[199] After World War I, the NACA had found for itself a niche in American aeronautics; after World War II, it had to see if that niche still fit. It did not. The NACA had changed in the course of the war. American aeronautics and government support of science had changed even more. As it did after World War I, the NACA would have to find for itself a place in the new scheme of things. And once again it would have to develop internal policies and procedures suited to its new role.

At first the NACA concentrated on the technical changes precipitated by World War II. Jerome Hunsaker claimed often and widely that the war had revolutionized aeronautics. Jet propulsion gave man the power to fly faster than sound. Even before the "sound barrier" was broken in 1947, knowledgeable people like Hunsaker perceived that the research problems of the future would be those associated with supersonic flight: compressibility, heat, and unprecedented complications in stability and control. In the last months of World War II, Hunsaker called for a national aeronautical research policy that would recognize this revolution and restore the NACA to its prewar role of fundamental research on the "frontiers of flight." The NACA echoed the call of its chairman, making the aeronautical revolution of World War II the leitmotiv of its postwar requests for increased funding and an expanded program of research.¹

Another revolution resulting from World War II - this one in the structure of the American aeronautical community - was going to influence the new national policy more than Hunsaker and the NACA seem to have anticipated. At the end of the war, the aircraft-manufacturing industry was the largest in the United States, and the Army Air Forces had grown from a branch of the ground forces into a military service in....

....its own right, soon to be anointed with independent status equal to that of the army or navy. Although the NACA had also grown tremendously during the war, it was dwarfed by comparison.² Worse still for the Committee, industry and the air force - the two traditional allies and clients of the NACA - emerged from the war with some old and new bones to pick with the NACA. Not that the Committee had been immune to criticism in its first 30 years: far from it. But now the criticism was coming from its customary friends and supporters (and other new sources as well), just at the time when those allies had achieved the power and influence in national affairs hitherto denied them. The national aeronautical-research policy that Hunsaker wanted to formulate in the wake of the jet-propulsion revolution was going to be hammered out by an aeronautical community that was not as neatly in the NACA camp as it once had been.

Two other trends in national politics were to intrude upon the shaping of a new national policy for the NACA. First, World War II had made the United States keenly aware of the importance of science and technology in the modern world and led to numerous attempts to institutionalize these suddenly indispensable ingredients of national....

.....existence. Second, the performance of the military services in the war came under close scrutiny and inaugurated a restructuring of the entire military establishment to fit the atomic age.

The postwar institutionalization of science and technology flowed from the experience of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Historian A. Hunter Dupree has stated that 1940 marked a clear dividing line in the history of Science in the Federal Government, and "many of the characteristics of the wartime research effort were in fact permanent changes in the government's relation to science."³ Institutionalizing science and technology within the federal government was one such change. Before the war was over, bills appeared in Congress to continue the functions of the OSRD, and President Roosevelt asked Vannevar Bush to prepare a report for him on the subject. The bills reflected congressional receptivity to the idea of perpetuating something like the OSRD, but it was Roosevelt's request that set in motion the machinery leading ultimately to the National Science Foundation. Bush's report, Science, the Endless Frontier, recommended a scientific advisory body, consciously modeled on the NACA, to do for science what the NACA had done for aeronautics. Parts of this scheme came to fruition, but not before a protracted, often heated debate that divided [202] Washington and the scientific community and warned those who cared to listen that the NACA was no longer the ideal it had once been.⁴

One group - counting in its ranks Vannevar Bush, virtually all of the NACA, a large majority of the scientific community, and most of the contributors to Science, the Endless Frontier - favored a foundation controlled by a 24-man board appointed by the president. The board would select its own director to function in much the same capacity as George Lewis had for the NACA. This plan was in fact drafted by Bush, with help from John Victory. In the NACA files, across the top of one bill embodying this philosophy, is a penciled note, probably by Victory: "Organization to be run just exactly as NACA."⁵

In the opposite corner was another group including President Truman; his director of the budget, Harold D. Smith; and other old Washington hands - who were just as anxious for a national science foundation, but wanted the director to be head of the agency, being immediately answerable to the president and advised by a subordinate consultative board. The opponents were primarily concerned with chain of command, lines of authority, and precepts of efficient and responsible organization. They discounted the scientists' misgivings that such an arrangement would interject politics into the scientific process, as the NACA had maintained for years in defense of its system.⁶

Congress passed a NACA-style strong board bill in 1947. Truman vetoed it. Two years of intense, often acrimonious debate ensued before compromise legislation could be formulated. As finally instituted, the National Science Foundation embodied a director and a consultative board with parallel and complementary powers and functions. Even at that, disagreement on subordinate points was so strong that many issues had to be ignored or papered over in the legislation, to be worked out in practice in future years.

