One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power

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One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power Page 12

by Smith, Douglas V.


  2.Ibid.

  3.The administrative place, standing, and organization of naval aviation are matters complementary to that of personnel. Significant administrative developments parallel those of personnel in the first three decades of naval aviation. Fortunately, they have received more attention than the personnel problem.

  4.Marine officers and enlisted personnel were (and still are) included under the rubric of “naval aviation.” This chapter focuses on the Navy’s side of naval aviation.

  5.See Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark D. Mandeles, American and British Aircraft Carrier Development, 1919–1941 (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1999), for a discussion of the different paths by which the United States and Great Britain chose to organize their respective naval aviation forces and the practical consequences of those choices.

  6.The Act of 29 August 1916 established selection up as the mechanism for promotion to Rear Admiral, Captain, and Commander. Selection up was extended to promotion to Lieutenant Commander and Lieutenant by the Act of 29 May 1934. Prior to these acts, promotion was accomplished by attrition and seniority, tempered only marginally by passing promotion examinations.

  7.See Chisholm, Waiting (2001), chapters 18 and 19.

  8.NAV-DMS, 29 August 1925, 7. Records of the Bureau of Navigation, National Archives.

  9.See text later in this chapter for a discussion of the question of the appropriate distribution of pilots between commissioned officers and enlisted personnel.

  10.Senate Document No. 18, 69th Congress, 1st Session, 10 December 1925, p. 3.

  11.Qualifications for “Navy Air Pilot” had been established by administrative order of the Secretary of the Navy in April 1913, but these had no standing in law. In March 1915, “Naval Aviator” replaced “Navy Air Pilot” as the designation for naval officers qualified as aviators.

  12.Congressional Record, 3 June 1926, 10586.

  13.First used in March 1922 to comply with the law creating the Bureau of Aeronautics that required that the Chief of the Bureau and 70 percent of its officers be either aviators or observers, the “naval aviation observer” designation as established in law in 1925 had no relationship to usages of the same term in later decades. In this incarnation it was a practical success. Notable among the small initial cadre of naval aviation observers were William A. Moffett, Emory S. Land, and Joseph Mason Reeves. Moffett qualified as the first naval aviation observer in June 1922 in order to become the first Chief of the Bureau. An officer of many parts, Reeves began his commissioned service as an assistant engineer, became a line officer following the 1899 amalgamation of engineers with line, qualified as a naval aviation observer in 1925, and rose to become Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet in 1934. His contributions to the development of aviation and its effective integration into fleet operations cannot be overstated. See chapter six in Thomas Wildenberg, All the Factors of Victory: Admiral Joseph Mason Reeves and the Origins of Carrier Air Power (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005).

  14.House Report No. 389, 69th Congress, 1st Session, 26 February 1926, p. 7.

  15.The Act of 29 August 1916 appropriated $313 million for the Navy. It called for constructing sixteen capital ships, with eight to be built immediately, and 157 other warships during the following three years. House Report No. 1155, 64th Congress, 1st Session, 18 August 1916, p. 4.

  16.For all states, a fundamental problem is to build institutional mechanisms that allow rapid military expansion during wartime and an affordable military in more peaceful times. There was at this time no “naval reserve” as organized from the 1930s to the present. President Thomas Jefferson’s proposal for a naval militia failed. During the Civil War additional officers were procured by commissioning former naval officers and merchant marine officers, some few of whom were augmented into the regular line following the war. See Chisholm, Waiting (2001), chapters 12–14. A number of coastal states organized naval militias, mirroring their land militias, beginning in 1889. Although organization and training of these militias was haphazard at best, the total personnel, officers and men numbered over 4,000 by the Spanish-American War in 1898. Some 2,600 were mustered into the Navy as individuals, while 1,600 others joined the short-lived Auxiliary Naval Force and the Coast Signal Service. Support for any sort of Naval Reserve faded, not to revive until the 1914 onset of World War I. The 1914 Naval Militia Act authorized the president to mobilize the Naval Militia and Naval Reserve, but as there existed no Naval Reserve, in practice this meant calling out the militias (which by then added to 10,000 officers and men in twenty-two states). The Act of 3 March 1915 established the first U.S. Naval Reserve, to be composed of persons previously honorably discharged from naval service. This proved grossly inadequate. In consequence, following the National Defense Act of 1916, the Act of 29 August 1916 established a U.S. Naval Reserve comprising six classes, with the intent of quickly organizing a reserve of 10,000–15,000 officers and men. In September 1917, from the militias, 850 officers and 16,000 men were serving on active duty in the Naval Reserve Force in the class National Naval Volunteers, while the new Naval Reserve force itself provided 10,000 officers and men. The Act of 1 July 1918 transferred en masse the National Naval Volunteers to the Naval Reserve. With the Armistice, weighed down by an overly complicated set of laws and administrative rules, and congressional unwillingness to fund necessary training, the reserves, including the aviation reserve, fell into a state of desuetude. This brief narrative is drawn from the excellent account contained in Kenmore M. McManes, “Development of the Naval Reserve,” Military Affairs 17 (Spring 1953): 8–11.

