[173] For the NACA, World War II began in 193 7 with the discovery of the aeronautical research being conducted in Germany. The Committee then realized that it had fallen behind in aeronautical development and that the danger for the United States was increasing as war approached. By the time Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the NACA was on a self imposed war footing. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war merely formalized what the NACA had been doing for several years.
The NACA's most important preparation for the impending war was its construction of two new research laboratories. These projects consumed vast amounts of time and material, distracted and in some cases ' completely occupied key members of the staffs at both headquarters and the Langley laboratory, and led to 'a radical change in the way the NACA operated. Recruitment of new staff became more difficult as young men who might otherwise have been attracted to the NACA were considering, or being considered for, military service. Introduction of industry representatives into NACA committees and subcommittees - precipitated by the enlistment of George Mead and others needed to plan the new engine-research facilities - altered the very composition of the agency. It was hard to tell if the changed order of things was due more to the scale of operations the NACA was undertaking, the infusion of new blood, or the sense of urgency that accompanied the approaching war.
Establishment of the new Ames Aeronautical Laboratory (AAL) at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, California, went as smoothly as could be expected, thanks largely to the cool Competence of Smith J. DeFrance, the first and only director the laboratory was to have while it belonged to the NACA. After interrupting his college career to fly in World War I, first for Canada and then for the United States, DeFrance completed [174] his training in aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan in 1922 and joined the Langley staff the same, year. During the 1930s, he worked on the design and construction of research tunnels and test equipment at Langley and directed research, in four of the large tunnels there, thus becoming a natural choice to head the team that would build a new and better LMAL on the west coast. Even before the California laboratory was formally approved by Congress, DeFrance and his team were at work on the preferred site at Sunnyvale, making preparations to construct the laboratory they had designed at Langley.1
As soon as Congress approved the laboratory (in August 1939) the reality began to take shape. Construction of the flight-research building began the following February, the first of the service buildings two months later. In May, work began on all 16-foot high-speed tunnel, fastest of its size in the NACA, and on the first of two 7- by 10-foot workhorse tunnels. When DeFrance took over officially as engineer-in-charge in July 1940, construction was under way on a second 7- by 10-foot tunnel, and the first test piles were driven for a 40- by 80-foot full-scale tunnel, larger by a third than its predecessor at Langley. In October 1940 the first research began at Ames; by the time of Pearl [175] Harbor, the new laboratory had published its first technical report and begun wind-tunnel research.2
In contrast to this rapid progress at Sunnyvale, the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory (AERL) at Cleveland experienced delays and setbacks that upset the early construction schedule and interfered with the successful completion of the first researches. There were several reasons for this weaker start at Cleveland. Congressional approval for this laboratory came later than that for Ames and brought the project into greater competition with other war-related activities for increasingly scarce resources of men and materials. The NACA lacked the expertise to plan and execute such a facility and had to rely on outside experts unaccustomed to its methods. The logical man from the Langley engine research staff to head the new laboratory proved unacceptable to George Mead and others and was bypassed in favor of Edward Ray Sharp, who was recalled from Ames in 1941. A self-made man without benefit of a college degree, Sharp had joined the Langley laboratory in 1922 as an airplane rigger. Three years later he was administrative officer of the laboratory, a post he held until 1940 when he was sent to administer the building program at Sunnyvale. He was chosen for the Cleveland job because of his common sense and administrative ability, but he lacked the technical expertise that Smith DeFrance could call upon in establishing the Ames laboratory.3
When Sharp took over the Langley team working on the Cleveland laboratory in August 1941, more than a year after Congress approved funds for the project, not a single building had been completed. Caught up in the outbreak of war, the project soon fell even further behind. Drastic measures were required to get it back on schedule. The Langley team drafting plans for the laboratory was transferred to temporary quarters in Cleveland. Experts from the aircraft engine industry were brought in as consultants. Permission was sought and received to let new contracts for the laboratory on a cost-plus-fixed-fee basis rather than the lump-sum basis previously used. Pressure was put on contractors to meet their deadlines, and the Committee threatened them and their bonding companies with penalties if they failed to comply. The Army-Navy Munitions Board assigned the highest possible priority rating to the project, as did the Aircraft Division of the War Production Board, facilitating the purchase of critical supplies. And Congress granted additional funds to meet the escalating expenses incurred by these actions and by upward revision of the original estimates of what the laboratory should comprise and how much that would Cost.4
Because of these actions, the laboratory was able to begin research in June 1942 and formally opened in April 1943, nine months ahead of the originally predicted completion date. But the cost was more than twice the original estimate, and the results were not as sterling as many...
....had hoped. In September 1943 an informed army source reported that "the Army is very much discouraged by the lack of results at AERL," contrasting this with the "excellent results put out by AAL.5 In general he felt that AERL was not providing timely information, not providing the right information, and apparently not working quickly enough. No doubt many shortcomings could be attributed to the circumstances of the laboratory's planning and construction, but for whatever reason, the laboratory had gotten off on the wrong foot with the NACA's most important customer.
The beleaguered staff at Cleveland might have been comforted to know it was not alone: the Washington office was caught up in its own prewar scuffle for facilities and in many ways fared worse. In 1940 Victory asked for more space in the Navy Building, where the NACA had been housed since 1920, because, he said, "It is of vital importance that our activity remain ....in immediate proximity to the air organizations of the Army and Navy." In reply, the navy shunted the Committee's offices to the eighth-wing penthouse, letting it be known that "if Mr. Victory does much kicking about this space assignment he may find himself kicked out of the Navy Building." Apparently Victory did kick - as was his wont - and the following year the navy pressured [177] the Bureau of Aeronautics to remove the Committee entirely. Victory reported to Ames that the office controlling government space in the capital had offered the NACA its choice of "a negro public school, a small apartment house in southwest, or a garage." The Committee settled instead on renting the Leiter mansion in an exclusive section of Washington, with the understanding that after the war it would return to quarters near the military services.6
The competition for adequate quarters and facilities was merely the most irritating of the NACA's activities in the two years before Pearl Harbor. After President Roosevelt's approval of the mobilization plan, the NACA had gone on a war footing. Although the plan formally placed the NACA under the joint Army-Navy Aeronautical Board in the event of national emergency, it did not really change the way the Committee did its business, The services gained a power over the NACA that they never had to invoke, for the Committee voluntarily did everything it could to meet the requests of the services and to defer its own programs in the interest of national security. Requests from the services received priority over other investigations. When the military asked the Committee's advice on a technical question, as it did in December 1940 on continuing the development of a Pratt and Whitney liquid-cooled engine, the NACA followed streamlined procedures for returning authoritative recommendations at the earliest possible moment. All this was a change in degree, but not in kind, from the service that the NACA had for years provided to the military.7
The problem of advice was tied inextricably to the problem of coordination, an issue that grew more complicated as government agencies multiplied in preparation for war. Two important tasks of coordination fell to key Committee members. Vannevar Bush resigned as chairman of the NACA to head the National Defense Research Committee (later expanded into the Office of Scientific Research and Development) but he retained his NACA membership and supervised coordination between the two agencies. The National Defense Research Committee was modeled on the NACA, and aeronautics was specifically excluded from its jurisdiction in deference to the NACA.8
The other key coordination job was performed by George J. Mead, vice chairman d the NACA, who in 1940 became director of the Airplane and Engine Division of the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense (known as the National Defense Advisory Commission [NDAC], not to be confused with Bush's NDRC). Though Mead held the post for less than a year before resigning to devote his full efforts to NACA work, in that short time he helped set up the machinery with which the United States responded to President Roosevelt's dramatic call for 50,000 aircraft a year, established lines of communication between the NACA and the National Defense Advisory [178] Commission, and imposed upon the emerging system of cooperation his own strong views on the NACA's proper role in the war. Mead believed wholeheartedly that, as in World War I, the "proper function" of' the NACA was to serve "as an unbiased technical adviser to any branch of the government on aeronautical matters." Both Vannevar Bush and Jerome Hunsaker agreed, ensuring acceptance of this policy throughout the war.9
Experience was to prove that formal arrangements for cooperation were not as important as the commitment to cooperation; although the structure of interagency committees and commissions changed with dizzying frequency, the NACA provided advice and services to all who needed them. Much the same was true of coordination of research. The NACA office of coordinator of research, established early in 1940 to integrate aeronautical research activities in the country, survived the outbreak of war by only two months, though its function continued for the duration. S. Paul Johnston resigned as coordinator in February 1942 to take a post with the National Defense Advisory Commission, partly because he had accomplished his initial task of gathering information on America's aeronautical research activities, partly because various NACA subcommittees could handle the letting of research contracts to educational institutions, partly because industry showed some resistance to the NACA's dictating all research programs throughout the country, and partly because Johnston's post had always encroached upon the prerogatives and territory of George Lewis. To fill Johnston's place, the NACA appointed an "assistant for coordination" to the director of aeronautical research, who continued (with less power and less visibility but equal effectiveness) to keep tabs on American aeronautical research and suggest to the NACA how duplication might be avoided and gaps in research filled.10 As war approached in 1941 and Hunsaker took over from Bush the chairmanship of the NACA, his main concern was how completely the Committee would have to abandon fundamental research in favor of applied research for the services. In late 1940, George Lewis had told Hunsaker that about 50 percent of the Committee's fundamental research had already been displaced by pressing problems of military research. A year later, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the Committee reported to Congress that 71 percent of its work was on specific military projects. The NACA faced the real possibility of losing its identity in the war, but even Hunsaker was powerless to change things much."11
"Never was life more interesting," wrote John Victory in 1944. "Never have I been so busy. I take a keen delight in getting work done [179] and we are rendering service of truly great value to the war program." He had detected in himself' the "symptoms of a breakdown," but considered a vacation "just out of the question" for the "volume of the work and even its urgency continue to increase."12 Though Victory was wont to take himself too seriously, his comments reflect the pace and intensity of NACA activities during World War II, not only in the Washington headquarters but in the laboratories as well. In fact, the pace was even more hectic at the laboratories, for lack of gas rations kept Victory at home evenings and Sundays, while many of the facilities at the laboratories were running on two and even three shifts.