Most importantly for the NACA, the act itself (and Truman's rejection of the original scheme) signaled that the committee form of organization had fallen from favor in much of Washington, even in as esoteric a field as scientific research. When the NACA was formed, science may have been a small and curious enterprise worthy of an exceptional organization, but science was now big business, calling for careful organization and administration like other activities of government.⁷ In fact, the NACA form of operation had evolved over the years into something the government had never intended but had never repudiated. By the late 1940s it was found wanting, at least as a model for the National Science Foundation.

The military services meanwhile had begun a similar effort to institutionalize science and technology. In 1945 a Research Board for National Security was created within the National Academy of Sciences. [203] Composed of half military and half civilian members, it was intended to be a source of expert advice to the services. Truman and his budget director, however, did not want the Academy dictating military research policy, so the board was liquidated in 1946, to be replaced by a Research and Development Board within the military establishment. The title of this body reflected current opinion on the inseparability of research and development, and its positioning within the defense establishment was in harmony with the military suspicion that the Academy in particular, and the scientific community in general, had let the services down before the war. From now on the military would have its own source of scientific advice.⁸

Similar disenchantment with prewar mechanisms for scientific advice lay behind General Hap Arnold's creation of the Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) within the Army Air Forces. Vowing never again to be caught off guard as he had been in the early 1940s, Arnold enlisted Theodore von Karman to organize a group of top scientists, survey the field of aeronautics, and advise the air force on the technical needs of the future. After surveying captured German resources as part of an Army Air Forces inspection team in mid 1945, von Karman and his colleagues drafted "Where We Stand," a preliminary survey of the state of aeronautical facilities, and recommended building new facilities comparable to Germany's in the United States for the supersonic research that lay ahead. Before the end of the year, SAG completed its major work, Toward New Horizons, a 33-volume study containing detailed recommendations for future research in all areas of flight from power plants to medicine and psychology. One recommendation of the report - that the Army Air Forces maintain a permanent scientific advisory body - led to the creation in 1946 of the Scientific Advisory Board under von Karman's chairmanship. From then on the air force no longer depended solely on the NACA for institutionalized scientific advice.⁹

These steps to formalize the integration of science and technology into national policy were taken while the government was also reviewing the role of the armed services in World War II and determining its military policy for the atomic age. In spite of the triumph of American arms in 1945, Congress dealt severely with the armed forces as the war ended. Calls for demobilization, cutbacks in defense spending, and critical scrutiny of military preparedness in 1941 swirled about the Capitol. The most exhaustive inquiry into military activities (and the one with the greatest impact on the NACA) was conducted in the first year after the war by Senator James M. Mead's Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program. Mead's committee examined all aspects of national defense, including the role of aeronautics, [204] and it reached conclusions of equal import to the military establishment and the NACA.¹⁰

In line with the Mead committee recommendations, the military services were transformed in 1947 by the National Defense Reorganization Act. To the army and navy was added a separate and independent air force, all three unified within a National Military Establishment under a civilian secretary of defense. The newly created Research and Development Board (successor to the Research Board for National Security) was directly responsible to the new secretary. The National Military Establishment, which became the Department of Defense in 1949, was intended to coordinate the services, standardize compatible military policies, and eliminate interservice rivalry; but it had decades of tradition and habit to overcome, and throughout the NACA's remaining years the military services struggled uncomfortably with the new order.¹¹

The Mead committee also found room for improvement in the NACA record. In fact the hearings served as a clearinghouse for criticism of the NACA, especially by industry. This testimony convinced the Mead committee that, although the NACA had contributed significantly to aeronautical progress and deserved continued support, it had been guilty of "timidity" and "lack of forcefulness" in the prewar years by failing to request adequate funds to keep America abreast of its enemies. As a result, Germany had built better aeronautical-research facilities that had led to jet propulsion, swept-back wings, and other technical advances dangerous to the United States. Though it held the military jointly responsible for these failings, the Mead committee concluded that the NACA, "as the Government agency primarily responsible for the direction and coordination of aeronautical research, must assume aggressive, foresighted leadership in the research field."¹² This charge implied an absence of such leadership in the past.

