However, this was but a preliminary “strafing attack,” the name the admiral had coined for diving tactics. One day Wagner walked into the admiral’s cabin, his face as long as the Saratoga’s flight deck. Waving a letter in his hand he sank down in his seat at the mess table and announced, with a wry grin, “They’re shanghaiing me to Guam!” At first we thought he was simply using the slang phrase, but it turned out to be literally true.
“And as for you,” he added, nodding to me with a sudden grin that always signaled the triumph of his humor, “you’re headed for Coco Solo.”
Coco Solo, the big new base on the Atlantic side of the Canal, would have been most acceptable as a command following a full three years’ sea cruise, but I had been but a year afloat and was already on the short side of sea duty. The assignment, had it been carried out, would have been a sentence to oblivion. Admiral Reeves later saw that it wasn’t. For when the new Commander in Chief, Battle Fleet, who relieved Admiral Pratt, proved to be Adm. Louis M. Nulton, a friend of Admiral Reeves, the latter promptly dispatched a letter to Admiral Nulton suggesting that he ask for me as his Aide for Aviation on the Battle Fleet Staff. This assignment put me one notch above the Aircraft Squadrons, whose new commander was announced as Admiral Butler, with Ken Whiting in my job as Chief of Staff. And since Admiral Nulton was known as a man for detail, the Aircraft Squadrons Staff saw that they would need a friend on high if they were to retain the freedom of action Admiral Pratt had always given Admiral Reeves.
Meanwhile, it was a gloomy outfit that received Admiral Pratt on the Big Sara for the cruise home. The admiral had just been selected for the highest naval command, Chief of Naval Operations, in Washington. En route north he brought up the problem of the “home yard” for the Lexington. Norfolk was the Lexington’s home yard. Admiral Pratt, proposed to return her to the Atlantic in order to balance the work load—in other words keep the yard workmen employed.
Wagner and I took issue with him and I must have pressed too hard on the need for keeping the squadrons together for training, for Admiral Pratt turned on me in some annoyance and barked, “You always see the ultimate objective and want to take it on the first assault. You’ve got to learn to take minor objectives one at a time, and to hold them till the big one falls in your lap. Otherwise,” he added, shaking a finger in my face, “you’ll never get anywhere in this man’s Navy.”
Shortly after we arrived in San Diego, and even before the admiral’s relief had reported, Bull Reeves was detached from his command. The day he shoved off, all his squadron commanders and staff accompanied him to the Santa Fe railway station. Overhead FLEET AIR paraded for him in a last formation flight. The Old Man put up a cheerful front until Harry Bogusch shook his hand.
“Admiral,” said Harry, “we used to hate your guts for making us fly those tight formations, but that night off Panama we blessed you for the air discipline you had forced on us.” With that, two big tears welled up in Bull Reeves’s eyes and ran down his nose onto his gray whiskers.
After Admiral Nulton had hoisted his flag on the fleet flagship California, I found myself once again on a battleship. Time was when I would have thrilled at the thought. Now it left me numb. To have served with two great leaders in succession and to have lived through the creative period of naval aviation ashore and afloat and then go back to battle wagons cheerfully was too much to expect. I couldn’t get into the spirit of it.
When later the California spent the summer at the navy yard in Bremerton, Washington, I was completely cut off from aircraft operations except by correspondence. Admiral Nulton and his battle fleet staff tried hard to absorb some of the new ideas, but it was too much to expect them to think and act intuitively, along lines that crisscrossed every preconceived idea.
The end of the summer found us back behind the breakwater at San Pedro, when one day a message came that Fred Rentschler and Bill Boeing had flown down from Seattle in their Ford Trimotor and were at the Los Angeles Biltmore where they would like me to have dinner with them. I knew from the newspapers and from letters that great things had been going on in the aircraft industry. Not only had some of the companies made money on operations, but some of the leaders had become rich as a result of the increased values of their stocks. This was the beginning of the end of that mad period of speculation in which all sorts of mergers and consolidations had prompted the public to get into the market and make a killing. In the aircraft industry, Curtiss and Wright had led off with a merger that had brought together two of the greatest names in aviation and had put two of the biggest operations under the same tent.