Chapter Fifteen

Creation of Strategic Concept

The return of FLEET AIR to San Diego coincided with the commencement of the summer concentration period of 1928, and now with the two big carriers Lexington and Saratoga anchored off Long Beach, ninety miles to the north, their squadrons trained ashore at North Island under the direct command of Admiral Reeves. Scuttlebutt rumor had it that the next fleet problem would take place off Panama early the coming year, and this directed all staff efforts toward sound preparation for the big show. In all this we felt a certain sense of urgency; now was the time to show the battle wagons what we could do, and thus “sell aviation to the fleet.” Underneath the daily routine we somehow sensed that we were dealing with high destiny, though our course was never completely clear. What ultimately developed was not the direct result of anyone’s far-sighted vision; it just came naturally out of the conflict of forces and events.

At that period, the Navy had settled down into a certain organization and procedure that had evolved out of years of experience. The fundamental concept of the fleet setup had been derived from a somewhat shallow reading of Mahan and somewhat superficial instruction at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Mahan, in the evolution of his thesis on sea power, had made a painstaking analysis of history, and especially of naval history. Since he studiously excluded theory and opinion, drawing his conclusions from the record, he was able to present convincing evidence in support of his thesis that victory in war and prosperity in peace have always resided with that nation which controls communication by sea. The foundation of sea power is maritime commerce.

The United States Naval War College at Newport held classes in naval tactics and worked out tactical problems on the maneuvering board. For their precepts they naturally looked to Mahan’s classic studies and thus became imbued with the tactics of the battle line as employed by Nelson, the great English admiral. From a continued emphasis on the battle line and a general understanding of the role of sea power in history, it was easy to conclude that sea power and the navy were synonymous. The modern counterpart of this loose doctrine is the prevalent belief that strategic bombardment is air power.

The administrative organization of the Battle Fleet revolved around the battleships—the so-called “backbone of sea power.” The big-gun carriers based at Long Beach behind the breakwater where they found nearby plenty of sea room. The destroyer squadrons, then called DESRONS, the submarine divisions, or SUBDIVS, and the aircraft squadrons, or AIRONS, based on San Diego, ninety miles further south. For purposes of administration and elementary training, each of these units operated separately under the supervision of the commander in chief. Once each month, the fleet as a whole conducted combined tactical exercises off the coast. Yet even here the forces operated largely under the command of their administrative staffs. The idea of breaking up the several administrative units and reassembling them as task organizations so constituted as to bring to bear such a concentration of heavy guns, long-range torpedoes, and mobile aircraft as appeared necessary to the accomplishment of a particular mission had not as yet evolved. It was to grow out of the peculiar conditions that prevailed in the aircraft squadrons: the big carriers could find suitable anchorages and deep-water operating areas only at Long Beach; their aircraft could find adequate training and repair facilities only at the Naval Air Station, San Diego.

It was customary to change personnel just before the concentration, sending about half of them to “shore” or other duty, and receiving a new batch of students from Pensacola to be trained “at sea.” Half of the squadron officers changed at this time as well, a fact that dictated a fresh start on fundamental tactics each year. In view of this fact I determined upon a revolutionary procedure. Instead of accepting the ordinary run-of-the-mine officers sent to us by the Bureau of Navigation for duty in certain specified units, we would jump the gun and insist upon the right to select our own squadron commanders and assign other officers to such squadrons as seemed appropriate to us. When we suggested this selective process to Admiral Reeves, he smiled tolerantly and invited us to go ahead, intimating that we would be wasting our time. For the Bureau of Navigation usually selected its officers and made its assignments with little or no regard for their aptitude for the jobs in mind. Someone had long ago worked out a system designed to expose every officer to an equal amount of duty in every line, so as to afford him an equal opportunity to advance in rank, whether or not he possessed qualities of leadership.

But if the factor of leadership had fallen into low estate in Washington, it still rated high in the aircraft squadrons. Frank Wagner and I had observed the vast differences in character displayed by ships and organizations, and had noted that each had seemed to take on some of the personality and character of the man or men who had founded it, and to retain that personality and character no matter who had succeeded to command. If the U.S.S. Taddlyadlie started out as a “smart ship,” she would always be a smart ship; and if the U.S.S. Tiddlywinks started as a “madhouse,” her career would become a series of variations of that theme. With that idea in mind, we determined to give the aircraft squadrons a propitious start and began some tall wangling to gain our ends. For this we brought two powerful arguments to bear: the lives of pilots depended upon the quality of the leaders; if we were to be held responsible, we must have authority over our leadership selections. In our tough battle against this leveling system we won every skirmish but one—a squadron that suffered our only breakdown in morale.

While focusing attention on the quality of leadership of our subordinates, we did a little soul searching of our own. The rapid development of gadgetry in the Navy had tended to create a special group of staff-officer specialists who had become “plank owners” on various staffs. Thus the intricacies of steam engineering, or gunnery, or radio communications, or what have you, had become so mysterious to the average line officer that the specialists had taken over a lot of authorities without accepting the corresponding responsibilities. An admiral, for instance, might sign out a long-winded technical document without being able to pronounce the words, or he might let his radio officer sign the paper “by direction.” The addressee would turn the masterpiece over to his radio officer for reply, and thus accept responsibility for fundamental decisions fogged up by technical jargon. Even Admiral Reeves had tended to shift the administrative authorities to me and the operations to Frank Wagner. But Frank and I determined to have none of that; we directed these matters right back to the admiral.

Contrary to naval custom we sought to build up the admiral and play ourselves down. For instance, after having prepared an order for the Old Man’s signature, we would urge him to call a conference of squadron commanders to indoctrinate them in his plan. A fine speaker, one possessed of unusual knowledge of military history, of policy, strategy, and tactics, he often held us spellbound by his entertaining and instructive discourses spiced by keen wit. Wagner and I would grasp every favorable occasion to suggest a commendatory signal to a subordinate who had distinguished himself; similarly we saw to it that the admiral got word of any complimentary comment from his subordinates. In other words, we made it our first order of business to develop loyalty both ways—up and down. The time soon came when a squadron commander remarked, “If Bull Reeves told us to fly into the side of a mountain, we’d fly—and likely come out safe on the other side!”

We also gave critical attention to our own performance of staff functions stressing especially our communications procedures and techniques. On the matériel side we took extreme pains to train our “mechs” and to emphasize the importance of preventive engineering. Under this doctrine, it became the task of the maintenance crews to discover incipient failures and correct them before they could induce forced landings or other accident. Having good, sound, new equipment to start with, we were able to reduce mechanical failures almost to the vanishing point and to abolish them entirely from over-water operations.

On the important morale side, Frank Wagner was the key to success. Intimately acquainted with the younger pilots as he was, and an active participant in their social affairs, Frank could watch their reactions and recommend actions designed to keep them all at a high pitch of enthusiasm. One day, after we had been pressing hard toward perfection, Frank came to me with a long face; he feared the kids were getting stale. He thought we should secure all flying for several days and actually order the pilots off the station and away from their jobs. When we went in to see the admiral, concealing our misgivings as to this revolutionary idea, the Old Man threw back his head and parted his beard in a laugh that must have carried clear down to the Langley dock.

“Go to it!” he shouted. “And Wagner,” he added, “a little visit across the Mexican border to Tijauna might help you get a smile back on your own face.”

As the summer developed, two special projects helped bring our new outfits to a high degree of precision: the city of San Diego planned to dedicate Lindbergh Field, and the city of Los Angeles would be host to the national air races in dedication of Mines Field. This gave the staff an opportunity to keep the squadrons practicing their close formations, a drill that tended to bore them; they preferred the dive-and-zoom of practical combat exercises. But now, returning from the many operating areas Frank had established in the back country, they passed in review before the admiral’s critical eye, flying wing-and-tail in tight parade formations. Tommy Tomlinson, with the first section of his squadron, began practicing section acrobatics, putting on a rhythmic show of breathtaking formation loops, rolls, and dives.

At the dedication of Lindbergh Field, the overcast lay so close to the surface that, save for fine air discipline, we should have had to call off our participation. Instead, we flew some four hundred fleet aircraft in a thrilling fly past, at low altitude, with the tails of the formations lost in the clouds. Later at the National Air Races in Los Angeles, Tommy’s Three Sea Hawks stopped the show with their precision acrobatics. The Army responded with their Three Musketeers. When one of their team was unfortunately killed in an accident, Charles Lindbergh, stepping into the lead position, gave the crowd a sample, not alone of his own flying, but also of the quality of his teamwork and personal leadership.

