CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Germ of a Big Idea

When later the Commander in Chief, Adm. Louis R. de Steiguer, once my captain on the _Old Ark_, finally released his statement of the fleet problem, the attention of all hands was focused on the forthcoming Hawaiian cruise. In April the following year, 1928, the fleet would rendezvous at San Francisco to sail from there for the joint Army-Navy exercises. In preparation for the maneuvers, each unit commander was called upon to submit his own “estimate of the military situation” and to formulate his own decisions and his operation orders. The fleet staff, after analyzing the several solutions, would promulgate the commander in chief’s orders. In FLEET AIR, as the Aircraft Squadrons, Battle Fleet, were locally known, we planned to close the first phase of the exercises with a dawn attack on Pearl Harbor by planes launched from the _Langley_.

Appreciating that a dozen tiny fighters in competition with the great guns of the ponderous battle wagons would make little impression on Pearl Harbor, the admiral undertook to expand greatly the number of aircraft to be flown off the _Langley_. To provide living accommodations for their crews he instructed Captain Towers to request the Mare Island Navy Yard to undertake alterations to the vessel during her forthcoming annual overhaul. To increase the fire power of our embryonic air force, presently confined to a pair of thirty-caliber machine guns each, we started our squadrons training in a new tactic.

Dive bombing, first tested against Nicaraguan rebels by the United States Marines, had been further developed against naval targets by Fighting Five, a _Lexington_ squadron then being assembled at Norfolk, Virginia. Admiral Reeves waxed enthusiastic over this idea, primarily because it concentrated the attack upon objectives located at the surface, instead of wasting energy on the usual dogfights between knights of the air. Frank Wagner, after scurrying around to lease all suitable training areas in the vicinity, soon had airplanes diving all over the San Diego hinterland.

In order to remove some of the hazards of operating carrier land planes over the sea, we began training our two auxiliary vessels, the former mine planter _Aroostook_ and the sweeper _Teal_ as “plane guards” for the _Langley_. For protection against losses incident to distant water landings, we equipped all planes with rubber flotation bags and gear to inflate them, when necessary, with bottled gas. Finally we borrowed two fast destroyers from the local squadrons under command of Adm. Thomas J. Senn. Here, though we little appreciated it at the time, was the germ of the big idea of the carrier task force.

With a view to further speeding sea rescue, we asked BUAERO to undertake for us the development of a single-float amphibian gear, interchangeable with the seaplane float of the Vought Corsair. To navigate a single-seater without radio out of sight of the carrier, to engage in combat and then return to a pin-point contact with a roving carrier, demanded real skill. In order to provide some sort of homing device, our radio officer, Gordon Rowe, strung a loop of wires between the wings of a Corsair, thus utilizing the loop-antenna feature, then common in home radio sets. Rowe’s device, antedating radar, was intended to avoid the possible loss of precious pilots and planes but it also made the Corsair available as a liaison plane for fighter tactics. With a good carrier-based amphibian we could extend our control of combat units and, at the same time, release them for safe long-range operations.

To gain experience from the Hawaiian cruise, Admiral Reeves felt the _Langley_ should operate at least two eighteen-plane fighter squadrons as dive bombers together with six Vought Corsair two-seaters for scouting, rescue, and radio liaison. While the _Langley_, with the space available in her vast, empty coal bunkers, could easily provide ample hangar space and crew’s quarters, the restricted area of her flight deck and the limited capacity of her plane elevator introduced serious limitations. How to spot forty-two airplanes on an area believed by _Langley_ officers to be adequate for but twelve was something of a problem.

While working on this, I proceeded on another project close to my heart, a recommendation from FLEET AIR for a long-term development and procurement program that would conform to the one I knew to be under way in BUAERO. If we could eliminate some of the local

## partisanship that frequently obscured the fundamentals of such

problems, we might facilitate engineering progress.

When I submitted my schedule to the admiral he approved all of it save one critical item, the construction of an experimental two-seat fighter. The idea had originated in World War I on the Western Front, where the classic form of attack had been a dive out of the sun onto the enemy’s tail, to shoot him down when he wasn’t looking. Perhaps a tail gunner might guard a pilot from such surprise, but Admiral Reeves would have none of the idea. He thought an alert fighter pilot could do the job by twisting his neck. If he had to lug an extra gun and tail gunner, he would impair the combat performance of his airplane. Besides, during maneuvers, no rear gunner could serve a gun. This was no snap judgment on his part; he had had Wagner try it out during tactical exercises, using Voughts to simulate two-seat fighters. In his judgment there could be no such thing as a two-seat “fighter.”

