 The United States Army presents The Big Picture, an official report produced for the armed forces and the American people. Now to show you part of The Big Picture, here is Sergeant Stuart Queen. Last week you saw the beginning of aviation, starting in the fields of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Today we shall see part two of this three-part series, covering the era of General Billy Mitchell through to the supersonic aircraft of today. Brigadier General William Mitchell, who had had a distinguished war record, argued that the mayhem doctrine of sea power had been outmoded by the airplane and pleaded for a separate national air arm. He contended in seeking a $60 million appropriation for Army air services, or about half the cost of a single battleship, that the United States could begin developing an air force which could hold mastery of both the air and the seas. Larry Bell was still with Glenn Martin when. That resulted in Congress bringing about a test wherein one of the targets that we were supposed to sink or try to sink was the famous Oster Friesland. This ship was anchored about a hundred miles offshore, and six of the Martin bombers went out, each carrying a 2,000-pound bomb. They paraded over the battleship, and they dropped the six bombs and only one hit it, and that was by mistake. The rest were timed to detonate at 100 feet below the surface, and it practically exploded. The Oster Friesland, at least, had ripped the bottom of the ship from bow to stern, and the ship sank in four minutes. The nation accepted the airplane and tacitly agreed with its advocates, but there was still no federal provision for long-range planning and procurement. Nevertheless, a core of designers and manufacturers stayed with a business. In the ceaseless drive to attain longer range and more reliable performance, the airplane, its engine, its components, and its instruments steadily were growing more complex. But the primary goal was speed. Roscoe Turner. I have maintained ever since that I've been flying that there's only one reason for flying, and that is speed. It's 1910 Curtis, 49 miles an hour. 1910 White, 61 miles an hour. 1911 Wyman, 78 miles an hour. 1920 Mosley, 156 miles an hour. Maughan, in 1922, 206 miles an hour. In 1925 Doolittle, 232 miles an hour. Jimmy Doolittle, a hell for leather pilot whose own cold judgment was that he was essentially a technician. These record flights have a very real meaning. Competition has perhaps always been the greatest stimulus to improvement. A great many, great men have contributed to aviation purely as specialists, sparing one of the greatest. Colonel Clark, who devised one of the first good air foils. Sam Heron came along with his cylinders and his fuel, and then Frank Mark with his carburation devices and later fuel injection. Frank Colba with his propeller. Our earliest propellers were all wooden propellers, but they had several shortcomings. They were subject to atmospheric troubles, and they twisted out of shape in various climates. And they were also quite thick so that the high speed at which propeller tips operated, they were losing efficiency. One of the things which we did to overcome this was to develop a metal propeller, which first was a drop force aluminum alloy blade, being very much thinner than the wooden ones. The efficiency was maintained in better condition. Sam Heron began working on aircraft engines as early as 1909, and shortly went to the Royal Aircraft Factory in England. I came to this country in 1921, and for the next five years, was engaged in air-cooled cylinder development. It was really the air-cooled engine that made fuel development so necessary. The first move was to put tetraethyl lead in the existing gasoline. Later, the Air Force got the idea of adding the component that has the high end of the octane scale to the gasoline, and that eventually led to 100 octane gasoline. Frank Mark, the Carburetion and Fuel Control Specialist. Our carburetion work has always had to be a good bit like that of the Wright brothers, in the respect that we could get a little guide from the textbook. The automobile carburetor, of course, was designed to operate on the level. The aircraft carburetors have to climb, dive, even fly upside down. Also, they have to go up an altitude where the air is thin. Mark Hobbs, Perry, Clark, Caldwell, Heron. The singular devotion with which these men and scores of other specialists pursued their particular fields leads H.M. Jack Horner, whose own specialty of aircraft production combined the fruits of all their labors, to say that heritage of research, development, background work that goes into aircraft has continued throughout the whole existence of aircraft and the great improvements that have come there, too. Then, midway in the 20s came two events that turned the course of American aviation sharply upward. First, the government adopted the recommendations of President Coolidge's moral board. These called for a sustained aircraft procurement program built on the foundation of a privately operated and technically competitive aircraft industry. Although both military airmen and technologists were convinced that the airplane long before had outgrown its function as a scout, the bulk of our aircraft still consisted of observation planes. Now, new, more powerful engines began to emerge for advanced aircraft, which both services had