One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power (17 page)

That from these early decades naval aviation emerged poised to make its contribution as the fleet's principal striking force in the great campaigns of World War II's Pacific Theater is all the more remarkable, therefore. Out of a combination of sustained, systematic problem solving and internal political conflict came the personnel system that produced the officers necessary to plan and execute that wartime contribution, for, as Representative Fred Britten observed in 1934, “Cold steel isn't worth a damn in an emergency. You need men to direct it.” We know well the most senior officers who led aviation during the war—Ernest King, William Halsey, Marc Mitscher, John S. McCain, John Towers; but for every one of these flag officers there were thousands of junior to command grade naval aviators, regular and reserve, who made it possible to execute the high-level plans and accomplish the strategic objectives. Although it is the ships and especially the aircraft that most often capture our attention and imagination, the presence in the Navy of a vast cadre of aviators and their performance in combat was rendered possible by the often invisible, sometimes arcane, and typically not very interesting officer personnel system.

NOTES

This chapter is based, in part, upon material contained in, and the research conducted for, Donald Chisholm,
Waiting for Dead Men's Shoes: Origins and Development of the U.S. Navy's Officer Personnel System, 1793–1941
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).

    
1
.
  
George van Deurs,
Anchors in the Sky: Spuds Ellyson, The First Naval Aviator
(San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978), p. 59.

    
2
.
  
Ibid.

    
3
.
  
The administrative place, standing, and organization of naval aviation are matters complementary to that of personnel. Significant administrative developments parallel those of personnel in the first three decades of naval aviation. Fortunately, they have received more attention than the personnel problem.

    
4
.
  
Marine officers and enlisted personnel were (and still are) included under the rubric of “naval aviation.” This chapter focuses on the Navy's side of naval aviation.

    
5
.
  
See Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark D. Mandeles,
American and British Aircraft Carrier Development, 1919–1941
(Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1999), for a discussion of the different paths by which the United States and Great Britain chose to organize their respective naval aviation forces and the practical consequences of those choices.

    
6
.
  
The Act of 29 August 1916 established selection up as the mechanism for promotion to Rear Admiral, Captain, and Commander. Selection up was extended to promotion to Lieutenant Commander and Lieutenant by the Act of 29 May 1934. Prior to these acts, promotion was accomplished by attrition and seniority, tempered only marginally by passing promotion examinations.

    
7
.
  
See Chisholm,
Waiting
(2001), chapters 18 and 19.

    
8
.
  
NAV-DMS, 29 August 1925, 7. Records of the Bureau of Navigation, National Archives.

    
9
.
  
See text later in this chapter for a discussion of the question of the appropriate distribution of pilots between commissioned officers and enlisted personnel.

  
10
.
  
Senate Document No. 18
, 69th Congress, 1st Session, 10 December 1925, p. 3.

  
11
.
  
Qualifications for “Navy Air Pilot” had been established by administrative order of the Secretary of the Navy in April 1913, but these had no standing in law. In March 1915, “Naval Aviator” replaced “Navy Air Pilot” as the designation for naval officers qualified as aviators.

  
12
.
  
Congressional Record
, 3 June 1926, 10586.

  
13
.
  
First used in March 1922 to comply with the law creating the Bureau of Aeronautics that required that the Chief of the Bureau and 70 percent of its officers be either aviators or observers, the “naval aviation observer” designation as established in law in 1925 had no relationship to usages of the same term in later decades. In this incarnation it was a practical success. Notable among the small initial cadre of naval aviation observers were William A. Moffett, Emory S. Land, and Joseph Mason Reeves. Moffett qualified as the first naval aviation observer in June 1922 in order to become the first Chief of the Bureau. An officer of many parts, Reeves began his commissioned service as an assistant engineer, became a line officer following the 1899 amalgamation of engineers with line, qualified as a naval aviation observer in 1925, and rose to become Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet in 1934. His contributions to the development of aviation and its effective integration into fleet operations cannot be overstated. See chapter six in Thomas Wildenberg,
All the Factors of Victory: Admiral Joseph Mason Reeves and the Origins of Carrier Air Power
(Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005).

  
14
.
  
House Report No. 389
, 69th Congress, 1st Session, 26 February 1926, p. 7.

  
15
.
  
The Act of 29 August 1916 appropriated $313 million for the Navy. It called for constructing sixteen capital ships, with eight to be built immediately, and 157 other warships during the following three years.
House Report No. 1155
, 64th Congress, 1st Session, 18 August 1916, p. 4.

  
16
.
  
