AVIATION: The Embattled Farmers

“Grumman planes saved Guadalcanal” —Navy Secretary Forrestal.

The Hellcat is a tough, round-bellied fighter plane that looks like two beer barrels, end to end. The U.S. Navy calls it the greatest sea fighter in the world. The Japs respect it above all other planes. Wherever the Hellcats have roved in the skies above the Pacific, they have conquered. At Guam, Ensign W. B. (“Spider”) Webb nosed his Hellcat into a cluster of Jap dive bombers, joined them in their landing circle, leisurely shot down six. In the first attack on the Bonin Islands in June, Lieut. L. G. (“Barney”) Barnard shot down two Jap planes in 25 seconds, sent three more spinning out of the air within 25 minutes.

The Navy tirelessly trumpets the Hellcat record. In the first five months of this year, Navy pilots officially blasted out of the air 444 Jap planes, destroyed another 323 on the ground. The Navy lost only 71 planes, mainly because Hellcats, when they are seemingly held together only by will power, limp home to their carriers somehow. In the battle of the Marianas, which Navy flyers scoffingly call the “turkey shoot,” Hellcats shot down 360 Jap planes in one day, the greatest aerial bag of the war. In this combat, the Navy lost only 22 planes.

Down U-Boats. The Japs also respect a smaller brother of the Hellcat, the Wildcat fighter, and a halfbrother, the Avenger, a torpedo bomber. The Germans learned to respect them also in the once nip-&-tuck Battle of the Atlantic. With a “now-it-can-be-told” flourish, the Navy has let out the news that the most potent weapon of all against the U-boats were Wildcats, flying from baby flattops, and rocket-firing Avengers. In one six-month period, these planes sent 31 U-boats to the bottom, more than half of the entire total sunk by the Navy in that time.

But the most remarkable box score of all is still being totted up. It is the record of one Navy squadron, some of the “fair-haired bastards of Dr. Chung.”*

The squadron promised Dr. Chung 200 Jap planes by next Christmas, but by June it had bagged only ten. Then, during the battle of Saipan, the squadron shot down 177 Jap planes within two weeks without a loss. Joyfully, squadron leader, Commander William A. Dean Jr., wired Dr. Chung: “TOJO SAY ROY GRUMMAN PUBLIC

ENEMY NO. I. SCORE 187 TO O NOT GOOD FOR HONORABLE SONS.”

To which Leroy Randle Grumman, the man who makes Hellcats, Avengers, Wildcats and has more cats upcoming, wired back: “GRUMMAN MEN & WOMEN SAY BILL DEAN GRUMMAN COMPANY’S NO. I WORST CUSTOMER. SCORE 187 TO 0 NOT GOOD FOR THEIR BUSINESS.” Bill Dean’s squadron has now run its box score up to 223 Jap planes, has lost two.

Planemaker “Roy” Grumman (rhymes with summon) modestly insists that the high scores are due to superb Navy tactics and skill. The Navy thinks differently. Navy brass hats long ago ran out of glowing phrases (say they: “Roy Grumman is the hottest thing in aviation today”) and E flags for Grumman. Last week, as a new token of their esteem, the Navy was reportedly seeking permission to give him a medal, the Meritorious Civilian Service award, something no U.S. manufacturer has yet received. The medal was as much for Grumman’s amazing production record as for his superb planes.

Hellcat’s Father. The father of the Hellcats is a medium-sized, 49-year-old man. He has a pink face, seamed with hundreds of tiny wrinkles, sharp, bright blue eyes, sandy red hair and the twanging voice of a New England storekeeper. He is stoop-shouldered and extraordinarily shy, moves about as if he hopes no one will notice him. A Navy flyer, meeting him for the first time, said: “You don’t look like the guy who builds Hellcats.” Roy Grum man looks more like the suburban fellow who lives next door.

The Grumman home is a white-shingled, blue-shuttered, 17-room house in Plandome, L.I., overlooking Long Island Sound. There Roy Grumman lives with his wife, Rose Marion, and his four children: Marion, 22, whose Army captain husband is stationed in England; Florence, 20, called “Flicker”; Grace, 18; and David, 9, who is known as “Butch” by his own request.