  17.See Peter Mersky, ed., “U.S. Naval Air Reserve” (Washington, DC: Deputy Chief of Naval Operations and [Air Warfare] and the Commander, Naval Air Systems Command, 1987) for a detailed narrative and chronology of the development of naval aviation.

  18.See Gerald E. Wheeler, “Edwin Denby,” in Paolo E. Coletta, ed., American Secretaries of the Navy, Volume II (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1980), pp. 583–84.

  19.Mersky notes that “funds were provided in 1920 for 15[-]day training periods at Rockaway Beach, N.Y., for a limited number of Officers of Class Five. However, due to lack of funds, this opportunity was not offered again to Reserve aviators and, subsequently, all Class Five students were transferred to Class Six of the Volunteer Naval Reserve Force. Due to the fact that provision for actual flying was no longer made in the Naval Reserve, hundreds of aviation officers failed to reenroll at the completion of their first four years and left the Naval Reserve Force,” “U.S. Naval Air Reserve” (1987), p. 4.

  20.Note that authorized and actual numbers of officers were inevitably different in the event. Congress did not always appropriate enough monies to support the authorized strength and, when it did so, the Navy was not always able to commission enough officers annually to compensate for the attrition of officers, let alone to grow the officer corps to authorized strength. Usually the actual number of regular officers on active duty was less than that authorized.

  21.U.S. Statutes, 66th Congress, Session II, Chapter 228, pp. 834–35.

  22.Applications for transfer to the regular line totaled 1,461: 654 of 749 temporary Lieutenants, 382 of 576 Junior Lieutenants, and 425 of 591 Ensigns. Of this total number, 585 were Chief Warrant Officers, 399 Reserve officers, 474 enlisted men, and 3 Ensigns. Naval Academy officers were then retired on the basis of age-in-grade. Consequently, among the specific factors causing heartburn among the Naval Academy–educated officers was the length of service retirement mechanism accorded the transferred officers because they entered the Navy across a wide range of ages.

  23.In the early 1920s, the officer corps averaged about twenty resignations per month.

  24.Mersky, “U.S. Naval Air Reserve” (1987), p. 6.

  25.At this time, about 25 percent of the Navy’s pilots were in enlisted status as naval aviation pilots.

  26.In the event, only six universities organized and executed NROTC programs: University of California, Un
iversity of Washington, Northwestern University, Georgia Tech, Harvard, and Yale. The Navy had run a Volunteer Naval Reserve unit at St. John’s College commencing in fall 1924 (with a second class beginning fall 1925) as a proof of concept for the benefit of Congress. See Gerald E. Wheeler, “Origins of the Naval Reserve Officer Corps,” Military Affairs 20 (Autumn 1956): 170–74.

  27.An examination of World War II ships’ logs reveals that as Reserve officers reported aboard and departed ship, their commissioning source was indicated following their name and rank. Not all such officers were created equal. By mid-1943, NROTC line officers who went on active duty before the war started had been promoted to temporary Lieutenant Commanders, while Reserve officers from other sources rose no higher than Lieutenant.

