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Published Airpower Journal - Summer 1987
FROM THE heights of today’s aerospace industry, it is almost humbling to look back just 70 years ago to when American pilots were fighting their first air battles in the open cockpits of borrowed planes. Unweaned when we entered the First World War in 1917, the US Army’s fledgling air arm had only a handful of assorted flying craft, none of which was worthy of combat. Until US industrial furnaces were cooking at wartime heat, the newly formed American Air Service was forced to borrow combat planes and knowhow from our Allies--the British, the French, and the Italians.1
When war came to Europe in 1914, the United States had already fallen from the pinnacle of Kill Devil Hill, where the Wright brothers had first mastered powered flight, to the low rung of leadership in military aeronautics. When asked the reasons for this 50 years later, early air pioneer Maj Gen Benjamin D. Foulois attributed it simply to the lack of congressional funding. From the Army's acceptance of a $25,000 bid in 1908 to produce a military Wright Flyer until the war started, the United States had spent only $435,000 for military aviation. This was far lower than the amounts spent by other major industrial powers, even slightly less than some minor ones like Bulgaria, Spain, and Brazil.2
The underlying reason for this neglect was the failure by both civilian and military leaders to grasp the potential of military aviation. A typical congressional reaction in 1908 to "all this fuss" about buying military planes was "I thought we already had one." Three years later, in October 1911, the air arm retired its first obsolete aircraft when "Aeroplane No. 1" was "so far gone," that it became a museum piece at the Smithsonian Institution.3
The War Department’s attitude was no better. The Army set up a few primitive flying schools before the war, but the misadventures of the 1st Aero Squadron in support of the punitive expedition against the Mexican outlaw Pancho Villa in 1916 showed just how backward American aviation really was. Mack Sennett might have written the script for this comic experience, which even had the squadron commander, Captain Foulois, being arrested and jailed by Mexican police. Although this debacle helped publicize the sad state of Army aviation, it did little to change the general lack of appreciation for the airplane’s potential. The lack of funds and interest by the Army brass continued long after the Great War. One veteran pilot observed that interest in aviation did not "turn the corner" in the War Department until "we finally convinced them that airplanes were more than just substitutes for carrier pigeons."4
Even after the war threatened American interests, there was an uphill battle to overcome the deficit in aviation technology and production. Congress sought to improve the situation in 1915 by establishing an independent scientific group (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) to foster aviation progress, but few inroads were made because of the neutrality that had been ordered by President Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson and the American public are said to have been appalled to read newspaper headlines in 1916 that the armed forces were engaged in contingency planning for possible American involvement in the war. The outcry was quieted by War Department assurances that no more than mobilization planning for national defense was involved.5
On the eve of America's entry into the war, Foulois was called to Washington to oversee the drafting of a program to expand the air arm. Years later, Foulois said that he thought this program, which Congress passed two months after President Wilson declared war, was his greatest contribution to military aviation. At a cost of $640 million, the approved legislation called for producing 22,625 planes, 6,210 trained pilots, 45,000 aircraft engines, and a large store of spare parts. Although this laid a solid foundation for postwar needs, it proved to be much too ambitious for the time left in the war.6
Impetus for projecting such a high level of production came from the Allies, who requested the United States to assist in the campaign of 1918 with an air force powerful enough to enable them "to win supremacy of the air." The Allies were relying heavily on fresh American troops to turn the tide against the kaiser’s army, but they also needed the great industrial capacity of the United States to close the production gap resulting from three years of attrition on the battlefield. Unfortunately, the clouds of American planes that the Allies hoped would darken the skies over Europe never materialized.7
By all accounts, the response by US industry to the emergency was abysmal. Only our development and mass production of the Liberty engine could be cited as a noteworthy industrial contribution to the air war. Without suitable American designs, aircraft manufacturers were moved to concentrate on building British de Havilland (DH-4) biplanes. By the signing of the Armistice in November 1918, more than 1,200 American-made DH-4s had been shipped to combat units, but not a single plane of US design had gone to war. Until Air Service squadrons began operating at the front in the spring of 1918, American pilots fought with British and French units, using their planes. Even after American DH-4s began arriving in quantity in the summer of 1918, many US pilots continued to fly Nieuports, de Havillands, and other borrowed aircraft.8
Admittedly, the problem of developing the approved air program was unique. It was recognized by the War Department as being "one of the great problems of the war." The United States had built warships and had fielded ground armies, but there was no aviation industry in America and there were virtually no professionally trained aeronautical engineers or designers. Given the state of the nation's unpreparedness, it might even be considered an achievement that the United States produced nearly 12,000 airplanes--roughly half what Congress had funded--and 30,000 aviation engines by war's end.9