developed. The nation moved rapidly from a third-rate air power to international leadership. The second event was the successful green Charles Lindbergh made come true. In his single-engine Ryan monoplane, Lindbergh had flown the Atlantic nonstop to parents. Two weeks later, carrying Charles Levine as a passenger, Clarence Chamberlain flew the Atlantic and landed in Germany. First of all, we were trying to beat Lindbergh away. And second, we had to keep our plans a deep, dark secret because we had overheard Mrs. Levine say, if I thought my Charlie was going in that airplane, I'd burn it up. We finally got away about six o'clock in the morning on the 4th of June, 1927. The first thousand miles to Newfoundland was through good weather. The only trouble was we had had winds. And our tests on the Long Island showed that we could fly for 40 hours with at 100 miles an hour. Well, on the flight up to Newfoundland, we were only making 70 miles an hour. And 70 miles an hour for 40 hours is 2800 miles. It was 3200 to land on the other side, leaving the last 400 to swim. Well, fortunately, the wind shifted after we left Newfoundland. And as you see, we made it. The unusual engineering accomplishments of our American aeronautical industry began to bear fruit in the late 20s and early 30s. From a military point of view, for the first time, our various types of combat planes were unmatched abroad. Moreover, we found the solid beginning of commercial air transport. Two famous army pilots, Carl Tuey Spotz and Ira Aker, flew seven days in 1929 without landing. The question mark flight was an endeavor to use refueling as a means of keeping a plane in the air for a long time. The driving inspiration behind it, I believe, was Ira Aker. The flight did prove that refueling was practical. General Aker remembers an incident that forecast the need for equipment which would permit flying. In 1919, flying in the Philippines from Manila to Stotsenburg, our station at that time, I ran into a typhoon and the rain was so heavy that I couldn't see the horizon. I fell in a spin. And only the fact that the Manila Bay was yellow and the rain was darker was I able to recover from the spin and fly home. To my surprise, I fell in for the first time. And when you couldn't see, you couldn't fly. I described this to Lieutenant Longfella, a later general Longfella in the Second World War. And we began some crude experiments by hanging a plumb bob down across the instrument board and by putting a carpenter's level on the lingerie. And got so that with these two aids, we could fly through clouds, through several thousand feet of cloud. 10 years after General Aker's Manila experience, Jimmy Doolittle, an association with a sperry company, tackled the problem. I made the first blind flight, the first completely blind flight, taking off under a hood, flying a prescribed course, and landing back under the hood. Without ever having seen out of the airplane. This doesn't sound very important now, but out of that came two instruments, the artificial horizon, the directional gyro, that are today standard equipment on every commercial airplane and every combat military airplane. The Great Depression had come. The industry was hard hit. But nevertheless, new companies developed to meet the increasing complexity of the airplane and its growing use of metals, electronics, and automatic controls. Dutch Kindleberger departed from Douglas to take over North American. Companies were formed bearing the famous names Bell, Fairchild, Northrop, Beach, Cessna. A World War Navy pilot, Leroy Grumman, left civil engineering to enter aviation. We knew that a conventional airplane wouldn't get us an order. We finally ended up with the design of the first military fighter with retractable landing gear, for which we got a contract and which proved to be highly successful, having the speed for our excess of any current army or Navy fighter of that time. The 30s also were the years in which each summer, fierce competition was held to determine the best of the airplane breed. Proof of the individual airplanes, engines, and pilots came in the national air races. With thousands looking on, the legendary pilots raced. Doolittle, Hazelop, Turner, Whitman, Levere, Kulbach, Newman, Fuller, Jackwell, and Cochran. And flyers still flew against the clock across the continent, across the seas, and indeed around the world itself. Balkan, Post, Gatti, Bird, Hughes, Amelia Earhart, and Wrong Way Corrigan. As the hour swung late in the 30s, the air races were curiously American. For in Europe and Asia, aviation was not a case of relatively puny efforts and sums, such as America was providing, much of it from individual man and companies. Rather, the vast resources of powerful foreign nations now were thrown behind the construction of air forces designed to subdue the world or to defend against such aggression. In the United States, under the impact of a depression, Congress had scrapped the moral board procurement plan and stopped providing appropriations for 1,800 military airplanes that had been scheduled. A New Year's Day, 1936, the Army Air Corps had only 300 planes fit for war duty. A year later, we had dropped to sixth place among powers and air combat strength, although our industry was judged to be technically at least 18 months ahead of foreign competition. France had squandered a first-rate air power while she sat