John Lee, through his close association with the presidents of the West Coast companies, was able to give me an authoritative estimate of the sentiment out there. The presidents, he thought, were too much engrossed with their own immediate problems to become interested in the long-term difficulties. They were aware of the threat to survival but not as yet concerned with it. Like many other business chief executives, they were groggy and punch-drunk, and you couldn’t blame them. As a reward for their pains they had found themselves characterized as munitions racketeers, war profiteers, and merchants of death. Now, through production miracles, they had given the lie to their detractors. The profit motive no longer provided an incentive to creative endeavor.
“Take Mr. Douglas, for instance,” John summed up. “He is the key to the West Coast situation. If you could enlist his support, you could also get the help of the others; without it you’d be licked before you started. Time magazine recently quoted him as saying he had the perfect postwar plan: ‘lock the door and throw away the key.’ Of course Mr. Douglas didn’t say that, even though he may have thought it, but the quote is significant.”
Ever since that day in Jim Forrestal’s office, I had been mulling over an idea evolved one evening at Admiralty House, Bermuda, where my wife and I had been the dinner guests of Vice Adm. Sir Charles E. Kennedy-Purvis, RN, K.C.B., Commander in Chief of British Forces in the Western Atlantic. As Comdr. Charles E. Kennedy-Purvis, Executive Officer of the light cruiser Southampton, I had known him well in the old Grand Fleet days. “K-P,” as we called him, had recently been advised of his pending assignment as First Deputy Sea Lord, at the Admiralty, London, where he would be charged with responsibility for recreating the British carrier force after the decline suffered under the Air Ministry. He had asked us down for a visit in order to get my slants on the principles involved.
My idea had first come to me the evening following the German surrender in World War I when several of us wardroom officers had gone ashore to pay a social call on K-P and his wife in their tiny apartment over a cottage in the village of Limekilns. Upon my referring to Beatty’s congratulatory signal to the Grand Fleet, K-P had taken pains to remind me that the message had been addressed to the British Empire.
“Beatty,” he had said, “was not talking to the fleet but reminding the people that it had been the nine-knot tramps, the rusty colliers, the huge transports, the drifters and trawlers, all the ‘Merchant Men’ which had kept the Empire lifeline open. These,” he had added, “are the backbone of our sea power.”
K-P, who like most English officers was much better schooled in public affairs than were we, had gone on to give us a discourse on transportation. From the days of the aborigines’ pursuit of game herds, the progress of civilization was marked by the milestones of the development of transport. In America, the railroads had sparked reconstruction after the Civil War by opening up the resources of the West. Following the World War, the automobile would likely perform the same function. Improved transportation had always increased the number of persons who could subsist on a given area and had always increased the wealth and living standards of lands in which it had been exploited.
When I had inquired what future K-P foresaw for the airplane he had shaken his head.
“The economics of the thing are all against it,” he had replied. “The cost and complication of the airplane are out of all proportion to its limited useful load.”
Subsequently, with the coming of age of air transport, I had begun to visualize an analogy between sea power and air power, a line of thinking that had led naturally to Pax Britannica and Pax Aeronautica. About this same time John W. Donaldson published a paper on the same subject. This would become the keynote of the aircraft manufacturing industry’s struggle for survival, but first we must establish a wholly new definition of air power. Instead of its being synonymous with air force, the term must incorporate such other elements as aircraft production, airline transport, private flying, finance, public support, in fact everything that helps make a nation strong in the air. While advocating the preservation of our industry, we must predicate the need upon the public interest.
When I outlined this idea to John Lee, his eyes lighted up.