SLIPSTREAM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AIR CRAFTSMAN: Demanding Books on Fiction : Short Stories (single author): SLIPSTREAM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AIR CRAFTSMAN

To the world at large, Berlin Airlift headlines only highlighted another crisis in the “cold war.” Yet behind those headlines lay an epochal event: commercial air transports—not combat aircraft—had become the spearhead of United States foreign policy.

This dramatic incident brought renewed hope to air craftsmen who, nearly a half century earlier, had embarked on a starry-eyed crusade to utilize the airplane for the benefit of mankind. In World War I, they had helped smash the German Kaiser, only to find Hitler rising phoenixlike in his boots. Two decades later, they had strafed Hitler to earth, only to discover a colossal portrait of Joseph Stalin looming beyond a smoke curtain. Still later, as atomic bombs and lethal bacteria became weapons, they were asking themselves, “what next?” when the Berlin Airlift came up with the answer: air cargo, air commerce, air industry, air finance—air power for peace!

In December, 1943, we air craftsmen had our frustrations dramatized at a banquet staged in honor of the Wright brothers on the fortieth anniversary of Kittyhawk. Orville Wright, mouselike in a dinner jacket and obviously uncomfortable, had sat through a barrage of clichés microphoned by air power advocates. When finally called on to respond, he refused point-blank. Later, in an anteroom off the banquet hall, he gave vent to intense bitterness: evil men had seized upon the airplane to make it the most lethal weapon in history; he hated everything about the airplane; he rued the day he and his brother had invented the thing.

We manufacturers, who had engineered their fantastic contraption into a decisive instrument of World War II, echoed Orville Wright’s concern. Our lives had been a kaleidoscopic drama of “the five Ms”: men, management, money, materials, machines. Across our stage had walked the big names of a bloody quarter century involving two world wars. The setting had been fogged by haze from smoke-filled Washington hotel rooms and highlighted by klieg lights in Congressional investigating committees. Sucked by our own slipstream[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. Whether this should be a world of peace in our time, or whether it must wait on centuries of slavery, would depend on what we Americans did with the airplanes we had created.

Following the 1918 Armistice, we had carelessly taken a wrong turning. After the Italian General Douhet in his book Command of the Air had extolled the virtues of the air bombardment of civil populations, Brig. Gen. William Mitchell raised the air power banner at home. Later Alexander P. de Seversky, a former Russian combat pilot, spread the Douhet gospel in a best seller, Victory Through Airpower. When the American press followed this lead, air force in war became the major role of the airplane.

This Douhet doctrine is, of course, the negation of the philosophy expressed in the great body of international law which developed following the Dark Ages. Chivalry, a concept devised by Christendom to protect civilization from destruction by the Four Horsemen, had introduced the era in which differences were resolved through conflicts between military forces, rather than the destruction of civil populations. Behind the morality of the principle lay the practical consideration that it spared the conqueror the expense of rebuilding establishments which he himself might otherwise have battered down.

If Douhet, in our time, mistook air force for the foundation of air power, our British cousins, in the Elizabethan Era, had not failed to look at sea power through the correct end of the telescope. After fifteenth-century geographic discoveries had placed Britain at the crossroads of maritime commerce to America, Asia, and Africa, her merchants and mariners recognized freedom to trade as the guarantee of prosperity. The basic requirement for freedom to trade was a superior fleet, utilized to guarantee, hopefully through measures short of war, the right of all and sundry to proceed upon their lawful occasions. Having seen the vision, the English mustered the courage and enterprise to seize control of the sea and employ it to build Pax Britannica, a period of spiritual as well as material progress, motivated[Pg ix] by the Christian ideal, such as the world had not hitherto known.

