CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A Spark Is Struck

Don Brown’s death left a big gap in our ranks with no file closers available to fill it. United Aircraft, once the only company in the business with real depth to its management, had got thin on top. In reorganization, the directors elected Fred Rentschler chairman, with responsibility under the by-laws for the general conduct of the business affairs of the company. I was elected president with the authorities and responsibilities of chief executive officer. Raycroft Walsh succeeded me as senior vice-president, and J. F. McCarthy continued as controller with responsibility direct to the board of directors in financial matters. This rounded up a top organization in which the several personalities complemented each other in a way calculated to promote the closest kind of teamwork. In the four divisions, Jack Horner headed Pratt and Whitney, Sidney Stewart succeeded Raycroft Walsh in Hamilton-Standard, and C. J. McCarthy became general manager of the Vought-Sikorsky Division.

Then came May of 1940. The President of the United States in his fireside chat electrified the country with his announcement of a fantastic airplane production program. The total mentioned was 50,000 airplanes. Only two weeks earlier, a House of Representatives’ Report on the War Department Appropriation Bill had lopped all but 57 airplanes off the Army Air Corps’ own modest request for 496. By that time, some 2,800 airplanes had been contracted for under the previous year’s appropriations, of which some 2,200 had been training planes. Practically the entire capacity of the American aircraft industry had been allotted to foreign sales. On the morning following the Presidential foray into the numbers racket, I sat behind my desk working on the mail.

Through the open door to the anteroom, I could see my secretary, Mrs. Dexter, typing out some of the faultless copy with which she kept our business flowing. She had come up to the front office with me from Chance Vought Aircraft, and was one of the leading women of the inner circle of highly trained and competent women who managed the routine of the top executive offices. As the only member of my office staff, she sorted out the mail and handled visitors or outside calls. On the mail, she slid into the wastebasket the bulk of it that was obviously part of the advertising matter which Uncle Sam so kindly subsidizes at great expense to himself and the recipient. A large part of the remainder Mrs. Dexter answered outright—and more effectively than if I had handled it. The part that called for decisions came to me—and even that was enough to keep a man scrambling to try to keep the desk clean. How Mrs. Dexter, singlehanded, could manage the flow of mail and calls was more than I could understand but some wag of a punster had opined that she was dexterous indeed. As I turned to my own pile of papers, the phone bell jingled and she reached for the receiver.

“The Secretary of the Treasury is calling, sir,” she said, and then added, “just a moment, Secretary Morgenthau.” I lifted my receiver.

“Could you come down to Washington,” came the flat voice, “and have supper with me at my home Sunday evening?”

“Certainly, sir,” I replied.

“Would you mind,” the voice inquired, “if I invited a competitor?”

“Not at all,” I answered. “May I ask who you have in mind?”

“Vaughan,” came the reply. “Guy Vaughan, of Curtiss-Wright.” Something impelled me to try to inject a little humor into the colorless colloquy.

“An honest competitor,” I laughed, “but with an inferior line.” The phone clicked and I sat back to try to dope out what was going on. A 50,000-plane program and the two big suppliers of aircraft engines dining at the secretary’s home on a Sunday night! Shades of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Senator Black, and Postmaster General Brown! Phil Johnson, of United Airlines, had chanced to drop in on an informal conference called in the daytime to take away from him air-mail contracts he had won under competitive bidding and Congress had crucified him for it! It all seemed to depend upon whose political ox was to be gored.

I met Guy Vaughan in the Carlton Hotel on Sunday afternoon. Guy had already scouted the terrain and discovered from “Tommy the Cork,” so he said, that the bright boys intended to give us the works at supper and force us to agree to license the government to build aircraft engines under our patents. Why they should resort to the cloak-and-dagger technique remained a mystery; they already had such rights under numberless Army-Navy contracts. But there seemed no mystery about why they wanted the licenses; the big idea was to set up a string of big government-owned-and-operated aircraft factories in the several distressed areas of the country to give relief to the unemployed, and votes to their new employers.