For its part, the air force held the NACA more responsible than had the Mead committee for these shortcomings. Senior air force officers were circumspect in their public criticisms, but censure could be found between the lines of many official statements, including some by General Arnold himself.¹³ The NACA defense against these criticisms was not particularly effective: it argued that it was not far behind on jet propulsion, that it had discovered swept wings independently of the German work, that the Germans were ahead because of better facilities, that the NACA was under the control of the military during the war and was precluded by military policy from the fundamental research necessary for advances on a par with the Germans', and that comparing all the Committee's classified work with that of the Germans would show that, as George Lewis put it, "we are not so far behind." The staff at Langley actually drew up an "Appraisal of German Research....

.....during the War Compared to That of the NACA," and found themselves relatively blameless; but Hunsaker found the document "somewhat onesided" and recommended against publication. Hunsaker was willing to admit that "the Germans were in advance of this country in supersonic research, missile research, rocket research, and some phases of jet propulsion development," and to accept the consequences. ¹⁴

During this criticism of the NACA, Hunsaker took the initiative in developing a postwar aeronautical-research policy that would correct past mistakes, respond to the changed order of American aeronautics, and reconcile the traditional role of the Committee with newly emerging policies on science and national defense. Already familiar with sentiments in Washington, Hunsaker met with representatives of the aircraft industry in Cleveland and California to learn their views. He brought the question of postwar research policy before the NACA and sought to formulate a plan that would not only satisfy the perceived needs of the NACA and the government, but also allay industry fears of government encroachment on its domain of aeronautical development. A special NACA committee on postwar aeronautical research policy drafted a plan that Hunsaker presented to the Mead committee the following January. In essence this scheme formalized the division of labor worked out among the NACA, the military services, and the industry in the years between the world wars.¹⁵

For more than a year, as the war ended and demobilization began, this policy remained an informal guide. Finally, in March 1946, the NACA formally adopted a slightly revised version of the policy as endorsed by the army, the navy, the Civil Aeronautics Administration, and the NACA Industry Consulting Committee (a newly created standing committee designed to give industry a permanent voice in NACA....

.....affairs). Minor changes in the wording of the policy in the intervening months attempted to clarify the roles of the NACA, the industry, and the services. All agreed that the NACA would do fundamental research. All agreed that the industry should do development. And all agreed that the military services should do evaluation. What they could not agree on, and what the policy did not define, was how to distinguish between these activities, and how one party could prevent the others from encroaching. And the policy did not say whether research could any longer be productively separated from development.¹⁶

In contrast to the National Aeronautical Research Policy, other NACA responses to changed policies on science and national defense were readily understandable. The Committee handed over to the National Inventors Council created in 1940 by the secretary of commerce most of its duties as Aeronautical Patents and Design Board, even though it was never legally relieved of this responsibility. The joint Army-Navy Board had lapsed into disuse in 1943 and was formally abolished in 1947, returning the NACA nominally to the independent status it had enjoyed before the war. And in 1948, the NACA organic legislation was amended to provide for 17 instead of 15 members on the Main Committee; this added a representative of the new military Research and Development Board along with one more private member, changing the ratio of government-to-private members to 10:7.¹⁷

Addition of a representative of the Research and Development Board assured that the military would remain the dominant bloc on the Main Committee, with 5 out of 17 votes. But the greatest shift in power on the NACA in the 1940s was toward industry, which won three seats where it had none before. This reflected, as Hunsaker told the Mead committee, that "industry as a result of the war [had] become large and [207] responsible and [had] come of age." And it showed every sign of remaining strong in the postwar world. Even with the cancellation of $26 billion in military contracts in 1945, the industry was able to hold together as it had not at the end of World War I; by the end of the decade, it was again growing and prosperous.¹⁸

