Squadrons were also being assembled for the carriers. Langley units based full-time at San Diego and carried out their protracted gunnery schedules over nearby areas. Some Lexington squadrons were being gradually assembled at the Naval Air Station at Norfolk, Virginia, while the Saratoga units were being brought together at San Diego. These squadrons would be equipped with the new air-cooled fighters and torpedo bombers we had been developing at BUAERO and manned with new pilots then under training at Pensacola. The whole organization, under the leadership of Admiral Reeves, must be rounded out and trained during the next few years.
The admiral had always been “Bull” Reeves to his contemporaries, from the day when he had created the first football headgear so that he might get into the Army-Navy football game after a serious head injury. His juniors in aviation now called him “Billy Goat” because he wore one of the few beards then extant in the Navy. This beard was a lovely gray Vandyke which, with the admiral’s shell-pink complexion, gave him an air of grave distinction that quite belied an uproarious sense of humor. He had a deep, vibrant voice and he spoke with great eloquence—a fact he ascribed to his having once studied for the ministry. Standing before an assembly of his brother officers he could expound the weightiest tactical or strategic doctrines in an entertaining and enlightening manner, speaking always with the obvious relish of a man engaged in an undertaking at which he knows he is competent. He differed from Admiral Moffett in almost every characteristic, but especially in his logical, measured approach to a problem. Though trained as an engineer, he had specialized in tactics and strategy and had brought to these subjects an orderly but very active mind. Even as I slid into the routine of my new job, I looked forward with impatience to the Old Man’s return.
On the first morning that we faced each other across the desk in his bare office, Admiral Reeves raised the question of the Langley’s reluctance to expand her operating complement. Entertaining as he did a high regard for Captain Towers both as a seaman and as a leader, and having in mind the initiative with which Jack had pioneered naval aviation, the admiral surmised that the long list of casualties among pilots had tended to overemphasize the hazards of flying off carriers. The fleet problem that was scheduled for the coming spring would offer an opportunity for an air attack on Pearl Harbor. In light of the probable arrival of the big carriers the following year he wanted to try out some of his ideas on the Langley, if only on a small scale. However, the scale proposed by that vessel was too small for any use at all. Our job was to find some way around the difficulty.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Germ of a Big Idea
When later the Commander in Chief, Adm. Louis R. de Steiguer, once my captain on the Old Ark, finally released his statement of the fleet problem, the attention of all hands was focused on the forthcoming Hawaiian cruise. In April the following year, 1928, the fleet would rendezvous at San Francisco to sail from there for the joint Army-Navy exercises. In preparation for the maneuvers, each unit commander was called upon to submit his own “estimate of the military situation” and to formulate his own decisions and his operation orders. The fleet staff, after analyzing the several solutions, would promulgate the commander in chief’s orders. In FLEET AIR, as the Aircraft Squadrons, Battle Fleet, were locally known, we planned to close the first phase of the exercises with a dawn attack on Pearl Harbor by planes launched from the Langley.
Appreciating that a dozen tiny fighters in competition with the great guns of the ponderous battle wagons would make little impression on Pearl Harbor, the admiral undertook to expand greatly the number of aircraft to be flown off the Langley. To provide living accommodations for their crews he instructed Captain Towers to request the Mare Island Navy Yard to undertake alterations to the vessel during her forthcoming annual overhaul. To increase the fire power of our embryonic air force, presently confined to a pair of thirty-caliber machine guns each, we started our squadrons training in a new tactic.
Dive bombing, first tested against Nicaraguan rebels by the United States Marines, had been further developed against naval targets by Fighting Five, a Lexington squadron then being assembled at Norfolk, Virginia. Admiral Reeves waxed enthusiastic over this idea, primarily because it concentrated the attack upon objectives located at the surface, instead of wasting energy on the usual dogfights between knights of the air. Frank Wagner, after scurrying around to lease all suitable training areas in the vicinity, soon had airplanes diving all over the San Diego hinterland.
In order to remove some of the hazards of operating carrier land planes over the sea, we began training our two auxiliary vessels, the former mine planter Aroostook and the sweeper Teal as “plane guards” for the Langley. For protection against losses incident to distant water landings, we equipped all planes with rubber flotation bags and gear to inflate them, when necessary, with bottled gas. Finally we borrowed two fast destroyers from the local squadrons under command of Adm. Thomas J. Senn. Here, though we little appreciated it at the time, was the germ of the big idea of the carrier task force.
With a view to further speeding sea rescue, we asked BUAERO to undertake for us the development of a single-float amphibian gear, interchangeable with the seaplane float of the Vought Corsair. To navigate a single-seater without radio out of sight of the carrier, to engage in combat and then return to a pin-point contact with a roving carrier, demanded real skill. In order to provide some sort of homing device, our radio officer, Gordon Rowe, strung a loop of wires between the wings of a Corsair, thus utilizing the loop-antenna feature, then common in home radio sets. Rowe’s device, antedating radar, was intended to avoid the possible loss of precious pilots and planes but it also made the Corsair available as a liaison plane for fighter tactics. With a good carrier-based amphibian we could extend our control of combat units and, at the same time, release them for safe long-range operations.
To gain experience from the Hawaiian cruise, Admiral Reeves felt the Langley should operate at least two eighteen-plane fighter squadrons as dive bombers together with six Vought Corsair two-seaters for scouting, rescue, and radio liaison. While the Langley, with the space available in her vast, empty coal bunkers, could easily provide ample hangar space and crew’s quarters, the restricted area of her flight deck and the limited capacity of her plane elevator introduced serious limitations. How to spot forty-two airplanes on an area believed by Langley officers to be adequate for but twelve was something of a problem.