CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Courage of Conviction

One of the important considerations that had influenced my decision to resign from the Navy had been my desire to work on constructive tasks with men whose competence I had admired. Among these were Fred Rentschler, Bill Boeing, George Mead, Claire Egtvedt, George Wheat, Don Brown, Phil Johnson, and Chance Vought. As fate dealt the cards, however, the decade of 1930 saw the passing of Chance, George, and Don, and of these, Chance was the first. During the summer of 1930, after I had added Sikorsky to my responsibilities, Chance died of septicemia, something which today would respond quickly to the new drugs. With him, much of the sparkle went out of United Aircraft.

By the time I joined United, Chance had already come to realize that his famous Corsair two-seater, which had done so well on battleship catapults and carrier decks, had all but been outmoded by the passage of time alone. And he was at a loss to know what to do about it, and talked far into the night about that problem. His untimely death relieved him of all necessity for further worry, but it also handed the job to me. Worse still, the Vought company, like most other aviation concerns, had always been a one-man show and there were no more Chance Voughts standing around to be hired, even with more jobless men around than the country had ever known. And so we faced the task of creating a new organization—one of a type then new to aviation—of developing some new product and of marketing it in what was becoming a tough market indeed. In this job we pinned our hopes on some of the old-timers in the Vought organization and on a relative newcomer, Charles J. McCarthy.

“C.J.,” as we called him, to differentiate the airplane engineer from “J.F.,” the financial wizard, had been in BUAERO in charge of the new department called “Stress Analysis” at the time when I had been chief of the Engine Section. It was C.J. who had flown to Norfolk with me the day the Wright T-3 engine jumped out of a torpedo bomber when the wooden propeller flew apart, and it had been out of that experience that we decided to standardize on metal propellers. It was curious how, in the aviation slipstream, we milled around, each trying to add his little push to the effective forward thrust. For Chance had offered C.J. a job in his company, and C.J. had accepted. Now I began to look upon him as my second there, and between us we decided to bring in a new chief engineer.

The newcomer was Rex Beisel, a man who had received good training in the old school of Curtiss Airplane Company but had gone west to create a new private airplane. The stock-market crash had made Rex available and we now promptly scooped him up. We thought Rex a bit opinionated, and expected to have to handle him roughly at times, but we knew there was great capacity there. And in this we were right, for Rex created a strong engineering organization as a substitute for the genius of Chance Vought, and came ultimately to head the Vought Division in his own right. The story of how this was done, like the story of Hamilton-Standard, or Sikorsky, or Pratt and Whitney, or any of the great independent outfits like Grumman, or Martin, or Douglas, or Boeing, is worth a book in itself; but for our purposes here we can sweep in only those high lights that seem to back light the slipstream itself. And though the several stories run concurrently, we are concerned more with events than with precise timing.

There was, however, one vital factor that influenced the performance of every aircraft company, and in the end, imperiled the existence of them all. For while the creative force of the Morrow Board policy carried over beyond the 1929 stock-market crash, it did not survive the ordeal of the New Deal. With the election of President Roosevelt in 1932 and his advent into the White House in 1933, an earthquake hit American aviation. When President Roosevelt ordered the cancellation of the air-mail contracts and directed the Army to take over, the young air-transport business suffered a vital blow. When, after the deaths of several Army pilots who had had no preparation for the complex transport task, the lines were returned to private operations, the blight of Congressional investigation fell upon the whole aircraft industry.

Senator Hugo Black, later a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who had been probing the ocean-mail subsidies, now turned his attention to aviation. The airplane, long a subject of great public interest, crowded the headlines with sensational charges and countercharges, none of which seemed to lead anywhere other than to the glorification of the investigators. Then Senator Gerald P. Nye, not to be outdone in courtesy, dragged out the old myth of the “munitions racketeer” and the “merchants of death” and dusted it off for the more modern treatment of klieg lights and other technological advances in the art of public relations. Whatever else may be said for these hippodromes, they had the effect of knocking down an airplane program just as a killer in the stockyards fells an ox with one neat blow from a maul. Even though the programs remained on the statute books, it would have required a courageous procurement staff, indeed, to make contracts with such apparent renegades as headed the unhappy aircraft companies.