It was in the National Air Races, too, that the air-cooled engine finally triumphed completely over liquid-cooled. A year earlier, Claire Egtvedt had come down from Seattle to get our ideas on the specifications for a new plane to replace his current production F3B. Primed by me, the admiral had given him the requirements for what had since become the first experimental single-seat fighter bomber, the XF4B. Flown by Tom Jeter in the free-for-all pursuit race, this airplane won handily, running away from the special souped-up liquid-cooled entries. Later in a special event promoted by Bill Boeing, a race to altitude from a standing start, Mort Seligman, in the XF4B, executed a triumphant loop over the T4M station ship cruising at 10,000 feet above the thronged grandstand, and dived back onto the field before the nearest competitor could climb to the target. Jim Fechet, Chief of the Army Air Service, followed Bill onto the field to get the Army’s first order in ahead of the Navy. In subsequent years this basic airplane served both Army and Navy, the one as P-12, the other as F4B, with variations to suit the special requirements of each.

Returning to San Diego, we spent the autumn of 1928 at gunnery training, interspersed by monthly tactical exercises with the fleet. All three carriers and their squadrons operated in conjunction with cruisers, destroyers, and submarines against a simulated enemy battle line and in support of our own “backbone.” Yet even as we developed intricate joint attacks under this time-honored doctrine, we in COMAIRONS began to flirt with a revolutionary concept: maybe our task force could defeat the battle line singlehanded! From here to the fantastic proposal to use battle wagons in support of aircraft carriers was a terrific mental leap. When the detailed plans for the winter exercises became available, we drew a long breath and took it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Maneuver for Position

When the commander in chief released the preliminary statement of the 1929 fleet problem, we in COMAIRONS staff wore broad smiles of satisfaction. For while the exercises contemplated a conventional assault on the defenses of the Panama Canal, the problem was so stated as to convince us that the high command was beginning at last to recognize the role of the carrier in warfare at sea. A “red” fleet, comprising the modern battleships then based in the Pacific with its accompanying submarines, destroyers, and train, moving into the Gulf of Panama with the object of attacking the Canal, would be opposed by a friendly “blue” fleet which had just transited the Canal and moved out into the Gulf to defend it. The blue fleet comprised the vessels of the scouting fleet, then based in the Atlantic but reinforced by the Lexington and Langley from the “battle fleet” of the Pacific. This gave the defenders an air force comprising all the Army and Navy shore-based aircraft in the Panama Canal Zone, the aircraft of the scouting fleet then based on my old seaplane tender, the Wright, and the planes of the Langley and Lexington; it left to the attackers the Saratoga and her planes, under the command of Admiral Reeves.

In the past, these Panama maneuvers had been stereotyped battle-line tactics with the battle wagons steaming majestically behind a destroyer-laid smoke screen while bombarding the Canal with their turret guns at maximum range. After the fleet had fired a few blank charges or “primers” to simulate long-range attack and its airplanes had been “shot down” by the local defenders, the vessels would proceed to their anchorage in the Bay of Panama and all hands would go ashore for a big bust at the Union Club. Later there would be a “critique” in which the high rankers would stand up before a congregation of Army-Navy officers and alibi their failures, or try to impress their personalities upon the assembly. Following this, the social whirl would begin and fleet grand tactics would be put aside until another year.

This time we proposed to spring something new. Instead of tying Big Sara to the apron strings of the battle wagons, we would propose that she be detached from the slow elements and sent on a wide southerly detour past the Galápagos Islands, along the north coast of South America, into the Gulf of Panama, through the screen of defending vessels, and up to a point where we might launch a predawn sneak attack on the Canal locks. The single drawback to our plan was the fact that the only vessel with enough high-speed cruising endurance to accompany Big Sara was the light cruiser Omaha, flagship of Adm. Thomas J. Senn, Commander, Destroyer Squadrons. However, Admiral Reeves and Admiral Senn were warm personal friends. Capt. Harold R. Stark, Admiral Senn’s chief of staff, and I were on terms of warm regard. We decided to chance submitting the fantastic proposal that a senior unit commander be deprived of his flagship to plane-guard Big Sara.

Meanwhile, storm clouds had begun to darken our political horizon. With the close of the concentration period, we had come face to face with the moot question as to the relationships of carrier squadrons to their carriers. Based on our experience we prepared a letter recommending such changes in the Navy Regulations as would permit the commanding officers of carriers to exercise administrative control over their squadrons, yet still preserve their freedom for assignment by the admiral to task forces and give to him the tactical command. By this time, Capt. E. J. King had assumed command of the Lexington, and Capt. Harry E. Yarnell of the Saratoga. Both were extremely able men but with quite different temperaments. Captain King had positive ideas for which he fought with determination; Captain Yarnell, while equally clear in his opinions, approached the problem with judicious moderation. In both the Lexington and the Saratoga, the positive convictions that the squadrons should be treated like gun divisions as an integral part of the ship rested largely with the old-line aviators running the air departments. And so we had a major difference of opinion in which senior naval aviators battled to keep the squadrons subservient to the carriers while we line officers, basing our convictions on practical experience, battled to keep the aircraft squadrons free. On the staff, we argued that the carriers existed for the squadrons; on the ships, they seemed to think it was the other way around. This conflict came at a time when our Washington fences were none too secure.

The fact that Admiral Moffett would complete his second full term as a bureau chief early in the coming year had intensified the efforts of his enemies to deny him reappointment. Their candidate for his relief was Admiral Reeves, and as a palliative they suggested that Admiral Moffett take over command of the Aircraft Squadrons, Battle Fleet. To us on the staff, the whole thing looked like a tempest in a teapot and we, of course, took no position. Admiral Reeves busied himself with preparations for the fleet problem and expressed amusement over Washington politics. Then came the news that some of the boys in the Bureau now had a foot out for me, and had represented me to Admiral Moffett as a turncoat—a former Moffett man now gone full out for Bull Reeves. Aside from the impact of this conflict upon our personal fortunes, there was the question as to what position BUAERO would take in the matter of the relationships of squadrons to carriers. But more important still, such a warm front of political turbulence afforded a poor climate in which to make our big play for recognition of naval aviation in the forthcoming fleet problem.

Now at the height of our concern for the future, we got a wallop in the solar plexus that all but sent us down for the count. When the commander in chief finally issued his own estimate of the fleet problem and his operation orders for it, there was no reference whatever to our proposal for a sneak attack with the Saratoga. The battle wagons would do their time-honored square dance behind a destroyer smoke screen; they would fire a few gun primers and exercise their fire control; then they would proceed to the anchorage and hit the beach for a big party at the Union Club. When Frank Wagner brought the news to me and we both dropped into the admiral’s office, he lifted his beard from his paper work to stare at us with amazement.

“Whatever it is,” he boomed, “it can’t be as bad as you men look.” After Frank had briefed him on the disappointing situation, Admiral Reeves reached for a message blank and drafted a dispatch to the commander in chief at San Pedro, asking for a conference for himself and staff on the subject of the fleet problem.

Next morning COMAIRONS and staff took off for San Pedro in a flight of three Loening amphibians, the admiral riding as my passenger. As we mounted the flagship’s side ladder to her quarterdeck, we were met at the rail by the ship’s captain, none other than Claude C. Bloch, the man who had counseled my wife to get me out of the side shows and back under the main tent.

Admiral Pratt, his blouse unbuttoned to reveal an old-fashioned stiff-bosomed white shirt, received us in his cabin. Seated behind the usual billiard-cloth-covered table, he inquired courteously in his State-of-Maine accent to what he owed this visit from so distinguished a group. To Admiral Reeves’s inquiry whether Admiral Pratt had read our estimate of the situation for the fleet problem, the commander in chief replied in the negative; he had left the matter in the hands of his assistant chief of staff. His earlier rejection of our big idea had been doubly disappointing because we respected him as a sailorman of the old school and a man highly regarded as a strategist and tactician. With the news that he had not known of our proposal, our hopes began to revive.

Admiral Reeves swept in his outline with deft strokes: The Saratoga would launch her aircraft two hours before dawn from a point some 150 miles away from the Canal. To reach that point where she would rendezvous with Admiral Pratt’s battleships, the Saratoga would steam all night at 30 knots, accompanied only by the Omaha, her plane guard. In the 10 hours of darkness between sunset and the launching time, the Saratoga would cover 300 miles. This, added to the 150-mile launching range, would put her 450 miles from Panama the night before the attack. During the previous day she would have run 360 miles more, and these distances were such that the enemy could hardly scout the possible areas of approach with any certainty of discovering the Saratoga. There was an excellent chance that we might get in undetected.

Admiral Pratt listened carefully and then put his finger on the one weak spot. He feared that if we launched aircraft that far at sea and lost even a single pilot, the reaction of public opinion at home might be most unfavorable.

Admiral Reeves replied that when he had offered the same objection I had produced the surprising record of the year’s operations. Using the new equipment provided by BUAERO we had gone through a full year without mechanical failure over the sea. Since we were drilling constantly to avoid cockpit failures it was reasonable to expect that we would have a similarly clean record off Panama.

