It seems difficult now for us to realize how utterly unlearned we were, both in official and technical quarters, in the design, the production, or the use of aeronautical equipment in those early days of 1917. Here in America mechanical flight had been born; but we had lived to see other nations develop the invention into an industry and a science that was a closed book to our people. In the three years of warfare before American participation, the airplane had been forced through a whole generation of normal mechanical evolution. Of this progress we were aware only as nontechnical and distant observers. Such military study of the progress as we had conducted was casual. It had, in fact, brought to America scarcely a single basic fact on which we could build our contemplated industry.
When the United States became a belligerent no American-built airplane had ever mounted a machine gun or carried any other than the simplest of necessary instruments. Such things as oxygen apparatus, electrically heated clothing for aviators, radio-communication with airplanes, landing and bombing flares, electric lighting systems for planes, bomb-dropping devices, suitable compasses, instruments for measuring height and speed, and the like—in short, all the modern paraphernalia that completes the efficiency of combat airplanes—these were almost entirely unknown to us.
The best of the prewar activities of America in this line had produced some useful airplane engines and a few planes which the countries then at war were willing to use only in training of aviators.
Within the Army itself there was small nucleus of skill around which could be built an organization expert and sophisticated. We had in the official files no adequate information as to sizes, capacities, and types of planes or engines, or character of ordnance, armament, or aeronautical appliances demanded by the exacting service in which our young birdmen were soon to engage. Even the airplanes on order in April, 1917 (over 350 of them), proved to be of such antiquated design that the manufacturers of them, in the light of their increased knowledge of war requirements a few months later, asked to be released from their contracts.
Nor was there in the United States any industry so closely allied to airplane manufacture that its engineers and designers could turn from one to the other and take their places at once abreast of the progress in Europe. There was little or no engineering talent in the United States competent to design fully equipped military aircraft which could compete with Europe. Our aircraft producers must first go to France and England and Italy, and ground themselves in the principles of a new science before they could attempt to produce their own designs or even before they could be safe in selecting European designs for reproduction in this country.
The first consideration of the whole program by the Joint Army and Navy Technical Board indicated a figure of 22,000 as the number of airplanes, including both training and battle types, which should be furnished for the use of the Army during the 12 months following July 1, 1917. This figure represented the determination of America to play a major part in aerial warfare. It was not possible for the board to realize at that time all of the problems which would be encountered, and the figures indicated confidence in the ability of the industrial organizations of the United States to meet a difficult situation, rather than an exact plan under which such production might be developed.
It is probable that it was not fully realized that the production of this program, with the proper proportion of spare parts required for military operations, meant the manufacture of the equivalent of about 40,000 airplanes.
Without an industry then, and with little knowledge or understanding of the problems of military aerial equipment, we faced the task of securing the equivalent of 40,000 airplanes in 12 brief months beginning July, 1917.
In one respect we were in a degree prepared in professional skill and mechanical equipment to go ahead on broad lines. This was in the matter of producing engines. The production of aviation engines in America had, indeed, been comparatively slight, but in the automobile industry had been developed a vast engine-building capacity. The detail equipment of automobile shops was not entirely suited to aviation engines, but, nevertheless, it furnished the basis for the future successful production of the Liberty engine and the other engines called for by the air program.