One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power (5 page)

The Navy's airfield was also conveniently near the Bureau of Engineering's Experiment Station. Perennially short of tools and supplies, Chambers' pilots and mechanics borrowed these in regular nighttime raids that began after the station's officers refused to support the aviation program—an all-too-common problem in these years. They also regularly wrote manufacturers, requesting samples of oil, gasoline, and other materials and equipment they needed, suggesting that lucrative contracts were in the offing. They often paid expenses out of their own pockets since the Navy proved slow to reimburse them and sometimes forgot them entirely.
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Seaplanes were critical both to satisfy Meyer's requirements and to prove that airplanes could operate with the fleet. While a few visionaries suggested constructing aircraft carriers, Chambers saw seaplanes as the only viable option given the state of technology, lack of funds, and scant support from Navy leadership. Early in his career, Chambers had witnessed new technologies isolated by the Navy's bureaucracy and ignored by officers, particularly torpedoes, which remained confined to the Newport Torpedo Station and its two torpedo boats before the Spanish-American War. Chambers hoped to put seaplanes on every cruiser and battleship in the Navy. This would not only spread the gospel of aviation, but also solve his financial problems by funding planes as part of a warship's regular equipment rather than through separate appropriations.

Over the winter, Chambers relocated most of the aviation unit to Curtiss' North Island base near San Diego where they could continue flying and also work with Curtiss on his new seaplane. Working with Ellyson, Curtiss developed effective pontoons and attached them to one of his planes, which they tested in several flights in late January. On 17 February 1911 Curtiss flew this new seaplane from shore and landed near the
Pennsylvania
, whose crew hoisted the plane aboard, refueled it, and lowered it back into the water. Curtiss took off without problems, satisfying Meyer's terms.

Armed with this success, Chambers convinced Meyer to support a $25,000 appropriation for naval aviation—a rather small sum when one considers that the Royal Navy had spent $175,000 on aviation the previous year. Congress passed the Navy's appropriation that March, but Chambers could not spend it until the fiscal year began in July. Meyer again refused Chambers' request to create an Office of Aeronautics with a dedicated staff, but months of additional lobbying convinced him to clarify Chambers' duties. Meyer ordered him to “keep informed” of the progress of aeronautics “with a view to advising the Department concerning the adaptability of such material for naval warfare, especially for the purpose of naval scouting.” He
was to guide the training of Navy aviators and consult with the bureaus involved in his work. Final authority to carry out Chambers' recommendations, though, rested “entirely with the bureaus having cognizance of the details.” This arrangement actually magnified all the problems of bureau coordination that Meyer had created the aide system to resolve. It left aviation, the great marvel of the twentieth century, saddled with nineteenth-century administrative problems. Chambers continued to operate without an official title or solid place in the Navy's hierarchy, signing his correspondence with a self-made title, “Officer in Charge of Aviation.”
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Chambers' friends continued to help him, or at least try to. On 30 March, Admiral Dewey transferred Chambers to the General Board where he would have clerical help and a voice in policymaking. Shortly afterward though, Congress assigned the $25,000 aviation appropriation to the Bureau of Navigation, which in those years oversaw personnel assignments. So Chambers had to arrange his transfer there, where no one wanted him. The Chief of the bureau, Reginald Nicholson, refused to assign him any staff and suggested that Chambers work from home, though Chambers found a corner in the dank basement of the War, State, and Navy building to set up shop. It was, he told friends, “a good place to catch a cold.”
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Chambers' small budget proved just enough for him to order three planes, two from Curtiss and one from the Wrights, which he ordered on 8 May, generally considered the official birth of U.S. Navy Aviation. Curtiss delivered his planes in early July. One of these was a seaplane, the A-1 Triad, which had retractable wheels attached to its floats allowing it to operate from land and sea. The Wrights delivered their plane (the B-1) a few weeks later—a conventional plane rather than the requested seaplane. Naval constructors William McEntee and Holden C. Richardson, who worked closely with the aviation program, designed and built pontoons for the Wright plane. The following year, they helped Chambers' pilots and mechanics assemble another Wright plane (the B-2) from spare and scavenged parts. The Wrights, who proved increasingly difficult to deal with, would sell only two more planes to the Navy. The B-1, underpowered before the addition of floats, rarely managed to exceed thirty-five miles per hour.
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By the end of 1911, Chambers had acquired a small mechanical and engineering staff, and his pilots had logged about one hundred hours in each of his three airplanes, often carrying passengers to demonstrate the potential of aviation. Chambers assumed that his team would build rapidly on this foundation the following year and that new demonstrations of airplanes' growing capabilities would clear bureaucratic obstacles and yield more support and funding. Essentially he believed that all he had to do was repeat his 1911 experiences, producing new and better aviation demonstrations to overcome each new obstacle, which would open the financial floodgates and lead to the integration of aviation into the fleet. The Army's pilots did much the same, hoping to promote their own program with successful tests and
demonstrations. Given the poor funding of the United States' two air Services, they could do little else.
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EXPANDING NAVAL AVIATION