In the early 1930’s, after American commercial air transport had revealed its potentialities, we Americans likewise stood at a crossroads. Had we but recognized our opportunity and displayed the courage and enterprise to foster a forward-looking air policy, we might have so directed our superior technology in the air as to match Pax Britannica with Pax Aeronautica. History discloses that the peaceful progress of civilization has always been paced by discoveries in transport. Had we recognized the revolutionary character of air transport, we might have removed enough of the causes of war to have avoided World War II. Instead, we hamstrung our own air power and provided our enemies with a favorable opportunity to seize control of the air.

The performance of air transport in the war revealed that the air is like an ocean that affords uninterrupted access to any spot on land or sea. Experience proves that the airplane, contrary to widespread belief, is inherently an economical vehicle. It demands no costly investment in fixed rights of way; its right of way is the air, which is free and infinitely flexible. Since the speed of the airplane permits it to transport goods a maximum of ton-miles for a minimum of initial investment, airline ownership of property of any kind is at a minimum. During the thirty-year life of air-mail service, the United States Post Office Department has recovered through sales of air-mail stamps alone more than it has paid out to the airlines for carrying the mails. While segments of the airline transport system have been subsidized in the interests of national security, the system as a whole has proved self-sustaining. The Postmaster General regards air mail not as an expense but as an investment. He recently stated publicly, “Probably no investment made by this government ever returned greater national benefits in commercial and cultural progress, and national security.”

It therefore seems a pity that, at the moment when providence has placed in American hands the instrument with which to speed world recovery, we should lack the wit to recognize the opportunity, and the initiative, courage, and enterprise to exploit it. Where the mission[Pg x] of the Air Force is to enforce the peace, the major role of the airplane is in air commerce, the key to world recovery. Responsibility for utilizing air power for peace resides with the people of the United States.

To air craftsmen, Orville Wright’s reaction served to emphasize the fact that all of us had been sucked up by the slipstream of our own propellers and whirled about like withered leaves or bits of waste paper. Yet underneath we knew that this apparently confused and wasteful process had accelerated progress. As engineers, we realized that when an airplane is earthbound with its engine revving up, the engine’s power is all wasted in noise and heat. In free flight, on the other hand, an airscrew converts upward of 80 per cent of its power into “effective forward thrust,” leaving but 20 per cent as “slip.” Our slipstream is therefore an efficient machine measured by any standard. To permit aviation to soar to new heights we must cast off its shackles. To this end we must needs understand its fundamental import.

My own thinking along this line began one November day in 1918, while watching the vaunted German High Seas Fleet surrender to the famed British Grand Fleet. At that time I was chief engineer of the battleship Arkansas, one of five American vessels that comprised Adm. Hugh Rodman’s Sixth Battle Squadron of Sir David Beatty’s Grand Fleet. Beatty had a secret weapon, a force of aircraft carriers. Some observers ascribed the German surrender to knowledge of this fact, yet Beatty himself realized that victory had been won, not by the ironclads which, since Jutland had not come into decisive action, but by the battered nine-knot tramps, the doughty drifters and trawlers, the troop-carrying liners and the wallowing tankers—merchantmen that had been keeping the life blood coursing through the Empire’s veins. Watching this triumph of sea power, even as the shadow of an airplane flitted across the gun turrets of the Grand Fleet, I had sought to draw an analogy between sea power and air power but had dismissed the idea because there had been no such thing then as commercial air transport.

The war over, Rear Adm. William Adger Moffett, founder and[Pg xi] first Chief of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, called me in from general service to specialize in aircraft engine production and, incidentally, to lend him a hand in his fight with Brig. Gen. William Mitchell, Assistant Chief, U.S. Army Air Service. This conflict between belligerent giants was more than a revival of the old Army-Navy Game. To the admiral, an inspiring leader and astute politician, the task was to prevent Mitchell, a brilliant pilot and ardent air enthusiast, from monopolizing all aviation—commercial, naval, and military—under an administrative setup resembling the new British Air Ministry. This separate and independent department, in the opinion of the admiral, had already begun to wreck British naval aviation and thus undermine British sea power.