Satisfied by the logic of this, Admiral Pratt began to warm to the whole idea. He suggested that, while it was now too late to change the orders all ready issued, this very fact might be converted to our advantage. The problem could be made a better exercise if we kept the new plan a secret among ourselves while he arranged later to spring a sudden change of orders on his fleet. He proposed to stop the formation somewhere along the west coast of Mexico, send out new orders by guard boat, release the Saratoga for her wide southerly detour, and, incidentally, profit by the element of surprise inherent in radio silence.

When COMAIRONS and his staff departed the flagship, we walked on air.

The fleet sailed on schedule, maneuvering down along the Mexican coast, with the Saratoga rehearsing her part with predawn take-offs and rendezvous. At the time we had no night-flying equipment and had done little night flying; but we had discipline, which was better than any equipment. Then one day the fleet flag made a signal for the fleet to stop and send boats for mail. When we opened our orders we found that Admiral Pratt had assigned the Omaha to us as Saratoga’s plane guard, but instead of transferring the DESRONS flag to a destroyer, had left Admiral Senn, Harold Stark, and all the staff on board.

As the Omaha, lifting in the swell, ranged up alongside the Saratoga, Admiral Senn, although Admiral Reeves’s senior, hailed the Big Sara from his bridge by megaphone. “What do you want me to do, Bull?” he inquired.

Now we began working our speed up to twenty knots, proceeding in company with the Omaha leading the way on our epoch-making wide southerly detour. And as the Big Sara’s decks trembled under the thrust of her great screws, we on COMAIRONS’ staff began to feel a tremor around our hearts. Looking back into the vessel’s boiling wake we could see the churnings of white water as the vast power of her great motors drove her forward; a portion of the energy went into slip, but by far the largest part of it went into effective forward thrust. In that turbulence we could visualize what went on quite unseen in the slipstream of aviation, that remorseless force which was driving us at such breathtaking speed.

From our lofty perch on the flag bridge we could count sixty-six airplanes trembling there in the breeze that swept across the deck straining them against their lashings and wheel chocks. Out in front stood thirty-six Boeing fighters with air-cooled radial engines, airplanes we had not dreamed about five years earlier when I had sat in the anteroom off Admiral Moffett’s office in BUAERO. Behind the fighters ranged twelve Vought Corsair scouts, conceived and constructed by Chance Vought, who had written the prescription for the Pratt and Whitney Wasp. Back on the fantail, their biplane wings folded, nested eighteen Martin T4M torpedo-bomber scouts, three-seaters built around the Pratt and Whitney Hornet, an engine that even George Mead, who had created it, had solemnly stated in writing was “quite impossible.”

As the crews milled about on deck, checking a cockpit cover here or a lashing there, the squadron commanders supervised their work. There was cagey old “Skinny” Wick, skipper of Fighting One, the squadron that wore the high hat insignia on its fuselages. Commanding the other fighter squadron was brilliant Art Davis. The celebrated Three Sea Hawks, with Art as their new leader, comprised the first section of this command but the entire outfit could now match the leading section in smooth squadron acrobatics. In command of our scout-bomber squadron we had that rough and ready old-timer, “Squash” Griffen. At the head of our heavy bomber outfit rode the Old Man of the Sea himself, Harry Bogusch, of whom Admiral Reeves had said, “That man is so crazy about flying you’ll have to shoot him down to get the squadron out of the sky.”

As we sped toward the equator, we speculated on our chances of success. Frank Wagner, appreciating the intelligence of some of the smart aviators on the Lexington, feared that, having trained under us and learned our mental processes, they might diagnose our play. If they should take their suspicions to Captain King, and he should pass them on to the “blue” C.I.C. along with a suggestion that he deploy the defending aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Panama to scout for Big Sara, the Lex could intercept us during our daylight run and strafe our planes on deck.

This fear the admiral discounted. While he had great respect for Admiral King’s intelligence and counted him an ambitious leader who had carefully schooled himself in all branches with a view to ultimate command of the fleet in case of war, he rated King a hard driver, one unlikely to invite initiative from his subordinates. To be a good driver you had to know more about your job than anyone else and be on it every minute. This tended to develop fear among your juniors and discourage their enthusiasm for making suggestions.

The most important factor in a campaign, according to the admiral, was a knowledge of the military character of one’s opponent. One should not discount his abilities, nor should he overestimate them. War is no exact science and not therefore subject to rational analysis like, say, engineering. War itself is irrational and the conduct of a battle is always a tragedy of errors. One must be prepared to take risks but these must be intelligent risks—where the advantage to be gained is commensurate with the hazards involved. Fighting spirit is a major factor. One must know the weapons and have faith in their efficacy. The admiral thought that King, for all his tour of duty in aviation, was still a battleship man. He doubted if King had real sympathy or enthusiasm for aviation.

“I recall that you used to box at the Academy,” he said, looking at me, “and you remember the old instructor there, ‘Matchew’ Strohm—he of the cauliflower ears, the flattened nose, and the Bowery dialect. ‘Matchew’ used to say, ‘If yer feelin’ sick to yer stummick, remember maybe de udder guy is feelin’ a leetle sicker. It ain’t de headwork, but de last leetle poosh, dat wins de fight!’”

We were now committed to action. We had perfected our technique. From here on out, we’d play it by ear!

Sitting there in the admiral’s cabin, yarning around the green-baize-covered table, I became suddenly aware of how far we had traveled in the brief span of twenty years. Two decades earlier, back there in Annapolis, I had been one of a couple of hundred midshipmen facing an uncertain future. Britannia’s rule of the waves had brought peace and prosperity to a world from which tyranny had all but disappeared. The Navy had lapsed into innocuous desuetude, after a brief flurry in the Spanish American War, and now offered but little hope of early promotion. Admiral Reeves, then but a lieutenant and an oldish one at that, had taught us “skinny”—physics, electricity, and chemistry. Rated “white” by the midshipmen and known for valor on the football field, he had threatened to grow old in the service with no chance to display his talents.

Today he was the commander of a naval force, totally undreamed of two years earlier, a product of his own conception and creation. And he was discoursing to us on matters of tactics, strategy, military policy, and leadership in terms we could not have comprehended much earlier. I had gone to Annapolis, not for any love of the sea, but because I had thought to save my father the expense of a college training which, at the time, he could ill afford. And chance had thrown me in with men like Dr. Lucke, a leader in the creation of the American technology, Admiral Moffett, a leader who had applied it to aviation, and Admiral Reeves, a leader who had conceived a new philosophy for the naval air force.

The morning we sighted the low volcanic cones of the mysterious Galápagos Islands, I recalled the day precisely twenty years earlier when I had helped reconnoiter this little-known archipelago while a midshipman in the armored cruiser Colorado. At the time such a thing as a gasoline engine was quite unheard of in the fleet. I had therefore sailed a whale boat into Post Office Bay and had sought out the barrel in which, it was said, whalers were wont to leave their letters for later transmission to their destination by whomever chanced to pass that way. In order to commemorate the day and emphasize the breathtaking progress of engines, I suggested to the admiral that I might take off in a fighter and touch wheels ashore. The admiral smilingly agreed but as we closed the islands, intermittent squalls and areas of low visibility forced us to cancel the project.

This unsettled weather continued until the evening before the night run to Panama. We had run all day at 30 knots, with a section of fighters on the take-off spot, ready to launch the moment the weather cleared. The Omaha had reported running short of fuel, giving us a new worry. Unless she could last the route at full speed, we would have to launch without a plane guard. Cruising along from one squall to the next, elated by the luck that had protected us against prowling Lexington scouts, we suddenly broke out into the clear in an area of unlimited ceiling and visibility. It was about 5 P.M. when the fighters roared into the air.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Frigate Birds

Up until this moment, everything done had been in rehearsal. Now, with the possibility of enemy contact at any instant, the flag bridge took on a new atmosphere of high tension. The admiral stood out on the bridge, binoculars glued to his eyes, while the breeze fingered his beard. Frank Wagner hovered beside him, alert for a suggestion or command, a quizzical expression in his eyes, indicative of his humorous reaction to stress. As we followed the tiny fighters racing directly ahead along our course, we were startled by a quick reversal that brought them racing back to the carrier.

At that time, fighters carried no radio. They zoomed across the bow at low altitude to drop short sections of garden hose as message holders. The fighters had sighted a destroyer dead ahead, an enemy scout, the Breck, heading for us on a collision course. Even as we read the message, we made out the ship’s mast, dead ahead. We’d been caught.

The Breck turned to parallel our course, well out of gun range, and seemed to be looking us over. The flag-chief quartermaster, gazing at her through his long glass, turned to the admiral.

“Sir,” he remarked, “it looks funny to me. I wonder if he thinks maybe he’s sighted the Lexington.” The admiral lowered his binoculars and turned to me.

“Well,” he asked, “what do you want to do with her?” Now, the lack of a plane-guard vessel for the next morning had lain heavily on my mind. We had enough worries without risking a take-off crack-up and a lost pilot. It must have been this that prompted my facetious reply.

