ARMY & NAVY: Daddy’s Day

Thirty years ago a young War Department clerk named John Mullaney signed an order for a flying machine built by two brothers Wright, Orville and Wilbur, out in Dayton, Ohio. The contraption was specified to go 40 m.p.h. with a 25-h.p., four-cylinder engine.* This Wright machine was not only the first plane bought by the U S.: it was the winged germ of the world’s first military flying force. At 54 Clerk Mullaney is still on the job and so is the force for which he bought Wright’s ship. In celebrating August 2 as its 30th birthday, the U. S. Army Air Corps last week could boast, not only that it is now in process of becoming the equal of any nation’s, but that it is already the daddy of them all.

The house where the Brothers Wright lived and worked no longer stands in Dayton. Henry Ford carted it away for his collection of Americana at Dearborn, Mich. But on Dayton’s northern outskirts lies a long, lusciously green field named Wright, shaped like an arrowhead, flanked by a long row of hangars and shops and a broad cluster of brick laboratory buildings. This is the heart and brain of the Air Corps, the home base of its Matériel Division, where every item of equipment used, from a gauge needle to a 15-ton bomber, is examined and tested before purchase; where its advance thinking and performance (blind flight, stratosphere, automatic control, radio research) are done; where its medical studies are pursued. Here come all bids for the $337,000,000 expansion program voted in April and June by Congress, which is to bring the Air Corps up to 5,500 first-line planes by 1941. And here, last week on the Air Corps’s birthday, was held the chief party in a celebration that spanned the nation.

That morning some 1,500 planes were taxied to the take-off lines at all the Corps’s major fields—Virginia’s Langley, Long Island’s Mitchel, Michigan’s Selfridge,* Louisiana’s Barksdale, Alabama’s Maxwell, Texas’ Randolph, Kelly, Brooks and Duncan, Illinois’s Chanute and Scott, Colorado’s Lowry, Washington’s Fort Lewis, California’s March and Hamilton. At a radio signal from President Roosevelt in the White House, the planes at all these fields roared forward, swept aloft, joined each other in droning, hammering formations, swung in wide arcs over many cities to show U. S. civilians and taxpayers what their nation’s wings look like and how they can fly. The length of the Pacific Coast, civilians were organized into a “listening network” to detect the approach of “enemy” planes which defenders from March and Hamilton fields flew up to “intercept.”

General Henry H. Arnold, chief of the Corps, officiated at a luncheon for oldtime pilots, the air industry and the press in the administration building at Wright Field. He pinned Distinguished Flying Crosses on four officers,† after General George H. Brett, chief of the Matériel Division, had introduced distinguished guests. Among the latter, the men who must build-their nation’s wings up to world war strength in two years eyed particularly a chunky Congressman from Akron, Chairman Dow Harter of the aviation subgroup of the House Military Affairs Committee. For he was trying to help get the expansion program through on time, and to spread its work and profits.

Records. Attachés from Germany and Italy sat among the foreign contingent directly in front of Chief Arnold as he dwelt upon the six new records casually set by the Corps during the week just past. For them he emphasized the fact that these marks had been made without recourse to “suped up” engines, synthetic fuels or “five-hour engines” (such as Nazis and Fascists use). Flying all one afternoon and night, the big four-motored Boeing “superfortress” (XB-15) carried a two-ton payload 3,107 miles averaging 166.32 m.p.h. No record existed for this weight and distance; the Corps just set it up to shoot at, expecting to break it as soon as the superfortress (150 ft. wingspread) is equipped with bigger engines. Two days prior, the same ship climbed to 8,200 feet with a 15½-ton payload (world’s record). Smaller Boeing “fortresses” (YB-17s, 105 ft. wingspread), carrying five-ton loads, established new altitude (23,800 feet) and speed (205 m.p.h.) records for a 621-mile course. Another “fortress” climbed to 33,400 feet carrying five tons (world’s record). In time for the party at Wright Field, a brand new Boeing B-17B, first of 26 supercharged versions of the present “fortress” about to be delivered, hurtled from Burbank, Calif, to Floyd Bennett Field, N. Y. (2,450 miles) in 9 hr. 14 min. 30 sec., at average speed of 259.398 m.p.h., only two hours slower than the transcontinental record made by Howard Hughes in a racing plane. Finally, a Grumman amphibian flew 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) at 186.094 m.p.h., bettering Italy’s world record of 159.8 m.p.h.

“Love & Kisses.” These record flights, and the whole birthday program, were a masterful stroke of publicity for the Corps. Ably assisting in the stroke was Lauren (“Deac”) Lyman, oldtime New York Times air correspondent who now works for United Aircraft, good friend of Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Newsmen still found lacking, however, publicity for one phase of Air Corps activity more dramatic than any other. Lest it seem too warlike, the Corps is not allowed by the War Department to publicize the extreme accuracy which its bombers have attained. They now can guarantee to smack their targets as precisely from 28,000 feet as they do from 8,000. With their proven flight range, they constitute a first-line of defense against enemy war-boats far at sea off either coast from bases far inland. Yet the same go-easy policy prevails as when the “flying fortress” squadron (2nd Bombardment Group) which circled South America last year was ordered to erase its motto, Mors et Destructio (“Death and Destruction”), from its coat-of-arms. The bomber boys wonder if the higher-ups would like them to adopt the motto “Love and Kisses.”

Andrews Up. The Air Corps felt as flattered as the man last week when Major General Frank Maxwell Andrews, for four years chief of G. H. Q. Air Force, was named Assistant Chief of Staff of the whole Army, in charge of Operations & Training, first flying general ever attached to the General Staff.

*It went 42-47 m.p.h. and Wright Bros, got a $5,000 bonus on their $25,000 order.

*Named for Thomas E. Selfridge, first Air Corps officer killed (in an early Wright), West Point classmate (1903) of Columnist-General Hugh S. Johnson.

†On Major Carl F. Greene & Captain Alfred H. Johnson for pioneering the stratosphere in pressurized planes “with utter disregard for personal safety”; on Captains George V. Holloman & Carl J. Crane for automatic instrument landings under like hazard.