CHAPTER ONE

It’s Anybody’s Fight

It was a day in March of 1924 when I first stepped across the threshold of the anteroom to the office of Rear Adm. William Adger Moffett, Chief of the new Bureau of Aeronautics in the Navy Department at Washington. The anteroom lay at the center of the extreme after end of the top deck of the third wing of the temporary frame structure which then housed, and in fact still houses, the Navy Department. Through the windows I could see the greening lawns of the Mall and the budding cherry blossoms along the rim of the Tidal Basin. Directly below, the Reflecting Pool, a square-cut sapphire, mirrored the tip of the Washington Monument and the cottony clouds of a blustery day. I handed my orders to the admiral’s secretary and, as she disappeared through a door to the left, I glanced around.

To the right of the secretary’s desk, a latticed, swinging half door of the type once common to saloons of the preprohibition era bore a gilt-lettered sign reading “Assistant Chief of Bureau.” To the left, on a similar door, the letters spelled “Chief of Bureau.” As it swung open, the secretary waved me toward a stiff-backed chair and said, “The admiral will see you in a few minutes, sir.”

Lifting my sword off its hook, I stripped the white lisle gloves from my hands, dusted a bit of lint off my two and a half gilt stripes, and sat down in the chair. Most young officers bearing such orders as mine would have thrilled at the thought of duty in Washington, but I was vaguely uneasy. That sword, standing on the tip of its scabbard between my knees, seemed, in a way, to point up my doubts. Forged into its blade was a quotation from one of Teddy Roosevelt’s slogans, “The only shots that count are the shots that hit.” Judged by that standard, I had not scored too well since graduation from Annapolis in 1908. Having set out on a career in gunnery, I had let myself be diverted from it.

I had been appointed to the Naval Academy from the state of Washington and had been admitted at the age of sixteen. Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, where I enjoyed the great outdoors, hunting and fishing with my father, I had drifted onto the Naval Academy rifle team, where I found fun in competition that made a sport out of a branch of my profession. Rifle shooting had intensified my interest in gunnery and had helped me to win my sword. The opposite side of its blade carried the words, “Class of 1871 prize for excellence in practical and theoretical ordnance and gunnery.” It was out of this background that I had determined to specialize in gunnery, but circumstances had deflected me into engineering.

After the close of the national rifle matches at Camp Perry in 1909, during which the Navy rifle team had won the military championship, I had been assigned to duty on a four-piper, a coal-burning torpedo-boat destroyer, the _Hull_, then attached to the Pacific Torpedo Flotilla based on San Diego, California. Just before I had reported to the ship, there had been an accident to one of the boilers; and since, up to that time, it had not been customary to assign officers to the engine room of destroyers, the subsequent court of inquiry had not been able to hang an officer for the explosion. Until the case could be reported as completed, the Navy Department could find no way to close its file, thus leaving an annoying piece of unfinished business. To guard against future lapses of this kind, someone had to be made Chief Engineer, and since I, a passed midshipman, was the junior officer aboard the _Hull_, I was handed the accolade.

Early in 1911, my Annapolis June Week Girl, Genevieve Speer, and I had been married at her home in Joliet, Illinois. We had later commuted between the Hotel del Coronado and less commodious accommodations in the Navy Yard town of Vallejo, California, until the summer of 1913, when we had been ordered back to our beloved Annapolis for duty, in compliance with my request for instruction in the new postgraduate engineering school, which had just been opened. The course included a year at Annapolis and another in New York at Columbia University, and was directed by Dr. Charles Edward Lucke, Dean of Mechanical Engineering and a pioneer in his profession.

Dr. Lucke, who had just published his monumental work _Engineering Thermodynamics_, found his Navy charges none too susceptible to his teaching techniques. Finally one day he discovered the reason; we were, to use his expression, “an aggregation of photographic memorizers.” And so far as I was concerned he was probably right—to win my sword I had memorized all the textbooks on ordnance and gunnery. The doctor had now to start from scratch to teach us “to reason from a set of facts to a logical solution.”

This was an era in which college professors made a mystery of science; it gave them a feeling of superiority over the practical man. The latter similarly looked down their noses at the theorists. The term “engineer” was used to designate the driver of a railway locomotive or, in New York City, the superintendent of an apartment house. Dr. Lucke was of the opinion that, if the time ever came when the practical man and the theorist combined their talents as professional engineers, they would set the world on fire.

“As engineers,” he stated for the opening gun of his new approach, “we deal with the application of combustion to industrial purposes.”