“Tell her to plane-guard us, sir!” I laughed.

Quick as a flash the admiral barked the signal to the flag-chief quartermaster. As the bright flags fluttered in the late afternoon light, the Breck answered. Then to our amazement, she turned and swung into position directly astern of us, four hundred yards away. There we might have left her save that Ken Whiting, the official umpire, felt obliged to make a ruling. And so we theoretically opened fire on her with the after ten-inch, and theoretically sank her. Ken signaled the Breck that she was now disabled without radio to communicate our position.

We were just congratulating ourselves on this break and sweating out the rest of the daylight, when the Omaha reported being attacked by the cruiser Detroit. Her captain, Dick White, who had once been my skipper on the destroyer tender Bridgeport and was an old friend of Admiral Reeves, had doped out our intentions, and disregarding his orders, had left his scouting station to look for us. Even then he was broadcasting our position in plain English, instead of code, begging the Lexington to come and get us.

Ken Whiting now ruled both cruisers out of the action. The Omaha, already short of fuel, slowed down, but the Detroit, calmly taking up the plane-guard station, began a play-by-play account of Big Sara’s every move. Well, the fat was in the fire now; Captain Dick knew we needed a plane guard too badly to wave him off, and besides, he knew Bull Reeves too well to worry about any future disciplining.

The tropic night fell on the Gulf of Panama, coming down suddenly at five bells of the first dog watch. All night we steamed at thirty knots with the stars closed in around our darkened decks. At midnight the admiral called me to the flag bridge.

“All the squadron commanders have been up in a body to ask me to launch immediately and not wait for dawn. What do you say?” That was a poser. No doubt, sweating it out down in the ready room, fearful that Army or Navy aircraft might catch them flat-footed on deck during the night, they had come up with their big idea.

“Sir,” I replied, finally, “we have no reason to believe that any night fighters or bombers can be out this far. At least we haven’t seen or heard any signs. To change a plan involves new risks, and we have enough already.”

“You’re right,” the admiral agreed. “I’ll tell them to turn in; we’ll stick to the original plan.”

Standing on the flag bridge with the seas slapping against the side and the night breeze filtering down our necks, I began to appreciate, for the first time, the kind of courage that was being displayed by this man. A half-dozen rivals, candidates for his job, were sitting back, waiting for a break. It was the old Navy Game, keep your neck in and let the other fellow take the risks. Sooner or later it pays off—if you live long enough. Bull Reeves had never played that game.

“Sir,” I began, “there’s a lot of brass hats watching us tonight.” The admiral inclined his head to hear me above the roar of the wind. “And,” I went on, “there’d be many a dry eye tomorrow if you should slip.” For a while I thought he hadn’t heard.

“I know,” he replied slowly, “but a commander who stops to appraise the impact of a military decision upon his personal fortunes has no right to be entrusted with a command.”

After a while, dark figures began stirring among the parked airplanes, and the blue lights winked on—flashlights screened by paper torn from packages of absorbent cotton, loaned by the sick bay. Still later, the staccato bark of an engine and red flashes from its short exhaust stacks signaled all mechanics to start their engines.

By now the night air was cold and we shivered as we stood around on the bridge, looking down on an expanse of exhaust flames. Ship’s officers had taken their stations, their telephone helmets on their heads. Pete Mitscher and Ken Whiting stood in the wings of the bridge. The roar of engines swelled then ceased as suddenly as it had started.

Without hearing the order, we knew what that meant: “Pilots, man your planes.” The radio messenger handed me a signal blank. It was a plain-English broadcast from the enemy cruiser Detroit. Dick White was on the air, in his play-by-play account.

“Saratoga has started all aircraft engines,” it began. “What a sight! A thousand tongues of red fire from their exhausts! I have turned on searchlights and am firing pyrotechnics to indicate present position. Can’t someone stop this? It would be a pity, but we can’t let them get away with this kind of murder.”

Over the bow roared Skinny Wick in the first airplane, her running lights on. She turned toward Panama. Now they were getting off at about ten-second intervals. They were rendezvousing on the course to the Canal. Eighteen had joined up. Off went their lights! They were going in darkened.

Now a second group had joined up and turned out its lights. There went the torpedo planes. They were forming in two nine-plane groups. One eighteen-plane fighter squadron would escort each nine-plane bomber division. Now they’d all disappeared. There came the last group, twelve in all—Griffen’s dive bombers. Now they were all gone. The signalman handed me an intercept from Dick White. “It’s magnificent. I’ve never seen such precision. It’s breathtaking.” With that he signed off.

Each of the fighters was a potential 500-pound dive bomber and if unopposed would dive immediately onto the locks. Afterward he would climb back to his station and protect the heavy bombers on their level-bombing run. Even the two-seaters were potential dive bombers, and if unopposed would also go in to bomb. Thus we had three detachments, timing their approaches so as to appear over the defending observation posts simultaneously in order to throw the defenses into confusion. After the bombers had delivered their attacks and started back to the Big Sara, the fighter pilots would remain behind to harass the Army pursuit. With their air-cooled fighters they could sit on top of the Army liquid-cooled jobs, watch them climb below in a futile effort to gain altitude, and finally thumb their noses, as the enemy lost flying speed and spun out of control.

On the Saratoga we sweated out the hour-long minutes of the approach. Radio silence was broken when Bogusch and Griffen reported success. We sweated out their return; the run would take all the available fuel. When they started coming aboard we were too busy to exult. Every plane got in safely except Les Arnold’s F3B. Les, our flag lieutenant, was right over the deck with a few seconds to go before the “cut,” when his engine conked, out of gas. He landed smoothly in the sea. We left him to the mercies of a convenient enemy destroyer we had called in to act as plane guard, and started out to sea.

But too late! For now we found ourselves under the guns of the defending battleships. It seems that Admiral Pratt in our battleship divisions had failed to come up in time to support us. The navigator of the flagship had underestimated the strong current off Cape Mala and the Saratoga’s screen was nowhere in sight. Every phase of the complex air operation had gone off like clockwork. All our squadrons had reached their objectives unopposed just at dawn, and had caught the defenders on the ground. With the exception of Les Arnold’s plane, which had now been recovered with only a ducking for Les, we had no casualties of any kind. Only the mighty battle wagons had missed the boat!

The critique that year was brief. Admiral Pratt took the floor.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “you have witnessed the most brilliantly conceived and most effectively executed naval operation in our history. I expect to fly my flag in the Saratoga on our return cruise north, partly as a badge of distinction but mostly because I want to know what makes the aircraft squadrons tick.”

Nearly twenty years after the dawn attack on Panama, I met Gen. J. B. Mitchell, USA, Retired, the officer who had then commanded the Panama defenses. The general told me that, having gone abroad early that morning in company with his adjutant, long before the alarm had been sounded, he had sighted specks against the sky.

“Frigate birds?” his adjutant had inquired.

“Frigate birds, my eye!” the general had retorted. “Those are enemy aircraft and they’ve caught us flat-footed.”

Our own high-rankers, while appreciating the tactical skill Bull Reeves had shown, had entirely missed the implications of his accomplishment. While the Army Air Service had been talking air power, the Navy had created the first American strategic air force, not one riveted to shore bases but one roving the high seas—on the backs of the fleet! Yet if this revolutionary development was lost upon most Americans, it was not lost upon our potential enemies, the Japanese.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Another Turning

Admiral Moffett did not miss the opportunity, afforded him by the Saratoga’s performance, to press for his reappointment as Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. He countered front office maneuvers in the Navy Department through adroit handling of the political angle at which he was past master. Someone on the Naval Affairs Committee let the Secretary know that the admiral’s reappointment for a third term was favored by that committee; then someone on the Appropriations Committee inquired when his nomination might be expected—and lo, the whole house of cards collapsed.

The performance of the Saratoga’s planes created a front-page sensation; The New York Times handled the story exceptionally. Hanson Baldwin, himself a Naval Academy man steeped in the Mahan tradition, was on the scene, and went out with us on several demonstrations arranged for fleet officers and distinguished visitors. Charles A. Lindbergh, then at Panama in connection with Pan American Airways’ first mail hop from Panama to Miami, spent several days on board the Saratoga.

Instead of quartering him in the admiral’s cabin, we berthed him down in the wardroom with the squadron pilots and passed the word around that he should be treated like any other visiting Army file. However, since his first act had been to request permission to take off and land on the ship, and further, since approval of his request might convey the impression that there was no mystery attached to being a naval aviator—especially a carrier pilot—I was designated to chaperon him during flight operations and diplomatically to fend him off.

We were standing together on the bridge of the Saratoga, watching the evolutions on deck. The very precision of the landings and take-offs was a delight, and the smooth teamwork of the deck crews was breathtaking, even to those who had grown up with the development. Lindbergh, enthusiastic as a kid with a toy airplane, kept up a running fire of questions as to the whys and wherefores of everything. He was particularly curious about the air tactics, and kept Wagner and the admiral busy answering searching questions. Lindbergh’s eyes gleamed and his boyish grin widened as the admiral held forth as only he could do.