Our quiet little supper party with Secretary Morgenthau did seem to bear out Guy’s dope. For afterward, the secretary informed us that since we were already overloaded with the foreign business, our government would have to look elsewhere. He served notice on us that we would be expected to license the government under our patents. Guy Vaughan, on being questioned, advised the secretary that in his opinion Curtiss-Wright could build all the engines the government might require, and stated further that his company would not license the government voluntarily on a program that would put competitors into his business—and at government expense—who would, after the war, put his company out of business. In reply to the same question, I stated that we would license others to build our engines.

The secretary indicated some surprise and inquired what our price would be. When I replied that we would license them without fee, the secretary appeared to disbelieve the statement and remarked that he had never seen anything yet that was worth more than it cost. To this I replied that there was a catch to it, and now the secretary seemed ready to believe me.

From here I went on to point out that the manufacture of an aircraft engine was an art that required skill, experience, and know-how; few organizations anywhere had been successful in this field. If we licensed someone to build our product, we must still accept responsibility for its performance—a responsibility that we had always accepted. And since we accepted the responsibility, then we must insist upon retaining authority over the choice of our licensees. We had thought this through long ago as a part of our war plan; a major war would stop production of many articles and throw men out of employment. It would break up organizations and teams that had the know-how of production and had demonstrated their competence in their own lines. We would train such organizations in the specialized technique of our business and thus get a good job. As examples we suggested such organizations as the Ford Motor Company, of Detroit, the Buick, Chevrolet, or Cadillac Divisions of General Motors, the Nash-Kelvinator Company, the Packard Company, Studebaker—in fact, you could go down the whole list and find a great untapped source of skilled production experts.

I went on to contrast this with the possibility of government undertaking the job. Without mentioning the difficulties peculiar to government business, I stressed the responsibility that goes along with aircraft production. When the engines fail, the airplane cracks up and young men get killed. We had got many gray hairs carrying this responsibility. If the government wanted to take it off our shoulders, that was their privilege, but they should go into it with their eyes open.

It was apparent by now that their eyes were fully open and we said good night with mutual expressions of esteem. Soon George J. Mead, once chief engineer of United Aircraft, then serving as vice-chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, had been appointed to supervise the Treasury Department’s functions in the 50,000 program. This was good news indeed. For aside from the fact that George Mead knew his airplanes, there was the further and more important consideration that George knew the Army and Navy each had skilled organizations, schooled in the procurement of aeronautical materials, and was likely, after the details of the still nebulous program had been determined, to give the highly technical procurement job back to the Armed Forces. For had fate left this problem in the hands of one of the political agencies then springing up all over the place, we might today be slaves of Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, and Joe Stalin.

The government had either forgotten that the Army Reorganization Act of 1920 placed responsibility for industrial mobilization upon the Assistant Secretary of War, Louis Johnson, or, noting the controversy between him and his chief, Secretary Woodring, had changed its mind. In any event, Bill Knudsen was appointed Chairman of the National Defense Advisory Committee and George Mead took over the aircraft job. At the time, no one was able to enlighten us on the real meaning of the 50,000-plane program; it might be a yearly output, a war total, or anything else the fancy might suggest. Nor could anyone advise us what types of aircraft were contemplated. Scuttlebutt rumor had it that the President had first asked the Army and Navy to submit estimates of the maximum number of aircraft they could use but upon receipt of the figures had been disappointed at their lack of imagination. They couldn’t seem to add up to more than a few thousand.

