One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power (4 page)

THE U.S. NAVY DISCOVERS AVIATION

The Wrights' 1908 demonstrations at the Reims air show and other aerial exhibitions highlighted the new possibilities of military aviation. After Reims, all of Europe's major powers increased their aviation spending and research. The U.S. Navy's leaders, though, proved slow to recognize aviation's potential and balked at funding aviation research.

A certain amount of skepticism and penny-pinching was to be expected. The U.S. Navy had just completed the greatest transformation in its history. Captivated by the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Congress funded an enormous expansion of the fleet including more than two dozen new battleships, as Mahan's disciples reoriented strategy from commerce raiding and coast defense to seeking command of the sea through decisive capital ship engagements. The United States soon boasted one of the largest and most modern fleets in the world. Each new class of battleships grew in size and armament, carrying guns so large that directing accurate fire became a problem. The 12-inch guns of the new battleship
Michigan
(BB-27), for example, could fire shells out to 21,000 yards. Under the best conditions, though, the ship's spotters could only see out to 16,000 yards. The Navy experimented with sending spotters aloft in kites and kite-balloons, but as with balloons on land, these proved problematic. Practical airplanes and airships appeared as the world's navies worked to solve this problem, though most naval officers failed to see their potential.

While the fleet expanded and officers improved their technical skills, much of the Navy's administration remained rooted in the past. To simplify the Navy's convoluted administrative structure and reduce the power of its eight bureaus, which despite a generation of reform continued to operate as independent fiefdoms, Secretary of the Navy George Meyer introduced the Aide System on 1 December 1909. Four aides (operations, personnel, inspection, and material), who reported directly to the Secretary of the Navy, would oversee different bureaus and encourage their cooperation. The Aide for Material oversaw the Navy's four technical bureaus: Construction and Repair, Ordnance, Engineering, and Equipment. Congress never sanctioned this arrangement, which failed to resolve fully the centurylong problem of interbureau cooperation. Bureau chiefs maintained substantial independence, particularly over their finances, which Congress continued to allocate to individual bureaus in annual naval appropriations.
¹¹

Among the officers who staffed this new administrative apparatus was Captain Washington Irving Chambers. The personal choice of Rear Admiral William H. Swift, the first Aide for Material, Chambers relinquished his brief command of the battleship
Louisiana
and became Swift's assistant. An 1876 Naval Academy graduate, Chambers played a critical role in the process of reform and technological innovation that transformed the U.S. Navy into a world-class fleet. One of the Navy's leading intellectuals, Chambers taught at the Naval War College in the 1890s and later contributed to the design of torpedoes and the Navy's first all-big-gun battleships. He came to his new position with a record of technological aptitude and substantial experience in the Navy's labyrinthine administration and incessant bureaucratic squabbling.
¹²

While the Navy's leaders proved slow to notice aviation developments, the growing clamor and the volume of mail promising that airplanes would revolutionize warfare overwhelmed Secretary Meyer's office. He demanded that his aides assign someone to deal with it. So, Rear Admiral Frank F. Fletcher, who had succeeded Swift as Aide for Material, added the aviation correspondence to Chambers' other duties in September 1910. A friend of Chambers since their days as Naval Academy midshipmen, Fletcher's support proved important as Chambers sought to master his new responsibilities and bring airplanes into the Navy.
¹³

Curious about aviation, Chambers had discussed recent developments with Lieutenant Sweet and had observed flights of lighter-than-air craft and Wilbur Wright's flights for the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Reading the aviation mail fired his imagination. He arranged for his friend Captain Templin Potts, the Navy's Chief Intelligence Officer, to send him copies of all reports he received on aviation, which he translated himself. The more he studied aviation, the more its potential fascinated him. Chambers became the most vocal champion of aviation within the Navy.
¹⁴