Chambers spent the first months of 1912 lobbying Congress. He asked for $150,000, which Congress reduced to $35,000. Another round of lobbying and letters from aviation enthusiasts raised it to $65,000, split among the three bureaus ($10,000 for the Bureau of Navigation, $20,000 for the Engineering Bureau, and $35,000 for Construction and Repair). The Army did little better that year, securing only $100,000 for its larger aviation program. The European powers, of course, spent much more. Between 1908 and 1913 Germany and France both spent more than $20 million on military aviation compared to a total of $435,000 spent by the United States Army and Navy. Not only did each of the major European powers outspend the United States in these years, so did Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Greece, and Japan.
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Chambers ordered three more planes including a flying boat (C-1), a new Curtiss design with a boatlike fuselage instead of a central pontoon. Several new pilots arrived in the second half of the year: Ensign William D. Billingsley and Ensign Godfrey de Courcelles Chevalier; Lieutenant Patrick N. L. Bellinger; and Marine 1st Lieutenant Alfred A. Cunningham and Marine 1st Lieutenant Bernard L. Smith. While they were learning to fly, Chambers arranged a succession of new demonstrations. Helped by Ensign Charles H. Maddox, a radio expert, Towers and Rodgers transmitted messages to shore stations and a torpedo boat. Towers, the rising star of the aviation program, also worked with Lieutenant Chester Nimitz, then commanding the Atlantic Fleet's submarine flotilla, to demonstrate that planes could locate submarines. On 6 October 1912 Towers set an endurance record by remaining aloft for more than six hours and also bested several other American records. Commanded by Towers, the aviation unit joined the Atlantic Fleet's maneuvers off Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in January. For the next eight weeks, the Navy's five planes spotted for gunfire, took photographs, hunted for submarines, dropped small bombs, and successfully located “enemy” ships. Encouraged by Chambers, pilots carried passengers on more than a hundred flights, among them Lieutenant Colonel John A. Lejeune and Lieutenant Ernest J. King who both received a ten-minute flight and aviation sales pitch from Towers.
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Chambers needed to find a way to launch aircraft from the Navy's existing warships. He studied the catapults used by Langley and the Wrights and also built on his own experience with torpedoes to design a compressed air catapult. Tested and improved over the summer of 1912, the catapult successfully launched Ellyson (in the A-3) on 12 November. Leaving the project in Richardson's capable hands, Chambers announced to reporters that a working catapult eliminated the last barrier
to deploying planes to the fleet. Hoping to pressure his superiors, he predicted that each of the fleet's battleships would carry a seaplane by the end of 1913.
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Less than miniscule funding hindered Chambers' work. The efforts by leaders of the Bureau of Construction and Repair to gain control of aviation repeatedly obstructed Chambers and slowed the growth of Navy aviation. Toward the end of 1912, for example, Chambers discovered that the bureaus had sabotaged his lobbying efforts by telling members of Congress that they needed money for other projects and that funding aviation was premature. The same thing happened in 1913, when Congress again authorized only $65,000 for Navy aviation. So, U.S. Navy aviation grew slowly in 1912 against considerable resistance, while other navies surged ahead. Royal Navy aviators duplicated Ely's shipboard take-off, and European aviators soon matched and then surpassed other American records. The French navy moved particularly quickly, converting the destroyer
Foudre
to a seaplane tender in 1912. The Royal Navy did the same to the obsolete cruiser
Hermes
the following year.
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The change in administration following the 1912 election compounded Chambers' problems. New Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels assumed his position determined to run things strictly according to existing laws and regulation. This necessarily entailed either dismantling or making permanent Meyer's ad hoc administrative arrangements. The first indication of changes to come was Daniel's threat to retire Captain Templin Potts, the Chief of Naval Intelligence, for lack of sea duty.