His own first figure, so the gossip went, had been a nice round 25,000, the very number, curiously enough, which had been hit upon back in 1917 as the number required to “darken the skies” over Germany. But later, so ran the story, the President had tried out his fireside chat on Lord Beaverbrook, the same “Beaver” who, not many weeks earlier, had snorted his scorn at the suggestion that England would ever have to look to America for aircraft production. And the Beaver, so we were told, had advised the President not to be a piker—100,000 airplanes would make better headlines—and the President had compromised on 50,000. In any event, BUAERO and Wright Field had now dubbed the announcement “the numbers racket,” so the fact that a fellow like George Mead, who not only knew the words and music of aviation but could actually sing the song, was now handling the aircraft program seemed to us an incredibly lucky break.

And so it proved, for George got the two services to agree upon the reasonableness of some kind of program that seemed to add up to 50,000 and then passed the job back to them for execution. This put the ball back in play on a field where we knew the score and where the officials knew the rules and the game. It converted the war from a phony to a shooting war, and gave us the signal for take-off.

Now as the new British addition began to take form, we put our War Plans Division to work on a new American addition. This we decided to create in two steps and to finance with funds to be acquired in the market. Designed to utilize the entire capacity of the East Hartford area, the addition would double the total facilities already in hand. Our carefully prepared war plan contemplated farming out more and more of the work to subcontractors and suppliers as rapidly as they could be trained to manufacture to our high standards of precision and workmanship. The original manufacturing concept of Pratt and Whitney, Hamilton-Standard, and Vought had contemplated utilizing the skills and facilities of other competent shops in peacetime and in the interest of economy; now we embarked on our long-contemplated program of expansion of this technique in the interest of accelerated war production.

The capacity of any working area such as East Hartford is definitely limited by physical characteristics, such as transport, electric power, water supply, labor supply, housing, and so on. These limits, as they existed in peacetime, could be expanded to meet wartime needs by close cooperation with the management of the utilities. The War Plans Division, having foreseen the limitations of the several factors, had provided us with the information on which to approach our numerous suppliers of all kinds. Certain of these, like the power companies, whose normal business contemplated a continuous expansion of facilities to meet normal demands, used the information furnished them to arrive at decisions to advance their schedules wherever necessary to meet peak demands. Now “the aircraft,” as we were called in Hartford, moved out of the category of a speculative venture and into the position of the controlling industry of the area. Our whole philosophy of leadership, based as it was on the cooperative process, now paid off, not alone in returns to us but to our neighbors and, in fact, to the whole country.

In this connection, reference can be made to a report on “Industrial Mobilization and Design and Development of Nazi Germany,” issued by the Office of Military Government for Germany under date of October 5, 1945. The report is based on an examination of Albert Speer by several officers of the Intelligence Department, and deals with the part Speer played subsequent to the year 1942 when he was directed to take over the administration of German war production. Speer had realized immediately what great fundamental errors had been committed and how small armament output had remained prior to his taking over. The Reichswehr had dealt with armament problems theoretically and industry generally had had no great inclination to participate in preparatory work. The government organizations had become so large that they had managed only to keep each other busy; they committed what might be called mental incest and paved the way for all the mistakes that had later kept armament production at a surprisingly low level.

Speer had gone on to say that the Germans had been at a great disadvantage because their rearmament had been planned too long on a theoretic basis. A strict system of discipline and orders fully in accord with their authoritarian regime had replaced what this apparatus lacked in knowledge and ability. He had written a memorandum to Hitler on July 20, 1944, in which he stated that Russia and the United States were to be envied because external circumstances had forced them to improvise. The United States had had to raise their armed forces quickly and therefore could not do without the active personalities in industry, politics, and public life. In Germany, on the other hand, those who occupied themselves with war production were professional soldiers, a closed corporation without the benefit of fresh outside minds. For this reason, Speer believed that the extended theoretical preparation of German armaments had been mainly responsible for their low level of production until after 1942 when he had restored the principle of individual initiative by putting war production back into the hands of private industry. Within a year he had completed an organization of completely new leading personalities to restore the autonomy of industry and preserve its unity even in the most trying times.

The virus that infected Germany also attacked us, but our rugged constitution enabled us to throw it off.