For the sole or leading purpose of creating reserves for future use by the Army, there was little or no production of air supplies after the armistice. Leaving aside all questions of the obsolescence of design, no major class of military supplies is less durable in storage than aircraft materials. Like an egg, an airplane or a balloon cannot be slightly bad and still be usable. It must be 100-per-cent perfect, or it is dangerous. The life of rubber is short even under the most favorable conditions. The rubber in balloon fabric does not escape this swift impairment. The rubber tires of airplanes deteriorate with equal rapidity. The laminated and glued joints of the wooden wing beams of airplanes expand, contract, and work loose in the varying humidity of the surrounding air and are soon weakened below the safety point. Propellers are also highly sensitive to changes in humidity and temperature. Storage batteries, when stacked together in storage, wear out in a few months, each cell apparently working upon and adversely affecting its neighbors. Bolted wing cloth, when left folded, becomes weak along the creases. Of all aviation supplies, engines are the least susceptible to deterioration in storage.
In view of these considerations, such production of aircraft and aviation supplies as was permitted after the armistice was undertaken almost solely in the interest of the contractors and their employees. Most of the factories were allowed to continue in operation under war contracts only until they had used up materials in process of manufacture when the armistice was signed. Even this operation was conducted at a reduced rate. The airplane contracts had called for a delivery of 27,000 planes in all. The production under these contracts, in exact figures, amounted to 11,754 planes before the armistice and 1,732 afterwards, a total of 13,486 airplanes produced by the American factories. Contract terminations canceled the production of about an equal number.
The post-armistice production of airplane engines was somewhat greater, both proportionately and in numbers of units delivered. This was due partly to the greater momentum acquired by the engine project, partly to the fact that engines could be stored safely and would retain good military value for years to come, and partly to the necessity of keeping the engine makers at work while their factories were turning to normal production. The total American production of aviation engines on the war contracts was as follows: deliveries to October 31, 1918, 28,509; deliveries thereafter, 13,081; total war production, 41,590. Of these engines 20,493 were Liberty engines, of which about 5,000 were produced after the armistice.
About 300 observation balloons were produced after the armistice before the manufacture could be terminated.
In one important particular the policy adopted in the demobilization of the war aircraft industry was exactly the opposite of that used in demobilizing the ordnance industry. In working back to a peace footing, it was the policy of the Ordnance Department to reserve complete manufacturing equipments and to set up stand-by plants for the manufacture of some of the most important materials in ordnance supply. On the other hand, in demobilizing the airplane industry it was the policy for the Government not to retain any manufacturing facilities whatsoever. There were strong strategic reasons behind both these policies. For field guns, for recuperators, for shell, and for other important ordnance, there is little or no normal commercial demand; and the only way the Ordnance Department could guarantee the future existence of facilities for producing these materials was to retain the equipment created during the war. But there is, or can be, some commercial demand for airplanes, and some day there will undoubtedly be a great commercial demand for them. It is important to the military welfare of the United States that this country take a foremost place in the improvement of designs and in the production of flying machines for commercial use. Only through the development of a great independent aircraft industry in this country can the Government be assured of the existence of facilities upon which it can rely to give this nation great power in the air. As conditions now are, the Government itself must be the chief customer of the airplane industry, and on the government orders the industry must live until commercial flying begins to develop on a scale comparable at least to the early development of railway transportation in the United States. If the Air Service were to have retained the war manufacturing facilities as government producing and stand-by plants, that act would have dealt a staggering blow to the infant commercial industry in the most uncertain period of its existence.
Only one exception was made. During the war the Wright-Martin Aircraft Corporation developed a plant in Long Island City for the production of Hispano-Suiza engines. This plant was purchased by the War Department and is being retained as a stand-by plant under the name of the United States Aëronautical Engine Plant. The future of this establishment, however, is uncertain.
Although it ruthlessly dispensed with the war manufacturing facilities, the Air Service retained in the demobilization a considerable part of the physical plant created for it during the war. Of the twenty-six flying fields used in the training of the war aviators, six have been retained as flying fields. These are the Bolling, Langley, Mather, and Kelly flying fields and the Carlstrom and March pilot training fields. The present equipment also includes three balloon schools, three balloon fields, one mechanics school (Chanute Field), one observation school, various stations for the defense of our island possessions and for the patrol of the Mexican border, nineteen supply, storage, and repair depots, and various other stations.
The storage of reserve supplies retained by the Air Service afforded some interesting problems, since nearly every class of supplies required special treatment in storage. Engines, for instance, were thoroughly covered inside and out with a heavy rust-preventing grease compound before being stored away in dry, cool concrete warehouses. Reserve balloons were dusted with talc, rolled carefully so as to put as little weight as possible on creases and folds, enclosed in sealed rubber envelopes, packed in wooden chests, which were then sealed up so as to be practically waterproof and air-tight, and then stacked in dry rooms in which air at a medium temperature circulates constantly among the chests. Even so, no long life for the balloons is expected. Wing fabric, both cotton and linen, was unbolted, rolled upon cardboard tubes, wrapped in paper, and suspended on racks in rooms heated in winter. Aviators’ fur and woolen clothing was stored in fly-proof and moth-proof tar-paper-lined rooms, the floors of which were thickly covered with naphthaline. Fabric was stripped from airplane wings before storage in order to permit the free ventilation of the wood; glued joints were given an extra coat of varnish; all metal parts were painted with red lead or white lead; and the wings were stored in racks designed to keep their edges straight. Thousands of propellers were stored at the aviation supply depot at Middletown, Pennsylvania, in a room in which moisture sprayers maintain a constant humidity and a thermostat a constant temperature.
The aircraft contractors’ claims proved to be fairly easy to adjust except one, the so-called castor bean case. This proved to be one of the most vexing settlements which came before the War Department Claims Board. From its humble position as an unwelcome medicament of the nursery, castor oil jumped during the war to the eminence of being an indispensable lubricant for the rotary engines used in driving airplanes. The prospective demand in 1918 for castor oil far outstripped the world supply. We needed 6,000,000 gallons by July, 1919. The Air Service therefore took the unprecedented step of attempting to grow castor beans in America, although castor beans, in merchantable quantities, had never been grown here before. Still, in the Southern States we had the correct climate, and no obstacle seemed to stand in the way of a successful crop.
Accordingly, through twenty-three prime contractors, the Air Service arranged with some 12,000 southern farmers to plant castor beans in 100,000 acres of land. Glittering prospects were held forth: thirty bushels an acre was only an average yield, and the Government would pay handsomely for the beans. Thus castor beans won 100,000 acres of good American soil away from rice, cotton, and corn, even at the war prices of these commodities. About planting-time in 1918 all was ready—fields, husbandmen, and tools—all except seed. After all, the farmers had to have seed; and to get seed the Government seized a cargo of castor beans from India, originally committed to a more sinister purpose. These beans the Government distributed among the 12,000 prospective producers, who planted them; and then, as the cartoonist so aptly says, the fun began.