Quite undismayed by this, we had indulged in our usual penchant for adopting slogans as substitutes for elementary strategy. Our politicians boldly declared their intent to “darken the skies over Germany with clouds of aircraft.” The headline figure had been 25,000 planes. But if anyone had any idea what we expected to do with them, other than darkening the skies, such information had been kept secret. There was a suspicion in some quarters that our bold brag had been designed to screen the simple citizens from the unhappy fact that we had no power plants with which to fly those clouds into the air.
That had been a period of childlike faith in the magic of mass production. Then the government, in a frantic effort to buy time, had called in the automotive industry. A handful of citizens, whose heads contained all that was known in this country about high-powered engines of any kind, had been locked in a smoke-filled room of the Willard Hotel in Washington, and there held incommunicado, until they gave birth to the Liberty engine.
The Liberty, conceived in a crisis, and literally bulldozed into production, had proved surprisingly effective in postwar flying, especially after the usual bugs had been engineered out of it. Actually, few if any engines had been used in front-line combat. Yet, keeping in mind the fact that we had only remained in the war twenty months, and that it usually takes at least two years to construct and test an experimental model, the production of several thousand engines had been little less than magic.
The Liberty had been rated at 400 horsepower on a dry weight of some 835 pounds, or at the rate of a little over 2 pounds per horsepower, a striking advance over contemporary practice. And although under the interallied agreement, we had been denied the right to build front-line planes of our own design, we had installed the Liberty in the British de Havilland observation plane and made quite a job out of it. Dubbed “flying coffins” until after correction of the bugs, these had passed through the initial stage of unpopularity, to become “the good old DH,” and pretty much the standard for “cross-country” airplanes.
But during the war, failure by the automotive industry to meet the fantastic goals set by politicians had aroused a storm of criticism in the United States. Hardly had the ink dried on the Armistice before the government, convinced that “munitions racketeers” had profited out of the war, had turned its wrath upon “malefactors of great wealth” by ruthlessly canceling war contracts, with little regard for its contractural obligations. Having now made the world safe for democracy, it felt at liberty to destroy its expensive and unnecessary war industry, venting its spite meanwhile on the industrialists.
Manufacturers, who before final accounting had anticipated profits, now found themselves facing losses instead. Some, the less well-financed, had gone into bankruptcy; others had reorganized and kept in business. Overall, it was estimated that representative suppliers of war goods had taken a write-down of nearly a billion dollars, or about one-half their “apparent” net worth. The automotive industry, licking its wounds, had gone back to do private business with its individual customers, resolved to leave future government business to the naïve.
Judged in retrospect, the venture had proved a fiasco. It would have been bad enough had industry earned its reputation for profiteering, but to have gained the reputation after losing its shirt must be counted a public-relations failure of the first magnitude.
Meanwhile, the giant aircraft industry had just withered on the vine. A handful of the hardier “old-line” aircraft manufacturers, pioneers still obsessed by undiminished zeal for aviation, still held on. Among such engine builders had been the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company, of Buffalo, New York, and the Wright Martin Aircraft Corporation, of New Brunswick, New Jersey, now reorganized as the Wright Aeronautical Corporation, of Paterson, New Jersey. Of the automotive industry, Packard alone kept a finger in the pie.
During the war, Wright Martin had followed the other alternative to engine construction; they had bought a license to manufacture the famed French Hispano-Suiza engine. And although this procedure had been advanced as promising quicker returns, wartime experience had developed the complexities of putting foreign models into production. Designed around the European idea of handwork by skilled craftsmen, they had to be redesigned to conform to the American technique of machine-tool production. And so experience had demonstrated the necessity for having domestic types in production and ready for expansion.
After the Armistice, the new Wright Aeronautical Corporation continued to develop the Hispano type, under the aegis of the Navy Department. Using the method of “run’em, bust’em, fix’em, and run’em again,” financed by the Engine Section, Wright had developed its temperamental wartime Hispano into a rugged, 200-hp Model E-4. Wright had also developed a 300-and later a 500-hp-model Hispano, but since Congress had appropriated limited funds, and on a hand-to-mouth basis rather than for a long-term program, they had found the going rough. As long as the surplus of wartime Liberties and Hispanos hung over the market, manufacture bogged down.