight, and this, in turn, controlled the size of our new airplane. The weight of the engine determined the final all-up weight of the aircraft, and the power output was dictated by the necessity for getting the plane up to flying speed before it reached the end of the catapult. And while there was no such limitation on aircraft carriers, like the new Lexington and Saratoga, then building in the shipyards, the over-all size of the airplanes would determine the number each carrier might line up on her flight deck. The Vought prescription would also lead to a new type of fighter, smaller than anything around the P-2 but with higher performance.

Better still, Chance Vought’s new engine seemed to lie within the realm of possibility. The 200-hp Whirlwind had a cylinder volume of some 800 cubic inches; the bigger Cyclone, at 450 hp, had about 1,650 cubic inches. A Wright engine just between these two might displace about 1,200 cubic inches, and conceivably be made to develop 350 horsepower. Chance had put the job up to us and we would put it up to Wright.

“All right, Chance,” I said soberly enough, “you go on back to Long Island and start work; we’ll get your engine for you.” Chance Vought relaxed and grinned back at me.

“Meanwhile,” he inquired, “what will I do to keep the shop open?”

“Go call on Commander Kraus, over in Procurement,” I replied. “Tell him about this discussion. Maybe he can scrape up an order for enough UO’s to keep you ticking.”

As soon as Chance had left the room, I telephoned Charlie Lawrance and Guy Vaughan, of Wright Aero, and asked them to take the midnight train down for a conference the next day. They were not too enthusiastic at first, fearing that a completely new engine on top of their already heavy load might break them down. But we compromised on a proposal to scale the P-2 model down to about 1,200 inches displacement, without undertaking a completely new design. This was not so crazy as it might sound, for while you couldn’t scale an engine up with any hope of success, you could scale it down if you were willing to accept a few compromises on weight. We were willing and Wright was agreeable. Thus was born the Wright R-1200, or Simoon, an engine that, though it never went into production, still had its impact on naval aviation.

The reason why it never got into production appeared nearly a year later in the person of Mr. Frederick B. Rentschler, former president of Wright Aeronautical Corporation, who walked in on us one morning carrying a dilapidated cowhide brief case and looking even thinner than when I had first met him on that visit with Bruce Leighton, a year earlier. I recalled that in his argument with Leighton over air-cooled versus liquid-cooled he had shown dogged singleness of purpose and ability to reason logically. He had resigned from the presidency of Wright Aero shortly afterward, and for reasons which I had not learned. Now he began to tell me.

It seemed there had been some disagreement on financial policy between him and Dick Hoyt, chairman of the board. Hoyt had wanted to declare a dividend out of earnings from the Army contract for Hispano H engines; Rentschler had insisted on retaining earnings for investment in engineering development. Finally Rentschler had resigned. It had been rumored that he and Hoyt had disagreed over the acquisition by Wright of the Lawrance engine, but Rentschler now made no reference to this. After his resignation from Wright he had intended going back to Hamilton, Ohio, to his father’s foundry business, the firm of Hooven, Owens, Rentschler. His father had been certain that the aviation business held no future, but aviation had got into his blood. During a spell in the hospital, he had made up his mind to stay in the game and had given consideration to what he might do to help out.

It was his considered opinion that we needed more competition than we could possibly get under present circumstances. The Curtiss company had no serious interest in air-cooled engines; on the contrary, they were committed to liquid-cooled. Wright, he thought, was unlikely to progress as rapidly as we required, especially under its present management. He knew the inside thinking of both Curtiss and Wright, and was certain that an ultimate merger of the two companies was not an impossibility; as a matter of fact, if the Wright air-cooled engine got threatening, Curtiss might move toward merger and control. The import of his remark was not lost on the Engine Section.

For in taking the decision to support the air-cooled program in competition with the more advanced liquid-cooled development, we had counted heavily on competition in private industry as the vital spark. This merger idea, somewhat new in that era of private initiative, was of course wholly unexpected by such business amateurs as then comprised the Engine Section. The threat to our whole air-cooled program was so immediate, however, that we listened with rapt attention to our visitor.

