Shortly after President Roosevelt’s announcement of his 50,000-airplane program, or the “numbers racket,” newspaper headlines flared the story that government had called industry leaders to Washington to tell them off for their crime, “too little and too late.” The call brought Phil Johnson from far-off Seattle, Donald Douglas, Bob Gross, and Dutch Kindleberger from Los Angeles, and others from farther or nearer. Phil Johnson, once driven out of air transport, had now been called back to Boeing to build heavy bombers.
But when we manufacturers foregathered together and proceeded to the assigned meeting places, we found the rooms so jammed with sound cameras, klieg lights, and heavy cable, there was room for but a few of the better-publicized culprits. The others watched through doors and windows while big politicos mugged cameras that would flicker their message to the hinterlands. Most of us had to see the newsreels to find out what message it was we had traveled so far to receive.
The problem of how to expand production, train licensees, and meet all Selective Service demands was always with us. For all United Aircraft divisions had accepted the responsibility for servicing in the field all equipment of our design whether manufactured by us or anyone else. This kept hundreds of trained service men in the field, including many in the front lines.
One day I received a visit from my old friend Joe Beach, former mayor of Hartford, once a good citizen but then a major assigned to the Army Personnel Procurement Branch. Joe, who knew our problems, regretfully advised me that he had received orders to recruit, from Pratt and Whitney, several hundred men conforming to a specification that described our best-trained field-service men, specialists who could be replaced only with the greatest difficulty. Joe tried to soften the blow by saying the men would be immediately commissioned captains or colonels or something. The Army would not take “no” for an answer; it was come across or else.
In this tough spot, I phoned for “Tiny” Flynn, our service manager, and with Joe listening asked him how many of his staff had been inducted into the Army and what the Army had done with them. The answers were “plenty” and “K.P.” or “latrine duty.” I then asked Tiny if he had their present addresses, and when Tiny answered in the affirmative, Joe grinned and walked out. Later he confessed to having never sprung one of these men out of “K.P.”
After the Jap sneak attack on Pearl Harbor I called on my old friend Admiral Reeves in Washington to get his slant on what had happened. The admiral, now retired, had been recalled to active duty and assigned to the Navy Department in charge of Navy lend-lease. Always an Anglophobe, he there tried to keep our English cousins within reasonable bounds. Considerably older now, the admiral was said to require two traffic lights to get across the expanse of Constitution Avenue, but the old spirit flamed.
“The one thing the administration needed to bring the people into the war on the side of the British,” he explained, with that sweeping gesture of his, “was Pearl Harbor. Who could have expected them to be so dumb as to play right into our own hand? Our big surprise wasn’t Pearl Harbor; what defeated us was that the Japs could be so dumb.”
After the attack, the admiral was ordered to Pearl Harbor as a member of the Roberts Board to investigate the efficacy of the Japanese assault under a strategic concept which the admiral had conceived but his contemporaries had not understood.
Following Pearl Harbor, aircraft production shifted to full throttle. Under Bill Knudsen’s leadership, Ford, Buick, Chevrolet, and Nash created new facilities and shipped United products. Wright Aeronautical first built a huge plant near Cincinnati and then drew Studebaker and Chrysler into the complex. At United we stepped employment up to 75,000 and thought we had attained our peak production. Then we were called to Washington and told to build a new plant somewhere out west, one bigger than the Hartford establishment. This looked at first like the straw to break the camel’s back, yet Jack Horner discovered an ideal plant site in Kansas City, Missouri.
In undertaking this job for BUAERO, we pointed out that we had no funds of our own with which to finance either construction or operation. We therefore suggested that we take the job on without profit to ourselves. The plant could be constructed by the Defense Plant Corporation under our plans and, when it came to operations, the Navy could put a disbursing officer at Kansas City who would pay the vouchers and invoices certified to him by our manager and approved by the Navy inspector. This was a procedure we had tested in Canada where James Young, president of our Canadian Pratt and Whitney, had been called on to build a propeller plant in Montreal.