The NACA's work procedure during World War II was generally the same as it had been through the previous quarter century. Suggestions for research projects came into the headquarters from the military services, industry, the technical committees and subcommittees, and the laboratories. These were either referred to a technical committee for evaluation or (especially in the case of requests from the services) approved outright in George Lewis's office. The research was assigned to a laboratory, which in turn scheduled it for one of the wind tunnels or other test facilities, depending on its priority. As the work progressed, preliminary reports were prepared and referred where appropriate to the sponsoring or interested agency or party. When the entire investigation was completed, a final formal report was prepared and published and the research authorization was closedout.13
World War II changed some details of this procedure without altering the general sequence of events. For example, most of the Committee's war work was cleanup and testing of prototype models of military aircraft; before the war, the NACA had devoted little time to such engineering testing, for which the services themselves had been principally responsible. As an arm of the military services for the duration of the war, the NACA could not refuse such requests, though in practice it had seldom turned down military projects in the peacetime years.14
The NACA's two principal technical publications before the war had been the Technical Report (containing major research conclusions, usually at the end of an investigation) and the Technical Note (containing interim and less important results). Both were generally unclassified and widely distributed, though some Technical Notes had only limited distribution if they contained proprietary information or results considered so advantageous to the United States that they should not yet be shared with other nations. During World War II, the TR and TN series were virtually suspended; they were replaced by a series of wartime reports, all classified and with limited distribution, usually within the military services and among industry contractors having a need to know. This change in policy meant that during the war the....
[181] ....NACA issued a greatly increased volume of' reports to a greatly reduced audience, concentrating more on interim reports of research in progress than on conclusive reports when all the results were in - a luxury that neither the NACA nor its customers could afford in the frantic rush to get new and better aircraft from prototype to construction to operations. How far the NACA was forced to stray from its peacetime ideal was revealed by John Victory in 1943, responding to a request for information about what the NACA was doing:
Similar changes infected the meetings of the technical committees and subcommittees. Meetings retained the same format and the same purposes, but they were held more frequently and attended by far more industry representatives than in previous times. The presence of industry representatives posed two problems, but these quickly evaporated. First, government representatives expressed some concern about the discussion of classified information in the presence of such individuals, but the services readily conceded the necessity for doing at the NACA what they were doing elsewhere in Washington, as civilians and consultants Joined the war effort in unprecedented numbers; no instance of compromised information seems to have resulted. The related question of how to deal with proprietary information had arisen early but, in the pace of wartime activities, the normal dangers of industrial espionage disappeared. All the manufacturers had more work than they could handle, and the war seems to have instilled in all a sincere desire to produce the best planes for the military services, regardless of where the ideas came from or where they were applied. Surely the varying firms still competed for government contracts and took institutional pride in turning out the best planes, but none of this was allowed to interfere with the flow of information to the place where it was needed.16
The overall committee structure of the NACA was remarkably stable during the war. Most of the changes were creations of technical subcommittees to address specific problems, such as metals for turbo-supercharger wheels and buckets, welding problems, heat exchangers, vibration, and dual rotation of propellers. None of these survived the war, but several others that were created during the war went on to a [182] lengthy service, like those on icing problems and heat resisting materials.17
Only one new main technical committee was added during the war, but its history held portents of changing times for the NACA. Ed Warner, who had long argued that the NACA should have a Committee on Operating Problems, became the first chairman of this body when it was formed in 1942 to address problems encountered in wartime flying. After the war, Warner would be succeeded in this post by William Littlewood, vice president of American Airlines. Littlewood had been brought onto the Main Committee in 1944 to replace the invaluable George Mead, whose health was failing. Littlewood's appointment was significant in that he was the first appointee to the Main Committee from an active position in the aviation industry - and from a commercial airline at that, not from a manufacturer. With him the last NACA barriers to industry representation fell, and the shape of the postwar NACA became clearer.18
In 1939, instead of using the word conference to title the annual industry meeting, Victory called it the "Fourteenth Annual Inspection of the N.A.C.A. Laboratories." The military terminology reflected both the nature of the work engaging the Committee at that time and the sad fact that the NACA could no longer discuss its projects freely with industry representatives. After 1939 there were no annual laboratory meetings at all, the necessary exchange of information taking place instead in closer personal contacts between the NACA staff and industry representatives. Manufacturers brought their planes and their problems to the laboratories on an ad hoc basis; the NACA staff visited factories more often and worked more closely with problems of development and design. In 1943, for example, the Committee reported that the Langley laboratory had a daily average of 45 visiting industry representatives who stayed a few days or a few weeks, then took the latest NACA results back to their factories and drawing boards.19
This closer cooperation with industry was revealed most forcefully by the creation of the Western Coordination Office in 1940. Since much of the aircraft industry was located in California, much of the liaison work facing the NACA lay there. In 1940 Edwin P. Hartman, a mechanical engineer with ten years' experience in aeronautical engineering at LMAL, was appointed western coordinating officer for the NACA and given quarters in a temporary building from which construction of the Ames laboratory was being supervised. Hartman began making regular rounds of the aircraft manufacturers in and around California and sending trip reports to headquarters. These proved so valuable and so much in demand that Hartman's activities increased. By 1942 he was spending two-thirds of his time in the Los Angeles area, where most of the manufacturers were located. At that juncture, [183] the Committee won approval to open a Western Coordination Office in Santa Monica. Hartman occupied the office for the rest of' the NACA's lifetime and compiled in his regular reports a remarkable picture of the growth of the west coast aircraft-manufacturing industry.20
Throughout the war the NACA workload grew, faster than the available staff could handle. This generalization had always been true of the NACA, but in the past the limitation was money, a limit that Congress in its wisdom imposed upon the Committee. Now, in the crush of war, funds were available for virtually any good purpose, but no longer could the Committee muster the personnel or the facilities to make use of it. The NACA farmed out what research it could by contract, usually to universities, but this hardly dented the backlog.21
The greatest handicap was personnel. Many staff' members not subject to the draft left the Committee for higher paying jobs in industry, where they could do equally patriotic and productive Work. The NACA Overtime Act, approved 10 February 1942, alleviated this problem by making higher take-home salaries available to NACA personnel, but in December of the same year this special legislation was replaced by general government overtime regulations less generous than the NACA schedule had been. The drain of experienced personnel to industry remained a minor problem throughout the war, but a harbinger of more serious problems to come.22
The key NACA personnel problem during the war was military service. The mobilization plan of 1939 had declared that the NACA would be considered an "essential industry" in the event of' national emergency and that a deferment plan would be negotiated with the proper authorities. When war actually broke out, the "proper authorities" turned out to be the Bureau of Selective Service, which was far less understanding and sympathetic than the military services. Early in 1942, the army allowed NACA personnel holding reserve commissions to resign their commissions and thus avoid a call to active duty. The Selective Service, however, refused to make special arrangements for NACA personnel and instead put them under the standard replacement schedule for industrial establishments. This plan required the NACA to train replacements for experienced workers of draft-eligible age. While the Committee had no objection to this policy in the case of' unskilled or semiskilled workers, it balked at trying to train green recruits to do the aeronautical research that its leading young engineers had been working at for years. The Selective Service policy which remained in effect through 1942 and 1943, put a direct drain on key NACA personnel by making them eligible for call-up, and all indirect drain on the remaining staff by lowering morale and making the future uncertain.23
Late in 1943, despairing of any change in Selective Service policy, the Committee turned to the military services and worked out with [184] them a plan to circumvent the Selective Service. The "Army-Navy-NACA plan of I February 1944," approved by President Roosevelt on 10 February, provided that essential NACA personnel would be inducted into the armed services and then assigned to duty at the NACA laboratories where they had been working. Personnel from LMAL and AERL would receive enlisted reserve status in the Army Air Corps; those at headquarters and AAL would go to active duty in the navy. Within 9 months, 1646 NACA employees were serving under the plan, employees who might otherwise have been lost to the Committee. Another provision of the plan allowed the NACA to recruit new employees from Army enlisted personnel returning to the United States from overseas service. This relieved some of the shortages created by earlier policies and saw the NACA through the war. Though the compromises worked out on this difficult topic were never entirely satisfactory, they were better than those won by comparable agencies, and this special treatment reflected the NACA's rapport with the military services and the importance they attached to the continuation of the NACA's work.24
Shortages of facilities were more easily solved than those of personnel. The NACA set first priority on construction of its own new wind tunnels, and it fought hard to acquire the necessary materials. But when industry or universities sought to build tunnels that did not compete for, scarce resources of men and materiel with those of the NACA, the Committee generally approved. As of April 1943, Jerome Hunsaker was recommending that industry and universities be allowed to, even encouraged to, build new atmospheric tunnels of moderate size and speed, but no high-speed variable-density tunnels, which were already in sufficient supply within the NACA and the military services.25
Although the NACA had all it could do to keep up with the congestion of U.S. military and civilian agencies and offices that sprang up during the war to deal with different aspects of aeronautical research, it made a sincere effort to cooperate with the Allies as well. Unfortunately, the course of' the war in Europe made most of this cooperation impractical if not impossible. When the Germans overran France in 1940, John J. Ide was forced to close down the Paris office, rescue what confidential papers he could, and destroy the rest. Thereafter, Ide, an officer in the naval reserve, was called to active duty, and served out the war doing intelligence work in London. Some cooperation took place between the NACA and the aeronautical research institutions of the Soviet Union, but not on a scale to affect appreciably the NACA program.26
It was with the British that most international cooperation was carried on during the war. Some of this merely continued the cooperation....