And having thus stated the role of the engineer he went on to develop the fundamental requirements for combustion:

“The fuel and oxygen,” he advised, “must be present in the proportions necessary to chemical combination; they must be intimately mixed; they must be brought to the ignition temperature and retained there until combustion is complete.”

And having expounded this truth he went on into one of his excursions into philosophy:

“That,” he said, “might be taken as a prescription for life. And remember,” he warned, “that whereas material things respond always in the same way to the same stimuli, that is not true of the human spirit. As engineers you will deal quite as frequently with the spiritual as with the material and must understand both.”

The doctor, who exercised a strong influence on some of us, inspired us to do creative work. My first opportunity came shortly after graduation from Columbia in 1915, with my assignment as Chief Engineer of the battleship _Arkansas_. The “_Old Ark_” had been commissioned three years earlier with Comdr. William Adger Moffett as her Executive Officer, and still retained the marks of his leadership. In fleet athletics and in the gunnery competitions she had won honors. In engineering, however, she had, like other ships with the new turbines then replacing reciprocating engines, earned a reputation as a “coal hog.” To overcome this, I had worked out a scheme for using the waste heat of auxiliary exhaust steam for distilling sea water, thus saving about one-third of the daily port consumption. For this development I had narrowly escaped being disciplined because I had not previously obtained permission from the Bureau of Engineering.

After our entry into World War I, the _Arkansas_ was assigned to the Sixth Battle Squadron of the British Grand Fleet and had been present at the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet. It was there, on the afternoon of November 21, 1918, that the shadow of the airplane had first fallen across my path.

The Sixth Battle Squadron had returned to its anchorage east of the great Forth Bridge. Adm. Sir David Beatty, Commander in Chief of the Grand Fleet, on his flagship _Queen Elizabeth_, had swept through the American Squadron. And as the “_Q.E._” passed us, so close aboard that one could have heaved a spud onto her decks, Beatty had stood on his bridge, gold-visored cap cocked over his right eye, bulldog chin jutting out over the bridge screen, hand raised to his visor in acknowledgment of our cheers. As these died away, _Q.E._’s searchlights had begun flashing a bridge signal that burned itself on my memory:

FROM: COMMANDER IN CHIEF GRAND FLEET

TO: BRITISH EMPIRE

BRITAIN HAS THIS DAY WITNESSED A DEMONSTRATION OF SEA POWER WHICH SHE WILL FORGET AT HER PERIL

Then as the flagship had slid by, her turrets topped by fighter aircraft poised for take-off, she had uncovered to our view the loom of a hulk lying down toward May Island. It was the aircraft carrier _Argus_, latest addition to the world’s one and only carrier force. And I had thought that, even as British sea power had triumphed, the shadow of air power was darkening the fleet.

I had learned details of the _Argus_ from an enthusiastic naval aviator, Godfrey de Courcelles de Chevalier, class of 1909, one of our big boat pilots from the Northern Bombing Base, who, detailed to observe carrier operations, had been billeted on the _Ark_. The British Admiralty, fearful lest the Hun decoy Beatty into the Skagerrak and hit him below the armor belt with torpedoes carried by shore-based aircraft, had mounted fighters on every available ship, and had augmented this defense with aircraft carriers. Most of these had been converted from old battle cruisers and, like other vessels, could only launch aircraft. Their fighting planes were expected to return to prepared air fields on shore, such as the Grand Fleet base at Turnhouse, whence they would be lightered off to their vessels.

But the _Argus_, originally built for the Italian Line as the _Conte de Savoia_, had been the first flattop capable of receiving aircraft aboard as well as launching them. And she had carried torpedoplanes with which to hit the Hun below his own belt. This force had been Beatty’s “secret weapon,” and, some thought, had helped persuade the Hun to surrender without firing a shot.

After the German surrender, the _Ark_ had been ordered home, and I had been assigned to the Naval Training Station, Great Lakes, Illinois, as Officer in Charge, Aviation Mechanics Schools. Here again I was to encounter Dr. Lucke and Capt. William Adger Moffett. During the war, Captain Moffett had commanded the training station and used it to show the Navy’s colors to the Middle West. One of those rare personalities, a naval officer with a flair for public relations, he had made many friends on the North Shore, but after the Armistice, was sent to the Pacific in command of the _Mississippi_, one of the few battleships with an airplane catapult aboard. Dr. Lucke had offered his services to the Navy upon the outbreak of the war and had established a chain of aviation mechanics schools, operated on the new principle of line production in education. One of these had been located at Great Lakes and, at the end of the war, Captain Moffett had succeeded in consolidating them all there.

