| Preface. | [vii] | |
| Chapter | ||
| One. | It’s Anybody’s Fight | [1] |
| Two. | The Power Plant, the Heart of an Airplane | [12] |
| Three. | Its Vital Spark | [19] |
| Four. | A Backward Art | [28] |
| Five. | Toil and Trouble | [38] |
| Six. | What the Doctor Ordered | [47] |
| Seven. | Calvin Coolidge’s Town Meeting | [58] |
| Eight. | Dwight Morrow Advances the Throttle | [71] |
| Nine. | The Gospel According to Aunt Lucy | [82] |
| Ten. | The Take-off | [93] |
| Eleven. | A Lone Eagle Sets the Standard | [102] |
| Twelve. | A Change in Status | [109] |
| Thirteen. | A Salt’s Solution | [115] |
| Fourteen. | Germ of a Big Idea | [121] |
| Fifteen. | Creation of Strategic Concept | [129] |
| Sixteen. | Maneuver for Position | [135] |
| Seventeen. | Frigate Birds | [144] |
| Eighteen. | Another Turning | [149] |
| Nineteen. | Necessity, the Mother of Creation | [160] |
| Twenty. | Igor Sikorsky Spans Two Gaps | [172] |
| Twenty-One. | The Courage of Conviction | [185] |
| Twenty-Two. | Review of Some Fundamentals | [196] |
| Twenty-Three. | A Yankee Peddler | [204] |
| Twenty-Four. | A Chill Sets In | [213] |
| Twenty-Five. | An Unfavorable Climate | [224] |
| Twenty-Six. | A Spark Is Struck | [229] |
| Twenty-Seven. | For What Is a Man Profited? | [237] |
| Twenty-Eight. | Off the Beam | [247] |
| Twenty-Nine. | For Survival | [260] |
| Thirty. | Toward Public Inquiry | [271] |
| Thirty-One. | Before the Bar of Public Opinion | [290] |
| Thirty-Two. | The Hand on the Stick | [296] |
| Index. | [311] |
SLIPSTREAM
CHAPTER ONE
It’s Anybody’s Fight
It was a day in March of 1924 when I first stepped across the threshold of the anteroom to the office of Rear Adm. William Adger Moffett, Chief of the new Bureau of Aeronautics in the Navy Department at Washington. The anteroom lay at the center of the extreme after end of the top deck of the third wing of the temporary frame structure which then housed, and in fact still houses, the Navy Department. Through the windows I could see the greening lawns of the Mall and the budding cherry blossoms along the rim of the Tidal Basin. Directly below, the Reflecting Pool, a square-cut sapphire, mirrored the tip of the Washington Monument and the cottony clouds of a blustery day. I handed my orders to the admiral’s secretary and, as she disappeared through a door to the left, I glanced around.
To the right of the secretary’s desk, a latticed, swinging half door of the type once common to saloons of the preprohibition era bore a gilt-lettered sign reading “Assistant Chief of Bureau.” To the left, on a similar door, the letters spelled “Chief of Bureau.” As it swung open, the secretary waved me toward a stiff-backed chair and said, “The admiral will see you in a few minutes, sir.”
Lifting my sword off its hook, I stripped the white lisle gloves from my hands, dusted a bit of lint off my two and a half gilt stripes, and sat down in the chair. Most young officers bearing such orders as mine would have thrilled at the thought of duty in Washington, but I was vaguely uneasy. That sword, standing on the tip of its scabbard between my knees, seemed, in a way, to point up my doubts. Forged into its blade was a quotation from one of Teddy Roosevelt’s slogans, “The only shots that count are the shots that hit.” Judged by that standard, I had not scored too well since graduation from Annapolis in 1908. Having set out on a career in gunnery, I had let myself be diverted from it.
I had been appointed to the Naval Academy from the state of Washington and had been admitted at the age of sixteen. Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, where I enjoyed the great outdoors, hunting and fishing with my father, I had drifted onto the Naval Academy rifle team, where I found fun in competition that made a sport out of a branch of my profession. Rifle shooting had intensified my interest in gunnery and had helped me to win my sword. The opposite side of its blade carried the words, “Class of 1871 prize for excellence in practical and theoretical ordnance and gunnery.” It was out of this background that I had determined to specialize in gunnery, but circumstances had deflected me into engineering.
After the close of the national rifle matches at Camp Perry in 1909, during which the Navy rifle team had won the military championship, I had been assigned to duty on a four-piper, a coal-burning torpedo-boat destroyer, the Hull, then attached to the Pacific Torpedo Flotilla based on San Diego, California. Just before I had reported to the ship, there had been an accident to one of the boilers; and since, up to that time, it had not been customary to assign officers to the engine room of destroyers, the subsequent court of inquiry had not been able to hang an officer for the explosion. Until the case could be reported as completed, the Navy Department could find no way to close its file, thus leaving an annoying piece of unfinished business. To guard against future lapses of this kind, someone had to be made Chief Engineer, and since I, a passed midshipman, was the junior officer aboard the Hull, I was handed the accolade.
Early in 1911, my Annapolis June Week Girl, Genevieve Speer, and I had been married at her home in Joliet, Illinois. We had later commuted between the Hotel del Coronado and less commodious accommodations in the Navy Yard town of Vallejo, California, until the summer of 1913, when we had been ordered back to our beloved Annapolis for duty, in compliance with my request for instruction in the new postgraduate engineering school, which had just been opened. The course included a year at Annapolis and another in New York at Columbia University, and was directed by Dr. Charles Edward Lucke, Dean of Mechanical Engineering and a pioneer in his profession.
Dr. Lucke, who had just published his monumental work Engineering Thermodynamics, found his Navy charges none too susceptible to his teaching techniques. Finally one day he discovered the reason; we were, to use his expression, “an aggregation of photographic memorizers.” And so far as I was concerned he was probably right—to win my sword I had memorized all the textbooks on ordnance and gunnery. The doctor had now to start from scratch to teach us “to reason from a set of facts to a logical solution.”