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.