The American aircraft industry genuinely appreciated the contributions made by the NACA over the years, and most firms were happy to supply the commendations the Committee felt obliged to parade before Congress and the Bureau of the Budget. These compliments did not, however, mean that the industry was free of criticisms of the NACA. Many felt, for example, that the NACA was too slow in publishing results of its research, that it concealed negative results, that it concentrated too much on aerodynamics, and that it was not always scrupulously correct in its handling of proprietary information. But these were venial sins, not mortal. Though one industry representative suggested to the NACA in 1944 that it was perhaps time for the Committee to pass out of existence - a sentiment echoed by Senator Mead - most others felt it still had an important role to fill. The industry wanted not to destroy the NACA with its criticism, but to gain a greater voice in Committee affairs and thus make the Committee more responsive to industry needs.¹⁹

During the war, the aircraft industry had taken great strides toward achieving this stronger voice. The Industry Consulting Committee (ICC) formed in 1945, composed of heads of major aircraft manufacturing and operating firms, was not a consulting committee at all but an advisory committee. It did not wait to be consulted by the NACA, but instead met on its own initiative and advised the Committee how to improve NACA-industry relations. Though the NACA did not, of course, agree with all the complaints or adopt all the reforms, it took the industry position seriously and met frequently with the ICC in an attempt to work out compromises.²⁰

One of the first ICC suggestions, and one of the earliest to be adopted, was expansion of industry representation on the Main Committee. When the ICC was formed, the Main Committee had only one industry representative: airline executive William Littlewood, who had succeeded George Mead when the latter retired in 1944. Within months of its establishment, the ICC recommended that Littlewood be joined by a representative of an airframe manufacturer and a representative of an engine manufacturer. When the next vacancies appeared in April of the following year, A.E. Raymond, vice president of Douglas Aircraft, and R.M. Hazen, chief engineer of the Allison Division of [208] General Motors, joined the Main Committee just one month after industry endorsed the National Aeronautical Research Policy. Industry representation on the Main Committee became a tradition that endured the rest of the NACA's days and gave the industry a voice second only to the military's.²¹

At the time these industry representatives joined the Main Committee there were only six members from private life, meaning that the industry controlled half the outside seats. Vannevar Bush found this deeply disturbing. Writing to Hunsaker late in 1946, he noted:

The basic idea back of NACA, and the concept on which a great deal of its success has been based, is that the governing board will be made u of ex officio members plus .... individuals representing science and the public somewhat generally. I have no doubt in my mind whatever that a man in an industrial post can divorce himself in his thinking from his industrial connections to sit on a public board as a representative of his profession, and as a citizen, without his thinking and actions being in any way influenced by his industrial connections. But I do not believe that the public or the Congress would be convinced that this is the case except when experience had given the demonstration, and I believe, therefore, that the general point of view is very likely to be that these individuals will represent the interests of industry in the NACA, say to balance the interests of various parts of the government .... It is far better that the members of NACA outside of the ex officio members should represent science and the public, but should not be in their personal connections so involved that their interest also takes the form of interest from a specialized standpoint connected with the health and development of the industry as an element in our economic picture.²²

Bush had considered expanding the membership of the Main Committee, an idea that seemed even better the following year when the National Military Establishment was created. But finally he decided "the only out-and-out solution [was] to reverse our steps and return to the policy that was prevalent between the two wars, with no representation of specific groups, except those in government." As things stood, he did not think the Committee had "enough completely independent individuals for the various activities of the NACA, such as the chairmanship, the vice chairmanship, and the headship of various important committees, to carry on the affairs of NACA along the original contemplated lines which were so successful." The extrapolation of Bush's concern was that the NACA might soon be reduced to interest-group politics, accompanied by factions, vote-swapping, and pluralism. When impartial academics had held the nongovernment seats on the Main Committee, the public weal seemed secure. When industry representatives [209] took over those seats, there was chance of mischief, or at least the suspicion of mischief, the appearance of mischief.

Hunsaker, who himself sat on the boards of directors of four firms (three of them on the fringes of aviation), did not share Bush's concern, though he did "reluctantly agree" that the danger Bush cited might be perceived by Congress and the public. Hunsaker believed that

the public service is most inefficient when the principle of disinterest is carried to the limit of having nobody who really understands the problems. Popular distrust of the expert is part of our inheritance from the early Republic. Witness the War Production Board [of World War I] with a publisher in charge of aircraft production and an advertising man deciding on cargo planes! The original act establishing the NACA required "persons who shall be acquainted with the needs of aeronautical science ....,or skilled in aeronautical engineering or its allied sciences." Littlewood, Raymond, and Hazen exactly comply with this language of the act and strengthen the commit tee by their intimate knowledge of what is needed.²³