It was after the operations had been concluded and we were heading back to port that Lindbergh popped the question that was uppermost in his mind.

“Why won’t you let me land on board?” he asked abruptly.

“Admiral Wiley is reluctant to accept responsibility for your safety,” I replied.

“I’m responsible for myself,” he retorted brusquely. “Isn’t it a fact that they just don’t want an Army officer around a carrier?” he added.

“Of course,” I replied. And then I moved on to the counterplan. “You remember the Three Sea Hawks at the Los Angeles air races last year?” I inquired.

Naturally Lindbergh remembered.

“Well,” I went on, “Tommy Tomlinson has left the service, but Put Storrs and Bill Davis are here, and the boys thought you might like to lead them in a Section take-off, and fly ashore with them when you go.”

Lindbergh nodded. “I’d like that,” he said simply.

“It would make a good story,” I went on. “‘Leader of Three Musketeers takes off with Three Sea Hawks.’” Lindbergh shook his head.

“Not interested in the publicity,” he said.

And there, thought I, was a key to his conduct. Lindbergh was so honest, intellectually and in every other way, that the antics of publicity seekers revolted him. Newspaper men, having never before encountered a celebrity who was not avid for publicity, could not be expected to understand this. They made—and broke—celebrities at will. They considered that they had made Lindbergh and most now thought him ungrateful.

With Admiral Moffett’s reappointment to the Bureau, we became curious as to Admiral Reeves’s new assignment. He had made it a practice never to request duty for himself, and now rather hoped he might get command of the Ninth Naval District, at Great Lakes. But when the news leaked out through the grapevine, it was a dive-bomb hit right amidships. Admiral Reeves was to go to the Navy Yard at Mare Island as Inspector, a job that usually rated a commander or, at most, a captain. The admiral took the news cheerfully as usual.

However, this was but a preliminary “strafing attack,” the name the admiral had coined for diving tactics. One day Wagner walked into the admiral’s cabin, his face as long as the Saratoga’s flight deck. Waving a letter in his hand he sank down in his seat at the mess table and announced, with a wry grin, “They’re shanghaiing me to Guam!” At first we thought he was simply using the slang phrase, but it turned out to be literally true.

“And as for you,” he added, nodding to me with a sudden grin that always signaled the triumph of his humor, “you’re headed for Coco Solo.”

Coco Solo, the big new base on the Atlantic side of the Canal, would have been most acceptable as a command following a full three years’ sea cruise, but I had been but a year afloat and was already on the short side of sea duty. The assignment, had it been carried out, would have been a sentence to oblivion. Admiral Reeves later saw that it wasn’t. For when the new Commander in Chief, Battle Fleet, who relieved Admiral Pratt, proved to be Adm. Louis M. Nulton, a friend of Admiral Reeves, the latter promptly dispatched a letter to Admiral Nulton suggesting that he ask for me as his Aide for Aviation on the Battle Fleet Staff. This assignment put me one notch above the Aircraft Squadrons, whose new commander was announced as Admiral Butler, with Ken Whiting in my job as Chief of Staff. And since Admiral Nulton was known as a man for detail, the Aircraft Squadrons Staff saw that they would need a friend on high if they were to retain the freedom of action Admiral Pratt had always given Admiral Reeves.

Meanwhile, it was a gloomy outfit that received Admiral Pratt on the Big Sara for the cruise home. The admiral had just been selected for the highest naval command, Chief of Naval Operations, in Washington. En route north he brought up the problem of the “home yard” for the Lexington. Norfolk was the Lexington’s home yard. Admiral Pratt, proposed to return her to the Atlantic in order to balance the work load—in other words keep the yard workmen employed.

Wagner and I took issue with him and I must have pressed too hard on the need for keeping the squadrons together for training, for Admiral Pratt turned on me in some annoyance and barked, “You always see the ultimate objective and want to take it on the first assault. You’ve got to learn to take minor objectives one at a time, and to hold them till the big one falls in your lap. Otherwise,” he added, shaking a finger in my face, “you’ll never get anywhere in this man’s Navy.”

Shortly after we arrived in San Diego, and even before the admiral’s relief had reported, Bull Reeves was detached from his command. The day he shoved off, all his squadron commanders and staff accompanied him to the Santa Fe railway station. Overhead FLEET AIR paraded for him in a last formation flight. The Old Man put up a cheerful front until Harry Bogusch shook his hand.

“Admiral,” said Harry, “we used to hate your guts for making us fly those tight formations, but that night off Panama we blessed you for the air discipline you had forced on us.” With that, two big tears welled up in Bull Reeves’s eyes and ran down his nose onto his gray whiskers.

After Admiral Nulton had hoisted his flag on the fleet flagship California, I found myself once again on a battleship. Time was when I would have thrilled at the thought. Now it left me numb. To have served with two great leaders in succession and to have lived through the creative period of naval aviation ashore and afloat and then go back to battle wagons cheerfully was too much to expect. I couldn’t get into the spirit of it.

When later the California spent the summer at the navy yard in Bremerton, Washington, I was completely cut off from aircraft operations except by correspondence. Admiral Nulton and his battle fleet staff tried hard to absorb some of the new ideas, but it was too much to expect them to think and act intuitively, along lines that crisscrossed every preconceived idea.

The end of the summer found us back behind the breakwater at San Pedro, when one day a message came that Fred Rentschler and Bill Boeing had flown down from Seattle in their Ford Trimotor and were at the Los Angeles Biltmore where they would like me to have dinner with them. I knew from the newspapers and from letters that great things had been going on in the aircraft industry. Not only had some of the companies made money on operations, but some of the leaders had become rich as a result of the increased values of their stocks. This was the beginning of the end of that mad period of speculation in which all sorts of mergers and consolidations had prompted the public to get into the market and make a killing. In the aircraft industry, Curtiss and Wright had led off with a merger that had brought together two of the greatest names in aviation and had put two of the biggest operations under the same tent.

In reply Boeing, Rentschler, Chance Vought, and others, fearing the giant thus created, had consolidated in a merger of their own. Unlike the Curtiss-Wright consolidation, which, to them, smacked of Wall Street, the new one was to comprise only sound companies, those which had already proved profitable or seemed likely to continue to do so. The big idea was to bring together, under one leadership, the best in airplanes, engines, propellers, and transport systems in order to coordinate engineering experience in a way that would speed progress. For passenger air transport still seemed to hang on a dead center: it was impossible to reduce rates unless volume could be stepped up, and volume refused to step up until costs came down.

The new outfit, which had taken the name of the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, planned to get its engineering heads together and create improved aircraft designed to break that log jam. Fred Rentschler and Bill Boeing had come to Los Angeles to look over some of the western companies like Northrup, which had already joined up, and Menasco, which would like to. Reading about the Curtiss-Wright consolidation, I had to smile at the idea I had once had of depending upon those two for air-cooled engine competition. Save for Fred Rentschler and Pratt and Whitney, they would now have us by the neck.

It was an interesting circumstance that the particular group should have joined up in the new outfit. For I had put the bee on Chance Vought that had produced the prescription for the Pratt and Whitney Wasp, and had later sent Bill Boeing to Fred Rentschler for the engines for his mail planes, the very engines that had made possible a tidy profit out of a venture that Bill’s competition had called impossible. And save for the Martin torpedo bombers, this group had supplied all the equipment for our carriers, including the engines for the Martins. And the marriage seemed natural from another point of view: the parties at interest were all pioneers with a zeal for aviation and they had all played the game according to Hoyle.

On arrival at the Biltmore I found another old-timer in their company. Thomas Hamilton, like Bill Boeing, had grown up in Seattle, but unlike Bill Boeing he had not had money to spend on airplanes. Instead he had taught himself to fly in a crate of his own construction and had then built his own business. On the outbreak of World War I, Tom had rushed to Washington to get a contract to build airplanes but had been diverted to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the home of furniture manufacture, to make propellers. He had, however, established his own Metalplane Company and built a high-wing metal monoplane that, he claimed, antedated the Ford. And when the new United Aircraft and Transport Corporation had looked around for a propeller company to round out their line, they had taken over Tom Hamilton, his Hamilton Aero Manufacturing Company, and his Hamilton Metalplane Company. Tom, like every other Tom, Dick, and Harry of that time, had been in the stock market but, unlike some of them, had done well.

At dinner that evening, I noted the changes that had come over these men. The time had been when they had scratched gravel for the last trace of “color” that might lie close to bedrock. Now they flew high, wide, and handsome on the crest of the current boom. They had flown in aboard their own Ford Trimotor; they had taken a suite at the Biltmore and now they ordered the exotic foods on the menu. One advantage of the naval service was that much of this had passed us by; we had security, but no wealth. These men had wealth but little security, and even at the height of the great boom of the late ’twenties, Fred Rentschler, at least, clearly foresaw the ultimate outcome. To him the whole thing was crazy—a house of cards built on a foundation of sand, foredoomed to collapse at the first real tremor. Meanwhile they shop-talked back and forth, discussing their current management problems, one of which seemed to concern Tom Hamilton and his propeller company.

