NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO
SLIPSTREAM
Copyright, 1950, by the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. It may not be used for dramatic, motion-, or talking-picture purposes without written authorization from the holder of these rights. Nor may the book or parts thereof be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Whittlesey House, 330 West 42d Street, New York 18, New York.
Published by Whittlesey House
A division of the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
To
my wife
Preface
To the world at large, Berlin Airlift headlines only highlighted another crisis in the “cold war.” Yet behind those headlines lay an epochal event: commercial air transports—not combat aircraft—had become the spearhead of United States foreign policy.
This dramatic incident brought renewed hope to air craftsmen who, nearly a half century earlier, had embarked on a starry-eyed crusade to utilize the airplane for the benefit of mankind. In World War I, they had helped smash the German Kaiser, only to find Hitler rising phoenixlike in his boots. Two decades later, they had strafed Hitler to earth, only to discover a colossal portrait of Joseph Stalin looming beyond a smoke curtain. Still later, as atomic bombs and lethal bacteria became weapons, they were asking themselves, “what next?” when the Berlin Airlift came up with the answer: air cargo, air commerce, air industry, air finance—air power for peace!
In December, 1943, we air craftsmen had our frustrations dramatized at a banquet staged in honor of the Wright brothers on the fortieth anniversary of Kittyhawk. Orville Wright, mouselike in a dinner jacket and obviously uncomfortable, had sat through a barrage of clichés microphoned by air power advocates. When finally called on to respond, he refused point-blank. Later, in an anteroom off the banquet hall, he gave vent to intense bitterness: evil men had seized upon the airplane to make it the most lethal weapon in history; he hated everything about the airplane; he rued the day he and his brother had invented the thing.
We manufacturers, who had engineered their fantastic contraption into a decisive instrument of World War II, echoed Orville Wright’s concern. Our lives had been a kaleidoscopic drama of “the five Ms”: men, management, money, materials, machines. Across our stage had walked the big names of a bloody quarter century involving two world wars. The setting had been fogged by haze from smoke-filled Washington hotel rooms and highlighted by klieg lights in Congressional investigating committees. Sucked by our own slipstream into the maelstrom of politics, we had all but lost sight of the dim off-stage shape of One World being remorselessly forged by air transport. Whether this should be a world of peace in our time, or whether it must wait on centuries of slavery, would depend on what we Americans did with the airplanes we had created.