One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power (14 page)

Initially, officers for aviation were simply taken out of hide—volunteers from the regular line—for the numbers were very small. However, the dramatic Navy expansion occasioned by U.S. entry into World War I necessitated other measures. The Act of 29 August 1916 established the largest naval construction program for any nation to that date.
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The sole source of commissioned officers was still the Naval Academy, which even with an expanded brigade and a truncated curriculum could hardly supply enough officers in a timely manner to meet both fleet and aviation requirements for wartime.

During the four preceding decades, the Navy had worked out an algorithm for establishing the required number of enlisted personnel based on tonnage of capital ships in commission. The Act of 29 August 1916 established the number of officers in turn as a ratio (4 percent) of enlisted personnel. However, just as changes in the types of ships in the fleet affected the appropriate distribution into the several grades and specialties, so the arrival and expansion of aviation called into question the existing algorithm, by requiring a much higher proportion of officers.

The Act also contained personnel provisions to support the dramatic fleet expansion. It authorized increasing enlisted personnel and slightly increased annual appointments to the Naval Academy, provided for temporary officers (to be commissioned from senior enlisted and warranted personnel), and created a Naval Reserve Force with several classes of officers and men within. The Act specifically established a Naval Flying Corps in addition to those officers and men already provided for in law.

Complementary to the Naval Flying Corps was a Naval
Reserve
Flying Corps, part of the larger Naval Reserve Force, which would be developed through transfers of officers and enlisted men from the former, from “surplus” graduates of aeronautics schools, and from other Naval Reserve Force members who already had aviation experience.
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The reserves proved essential to the war effort: when the United States entered the war in April 1917, the sum of regular personnel assigned to naval aviation still totaled only 48 officers (including 6 Marines) and 239 enlisted men.

In practice, volunteer aviation units were initially formed at several universities (including Yale) from which came a core of Reserve aviator officers. The few regular aviators, such as Marc Mitscher, were detailed to command the training stations that in nineteen months produced about 2,000 aviators and 30,000 enlisted personnel, which then were deployed to twenty bases overseas, flying more than two million miles of coastal anti-submarine patrols, damaging or sinking twelve German submarines before the end of the war, bombing German submarine bases, and beginning to support the Allied strategic air attacks on German land targets. By the Armistice, naval aviation had peaked at 37,407 officers and men, 82 percent of whom were reservists.
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With the 11 November 1918 Armistice, however, came the need simultaneously to reverse the temporary wartime expansion and to maintain a permanent increase of the regular officer corps—in good measure to support a larger naval aviation component. However, any additional officer aviators would come at the expense of filling shipboard billets. The increasing technological complexity of ships also demanded more officers.
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Unfortunately, although the fleet grew over the next decade, authorized officer strength remained essentially static. BuNav was compelled to strip shore installations of officers for the ships, especially the new destroyers. By the end of 1920, only a comparatively small number of Reserve officers remained on
active duty. By 1922 the Naval Reserve Flying Corps was rendered inactive.
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Under these conditions it proved very difficult for Navy aviation to grow, absent new institutional mechanisms for providing officers.

The 4 June 1920 Naval Appropriations Act authorized 500 Reserve officers for active duty in naval aviation and extended temporary commissions—combined with regulars and reserves—not to exceed the total authorized officers, or 5,499 (4 percent of regular, authorized, enlisted personnel), until the end of 1921.
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More important to the aviators, this same act provided that Officers holding temporary commissions and Warrant ranks in the Navy and members of the Naval Reserve Force of commissioned and Warrant ranks shall be eligible for transfer to an appointment in the permanent grades or ranks in the Navy for which they may be found qualified not above that held by them on the date of transfer, but not exceed a total of one thousand two hundred commissioned Officers of the line, of which five hundred may be appointed from class five, Naval Reserve Flying Corps.
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No transfers would be made above the grade of Lieutenant. Aviation was assured of at least some new permanent officers. However, bringing into a corps of fewer than 3,000 officers—virtually all of whom were Naval Academy graduates—another 1,200 officers, none of whom were Academy graduates and many of whom were aviators (most of the Reserve aviators still on duty applied for and were accepted into the regular line), could not fail to cause heartburn among the former.
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Transferred officers took lineal precedence between the Naval Academy classes of 1919 and 1920, creating an enormous “hump” that blocked promotion for officers commissioned thereafter, and as we shall see, shortly precipitated extension of promotion by selection up.

By early 1921, of the ships authorized by the Act of 1916, ten scout cruisers and more than sixty submarines were nearly complete and fifty destroyers had been commissioned, while ten battleships and six battle cruisers remained incomplete. Congressional wartime largess turned to peacetime unwillingness to spend on armaments. Faced with strong congressional sentiment, President Warren G. Harding organized the Washington Naval Conference, which resulted in drastic formal limitations on capital warships among the great naval powers. In the United States, this also translated into severe limits on enlisted personnel and commissioned officers. Although the Act of 1916 authorized 160,000 peacetime enlisted personnel, Congress ultimately only appropriated for 86,000 men and 4,500 line officers.

