Compounding these difficulties was the initial absence of aviators in the flag grades. For the first decade or so, Navy aviation would have to rely on selection boards composed of battleship admirals, some of whom were actively opposed to any significant role for aviation in the Navy, to promote aviators whose career paths did not look familiar to them. Two methods were adopted to address this problem. Aviators worked to insert language by law and administrative direction in the instructions to selection boards about criteria for evaluating officers. Simultaneously, as noted above, aviators sought sympathetic battleship officers who might be formally grandfathered in as naval aviation observers. In turn, aviators lobbied within the Navy to see that at least one such formally designated officer (and subsequently naval aviators) would be included on every selection board.
Analysis of line selection board membership over the 1916–1941 period reveals that their efforts were successful. Although never part of administrative regulations, let alone law during this period, aviators appear to have gained an informal “quota” for selection board membership. Beginning with the June 1926 board, at least one aviator (and occasionally two) was included among the nine members. This started with the senior officers qualified as naval aviation observers and continued until enough naval aviators had reached flag rank to serve. The overwhelming majority of non-aviator board members were drawn from officers stationed in or near Washington, D.C.; for example, Boston, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Philadelphia. By contrast, the aviator members came a great distance to serve on the boards.40
Support for extending promotion by selection to Lieutenant Commander and Lieutenant grew as a way to address the “hump,” as we saw above. Although ostensibly a neutral mechanism functioning solely to promote the officers comparatively best fitted for the duties of the next higher grade, another agenda was also at work, namely, the place of aviation officers and the larger problem of generalists versus specialists. The comments of Rear Admiral J. Raby, following his tenure on the December 1932 selection board, are instructive:
If you look over the list today you will find that there are a good many men who are able to pass their examinations, not necessarily Naval Academy graduates, but men who came up from the ranks or temporary Officers during the war and many who are aviators. They followed one line all their lives and it does not look to me that they are qualified to perform their duty as Lieutenant Commander aboard ship, and for that reason . . . we ought to have some way of eliminating those men that would probably be a drag on that grade. They eventually . . . will fail in selection when they get to the next higher grade.41
It was the boldest declaration to date of the lack of confidence of senior officers in the non-Academy officers in the “hump” and the most direct linkage of the “hump” and naval aviation.
The Act of 29 May 1934, conceived in the Bureau of Navigation and introduced and passed in the Congress in a mere six weeks (while most officers were at sea on a fleet problem), extended promotion by selection to Lieutenant Commander and Lieutenant as a means, not so much to secure more effective officers, but to eliminate stagnation in promotion for Academy officers, and along the way to reduce if not completely purge the non-Academy officers, many of whom happened to be aviators.42
A key element in selection for promotion would be how sea service was defined. When promotion by selection was established in 1916, eligibility for selection was tied to four years’ service in grade, two of which had to be at sea; this, to forestall promotion of officers who navigated only their desks ashore. At the time, the specialized duties of aviators had not become entirely clear and their numbers were small. With the extension of selection up to the junior line grades, this provision became an obstacle to the aviators. More generally, it is indicative of the challenge aviation and its requirements posed to the prevailing understanding of what it meant to be a Navy officer.
Shortly before the first selection boards were to consider officers for promotion to Lieutenant Commander and Lieutenant, Rear Admiral William Leahy, Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, issued a circular letter defining sea duty as “service on board sea going ships of the Fleet and special services considered sea service.” He laid out specific duties and ships that were not considered sea duty.43
Consequently, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, Rear Admiral Ernest King, on the belief that this interpretation of sea duty was strongly prejudicial to aviation interests, wrote to Leahy recommending that language governing Marine Corps promotion be inserted in junior selection board precepts, to wit: “in determining an Officer’s fitness for promotion, administrative staff duty performed by him under appointment or detail, and duty in aviation, or in any technical specialty, shall be given weight by the Board equal to that given line duty equally well performed.”44 King argued such was necessary both to protect equity for individual officers, who, through no fault of their own, had not been to sea, and to ensure that an adequate number of aviators would be retained in the Navy.
Leahy was willing only to provide the language proposed by King in a composite of laws regularly furnished to selection boards—no special attention would be given to it. Not one to concede defeat readily, King appealed directly to Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson. Shortly thereafter the latter clarified Navy promotion policy in a January 1935 instruction to Leahy. Notably, the instruction was couched in general terms, but its most important outcome was intended to be the protection of junior naval aviators:
The repeated assignment of many Officers to special types of duty, for which they have been fitted by postgraduate instruction or special training, is highly essential to the efficiency of the Fleet . . . and that the assignment of Officers below the rank of Commander to other general service for the sole purpose of “rotation” or “rounding out the record” of an individual at the expense of the Service is, at the present time, considered neither necessary nor desirable.