Criticism of the wartime production record was not just a phenomenon of aviation, however, for the Allies had some unkind words for our total industrial performance. In his War Memoirs, British Prime Minister Lloyd George's observations about the American industrial contribution bordered on the contemptuous:
No field guns of American pattern or manufacture fired a shot in the War. The same applies to tanks. Here one would have thought that the nation who were the greatest manufacturers of automobiles in the world could leave turned out tanks with the greatest facility and in the largest numbers, but not a single tank of American manufacture ever rolled into action in the War.10
The wartime buildup in manpower was an equally frustrating experience. There was no dearth of volunteers for the flying training programs, for stories of the air war in Europe had fired the imagination of America's youth. But having to expand the existing programs to accommodate the massive influx of people was an almost insurmountable problem. In 18 months the air arm burgeoned from a force of less than 1,400 officers and enlisted men to one of almost 200,000 people. At the outset, there were only two active flying fields available to the Army to accommodate this expansion.11
Leading educational institutions across the nation were called to handle the ground-school phase of the air training program; and by the end of the war, they had graduated more than 17,500 flying cadets. The number of Army flying fields had expanded to 27 in the United States and 16 in Europe, but much of the wartime flying and technical training had been carried out at French and British airfields and factories. Although there were problems with the quality and the responsiveness of the training pipeline, this combined wartime complex got the job done. At the close of the war, there were 58,000 officers and men in the Air Service in France, and thousands more were on their way.12
So, the Allies got their scores of American pilots, though not their clouds of planes. Despite our shortcomings in mobilizing for the war, the extra muscle of American military power at the front, with the promise of more to come, spelled victory for the Allies. As Gen Carl Spaatz recalled years later, aviation in its primitive state "made but slight contribution to the ultimate decision."13 Yet American aviators could be justifiably proud of their combat record in the war. The destruction of 756 enemy airplanes was in itself a mirror of their magnificent performance in this baptism of aerial warfare.14
The Air Service's brief activity at the front in World War I remained the only American experience of aerial warfare for more than two decades. Such a lengthy hiatus between world wars was enough time for the aviation industry to redeem itself, but there were still obstacles to overcome. Perhaps the greatest encumbrance was the political anathema that continued to hound peacetime military preparedness for much of the interwar period. For Billy Mitchell and other proponents of air power, their greatest disappointment must have been the obstruction from their own superiors, the die-hard traditionalists in the War and Navy departments. Other setbacks came with the Great Depression following the stock market crash of 1929. The problems the Army Air Corps had in the airmail fiasco of 1934 highlighted the extreme neglect of military aviation and helped to educate the Congress and the public on the need for improvements.15
This last episode coincided with the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency and his New Deal programs that started the American economy, including the aviation industry, on the road toward national recovery. Five years later, the world was at war. American neutrality was even more short-lived than it had been in World War I Alarmed by the Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg victories in Europe and Japanese aggressions in Asia and the Pacific, Americans rallied behind their president's directives for rearmament in 1940 and 1941. Well before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt called for an air force of 50,000 planes, supported by a 50,000-plane annual production capacity. He did not propose to build up just the American air power but wanted to strengthen the British and other Allied air forces as well. This was later spelled out in the Lend-Lease Act of 1941.16
On the eve of America's entry into the war, the Army Air Forces' rnobilization requirements were defined more exactly in a hastily prepared Air War Plans Division document, AWPD-1. To meet the global demands of simultaneous war against Germany and Japan, this plan envisioned the build up to a peak of just under 63,500 aircraft, a projection that was not far off the mark. At its peak the Army Air Forces never possessed more than 80,000 planes. During the course of the war, the air mobilization requirements in AWPD-1 and subsequent plans became the blueprint for one of the truly remarkable industrial success stories of the twentieth century.17
Conditioned by the hardships of the Great Depression and fired by images of a ruthless and hated enemy, the will of the American people was mobilized along with our vast reservoir of natural resources, manpower, and industrial machinery. President Roosevelt gave the War Production Board the power to get the job done,18 and the American people responded. For Americans on the home front, the ration card became a badge of honor that was almost the equivalent of the "fifty-mission cap" and the "Ruptured Duck" to those who served. From the factories, "Rosie the Riveter" became a household name as well known, although not nearly as loved, as "Willie and Joe." After Pearl Harbor, the whole nation went to war.