The moment arrived when Chance Vought Aircraft was running out of work. In order to extend the useful life of the old Corsair, we had replaced the Wasp engine with a new Pratt and Whitney Hornet 1690. This gave us a breathing spell while we assembled our engineering team and dreamed up a new model. But BUAERO had now revived the old two-seat fighter project and thrust it on us. Worse still, they had designed the airplane themselves and now looked to us to detail it and build the prototype. Recalling the old fight between FLEET AIR and BUAERO on this subject, back when I had been Admiral Reeves’s chief of staff, the whole thing had elements of poetic injustice in it that now aroused me to action. I decided to build their old two-seat fighter, according to all specifications, to exceed their designed performances, and at the same time build the structure strong enough to be used as a dive bomber. This would take a lot of doing, for the performance guarantees were already high, but it would leave us with two strings to our bow, a two-seat fighter that would probably not go into production, and a two-seat dive bomber that probably would. In the latter event, Vought would give the Navy a distinctly new type of airplane, one that could depend upon its guns to penetrate enemy fighter cover and then use its bombs on ground targets.

One of the complications involved was the specification that called for the installation of the new Pratt and Whitney two-row radial, the R-1535. The two-row feature would have introduced excessive drag and cooling difficulties, except that I chanced to read an article by C. G. Grey in _The Airplane_, a British magazine devoted to aviation and to running down everything American. Mr. Grey had recently visited the great Bristol airplane factory and had been impressed with a project for cooling air-cooled engines. Unlike certain foreign engine builders who insisted on blowing large quantities of air in the general direction of their cylinders, Bristol had devised an ingenious contrivance through which they had succeeded in directing a “mere trickle” of air at precisely the required spots, thus saving much drag and improving the cooling no end.

After this tip-off, we set up a joint project using the Sikorsky wind tunnel and staff, under the direction of Chance Vought engineers, to develop a cowl for a Pratt and Whitney engine. Out of this cooperative effort came a new power-plant installation using the “cowl-flaps” which any passenger in any American transport can still see by looking out the window at the engine nacelle and watching the opening and closing of the “gills.” This development not only made the two-row radial a success but proved so effective that it has been rated by discerning observers as a development quite as revolutionary in its way as was the controllable-angle propeller.

With the drying up of both military and commercial business in our own country, we must needs look elsewhere or fade out. The export market was the only outlet, and while there were obstacles there, the superiority of our products, built up under the Morrow policy, had put us in a strong competitive position. Even from the point of view of costs and in the face of a preference on the part of some countries for aircraft of their own production, we could still make headway. American automobiles had won leadership in foreign markets because of superior quality and lower price. The idea that we could not compete with “slave labor” had been disproved; the technology of production could support higher wages and still produce low-cost goods of high quality. That was our heritage which we would now exploit.

However, there were other considerations. The control of export permits had been lodged in the State Department, which would not grant such permit without the approval of the military department concerned. In the case of the SBU-1 two-seat dive bomber we had first to obtain permission from BUAERO and then run the gantlet of the State Department and the office of a Mr. Joseph Green. This problem came to the fore when the Argentine Navy sought to acquire some of our planes. Admiral King ruled that since the airplane had the characteristics of a dive bomber it was too secret to permit foreign sale. Of course the only secret about it was that the wings had been made strong enough to take the pull-out loads—something any designer could build in—but that proved enough.

Chance Vought Aircraft now found itself in a tight spot. I camped on the doorstep of the State Department, of BUAERO, and even went to see Adm. William H. Standley, then Chief of Naval Operations, to urge that the matter be viewed from the point of view of the long-term public interest, keeping a vital industry alive and 800 men and women employed. We already had millions on relief without swelling the throng on a technicality, but I was too poor a salesman to make the idea stick. In desperation, I tried another approach.

With my wife as company, I caught a Pan American Airways flight for Buenos Aires, determined to close the contract and then see what Uncle Sam had to say. If he wanted to accept the responsibility for an overt act that would take the food from the mouths of our men, he could do so, but I refused to hold the bag while they gave me the run-around.

We were fortunate in our representation in Argentina. The firm of Jorge Luro y Cia. brought us the experience of Jorge Luro, a distinguished pioneer aviator, and the mature wisdom of Señor Guillermo Leloir, member of an aristocratic Argentine family.

“We Latins,” Guillermo counseled me, in anticipation of direct negotiations with Capt. Marco Zar, the director of Argentine naval aviation, “admire your North American enterprise but resent your high-pressure salesmanship.”

