Slipstream: the autobiography of an air craftsman

by Eugene E. Wilson

The news took my breath, for the thing we feared worst after the separate air force was unified procurement supply and design. Admiral Moffett had taken a strong position against it, but if the industry supported the Army on that, then the Board might accept it as a compromise. The only thing left for us to do was to block such a recommendation. While Keyes went on to support the proposal, I slid out the door and down to the Engine Section.

Here I put in a call for Fred Rentschler, in Hartford. I knew that some weeks earlier, Kraus in Procurement had informally agreed to Pratt and Whitney’s proceeding with the purchase of a lot of tools and materials against a contract then being negotiated, and that Pratt and Whitney had already committed itself in advance in the interest of saving time and money. When I heard Fred’s voice on the phone, I told him about Keyes’s visit and suggested that he might reconsider his advance purchase order; I doubted that Admiral Moffett would sign a contract now for the new engines, since the industry proposed a new agency to do all its buying. I did not pretend to read the admiral’s mind, and was talking unofficially, but thought he should be aware of this possibility.

It didn’t take Rentschler long to get the point. Within an hour he had been in touch with Chance Vought, Grover Loening, Bill Boeing, and others who had taken similar risks. And when, next day, Mr. Keyes appeared before the Morrow Board to speak as the sole representative of the industry, Chairman Morrow advised him that there had been a change of plan. So many industry members had asked to address the committee that he could allow Mr. Keyes but a reduced period and that period had now expired. Meanwhile the admiral knew nothing of my action and the industry members who looked to the Bureau for business were not talking.

And while we sweated out the hearings, Admiral Moffett moved on another front. None appreciated better than he the influence of public opinion on the whole controversy, and he had found much to worry about in the approval given the Mitchell proposal in the public press. He had, therefore, suggested to George Wheat, now Fred Rentschler’s public relations counsel, that he would like to meet the editorial writers and especially the aviation writers of the metropolitan dailies in New York at an informal dinner where he could talk with them, and he invited me to go along.

The dinner, held in a private dining room of the old Waldorf Hotel, started out being a bit stuffy with the natural suspicions engendered in newspaper men by industrialists giving away free food, but Admiral Moffett broke the ice with some delightful personal reminiscences, among them the intimate details of how he outsmarted Billy Mitchell at the Washington Limitation of Arms Conference and won the German rigid airship Los Angeles for the Navy. Then as things loosened up, one of the newswriters put the very question he wanted, by asking why we opposed the idea of unified procurement, supply, and design. To the layman, this looked like a natural way to avoid duplication of effort, to prevent competitive bidding between the Army and Navy for the same products and generally reduce expenses.

The admiral warmed to the subject. He recalled that he had once had that idea and had investigated a few successful business enterprises in the effort to find out how they handled it. He had found his answer at General Motors. If any group could have effected important economies by central purchasing, it would seem to be that corporation. To his surprise, the several divisions of General Motors had been decentralized and given complete autonomy. Matter of fact, that had turned out to be the basic policy that had made the corporation successful. G.M. divisions had been encouraged to compete among themselves. No single all-powerful executive had been given the job of deciding things. Instead, General Motors’ customers made all the decisions. The financial statements of the several divisions were good barometers of the effectiveness of their management. The customer was always right.

Now, the admiral continued, with each G.M. division held responsible for its own performance, common sense dictated that its officers must have full authority over the tools and materials required to discharge that responsibility. Control of purchasing was one of the first requirements. Automotive line production called for split-second scheduling of material receipts, and this could not be surrendered to some independent agency without danger of breakdown. Besides, while central purchasing might appear to reduce cost through volume purchases, competition between the divisions might do at least as well without endangering deliveries. That was all theory, but obviously a company like G.M., in which central purchasing might appear particularly attractive theoretically, must have come to their decision to decentralize after experience.

Next day, on the train back to Washington, I felt depressed by the almost universal acceptance of the Mitchell plan. Even though the Morrow Board were to turn it down, public opinion would ultimately force its acceptance. The admiral, however, was most cheerful. He thought that if he now had just one man in the Bureau, he could turn the whole thing to his advantage. The man he had in mind was Capt. Henry C. Mustin, a pioneer naval aviator who had died in the service. Henry Mustin, he said, was one of the few men in aviation who combined vision and imagination with practical judgment. It was the latter quality that Mitchell lacked; Mustin had had them all. Before he died he had drawn up a detailed plan for the organization of naval aviation. He had sketched the big carriers with their squadrons flying overhead, their spare planes on deck and the personnel listed down to the last ordinary seaman. That sketch now lay in his safe in BUAERO. When we got back there, I was to get hold of Du Bose, his Financial Division head, and help work out estimates of the cost of creating such a force. We should spread this over a five-year period—make a five-year procurement program for naval aviation.

“And,” he summed it up, “don’t figure too close. Use your imagination.”

When, finally, the long-awaited report of the Morrow Board was published, it came as a distinct letdown to many. The advocates of the independent air force let out loud wails of “whitewash,” and the press reflected its disappointment. However, in BUAERO there was satisfaction. The Board rejected the idea of the separate air force at that time. It did, however, recommend an Air Corps status for the Army Air Services, something quite compatible with the Army organization’s several branches such as Infantry, Field Artillery, Cavalry, Engineers, Coast Artillery, and so on. The report made separate recommendations for reorganization of the Army and Navy, which would later be enacted into law in the Air Corps Act of 1926. It referred to the need for waiving the requirement for competitive bidding in cases where the public interest required it, a provision that was later so garbled in the Air Corps Act that it became quite impossible to procure aircraft at all without violating the law.