In this they had met hard sledding because those unwieldy catapults had cluttered up the decks, destroyed the symmetry of the ships’ silhouettes, and shed grease all over the precious teak decks. However, the aviators had penetrated the cold front by learning how to spot the fall of shot in long-range battle practice, and how to signal the ship the correction that would put a salvo on a target. Ships with planes had thus gained an advantage in the gunnery competition over those that had none, and besides, their pilots had been trained for deck duty and could share watches at sea or in port.
Meanwhile, BUAERO had pushed on with its plans to match the British in carrier aircraft. Under the leadership of Kenneth Whiting, who as Commander of the Northern Bombing Group at Killingholm, Scotland, during the war had sent Godfrey de Chevalier down to the Grand Fleet to observe carrier operations, the old electric-drive collier Jupiter had been converted to the experimental carrier Langley, and pilots had been trained in deck landings, to gain experience from which to design new carrier aircraft. Here, too, the air-cooled engine offered important advantages, provided it could be made dependable. That job was to become the first order of business for the new chief of the Engine Section.
As a further extension of this carrier development, Admiral Moffett had put over a master stroke at the Washington Limitation of Arms Conference. At a time when the United States was making the fatal gesture of scrapping all its latest vessels, to bring “peace through disarmament,” the admiral had salvaged from the scrap heap the giant battle cruisers Saratoga and Lexington, and was now supervising their conversion into the largest aircraft carriers in the world. In this he had been greatly aided by Capt. Henry C. Mustin, who had since died. Mustin, a wise man with a clear understanding of the principles of war as they might be affected by aviation, had drawn up a complete plan for the complements of the carriers. They would have single-seat fighters to gain command of the air, long-range scouts to obtain information of the enemy, torpedo bombers for attacking enemy vessels, and rescue craft for recovering pilots that might be forced down at sea. The larger craft would demand high-powered engines and since, as yet, we had no air-cooled engines above 200 horsepower, we must needs speed our high-powered liquid-cooled development to the limit.
Leighton gave me his own quick estimate of the personalities in the Bureau other than the admiral. The Assistant Chief was Capt. Alfred W. Johnson, an old Queenstown destroyer skipper. Brought up in the old school, he had been my skipper on the notorious Caribbean cruise of the seaplane tender and kite-balloon ship Wright, and I loved and admired him. We had both fought a losing battle against aviation extravagance. The skipper, hoping to cut down useless paper work by refusing to have a yeoman, had answered all his own correspondence in longhand, expecting thus to shame his correspondents into doing likewise, but only he had been shamed.
The Chief of the Matériel Division was Capt. Emory S. Land, of the Corps of Constructors. Unlike so many constructors, Jerry was no theorist but a thoroughly practical and competent leader. He had played football at the Academy and still refereed college games. Able to see both sides of an argument, forthright, and honest, he was an ideal head for a division like Matériel that contained both naval constructors and line officers. The old line-staff controversy was likely to burst out at any moment, and it took a sense of humor to break it up.
The Design Section of the Matériel Division, under which the Engine Section was set up, was headed by a grand old man of aviation, Capt. H. C. Richardson. “Captain Dick,” one of the early pilots, a member of the crew of one of the NC boats of 1919 transatlantic fame, and a skilled engineer, had inherited Design from “Jerry” Hunsaker, a classmate of mine, when Jerry resigned from the Construction Corps to go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor. Jerry had founded the Design Group, and had built up a large drafting room and staff with which to carry on naval aviation design. His designs were to be built experimentally at the Naval Aircraft Factory at Philadelphia and then farmed out to the factory, or perhaps to some willing private manufacturer.
It was right at this point that Leighton stressed a difference between the Engine Section and the Design Section. There were but a handful of people all told in the Engine Section: Leighton himself; his assistant, Lt. Frank Maile, who had once served with me on the Old Ark; Lt. Ricco Botta, a former Reserve officer and a skilled engineer; Lt. (jg) Ralph M. Parsons, a former student under Dr. Lucke and my assistant at the Aviation Mechanics Schools at Great Lakes; and two secretaries. The senior secretary was Miss Alma Quisenberry, a quiet, soft-spoken young woman from Nashville, Tennessee. And this handful of people not only had no desire to design or build its own engines but had a clear conviction that the hope for the future lay in the Bureau’s placing its dependence for design, development, and production entirely upon private industry.
In this respect, the Engine Section now stood quite alone. After the Armistice, the Army Air Service had devised a plan for setting up a great government production center at McCook Field, near Dayton, Ohio. Army aircraft were to be designed by brain trusters in government employ. The institution would be surrounded by a complex of interested private manufacturers who would produce aircraft to Army design and specification. The plan had fallen through, largely because ambitious young men had preferred to risk their futures in chancey private industry rather than rest secure in the dead end of a government establishment. But the idea still persisted, and many in both Army and Navy were still sold on nationalization for the aircraft industry.
I could tell from Leighton’s development of this knotty problem that he was still uncertain as to where I stood. Conceivably I might be one who would want to build up a great engine-design group in BUAERO and another big production group at the Philadelphia Aircraft Factory and thus establish for myself quite a respectable empire. However, I had developed a few positive ideas of my own on the subject, and, curiously enough they had come out of the old rifle shooting competitions. I now relieved Leighton on this subject, obviously so close to his heart.
Under the rules for the national rifle matches, it was mandatory for military competitors to use government-issue cartridges, which, at the time, were produced solely by the government at Frankfort Arsenal. In quality this ammunition was reminiscent of Chinese firecrackers—many were complete duds, and of those that finally went off, many more were just “fizzlers.” As to accuracy, there were so many “droppers” in each bandoleer that the element of skill was largely neutralized by the element of chance, thus undermining the foundation of competition. And worse still, there seemed to be nothing we could do about it. Army Ordnance, entrenched in its monopoly, turned a deaf ear to all complaints.