When, after the Armistice, Dr. Lucke had sought a regular officer as his relief, he had recommended me to the Navy Department. I had accepted the appointment with enthusiasm because the station was near my wife’s former home in Joliet. After we had been there on duty a year or so, Captain Moffett had returned for a visit with his friends and had surprised me one morning by calling on me in my office.

He had completed his tour of duty at sea and was headed for Washington on a new project. As Captain of the _Mississippi_, he had been hampered in his catapult work by the lack of direction in Washington. Aviation activities were scattered all over the Department: engines in the Bureau of Engineering; airplanes in the Bureau of Construction and Repair; guns in the Bureau of Ordnance; and Operations in a branch of the Office of Naval Operations. Moffett had decided to go before Congress with a proposal to create a new Bureau of Aeronautics in the Navy Department and expected to be made its first Chief.

And that morning at Great Lakes he had asked me point-blank if I would accept duty in his new bureau in charge of the Engine Section. I had first shied away from the idea, but he brushed my objection aside. He would have me ordered to sea duty in aviation, he said, and then bring me ashore to his bureau. Accordingly, in 1921 I was ordered to New York to put the seaplane tender and kite-balloon ship _Wright_ into commission, with duty as Chief Engineer, a job which had turned out to be that of wet nurse for a lot of dizzy, heavier-than-air and lighter-than-air pilots. As a “Kiwi,” the current name for a nonflying officer, I had found my young charges willing to concede me all the responsibilities of the organization, provided no one interfered with their authorities.

Our first “cruise,” nominally to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, strewed aircraft all along the Atlantic Coast after forced landings, with dense concentrations at Palm Beach. All failures in this outfit were classified as “mechanical”; the term “cockpit failure” had not yet been created. On analysis, I had discovered that practically all forced landings and delayed starts were chargeable to a few pilots. But when I posted the figures on the wardroom bulletin board, this act had been considered hardly cricket. Fed up with the vagaries of this school of aviation thought, I had looked around for a change of duty, and found it during the summer of 1922.

That year, the National Rifle Association of America had decided to enter a team in the international free rifle matches at Milan, Italy, and extended me an invitation to compete for the squad. Here was an opportunity to escape the razzle-dazzle of naval aviation into something I knew about. Better still, it afforded an opportunity for my wife and me to make a joint European tour. At Milan, our team won the championship of the world. By that time, my wife had obtained tickets to the last performance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau, an event destined to shape my outlook.

We had been billeted in the home of Antone Lang, the Christus of the play, and had been stirred by the devout spirit shining in the faces of the villagers. The play, too, had moved us deeply as a revelation of the fundamental tenets of our Christian faith. Though spoken wholly in German it had remained for us a vital religious experience.

During the evening following the performance we had talked with Antone Lang in his parlor and obtained his autograph on a photograph of himself in his role. And when we had come to settle with Frau Lang for our lodgings, we had been astonished to find them so absurdly cheap. Upon our offer to contribute to a local charity—this at a time when inflation had put the exchange rate up to several thousand marks to the dollar—Frau Lang had set a limit of twenty-five marks. At my exclamation of surprise she had hurried to explain, “We need honest work, not charity. Today there is nothing that money can buy!” I had left with a deep impression of the disaster of inflation and the folly of war.

Upon our return from Europe, I had avoided the Bureau of Aeronautics and obtained an assignment as Executive Officer of the destroyer tender _Bridgeport_, a converted former German merchantman. Under command of Capt. R. Drace White, I had enjoyed a year and a half of pleasant duty, trying to make a yacht out of a floating machine shop, and had just begun to feel at ease, when Adm. William Adger Moffett reached down into the Caribbean to pluck me off my happy home and install me in his bureau.

Thus it had been that, thanks to Dr. Lucke and the admiral, I was diverted from gunnery into engineering and then into aviation. Now as a buzzer sounded, and the admiral’s secretary smiled her signal to enter the sanctum, I hooked on my sword and pushed open the door, not with the enthusiasm of an aviator but with the reservations of the professional seaman.

Inside his sunny corner office, Admiral Moffett leaned against the old-fashioned high desk at which he stood when signing out papers. That desk, I thought, was a relic of the days of high stools and celluloid eyeshades, and must have been dragged out from some old storeroom by the admiral for the sake of sentiment. He was like that, a curious mixture of sentimental attachment to the days of sail and nervous enthusiasm for the airplane. Over his shoulder draped the silk cord of a pince-nez, poised on the bridge of his nose. His double-breasted blue-serge civilian suit, cut to look like the new uniforms, bespoke revolt against the executive order which had instructed officers on duty in Washington to stow their regimentals away with moth balls in sea chests.