In October 1910, Admiral George Dewey and the Navy's General Board, an advisory body of senior officers, recommended deploying airplanes on the new scout cruiser
Chester
. When this came to their attention, the Chiefs of both the Bureau of Construction and Repair and the Bureau of Engineering separately wrote Meyer requesting that he assign responsibility for aviation to his particular bureau. Chambers scrambled to maintain control of aviation and convinced Meyer's assistant, Beekman Winthrop, to intervene on his behalf. Winthrop ordered each bureau to assign an officer to coordinate with Chambers. This decision, which remained in force throughout these years, split responsibility for aviation into three parts: Chambers remained tenuously in charge of personnel, policymaking, and the general direction of the program; the Bureau of Construction took charge of the planes; while the Bureau of Engineering looked after their engines. This was a poor arrangement, made worse first, because bureau chiefs received temporary rank as rear
admirals, so they outranked Chambers and routinely bypassed him to speak directly to the Secretary of the Navy; and second, because when Congress later sanctioned this arrangement, it split funding among Chambers and the two bureaus.
¹⁵

After examining about three dozen different aircraft and discussing aviation progress with the Wrights, Curtiss, and other inventors, and with pilots at aviation meets at Belmont Park, New York, and Halethorpe, Maryland, Chambers recommended that the Navy establish a national aeronautic laboratory to research flight, assign officers to study aviation and adapt it to the fleet's needs, construct an airfield, train pilots, buy a few airplanes, and establish a distinct Naval Aeronautics Office to direct this effort. His report fell on deaf ears, so Chambers went in person, first to Rear Admiral Richard Wainwright, the Aide for Operations, and then to Secretary Meyer. Wainwright told him that “the present state of aeroplanes” did not merit funding, while Meyer dismissed airplanes as carnival toys. Glenn Curtiss received a similar response when he approached Meyer on his own.
¹⁶

Hoping to force the issue, Chambers and Curtiss planned a demonstration for the Navy. Publisher and aviation enthusiast John Barry Ryan helped arrange a flight from a Hamburg-America passenger liner. Curtiss supplied a plane and pilot, Eugene Ely, but an accident damaged the plane, and the ship sailed before Curtiss repaired it. The liner's German registry, though, allowed Chambers to hint darkly that the Germans were pursuing naval aviation. Supported by Fletcher and civilian aviation organizations, Chambers convinced the Navy to facilitate the demonstration. So, Eugene Ely took off from an improvised flight deck paid for by Ryan and erected on the cruiser
Birmingham
on 14 November 1910. Meyer's grudging congratulatory letter arrived a few days later and spelled out further a requirement for Chambers and Curtiss to meet: “When you show me that it is feasible for an aeroplane to alight on the water alongside a battleship and be hoisted aboard without any false deck to receive it, I shall believe the airship is of practical benefit to the Navy.”
¹⁷

Essentially, Meyer asked for a seaplane, which Chambers, inspired by Henri Fabre's March 1910 seaplane flight, had already asked Curtiss to build. Fabre equipped a monoplane with three floats and completed the world's first seaplane flight, taking off from and landing on the calm waters of la Méde harbor near Marseilles. Since Curtiss' seaplane was not ready, Chambers rushed ahead with the second half of his demonstration. He arranged to land a plane on the armored cruiser
Pennsylvania
(ACR-4), then anchored in San Francisco Bay and commanded by Captain Charles Pond, another of Chambers' friends. Workers erected a 119-foot wooden platform over the ship's aft deck, attached three metal hooks to the bottom of Ely's plane, and strung twenty ropes between 50-pound sandbags along the deck for the hooks to catch. On 18 January 1911 Ely took off from shore, circled the
Pennsylvania
, and then turned to land. He cut his engine fifty feet from the ship and glided in for a landing, but a sudden gust of wind lifted the plane. Responding quickly, Ely pushed
the plane's nose down and landed on the deck. The hooks caught eight of the ropes, which stopped the plane before it crashed into the canvas barrier at the end of the platform. The
Pennsylvania
's crew refueled the plane, and Ely took off from that same short platform a few hours later after a celebratory toast with Chambers and ship's officers. Over the next few days Chambers arranged a succession of other flights and demonstrations for the officers of the Pacific Fleet, which coincided with a nearby civilian aviation meet. Captain Pond was particularly impressed and announced that he was “positively assured of the importance of the aeroplane in future naval warfare.”
¹⁸
Two weeks later, John Alexander Douglas McCurdy, shadowed by a squadron of destroyers arranged by Chambers, attempted to fly from Key West to Cuba in a Curtiss biplane. While engine trouble forced him down fourteen miles from Havana, he flew an accurate course for one hundred miles, further underlining the rapid progress in aviation.
¹⁹

