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...in France remained largely dependent on its allies for the provision of tanks, artillery, machineguns, fighting planes, and many other necessities of modern warfare.
Postwar congressional and public scrutiny focused on the wartime production record of the U.S. aviation industry, for this industry and its proponents had raised the nation's expectations with visions of fleets of American-built fighting planes that would soon take to the air. Frederick Rentschler, president of Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company during the 1920s, explained:
Immediately after our entry into the war, it was determined that one of our great contributions was to be in the air, and all generally accepted the idea that our great automotive companies, within a few months' time, could duplicate anything in quantity, and as Howard Coffin [president of Hudson Motor Car Company and chairman of the Air Production Board] put it, "darken the skies over Europe." (2)
These heady expectations would not be realized, however. American factories flailed to produce and ship a single pursuit plane to fight in France. The much-modified British D.H. 4 bomber, the single type of fighting plane to be built and shipped from U.S. factories, was obsolescent by the time it reached France. (3)
What follows is a chronicle of the events that led to the humiliating failure of America's aviation production efforts in World War I. Fortunately, the appropriate lessons were learned, and would be applied with great success in a future war.
The Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, U.S. Army, possessed 26 qualified pilots and 142 airplanes when war with Germany was declared on April 6, 1917. These meager assets, dispersed across the United States, the Philippine Islands, and the Panama Canal Zone, were supported by a domestic aviation industry that managed to deliver only 83 of the 366 airplanes ordered by the U.S. Army during 1916.
Prior to the declaration of war, American aviation factories had not produced a single modern combat plane capable of fighting and surviving on the Western Front. American aeronautical engineers and air officers had little concept of the function and design of modern combat aircraft. American air observers were not privy to developments in military aviation overseas, as Col. Samuel Reber; former chief of the Aviation Section, Signal Corps, observed:
In that fog of war, no blanket was thicker than the one every army hung over its aircraft plans, and on no other single point was it so eager to learn the enemy's. Either could only examine the construction of enemy planes in use at the time, from the examples which fell in their lines; and foreign military attaches, who were never allowed permanently at the front, might, on visits; see the planes of the various armies at the aerodromes. But the new types that were in the process of manufacture were for no eyes except those of the experts in one's own army. (4)
Implementing President Wilson's policy of strict neutrality, Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, compounded the difficulties involved in acquiring vital intelligence regarding rapidly changing developments in military aviation.
Perhaps an even greater shortcoming of the Aviation Section, at the beginning of the war, was its lack of doctrine. Michael Doubler has defined doctrine as "the fundamental, authoritative principles armies use to guide their mission accomplishment," and from doctrine, "an army derives its tactics, procedures, organization, equipment and training." (5) Once war was declared, the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, reorganized in May 1918 as the Army Air Service, began to define its doctrine and organize the elements derived from it. The Army Aviation Section was clearly a start-up organization.
Organization and planning began in April 1917, with the creation of the Joint Army and Navy Technical Board. The board was charged with the responsibility for standardizing the designs and general specifications of aircraft to be procured by each of the services. Composed of three Army and three Navy aviation officers, the board reported jointly to the secretaries of the War Department and of the Navy. Among the Army officers was Maj. Benjamin D. Foulois, who would become Chief of the Air Service, AEF, eight months later, with the temporary rank of brigadier general.
The Chief of the Aviation Section of the U.S. Signal Corps, Brig. Gen. George O. Squier, gave an indication of the board's scope and authority, when he declared that he "would not buy a stick of wood which this technical board of Army and Navy officers did not recommend." (6)
The Joint Technical Board began work without benefit of a policy directive that would have provided a basis for planning for numbers or proportions of observation, pursuit (as fighters were then called), and bombing aircraft. With little information about how to proceed, the board was receptive to the ideas and proposals being offered by its new allies.
As British, French, and Italian military missions converged on Washington, D.C., a cable arrived from Premier Alexandre Ribot of France. The cable, directed to the Joint Technical Board for review, read:
Two thousand planes should be constructed each month as well as 4,000 engines by the American factories. That is to say, in the first six months of 1918, 16,500 planes of the latest type, and 30,000 engines will have to be built. The French Government is anxious to know if the American Government accepts this proposition, which would allow the allies to win the supremacy of the air. (7)
Incredibly, Ribot's cable became the basis for establishing target numbers (but not types) of American combat aircraft and engines, with the requisite number of pilots and mechanics. With Ribot's cable in hand, Major Foulois prepared the personnel and equipment requirements and appropriations legislation needed to meet the targets. Brigadier General Squier presented the plan to the secretaries of the War Department and of the Navy and quickly received their approval, followed by the approval of the General Staff On July 14, 1917, amid a barrage of favorable press publicity, the House of Representatives voted on the enormous $640 million aeronautics appropriations bill. The House passed the bill, authorizing a sum greater than the cost of the Panama Canal, without a single dissenting vote.
American and Allied media trumpeted the passage of the bill, and painted a fanciful picture of the accomplishments of American industry and aviators once the program got under way. A typical editorial, appearing in the New York American, boasted: "Fifty thousand American aviators in fifty thousand flying machines, each dropping one hundred dynamite bombs on German soil, would do the work." (8)
Official Washington also heralded the coming triumph of America's new air arm. Brigadier General Squier, who was also a member of the Air Production Board chaired by Howard E. Coffin, spoke of "winged cavalry sweeping across the German lines and smothering their trenches with a storm of lead, which would put the 'Yankee punch' ... into the war, ... sweep the Germans from the sky, [and] ... blind the Prussian cannon." Squier continued: "The time will be ripe to release the enormous flock of flying fighters to raid and destroy military camps, ammunition depots, and military establishments of all kinds." (9)
These expectations seemed reasonable at the time because America, the most technologically n advanced nation in the world, had pioneered mass production. Its vast automotive industry appeared fully capable of producing thousands of fighting planes. Writing in National Geographic magazine, Maj. Joseph Tulasne, chief of the French Aviation Mission to the United States, proclaimed in a more restrained manner: "In America, the European types of airplanes and motors will be built, at first, to aid the English and French factories, in order that the Allies may have the largest possible number of battle planes at the earliest possible moment. Then the new airplanes, more powerful and better armed, will be built...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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