This order was a manifestation of the “return to normalcy,” under which slogan, Senator Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge were to be sledded into the White House and the Vice-Presidency later the same year. For the American people, disillusioned after their recent crusade to make the world safe for democracy, had now turned their backs on Europe to devote themselves to something they knew more about—how to make money fast. During the existing reaction against all things military, the Administration deemed it wise to keep uniforms out of sight as far as possible. They were only permitted to be worn by officers reporting for duty, as I was at that moment.

The admiral turned to shake hands with me and hand me my signed orders. His was the aristocratic bearing of the Southern cavalier.

“Glad to see you aboard,” he greeted me warmly. “You are to relieve Lt. Comdr. B. G. Leighton as Chief of the Engine Section—an important department. I’m sure you’ll do well at it.” His was the accent of Charleston, South Carolina, but without the drawl. He clipped his words like a nervous Yankee.

“Aye, aye, sir,” I replied, acknowledging the order in the conventional manner, “but what I don’t know about aircraft engines,” I added, “would overflow the library of Congress.”

“Well,” grinned the admiral, “you have one advantage—you know you don’t know anything, which is more than I can say for some people in this Department.” He reached for his pipe and struck a match. (I was to learn that he smoked more matches than tobacco.) As the pipe went out he glanced at me.

“Leighton tells me you are not too happy about coming here for duty.”

“It breaks my sea cruise,” I explained, “and I don’t like to give the Selection Board an excuse to pass me over.”

“The last Board picked you up,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And a year ahead of time,” he went on.

“Yes, sir.”

“I am not supposed to discuss the proceedings of the Board,” he continued, “but I was a member of it and, confidentially, I served notice on them that I would not approve a list that failed to reach down through you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I needed you here, and you can depend on me to look out for you in the future.” He fumbled with his pipe.

“There’s a lot going on around Washington,” he volunteered. “That fellow Billy Mitchell over in the Army Air Service makes a lot of trouble for me. But back in ’twenty-two at the Limitation of Arms Conference I set him back on his heels. He tried to take over the chairmanship of the session on aviation, and the first subject on the agenda was reparations. This country was scheduled to get one of the latest German Zeppelins, converted to a merchantman, and I didn’t intend to let the Army beat me to that punch.” He paused to glance at a silvery model of a rigid airship, standing on top of his cluttered desk.

“And so,” he went on, “when Mitchell breezed in with a secretary, all ready to take the chair, I inquired by what authority he pretended to assume the chairmanship. He mumbled something about rank. ‘Since when,’ I demanded, ‘does a one-star brigadier rate a two-star admiral?’ That stopped him, and the Navy got the _Los Angeles_.”

He moved close to me, tapping me on the forearm with his pipestem. “It isn’t just the old Army-Navy dogfight, though of course there is a lot of that in it. But these overzealous knights of the air actually believe that the airplane has already obsoleted the Navy. It isn’t their own idea but the nonsense preached by that Italian General Douhet in a book called _Command of the Air_. And on his say-so, these wild-eyed enthusiasts want to scrap the Army and Navy, on no other grounds than their personal opinions, unsupported by experience or fact.” He paused.

“And the old fogies over in Operations are no help to me, either,” he added. “They lay themselves wide open to Mitchell. If they had let me handle the publicity on the bombing off the Virginia Capes, I could have made a monkey out of him.” He began pacing the room.

“If the Navy doesn’t hurry and build up its own air force,” he rattled on, “it _will_ be obsolete, just as Mitchell claims. Without an air force, the fleet would be a sitting duck. Mitchell knows that, and his game is to concentrate all aviation in a separate and independent air force under his command. With that setup he can emasculate naval aviation just like the British Air Ministry is doing in England. Meanwhile I am taking advantage of that to catch up with our own carriers. Give me a little time and we’ll leave them in the ruck.” A flush had crept up around his ears.

“So that’s why I had to create this Bureau—and why I had you ordered here. We’ve got a fight on our hands to keep Mitchell from sinking the Navy, and the country along with it.” He paused to cock his eye at me.

“Of course,” he said, “if you don’t like a nice knockdown, drag-out fight, I can send you back to General Service.”

My thoughts flashed back to my last night aboard the old _Bridgeport_, a Caribbean night beneath the stars when the crew had given me a farewell “happy hour.” Floodlights had glowed on the boxing ring, rigged on Number Three hatch. Brown-faced, white-shirted sailormen had looked up at the two gloved lads in boxing trunks whom the referee had called to the center of the ring for final instructions. And then as he had sent them back to their comers with a slap on each back he called after them, “Remember, now: break clean and come up fightin’. It’s anybody’s fight.”