In Washington, the struggle over the separate air force climaxed in the summer of 1925. The big Navy rigid airship Shenandoah, barnstorming over western country fairs, was destroyed in Ohio by a line squall. General Mitchell, previously exiled to San Antonio, Texas, seized upon the crash as a favorable moment for hurling charges at both the Army and the Navy of their treasonable neglect of aviation. President Calvin Coolidge, in order to sift the charges, convened a public inquiry by a board of distinguished citizens under the chairmanship of Dwight W. Morrow. Testifying before the Board, Admiral Moffett took sharp issue with Mitchell on the question of the independent air force, but took advantage of the opportunity to outline the basis of a constructive national air policy.
The Morrow Board, while disapproving the Mitchell proposal for the time being, did recommend a separate air corps status in the Army for military aviation. It took strong exception to the idea of including air transport in any military establishment and urged instead its orderly development under civil authority and preferably by competitive private industry. The Board’s recommendations were approved by the President and transmitted to Congress where they were quickly implemented by the Air Corps Act of 1926 and the Air Commerce Act of the same year. These acts fixed responsibility for aeronautic development upon the several government agencies concerned.
General Mitchell was convicted by an Army court-martial of “conduct unbecoming,” but was permitted to resign. He died ten years later, having become firmly established in the public mind as a man of vision martyred by reactionaries. Admiral Moffett followed up the Morrow Board findings with a recommendation for legislation establishing a five-year development program for naval aviation. The Army followed suit. The Post Office inaugurated contract air mail. In the favorable climate induced by the Morrow Board policy, American aviation attained the world leadership which it held until after the air-mail contracts were canceled in the middle 1930’s.
Having become interested in naval aviation as a career, I qualified as a naval aviator and later became Chief of Staff to Rear Adm. Joseph M. Reeves, Commander, Aircraft Squadrons, Battle Fleet. There I helped commission the new aircraft carriers Saratoga and Lexington, equipping their air squadrons with the new aircraft we had created in the Bureau of Aeronautics. During fleet maneuvers we developed the new tactical concept of the carrier task force, and in January, 1929, by delivering a successful attack on the Panama Canal from a point 150 miles at sea, we demonstrated the revolutionary strategy of a mobile-based, long-range, naval air striking force, the first American strategic air force. Yet while we succeeded in our demonstration, we failed to impress upon the high command the revolutionary character of the idea. Twelve years later at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese did a better job of selling. Paradoxically enough, Admiral Reeves, as a member of the Roberts Board, went out to Honolulu to investigate the wartime effectiveness of his peacetime concept.
Meanwhile, in January, 1930, I resigned from the Navy to accept a position as chief executive of a subsidiary of the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, the Hamilton-Standard Propeller Corporation. Within a year I found myself responsible for two additional subsidiaries, Sikorsky and Chance Vought, the one a builder of large flying boats, the other a producer of shipboard aircraft. In private industry, I enlarged my experience in the so-called “aviation game.”
When in the middle 1930’s the air-mail contracts were suddenly canceled, American aviation received a body blow. Repercussions from the punitive Congressional investigations sponsored by Senators Gerald P. Nye and Hugo Black—now Mr. Justice Black of the United States Supreme Court—interfered with both military and commercial development and halted progress. While American aviation was being kicked around as a political football, Messrs. Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, and Stalin seized the favorable opportunity, so unexpectedly handed them, to inaugurate their bids for world dominion under the Douhet doctrine of victory through air force.
The American aircraft manufacturing industry, its domestic market impaired by the abandonment of the Morrow Board policy, was forced to fall back on foreign sales. For a while we existed by selling our superior commercial air transports abroad, and in our frantic struggle to survive, each manufacturer risked everything to develop improved types of possible interest to our government. Early in 1939, when many companies were all but out on their feet, orders from France and England arrived in the nick of time. It was thanks to those orders that when the American aircraft-expansion program was finally undertaken we were able to expand swiftly.
However, this shot in the arm was all but neutralized by the workings of our own Arms Embargo Act. In order to deny France or England access to American arms, Hitler had only to make them belligerents—in other words declare war on them. After he had done so, we repealed the act, and still later President Roosevelt called for 50,000 airplanes. The first news we aircraft manufacturers had of this decision came by way of a radio fireside chat. This released a flood of production, the magic of which surprised us as much as anyone else—a flood on which American air power reversed the tide from sure defeat to certain victory.
Upon our entry into the war, I found myself president of United Aircraft Corporation. In the razzle-dazzle of the wartime Washington merry-go-round, I watched the expansion of air transport until it became a decisive factor in the war. Hurdling the Himalayan Hump and leapfrogging submarine-infested sea lanes, it delivered important persons and critical cargoes to decisive points inaccessible to other forms of transportation. Believing that this performance presaged the advent of expanding air commerce, we manufacturers began investing our earnings in bigger and better transports.
One day Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal sent for me. At the time when some critics were still harping their cry, “too little and too late,” he gave me private instructions to cut back production. His problem had become “too much and too soon.” The cutback brought us face to face with the nightmare that had haunted our dreams since the outbreak of war. Following the Armistice of 1918, our government had so ruthlessly canceled war contracts that the aircraft industry had been all but destroyed. When I pointed out this danger, the secretary suggested the only possible solution: the aircraft industry must take its story to the public. He advised that I undertake to lead the industry in our campaign for survival.