Mobilization reached its zenith in World War II. The wartime industrial output became the heartbeat of America, with the aviation industry succeeding even beyond the wildest dreams of the Billy Mitchells two decades earlier. Clouds of American-designed and American-made bombers (Mitchells, Fortresses, and Superfortresses), fighters (Warhawks, Mustangs, and Thunderbolts), and transports (the indomitable Gooney Birds) filled the skies, not just over Europe but around the globe. For the industrial birth of this global air force, the government spent $45 billion. It received in return nearly 300,000 military aircraft for the Army, Navy, and Allies. By V-J Day, the Army Air Forces had accepted 158,880 aircraft, including 51,221 bombers and 47,050 fighters. By war's end, the annual production rate was almost 110,000 planes.19
The wartime buildup in manpower was just as incredible. From an elite corps of 20,000 regulars in mid-1938, the air arm grew to a peak force of more than 300,000 officers and 2,000,000 enlisted men before the war was over. Unlike the industrial expansion, "the task of training thousands of young men in highly specialized skills required for military aviation . . . was borne entirely by the limited resources of the [service] itself."20
Hundreds of new bases and schools were opened around the country to handle this crash effort, but the War Department had much to learn about managing them. Before consolidating all of the training programs under a single command in the summer of 1943, the Army Air Forces was roundly criticized for its fragmented management of these activities. One general officer believed "the flak" was deserved, explaining that wholesale waste had resulted early in the war from shuttling men back and forth across the nation to train them and send them on to new assignments. The newspapers had accused the service of moving six million men around, the general said, when in fact "we have moved one million men six times."21
Scientific and technological skills like those that helped shape the Army Air Forces into the mighty force it became were infinitely more valuable than they had been in earlier wars. Even contributions that were less decisive than the atomic bomb oftentimes bordered on wizardry. Gen Dwight D. Eisenhower said in his postwar salute to scientists and inventors that they literally "transformed the face of the war."22 Eisenhower was ahead of his peers in recognizing that "the extraordinary and growing influence of the airplane in the waging of war" was "foremost among the military lessons" to be learned from World War II.
Gen Henry H. Arnold recognized in November 1944 that scientific advancement was inextricable from the decisiveness of air power when he established the AAF Scientific Advisory Group to create a longrange research and development program. Hap Arnold knew from his own experience of air power that "the weapons of today" were becoming with frightening frequency "the museum pieces of tomorrow."23
Hap Arnold also sought assurance that the postwar air force would be ready to carry out the global responsibilities that had been thrust upon the American people by victory in World War II. The Scientific Advisory Group's report, New Horizons, which was published in December 1945, charted the Air Force's future research and development requirements for meeting these responsibilities.24 In remarks made at Harvard University on 6 September 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill's allusion to America's part in the Grand Alliance and its new role in the world was more than just a placebo for the bitter pill we had to swallow from Lloyd George's memoirs two decades earlier. Churchill said:
The price of greatness is responsibility. If the people of the United States had continued in a mediocre station, struggling with the wilderness, absorbed in their own affairs, and a factor of no consequence in the movement of their world, they might have remained forgotten and undisturbed beyond their protecting oceans: but one cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilized world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes.25
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
Notes
1. James J. Hudson, Hostile Skies: A Combat History of the American Air Services in World War I (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1968), 2-3; Alfred Goldberg et al., A History of the United States Air Force, 1907-1957 (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1957), 15-16. Hudson’s book is a highly readable account of the Air Service’s experience in World War I.
2. Oral history interview of Maj Gen Benjamin D. Foulois by Dr Alfred Goldberg (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 9 December 1965), 28-29, United States Air Force Historical Research Center (USAFHRC) K239.0512-766; AAF Historical Study No. 50, Materiel Research and Development in the Army Air Arm, 1914-1945 (Washington, D.C.: AAF Historical Office, 1946), 12, USAFHRC 101-50. At the two ends of the spending curve, Germany spent $28,000,000 and Brazil $500,000 on military aeronautics during the five years prior to 1914.