Marco Zar, a graduate of the Pensacola Naval Air Station, had come to me one day in BUAERO, asking for advice on his procurement problems. His current interest in Vought airplanes was due to his knowledge that I managed the company. An earnest, conscientious officer, he believed that a good deal for his service must needs be a fair deal all around. My tactics during the negotiations were predicated on this fact plus the advice from Guillermo.

Details of our contract were argued out before a large conference of Captain Zar’s subordinate officers. The captain won every skirmish pertaining to prices or specification, yet the final conclusions were satisfactory to all concerned. When I returned to Hartford, I passed the word around the shop that the kids could eat for another year, provided Uncle Sam did not refuse us an export permit.

With work for the shop we could direct our attention to a new development. It was already clear that biplanes were being outclassed by monoplanes, but they had persisted longer on carriers because of the space limitations imposed there. As a replacement for our two-seat dive bomber, which could carry a 500-pound bomb, we drew up a proposal to construct a folding-wing 500-pound monoplane dive bomber so designed that a carrier could manage its full complement of the new, faster type. The Bureau considered the proposal for a while, and then, instead of giving us the advantage we deserved for having conceived the idea, got out its own specification and published it to the trade. Then they further complicated the problem by advertising for two types, a 500- and a 1,000-pounder. We submitted proposals for both, and were awarded the 500-pound model. Now in order not to get left at the post in case BUAERO finally decided to buy only 1,000-pounders, we decided to build our ship to meet all the tight specifications for the smaller size but still capable of carrying a 1,000-pound bomb.

The competition from other manufacturers was tough. Every airplane was stressed to the ultimate and no margins were left for error. After winning a design competition, a manufacturer had to submit an article for test by the trial board at Anacostia. If he beat out his competitors there and won a production award, then followed the trials and tribulations of trying to build his brain child without losing his shirt. Then, after the airplane got into service and developed the unforeseen bugs that always show up regardless of previous care, he had the added responsibility for correcting faults on aircraft he might have donated to the government at a substantial loss to himself. After that, all that remained was to dream up a new model to replace the old, and in the meantime, keep service men in the field to show untrained mechanics how to operate a complicated contraption that was fully as high strung as the president of the company that had built it.

After our new SB2U went into service, we shifted our attention back to building a monoplane observation replacement for the battleship and carrier-catapult planes, represented by our original Corsairs. For so well had Chance Vought wrought that his little two-seaters, conceived back there in 1926, remained in service until after Pearl Harbor, some fifteen years later. Our replacement was called the “Kingfisher” and it saw service in World War II. One of them saved Eddy Rickenbacker from a watery grave on the vast Pacific, something that alone compensated us for the painstaking design efforts we had put into a complicated project.

Meanwhile, in the effort to find a product for export sale and, possibly, break into an Army competition, we built a fighter under circumstances so fantastic as almost to belie the telling. Jack Northrup, who had built a sweet little single-seater for the Army, using the Wright 1510 two-row engine, had won high praise from the Army Engineering Division at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, in competition with fighters by Curtiss and Seversky. But during an interlude in the contest, after the plane had gone back to California, it had sailed out over the broad Pacific and not returned. There had been gossip at the time that the Japs might have had something to do with it. At any rate, Jack Northrup had decided not to reenter the Army competition, but Jack Horner, sales manager of Pratt and Whitney, suggested that Vought take over the design from Northrup, reconstruct the model around the Pratt and Whitney 1535 engine, and create an export fighter model for United Aircraft.

I conducted the negotiations with Jack Northrup over the telephone and sent our men west by air. Starting with few drawings and no materials, we rushed the airplane to completion in something like forty-five days. During the work at East Hartford, the Connecticut River overflowed its banks and cut off the electric power, but our crews, working night and day, finished the little ship in the light of their automobile headlights.

In the competition at Wright Field, which was based not on the actual performance of the prototype but on what the contractor was willing to guarantee in production, we lost out to Alex Seversky. When we offered the airplane to the Navy, with arresting gear, we were unable to arouse interest. While this put us in the clear for an export permit, we failed to sell any of the craft, at least to countries with cash to buy them. One day our European export representative, Tom Hamilton, brought some Japanese officers to Hartford.

When the Jap pilot put the little fighter through its paces, we looked at one another in wonderment. We had long understood that these boys couldn’t learn to fly—they had myopic eyes. But whatever else the Japs had, this pilot had everything; he didn’t put on any dive-and-zoom noise show, but checked out the little airplane especially as to its maneuverability at altitude, the characteristic at which it excelled. And so with the full approval of Washington, the plane, which had been rejected by both Army and Navy, was sold to the Japanese.

