The America Air Entry into the Great War - Part 1

By late 1916, three years of continuing and savage fighting had ravaged much of northern France and the Low Countries. A dreaded stalemate had descended over the Western Front. By January 1917, and after showing early promise, the air campaign that visionaries thought would magically deliver a knockout blow to the enemy’s will to fight, did not materialize and in fact, it can be argued that it exacerbated the horrendous stalemated of the trenches. Aviation pioneer Orville Wright wrote in December 1916 that “neither side has been able to win on account of the part of the aero plane has played. The two sides are apparently equal in their aerial equipment and it seems to me that unless present conditions can be changed, the war will continue for years!” The only hope Orville saw of ending the war promptly was if the Allied achieve “such overwhelming superiority in the air that the Germans’ eyes can be put out”. But by early 1917, the only real opportunity to accomplish Orville’s proposition rested with the United States and on April, that possibility grew with America’s entry into the War to End all Wars.

Along with the US entry in the war came boosting remarks by many American commanders about what the new American power could bring to the table. General Squier, the US Army’s top aviation officer remarked that “America would put the Yankee punch in the war and sweep the German lines”. This sentiment was echoed in Washington where the nation’s leaders blindly believed that the American way and know-how will carry the day for the exhausted Allies. Nowhere was the sentiment more palpable than in the War Department, where Secretary of War, Newton Baker declared that “a huge American aviation program would be an expression of America’s traditions of doing things on a splendid scale”. The seeds were planted for the US to develop and deploy the grandest air armada the world had ever seen. And if America planned to deploy such a “splendid force”, they needed a strong willed man to lead it.
A brash, self promoting, aggressive and extremely capable, thirty-seven year old Major named William “Billy” Mitchell was the choice. The young Mitchell became converted to the cause of air power sometime in the early 1900s. By 1906, he published an article on the Cavalry Journal stating that “Conflicts no doubt will be carried out in the future in the air”. In the spring of 1917, Mitchell and several other Army officers were sent to France as military observers to learn about air tactics and operations. Mitchell heard the news of the US declaration on war while he was traveling in Spain. He immediately boarded the first train he found bound for Paris. In Paris, Mitchell opened a small office with two French military liaison officers attached to it. It was there that the brash Mitchell began to craft numerous air plans and operational packages that he would cable to Washington for further study. In his papers, Mitchell wrote about the size of the Army’s air arm, America’s manufacturing capabilities and his goals for a massive industrial effort concentrated on aircraft design and development. There are rumors, albeit without much evidence to support it so far, that Mitchell played a pivotal role in French Premier Alexandre Ribot’s request to Washington for 4,500 new aircrafts, 5,000 pilots and 50,000 mechanics early in the summer of 1917.

The “outrageous” proposal caught the US General Staff completely off-guard. But it did find a sympathetic ear on the President and his allies in the US House of Representatives. In July 1917, the House passed the largest, single piece appropriation bill ($ 640,000,000) in the country’s history. Unfortunately for the Allied, no amount of money was able to cover the fact that by the mid 1910s, America’s industrial base was unable to mass produce the numbers of aircrafts the Bill intended. Even with the decision to manufacture only European design, America’s industries were inadequate set up for the task. This was a daunting task for an industry that “only” produced 87 airplanes the previous year. The Americans were years behind Europe. Something “must be done” said a surprised President Wilson. In the spring of 1917, the President appointed Howard E. Coffin to head a committee for the mobilization of the nation’s resources towards mass production of aircrafts and its systems. Coffin, a workaholic automobile executive, promptly applied his automaker, assembly line methods to the aircraft industry. He was so sure of his methods that a few months after his appointment, Coffin boasted to The Saturday Evening Post that “fifty thousand open roads to Berlin” will be available very soon. To make his promise a reality, Coffin had to employ several unorthodox methods. Chief among them was the creation of the Spruce Production Regiments. In 1917, the US had a sever shortage of spruce lumber, a vital ingredient in the construction of aircraft frames. To combat this, Coffin recruited 26,500 soldiers and placed them in massive logging camps all along the Pacific Northwest. He also shifted all aircraft engine production into one single model, the American Liberty engine. The Liberty was the brainchild of two auto engine designers, JG Vincent of Packard Motor Car Company and EJ Hall of Hall and Scott Motor Car Company. On May 1917, both men were urgently summoned to Washington and told that they will be sequestered in a hotel room until they came up with a workable and innovating design. With the help of workers from the National Bureau of Standards, they did it in just five days. The first Liberty engine rolled out of the production lines in December.

If designing and building a workable engine turned out to be relatively easy, building the aircrafts themselves turned out to be a long and painstaking process. It was soon realized inside Washington circles that the Americans would take years, even a decade, to catch up with the Europeans in aircraft design and development, so the decision was adapted to standardize a few of the European models. Planes such as the Italian Caproni bomber, the English Spad and Bristol fighters as well as the DH4; were viewed as firm and basic concepts from which the massive US industrial base could make “copies” of. But the reality was, as it is today, that aircraft manufacturing and design goes hand in hand. The degree of hand craftsmanship so integrated in all European designs clashed with the American way of mass production. The production problem would lead to countless delays and setbacks on the productions lines. Tens of millions of dollars were “wasted” on producing Italian and British aircrafts. For example, the failure to properly adapt the Liberty to heavier Caproni bomber meant that the vaunted Italian bomber would be underpowered for its task. The same goes with the DH4 conversions. The DH4 was the only aircraft type the Americans mass produced (1.400 units were sent to France), but once it arrived on the front, the American DH4 proved to be an unreliable air platform. The Liberty engine, which was adapted to fit a smaller engine section, gave the plane a bigger torque than its airframe could take. Pilots who try to run the engine at full throttle usually discovered that the plane’s airframe began to disintegrate in mid air. Such was the traumatic experience of American manufactured aircraft that by the end of the war, more than 80% of all US Air Service pilots were flying French made aircrafts.

No matter which planes they fly, Mitchell was determined to make the American air effort in the war as grandiose as he could. It must have shocked the inflatable Mitchell when he heard the news that Brigadier General Benjamin Foulois was appointed Chief of the Air Service, “an artillery man” as Mitchell usually called him. Foulois arrived in France in the fall of 1917 ready to take command of one hundred officers and around three hundred men. The next summer saw Foulois take overall command of air operations for the American First Army under the command of “Black Jack” Pershing. For Mitchell, the appointment of a “land commander” to such a prestigious (and a post he himself held briefly) was adding insult to injury. He repeatedly clashed with his new leader. So much so that Foulois wrote a letter to Pershing asking him to relieve Mitchell from all active commands and to “ship him to the US for good”.

Read Part 2 of this story here.

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Story By: Raul Colon

e-mail:rcolonfrias@yahoo.com

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