“Building an army in the air, regiments and brigades of
winged cavalry on gas driven flying horses”, The America Air
Entry into the Great War
By: Raul Colon 2009
By late 1916, three
years of continuing and savage fighting had ravaged much of
northern France and the Low Countries. A stalemate had
descended over the Western Front. By January 1917, and after
showing early promise, the air campaign that visionaries
thought would 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 stalemate 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 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 said 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 would carry the
day for the exhausted Allies. No where was the sentiment
more palpable than in the War Department, where Secretary of
War, Newton Baker declared that “a huge American aviation
programme 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 planed 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 a convert 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 travelling 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 were rumours, 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 aircraft, 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 the sympathetic ear of
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 Allies, 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 aircraft the Bill intended.
Even with the decision to manufacture only European designs,
America’s industries were inadequately set up for the task.
This was a daunting problem for an industry that had 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 aircraft 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 boosted to The Saturday Evening Post that “fifty
thousands 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 was 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
relative easy, building the aircraft itself turned 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 adopted to standardize
few of the Europeans’ 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 aircraft. For example, the failure to properly adapt
the Liberty to heavy Caproni bomber meant that the vaunted
Italian bomber would be underpowered for its task. The same
went for the DH4 conversions. The DH4 was the only aircraft
type the American 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 tried 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
manufactured aircraft.
No matter which planes they flew, Mitchell was determined to
make the American air effort in the war as grandiose as he
could. It must have shocked Mitchell when the news arrived
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 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”. Pershing’s response was as pragmatic as his
management skills. He knew men like Mitchell would form the
cornerstone of his Army’s air arm. Pershing would live with
a hot-headed officer as long as he delivered in the
battlefield. Foulois was “asked” by Pershing’s chief of
staff to accommodate the brash, but highly innovating
Mitchell. Foulois gave in and in July 1918, ceded to the
young officer the top tactical command of all United States
air forces in Europe.
Mitchell did not have long to bask in the glory of his new
command. A few weeks later, Pershing’s First Army was given
its own sector on the Western Front, the Saint-Mihiel
salient. A twenty four mile long bulge in the lines that the
Germans had held since their 1914 Verdun campaign. Now, four
years later, the newly arrived Americans were given the task
of straightening out the bulge. The situation was tailor
made for Mitchell’s newly developed tactics. The brash
American would have under his command the largest air armada
the world had ever seen, 1,418 aircraft, around 700 of them
from French operated squadrons. Their assigned task was more
complex than any air effort so far in the conflict. First,
they would sweep the salient’s skies of any German fighter,
paving the way for the second phase of the operation: the
strafing of enemy positions. Meanwhile, after achieving air
superiority, the artillery spotting package began to pin
point German troop concentration areas for artillery
bombardment attacks.
In the early hours of September 12th and in the mist of a
strong southwest wind, Mitchell’s massive air armada took to
the air. With more than 700 fighters in their fold, the
force was prepared to face the new Fokker D.VII, a single
seat fighter that came too late to alter the results on the
front. In fierce air to air combat, the Allies were able to
clear the Saint-Mihiel sector of any organized German
resistance. Without fighter cover, the Germans on the ground
were sitting ducks. For most of the American offensive,
Allied fighters and bombers pounded away at the retreating
German columns near Vigneulles and St. Benoit. “Dropping
down at the head of the column I sprinkled a few bullets
over the leading teams”, recalled the famous American air
ace, Eddie Rickenbacker. “Horses fell right and left…The
whole column was thrown into the wildest confusion” added an
exuberated Rickenbacker. The clearing and strafing strategy
proved so successful that Mitchell employed it a moth later
in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. On October 9th, a force of
two hundred bombers and one hundred fighters attacked with
impunity the German ground formations in the largest, single
daytime raid of the war.
The Saint-Mihiel air success was, for the most part, due to
the enormous scarifies and valour exhibited by the American
airmen and their ground support personnel. It’s a testament
to them and their visionary leaders that the 1918 battle for
the important Saint-Mihiel salient resulted in a clear
Allied victory instead of another stalemate. And although
the Americans did not build an “army in the air”, their new
air tactics and the implementation of old concepts by their
leaders, more noticeable, the brash Mitchell; accentuated
the American entry into the War to End all Wars.
The First World War, Hew Strachan, Penguin Books 2003
World War I, HP Willmott, Covent Garden Books, 2003
The Illusion of Victory, Thomas Fleming, Basic Books, 2003
The US Air Force: A Complete History, Group West Publishing
2004
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