Later on in the Pacific war, their fighter pilots proved quite proficient in the air. Furthermore, their fleet fighters, the Zeros, could give even our Grumman Wildcats plenty of trouble. Finally one of their Zeros was captured and brought to San Diego where, after passing severe tests by the guards, I was permitted to see it. It was bigger than our Northrup-Vought and powered with a Japanese two-row radial of about the size of our 1830. The engine was of Japanese design but incorporated what the Japs considered to be the best features of the French Gnome-Rhone radials, the British Bristol Jupiter, the Wright Cyclone, and the Pratt and Whitney Wasp. And it displayed beautiful workmanship throughout.

As for the airplane, it looked a good deal like the Northrup-Vought, though it was larger and incorporated some of the best features of other aircraft bought by the Japanese, as well as some neat wrinkles of their own. The power-plant installation was distinctly Chance Vought Aircraft, and the wheel stowage into the wing roots was definitely Northrup. The wing-tip folding was Japanese, and it looked like an idea we should have used. All in all, it was a masterful example of good imitation—they even copied the Navy inspection stamp from the Pratt and Whitney type parts—plus some good Jap innovation which combined to make the product of an “inferior race” all too devastating. As Admiral Reeves had been wont to remark, “One should never discount an enemy.”

But while the Japs had been busy with their Zeros, we had not been idle at Vought. I, for one, had not forgotten the lesson of Panama, even though our Navy now seemed to have turned its back on the fighter-bomber idea. Fighter pilots are inherently resentful of any suggestion that they should know how to dive bomb as well as dogfight. But the fact remains that, once they have driven an enemy from the skies, neither they nor their ships are useful unless they can turn a hand at attacking objectives on the ground. With this idea in mind, we set out at Vought to build a new Corsair. She must be able to out-perform enemy fighters and still be readily convertible to a dive bomber; she must have the structural ruggedness and strength to withstand the high stresses of this work. This meant, in turn, that she must be larger than the pure fighter and to this end she must have a more powerful engine. That is just another way of expressing Bruce Leighton’s ancient adage about the power plant being the heart of the airplane.

We had such an engine in the new Pratt and Whitney 2800. Originally intended to develop from 1,800 to 2,000 horsepower, this engine was later actually used at from 2,500 to 3,000 in World War II. Around the new power plant we designed a new fighter bomber, and offered it to BUAERO in anticipation of the war that seemed inevitable. But BUAERO was cool to our proposal. Large airplanes could not be carried on the flattops in the same numbers as could the smaller, more compact fighters; number was an important factor in the complement of a carrier. They were willing to let us go ahead on the project, but they could not hold out much hope for ultimate production.

Now I took a long breath and embarked on the gamble of a lifetime. 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.

But in taking this kind of decision we were not alone. Out in Seattle, Boeing had staked its future on the conviction of the Young Turks of the Army that a long-range heavy bomber would one day become the backbone of air power, no matter who said it would not. Farther down the West Coast, Don Douglas risked everything on the future of a new four-engined transport to be called the “DC-4” at a time when the Army remained cold to all transport and the airlines were doing very well, thank you, with the DC-3. Across the city, Bob Gross, at Lockheed, took his chances with a new twin-engined liquid-cooled fighter to be called the “Lightning,” at a time when the predominance of opinion was against such craft. Nearby, Dutch Kindleberger of North American, always crazy like a fox, dreamed up a single-seat liquid-cooled fighter around the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, a fighter which was to be called the “Mustang,” that would one day become a long-range escort for bombers over Europe. Down at San Diego, Reuben Fleet plugged along with flying boats and amphibians, long after the smart money was all on carrier planes. His Consolidated’s Catalinas would one day fight the world over for all our allies. And down Baltimore way the Old Master, Glenn Martin, rode his own hobby of light, fast bombers for ground attack at the very moment when the “Young Turks” seemed about to prevail in their battle for heavy bombardment. 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? But our saving grace lay in the fact that this was a free country where any man might risk his money, or even his neck, in backing his pet idea. When the chips were finally down, Uncle Sam, who hadn’t killed his air craftsmen with kindness, found they had supplied him with a wide variety of combat types from which to choose, a variety that made it possible for him to go out and win. In a postwar interview, Hermann Goering was reported to have said that the one thing the Germans had envied us was our flexible system of individual initiative and enterprise.