......of prewar years, such as the exchange of publications and personnel between the NACA and the British Aeronautical Research Committee. Some came about through personal contacts, like the visits to England of Edward Warner in 1942 and Eastman Jacobs of LMAL in 1943. Some of the cooperation consisted of participation by the NACA staff and their British counterparts in activities of other agencies such as the joint Aircraft Committee of the Army-Navy-British Purchasing Commission, a child of the National Defense Advisory Commission created in 1940 to coordinate the needs and resources d the American and British programs. While these measures kept the Committee in close touch with British aeronautical research, none was sufficiently early or unrestricted to save the NACA from the most damaging failure of its history: the failure to develop jet propulsion before other nations.27
[186] The engine research policy of the NACA dated from 1916, when the Committee had played a pivotal role in reconciling differences between the armed services and the automobile-engine manufacturers then beginning to make aircraft engines. Because engine manufacture was viewed as a mature technology that required only adaptation to the field of aviation (i.e., development), the NACA decided early on to leave this research field to the industry, the services, and the National Bureau of Standards, which already had staff and facilities for engine research. Aerodynamics was the real infant technology in World War I; to this field the NACA devoted most of its resources: its wind tunnels and engineers. The one great American aeronautical achievement in World War I - development and production of the Liberty engine - seemed to confirm this judgment.28
This is not to say that the NACA did no engine research over the years. The Committee on Power Plants for Aircraft lasted the entire life of the NACA, the only technical committee with such a record. The NACA produced more reports in the field of power plants than in any other except aerodynamics (although most of them were actually prepared for the NACA by the National Bureau of Standards); half the Committee's reports in 1918 were on propulsion. After the war, however, propulsion research was overshadowed by aerodynamics. In all, the NACA produced four times as many reports in aerodynamics as it did in propulsion. When the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory was finally proposed in 1939, it was not so much to expand a capacity within the NACA as to close a gap that had been unperceived or unappreciated for years. As late as 1937, Joseph Ames had told the Bureau of the Budget that "for the immediate practical development of higher powered engines it is believed that no additional expenditures for scientific research by this Committee are required." But just two years later, the Special Survey Committee on Aeronautical Research Facilities reported "a serious lack of engine research facilities in the United States" creating an urgent need for a new laboratory. A BoB official inspecting construction at AERL in 1943 noted that "we are paying heavily for our lack of foresight."29
The Committee could well claim after the fact that its longstanding policy of neglecting engine research had the tacit approval of the military services and even the industry, for neither in meetings nor at the annual industry conferences was the NACA called upon to involve itself more deeply in engine research. But the NACA remained open to criticism for lack of foresight. After all, members and staff had claimed repeatedly over the years that "it is the responsibility of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics to anticipate and to meet the [187] research needs of aviation, civil and military, and to provide the Army, the Navy, and the industry with that constant flow of new knowledge that is essential to American leadership in aircraft performance."30 Such boasts left them subject to blame for the lag in American engine development and even more for the failure to develop jet propulsion.
The fundamentals of the technology are simple enough. All powered aircraft are propelled by reactive force. Air is pushed backward, forcing the plane forward. Aircraft in the 1930s created the backward push by capturing and accelerating an air mass with a propeller. At relatively low speeds, this is still the most efficient way to drive a plane.
At higher speeds, however, another method of propulsion becomes practical. Air heated in an engine at greater than atmospheric pressure and allowed to escape through a nozzle at the rear will expand greatly upon exit, leaving the nozzle at high velocity. The thrust of the gas in one direction pushes the aircraft in the opposite direction.
There are two kinds of reaction propulsion by hot gases. In rockets, the fuel and oxygen are both contained within the engine. No intake of air is required. In so-called jet engines, air gathered from the atmosphere is compressed, mixed with fuel, and burned. The simplest engine of this type is the ramjet, which uses its own forward speed to literally ram air into itself to high pressures. But this engine must get up to high speed before it can work. More practical is the gas-turbine engine, in which the air is drawn in, compressed, mixed with fuel and burned, passed through a turbine, and exhausted in a powerful jet of hot gases. The turbine converts some of this thermal energy into mechanical energy which turns the compressor at the front of the engine - and in a turboprop engine, turns a conventional propeller as well.31
All of this was known in theory long before a practical jet engine for aircraft was built, and the NACA had dallied with the technology several times in its first quarter century. George Lewis wrote to George de Bothezat in 1920, reminding him that, during Lewis' recent visit to McCook Field, a Major Hallett had asked de Bothezat to "give him a statement as to the possibility of jet propulsion engines being used on aircraft." Lewis enclosed a published description of a device invented by M. Melot, recently exhibited at the Paris air show, and a copy of Robert Goddard's classic paper, "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes." This familiarity with early rocket research shows that Lewis, new to his job at the NACA, was already informed on the latest developments in what was still a nascent technology. No distinction in terminology had yet been drawn between air-breathing and rocket versions of jet propulsion. Unfortunately for the Committee, any response by de Bothezat on this topic seems to have been lost in the [188] controversy and acrimony surrounding his departure from McCook Field later the same year.32
In 1923, at the behest of the Army Air Service, Edgar Buckingham of the National Bureau of Standards undertook an investigation of the feasibility of jet propulsion. He concluded, in a report published by the NACA, that "propulsion by the reaction of a simple jet can not compete, in any respect, with air screw propulsion at such flying speeds as are now in prospect," because at those speeds (about 250 miles per hour) "the jet would . . . take about four times as much fuel per thrust horsepower-hour as the air screw, and the power plant would be heavier and much more complicated."33 Though Buckingham was right about the impracticability of jet propulsion at low speeds, he accepted the common fallacy that a turbojet would weigh too much to be practical. He, and most others who considered the application of turbines to aircraft in the 1920s and 1930s, assumed that such turbines would resemble the heavy industrial turbines then being used in blast furnaces and boilers. Technology was already available, however, to make aircraft turbines much lighter.34
When Charles G. Abbot raised the issue again at the annual industry conference at Langley laboratory in 1930, he received answers from two men who were to play key roles in the future. Eastman Jacobs of the Langley staff said that his work on the problem showed a need for more thrust than was currently attainable. Hugh Dryden, a brilliant young physicist then heading the National Bureau of Standards's Aerodynamics Section, told Abbot of Buckingham's work and reported that the NBS would be recommending the related technology of thrust augmentation to the NACA as a research project for the coming year. The NACA Executive Committee approved three research authorizations for this project the following month, and Dryden directed the studies, winning appointment to the prestigious Aerodynamics Committee the following year. The research, however, did not improve performance enough to substantially alter Buckingham's conclusions.35
Another investigation of jet propulsion came to the attention of the NACA in 1938 when Vannevar Bush reported to George Lewis that the National Academy of Sciences had recently set up a committee to study, among other things, jets. This investigation resulted from a report by a naval officer who had observed the development of gas turbines in Europe. The navy asked the academy to appoint a committee to investigate the possibilities of gas turbines for marine propulsion. The committee, apparently under the leadership of Professor Lionel S. Marks of Harvard, included Theodore von Karman and Robert A. Millikan of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, and it addressed the "possibilities of the gas turbine for aircraft propulsion." Its report, submitted in June [189] 1940, concluded that "the gas turbine could hardly be considered a feasible application to airplanes mainly because of the difficulty in complying with the stringent weight requirements imposed by aeronautics."36
By this time jet aircraft had already flown secretly in German), and would fly in England the following year. The United States was, quite simply, egregiously late in appreciating and developing jet propulsion for aircraft. In this tardiness, the NACA was no better and no worse than the other American institutions with which it shared responsibility for the development of aircraft propulsion. The military services never asked the NACA for an opinion on jet propulsion; instead, they asked their own consultant, the National Bureau of Standards, or the National Academy of Sciences. Only Charles G. Abbot, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, seems to have asked the NACA about the subject, and he was told what the NACA had done and planned to do in 1930. Eastman Jacobs had done some early research on the subject, and in 1939 was at work again under a job order at Langley laboratory. But the Committee seems never to have appreciated the importance of the topic, and seems to have been slow in giving Jacobs full support. Its defense against these charges must be that it was not the agency primarily responsible for engine development in the United States, and that defense must stand in the bright glare of the claims the NACA staff and committee members had made for themselves over the years.37
Whoever was to blame for American tardiness, the action increased dramatically early in 1941 when General Hap Arnold learned of German progress in the field. On 25 February Arnold wrote to Vannevar Bush emphasizing the importance and urgency of jet propulsion; after a meeting between Bush, Arnold, and Admiral Towers, Bush decided to expand the scope of a recently constituted NACA subcommittee on auxiliary jet propulsion. On 24 March he advised the Main Committee that he planned to create a special committee on jet propulsion, chaired by Dr. William F. Durand, charter member of the NACA and then the 82-year-old dean of the American engineering community. Durand's specialty had been propellers, but he was well versed in all aspects of aeronautical research, and his seniority and prestige lent weight and moment to the new committee. In fact it was Durand who was to turn the Committee's attention from rocket propulsion, which Arnold thought the Germans were developing, to jet propulsion, which Arnold subsequently learned the British had achieved.38
Membership on the special committee went to the usual sampling of government and academic experts, as well as to three representatives of commercial firms engaged in turbine development: one from Allis Chalmers, one from Westinghouse, and one from General Electric.