Amid the rough and tumble of interdepartmental politics, I discovered the fundamental precepts of aeronautic technology: the power plant was the heart of the airplane; progress in its development could be measured in terms of “pounds per horsepower”; the key to technological progress was competition within the private manufacturing and transport industries; under pressure of free competition, the “impossible” got done today—the fantastic took a little longer. It was no accident that the airplane had been invented in America or that it had here attained its maximum development. Technological leadership stemmed directly from the concept under which our government had been created, the creative idea of the dignity of the individual and his innate right to liberty under just law.

In Washington, the struggle over the separate air force climaxed in the summer of 1925. The big Navy rigid airship Shenandoah, barnstorming over western country fairs, was destroyed in Ohio by a line squall. General Mitchell, previously exiled to San Antonio, Texas, seized upon the crash as a favorable moment for hurling charges at both the Army and the Navy of their treasonable neglect of aviation. President Calvin Coolidge, in order to sift the charges, convened a public inquiry by a board of distinguished citizens under the chairmanship of Dwight W. Morrow. Testifying before the Board, Admiral Moffett took sharp issue with Mitchell on the question[Pg xii] of the independent air force, but took advantage of the opportunity to outline the basis of a constructive national air policy.

The Morrow Board, while disapproving the Mitchell proposal for the time being, did recommend a separate air corps status in the Army for military aviation. It took strong exception to the idea of including air transport in any military establishment and urged instead its orderly development under civil authority and preferably by competitive private industry. The Board’s recommendations were approved by the President and transmitted to Congress where they were quickly implemented by the Air Corps Act of 1926 and the Air Commerce Act of the same year. These acts fixed responsibility for aeronautic development upon the several government agencies concerned.

General Mitchell was convicted by an Army court-martial of “conduct unbecoming,” but was permitted to resign. He died ten years later, having become firmly established in the public mind as a man of vision martyred by reactionaries. Admiral Moffett followed up the Morrow Board findings with a recommendation for legislation establishing a five-year development program for naval aviation. The Army followed suit. The Post Office inaugurated contract air mail. In the favorable climate induced by the Morrow Board policy, American aviation attained the world leadership which it held until after the air-mail contracts were canceled in the middle 1930’s.

Having become interested in naval aviation as a career, I qualified as a naval aviator and later became Chief of Staff to Rear Adm. Joseph M. Reeves, Commander, Aircraft Squadrons, Battle Fleet. There I helped commission the new aircraft carriers Saratoga and Lexington, equipping their air squadrons with the new aircraft we had created in the Bureau of Aeronautics. During fleet maneuvers we developed the new tactical concept of the carrier task force, and in January, 1929, by delivering a successful attack on the Panama Canal from a point 150 miles at sea, we demonstrated the revolutionary strategy of a mobile-based, long-range, naval air striking force, the first American strategic air force. Yet while we succeeded in our demonstration, we failed to impress upon the high command the[Pg xiii] revolutionary character of the idea. Twelve years later at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese did a better job of selling. Paradoxically enough, Admiral Reeves, as a member of the Roberts Board, went out to Honolulu to investigate the wartime effectiveness of his peacetime concept.

Meanwhile, in January, 1930, I resigned from the Navy to accept a position as chief executive of a subsidiary of the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, the Hamilton-Standard Propeller Corporation. Within a year I found myself responsible for two additional subsidiaries, Sikorsky and Chance Vought, the one a builder of large flying boats, the other a producer of shipboard aircraft. In private industry, I enlarged my experience in the so-called “aviation game.”

When in the middle 1930’s the air-mail contracts were suddenly canceled, American aviation received a body blow. Repercussions from the punitive Congressional investigations sponsored by Senators Gerald P. Nye and Hugo Black—now Mr. Justice Black of the United States Supreme Court—interfered with both military and commercial development and halted progress. While American aviation was being kicked around as a political football, Messrs. Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, and Stalin seized the favorable opportunity, so unexpectedly handed them, to inaugurate their bids for world dominion under the Douhet doctrine of victory through air force.