It seemed that after I had taken the decision, away back there in BUAERO, that we would use the new metal propellers in place of the wooden ones, two companies had competed for the business—the Hamilton Aero Manufacturing Company, of Milwaukee, and the Standard Steel Propeller Company, of Pittsburgh. In the middle had sat the Reed Propeller Company, owners of the patents taken out by Dr. Sylvanus Reed. These patents, covering metal propeller blades made of “light alloys, solid throughout the outer half of their length,” had been discounted by both Hamilton Aero and Standard Steel, who had declared them invalid. However, the new Curtiss-Wright Corporation had absorbed the Reed Company to put the power of Curtiss-Wright dollars behind the patents.

Meanwhile, Tom Hamilton, of Hamilton Aero, and Harry Kraeling, of Standard Steel, fought their conflict on other grounds. To match Tom Hamilton’s propeller-design savvy, Harry Kraeling hired Frank Caldwell, the Army’s civilian propeller expert, away from the Army. Frank Caldwell had a few inventions himself and was one of the best informed men in the industry. Both companies sold “two-piece” propellers—that is, duralumin blades mounted in steel hubs that permitted blade-angle adjustment on the ground. The Reed Company held to single-piece, fixed-pitch props made of solid duralumin. It was one of these that had dumped me into the dirt at Anacostia, back in 1926, when a blade had broken off close to the hub. I still kept a section of that blade as a souvenir. Now after United Aircraft and Transport Corporation had acquired Hamilton Aero, of Milwaukee, Standard Steel, of Pittsburgh, had countered by recognizing the Reed patents and taking a license from Curtiss-Wright. Standard paid Curtiss royalties, and in exchange Curtiss agreed to sue all infringers of the patents—including Hamilton.

Fred Rentschler, as president of United, had not relished a patent suit with Curtiss and had therefore bought up Standard Steel of Pittsburgh from its local stockholders. This had given him freedom from the threat of suit because he had acquired the license in the transaction, but it had opened up other problems. The two propeller companies had been so highly competitive, it now seemed unlikely that either Hamilton or Kraeling could consolidate the two outfits into a single company; they needed new and neutral management. Furthermore, since the consolidation had brought the two manufacturers into one group, the action had deprived the Army and Navy of their cherished competitive sources and had substituted instead a potential monopoly.

It was like old times to chin with these friends about their business problems and to become, for an evening at least, a part of the world I had once lived in. In that world, petty personal jealousies had to be subordinated to business principles. Only in a semipolitical organization, such as the Army or Navy, where there was no financial statement to measure the quality of leadership, could men indulge in such extravagances as personal politics. Of course in business, personalities did exercise strong influences, but in the long run, economics seemed to write the answer to the business equation.

After a visit in Los Angeles, Rentschler and Bill Boeing flew to San Diego to call on the Navy. Taking off in my little Vought Corsair, I went ahead to introduce them to the new command down there. Then one evening as we sat together in a bedroom of the old Hotel del Coronado, that relic of the lush boom days of Southern California, Tom Hamilton and Bill Boeing turned in, leaving Fred and me to talk shop. Fred was back on his propeller problem, wondering if I, by any chance, could suggest a possible new president for the consolidated company. He had, of course, kept in touch with the gossip in BUAERO over the controversy with FLEET AIR, and was aware of its influence on my personal situation. The talk drifted naturally to this subject, and before I was aware of its drift, Fred had invited me to take over the propeller job.

“Don’t be silly,” I laughed. “At forty-two, I’d be crazy to even consider it. In the first place I am devoted to the service and, in the second, there’s nothing in a naval officer’s training to qualify him for business competition.”

“I haven’t suggested it,” Fred replied soberly, “without first thinking the matter through. I’m sure you have the necessary versatility and resourcefulness.”

“I appreciate your interest and thank you for the compliment,” I replied, “but frankly I’m sorry you brought it up. If I accepted, which, of course I have no intention of doing, the time would surely come when I would regret it. And in passing it up, I open myself to the certainty that every future setback will make me sorry I lacked the guts to resign.”

“Is there no way for you to retire?” he asked.

“No, and if there were, that wouldn’t be the way to go about it. Nothing but a complete separation would do, and for me, that is quite out of the question. I’ve got twenty-five years in on my retirement. Throwing that away would be stupid.”

“Well, think it over,” he persisted. “And when you’re ready, let me know. You could start with the propeller company, and then, if things work out, you could go on from there.” I laughed at the idea.

And, at the moment, I was serious about it, but after Fred and Bill and Tom had left, I found I couldn’t turn off his voice by a flick of the switch. This was no ordinary proposal to be dismissed forthwith: These men had shown me their stuff on many occasions. They were deep in the technical development of aviation, something close to my own heart. They were getting big things done; I was bogged down in a maze of politics with no clear objective before me, and frustrations wearing me down. I began lying awake nights, analyzing the pros and cons.

Trying to compare advantages and disadvantages like this got me nowhere. The fundamental fact was that if I persisted in working at aviation I must risk my chance for high command. If, however, I gave up aviation and returned to line duty, I would be deserting technical development at the very time it needed the attention of everyone who had acquired experience in it. In private business I could continue the engineering development and, far from impairing my future as an executive, could actually enhance it. For in the new era which had blossomed in the brief fifteen years since Dr. Charles Edward Lucke and Columbia University, an executive with a fundamental engineering training had a better chance to accomplish things in a manufacturing business than one without such training.

The chances of a former naval officer succeeding in business were slim, but the chance was there. The risk of failure was great, but the opportunity to contribute importantly to the advance of aviation was enough to warrant taking the chance. Admiral Reeves would have judged it “an intelligent risk.” I submitted my resignation, and received the acceptance in December, 1929.

The stock market had crashed two months before; the world had entered a protracted period of depression. I had bought a complete outfit of brand new uniforms, for duty on the commander in chief’s staff. Now I packed them away in a sea chest, along with the prize sword “awarded by the Class of 1871 for proficiency in ordnance and gunnery,” and turned my back on the sea. After twenty-five years of naval service, I signed off for life.

Throughout this tortured period of indecision, my wife had taken no other position than the traditional one of the Navy wife, “Whither thou goest!” She had listened with her usual patience to my reasoning, but reserved to herself the intuitive process that proved in the end to be right. For it was only after we had been out of the service some time that I learned a fact that would have made the decision far easier, one that she had sensed all along. In civil life we were free. No longer were we social and professional slaves to every officer and his wife who happened, by accident of date of appointment or scholastic standing at Annapolis, to outrank us on the precedence list. But one basic fact was clear; the slipstream that had sucked me into naval aviation had now blasted me out of the service I had loved, and into civil life.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Necessity, the Mother of Creation

When, shortly after the first of January, 1930, Tom Hamilton took me up to Milwaukee to look over the Hamilton Aero plant there, the stock market crash had already enveloped the country in a cold chill. Along the Northwestern Railway’s right of way, cold smoke stacks pointed dead fingers toward leaden skies and fear gripped the land. However, we found Tom’s modern factory still bright and cheerful for it had been well equipped and was now well run by Arvid Nelson, its manager. While the civilian demand for propellers had collapsed with the boom, military business had continued firm under the five-year Army and Navy building programs.

It was when we went down to Pittsburgh to look over Standard Steel that I got a jolt. The plant, located across the river in Homestead in a former cap-pistol factory, was as drab and cheerless as Pittsburgh itself. With many of the steel mills down as a result of the market collapse, there was less smog than usual along the Monongahela, but the grime of the past still clung to treeless slopes. After a look over the situation there it was clear we must cut the consolidated propeller company back to a size suited to the reduced demand.

While the plant in Milwaukee appeared the better of the two, the State of Wisconsin had a heavy corporation income tax that would have to be included in costs; and besides, Milwaukee lay off the main east-west line of rail communication. At Pittsburgh, Harry Kraeling had just completed a new three-story loft building in which we might concentrate the machinery of both companies, and the plant had a siding to the main line of the Pennsylvania. Here, about halfway between Washington, D.C., and Dayton, Ohio, was a situation that offered such advantages that we decided to consolidate the best equipment and the most skilled workmen there. We would then abandon all excess facilities and endeavor to set up a plant with a break-even point calculated to keep us in the black even with the greatly reduced military production level.

In calculating this setup, I had help from the head office in New York and in the person of Joseph F. McCarthy, controller of United Aircraft. Mac, I found, was the sort of wizard who could glance at columns of figures and read in them signs and portents such as could be made clear to me only after I had reduced them to engineer’s language of graphs and charts. From him I discovered that a financial statement is not just the cold record of past mistakes or triumphs, but also a weather map from which to forecast future trends and to take decisions calculated to reap the abundant harvest.