At Arnold's insistence, there were no representatives from the reciprocating aircraft-engine industry, because he feared they would oppose any radical new departures in engine development; later it was claimed that they were excluded because their "energies" were Judged to be "completely absorbed in production problems." After meeting seven times in the course of five months, Durand's committee recommended that the services let contracts for three types of jet engine development - one to Allis Chalmers, one to Westinghouse, and one to General Electric. Progressives of 1915 might have blushed at the conflict of interest here, but Durand's committee was never intended to be either democratic or egalitarian. It was intended to get the United States back in the race for aircraft engine supremacy, The way to do that was to bring in the best industrial representatives available, review their research, and support the most promising ones, Not surprisingly, the Main Committee decided that the projects of all the companies represented on the special committee were worthy of support. The military services, who were of course also represented, took the committee's recommendation and awarded development contracts to the three firms.39
[191] The NACA had gone a long way toward rescuing the situation and reestablishing its credibility as the central agency for coordinating American aeronautical research. But it did not stop there. It also recommended that its own project for Jet propulsion, under the direction of Eastman Jacobs's at the Langley laboratory, should receive full support and early trials. Jacobs's scheme was a variation on the Campini ducted fan which used a traditional reciprocating engine to drive a fan within a duct behind the engine. To get spurts of additional thrust for combat, fuel could be burned in the duct behind the fan, adding jet propulsion to the conventional thrust. At the time the Durand committee met in 1941, Jacobs had not solved the problem of stable combustion in the afterburner, but the Main Committee nonetheless recommended support. Though Jacobs would make considerable progress over the next two years, he never succeeded in developing an engine as appealing to the military services as the turbine engines developed by the commercial manufacturers. In 1943 the services turned down a request by the Committee to construct an airplane incorporating the Jacobs engine, and there the project died. Jacobs and some other staffers at Langley felt the services were wrong to ignore what Jacobs called a "conservative straightforward engineering design"; but what the services felt they needed - rightly, as it turned out - was a radical new design to help the Americans catch up with England and perhaps Germany.40
After the original recommendations of the Durand committee, the NACA's wartime efforts in this field, as in most others in American aeronautics, were limited to coordinating and testing. Significantly and ominously, the NACA was kept in the dark about much that was happening in jet-engine development. When the services brought a Whittle engine to the United States and assigned General Electric the task of building a similar engine, entirely apart from the development contract that company already had on NACA recommendation, the NACA was not told, in keeping, it seems, with a general promise of secrecy made by Arnold to the British. Only through rumor did it learn of the jet-propelled airplane being developed by Bell Aircraft under contract to the services. When Warner wrote from England in 1943 that the British were supplying the United States with all the jet-propulsion information they had, Hunsaker suggested in reply the extent to which the NACA had been reduced from its traditional role: "The idea that they [the British] are supplying 'us' everything the), have does not apply to NACA but may apply to the services. The details of this situation are somewhat sticky but I can give you the story orally." Part of the story was simply that the services had put an unprecedented lid of secrecy on all jet-propulsion development. Not only did this policy shut out the NACA more completely than ever [192] before from developments in military aviation, but it also prevented the manufacturers from freely exchanging information on their projects. In fact, the two sections of the General Electric Company working on the separate jet projects did not know that the other team existed, though of course rumors flew at a great rate. The "Buck Rogers" project for a jet airplane at Bell Aircraft was apparently unknown to some of the employees there. The full story of' American jet development during the war has never been made public, but enough is known to suggest that it is a case history in the hazards of excessive secrecy.41
This general cloak of secrecy, however, does not fully explain the extent to which the Committee was excluded from its normally close and candid collaboration with the military services, as Hunsaker's letter to Warner suggests. What had really happened was the onset of a crisis of confidence, a suspicion on the part of the services that the NACA had let them down. Military men understood that the), themselves were ultimately responsible for the state of military unpreparedness in which they found themselves. Depending on the NACA to tell them what was important had lulled them into a comfortable laxness in which they had left their own flanks unguarded. Now they were second best in an important new technology, and they felt that their past reliance on the NACA had been a mistake. So they took to running this new technology by themselves, relying on their own judgment, their own sources of information. Since they wanted to keep the whole field as secret as possible, there was no reason to inform the NACA. The Committee had no "need to know"; keeping the NACA abreast of developments would serve only to multiply potential leaks of information without getting any assistance or advice in return, for the services expected none.
None of this was explicit. There were no confrontations, no exchanges of acrimony, no pointing of fingers. Outwardly all went on as before, arid the written record remained as polite, cordial, and sterile as ever. But beneath the surface and between the lines was a cooling of attachments and a keeping of distances such as the NACA had never known. When Jerome Hunsaker sent General Arnold a paper on "Aeronautical Research" in September 1942, he received in return the suggestion that he concern himself less with the possibility of "frozen designs" in American aircraft production and more with developing better aircraft engines for fighters. "I do not feel that progress made in the improvements of engines is keeping pace with that of the airplane," wrote Arnold. Hunsaker derived from this letter the "Impression that there is a feeling that American engine development has been outdistanced by that of foreign powers," and lie asked for a meeting with the chief of the Army Materiel Command to clarify the army's position. He was told that the army expected to fight out the war with the aircraft [193] engines then in production (a reason given then and later by both the army and the NACA for delay in developing jet propulsion). The Committee should therefore occupy itself with refining the engines already in production, a role that effectively barred the NACA from the jet-propulsion development being pursued by the army. The Committee did become involved in testing such jet engines as reached prototype stage; but, when it attempted in the winter of 1942-1943 to penetrate army long-term councils, it was politely advised to stick to conventional engines.42
Sensing this new situation without ever being candidly apprised of it, the NACA tried to cut its losses by doing for jet propulsion what it was best at doing. It had been working on compressor design for years in connection with turbosuperchargers. The principles and problems in both fields were almost identical and the NACA could transfer its expertise to the newer field, as indeed it did. Furthermore, the [194] Committee could use its new laboratory at Cleveland for some of the testing required once the new engines reached prototype stage. Although the Cleveland laboratory had not been designed for research in jet propulsion, some of its equipment was suitable for testing both conventional and jet engines, and the Committee quickly sought appropriations for new equipment specifically suited to jet development.43
And Eastman Jacobs, stung and dissatisfied with the services' rejection of his ducted-fan proposal, began a line of argument that he maintained through the war and into the era of practical jet aviation: too much emphasis was being put on engine development and not enough on the means of fitting these new engines to aircraft. The engine and the airframe must be matched to each other, he maintained, or the efficiency of both would be compromised. Essentially he was arguing for more attention to the aerodynamics of jet engines, and aerodynamics was the NACA's forte, a way for the Committee to make a real contribution to jet-aircraft development even if it was largely excluded from development of the engines .44
The NACA's failure to discover and develop jet propulsion should not be allowed to mask its real and significant contributions to American aerial victory in World War II. Though air power was not the sole, [195] or even the most, important ingredient of American victory in the war, it was a key ingredient; without the NACA, American aerial superiority would have been less complete, less early. Every American airplane that fought in the war, every aircraft engine, had been tested and improved in NACA facilities. Most of this cleanup and testing was incremental and anonymous, hard to trace to the NACA, and difficult to evaluate. With military officers, NACA engineers, and aircraft designers and manufacturers all poring over the same test results in an effort to improve the flying qualities of an aircraft, the credit for improvements must be spread widely. Some examples of NACA contributions can be isolated, as when the Committee predicted that the B-32 would fail and recommended that its development be abandoned. In some cases, the prescribed NACA fix for a problem aircraft was rejected by the manufacturer, as when Kelly Johnson of Lockheed ignored the first solution proposed by the NACA for the problems his P-38 was experiencing.45
Two Committee achievements during the war were so obviously useful and noteworthy that the NACA took great pride in citing them. The first investigation undertaken at the new Ames laboratory - icing research - was so useful not only to military bombers operating at high altitudes and through all kinds of weather, but also to commercial operators, that it won for its principal investigator, Lewis A. Rodert, the Collier trophy of 1946. The low-drag wings of the P-51 Mustang, the result of years of NACA research on wing characteristics, became a hallmark of NACA achievement. Though some questioned that these laminar-flow wings (as they were often and incorrectly called) were responsible for the unparalleled performance of the Mustang, most agreed that they were a significant contribution to airfoil development and drag reduction. John Victory was pleased to report in later years that captured German documents revealed an inability by the Germans to account for the superior performance of the Mustang, even after they captured one intact and tested it, because their wind tunnels could not duplicate the low turbulence produced by the NACA.46
After the war the NACA got its share of medals and accolades in the general euphoria and self-congratulation that came with the peace. Quickly, the Committee began to make a case for a return to its prewar role. But doubt had been cast on the record, and the captured German documents, scientists, and aircraft did nothing to dispel the suspicion that the NACA had been bested in aeronautical research. Thus, what might have been a smooth reversion to the good old days became instead a period of serious questioning, even within the Committee itself.47
George Mead, the outside critic of prewar days who had led the march of industry into the NACA ranks, had undergone a full conversion and argued strongly for recapturing the old NACA independence.