The American aircraft manufacturing industry, its domestic market impaired by the abandonment of the Morrow Board policy, was forced to fall back on foreign sales. For a while we existed by selling our superior commercial air transports abroad, and in our frantic struggle to survive, each manufacturer risked everything to develop improved types of possible interest to our government. Early in 1939, when many companies were all but out on their feet, orders from France and England arrived in the nick of time. It was thanks to those orders that when the American aircraft-expansion program was finally undertaken we were able to expand swiftly.

However, this shot in the arm was all but neutralized by the workings of our own Arms Embargo Act. In order to deny France or[Pg xiv] England access to American arms, Hitler had only to make them belligerents—in other words declare war on them. After he had done so, we repealed the act, and still later President Roosevelt called for 50,000 airplanes. The first news we aircraft manufacturers had of this decision came by way of a radio fireside chat. This released a flood of production, the magic of which surprised us as much as anyone else—a flood on which American air power reversed the tide from sure defeat to certain victory.

Upon our entry into the war, I found myself president of United Aircraft Corporation. In the razzle-dazzle of the wartime Washington merry-go-round, I watched the expansion of air transport until it became a decisive factor in the war. Hurdling the Himalayan Hump and leapfrogging submarine-infested sea lanes, it delivered important persons and critical cargoes to decisive points inaccessible to other forms of transportation. Believing that this performance presaged the advent of expanding air commerce, we manufacturers began investing our earnings in bigger and better transports.

One day Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal sent for me. At the time when some critics were still harping their cry, “too little and too late,” he gave me private instructions to cut back production. His problem had become “too much and too soon.” The cutback brought us face to face with the nightmare that had haunted our dreams since the outbreak of war. Following the Armistice of 1918, our government had so ruthlessly canceled war contracts that the aircraft industry had been all but destroyed. When I pointed out this danger, the secretary suggested the only possible solution: the aircraft industry must take its story to the public. He advised that I undertake to lead the industry in our campaign for survival.

This made it necessary for me to relinquish the presidency of my company and accept the chairmanship of the board of governors of our trade association. The first step was to decide on an industry policy and obtain agreement on a program. Out of the history of aviation I drew the analogy between sea power and air power and formulated a program of peace through air power. We took for our objective the appointment of a new Presidential advisory commission[Pg xv] to hear testimony in public and recommend a new air policy revised to conform with technological developments. As the basis for our operations we covenanted to cooperate with one another in the public interest in matters pertaining to policy but to continue to compete vigorously in our business operations.

In an effort to crystallize aeronautic opinion, I published a book called Air Power for Peace. This study, an objective technical treatise, patterned on Adm. A. T. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, disclosed that, despite spectacular war performances by Army and Navy air forces, the Mahan doctrine still prevailed: victory had again rested with those who had secured to themselves—and denied to their enemies—freedom of communication by sea. No overseas assault could have been mounted nor could our own supply lines have been secured without first subduing German submarines in the Atlantic and sweeping Japanese sea power from the Pacific. Yet in both actions an important new strategic factor had developed: command of the air over the sea had become vital to command of the sea itself. It was the carrier task forces that had proved to be the decisive instruments in both oceans. Furthermore, brilliant, though limited, success by military air transports had disclosed that air power was an integration of air force, air transport, aircraft production, and in fact all that went to make us strong in the air. Yet, until air transport could assume the full burden of overseas trade, victory in war and prosperity in peace must still rest with him who is strong enough—and wise enough—to retain command of the sea. Russia’s submarine fleet later gave added strength to this conclusion.

Meanwhile, as spokesman for the aircraft manufacturers, I addressed organizations of all kinds, seeking to interest the molders of public opinion in the air power problem. Our association and our members participated in a nationwide program of public information. The key to our effort was our endeavor to promote the public interest as the means of serving our own enlightened self-interest.