The Secretary considers it necessary to Naval efficiency and to the best interests of the Service that extended devotion to duty in all Naval specialties and the successful performance of specialist duty be given full consideration in determining an Officer’s fitness for promotion, equal to that given other general line duties equally well performed. Continued employment on specialist duty of Officers below the rank of Commander should not adversely affect their prospects for selection and promotion.45
Although the issues of specialization and the equivalence for purposes of promotion of broadly different types of duty within a single unrestricted line officer corps were not now entirely laid to rest, the foundational concept had been established. As officer career paths were increasingly formalized in succeeding decades, greater precision was achieved in assessing the equivalence of different kinds of duty. Inevitably, and appropriately, some duties would be more equal than others in selecting officers for promotion.
In the event, junior line selection boards passed over 247 of 292 Lieutenants who were not Naval Academy graduates while the overall promotion rate from Lieutenant to Lieutenant Commander was nearly 70 percent. Lieutenant W. J. Slattery testified before the House Naval Affairs Committee that Academy graduates were promoted who “were in high school when I was standing watch on a warship in the World War. I am in command of a squadron from which two Lieutenants have just been selected over my head.”46 Some in Congress, focused on equity for the non-Academy officers, responded sympathetically. Others, most concerned with naval efficiency, noted that promotion was not so much a matter of individual merit as it was usefulness to the Service.
The Act of 22 June 1938 approached a comprehensive reorganization of the line officer corps. Notably, it created the category of “fitted Officer” (vice “best fitted”), to which a selection board might assign an officer—an officer who might be continued on active duty and remain eligible for consideration by the next selection board or who could be retired in his existing grade at the discretion of the board. The law’s provisions also institutionalized administrative practices, establishe
d specific new procedural protections for officers in selection, and clarified areas that contained significant ambiguities. Referring to the difference between fitted and best fitted officers, a subsequent Bureau of Navigation memorandum to flag officers noted that “the law fixes no standards for this adjudgment; the selection boards must, in their collective experience and judgment, develop them for their own guidance.”47
The Act of 13 June 1939 called for the Navy to appoint a board to consider the regular and Reserve personnel of naval aviation, which board was to render its report by 1 December of that year. The Horne Board (discussed earlier) proceeded from the principle that “no solution proposed at this time can be lasting. It is, therefore, of first importance to emphasize the most effective method of obtaining the desired result.” This included permitting the Navy the maximum administrative discretion possible in reshaping the officer personnel for wartime.
Indicating how far understanding of the place of aviation within the Navy had come since its 1911 inception, the Board had constantly kept in mind the fact that naval aviation is inseparably woven into the very warp and woof of the entire naval establishment. Therefore the board has given the most mature thought to the question of the relation of aviation personnel to the Navy as a whole. One element cannot be separated from the other elements and treated independently without gravely jeopardizing the strength and stability of the whole structure.48
It was a mature reflection on what it meant to be a naval officer.
The board recommended, among many things, that regular officers for aviation be secured based on (1) their completing two years’ sea service; (2) being under age 32; and (3) volunteering. Because it believed that “intensive aviation activity required in carrier-based aircraft squadrons tend[ed] to the early development of individual responsibility and piloting ability,” officers—after completing the aviation course—would perform two years’ duty with fleet aircraft squadrons before becoming eligible for other duty.
Its conclusions are worth noting in detail:
1.Officers should be rotated through all aspects of aviation duty to acquire a well-rounded knowledge;
2.assignment of line Officers . . . to aviation duty permits such diversification of duty from junior to senior billets that the designation “naval aviator” should be considered an added qualification and not a specialty tending in any way to divorce those Officers from the line [my emphasis];
3.aviation is an integral part of the Navy and continuous assignment to aviation should not prejudice an Officer’s career;
4.aviators should be required to maintain qualification for general line duty;
5.aviators on duty in aviation from junior to command grades should be considered eligible for assignment to command based on relative professional fitness with other line Officers;
6.aviators should be available for assignment to any line duty commensurate with their grade, without prejudice to reassignment to aviation duty or to future advancement;
7.as required by law, Commanding Officers of aircraft carriers or seaplane tenders should be naval aviators or naval aviation observers; Commanders of naval aviation schools, naval air stations, or naval aviation units for flight tactical purposes should be naval aviators; and
8.only naval aviators who were regular line should be assigned duty commanding a group or wing of aircraft.49
Thus, the board came down strongly on maintaining regular aviators, notwithstanding their need to develop certain specialized skills and abilities, as integral members of the unrestricted line. It specified certain career milestones and requirements that it believed would facilitate the appropriate probability of promotion for aviators.