Using the figures available, we calculated the size of the facility with which we might expect to continue to break even during a period of slow demand but still retain the flexibility essential to reaping a profit when the tide turned. United Aircraft was frankly not in business for its health; it was in business for a fair profit and each of the subsidiaries was expected to stand on its own two feet. By consolidating the financial resources of all its subsidiaries in the parent company, it had in effect broadened the resources of each. Any company in temporary need of funds might look to the parent company without going outside to borrow, but over the long pull it must contribute its share to the over-all income.

Having had no training whatever in accounting or finance, but having been schooled by Dr. Lucke to search for fundamental principles, I now began digging down to bedrock and in J. F. McCarthy, himself, discovered a rich nugget. Profit, it seemed, was not just the excess of receipts over expenditures, a sum to be divided among a few insiders and squandered in riotous living. Profit was, among other things, the great regulator and controller of trade, and trade was the foundation of human existence. Under the free play of natural competitive forces, the compelling need to make a profit or go out of business and starve was what drove men to cut costs of production. If they could reduce costs enough to make the product available to more people they could increase the demand and expand the volume of production. Out of their profits, or the anticipation of profits, they could attract new money with which to buy new machinery designed to cut costs further and expand volume further. All this was a delicate, living process that required good judgment and great skill to nurture.

Profit, it appeared, was like the governor on a steam generator. Increased demand for power would slow down the engine and reduce the voltage were it not for the fact that the governor, sensitive to small changes in speed, now opened the throttle wider to admit the extra steam required to meet the new demand. Contrariwise, when the demand fell off the engine might overspeed and destroy itself, save that the eversensitive governor now reacted quickly to close the throttle, and save the machine.

Profit was therefore no devouring ogre, as some would have us believe, nor was it just the regulator or controller of costs. Men, in seeking to make a profit—and correspondingly to avoid a loss—were ever on the alert to create new devices and new products. If one of these turned out to be useful, or desirable, and if its price proved reasonable, then the device would come into general use and its production and use would become profitable for both its creator and its user, to say nothing of the workmen who manufactured it. If, however, the device or idea failed to measure up to the customer’s expectations, or failed to satisfy his tastes, then it would just fade out; nature, it appeared, was highly selective. She believed in enterprise.

When natural law was permitted to function according to principle, corrective forces maintained a degree of equilibrium. To each action there was an opposite and equal reaction and the action contained the germ of the reaction, to the end that the pendulum could not swing too far. It was only when man-made law began hampering natural law that the violent swings took place. No man could understand the workings of the natural law well enough to anticipate the future nor, were he able to do so, could he control the future. Least of all did he have wisdom enough to incorporate the germ of a corrective action in his plans.

As I studied this matter of profit and business cycles, I began to get hold of a truth that seemed to be the answer to a lot of questions about the place of the machine in the economy. Men were beginning to argue that labor-saving machinery would bring about technological unemployment, and as the world-wide depression deepened, the facts seemed to confirm the opinion. However, there was another side to this coin: in a technological age when some engineers were engrossed with the task of cutting costs with machinery, other engineers were busy creating new devices to sell. And when these new devices clicked, they called for the creation of new enterprises, the employment of new money—even the creation of new wealth—and best of all the creation of new jobs for workmen. The automotive industry was one of many brilliant examples of this fact.

Now no man or group of men could possibly have enough wisdom to control the operations of this law. The free play of natural forces was the only intelligent controller. Like the slipstream of an airplane, this process might appear to be turbulent and wasteful, but again, like the slipstream, it was one of the most efficient processes in nature. The best men could do was try to maintain a healthy climate in which the process could flourish, and since the key lay in the incentive for the human spirit, men’s chief contribution must come out of faith in the natural process.

All this was a revelation to me in more ways than one. Like most naval officers I had absorbed something of the point of view of the professional man who tends to look down his nose at the tradesman. Overimpressed by the sins of a few profiteers, we considered businessmen mere money grubbers inclined to wink at sharp practices, if not downright dishonesty. To the professional man, especially one in public service, whose compensation does not clearly reflect the results of his own efforts, the real reward lies in his knowledge of a job well done. To some, this provides all the incentive required, but to most it furnishes an excuse to sit on the beach and watch the ebb and flow of the tides. The military man is prone to forget that some hard worker must create the wealth necessary to support him in the honorable estate to which he has become accustomed and that if comparable salaries make his appear modest, Uncle Sam is lavish with the perquisites.

When I sought to probe these matters with J. F. McCarthy, I found a kindred spirit. From the inception of the company, Fred Rentschler had brought Mac into every business discussion and decision; it had been his idea that finance should walk hand in hand with operations rather than bring up the rear with a truck load of old ledgers. He had, therefore, given Mac a high degree of autonomy in financial matters especially in the subsidiaries and Mac had used this so skillfully that everyone in the organization respected his business judgment and admired his integrity.

As time passed, and my responsibilities in United widened, Mac and I expanded our viewpoints together. Shortly after completing the physical consolidation at Pittsburgh, I was made president of the Sikorsky company at Bridgeport. A year later, after Chance Vought had died suddenly, I became head of his company in East Hartford. In less than a year, I, the least experienced businessman in United had fallen heir to its three problem children. As the depression deepened, and vast social changes began to take place, I sensed the far-reaching responsibilities that attach to the head of a manufacturing organization. Aside from the normal headaches incident to managing a competitive enterprise during a period of world-wide depression, there were heavy responsibilities imposed by strange forces unleashed by politicians prying open Pandora’s Box. This was an era when American business was placed on trial for its very life.

Our difficulty at Pittsburgh sprang primarily from the fact that the consolidation of the two manufacturers of metal propellers had created a potential monopoly; and there is no business more vulnerable than a monopoly. Our two steady customers, the Army and the Navy, wasted no time in slapping us down; they turned their propeller business over to fly-by-night competitors, and worse still, to government arsenals. My first venture in business was now threatened by unfair competition from sources that contributed nothing to engineering and development and charged their overhead to a government appropriation.

It was somewhat as if Uncle Sam had pirated a manuscript of a best seller and had had it printed in the Government Printing Office or a sweat shop at public expense, and then left the author to starve. The policy is hardly designed to advance the writing art and, in the long run, is sure to prove bad medicine for the government, that is the people, itself.

This fact we endeavored to point out to both Army and Navy, urging that it was to their interest that we continue to live. After all, we were the only organization in the world capable of continuing the development of metal propellers; foreign aircraft still clung to their archaic wooden props, and foreigners were still convinced of their superiority. We tried to point out that the consolidation had been forced by patent considerations and for no other reason, that the new management had been drawn from Army and Navy and had no intention of monopolizing anything but was determined to foster progress in new design. Their reply was to ask to see the color of our new designs.

With survival dependent upon the creation of something new and better, I went upstairs to the engineering department to put the problem before its chief, Frank Caldwell. Frank, a big cinnamon bear of a fellow with a slow Tennessee drawl, had forgotten more about aircraft propellers than most engineers would ever know. While Chief of the Army Propeller Branch at Dayton, he had suggested to Harry Kraeling, then a salesman of the steel alloy Vanadium, that he give up trying to build propeller blades out of welded-steel sheets, and use instead the new aluminum alloy, duralumin. When I put the problem up to Frank, he hoisted his bulk out of his chair and ambled toward a drawing table in the corner of his office. Pushing aside a T square, he peeled the cover back from a large drawing and looked at the black lines with modest pride.

At that time, the Hamilton-Standard duralumin blades were clamped into the sockets of steel hubs in such a way that when an airplane stood on the ground, the blades might be adjusted to whatever setting was desired. However, once set, the blades were not adjustable in the air. This gave the airplane a handicap such as a motor car would have if deprived of its gearshift. The propeller shown in Frank’s drawing, however, had a mechanism for adjusting the propeller blade setting in the air. The pilot might use one setting, corresponding to low gear, when taking off, and another corresponding to high, for cruising. Frank visualized his “controllable pitch propeller” as the “gearshift of the air.”

The idea of such a propeller was not new. Many people had tried the device and found it sound in conception; the problem was that no one had been able to build one of the things strong enough to stand up under the extremely high centrifugal and vibratory stresses found in propeller blades. The novelty of Frank’s design lay in its simple hydraulic control mechanism, in which oil pressure on a piston rotated the blades and locked them in either of two positions, the best setting for cruising or for take-off. Judged by the old engineering adage, “to be good it must look good,” Frank’s propeller looked to me like the answer to a maiden’s prayer.

Now Frank Caldwell was no overenthusiastic salesman. The best he would say for his brain child was to express the quiet hope that it might amount to something some day—provided we could make it hang together. But to me there was no use fooling around; here was just the kind of gadget we needed to pull us out of the hole. I gave orders to shoot the works and rush the development of the “gearshift of the air.”