He now proposed to organize a company to design and construct air-cooled aircraft engines for the Bureau. He had interested the Niles Tool Company in his project, and had their approval to his taking over certain vacant loft areas in the huge plant of the Pratt and Whitney Tool Company, of Hartford, Connecticut. That company, having expanded its facilities to meet excess demands in World War I, now rented the extra space for use as a tobacco warehouse. He had received assurances as to the necessary capital; Pratt and Whitney had idle funds it could advance to a new enterprise willing to rent its excess facilities. The company had extra machine tools and trained supervision and Hartford was a fine labor market for the machinists and craftsmen so necessary for precise aircraft-engine production. He proposed to select a small group of the most experienced engineers and production men in the business and to build around this nucleus the best organization in aviation. Competition from such a group would give the Navy the superior engines it so badly needed.

As Rentschler completed his airtight proposal, I was struck by the sheer logic of his presentation. He’d apparently thought it all through and made himself letter perfect. But there was one big drawback which I now pointed out to him.

We would welcome competition, but current appropriations would hardly support Wright Aeronautical, let alone a new company. We had tried to make such progress through good leadership as might approximate the benefits of strong competition, and had so far succeeded fairly well. Wright Aeronautical had spared no efforts to make dependable air-cooled engines, but Curtiss had not been pushing their R-1454. This had left us with but one source of supply and made us vulnerable to criticism by Congressional investigation, which might charge us with supporting a monopoly. This took us into the field of policy, which was the province of the chief of Bureau, so we decided that perhaps we had best put the proposal before him.

When we were ushered into the admiral’s sunny corner office, I noticed a newspaperman, George S. Wheat, sitting in one of the easy chairs. Quite a crony of the admiral’s, he had worked for Wright Aeronautical back in the period when Rentschler had been its president. I now associated him, therefore, with Wright, and was somewhat surprised when he made no move to leave the room. It didn’t occur to me at the time that he might be a part of Rentschler’s approach to the subject of the new company, and I didn’t learn the facts until years later. Then George confessed that Rentschler, prior to invading my office, had inquired about the new chief of the Engine Section, and that George had described me as an opinionated somebody who apparently knew where he was going. But in Admiral Moffett’s office that morning, suspecting no connection between the two men, I plunged into my statement.

The admiral listened attentively until I had finished and then made a quick decision.

“This Bureau,” he began, “is wide open to criticism for supporting an engine monopoly. We know it isn’t so, but that won’t prevent our being smeared by headlines. I realize we haven’t the necessary appropriations, but you leave that to me; I’ll wangle them out of Congress. If you can work out anything reasonable with these men, go ahead; I’ll approve whatever you recommend.”

As I turned to go, the admiral called me back. Some time earlier he had instructed me to prepare a statement for his presentation to a Congressional committee in support of his proposal to junk the war-surplus Liberties and Hispanos and buy new engines. I had given him a rather technical treatise, pointing out the superior aerodynamic performance to be had with the new engines. This he had promptly tossed back in my lap with a remark that Congress had no interest in performance; they wanted to save cash. Now that incident came to his mind and he inquired if I had made any progress.

“Yes, sir,” I replied, “I’ve looked up the records and found that it costs about a thousand dollars to convert an old Liberty into one incorporating all the new changes. After that we can get seventy-five-hours flying time out of it before we have to put in another converted one. For three hundred hours flying time, we spend four thousand dollars on conversions. Meanwhile we can get a new Wright Whirlwind for about the same money and run it for three hundred hours without overhaul.” The admiral smiled.

“That’s more like it,” he said. “Even I can understand that kind of engineering, and so can a Congressman. It’s cheaper to scrap junk than try to save it!”

“Exactly,” I replied.

“Well,” the admiral smiled, as he waved us out the door, “see if you can dream up something like that on this new engine.”