Against such logic I could but argue that many officers in the Bureau favored the project, among them Bruce Leighton, who, having finished his tour at sea, was now head of the powerful Plans Division. Failure to include his pet project in our recommendations would stir up such a controversy as to hazard the entire program. The admiral smiled at me.

“You’ve been with Moffett so long,” he chuckled, “that you’ve begun to think like a politician yourself.” It being hopeless to argue further with this forthright old sea dog, I modified the letter, knowing full well that Bruce Leighton, who had fostered the air-cooled engine against bitter opposition, would not readily abandon his pet two-seat fighter. And so it proved. BUAERO and FLEET AIR split wide open on this single controversial item with the result that the rest of the program fell apart. Before long we were engaged in acrimonious correspondence on almost every subject. Even engineering needs politics for lubrication.

When the _Langley_ returned from her overhaul, she brought more trouble in her wake. The alterations for additional crew space had not been approved. When the admiral learned this from Frank Wagner his beard bristled and his eyes flashed.

“Instruct Fighting One and Fighting Six to assemble all aircraft on the _Langley_ dock,” he ordered. “Collect a dozen Vought Corsairs and advise Captain Towers we will call on him after lunch. We’ll soon see,” he added ominously, “just how many planes the _Langley_ can be made to operate.”

When, after lunch, the admiral with his staff bore down under all plain sail upon the _Langley_ dock, Captain Towers and his officers met us at the gangway. The admiral, taking personal charge, soon had Wagner and me helping the deck crews to spot planes closer and closer together. When he had finished, he wrung from the _Langley_ officers their reluctant admission that forty-two airplanes might be operated, but they expressed their firm conviction that it would be dangerous. As the admiral swept off the flight deck in triumph, he pointed up the moral in a strong, resonant voice.

“Most standards,” he said, “are limited by opinion or prejudice. They break down under pressure. The function of a leader,” he added, “is to generate the pressure.” Turning to me he continued, “Please collect all the artificers in FLEET AIR, every carpenter’s mate, shipfitter, and helper. Go in person aboard the _Langley_ and construct quarters for the plane crews.”

“Without authority from Construction and Repair?” I queried.

“Upon the authority of COMAIRONS,” he replied, “and,” he added, “on my responsibility.”

Arriving at San Francisco, we found Chance Vought waiting with a new Corsair single-float amphibian which he had personally chaperoned all the way from Long Island City in a baggage car. The Naval Aircraft Factory at Philadelphia later supplied two more of a somewhat different design. After testing them, I came in for a good deal of ribbing from _Langley_ pilots who, like Chance, insisted I had spoiled good airplanes by overloading them with junk. The craft may have been “klucks” but they lifted a heavy load from the staff conscience.

The fleet sailed on schedule with the aircraft squadrons ready in all respects. Some of our wives, including mine, were to all sail later on a passenger steamer from Los Angeles. With our convertible coupe in the ship’s hold and my own recollections of an earlier visit to Honolulu in the old Armored Cruiser Squadrons in mind, we looked forward to a pleasant sojourn.

During passage, the fleet passed the steamer at sea, where the wives got a close-up of the _Langley_ launching and receiving planes. We had been assigned a fixed station “6,000 yards astern of BAT DIVS,” an order that irked the admiral no end. To launch and receive aircraft, the _Langley_ had to leave her station and head into the wind, a fact that seemed to cause acute distress to those elements of the fleet accustomed to cruising in precise formation.

On the slow journey westward, daily exercises, morning and afternoon, developed our flight-deck technique to the ultimate. As a plane floated in over the ramp, to drop into the gear and be brought up with a jerk, squads of deck handlers swarmed out of the nettings, cleared hooks from landing wires, caught wing tips, and hustled the craft forward of the barrier, just in time to clear the gear for the next plane, even then floating down the groove. It was Bull Reeves who pressed always for more speed. Always quick to condemn a miscue or commend smart action, he finally inspired the _Langley_ officers until they cut the take-off interval between planes down to ten seconds and the landing intervals to thirty.

At the crack of dawn, one lovely Sunday morning, we headed into the wind to launch aircraft for the assault on Pearl Harbor. We had selected this day in the knowledge that the defenders, after the usual Saturday night festivities, would be sleeping late.

First across the bow was Gerry Bogan of Fighting One; the rest of his flock zoomed after him at ten-second intervals. Fighting Six followed, led by “Injun Joe” Tomlinson. Finally scouts and amphibians roared into the air, leaving the deserted flight deck a bleak expanse of silence. After their attack on Pearl Harbor, the squadrons were to land ashore.

