It is now part of history that Beatty, himself a hard-riding fox hunter, succeeded in bringing his command to the peak of its fighting efficiency at the precise moment German sailors selected to mutiny. I had got an insight into Beatty’s mind one day just prior to the Armistice when he had called me aboard the Queen Elizabeth to compliment me on some verses I had published in The Arklight, our ship’s paper, under the title, “When the Grand Fleet Goes to Sea.” On the settle before the open coal fire in his cabin, Admiral Beatty summed up a discourse on leadership.
“I appreciate the tribute in your verses,” he had said, “because morale is the first responsibility of the leader and my every conscious and subconscious act has been directed toward maintaining high morale here in the fleet.”
As United Aircraft spilled over into every vacant loft in the Hartford area and then expanded into huge satellite plants in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, morale became my first responsibility. In order to indoctrinate our many new supervisors in our underlying philosophies, we organized seminars and conducted classes in leadership. In these I personally made it clear that United management had no faith in “shovership”; we would stand or fall on leadership.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
For Survival
In the anteroom to the office of the Secretary of the Navy, Fred Rentschler and I waited our turn. A stream of visitors, mostly naval officers of high rank, swept in and out of the sanctum. The men who were furnishing the leadership for this war were contemporaries of mine back in those brave days at the turn of the century when Pax Britannica still reigned and when the chances for professional advancement or even a career looked slim indeed. Now as they moved in and out, many paused to greet us and say a word of congratulation on our industry’s production miracle. Meanwhile, we wondered what the secretary might have in store for us.
Jim Forrestal sat behind his desk, taking a telephone call. As we took chairs in front of him, I glanced around at the flag-draped room and its collection of trophies. Jim had made a bid to refurnish the long room, decorating the walls with blow-up photos and seagoing mementos but even a powerhouse like Jim could not dispel the musty odor of the temporary structure or paint out its shabbiness. By 1945 that collection of shacks had served twenty-five years and seen two world wars, and it bid fair to go on indefinitely. Jim hung up the telephone, flicked a switch to his “intercom-squawker,” barked a sharp order at the answering voice, and then turned to us.
James Forrestal, like Fred Rentschler, was a Princeton man. Curious how you can spot the stamps of Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, and other Ivy League colleges. Schools like this leave as much of an imprint upon their alumni as do West Point and Annapolis. Jim was a close-knit, clean-cut, youngish fellow, dark-complexioned, with the muscles of an intercollegiate boxer bulging around his shoulders and upper arms. A man of few words, he packed almost as much meaning in them as did Fred Rentschler.
“I am going to tell you fellows something, now,” he began, “and if you repeat it, I’ll deny I ever said it.” He paused to pull open the upper left-hand drawer of the desk and remove a packet of gum. After offering us some, he wadded the wrapper of his own piece, flicked it into the wastebasket, and went on.
“You fellows are swamping us with your production,” he said. “Engines, propellers, and airplanes are running out of our ears. The time has come to slow down.”
I couldn’t resist a crack. “So it’s now ‘too much and too soon.’”