  28.Section Five of the Act provided that officers not promoted and who, by length of service had become ineligible for further consideration for promotion, or who had been selected for promotion but found professionally unqualified on being examined, would be retired. Lieutenants age forty-five or more, or who had completed twenty years or more service and had failed the promotion examination for Lieutenant Commander, would be retired [my emphasis]. If they had been permanently appointed Ensign or above while holding permanent Warrant rank, they could revert to that rank rather than retire. These provisions disproportionately affected naval aviators.

  29.Comments of Representative John Delaney (D-NY) on the House floor. Congressional Record, 27 March 1935, 4541.

  30.Mersky, “U.S. Naval Air Reserve” (1987), p. 10.

  31.The Bureau of Aeronautics had projected that naval aviation’s requirements for 1941 would be met by the more than seven hundred aviation cadets expected to be on active duty by then. After that, their numbers would decrease gradually “until they eventually disappeared.” Ibid., p. 11. Some in naval aviation, however, believed that “there is little prospect of meeting Naval Aviator requirements from regular service sources, and that we must accept the Aviation Cadet as a permanent fixture and expect them to compose forty-five percent of the Naval Aviators, unless some remedial action can be taken,” ibid.

  32.Naval aviators in the Volunteer Reserve were largely “Pensacola graduates who were not attached to a Fleet Reserve squadron, largely because of their place of residence,” ibid.

  33.Ibid.

  34.Initial appropriations for fiscal 1935 partially restored the number of annual drills for aviators to thirty-six from the twenty-two that had been held the year previous. Supplementary funds allowed forty-eight drills to be held by the end of the year. More important, flight training was returned to forty-five hours (although still none for the Volunteer Reserve), ibid.

  35.The Horne Board comprised Rear Admiral Frederick J. Horne (then on the General Board) as senior member, and Captain George D. Murray, Commander Edwin T. Short, Lieutenant Colonel Lewie G. Merritt (USMC), and Lieutenant Commander Walton W. Smith as members. It operated according to the regulations governing Navy courts and boards. See Chisholm, Waiting (2001), pp. 736–41.

  36.Transferred officers would be carried as additional numbers in the grades to which they were transferred and in any grades to which they might subsequently be promoted. To be eligible for transfer, officers must have completed eighteen months active duty since completing naval aviation cadet duty. Sea service requirements would not apply to transferred officers while in the grade to which they were originally appointed. Reserve naval aviators would be paid a lump sum ($500) when released from active duty. When mobilized, reservists would take precedence after the regular officers whose active service was one-half of theirs. To appoint up to 370 Reserve naval aviators to the regular line, a board of officers was established, the Leary Board, which in October 1940 recommended 3 Lieutenant Commanders, 20 Lieutenants, 56 Junior Lieutenants, and 284 Ensigns for the regular line. This constituted the largest such appointment of non–Naval Academy officers to the regular line since the Act of 4 June 1920.

  37.The two-tier system meant that only some junior officers would be on the track to the higher grades; the remainder would be in and out, with some happy few given the opportunity to become regulars and the rest taken care of equitably by bonuses on separation.

  38.From 1899 through 1915, in order to reduce the age of officers in the senior grades—if insufficient natural attrition (death, disability, dismissal, or resignation) occurred to provide the specified annual flow—a board of senior officers was constituted to “pluck” those officers deemed inefficient. Out of equity concerns, Congress rescinded approval of this mechanism in 1915. During the regime of promotion by seniority, officers were required to pass examinations before being promoted. However, these examinations were of insufficient rigor to weed out officers incompetent to the duties of the next higher grade. Rear Admiral G. T. Pettingill observed in 1933 that “examining boards have always been chickenhearted about handling cases drastically because the penalty is so great.” Hearings before the General Board, Naval War College Microfilm Collection, 15 February 1933, p. 28.