![In 1948, Air Force Chief of Staff Carl Spaatz presents medals for World War II service to Jerome Hunsaker, [George Mead?], George Lewis, John Victory, H. J.E. Reid, Smith DeFrance, and Edward Sharp. (LaRC)](p196.jpg)
As he saw it, the Committee had "been forced out of its role to wet nurse the designs of most companies, large and small," which had maintained neither "adequate scientific personnel nor proper tools for their use, such as wind tunnels." He also regretted that the NACA had been "dominated so completely by the military forces." He wanted the Committee to become once again "more truly 'national advisory'" instead of being "a service station for the Army and Navy."48
Jerome Hunsaker, also a critic in prewar days, agreed "in principle" with Mead but did not know just where the Committee would fit in. "We have become, to a large degree," he said, "a service agency," and he felt that - in view of some of the unique equipment held by the NACA - it "must expect demands to test or 'perfect' existing designs" as it had done during the war. The choice was not really between total independence or total service, all fundamental research or all testing, for throughout its history the NACA had in fact combined the two. The question was what the mixture would be in the postwar world.49
An ominous sidelight on this question was the general relation of science to national defense as the war drew to a close. Numerous proposals were afoot to institutionalize scientific and technological advice in national defense. It. would take several years to sort these out, but in 1944 several trends were already apparent. First, the military services would increasingly use contracts with universities and private [197] institutions to obtain the research and development formerly, done in their own laboratories or not at all. The contract freed the "scientists against time" who had come to Washington during the war to return to their home institutions and there conduct the research that would obviously be needed in the postwar world.50
Second, military authorities were beginning to realize the need for standing mechanisms to provide scientific advice, and they embraced the general belief - perhaps to help explain away their own failures that the scientists had let them down in the prewar years and left them technologically inferior to the Germans in many areas. For their part, the scientists suspected that - once the war emergency was over - the services would no longer take their advice as seriously as they had during the war. Both sides were partially right, but the sum of their beliefs was a shared conviction that the best way to ensure the availability of technological sophistication in national defense for the future was to create permanent institutions through which the military could get advice and the scientists could make their voices heard. The NACA would be part of this effort., and in some respects a model.51
The NACA would not, however, be the model it wanted to be. The history of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which grew out of the National Defense Research Committee, shows how completely things had changed and how dated the NACA pattern was. As historian A. Hunter Dupree has pointed out, one of the reasons for the creation of the OSRD was that
This trend posed a dilemma for the NACA. Traditionally, it had done fundamental research and left development to the military and the industry. If research and development were now becoming inseparable, as the World War II experience suggested, how was the NACA to return to its prewar status? If it combined research and development (as it had claimed to be doing during World War II), would it not be intruding on the territory of the military and the industry and creating that duplication of effort which Congress had always found intolerable? And if it did only basic research, could it hope to remain as useful as it had been in the past? When the NACA proposed a postwar National Defense Research Committee in 1944, to do for national security what it had done for aeronautics, the proposal went nowhere. The military services might establish their own advisory committees of outside experts, and they might contract with universities and private institutions....
....for basic research, but they would not permit a single body to perform both functions. In short, they would not endorse the NACA model.53
These questions - the role of contracting out and the mix of basic research and development - were only the first of the uncertainties facing the NACA. What would be the NACA's relation to the aircraft industry, grown large and powerful during the war? Who would operate the new wind tunnels that would have to be built to study supersonic flight, now made possible by jet propulsion? Who would conduct high-speed flight research, and how? What would be the role of jets in military and commercial aviation? Were rockets and missiles a part of aeronautics? Where would NACA headquarters be located? How would wartime research results be declassified and distributed? Did the NACA favor an independent air force? Should Jack Ide be returned to his prewar post as the NACA's European representative? And - perhaps most important and most poignant - who was going to replace George Lewis? He suffered two heart attacks in November 1945 and could not thereafter resume the full duties he had performed for more than a quarter of a century. Lewis (said John Victory) did not take a day of vacation between Pearl Harbor and the armistice; his body seems to have held up only as long as it was needed.54
1. NASA news release 65-298, 20 Sept. 1965; Walter T. Bonney notes, from DeFrance's official personnel form; Victory to DeFrance, TWX, 22 Mar. 39, in 57 A 415 (33), 22-1, 1938 -1939. During a flight test in 1924, the aircraft piloted by DeFrance crashed, killing another engineer on board and critically injuring DeFrance lost his left eye as a result of the crash and his face was badly mutilated. He carried t scars, both physical and emotional, through the rest of his days. See Victory to Ames, 22, Aug. 1924.
2. John F. Parsons of the Langley staff was actually appointed to take charge of construction at Moffett Field in 1939, but DeFrance had already been working on the project for more than a year and was unofficially the head long before he was formally appointed engineer in-charge of the new laboratory. DeFrance visited Sunny ale briefly in 1939, but he performed most of his duties at Langley before moving for good to the new laboratory in August 1940. Edwin P. Hartman, Adventures in Research: A History of Homes Research Center, 1940 1965, NASA SP-4302 (Washington, 1970), pp. 25-27, 31-32, 45-4 ; Donald H. Wood to Victory, 4 Aug. 1942, 62 A 35 (2), 122.3.
3. George Mead outlined the problems at Cleveland for Jerome Hunsaker in a letter of 10 Nov. 1941, suggesting ways to advance the completion date of the laboratory from 1 Sept. 1943 to 1 Dec. 1942. Information on Sharp is drawn from in his undated NACA biography [ca. 19571; Walter T. Bonney to Robert Hotz, 11 Dec. 960; and Bonney notes from Sharp's official personnel form. Sharp was appointed construction administrator for AERL early in 1942, then manager when the laboratory opened in May. Only in 1947 after attempts to recruit a director from outside the NACA had failed and Sharp had proven himself an excellent head of the lab-was he finally appointed director. On the search for a head for the new laboratory, see L.S. Hobbs to J.C. Hunsaker, 1 Jan. 1942, and Hunsaker to Hobbs, 9 Jan. 1942.
4. George J. Mead to Hunsaker, 10 Nov. 1941; Lewis to Mead, 2 Dec. 1941; Lewis to Harold D. Smith, 26 Jan. 1942; Senate Committee on Appropriations, Third Supplemental National Defense Appropriations Bill for 1942, hearings, 77/1 1941, pp. 196-201; Hunsaker to L.S. Hobbs, 9 Jan. 1942; Victory to Walter I. Beam , 8 June 1942; Victory to Clifford Gilder-sleeve, 17 July 1942; H.G. Knight to "Mr. Martin," BoB intra-office memorandum, 17 Aug. 1943.