When our party returned to the Engine Section, we gathered once more around my desk. Rentschler asked what size engine we thought he should build and I gave him the background of the Wright R-1200 Simoon, especially the basis on which Chance Vought had written the prescription. However, I intimated, Wright had been working on that nearly a year and might have a prohibitive head start.

Rentschler wasn’t so sure; Wright had a heavy load with two new engines and the task of developing the third, the Whirlwind. A good engineering outfit, with no production problems and only one project, ought go places; starting off with a clean sheet of paper and no commitments as to old tools or techniques, they might even have the advantage. But they must be sure of their basic design principles. The Wright R-1200, a scaled-down P-2, would suffer certain handicaps inherent in the process; the new engine might generate the 350 horsepower on less weight.

It looked to me as though they should try the other way around. Keeping the 650-pound weight Chance had specified, they might put their advantage into greater power. Any airplane man would snap at this advantage and thus become an ally. Furthermore, it seemed to me, if by clever design the new company could build more cylinder capacity into the engine and still keep the specified weight, and if by cylinder refinement they could take out more power for each cubic inch of displacement, they might gain an outstanding advantage. This, in turn, might compensate for some of the time advantage Wright had already gained.

This idea seemed to enlist just a tinge of enthusiasm from Rentschler, who was most serious and calculating. Doing a job seemed a fetish with him and he lacked humor where business was concerned. He moved now to the question of an experimental contract. Since we had given one to Wright Aero for the R-1200 Simoon, he presumed, of course, we would do as much for him.

This was a matter on which I had to throw cold water. Wright, I informed Rentschler, was a going concern complete with management, production facilities, engineering, and experience. His new company was still but a figment of his own imagination and I could not recommend to Kraus that he risk public funds in support of anything so ephemeral. Admiral Moffett had earlier obtained an appropriation of $90,000 from Congress for an experimental engine. The best I could do for Rentschler was to earmark the fund and hold it in reserve for his project. If he built an engine that fulfilled our requirements, the fund would be available to help compensate him; after that the engine would stand on the same basis as the Wright—the best job would take the business.

After this statement, Rentschler sat a long while in thought. I could see he was greatly disappointed.

“Well,” he said finally, “if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is, but I think you’re pretty tough with me.”

I didn’t agree with him. The moment a contractor accepted a contract with the government he was obliged to grant his customer some control over the project. Such a division of authority was bound to slow a development and might even compromise its integrity. But as long as the contractor risked only his own money, then he had full authority over how he spent it, and no one could interfere. Furthermore, in this case, time was of the essence even more than usual, and when a contractor is wasting his own money and time, he is less complacent about it than if it belongs to Uncle Sam. The medicine might look bitter to Rentschler, but in the long run it must prove more effective. And more important than all, the moment he began risking his own funds for our advantage we inherited a moral responsibility to give him every reasonable assistance—and this we did.

From that date forward, Rentschler made it a point to visit the Bureau from week to week to keep us advised of progress. His first surprise was the news that he had collected a small group of men, mostly drawn from Wright Aero, as the nucleus of his organization; and he had shown rare judgment in picking the ablest of them. There was Don Brown from the shop, Andy Willgoos and George Mead from engineering, Jack Borrup and Charles Marks on the tooling side, and so on, to include upwards of a dozen really competent men. The impact on Wright Aero would prove severe and replacements would be hard to find.

George Mead arrived in Washington early in June on a day when my wife and I had planned to run over to Annapolis for the June Week exercises—we had first met there and loved the little town. Going back and forth in the car, George and I first discussed the design principles for the new engine. Of course the enclosed valve gear and rotary induction of the R-1454 were musts, but we rejected that engine’s arrangement of accessories on the front end; we would tuck ours on the rear out of the salt spray. We would split the crankshaft in two pieces, as George had done on an earlier engine, and would divide the crankcase similarly. As we talked, George sketched the ideas on the back of an envelope and captioned them in his precise printed letters. Later, we found some of our principles had already been used in the British Bristol Jupiter, but for the moment we glowed with the enthusiasm of creators of a new art.