  39.Integration into the line did not, of course, mean that naval aviator officers appeared no different than their battleship brethren. To mark their additional qualification as a naval aviator, officers quickly sought a distinguishing badge (perhaps stimulated by Army aviators, who began wearing special badges in 1913). John Towers recollected in 1948 that when he took over the aviation desk in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations in autumn 1916, he recommended that naval aviators be authorized to wear an insignia. He submitted a design for same based on work by the naval artist Henry Reuterdahl, which was in turn modified by the manufacturer Bailey, Banks, and Biddle. “Origin of Navy Pilot Wings: Adm. Towers Recalls Artist-Designer,” Naval Aviation News (Autumn 1948): 21. Based on Towers’ proposal, the Chief of Naval Operations wrote to the Bureau of Navigation in July 1917 that since the Army and foreign services already had aviation devices, naval aviators should be given comparable recognition. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels approved an amendment to the Navy’s Uniform Regulations in September 1917, establishing official recognition of the “wings of gold”: “A Naval Aviator’s device, a winged fouled anchor with the letters ‘U.S.’, is hereby adopted to be worn by qualified Naval Aviators. This device will be issued by the Bureau of Navigation to Officers and Men of the Navy and Marine Corps who qualify as Naval Aviators, and will be worn on the left breast.” The first gold wings were evidently delivered two months later. No other line officers had such a distinguishing badge at the time. Submariners would not have their “dolphins” until 1924 (at Ernest King’s recommendation), and it would be several decades more before the Navy’s other communities developed their own distinguishing marks. In addition to the “wings of gold,” the same month Secretary Daniels approved the “aviation working greens” uniform (based on the Marine Corps’ green uniform) for naval aviators, prompted by a desire that the aviators would have a practical uniform they would actually wear (aviators were already notorious for disregarding uniform requirements, in part because existing uniforms were poorly adapted to the conditions of flying). Add to the wings and the greens the aviators’ brown shoes (worn with the greens and with khakis) and leather flight jackets—none of which were authorized for non-aviators—and it is not difficult to grasp the heartburn, if not outright hostility, aviators occasioned among the latter, particularly senior officers. Naval aviators might be part of the line but they made no bones about what was in their view, their special status.

  40.At a time when long-distance travel, even for naval aviators, was mostly accomplished by means of rail, this required a greater investment of time for aviators than that expended by their battleship brethren. Of course, naval air stations were largely at substantial remove from the northeastern United States. The implication is that special efforts were made to ensure that naval aviators would serve on the selection boards.

  41.Hearings before the General Board, Naval War College Microfilm Collection, 15 February 1933, p. 28.

  42.In test
imony before the House Naval Affairs Committee, Admiral William Leahy, Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, estimated that of the 1,219 officers commissioned under the Act of 4 June 1920, the law would remove 787 by 1942. Most of those would be aviators. To be sure, there was a genuine problem of stagnation in promotion, and existing length-of-service retirement provisions meant than many officers would be retired before being promoted. For example, by early 1934, 250 officers had accumulated on the Lieutenant Commanders’ promotion list, but only eighty vacancies occurred annually. The law established the junior selection boards with one rear admiral as president and eight captains as members.

  43.Army and Navy Register, 30 June 1934, pp. 501, 517.

  44.The Act of 11 May 1928 had already specified that “when Officers are assigned to airships on duty requiring them to participate regularly and frequently in aerial flights, the Secretary . . . shall determine and certify whether or not, in his judgment, the service to be performed is equivalent to sea duty. If such service as this is considered to be the equivalent of sea duty, it shall be considered to be actual sea service on sea-going ships for all purposes.” King also proposed that this language be made known to the selection boards. Memorandum, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics to the Chief of the Bureau of Navigation and the Judge Advocate General, 25 July 1934, Aer-F-3-HAD (OL P16-3), pp. 1–2. Records of the Bureau of Navigation, National Archives.

  45.Leahy could only respond, weakly, that “repeated assignment to specialist duties of Officers below the grade of Commander has not had any adverse effect on these Officers’ prospects of promotion and it is particularly important that it should not in the future have an adverse effect in view of the present policy of the Department to utilize young line Officers for the duties of the staff corps.” Army and Navy Register, 19 January 1935, p. 41.

  46.Army and Navy Register, 2 April 1938, p. 20.

 

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