behind the Maginot line. The British, too, had let the Axis powers outstrip them. Frantically, both countries turned toward the United States, aware that in the very act of running hard to meet crisis after crisis, an emphasis had been placed upon research, experiment, and development, which gave the United States technically superior aviation equipment. So the free world turned to the United States. Germany's Luftwaffe had demonstrated that the airplane was a vital weapon of modern offensive war. In the skies above England, the Royal Air Force now demonstrated that the airplane was a vital instrument of modern defensive war. The struggle in Europe shook America. A month after Congress had received a bill providing only 61 combat airplanes for the Army Air Corps for the following year, President Roosevelt called for a long-range production program of 50,000 airplanes. America slowly mobilized its productive capacity. It began to draft its young men. It sought to train them with wooden guns, cardboard tanks, and mock airplanes until it could gear its productive capacity to build the real thing. The war spread. Germany seized Norway, turned on its momentary ally, Russia, overran Greece, joined its partner, Italy and Africa, and encouraged its Asiatic ally, Japan. Nothing could have convinced the people of America more surely of the bitter nature of modern war than the sneak punch that Japan threw at Pearl Harbor. The nation fell to work to expand its token battle forces and its production into a great tide of men and machines to train men and to equip them for required long months, particularly in aviation. Immediately after the President's pronouncement in 1914, licenses were given to the automotive group largely to assist in the production schedules which lie ahead. Nevertheless, until the end of 1943, the equipment which actually saw service on the various fighting fronts all over the world were furnished entirely by the aeronautical industry because it was a fact that it required 20 months, two years, for the average automotive company to begin. With their momentum at full flood, the Japanese swept through the Pacific. Jimmy Doolittle and a little band of flyers carried the war home to them in a joint Navy Air Force operation. I've frequently been asked, what was the purpose and what was the effect of the first Tokyo raid? Well, the purpose was to take the war to Japan, to show them that their island was not inviolate. The effect was to cause them to divert some of their military strength that was needed in the South Pacific to the protection of the home islands. Slowly, the nation began to regain control of the air and the sea lanes that it had lost in the Pacific. The first great victory was the Battle of the Coral Sea. Captain Thatch, one of the Navy's ableist flyers and tacticians, remembers that battle and the subsequent battle of Midway. In the Battle of the Coral Sea, for example, the dive bombers and torpedo planes and the fighters came in almost simultaneously. But the enemy concentrated on the dive bombers. At the same time, that let the torpedo planes in and they did most of the damage. On the other hand, in the Battle of Midway later, the enemy fighters concentrated on the torpedo planes and the dive bombers came in almost unmolested. I could see them coming down like a huge waterfall and there were particularly no misses. They were the ones that did the job in the Battle of Midway. From their bases in England, American bombers began to strike at the heart of Germany under the direction of general spots. Strategic bombing was one of the ways of winning the war. And our fighter operations in a large measure developed into covering operations for the bombers. In order to do that, we had to have the development that had taken place. Good radio, so the leader of the fighter outfits could not only talk to his own men, but be in communication with the bombers and in turn get some guidance from ground control stations on the ground by radio. This resulted in a different type of fighting and a different type of operation. But it proved conclusively in World War II that the airplane had developed to such an extent that air warfare became a different war altogether than land and sea warfare. Wellwood Beale, a member of the team of designers who created the B-17, saw the airplane altered from a defensive to an offensive weapon. The conception of strategic air bombing was not fully developed at that point. Originally, for instance, the B-17 was built to protect our coast from an invading fleet and hence it was called the Flying Fortress. But when we got to England, it was obvious that to use these bombers to the greatest advantage that we would have to not only get the enemy's supply lines, but the places where he manufactured his military equipment. The British thought it would be easier to do it at night. It had much greater chance of success and would be less vulnerable to enemy fighters and they called their bombing saturation bombing. They dropped large numbers of bombs on a large industrial area. The Americans, however, decided that with the B-17 and the B-24 that they could pinpoint a specific target, for instance, the ball bearing factory at Swinefoot. They, in order to do the job properly, decided that it should be done at daytime where their bomb site was the most effective. At home, the United States had channeled its