Yet for all our effort, we were unable to get full cooperation from the two other elements of integrated air power, air transport and the[Pg xvi] armed forces. The Army Air Force, fighting for its autonomy, tangled with naval aviation in a jurisdictional dispute. The airline transport operators, jockeying for individual advantage under the policy of so-called “reasonable regulation,” split wide open on such questions as “the chosen instrument.” Government agencies, fearful of the possible loss of their prerogatives, gave less than enthusiastic support to our plea for a public policy-forming board. The appointment of the commission therefore lagged, while both airline transport and aircraft manufacturing suffered crippling losses. Convinced that this situation called for a new book on aviation, a sort of bible of air-power, or at least its gospel, I decided to write Slipstream. In December, 1946, in order to gain freedom to express my personal points of view without compromising my company, I resigned from United Aircraft.

While it was Mahan, the historian, who first revealed to the world the decisive influence of sea power upon history, it was Richard Hakluyt, author of The English Voyages, who inspired Englishmen to exploit sea power to their commercial advantage. By collecting the journals of the world’s leading merchants and the adventure narratives of its greatest navigators, and by editing them so as both to entertain his readers and stimulate them to seek their fortunes on the high seas, he influenced the course of history. There are no such journals and narratives of contemporary aviation. Although the whole record is comprised in the lifetimes of a single generation of still-active men so that no protracted research is needed to reveal the intimate background, much of it already tends to become dim, even in the minds of men who wrote the record. Unless it be set down now it may be forever lost, and that would be a pity, for the fantastic story holds lessons that apply equally well to other technological developments such as atomic energy. In undertaking to set forth the intimate narrative of events which, in the last quarter century, have helped shape the destiny of American aviation, I am impelled to proceed partly because of deep convictions and partly because my unusually varied experience gives me a somewhat broader point of view from which to judge the impact of events.

[Pg xvii]

While engaged on this task, I was disturbed to note that matters were going from bad to worse. In the summer of 1948, however, help came from an unexpected source. The Russians imposed their blockade on Berlin. The American public, aroused now to the need for preserving American air power, clamored for action. The Republican Congress voted a Congressional Aviation Policy Board; President Truman countered with his own Air Policy Commission. Before this latter organization, known as the “Finletter Board,” the aircraft manufacturers presented a well-prepared case. The airline transport operators, having suffered disastrous losses, were demoralized almost to the point where they were willing to accept a subsidy such as that long paid to the merchant marine. The Air Force, having earlier won its autonomy, made a vigorous plea for funds to provide a strong strategic air force.

Under the circumstances, the Finletter Board, whose report was published under the title, “Survival in the Air Age,” naturally gave priority to the military aspects of aviation. The Congressional Aviation Policy Board supported a long list of recommendations made by the Finletter Board and recommended legislative action, little of which has been forthcoming. But military appropriations, easily the immediate answer to the air power problem, were passed largely because the public had been convinced that this country must maintain a technically superior aircraft-manufacturing establishment under private management. Thanks to these appropriations, the aircraft industry has survived the ordeal of reconversion.

Meanwhile, bureaucratic muddling had all but wrecked the airline transport industry when, in the summer of 1949, Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado, chairman of the Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, commenced hearings to inquire into its ills. Out of the welter of testimony before this committee—evidence replete with inconsistencies and strongly flavored by self-interest—someone familiar with the intimate history of aviation could crystallize his convictions as to what must be done to make American air power a force for peace. Believing that these convictions should be expressed, even though they might prove distasteful[Pg xviii] to some of the customers of the aircraft manufacturers, and desiring to avoid embarrassment to my former associates, I resigned the chairmanship of the board of governors of the Aircraft Industries Association and severed my last connection with the industry. Now, I should at least be able to view the whole subject of air power objectively.

Out of the twisting and turning of our slipstream, air policy is revealed, not as so many believe, as a code book of detailed administrative procedures, but as a course of public conduct. It is no technical complexity of materials, money, management, or machines, but rather a simple expression of the spirit of men, one that can be stated in words of one syllable, “Air Power For Peace.”