Hunsaker went on in this letter to defend his own record and to explain his own connections with industry, apparently less alive than he might have been to the importance of the NACA's - like Caesar's wife's - not only being pure, but also seeming to be pure. He wanted to circulate his letter to all members of the NACA, but Lewis recommended that he first delete the paragraph quoted because it "could be used in an investigation," presumably of industry influence within the NACA. Hunsaker, Lewis, and Bush might agree about the merits of controlled industry representation on the Main Committee; but it was Lewis, the old Washington hand and veteran of the bureaucratic wars, who understood the real dangers of making the industry too visible in Committee affairs.²⁴ These dangers were to be realized in the coming years.

In 1946, however, the immediate problem was the status of industry representatives on the technical committees and subcommittees. One motive for creating the Industry Consulting Committee in the first place had been to head off this issue of industry representation. It did not succeed; in fact, the ICC became a focus of the continuing attempt by industry to make members of the NACA subcommittees representatives of the firms for which they worked. The NACA opposed this idea relentlessly and succeeded in holding off the industry move, or at least maintaining what Hunsaker called "the fiction of no representation."²⁵

The NACA wanted as members of its technical committees and subcommittees the best informed and most hard-working individuals in their respective fields. This was the only way to get the best advice available on what research was being done, what problems were the [210] most pressing, and what research wanted doing. To promote free discussion, committee meetings were held to be confidential, and no minutes of the meetings or other printed material provided to the members in the line of duty could be published or even made available to colleagues outside the committee. To the NACA, committee membership was a personal position attaching to the individual because of his expertise and willingness to cooperate with the government in the best interests of American aeronautics.²⁶

To the industry, committee memberships were positions of considerable prestige that reflected favorably not only on the individual but on his company as well. They provided an opportunity to stay abreast of the latest developments in aeronautics even when those developments were still classified or under the proprietary control of another firm. They provided contact with other experts. And they provided an opportunity to influence the course of NACA research. These undeniable benefits of committee membership led many in industry to advocate distribution of memberships evenly throughout the industry in order to achieve equal representation. If an engineer from Douglas was on the Subcommittee on High Speed Aerodynamics, then one from Lockheed ought to be on it as well.²⁷

Informally the NACA had always tried to balance the sources of industry membership on technical committees and subcommittees so that no one company or geographical area would dominate a field. This was common sense, for the NACA wanted the widest possible variety of opinions and perspectives, so long as they came from competent people. All things being equal, the NACA would try to distribute its memberships evenly throughout the aviation industry. But publicly it had to maintain that members were chosen on their merits as private individuals and in no way represented their firms. As Hunsaker remarked early in this debate, "the appointment of industry representatives sounds very innocent, but if they are appointed for the purpose of being representatives, it would upset our applecart." Bush was even more emphatic. He felt that if industry could dictate committee membership, "it would be fatal."²⁸ Although the NACA had allowed industry representation on the Main Committee, the Industry Consulting Committee, and the main technical committees, it publicly insisted that the technical subcommittees, remain lily pure.

Although the solution was not ideal, industry soon realized that on this one issue the NACA would not, perhaps even could not, budge. In the later years of the 1940s, therefore, it concentrated on its two main demands. First, the NACA should pursue a research program more suited to the needs of industry and distribute the results more quickly. Second, NACA research should not encroach on the development that industry considered to be its exclusive domain. Industry used its new [211] strength within the Committee to achieve the first demand. It used its increased influence with Congress and the executive branch of government to ensure the second. Industry effectiveness in this regard is seen most clearly in the saga of the Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan.

The "unitary" program originated as two independent (in fact competitive) programs begun almost simultaneously by the Army Air Forces and the NACA and developed along lines so similar that coincidence fails to explain their likeness. The NACA track started in April 1945 with a letter to George Lewis from an employee at the Engine Research Laboratory in Cleveland. Bruce Ayer wrote because he felt that the staff at the laboratory had not given "sufficient consideration" to his views. So he went over their heads, taking no little risk in an organization as hierarchically structured and procedurally disciplined as the NACA. Ayer considered the Committee's facilities "woefully inadequate" for the supersonic research of the future, and he recommended an "Altitude and Supersonic Research Laboratory" at a site like the new Bonneville dam on the Columbia River, where there Would be ample water for cooling and power generation.²⁹

With this one recommendation, Ayer covered all the major points in the forthcoming technical debate over postwar wind-tunnel facilities in the United States. The advent of jet propulsion meant that research problems of the future would be in high-speed, probably high-altitude, flight. Wind tunnels for this regime would require enormous amounts of power, far beyond the capacity of existing aeronautical research centers, including those of the NACA.