5. W.J. McCann to George Lewis, 23 Sept. 1943, in 63 A 101 (10), A-4-2, "Jacobs's Visit to England," 1943.
6. 62 A 35 (63), 300.7, Space, Assignments and Repairs, esp. Victory to W.E. Reynolds, 13 Apr. 1940, and Ralph Ulmer, memo for record, 22 Aug. 1940; Victory, memo for the chairman, 14 Sept. 1940; minutes of Executive Committee meeting, 24 July 1941, pp. 4-5.
7. The plan adopted by the Aeronautical Board and proved by the president on 29 June 1939 provided that:
In practice, power seems to have gravitated during the war to the joint Chiefs of Staff for policy; the NACA continued to handle requests that came directly from the services on a first come first served basis, with little if any need for the Aeronautical Board to decide which service should have priority. The Aeronautical Boar endorsed this policy at its meeting of 12 Mar. 1942, as reported to the NACA Exec. Comm. meeting of 19 March, pp. 1820, where the formal policy is quoted.
Vannevar Bush established the NACA's wartime policy on giving advice to the services when Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson asked him 5 Dec. 1940 for the committee's opinion on the advisability of continuing an army contract with Pratt & Whitney for development of experimental liquid cooled engines; the company wished to discontinue the investigation in favor of developing a more attractive air cooled engine. Bush wrote to the members of the Main Committee 10 Dec. 1940 suggesting "the following premises as a basis for our procedure":
The NACA actuary followed this procedure in the case of the Pratt & Whitney contract and whenever necessary thereafter. But in fact there was little more to this procedure than common sense and committing to writing what had been the modus operandi of the Committee for years. One sees John Victory's hand in this letter as much as Bush's. The difference was that the members of the NACA were taking their role in the war in deadly earnest, and the new men taking over the Committee were establishing fixed and explicit policies to replace the ad hoc methods of the Ames Lewis Victory triumvirate.
8. "Coordination" was the Committee's term for liaison, used previously in describing the Coordinator of Aeronautical Research in Universities and soon to be employed in the Western Coordination Office. Presumably the NACA chose this term to impress on Congress that it was actively trying to rationalize the nation's aeronautical research program and to prevent duplication by bringing together information on aeronautical research activities across the U.S. Surely nothing in its behavior during the war suggested that the NACA envisioned itself as being the central aeronautical research agency in the country with authority and responsibility to dictate policy to other aeronautical research teams. Still, the choice of terms was an unfortunate one and invited misinterpretation.
Though Vannevar Bush later forgot the fact, the National Defense Research Committee was modeled on the NACA. The act creating the NDRC was drafted by John Victory. Revealingly, Victory drafted that the NDRC should coordinate, supervise, and conduct scientific research on the problems underlying the development, production, and use of mechanisms and devices of warfare, except scientific research on the problems of flight, "while the presidential executive order formally establishing the NDRC declared that it should "correlate and support scientific research on the mechanisms and devices of warfare, except those relating to problems of flight included in the field of activities of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics." [sic] James Phinney Baxter 3d, Scientists against Time (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946), pp. 14, 451. Bush wrote to Victory on 25 Apr. 1966 that he could not recall whether Victory was involved in the creation of NDRC.
9. Mead's views on coordination of advice, as well as those, of Jerome Hunsaker, who was soon to take over chairmanship of the NACA, appear in an exchange of letters in mid 1940: Hunsake to Mead, 8 Aug.; with attached memorandum dated 10 Aug.; Mead to Hunsaker, 28 Aug.; Hunsaker to Mead, 23 Sept.; and Mead to Hunsaker, 2 Oct., from which the quotations are taken. On Mead's position in the National Defense Advisory Commission, see Irving Brinton Holley, Jr., Buying Aircraft: Materiel Procurement for the Army Air Forces, United States Army in World War II, Special Studies (Washington: Dept. of the Army, 1964), p. 256; and Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 6, Men and Planes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 308.
Mead's positions on both the NACA and the NDAC (a subsidiary of the Council of National Defense) made him the ideal person to help work out the details of coordination between the NACA and the NDRC, originally an outgrowth of the Council of National Defense. At Bush's prompting, Mead and Richard C. Tolman, vice chairman of the NDRC, negotiated a joint "Memorandum on the Fields of Activity of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and of the National Defense Research Committee," which Mead signed on 6 Feb. 1941, Tolman on 12 Feb. This agreement served both agencies well throughout the war, although one official in NDRC complained to Bush that "the NACA have remained quite aloof" when it came to coordination. (Carroll L. Wilson to Bush, 6 Nov. 194 1, in 62 A 35 (72), 370.11, 1941-1945.) The agreement was probably more useful in preventing duplication and conflict than in achieving cooperation and rationalization.
10. See pp. 167-168. S. Paul Johnston seems to have gotten on well with Vannevar Bush, less so with Jerome Hunsaker. Shortly after he became chairman, Hunsaker expressed dissatisfaction with a report prepared by Johnston because it failed to conform to a directive setting out the functions of his office. Within a month Johnston resigned as coordinator of research to become manager of the Washington office of the Curtiss Wright Corp. On 15 Jan. 1942 Hunsaker received the approval of the Executive Committee to abolish the position of coordinator of research and to reconstitute its functions under the director of aeronautical research. This he did on 9 Feb. 1942. Bush to Johnston, .13 Feb. 1940; Hunsaker to Johnston, 24 Dec. 1941; minutes of Executive Committee meetings, 15 Jan., p. 6, and 19 Mar. 1942, p. 2; Hunsaker to director of aeronautical research, 9 Feb, 1942; Institute of Aeronautical Sciences biography of S. Paul Johnston, 27 May 1955.
11. Minutes of annual meeting of the NACA, 24 Oct. 1940; Hunsaker to Bush, 17 June 1941, in 62 A 35 (29), 53; NACA typescript of 1942 appropriations testimony titled "National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics," 9 pp., undated, marked "Figures OK REU [Ralph E. Ulmer] 1-23-41, p. 8.
12. Victory to Porter Adams, 27 May 1944, U.S. Air Force Academy, Victory papers, box 1, general personal, 1944.
13. For a detailed description of the NACA's work procedures, see appendix F.
14. An undated NACA report on "Utilization of Wind Tunnels from January, 1939 to June, 1945" states that the following tunnels were used for specific tests of army and navy aircraft for the percentages of times shown, based on a 24-hour operating day:
|
. |
|
|
. | |
|
LMAL |
57 |
|
. | |
|
8-Foot High-Speed Tunnel |
23.5 |
|
16-Foot High-Speed Tunnel |
23 |
|
19-Foot Pressure Tunnel |
55.1 |
|
Propeller-Research Tunnel |
33 |
|
Two-Dimensional Tunnel |
79 |
|
Atmospheric Tunnel |
92 |
|
Full-Scale Tunnel |
57 |
|
. | |
|
AAL |
66 |
|
. | |
|
7- x 10-Foot Tunnel (No.1) |
56.5 |
|
7- x 10-Foot Tunnel (No.2) |
87.8 |
|
16-Foot High-Speed Tunnel |
66.5 |
|
40- x 80-Foot Tunnel |
81.25 |
|
. | |
|
AERL |
(not given) |
|
. | |
|
Altitude Tunnel |
92.6 |
|
Icing-Research Tunnel |
43 |
It was impossible to compute tunnel time for some of the other specialized tunnels. In the spin tunnel and the free-flight tunnel, for example, any number of models could be tested in a single day because no time was required to rig the model in the tunnel. The stability tunnel had very little applicability to applied research and testing was used almost exclusively for fundamental research.
The figures suggest that during the war the NACA did a smaller amount of fundamental research than it liked (and was accustomed) to do, but they do not necessarily support George Lewis's 1943 testimony before the House Committee on Appropriations that "since the declaration of war, the work of the Committee is 100 percent war effort on projects presented to the Committee by the War and Navy Departments." House Committee on Appropriations, Independent Offices Appropriation Bill for 1944, hearings, 78/1, 1943, p. 149.
15. Victory to Don L. Hoxie, 7 Oct. 1943, in 59 A 2112 (1 ), 105, general policies and procedures. For a detailed description of the NACA report system, see appendix G. From 1940 on, the annual report dealt "only in general terms with the results accomplished" (AR 1940, p. 1). Reports for 1943 through 1945 were actually not published until after the war.
Even before Pearl Harbor, the Army Air Corps, the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, the Aeronautical Board, and the NACA agreed that "results of [NACA] investigations made on designs of a given aircraft manufacturer be made available for the duration of the present emergency to other manufacturers if those results were applicable, in the opinion of the Air Corps, the Bureau of Aeronautics, or the Committee, to any other manufacturer's design." (Minutes of NACA annual meeting, 23 Oct. 1942). Generally the NACA was more severe than the services in restricting the flow of information; see, for example, Lewis to Miss Muller, 10 May 1941, in 57 A 415 (46), 32-5, 1937-.