Because Grumman plants, 17 miles away at Bethpage, have sucked in all available labor, Roy Grumman sometimes cuts the grass on his three acres himself. At 8:30 a.m. on workdays he drives his Lincoln Continental to Bethpage, returns about 6:30 p.m. He spends his evenings reading, drops in on neighbors with his wife, or plays bridge — with men if possible. He thinks women “talk too much.”

Although he lives only 20 miles from Manhattan, Roy Grumman rarely goes to town. He dislikes big cities. He was born in a small town, Huntington, L.I. (pop. 6,000), where his father had a carriage shop, some ten miles from the present Grumman plant. Roy has seldom got far away. Four years at Cornell (he worked his way through) and three years in the Navy as a World War I seaman and pilot — he was a lieutenant (j.g.) when discharged — failed to loosen his Long Island roots. He has a small-towner’s taste in clothes, usually wears blue-striped shirts and striped ties. He is particular only about his shoes, which must have thick, crepe-rubber soles (he bought ten pairs just before World War II began). These bulky sneakers are easy on his feet as he shambles over the acres of plant floors.

Shirt Sleeves. There is nothing of the big business tycoon about Roy Grumman in his office. As soon as he gets there, he takes off his coat. Then he props his feet on the desk or an open drawer, puts a pipe or cigar in his mouth, and is ready to make all the Hellcats the Navy needs.

His office is small, with brown linoleum on the floor. Small as the office is, President Grumman shares it with a balding onetime professional basketball player named Leon A. (“Jake”) Swirbul, 45, Grumman’s executive vice president and production boss. Like Grumman, Jake Swirbul grew up in a small town (Sag Harbor, L.I. — pop. 2,517), also attended Cornell, but left to enlist in the Marines in World War I. Swirbul is big, hard-muscled and walks with the quick steps of a prizefighter. He is talkative, exact (Grumman is vague), with a passion for planning production to the last thousandth of an inch. These two temperamental opposites mesh into the smoothest team in the aircraft industry.

How the Team Plays. Roy & Jake have a big job on their hands. The Bethpage plant sprawls over 200 acres employs 21,000 workers. Its five red brick buildings turn out more combat planes than any other single plant in the U.S.

Roy & Jake work in an offhand manner that once shocked but now delights the Navy. They scoff at the ordinary appurtenances of big business and like to call themselves “the embattled farmers.” Roy & Jake have one secretary in common, and she sits down the hall. They seldom dictate letters; when Roy decides that a letter must be written, he painstakingly writes it out in longhand, sometimes puts in a whole day on a draft.

In the gregarious Grumman atmosphere workers constantly walk in, to buttonhole Roy or Jake directly, arguing, complaining, or whatever. Says Swirbul: “They don’t have to talk to a lot of monkeys along the line.” When the office becomes too cluttered with workers, Jake moves into an office next door, where he and Roy also have desks side by side, and 160 model planes dangle from the ceiling.

Whenever a question arises over the design or size of almost any plane in the world, Roy clambers on a desk, finds the model.

The Eraser Plane. Grumman designs his planes in the same informal manner Once he was trying to crack the tough problem of designing a plane whose wings could be folded back, making it possible to pack more on an aircraft carrier. With his feet cocked on his desk, he picked up a square gum eraser and a handful of paper lips and went to work. He stuck the clips m the eraser, worked them back & forth until he had the solution. He believes you can “see things that way you can’t on a blueprint.” Hellcat wings now fold back as neatly as a bird’s.

For similar reasons, he still flies himself. He says: “When you’re alone 5000 feet in the air, lots of things about a plane become important that you can overlook on the ground.” The details of design are left to young William T. (“Bill”) Schwendler, 40, who bosses the company’s 500 engineers. Bill Schwendler sits down with Roy & Jake when a new design is gestating, and they 11 mull it over. He has a sixth sense as to what Roy wants. Thus, to get a prototype of the newest Grumman plane, Roy simply wrote out a memo describing what he wanted, and sent it over to Bill Schwendler.

Despite this offhand management Grumman is adept at finding his way through the jungles of governmental red tape. What he cannot cut, he blandly ignores. When the Army tried to get rumman to camouflage his plants, he objected, said it was unnecessary and would interfere with production. When the Army insisted, Grumman said: “From the-air, we find the plant by flying over to Mitchel Field and taking our directions from the runways there. Maybe you ought to camouflage them first.” The Army quit bothering him. The Navy lets Grumman do things much as he wants, sure they will be all right. Said Vice Admiral John McCain : “The name Grumman on a plane or a part is like sterling on silver.”