In June 1921 there were 5,295 regulars and reserves on active duty. All temporary commissions terminated at the end of 1921, the remaining 1,011 temporary officers reverted to their permanent status, while 1,059 regular officers serving temporarily in higher ranks reverted to their permanent ranks. Through dismissal or resignation, 174 permanent officers had left the service.
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These terminations left a regular line officer strength of 4,436 officers by June 1922. Congress refused to appropriate additional pay for reservists, and by mid-1923 the regulars and reserves combined totaled only 4,596 (of which 41 percent were Ensigns or junior Lieutenants). It became exceedingly difficult to officer ships in commission, let alone those still building. Fleet operations were continually short of officers. Ships operated with 85–90 percent of normal officer complements, while destroyers were rotated in and out of commission. Inexperienced Ensigns performed duties usually reserved for more experienced seniors. Although the Naval Academy classes were now the largest ever, and contributed to the “hump,” they remained insufficient to replenish the line and to bring it up to its authorized strength. The 1923–1924 appropriations act returned the number of Academy appointments to pre-war levels. Naval aviators occupied almost exclusively the three lowest officer grades. None of this was auspicious for naval aviation, which was bent on growing.

At this time, attention again focused on an effective Naval Reserve, culminating in the Naval Reserve Act of 4 March 1925. At Rear Admiral William Moffett's urging, the Chief of Naval Operations had published a Naval Aviation Reserve Policy in November 1923, providing for one aviation unit in each naval district, which mission was to enroll and train “new members who were suitable officer material in order to insure a supply of new blood, and to maintain the efficiency of members already qualified.”
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The practical challenge was to secure adequate funding from an increasingly penurious Congress. Even if appropriations were secured and more officers commissioned, these naval aviators still lacked the requisite education and experience to make them effective naval line officers. As such they would be relegated, if only informally, to second-tier status in the officer corps.
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The 1925 law disestablished the Naval Reserve Force created by the Act 29 August 1916 and in its stead, using the Army's Reserve Officer Training Corps as a model, created a
Naval
Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC), organized at six universities, at a maximum overall strength of 1,200 members.
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This would supplement the Naval Academy's output of college graduate officers. The first 130 NROTC graduates were commissioned in spring 1930. They would comprise an elite cadre of Reserve officers.
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Naval aviation would gain a portion of those newly commissioned officers.

Problems of stagnation in promotion resulted in officers old for their grades and the inevitable discouragement this engendered. In response, the Act of 3 March 1931 permanently established length of service as the mechanism for retirement of officers, irrespective of commissioning source, which was directed principally toward expediting promotion, evening chances for promotion, and regularizing the promotion process. It also laid the foundation for retirement of non-Academy officers, mostly naval aviators, not promoted.
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Naval Reserve Freshmen, class of 1930, University of California
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The simultaneous continued differentiation of the fleet into different types of ships and the continued commissioning of new ships occasioned a requirement for more-junior officers, but Congress would not fund the authorized five appointment regimen for the Naval Academy, nor would it authorize an increase in the total number of officers. This meant no accommodation for the long-term growth of naval aviation, especially given the policy that 75 percent of pilots would be officers.

In 1933 the authorized strength of the line remained below that required for the peacetime treaty-strength Navy (let alone wartime), especially given vessels then under construction and the continued expansion of Navy aviation. Graduating Naval Academy classes exceeded annual attrition of officers, leaving the problem of what to do with the surplus. The “hump” created by the accession of officers under the Act of 4 June 1920 had not gone away and stagnation in promotion was intensifying: Academy graduates would have to retire for service in grade before being promoted because non-Academy officers were ahead of and blocking them.

The immediate solution for Navy aviation was another new mechanism for accession. The Act of 27 March 1934 authorized a 1,910-aircraft program for Navy aviation, but there were only 806 naval aviators. The Act of 15 April 1935 redressed some of this shortfall, and in a novel manner. Based on an analysis of officer personnel problems prepared by Commander John S. “Slew” McCain and drafted in the Bureau of Aeronautics, it authorized the Secretary to appoint an unspecified number of aviation cadets to the Naval Reserve (Swanson intended to train 498 cadets in fiscal 1935 and 1936). The cadets were intended both as a temporary palliative to quickly bring active duty naval aviation personnel up to peacetime requirements
until the grades could be filled with regular officers and to create an experienced cadre of aviators in the Naval Reserve.

Cadets were obligated to four years of active service, the first in pilot training, the next three in active flying duty. They were then to be commissioned as Reserve Ensigns (or Reserve Marine second Lieutenants), and subject to recall to active duty as skilled aviators in a national emergency. Naval aviation cadets were neither commissioned nor warranted officers nor enlisted personnel; they ranked immediately below Ensigns and above warrant officers. From the aviators' perspective, this mechanism provided for the numbers required for the treaty-strength Navy. From the non-aviators' point of view, this was attractive: it reduced the strain on future Naval Academy classes, did not increase aviation officers in the regular line (hence, did not intensify competition for and speed of promotion), and cadets would be in and out of active duty in four years.

A frugal Congress found the Act appealing as it required no increase in authorized officer strength and cadets were paid less than Ensigns: $75 per month when training or not flying, and $150 monthly when on flying duty. Cadets completing their four-year obligation received a $1,500 lump-sum bonus, and, notably, they were afforded $10,000 in life insurance. Congress also liked that applicants for aviation cadet would apply at the thirteen naval air stations “from the east coast to the west coast and from the north to the south and adjacent to our populous cities.”
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What member of Congress could oppose a bill to provide jobs, especially when his constituents would have a shot at them?