16. Minutes of NACA semiannual meeting, 23 Apr. 1942, p. 6; Edward Warner to Maj. Howard Z. Bogert, U.S.A., 3 Dec. 1940; Bogert to Warner, 6 Dec. 1940; S. Paul Johnston to Vannevar Bush, 6 Dec. 1940; Warner to Bush, 9 Dec. 1940; Bush to Maj. Gen. Henry H. Arnold, U.S.A., 31 Dec. 1940; Maj. Mervin E. Gross, U.S.A., to Bush, 8 Jan. 1941.
17. See appendix B.
18. Warner gave up chairmanship of the prestigious Aerodynamics Committee to T.P. Wright in order to take over Operating Problems. The entire story appears in minutes of Exec. Comm. meeting, 16 June 1942, pp. 28 30. Of Mead's withdrawal, Hunsaker wrote to the members of the Main Committee on 21 Oct. 1943:
19. Lewis to Ames, 3 May 1939; minutes of Exec. Comm. meeting, I I Sept. 1941, pp. 2, 11; AR 1943, p. 1. During the war the NACA staff did not attend large industry meetings, which Lewis did not consider worth the time. In 1943 he wrote:
20. Edwin P. Hartman, Adventures in Research, p. ix; minutes of Exec. Comm. meeting, 16 June 1942, p. 23; Russell G. Robinson, "Memorandum for Mr. Victory," 2 May 1942; Robinson, "Memorandum for Mr. Hartman," 5 Dec. 1942. For an example of the excellent information Hartman was able to gather, see his memo for coordinator of research, 16 Dec. 1943. Copies of Hartman's reports are in 60 A 635 (14-19); at the San Francisco Federal Archives and Records Center in 62 A 621 (1-4); and at the Los Angeles Federal Archives and Records Center in 68 A 899 and 68 A 935.
21. In 1943, Lewis was authorized to approve contracts with universities and research organizations without prior approval from the Executive Committee. Minutes of Exec. Comm. meeting, 20 May 1943, p. 11. Hunsaker reported to Congress in 1943 that a recent survey of the Committee's activities revealed that the staff was working on only 38 percent of the research projects already authorized. House Committee on Appropriations, First Supplemental National Defense Appropriation Bill for 1944, hearings, 78/1, 1943, pp. 1534-35.
22. On the problem of losing personnel to industry, see minutes of Exec. Comm. meeting, 15 Jan. 1942, p. 18; and "NACA Research and the Nation's War Planes," 13 pp., typescript prepared for congressional testimony, 9 Sept. 1942, p. 10. Public Law 450, approved 10 Feb. 1942 and implemented by Executive Order 9117 of 31 Mar., was repealed by P.L. 821, approved 22 Dec. 1942. The latter expired on 30 Apr. 1943 and was replaced by P.L. 49 of 7 May 1943. Minutes of Executive Committee meetings 26 Nov. 1941, p. 3; 25 Feb. 1943, pp. 13-14; and, 23 Apr. 1942, pp. 2-3; and appendix A.
23. In congressional testimony late in 1943 Victory expressed his frustration with the replacement schedule:
See also minutes of Exec. Comm. meetings, 15 Jan. 1942, p. 16; 19 Mar. 1942, p. 18; 10 Sept. 1942, p. 14; 17 Dec. 1942, p. 15; 20 May 1943, pp. 9 10; 16 Sept. 1943, p. 4; and minutes of semiannual meeting, 22 Apr. 1943, p. 3.
24. The plan was first proposed by Hunsaker at the semiannual meeting of the NACA on 22 Apr. 1943. (Minutes, p. 7.) The history of the Army Navy NACA plan was outlined in James J. Kelly, Jr., to Victory, "Selective Service during World War II" 30 June 1949. See also minutes of Exec. Comm. meetings, 27 Jan. 1944, p. 2; 16 Mar. 1944, p. 5; and 18 Dec. 1944, p. 12; and minutes of NACA meetings, 20 Apr. 1944, pp. 10-11; and 19 Oct. 1944, p. 14.
25. Hunsaker memo, "Priority rating for two private wind Tunnels," 23 Apr. 1943; and minutes of Exec. Comm. meeting, 16 June 1942, pp. 4-5.
26. Minutes, Exec. Comm. meeting, 13 Sept. 1940, p. 4; Lewis, "Organization of aeronautical research in the U.S.S.R.," memo for files, 16 Jan. 1943.
27. The difficulties of cooperating with, even such close allies as the British became clear in mid-1942. Ed Warner wrote from London recommending a "generally united action in the planning of research and development." As he saw it,
Hunsaker found this "interesting but difficult to see through clearly." He wrote to Lewis: "I can't see how we can function as part of a single research organization as we do not yet function smoothly as a part of our own Army and Navy." Though Hunsaker was surely anxious to effect what cooperation he could with the British, the focus of all Joint work was the military. "If we have an important new proposal such as a rocket ship we would go to [General] Arnold," he told Lewis, and "the British ... also go direct to Arnold." Warner to Hunsaker, 14 Aug. 1942; Hunsaker to Lewis, 26 Aug. 1942.
28. See pp. 88-89. On engine development in general, see C. Fayette Taylor, "Aircraft Propulsion: A Review of the Evolution of Aircraft Power plants," Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1962 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1963), pp. 245-99.
29. Appendixes B and G; Ames to F.J. Bailey, 25 June 1937; report of Special Survey Committee on Aeronautical Research Facilities, 19 Oct. 1939, quo ed in Victory to chairman, NACA, "Origin and Status of the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory," 7 Oct. 1941; H.G. Knight to "Mr. Martin," "Report of Visit to N.A.C.A. Engine Research Laboratory, Cleveland, Ohio, August 5-6, 1943," 17 Aug. 1943.
30. "National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics," typescript of testimony prepared for 1942 appropriations hearings, marked "Figures OK. REU 1-21-41," 9 pp., n.d., p. 2.
31. Robert Schlaifer, Development of Aircraft Engines (Boston: Div. of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, 1950), pp. 21-24; George W. Gray, Frontiers of Flight: The Story of NACA Research (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948), pp. 275-76.
32. Lewis to de Bothezat, 30 Apr. 1920. On 13 May, de Bothezat asked Lewis to buy him a personal copy of Goddard's paper that he might keep. (NA RG 255, entry 3, box 6, George de Bothezat.) On de Bothezat's troubled relations with the NACA, see pp. 89-92.
33. Edgar Buckingham, "Jet Propulsion for Airplanes," TR-159, in AR 1923, pp. 75-90.
34. Schlaifer, Development of Aircraft Engines, pp. 329-31.
35. 57 A 415 (4), 1-16D, 1929-1935. Research Authorization 328, "Investigation of Methods of Increasing the Thrust Reaction of High Speed Air Jets," was approved by the Exec. Comm. on 24 June 1930. The results appear in Eastman N. Jacobs and James M. Shoemaker, "Tests on Thrust Augmenters for jet Propulsion," TN-431, Sept. 1932; and G.B. Schubauer, "Jet Propulsion With Special Reference to Thrust Augmenters," TN-442, Jan. 1933. See also Schlaifer, Development of Aircraft and Engines, pp. 445.
36. Bush to Lewis, 14 Oct. 1938, in NA RG 255, entry 3, box 4, Bush, 1938 1940; U.S. Navy Dept., Bu. of Ships, Technical Bulletin 2, "An Investigation of the Possibilities of the Gas Turbine for Marine Propulsion," report submitted to the secy. of the navy by a committee on gas turbines appointed by the National Academy of 41 sciences, 10 June 1940 (Washington: Dept. of the Navy, 194 1), p. 37. Commenting on this report in 1946, Jerome Hunsaker concluded that the lesson to be drawn from this product of "eminent doctors who looked pretty much backward "was ".... do not depend on a survey of past efforts to forecast engineering possibilities under different conditions." Hunsaker suspected "the report was written by Professor [Lionel S.] Marks [of Harvard], a good engineer but old and not in touch with aviation developments. The others [including Millikan and Von Karman] would sign what Marks had written after seeing how carefully he had surveyed the prior art." Hunsaker to Capt. G.L. Schuyler, U.S.N., 17 May 1946.
37. Jacobs's work was first authorized under a LMAL job older written in Feb. 1939; an official research authorization was not approved until 10 Sept. 1942. 58 A 454 (4), special file, RA 1020, Sept. 1942-July 1949.
38. The discussion in this chapter of jet engine development in the U.S. is based primarily on Schlaifer, Development of Aircraft Engines, chap. 16. Gray, Frontiers of Flight, is accurate as far as it goes but omits several facts that cast the NACA in a poor light. From 1929 to 1936, Durand supervised the planning, preparation, and publication of a six volume study of Aerodynamic Theory sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation. He wrote three of the 20 divisions in the set and worked closely with the other authors, therefore was fully abreast of the state of the art shortly before World War II. Hugh L. Dryden, "The Contributions of William Frederick Durand to Aeronautics," paper delivered at the Durand Centennial Conference, Stanford University, 5 Aug. 1959.
