These are but a few of many that come readily to mind. The fact was, no one could guess whom we would fight, to say nothing of how or when. Without a foreign policy, we could shape no military policy, and without a military policy who could guess what airplanes might be called upon to do? But our saving grace lay in the fact that this was a free country where any man might risk his money, or even his neck, in backing his pet idea. When the chips were finally down, Uncle Sam, who hadn’t killed his air craftsmen with kindness, found they had supplied him with a wide variety of combat types from which to choose, a variety that made it possible for him to go out and win. In a postwar interview, Hermann Goering was reported to have said that the one thing the Germans had envied us was our flexible system of individual initiative and enterprise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Review of Some Fundamentals
During the protracted period when Hamilton-Standard, Sikorsky, and Chance Vought found the going rough as they endeavored to create new products that could be sold to a reluctant government, Pratt and Whitney for a while made much smoother weather of it. The Wasp engine had proved so outstanding that no other power plant had challenged it, and in a field that offered the greatest volume. Subsequent engines, while not outclassing all competition, as had the Wasp, won a fair share of the market. As a matter of fact, it was Pratt and Whitney that had provided most of the resources out of which the other divisions had prosecuted their new developments. But now as the year 1937 arrived, even the bellwether of our flock began to find the pickings scarce.
For certain ones in the Army Air Corps still persisted in advocating liquid cooling, and now, as they began occupying positions of power, they pressed harder than ever, this despite the fact that the brilliant performance of the air-cooled radials had all but driven liquid-cooled in-line engines out of the country. In England, however, where the Bristol air-cooled engines had not attained to the same leadership as had the Pratt and Whitney and Wright radials in America, Rolls Royce had done an outstanding job with a racing-plane engine which they had later developed into a fine pursuit engine. In Germany, where tremendous effort was being made to rehabilitate aviation after the terms of the Treaty of Versailles had been modified, Junkers had taken a license to build Pratt and Whitney engines but, as usual, had not built power plants wholly comparable with the original. Simultaneously B.M.W. had prosecuted the development of their own liquid-cooled engines, a type in which they had background and experience. These facts, plus some new liquid-cooling developments, had encouraged certain men in the Army to promote an American liquid-cooled program.
By using Ethylene Glycol, or Prestone as we know it in our automobile antifreeze mixtures, many of the difficulties inherent in liquid-cooling were ameliorated. The new “pressure-cooling” systems became competitive with the “baffles” of the radials in so far as weight and performance were concerned; they still retained the old handicaps of leaky plumbing. In order to exploit this progress, the Army Engineering Division at Wright Field had designed a liquid-cooled, in-line engine of its own, and turned over the job of building and testing it to the Allison Engineering Company, of Indianapolis, Indiana.
Allison, skilled in automotive experimental work, especially that associated with racing in the speedway, had built up a fine reputation by undertaking highly experimental projects that, for one reason or another, failed to appeal to companies interested in production. Allison’s president, “Pop” Gilman, had done a lot of Diesel development, and other clever experimental work for BUAERO when I was chief of the Engine Section, and he had built up a highly competent outfit. After completely redesigning the Wright Field effort, Pop had gone ahead to make a fair engine out of the “Allison.”
In addition to their convictions that the United States should develop a good liquid-cooled engine, some men in the Air Forces had always believed that General Motors should become a factor in engine production. Out of this conviction, the time came when General Motors absorbed Allison and put its back into power-plant development. This meant tough competition for the aircraft industry and while we might, by dint of great effort, keep ourselves in the forefront of technological progress, we could not, of course, match the limitless financial resources of “the corporation.” With the head start we already held in current engine types, we should more than hold our own, but now with the cold hand of the long depression pressing down on us, we found the new Army-G.M. alliance cold comfort indeed.
Meanwhile, the Army continued its pressure on Pratt and Whitney and Wright Aeronautical, to force both companies to undertake liquid-cooled engines of their own design. The fact that the two types would not mix any better than oil and water, and that for us to divert a portion of our limited energies to something we did not believe in would impair the development of air cooling, seemed to have no weight with a few liquid-cooled fanatics.
And now they dug up a new angle. It seemed that out in Santa Monica, Don Douglas and his engineers were studying a new twin-engined bomber and were leaning toward the idea that, in order to reduce the drag and improve the air flow over the wings, the engines, instead of being mounted outside in the cowls, should be completely housed in the wings. To meet this requirement, the engine must be flat, in the form of a pancake. Our own studies contemplated a twenty-four-cylinder job, and such an arrangement demanded liquid cooling. Under tremendous pressure from Wright Field, where, of course, the purse strings were held, Pratt and Whitney reluctantly agreed to go ahead. Similarly, Wright Aero accepted the inevitable.
This was the situation in the summer of 1937, when, with Chance Vought Aircraft just beginning to round out into an effective team, I was put out of commission by an automobile crack-up that took me out of active service for several months. Coming home after dark in a driving rain from a day of trout fishing at the East Haddam Fish and Game Club, some thirty miles from Hartford, I was smacked so hard by a speeding motorist that my new convertible was reduced to a heap of junk. Only through kind providence was I spared the same fate.