For all states, a fundamental problem is to build institutional mechanisms that allow rapid military expansion during wartime and an affordable military in more peaceful times. There was at this time no “naval reserve” as organized from the 1930s to the present. President Thomas Jefferson's proposal for a naval militia failed. During the Civil War additional officers were procured by commissioning former naval officers and merchant marine officers, some few of whom were augmented into the regular line following the war. See Chisholm,
Waiting
(2001), chapters 12–14. A number of coastal states organized naval militias, mirroring their land militias, beginning in 1889. Although organization and training of these militias was haphazard at best, the total personnel, officers and men numbered over 4,000 by the Spanish-American War in 1898. Some 2,600 were mustered into the Navy as individuals, while 1,600 others joined the short-lived Auxiliary Naval Force and the Coast Signal Service. Support for any sort of Naval Reserve faded, not to revive until the 1914 onset of World War I. The 1914 Naval Militia Act authorized the president to mobilize the Naval Militia and Naval Reserve, but as there existed no Naval Reserve, in practice this meant calling out the militias (which by then added to 10,000 officers and men in twenty-two states). The Act of 3 March 1915 established the first U.S. Naval Reserve, to be composed of persons previously honorably discharged from naval service. This proved grossly inadequate. In consequence, following the National Defense Act of 1916, the Act of 29 August 1916 established a U.S. Naval Reserve comprising six classes, with the intent of quickly organizing a reserve of 10,000–15,000 officers and men. In September 1917, from the militias, 850 officers and 16,000 men were serving on active duty in the Naval Reserve Force in the class National Naval Volunteers, while the new Naval Reserve force itself provided 10,000 officers and men. The Act of 1 July 1918 transferred en masse the National Naval Volunteers to the Naval Reserve. With the Armistice, weighed down by an overly complicated set of laws and administrative rules, and congressional unwillingness to fund necessary training, the reserves, including the
aviation reserve, fell into a state of desuetude. This brief narrative is drawn from the excellent account contained in Kenmore M. McManes, “Development of the Naval Reserve,”
Military Affairs
17 (Spring 1953): 8–11.

  
17
.
  
See Peter Mersky, ed., “U.S. Naval Air Reserve” (Washington, DC: Deputy Chief of Naval Operations and [Air Warfare] and the Commander, Naval Air Systems Command, 1987) for a detailed narrative and chronology of the development of naval aviation.

  
18
.
  
See Gerald E. Wheeler, “Edwin Denby,” in Paolo E. Coletta, ed.,
American Secretaries of the Navy, Volume II
(Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1980), pp. 583–84.

  
19
.
  
Mersky notes that “funds were provided in 1920 for 15[-]day training periods at Rockaway Beach, N.Y., for a limited number of Officers of Class Five. However, due to lack of funds, this opportunity was not offered again to Reserve aviators and, subsequently, all Class Five students were transferred to Class Six of the Volunteer Naval Reserve Force. Due to the fact that provision for actual flying was no longer made in the Naval Reserve, hundreds of aviation officers failed to reenroll at the completion of their first four years and left the Naval Reserve Force,” “U.S. Naval Air Reserve” (1987), p. 4.

  
20
.
  
Note that authorized and actual numbers of officers were inevitably different in the event. Congress did not always appropriate enough monies to support the authorized strength and, when it did so, the Navy was not always able to commission enough officers annually to compensate for the attrition of officers, let alone to grow the officer corps to authorized strength. Usually the actual number of regular officers on active duty was less than that authorized.

  
21
.
  
U.S. Statutes, 66th Congress, Session II, Chapter 228, pp. 834–35.

  
22
.
  
Applications for transfer to the regular line totaled 1,461: 654 of 749 temporary Lieutenants, 382 of 576 Junior Lieutenants, and 425 of 591 Ensigns. Of this total number, 585 were Chief Warrant Officers, 399 Reserve officers, 474 enlisted men, and 3 Ensigns. Naval Academy officers were then retired on the basis of age-in-grade. Consequently, among the specific factors causing heartburn among the Naval Academy–educated officers was the length of service retirement mechanism accorded the transferred officers because they entered the Navy across a wide range of ages.

  
23
.
  
In the early 1920s, the officer corps averaged about twenty resignations per month.

  
24
.
  
Mersky, “U.S. Naval Air Reserve” (1987), p. 6.

  
25
.
  
At this time, about 25 percent of the Navy's pilots were in enlisted status as naval aviation pilots.

  
26
.
  
In the event, only six universities organized and executed NROTC programs: University of California, University of Washington, Northwestern University, Georgia Tech, Harvard, and Yale. The Navy had run a Volunteer Naval Reserve unit at St. John's College commencing in fall 1924 (with a second class beginning fall 1925) as a proof of concept for the benefit of Congress. See Gerald E. Wheeler, “Origins of the Naval Reserve Officer Corps,”
Military Affairs
20 (Autumn 1956): 170–74.

  
27
.
  
An examination of World War II ships' logs reveals that as Reserve officers reported aboard and departed ship, their commissioning source was indicated following their name and rank. Not all such officers were created equal. By mid-1943, NROTC line officers who went on active duty before the war started had been promoted to temporary Lieutenant Commanders, while Reserve officers from other sources rose no higher than Lieutenant.

  
28
.
  
Section Five of the Act provided that officers not promoted and who, by length of service had become ineligible for further consideration for promotion, or who had been selected for promotion but found professionally unqualified on being examined, would be retired. Lieutenants age
forty-five
or more, or who had completed twenty years or more service and had failed the promotion examination for Lieutenant Commander, would be retired
[my emphasis]. If they had been permanently appointed Ensign or above while holding permanent Warrant rank, they could revert to that rank rather than retire. These provisions disproportionately affected naval aviators.

  
29
.
  
Comments of Representative John Delaney (D-NY) on the House floor.
Congressional Record
, 27 March 1935, 4541.

  
30
.
  
Mersky, “U.S. Naval Air Reserve” (1987), p. 10.

  
31
.
  
The Bureau of Aeronautics had projected that naval aviation's requirements for 1941 would be met by the more than seven hundred aviation cadets expected to be on active duty by then. After that, their numbers would decrease gradually “until they eventually disappeared.” Ibid., p. 11. Some in naval aviation, however, believed that “there is little prospect of meeting Naval Aviator requirements from regular service sources, and that we must accept the Aviation Cadet as a permanent fixture and expect them to compose forty-five percent of the Naval Aviators, unless some remedial action can be taken,” ibid.