THE FIRST PILOTS AND PLANES

Chambers still had no budget, but Curtiss offered to train Navy pilots for free. The Wrights made a similar offer contingent on purchasing airplanes, which Chambers promised to do. Only a handful of Navy officers had requested aviation duty—how many remains uncertain since their requests often disappeared in the Navy's bureaucracy before reaching Chambers. Nonetheless, he secured his first pilots, splitting them between Curtiss and the Wrights. Lieutenant Theodore Ellyson trained with Curtiss, and Lieutenant John Rodgers went to the Wrights.
²⁰
Rodgers had witnessed Ely's landing while serving on
Pennsylvania
and afterward ascended in a box kite to spot and direct the ship's fire by telephone. Two more pilots arrived the following summer: Lieutenant John Towers,
²¹
previously the Chief Gunfire Officer on the
Michigan
, who trained with Curtiss; and Ensign Victor Herbster, who trained with the Wrights. Towers' experiences trying to direct the
Michigan
's guns convinced him of aviation's importance despite the efforts of senior officers to discourage him from such foolishness.
²²

Chambers needed a plane better suited to the Navy's needs than either Curtiss or the Wrights manufactured, and he worked to develop good relations with both companies. Curtiss proved more responsive to his requests and, unlike the Wrights, was willing to borrow and improve upon the ideas of others. Chambers had first approached the Wrights to fly a plane off a ship, but they declined, as they had most suggestions for demonstrations and contests. Curtiss loved the idea, and his daring and outgoing nature endeared him to the Navy's pilots. Unlike the Wrights, Curtiss also brought Navy officers into his design process. Lieutenant Ellyson helped Curtiss design and build the pontoons for his first seaplane and test a number of devices and modifications to his airplanes.
²³

Lieutenant John Towers was convinced of the importance of an aviation program in spite of the skepticism of senior officers
.

The Wrights, though, did things their own way, and frequently ignored requests and suggestions from Chambers and his pilots. Relations worsened after Wilbur died from typhoid fever on 30 May 1912. Withdrawn and taciturn, Orville lacked Wilbur's charm and had no interest in building seaplanes. He was, though, very interested in enforcing the Wrights' patents. The Wrights had filed suit against Curtiss in 1909 and they continued to sue other pilots and inventors who infringed on their pioneering work to enjoin them from building, selling, or even exhibiting aircraft. Apart from complicating the work of military and civilian aviators, the patent fight hindered aviation research and development in the United States. The federal government did not step in and settle the dispute until 1917 when preparation for war necessitated a settlement, which it arranged by cross-licensing the key patents through the newly created Manufacturers' Aircraft Association.
²⁴

While the Navy's aviators favored Curtiss, the Army favored the Wrights, and this may have exacerbated the tendency of Army and Navy aviation leaders to go their own way. Navy aviators, who operated from a small airfield Chambers established
near the Naval Academy at Greensbury Point in the summer of 1911, occasionally socialized with Army aviators stationed at nearby College Park, Maryland, but few friendships developed between the two groups. Whatever the reasons, cooperation and resource sharing between the Services' aviation units remained slight.