Catapult Up. While Roy was in the Navy in World War I, he had been sent to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for training in aeronautics. When he was discharged, he was expert enough to get the job of general manager of the Loening Aeronautical Engineering Corp. at $4,200 a year. In 1929, the flurry of plane company mergers made Grumman’s job a poor one. Jake Swirbul, who was works manager at Loening, and Bill Schwendler, just getting started as a designer, were in the same boat. The trio decided to start their own company to repair planes. Grumman plunked $16,875 into the new company, Swirbul $8,125, and Schwendler $3,000.

Thanks to the recklessness of sportsmen pilots, the Grumman plane repair shop did a brisk business even in 1930. The partners bought one plane which had dived into a lake until only its tail was visible, for $450. They fixed it up and sold it for $20,000. They also made aluminum trailers, and finally landed their first Navy contract for two amphibian floats at $33,700.

When Grumman built these floats, in an unconventional design, the Navy said they were too light, would collapse. Roy & Jake staked their lives on their design. They climbed into a Navy plane behind a Navy pilot, were catapulted successfully from a battleship. The Navy ordered six more floats, and then gave Grumman a contract for an experimental fighting plane. This turned out to be the first Navy fighter in the world with retractable landing wheels, and it dazzled the Navy with a speed of 206 m.p.h. Grumman landed its first big Navy order for 27 fighters, worth $641,250.

Carriage Trade. But Grumman could not live on Navy orders alone. He began to build de luxe amphibians for sportsmen and corporations to hustle bigwigs around the country.* By 1937, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. had so much business on the books it almost went broke. The company had run out of working capital, and owed the banks $450,000 (mainly because it had lost $100,000 on an amphibian-plane contract). To raise cash, Grumman got ready to float his first public stock issue. Then the market crashed. Wall Street’s famed Bernard E. (“Sell ’em Ben”) Smith, who was trying to buy an amphibian, saved the company by helping underwrite the stock issue.

By 1939, Grumman had 700 employes, did a business of $4,400,000. When the war came, Grumman, like most other plane companies, exploded rather than expanded.

That explosion virtually swept all possible Grumman competitors into the background. The reasons were simple. While other planemakers argued with the Navy over design changes, Grumman went to Big Bill Knudsen, then froze Grumman designs. Instead of waiting for new plants to be ready, Grumman spread-eagled work in garages, a shooting gallery, almost any available space around Bethpage, even assembled planes under tents. As a result, Grumman proved he could get out planes when the Navy had to have them.

Hellcat Birth. Shortly after World War II began, Grumman heard that the Wildcats, which were in production, were having trouble with Jap Zeros. So Swirbul hopped to Pearl Harbor, buttonholed Navy flyers (“just calling on the trade,” says Grumman), listed their complaints. Back at Bethpage, he cocked his feet on the desk, read them to Grumman.

The first Hellcat was built in August 1942. Five months later, the production line began to tick them off. This was unheard-of speed in an industry which used to need years to translate blueprints into planes. When a Navy brass hat dropped in to tell Grumman that he should expand to take care of Hellcat production, Swirbul pulled a mess of blue prints from his desk, said: “We are.” When the officer said he would rush priorities for steel, Swirbul said: “I’ve got steel.” And he had it, from Manhattan’s razed Second Avenue elevated railway. But Grumman was still crowded for space. Wildcat and Avenger production was moved into General Motors’ Eastern air craft division at Linden, N.J. The pattern which, in effect, made Grumman main purveyor to the Navy had been set. Now all the fighters and torpedo planes on most Navy carriers are Grumman-designed planes. This, more than words, shows what the Navy thinks of Grumman.

Turkeys for All. Despite its informality, the Grumman policy towards its workers is hardheaded realism. Everything is planned with one idea: will it help production?

Some 30,000 cheap, hot meals are served every day in the air-conditioned plant (none of the executive offices are air-conditioned). There are nurseries for the children of women workers, libraries with the book shelves economically made from old packing cases, an employes’ orchestra to play for dancing during the lunch hour, volley ball, handball and base ball games. To the parents of new babies go record books, blue for boys, pink for girls. On Christmas, turkeys are sent free to everyone. This year, to make sure of getting them, Grumman bought the eggs and is now in the turkey business.