Fifteen years later, after we had become more conscious of the need for corporate social security and after we had got ourselves all bound up in our own red tape, I doubt if United Aircraft would ever have undertaken such a project.

For the problem was not so simple as I have so far stated it. The new propeller must of necessity prove more costly than the old type, and there was no proof that the increase in performance would justify the increased costs. This question did not lend itself to precise calculation, nor could we solve it by trying the propeller on an existing airplane. In order to realize the advantages of the new type we must build a new airplane designed to exploit it, and in those days people just didn’t haul off and build airplanes to sell other people’s propellers.

The point is that at the moment the controllable-pitch propeller, one day to be recognized as the most revolutionary device in aeronautics, was not then something that men demanded. In fact, current opinion was bearish on the idea just as it had been on the air-cooled engine and still was on reduction gears. In the judgment of the wise men, such devices were bound to be so heavy or so costly that their advantages might at best balance out their disadvantages, so why bother with the complication? Frank Caldwell had thought it through, but, being modest and conservative, he did not try to sell the device to me. My own reaction was intuitive rather than rational.

Though I reported my decision to Fred Rentschler at the New York office, he naturally took little notice of it until our financial statement began showing red ink. Lacking profitable production to support an expensive development, we had begun to show serious losses. Since there was no flight experience available to support my venture, Fred was all for canceling the project to avoid further losses. The sole argument I could bring to bear was the fact that I had installed an experimental prop equipped with magnesium blades in one of the small Sikorsky amphibians, an S-39, which had astonished me with its quick take-off and improved cruising characteristics. Behind my decision, however, had lain the whole background of aviation development. One device after another had been proposed and rejected on the basis of engineering judgment, only to be later perfected by some zealot who refused to recognize handicaps. I expressed confidence in the outcome and offered to gamble my job on it. Fred shook his head in doubt.

“Well,” he said sourly, “it had better pan out or it will be just too bad for you.”

Now there remained one process by which I might recover some of our investment. The propeller had been developed to the point where we might offer a few of them to the Army and Navy at experimental prices on experimental contracts, a practice long used to foster new and expensive developments. But when I went down to BUAERO I ran into a cold front that iced me up like nothing I had ever before seen. The Plans Division of BUAERO seemed now to have usurped the functions of the Engine Section in developments of this kind, and the head of that division was now Comdr. Richmond Kelly Turner, USN, a Naval Academy classmate of mine and a friend of long standing. “Spuds” Turner was a tough egg, something the Japs were to learn at Tarawa and other South Pacific actions some fifteen years later; I didn’t have to wait that long.

Kelly Turner seemed to think that controllable-pitch propellers were no good in general, and to suspect that the one I was trying to sell was probably the least useful of them all. If I had wasted my company’s money chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, he had no intention of sending any of Uncle Sam’s hard earned cash on a wild-goose chase to try to bail me out of my business mistakes. “Spuds” did not confine his opinions to me in a confidential chat, but took pains to broadcast them all through the corridors of BUAERO in a loud stentorian voice.

Meanwhile, after taking over the Sikorsky job, I had felt the need of a new assistant in Hamilton-Standard and had learned through George Wheat, our public relations counsel, that Raycroft Walsh, a former major in the Air Corps who had resigned to go into business, might be interested. Ray had had an active Army career and, during the Mitchell controversy, had served in the Office of the Chief of Air Corps, Maj. Gen. Mason M. Patrick, as Finance Officer where he had performed some of the functions I had performed for Admiral Moffett. I liked him the moment I met him, and immediately recommended that he be brought into the company.

When Ray took the new propeller to the Army, he encountered a similar lack of interest. Even though he carried his case to the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, Mr. F. Trubee Davison, and finally to his friend Pat Hurley, Secretary of War, stressing the fact that refusal to help develop the new propeller would prove disastrous to the Army and fatal to Hamilton-Standard, he made no more progress than had I with my friend “Spuds” Turner. It was a kind providence which, taking us by the hand, led us out to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and a new milepost in history.

For prior to the crisis in the affairs of Hamilton-Standard, United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, having in mind the need for building new transport aircraft designed to carry passengers and mail on a profitable basis, had initiated a joint airplane development headed up by Boeing. Based upon the performance of the Boeing “Monomail,” a single-engined low-wing monoplane itself partly derived from the earlier work of Jack Northrup, Boeing had taken in hand its new ten-passenger, twin-engined, low-wing monoplane to be called the “Boeing 247.” Designed around a new Pratt and Whitney Wasp engine and equipped with Hamilton-Standard propellers, it was intended as a replacement for all other assorted models in use on the line. Boeing, confident of its engineering ability, had released for production a full order of some sixty airplanes without first testing out a prototype. This procedure, if successful, would put the airplane company far ahead of any competitor and would give the transport company a big jump on other airlines such as it had earned by creating the earlier model, 40-B.

At first everything had gone swimmingly, but the day the first ship to fly over the lines essayed to take off with full load from the high-altitude field at Cheyenne, serious trouble developed; the airplane just could not handle full load satisfactorily from such elevations. At first, Boeing had been inclined to blame Pratt and Whitney and the Wasp engine for insufficient horsepower, but when that attempt failed, both parties shifted the blame onto Hamilton-Standard propellers, claiming faulty propeller design. This was the old Indian game of passing the buck around the eternal triangle of engine, propeller, and airplane. When we sent Frank Caldwell to Cheyenne to investigate he went quietly about a demonstration that, we hoped, would prove convincing.

First he adjusted the duralumin blades at best setting for take-off to show how well the ship would perform even at high altitude. This setting, however, was so inefficient at cruising speeds that the nearby mountain peaks echoed and reechoed the whining complaint of whirring blades. To meet this defect, Frank reset the blades to the best angle for cruising, where the airplane, its load having been reduced for take-off, performed perfectly. After this convincing demonstration, he unwrapped his drawings of a controllable-pitch propeller for the 247. While no such prop had yet been air-tested, Boeing brushed the objection aside, confident now that between the two companies, the airplane could be salvaged.

So it was that Frank Caldwell’s controllable-pitch propeller not only saved the whole string of Boeing 247’s, but in doing so, it opened up the new era of “three-mile-a-minute” air passenger travel and started air transport on its way. After that, even the Army and Navy began to recognize the potentialities of the new propeller; it paved the way for low-wing monoplanes with their high-wing loadings and thus marked the passing of the biplanes.

But prior to the Cheyenne demonstration, Hamilton-Standard propellers dragged bottom. Ray Walsh, who had taken over its management, closed the Pittsburgh plant, reduced the organization to a handful of the ablest men, and moved the shop into a corner of Pratt and Whitney’s ample building in East Hartford. Later, when success acclaimed the genius of Frank Caldwell, Ray began expanding his organization to meet new demands and finally built an additional wing on the Pratt and Whitney building to house his new shop. Still later, we moved Chance Vought Aircraft down to Stratford to bunk in with a much deflated Sikorsky, and turned the whole Vought shop over to Hamilton.

Meanwhile, when Ray undertook to sell the rights to manufacture the new propellers in England, he encountered problems both at home and abroad. The British Air Ministry, like our own services, discounted the propeller—this was a time when most Britishers discounted everything American—and our own armed forces threatened to refuse us the right to license them under our patents. Since our government had contributed precisely nothing to the development, and especially since my classmate, Kelly Turner, had broadcast his decision to the whole aeronautic establishment, they were hardly in position to claim much equity or any right to control a device of such obvious interest to commercial air transport.

However, it was in a totally different role that the Hamilton-Standard controllable-pitch propeller attained immortality. The manager of the propeller branch of the de Havilland Aircraft Company, Ltd., our English licensees, was John Parkes, himself a fighter pilot, an Englishmen who retained some of the ancient enterprise and love of innovation. Today he is managing director of Alvis Limited, Coventry, but then he was the moving spirit in the adaptation of the Hamilton-Standard propeller to the British Spitfire fighters, the planes that helped win the Battle of Britain. The Germans had developed their own controllable-pitch propellers and, save for the curious chain of circumstances outlined here, would have hopelessly outclassed the British. When Mr. Churchill paid tribute to the “so few” to whom Britain owed so much, he probably had in mind the courageous fighter pilots but behind them stood, among others, Ray Walsh, Frank Caldwell, and John Parkes.

And so we trace the living process through which our struggle to survive created new devices and exercised profound influences that no human mind could have imagined. The miscalculation of one engineer saved the creation of another engineer just in time to give air transport the necessary fillip, and to provide British fighters with the winning punch. And there is a final point to keep in mind: it was the performance of Hamilton-Standard’s controllable-pitch propellers in Boeing transports copied by the Germans that impelled them to develop their own propellers. The moral seems to be that leadership in scientific research and technological development is the key to military security. A laggard faces extinction.