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As he had Chambers, Meyer had recalled Potts from a battleship command to assume his new post. As word spread of Potts' problems, virtually every officer on shore applied for command at sea, producing a tremendous shake-up in the Navy's administration. Hutchinson I. Cone, Chambers' strongest supporter in the bureaus, relinquished his position as Chief of the Bureau of Engineering and returned to sea as a Lieutenant Commander. Others left as well, including Ellyson, and Chambers watched most of his carefully cultivated group of supporters and contacts sail out to sea with the Atlantic Fleet. Chambers, himself short of sea duty, refused to apply for sea duty until Daniels appointed an officer to replace him in charge of aviation.
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Chambers also ran into problems with his new commander, Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske. A reformer appointed Aide for Operations in February 1913, Fiske desperately wanted to become the first Chief of Naval Operations, an office everyone expected Congress would soon create. In 1911, Fiske had stunned the General Board by suggesting that torpedo-armed airplanes could defend the Philippines. When he returned to Washington two years later after a tour at sea, Fiske still understood neither the complexities of aviation technology nor the intricacies of interbureau politics as they related to aviation matters. Fancying himself a master of new technology, he wrested control of the Navy's aviation program. A visionary, Fiske understood neither the “problems of builders or pilots.” He routinely clashed with the pragmatic Chambers, who insisted that unless critical technical problems were solved, all of
Fiske's ideas would come to naught. Fiske quickly tired of these debates and maneuvered to replace Chambers with a more amenable officer.
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Internal resistance to aviation was such that Chambers spent most of 1913 working to overcome it, emphasizing struggles inside the Navy over lobbying Congress for more money or even saving his own career. In June, shortly after Chambers received a gold medal from the National Aeronautical Society for his pioneering work and aviation advocacy, the Navy announced his retirement for lack of sea service as a Captain. Chambers, in fact, had belatedly applied for sea duty, but Fiske interceded with Daniels and prevented his reassignment to a battleship command. It is also likely that Chambers' insistence that a qualified officer first relieve him in command of naval aviation had irked Daniels. While Fiske searched for an officer willing to risk his career by succeeding Chambers, Chambers launched a last desperate effort to overcome the combination of political and administrative neglect and bureaucratic competition that slowed aviation progress, focusing his efforts on improving safety, funding a national aeronautic research lab, and expanding the naval air service.

Newly appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt—probably at Admiral Dewey's suggestion—facilitated Chambers' campaign by appointing him to chair a special aeronautics board (usually called the Chambers Board) on 7 October 1913. Chambers added Towers to the board, the Marine Corps sent Cunningham, and each of the bureaus sent a representative. Richardson represented Construction and Repair; Commander Carlo B. Brittain represented Navigation; Commander Samuel S. Robison represented Engineering; and Lieutenant Manly H. Simons represented Ordnance. The board met in mid-November for twelve days and afterward issued a unanimous report that charted the future of naval aviation. Its recommendations totaled $1,297,700 and included purchasing fifty airplanes and three dirigibles and assigning a ship to serve as a mobile aviation base, as Britain and France had. While Fiske had lobbied to create a separate aviation bureau, the existing bureaus strongly opposed this, and the Chambers Board simply recommended an Office of Naval Aeronautics, directed by a Captain and a small staff that included representatives from the Marine Corps and the four bureaus involved in aviation. Similarly, they refused to choose sides in what had become a fractious dispute and recommended funding aeronautic research at both the Navy's model basin and the Smithsonian.
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