Our striking force, undetected by the defenders, caught Army and Navy pilots flat on their backs in bed, just as their successors were destined to be caught some thirteen years later on Sunday, December 7. It now seems likely that the casual Japanese oil tanker that managed always to find herself in the center of our operating areas off San Pedro, or those “fishing” sampans that busied themselves off Honolulu that very morning, later communicated our movements to the Japanese high command. It was natural for their admiralty to assume that we understood the import of the new weapons we were exercising. They could not have believed the intelligence that our own high command had so discounted the striking power of aerial bombs and submarine torpedoes that they had neglected to equip their vessels with adequate gun defenses. Recognizing in FLEET AIR—as they surely did—a revolutionary instrument of sea power, they sped their own development and hastened to exploit it in the rapid expansion of their East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.

During the remainder of the Hawaiian exercises, we conducted joint operations with local naval forces and with the Army, polishing our flight techniques at sea. One day, a shift of wind, sweeping yellow volcanic dust from an extinct crater, cut our surface visibility to a dangerous low just after Gerry Bogan, with nine fighter bombers from Fighting One, had roared over the bow to attack a distant enemy fleet. Our worried staff found some comfort in the knowledge that one of our radio-liaison Corsairs was supposed to be plane-guarding the unit, ready to lead the flock back aboard after its mission had been completed. But when we radioed the Vought, the pilot reported he had lost the fighters. After homing the Corsair and taking her aboard, we began really sweating it out, peering hopefully into the yellow spaces, looking for Gerry Bogan. Finally at long last came the drone of engines. One by one the planes lurched into the gear and taxied forward. The admiral sent his orderly for Bogan.

“Where the hell have you been anyway?” he demanded with unwonted truculence.

“Fightin’,” replied Gerry.

Years later when I read of Gerry Bogan’s fantastic exploits in the Pacific, and especially Bill Halsey’s estimate of his courage, I recalled this laconic yet complete answer—as well as the way it had parted Bull Reeves’s whiskers in an appreciative grin.

At Pearl Harbor, one day, we got news of the arrival in San Francisco of the long-awaited _Lexington_. She planned to proceed at once to Honolulu on a trial run at thirty knots. Day by day we watched her phenomenal performance, and we admired her from afar as she anchored in triumph off Waikiki with Diamond Head as a fitting backdrop. There her captain, Frank D. Berrien, welcomed us warmly as we transferred aboard.

Whereas on the _Langley_ COMAIRONS staff had perched under the flight-deck ramp in temporary cubby holes hung as an afterthought out over the stern, on the “_Big Lex_” the chief of staff rated a living room, bedroom, and bath, a sumptuous suite in which I rattled around like a single die in a wardroom dice box. Messing as we did with the admiral in his big cabin, we luxuriated all the way back to San Diego. There, anchored in the Roads, we found big “_Sister Sara_” under the able command of Capt. John Halligan. Bull Reeves’s two-starred flag floated over the world’s most powerful carrier force, a smart outfit that already gave signs of great _esprit_ in the making.

Meanwhile a number of new aircraft and new pilots had been assembling for the “summer concentration.” Our job now was to whip the force into shape for the next fleet operation less than a year away. Captain Towers turned over command of the _Langley_ to Capt. Arthur B. Cook, another good skipper, and now returned to BUAERO to become Admiral Moffett’s Assistant Chief. We hoped that the stresses and strains of the winter might not complicate our affairs, for we already had a tough problem to solve in the relationship between the carriers and their squadrons. The admiral held that the squadrons should base under him at San Diego and should operate under his command in the monthly fleet tactical exercises; some of the carrier officers, and singularly enough it was the naval aviators now acting as ship’s officers, and not the line officers at all, insisted that the squadrons should function with respect to the carriers just as a turret crew works on a battleship. Aside from the fact that it was impractical to base squadrons on carriers and train them there without keeping the carriers continuously at sea, the introduction of carrier skippers into the chain of command tended to slow down air operations.

This was a conflict that raged even more bitterly as time went on and especially after Capt. E. J. King took over command of the _Lexington_. It was complicated by the _Langley_ incident and worse still by a political situation even then developing back in Washington. Some of the high brass had gone gunning for Admiral Moffett’s scalp—his term of office would expire in a year—and their candidate, as yet unbeknownst to Bull Reeves, was Rear Adm. Joseph M. Reeves.

As the net of complications began to tighten about us, I chafed under them. To me it seemed that grown men ought to learn to bury their pet prejudices and to move ahead on the big ideas in an orderly and cooperative fashion. To Bull Reeves, an older, wiser, and always more philosophical man, these conflicts all seemed part of a plan that somehow produced the right answers where the apparently more orderly processes finally created planned disorder.