However, as noted above, the board also recognized that all military organizations had to maintain large foundations of junior officers, with “successive groups of increasing responsibility and authority leading up to a small group in highest authority.” Expansion required principally increases in the numbers of junior officers and relatively fewer in the senior grades. Sufficient numbers of aviators would never be accessed through the regular line. Thus, the long-term solution was to have some officers pursue a naval career, while others would stay a short while and return to civilian life. In its view, the permanent number was to be 45 percent.
Reserve officers would continue to play an essential and expanding role (especially in wartime) in naval aviation. It devised a series of milestones for the development of Reserve officers following their accession through existing NROTC programs, from among graduates of aeronautical engineering courses at recognized universities, among other university graduates and those who had completed at least one-half of the courses required for graduation. The board proposed retaining Reserve aviators on active duty for up to twenty years, with some few annually permitted to commission into the regular line.
The board’s report was forwarded to Congress in January 1940. Most of its recommendations were incorporated into the Naval Aviation Personnel Act of 1940, signed into law by President Roosevelt on 27 August 1940. The Horne Board had laid out much of the foundation for conceptualizing and operating the officer personnel system for the next decades, especially the place of naval aviator officers within the larger regular line. Notably, regular aviators would have to meet the same requirements as any other line officer; they could not simply fly aircraft. Conversely, naval aviators would not be precluded from promotion and higher command on account of their “additional qualification.”
The problem of supplying the very large numbers of officers to fly in aviation units would be solved by acquiring Reserve officers, most all of whom would serve only in the junior grades, but could compete for a small number of regular commissions annually. Naval aviation would thereby have enough regular officers to provide organizational continuity and greater levels of expertise, and to compete for promotion to the higher grades and positions of greatest responsibility in the Navy with non-aviator regular line officers. In reality, there was no other mechanism by which the Navy might afford a peacetime naval aviation establishment that could greatly expand temporarily as required in the event of war.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
The introduction of aviation in 1911 triggered a set of organizational dynamics within the Navy resembling those occasioned by previous requirements for new kinds of expertise afloat, especially that of steam engineering in the mid-nineteenth century. Aviation called for a significant readjustment of thinking within the Navy about how “line officer” was defined, and, predictably, a three-decade tussle over the place of aviation within the Navy ensued over that meaning, resolved only on the eve of world War II. In that resolution were contained mechanisms to address three intertwined primary officer personnel problems: how specialization in aviation would be treated, how the appropriate numbers of officers would be acquired for aviation, and how naval aviators would fair in the rigorous process of promotion to the higher grades. The solutions adopted for these problems broadly defined naval aviation and still condition its place and performance in the Navy today.
Throughout these first three decades of naval aviation, the technology of aircraft and ships advanced rapidly, and the concept of operations for and aviation’s role in the fleet matured greatly. However, the underlying environmental conditions during this period were mostly not conducive to the development of aviation’s organization and personnel: the practical necessity of tremendous expansion of aviation for World War I, followed by its dramatic contraction in the immediate postwar period, the sore limitations imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty and the penuriousness of Congress in the 1920s, effects of the Great Depression, and then the threat of war. And, as naval aviation was attempting to find its place, the Navy was engaged in attempting to structure and solve its larger officer personnel problems.
That from these early decades naval aviation emerged poised to make its contribution as the fleet’s principal striking force in the great campaigns of World War II’s Pacific Theater is all the more rema
rkable, therefore. Out of a combination of sustained, systematic problem solving and internal political conflict came the personnel system that produced the officers necessary to plan and execute that wartime contribution, for, as Representative Fred Britten observed in 1934, “Cold steel isn’t worth a damn in an emergency. You need men to direct it.” We know well the most senior officers who led aviation during the war—Ernest King, William Halsey, Marc Mitscher, John S. McCain, John Towers; but for every one of these flag officers there were thousands of junior to command grade naval aviators, regular and reserve, who made it possible to execute the high-level plans and accomplish the strategic objectives. Although it is the ships and especially the aircraft that most often capture our attention and imagination, the presence in the Navy of a vast cadre of aviators and their performance in combat was rendered possible by the often invisible, sometimes arcane, and typically not very interesting officer personnel system.
NOTES
This chapter is based, in part, upon material contained in, and the research conducted for, Donald Chisholm, Waiting for Dead Men’s Shoes: Origins and Development of the U.S. Navy’s Officer Personnel System, 1793–1941 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
1.George van Deurs, Anchors in the Sky: Spuds Ellyson, The First Naval Aviator (San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978), p. 59.
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