great energies and its vast technologies to produce and flood the goods of war. And now, with our allies, our integrated sea, land and air combat team attacked. No one in aviation believes that aviation alone won the war. We do believe that the war might not have been won by ourselves and our allies, except that we had control of the air. In the war's closing hours, Germany had employed guided missiles brutally, but without decisive effect. Simultaneously, England and Germany had put a few airplanes in the air powered by a radical new type of engine, the jet turbine. The jet became really important in aviation. The accumulated engineering know-how that this country had built up with its destination equipment suddenly became very much less important. This event was really a great leveler in engineering background and potential for all countries. And we had to start over again to try to regain the supremacy which we had in World War II. In their march across Germany, Russia had seized Germany's military tools and designs and many of the engineers who were developing the jet. The Russians now increasingly saw the allied victory in which they had been a partner as largely their own. The Western world was either bled white by the war or demobilized. Russia and its communists allies alone kept their armies intact. Their whole creed was one of forts and they began imposing that force on Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and Czechoslovakia. Russia's abrupt belligerence forced this country's attention upon the air power we had let melt away. For the third time in little more than a generation, the nation set about building a modern air arm. This one to be shaped around the fantastic speeds the gas turbine engine provided. Then in 1948, when the Russians sealed off the land corridors leading to Western Berlin, the United States, England and France countered with a famous Berlin air leak. From their bases outside the Iron Curtain, a steady stream of airplanes flew night and day supplying West Berlin's two million residents with food, fuel and medicine. Finally, the communists capitulated and reopened the land corridor. Then they sent their minions into war in Korea. There the United Nations chose to stand and fight. It was a strange, bitter, circumscribed war. The Air Force's prime striking weapon, its strategic air command was ruled out of bounds. The first sustained jet combat in history took place in a quadrangle of sky up to 40,000 feet above the earth but always south of the Alu River. Russia set aloft a first-rate jet fighter than me. Only the Air Force's saber from the United Nations array of fighter planes could match it. It was a war in which transport airplanes flew 7,000 miles to deliver materiel and to return sick and wounded men. And it was a war in which the helicopter, with its ability to fly standing still and land anywhere, did a multitude of jobs. Among them, transporting literally thousands of wounded from the battlefield to rear area hospitals for prompt surgical attention. Under the impact of Korea, the nation had begun again to turn out modern aircraft in quantities. Mundy Peel, the chairman of the industry's association. We as an aircraft industry are at present time turning out about 14,000 airplanes. At the moment, we are a healthy industry. We have to pour back tremendous amount of funds into research and development, funds that we earn when we make the airplanes. This is a very healthy thing. It creates competition. We want competition. Modern test pilots who fly at sonic speeds and incredible altitudes take an equally factual view of their calling. Tex Johnston sums up his philosophy after putting the J57-powered B-52 through its paces. After 12 years of testing, 10 years in the jet field, involving the first jet airplane to fly in this country, the B-59, first rocket airplane to fly in the United States, the X-1 incident with the first airplane to fly faster than the speed of sound. The B-47, the B-52, I believe all the more in the two old sayings. First, that one test flight is worth 1,000 expert opinions, and the other one for the flyboys, altitude above you and runway behind you will never do you any good. Chuck Yeager, the first man to fly through the sonic barrier, and Bill Bridgeman, a test pilot who has flown almost twice the speed of sound and has piloted a plane at an altitude of 79,000 feet, discussed their calling in language peculiarly their own. I certainly enjoyed the work. I think launch is the only safe way to get into that kind of plane. It's a heck of a lot safer. Yeah, and you burn so much fuel when you take off before you get up to the altitude where the airplane can drop you. And I actually, I personally think that's the most fun involved in a flight is when the guy cuts you loose, you're just hanging there for a minute, just like on a rolling coaster. And so the airplane has evolved from the rights whose first flights at Kitty Hawk were at speeds hardly faster than an athlete can run to speeds today where the Bridgemans, the Yeagers, and the Johnstons travel faster than a bullet. Horizons far beyond today's achievements, still beckon. Frankly long. Had he flown before? Yes, I've flown before. The big picture is an official report for the armed forces and the American people produced by the Army Pictorial Center presented by the Department of the Army in cooperation with the state.