But the biggest thing in the Grumman policy of realism is the incentive wage plan. Started a year ago, it was the first in the aircraft industry. It is also probably the simplest. Time studies of individual operations are eliminated. The incentive pay bonus is paid, not on individual operations, but on the output of the entire plant. Thus on half of all poundage over a fixed rate (.48 pound per worker per hour) everyone in the company, from janitors up to executives mating $8,000 a year, is paid a bonus every three months. Bonus for the last year: 25% of wages.

No Problems. All of this, from turkeys to bonuses, is simply the Grumman way of getting the greatest production in the shortest time. As a result, neither absentee ism nor lack of manpower, the plagues of other war plants, have been a Grumman problem. Turnover, for all causes, including the draft, has been a small 2.3% so far this year, about half of the aircraft industry’s average. Swirbul is fond of saying: “We’re cold-blooded about all this, simply go out in the plant and tell the boys: you work a little harder and the company will make more money. If it does, then we’ll give you more money.”

For these reasons, coupled with the fact that Grumman workers are the fourth highest paid in the U.S. aircraft industry, and are ruggedly individualistic Long Island clamdiggers, chicken farmers, etc., no union is making any serious attempt to organize Grumman. The company has never had a strike or a slowdown. It has handled the explosive race problem just as smoothly, now has some 600 Negroes in all types of jobs. Worker morale is so good that Grumman can always strain production in emergencies. When the Navy lost an unexpected number of planes on Guadalcanal, Swirbul rallied the workers on a weekend, to make up the deficit. Although production then was only three planes a day, they uncrated parts already packed for shipping and sweated out 23 planes in 24 hours.

The Payoff. Grumman is certain that his realism pays. The company has made money and paid dividends every year since it started. From its first year’s sales if $110,000, the total swelled to $278,500,000 last year. On this, the company netted $6,598,200 after contract redetermination, including a postwar refund of “1,955,000. This year the company has turned out an estimated $156,000,000 in planes, including its new twin-engined fighter, the Tigercat, in the first six months. After renegotiation and taxes, Grumman expects to net a little more than last year. Roy Grumman, who owns 14% of the stock, collects a $65,000 salary, gets an-other $100,000 from the stock dividends ($1.50 a share). Swirbul is paid $60,000, collects $47,250 from his 6% stock interest.

The Navy is equally sure that Grumman’s realism pays. Production per pound per man is the highest of any Navy plane contractor (in June it was 60% above the average for the entire aircraft industry). And the price of Grumman planes, less motors and other Government-furnished equipment, has come down to an estimated $33,500, about a third under the contract price (the company gets one-fifth of the saving, the Navy the rest).

Up Schedules. At war’s end, if all U.S. plane contracts are canceled at one swoop, Grumman will have no choice but to “shut the doors” until he can find a market. But this contingency is remote. Grumman, with no cutbacks in the offing, this week goes back on a six-day week because of slightly increased schedules. And the shock of the end of the European war may be cushioned. The Navy may shift the bulk of plane contracts back to the old-line planemakers so that the automakers, et al., can get back to peacetime products.

Postwar Grumman has a large place in the Navy’s plans. Only a month ago the Navy finished building a $4,000,000 engineering and experimental building at Bethpage, bringing their investment at Grumman to $29,000,000.

In the acres of floor space in the new red brick buildings, Bill Schwendler’s engineers are already poring over drawing boards on new Navy projects, including plans for a revolutionary type of fighter. The Navy has piled on enough contracts to keep the staff busy for two years. The Navy does not know what kind of planes it will need in five years, nor how many it can then afford. But if the Navy can afford to keep only one plane company in business, that company will be Grumman.

* Dr. Margaret (“Mom”) Chung is a famed San Francisco doctor. In 1931, seven flyers, turned down by the Navy, asked her help to get them into the Chinese air force, and formed the “Flying Sons of Mom Chung.” When unmarried Dr. Chung pointed out that this made them all illegitimate, they changed the organization’s name to the “Fair-haired Bastards of Dr. Chung.” Among Allied pilots, there are now 659 such bastards.

* Among famed amphibian owners were : Lord Beaverbrook, who had two ; the Chicago Tribune’s Colonel Robert McCormick, who brought his plane in for repair, smashed it so badly on landing he had to buy a new one; Motorboat Racer Gar Wood.