Later, as the summer wore on and our engine problems eased up, storm clouds appeared in another quarter. The Engine Section had as one of its problems the Packard installation in the rigid airship Shenandoah. Lighter-than-air had always been the admiral’s pet hobby and we had spent a lot of effort on two jobs: preventing the cooling water from freezing, and recovering water from the engine exhaust to compensate for the expenditure of fuel. This, in turn, avoided the need for valving precious helium gas—a critical factor in lighter-than-air.
The chief engineer of the Shenandoah, Edgar W. Sheppard, was an extremely able young lieutenant, who had served as my Number Two at Great Lakes, and who now spent considerable time with us. From him I learned disturbing things about the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, headquarters for the rigids Shenandoah and Los Angeles.
In response to the criticism Billy Mitchell had leveled at the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations had scheduled a number of western flights in the Shenandoah for public relations purposes. Prominent people and news writers had already been taken on junkets, but the expedition scheduled for late August and early September seemed correlated with the country fairs all over the West—and just at the peak of thunderstorm activity. If there was one thing a lighter-than-air pilot disliked, it was thunderstorms—and for good reason. But the pilots had not dared make public confession of their fear, lest they betray a weakness of lighter-than-air that might retard its development. And so they gritted their teeth and tried to suppress the jitters that kept them all on edge.
And now, as the Shenandoah departed on her fateful cruise, all of us in BUAERO followed her with anxious hearts. Suddenly a telegram sent from a town in Ohio by one of her crew brought shocking news of one of the greatest disasters in history. Turbulent currents of a line squall had sheared the girders of the great silver ship and split her into three sections. Parts had been free-ballooned to safety, but many of the crew had lost their lives, among them Edgar Sheppard. The ship had broken under his feet; in falling he had seized a girder and held on, 6,000 feet in the air. One of his men, hanging on precariously nearby, had called to him. When Shep extended the helping hand, his own girder failed and he fell to his death. There had been no parachutes. The whole Bureau was stunned.
And then lightning struck in another place. From down in San Antonio, Texas, where Brig. Gen. William G. Mitchell, USA, had been exiled to keep him quiet, newspaper headlines trumpeted charges at both the Army and Navy—charges of “treasonable neglect.” The front-page news struck the public like a clap of thunder, and the battle for the separate air force was on in earnest. In BUAERO the whole staff rallied around Admiral Moffett, and embers that had so long smoldered now flamed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Calvin Coolidge’s Town Meeting
Billy Mitchell, handsome, dynamic, fast on the draw, and breathing the spirit of the offensive, personified the knight of the air of World War I. An outstanding pilot, a bold horseman, a soldier’s soldier, a courageous crusader, he was the newsman’s dream of dramatic copy. And now he assumed the lead in public opinion with the same sang froid he had displayed flying Number One of the First American Air Force on its first flight over the St. Mihiel Salient. With a fine sense of timing, he did that thing which every American longs to do—he told off his superiors in no uncertain terms, and with such sheer audacity that he almost got away with it. The public supported him from the start; it looked like a sure thing for his independent air force. Save for certain strategic errors, he would have won in a glide.
By seizing upon the crash of the great rigid airship Shenandoah as his take-off signal, Mitchell accepted the risk attendant upon hitting the Navy while it was down. And since lighter-than-air craft had become the personal hobby, and public responsibility, of Rear Adm. William A. Moffett, Mitchell made an implacable enemy of a man who, in the public mind, was no less devoted to the cause of aviation than Mitchell himself. And so, when Bill Mitchell sang out, “Tally Ho!” and started his power dive on Billy Moffett’s tail, he suddenly found himself in a dogfight with an opponent quite as wiley as the famous German Baron von Richthofen. Even this was a calculated risk and might not have brought Mitchell down. It was Mitchell’s attack on the Army that made him vulnerable. For while the Army might view with tolerant amusement Mitchell’s assault on the Navy, it could not countenance insubordination in its own ranks; mutiny is inherently an unpardonable sin. Mitchell may have made a fatal error in not resigning his commission before charging his seniors with “treasonable neglect.” By such action he could have martyred himself in the public eye and at the same time avoided the court-martial that finally convicted him without having to let the independent-air-force issue influence the trial. As it was, certain of his seniors, notably the then Chief of Staff, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who would one day use the Air Force to gain victory in the Pacific, seemed at the time fairly to lick their chops as they assembled to convict General Mitchell.
Over on the Navy side were many naval aviators who had suffered the same frustrations that had aroused Mitchell to a frenzy against the Army. Feeling themselves hamstrung by naval conservatism, they too believed their only hope for advancing their beloved aviation lay in a new deal all around. But steeped as they all were in the ancient tradition of the West Point-Annapolis football feud, their first reaction was to defend their Navy, and the second was to rally around their chief, Admiral Moffett. For General Mitchell to expect aid from them under the circumstances would have been something like a Hatfield trying to induce a McCoy to join up on a squirrel shoot, while the feudin’ and the fightin’ were at a climax. As it was, Admiral Moffett kept his hotheads in line, including a few who openly favored the separate air force.
Meanwhile Mitchell’s quick kick took the Navy high command completely by surprise. And as the political football sailed end over end toward the Navy goal, the only receiver ready was Admiral Moffett. A good open-field runner himself, he was about to take the ball over his shoulder on the dead run and might have sped to a touchdown save that his teammates blocked him out. The Navy strategists decided not to dignify Mitchell with any public recognition; they would just refuse to play.