Eugene E. Wilson

“ 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.” ”

“ We would commit Chance Vought to a new single-seat fighter, one with such blazing speed and such fire power and such maneuverability that it could blast any enemy from the skies, even though handicapped with all the rigging that goes on a carrier fighter. We would build into it such rugged strength that it could carry heavy bombs in a dive, and still withstand the clumsiness of any horny-handed pilot who might try to pull its tail off. ”

“ Down in Los Angeles, where a big segment of the airplane business, attracted by the physical and economic climate, had set up shop, I found Don Douglas at his old stand in Santa Monica, Dutch Kindleberger in a new shop at Inglewood, Jack Northrup in a new establishment at Hawthorne, and Bob Gross at our old flying field at Burbank. These men, though competitive and individualistic, and as different one from the other as night from day, were all animated by the same enthusiasm for aviation and zeal for its advancement. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Out at Farmingdale, Long Island, the brilliant engineer Kartveli was forging his Thunderbolts, intended as fighters but destined for use in the invasion of Europe as the long-range fighter bombers that broke Hermann Goering’s heart because he was sure we couldn’t build such planes.
These are but a few of many that come readily to mind. The fact was, no one could guess whom we would fight, to say nothing of how or when. Without a foreign policy, we could shape no military policy, and without a military policy who could guess what airplanes might be called upon to do? ”

“ For Survival In the anteroom to the office of the Secretary of the Navy, Fred Rentschler and I waited our turn. A stream of visitors, mostly naval officers of high rank, swept in and out of the sanctum. The men who were furnishing the leadership for this war were contemporaries of mine back in those brave days at the turn of the century when Pax Britannica still reigned and when the chances for professional advancement or even a career looked slim indeed. Now as they moved in and out, many paused to greet us and say a word of congratulation on our industry’s production miracle. ”

“ If you couldn’t keep ahead of the other fellow by resort to your own initiative and enterprise in a free market, he felt, then you certainly couldn’t beat him on a closed circuit. An alert mind could often find something in the other fellow’s research which the other fellow might have missed; and if the other fellow beat you to the punch in your own field, you deserved to lose out. The admiral’s highly competitive spirit kept the whole Bureau on its toes and a word of commendation from him fired his supporters to play better ball than they really knew how. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the silence that followed I realized that on my first day in the Aircraft Squadrons we had already pointed up an issue between the Langley officers and the admiral’s flag. The fat was in the fire.
“As I understand my job,” I said, trying to choose the right words, “it is to help the Old Man carry out his program, not hinder him.”
After lunch they showed me the slow-motion movies of carrier landings; not the successful ones, but the crack-ups. These ranged from simple landing-gear collapses to rolling off the deck and over the side into the sea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And so, when Bill Mitchell sang out, “Tally Ho!” and started his power dive on Billy Moffett’s tail, he suddenly found himself in a dogfight with an opponent quite as wiley as the famous German Baron von Richthofen. Even this was a calculated risk and might not have brought Mitchell down. It was Mitchell’s attack on the Army that made him vulnerable. For while the Army might view with tolerant amusement Mitchell’s assault on the Navy, it could not countenance insubordination in its own ranks; mutiny is inherently an unpardonable sin. ”

“ In the air, where movement is three dimensional, and fixed obstructions few, effective blockade becomes almost impossible. And since freedom of communication is vital to security, the basic strategy in both war and peace is to guarantee freedom of communication to one’s self and to deny it to an enemy. This must be the beginning and end of foreign policy and the basis of strategy in both war and peace. The actual performance of air transport in World War II therefore becomes one of the most vital factors of modern times. ”

“ We who had created a vital industry were put on the defensive as profiteers by leaders of a publicly supported labor monopoly, itself bent on profiteering. Whatever profit we might be allowed was a matter of law. As suppliers to the government, we were responsible to the people for keeping costs down. The workers, largely unskilled, were being urged by their leaders to slow down, while the same leaders blackjacked the public for higher wages for less work. All this, in the task of making the tools for the public’s defense. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Igor Sikorsky did invent the helicopter, just as the Wrights before him had invented the airplane, by diligent study, by painstaking experiment, by teaching himself to fly and then teaching others. In so doing, the man who had given the world the means of vaulting the last barrier to air commerce went to the other extreme to create the only vehicle that can operate in three dimensions without a prepared surface from which to take off or land. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At a time when new enterprises had been almost interdicted by the unfavorable economic climate and they had been singled out for attack, they had still gone on, with youthful self-reliance, with rugged independence, and a competitive spirit, to exploit the freedom of their homeland and create a new art.
And out of my swing around the circuit, I reached clear conclusions with respect to my own problem, aircraft power plants. I had heard nothing to shake my convictions as to the superiority of air-cooled radials. ”

“ 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 [Pg viii] 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. ”

“ Yes, we knew about Reuther from the headlines. With his usual flair for publicity, he had crashed the front pages with the bright idea of putting all the machine tools of the automotive industry, now laying off men to convert to war production, into construction of airplanes under the mass-production principle. To an expert like Reuther, the idea of buying new machinery just to build airplane engines smacked of another grab by the bosses. Its reaction on Bill Knudsen had prompted this call for help. ”

“ 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. ”