39. The membership of the Durand committee and a brief summary of its history are in R.E. Littell to Lewis, "Information desired by Mr. Gray on NACA jet propulsion activities," 9 Aug. 1946, from which the quotations are taken. Arnold 's views are reported in Schlaifer, Development of Aircraft Engines, pp. 458-59. Hunsaker is reported to have said later that the "regular aircraft companies were approached but were not one bit enthusiastic" about joining the Durand committee. First Lt. Ezra Kotcher, Experimental Engineering Div., Materiel Command, U.S. Army, memo report of jet propulsion meeting, 27 Nov. 1942, quoted in Craven and Cate, eds., Men and Planes, p. 247. See also minutes of NACA semiannual meeting, 24 Apr. 1941, p. 5; minutes of Exec. Comm. meeting, 11 Sept. 1941, p. 9; and minutes of annual meeting, 23 Oct. 1941, pp. 4-7.
40. Schlaifer, Development of Aircraft Engines, pp. 450-51, 459-61; and Macon C. Ellis, Jr., and Clinton E. Brown, "NACA Investigation of a jet Propulsion System Applicable to Flight," TR 802 (1944). On the rejection of the Jacobs design, see Maj. Gen. O.P. Echols, U.S.A., to Durand, 16 Mar. 1943; Durand to Lewis, 22 Mar. 1943; and Lewis to LMAL, 22 Mar. 1943. The reaction of Jacobs, from which the quotation is extracted, appears in H. E. Reid to NACA, 30 Mar. 1943.
During a liaison visit in England in the summer of 1943, Jacobs wrote to Lewis that the staff at the Royal Aircraft Establishment "profess to agree with me that the Army and Navy are short sighted in not backing our project to have constructed the N.A.C.A. jet propulsion airplane." Lewis replied: "I have always felt that if a jet-propulsion device was to be considered at this time for a single-engine airplane, and if range was an important factor, your particular scheme offered the best opportunity of answering the requirements." Jacobs to Lewis, 25 June 1943, in 61 A 195 (2), "Mr. Eastman Jacobs' visit to England"; Lewis to Jacobs, 12 July 1943, in NA RG 255, entry 3, box 12, 101.1, Hunsaker, OSRD.
41. Russell G. Robinson heard "rumors" of the "Buck Rogers" project that later became the P-59 during a visit to Bell Aircraft on 4 May 1942. Robinson to Lewis, 6 May 1942, in 61 A 195 (17), visits by NACA, April June 1942. Hunsaker's remarks to Warner are in a letter of 16 June 1943 in 63 A 29 (10), 623, jet propulsion power plants. The story of secrecy in U.S. jet propulsion development is in stark contrast to the policy pursued in England, where the Gas Turbine Collaboration Committee saw to it that resources were pooled and duplication avoided. See H. Roxbee Cox, "British Aircraft Gas Turbines," The Ninth Wright Brothers Lecture, Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences, 13 (Feb. 1946): 53-83. See also Lewis to Hunsaker, 28 Dec. 1942.
42. Arnold to Hunsaker, 14 Oct. 1942; rough draft of "Suggested Content of Letter to General Echols (To be signed by Dr. Hunsaker)," n.d.; Lewis to E. S. Taylor, 19 Jan 1943; Lewis and Hunsaker, "Memorandum of conference with General Echols regarding suggestions contained in General Arnold's letter of October 14, 1942, to Dr. Hunsaker, relating to engine design improvements especially for fighters," 23 Jan. 1943; Lewis to E.S. Taylor, 25 Jan. 1943.
43. Unfortunately for the NACA, most of its supercharger work was on the Roots type that George Lewis brought with him when he came to the NACA in 1919. This was a gear driven positive displacement supercharger, using neither the axial nor the radial flow compressors found efficient for jet propulsion, nor the exhaust gas turbines developed with technology applicable for jets. See Marsden Ware, "Description and Laboratory Tests of a Roots Type Aircraft Engine Supercharger," TR-230, in AR 1925, pp. 451-61. Eastman Jacobs and E.W. Wasielewski had launched in 1938 a study of axial-flow compressors based on airfoil theory (Schlaifer, Development of Aircraft Engines, p. 460n.), allowing Jacobs to report confidently from England in 1943 of the British: "Like us, they realized early that the compressor design constituted the main problem." "Visit to Royal Aircraft establishment at Farnborough," Nov. 1943, p. 13, in 63 A 101 (10), A-4-2, Jacobs' visit to England, 1943.
On 26 May 1944, General Arnold asked the chairman of the War Production Board for "highest precedence for electrical equipment for jet propulsion program," including a new drive motor for the 8-foot high-speed tunnel at LMAL and equipment for the special laboratory, designed particularly for the investigation of jet propulsion engines" which was then under construction at AERL.
44. Upon his return from England, Jacobs was asked by Lewis to "prepare for the consideration of the Committee a research program covering jet-propulsion projects which, in his opinion, should be undertaken by the Committee." Lewis to LMAL, 16 Nov. 1943, in 63 A 29 (10), 629, jet propulsion power plants. Lewis went on to say:
Jacobs's argument about coordinating engine and aircraft design appears in "Jet Propulsion in England: Report of a Conference Attended by Officers of the Army and Navy and Representatives of American Industrial Organizations Visiting England during the Summer and Fall of 1943 For The Purpose of Study on the Above Subject," held in NACA offices, Washington, 18 Dec. 1943. His plea was the same as that made by Lockheed Aircraft Corp., credited by Schlaifer with "the first serious American work on a turbojet," the L-1000. Development of Aircraft Engines, pp. 448-50.
45. George W. Gray's Frontiers of Flight began as a contract with the NACA to record and report the Committee's contributions to the war. The book went far beyond that, but its pages contain a summary of NACA accomplishments in the war years. The NACA prediction on the B-32 is reported in Craven and Cate, eds., Men and Planes, p. 210. Lockheed's heated disagreement with the NACA over the P-38 was the subjects of a memorandum, apparently by Hunsaker, Conference on P38 tests at Lockheed (August 14)," memo for files, 24 Aug. 1942, which concluded that the NACA should "treat tie Lockheed group with much more formality than others and give them no advice whatever [italics in original]." See also Hartman, Adventures in Research, pp. 97-99.
46. Both British and American skepticism about the Committee's claims for the low drag airfoil were reported to George Lewis in a letter from Ed Warner, 25 Aug. 1942. NACA low drag wing designs of this period achieved laminar flow over 130 percent of the chord in tests, but the Mustang and other aircraft using these wings never achieved such results in flight because of manufacturing irregularities and operating effects on the wing surfaces. Still, the low drag wings were a dramatic improvement over the conventional types.
47. "NACA: The Force behind Our Air Supremacy," an editorial in the Jan. 1944 issue of Aviation, illustrates the general support the Committee received for a return to its prewar role. But as soon as the Allies began to get hard documentation on German Aeronautical research advances during the war, the NACA record began to pay by comparison. See, for example, Adolf Baeumker, "A History of German Aeronautical Research," trans. by F.W. Pick, Royal Aircraft Establishment, translation no. 87, Jan. 1946, typescript, 89 pp. See also pp. 204-205.
48. Mead to Hunsaker [ca. 1 July 1944] (copy) .
49. Hunsaker to Mead, 14 July 1944.
50. Don K. Price, Government and Science Their Dynamic Relation in, America (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1954), chap. 3.
51. A. Hunter Dupree has observed:
Hunsaker was more pessimistic, and less prophetic. In 1944 he wrote: "Military people are ready for civilian scientific cooperation now, but were extremely reluctant in 1938 and will be again!" Hunsaker to Capt. W.P. Roop, USN, 27 June 1944, in 62 A 35 (53), 300.1, 1944-1946.
52. Science in the Federal Government, p. 371.
53. The NACA had always maintained that development was the function of the manufacturers and the military services, but on the eve of Pearl Harbor it changed its stand to meet the exigencies of the coming war. In its annual report to Congress, the Committee claimed:
In 1943, Hunsaker wrote to Bush regarding a successor to the Office of Scientific Research and Development: "I hope the successor can be set up by legislation similar to that establishing the NACA a Presidential Board or Committee with independent civilian chairman and senior service representatives." Hunsaker to Bush, 3 Sept. 1943, in 62 A 35 (42), 050, OSRD. The following year the NACA Committee on Postwar Research was given a memo dated 22 June 1944, apparently prepared by Victory, on "Outline of an organization paralleling NACA" to be named the National Defense Research Committee.
54. Victory told Gen. John Curry that Lewis had a heart attack on I Nov. and another a few days later. He told William Littlewood that Lewis's first attack was on 2 Nov., the second on 7 Nov. Victory to Maj. Gen. John F. Curry, U.S.A., 13 Nov. 1945, and to Littlewood, 18 Dec. 1945; both in 62 A 35 (15), 170.2 (semiofficial) (1).