3. Goldberg, A History of the United States Air Force, 5, 6.
4. Ibid., 10; Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: A History of Basic Thinking in the United States Air Forces, 1907-1964 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University, 1974), 9; Oral History interview of Lt Gen Kenneth Wolfe by Robert Piper, Space Systems Division History Office, June 1966, 5, USAFHRC K239.0512-788. Some so-called flying schools before 1914 had only one airplane.
5. Goldberg, A History of the United States Air Force, 13.
6. Hudson, 5; John F. Shiner, Foulois and the U.S. Army Air Corps, 1931-1935 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1983), 8.
7. Hudson, 4-7; I. B. Holley, Jr., Ideas and Weapons: Exploitation of the Aerial Weapon by the United States During World War II; A Study in the Relationship of Technological Advance, Military Doctrine, and the Development of Weapons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1983), 43-44. Professor Holley's classic history of the development of World War I weapons cites discrepancies in the French request for assistance.
8. Hudson, 17.
9. United States Army Aircraft Production Facts (Washington. D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 4-10, USAFHRC 168.6502-5.
10. Lloyd George, War Memoirs (London: Odhams, 1936), 1830-33, as cited in John Terraine, To Win a War (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), 5. Lloyd George chided Americans for their arrogance and slowness to learn from the British and French experience in the war. American industrialists regarded themselves as "masters of all the manufacturing arts," and at first "would have none of our aeroplanes nor of our cannon." On the other side, the British and French have been criticized for their reluctance to share their secrets with the United States.
11. United States Army Aircraft Production Facts, 4-10, USAFHRC 167.601-1D; Hudson, 26, 27. Professor Hudson's book says there were only three pilot training schools in the country, one of which was used to train national guard units.
12. Hudson, 24-43; Goldberg, A History of the United States Air Force, 22, 23.
13. Gen Carl Spaatz, "Evolution of Air Power," Military Affairs, Spring 1947, 4.
14. USAF Historical Study No. 133, U.S. Air Service Victory Credits, World War I (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Aerospace Studies Institute, 1969), 2. This study is the official record of aerial victories; other accounts vary. For instance, Goldberg's history (p. 27) cites confirmed claims of 781 enemy planes, while a brief history prepared by the Air Corps Tactical School in 1927 (USAFHRC 248.211-612) credits the destruction of 491 enemy planes confirmed and 354 unconfirmed, a total of 845. This is but another warp to the myth that morning reports might have better served the preservation of statistical history than have computers.
15. For the history of the Air Corps between the wars, see John F. Shiner and a forthcoming book by Maurer Maurer, Aviation in the U.S. Army. 1919-1939, scheduled to be published by the Office of Air Force History in 1987.
16. Goldberg, A History of the United States Air Force, 47, 48.
17. Ibid., 49. For a full discussion of AWPD-1 and subsequent planning, see The Strategic Air War Against Germany and Japan, a memoir by Haywood S. Hansell, Jr., published by the Office of Air Force History in 1986.
18. Ibid., 91.
19. Ibid. For study of the mobilization of aircraft industries by all belligerents in World War II, see R. J. Overy, The Air War, 1939-1945 (New York: Stein and Day, 1980), 191-231. This does not mean the aviation program was without problems. The Truman Committee took the "chaotic" war production effort to task for its "red tape and bureaucratic waste." See Year of Decisions, volume 1 of Harry S. Truman's Memoirs (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 174-81.
20. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lee Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 6. Men and Planes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 427-28.
21. Lloyd H. Cornett, Jr., Air Training Command Organization, 1943-1974 (Randolph AFB, Tex.: History and Research Division, 1974), 4, 5.
22. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948). 452-53.
23. Ibid.; Herman S. Walk, Planning and Organizing the Postwar Air Force, 1943-1947 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1984), 40.
24. Ibid.
25. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, An Intimate History, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1950), 749-50.
Contributor
Warren A.Trest (BS, University of Southern Mississippi) is senior historian at the USAF Historical Research Center, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. He was in the 3d Infantry Division during the Korean War, and he worked with CHECO and CORONA HARVEST projects in the Southeast Asia conflict. Trest served for 25 years as an Air Force historian in Europe, the Pacific, Air Training Command, and the Office of Air Force History. He has published in a variety of publications and is author and coauthor of numerous official histories and monographs.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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