Ayer received a polite and appreciative response from Lewis, but no action. Not until the following summer when NACA representatives returned from duty with the Alsos mission in Germany did his recommendation win support at headquarters and in Cleveland. The 100,000-horsepower water-driven supersonic wind tunnel under construction by the Germans just outside Munich greatly impressed the NACA representatives, as did a planned 500,000-horsepower tunnel designed to produce mach numbers between 7 and 10. In a 7 November memorandum to headquarters, AERL Manager Edward Sharp concluded that "the utilization of water power for wind tunnel drive appears to be the only feasible method for large supersonic wind tunnels." He recommended that the NACA "Confidentially" contact the Federal Power Commission and the Reclamation Service "with a view to determining the best locations for future laboratory sites at which would be located all of the future large supersonic tunnels to be built in this country." As if that were not clear enough, he went on to state....

....that "the Committee should at once take steps to preempt this field of high-speed research and an aggressive and vigorous policy should be adopted in the interest of keeping America first in scientific development along these lines." He repeated in closing that the matter should be handled "in the highest confidence."³⁰

Sharp took this memorandum to Washington personally and discussed it with the staff. John W. Crowley, recently recruited from Langley to fill in for the stricken George Lewis, led the headquarters group that authorized Sharp to pursue the matter. By the time Sharp reported in December, he had abandoned the notion of direct water-power drive, settled on Boulder Dam near Las Vegas as the best site, and raised the projected power requirements as high as 2,000,000 horsepower, a fourfold increase over that of the largest tunnel the Germans had been planning. The Committee was already considering budgets that would allot twice as much construction money to the new facility as would go to all the rest of the Committee's laboratories combined.³¹ In less than nine months the new supersonic laboratory had gone from an unheeded suggestion to the keystone of the NACA's plans for the future.

[213] The issue was presented to the NACA High Speed Panel in December and January and received that group's endorsement, along with the recommendation that the site for the new facility include space to accommodate an extremely long unobstructed runway for takeoff and landing of supersonic aircraft, and an inland missile range for the testing of rockets and pilotless aircraft. When Sharp reported on progress in February 1946, the new facility had been given a name, the Supersonic Research Center. By then Sharp had heard of similar army and navy plans, and he recommended that the NACA take immediate action on its own proposal so that it would not be forced to share the limited number of sites available in the United States. "The hour may already be late," he warned.³²

It was late indeed. The army had been working quietly on a similar proposal since June 1945, when it too learned for the first time of the research facilities under construction or planned by the Germans. Moving almost exactly in step with the NACA, the Army Air Forces investigated the need for new facilities informally at Wright Field, just miles from AERL, until October, when it established a formal committee to prepare plans for an "air engineering development center." On 10 December 1945 a formal plan was published and sent on its way through Air Force and War Department channels.³³

At the beginning of 1946, then, the NACA and the Army Air Forces each had plans for new research centers, both necessitated by the jet-propulsion revolution, both stimulated by the discovery of advanced facilities in Germany, and both reflecting badly on the NACA, which looked to be once again behind the times. Even as the Committee was sponsoring a sympathetic history of its wartime achievements, to be called Frontiers of Flight, it was learning that the Germans were much further out on the frontier. The NACA was scrambling to catch up and the air force was showing signs of taking on the responsibility itself. ³⁴

Exactly when each side learned of the plans of the other is not clear. At the October 1945 meeting of the NACA, General Arnold mentioned that several agencies wanted supersonic research facilities. Out of the ensuing discussion came a letter from Hunsaker to the secretaries of war and navy reporting the NACA's conclusion that "a unitary program" of aeronautical research, especially with respect to supersonic wind tunnels, was essential to orderly development. He asked the secretaries to add this proposal to the agenda of the Research Board for National Security, which was then considering the overall question of postwar research and development. But the RBNS dissolved before the secretaries could write.

At the 17 December meeting of the Executive Committee, General Crawford reported that the Army Air Forces were considering a super [214] sonic research center and investigating possible sites. This revelation prompted Edward Sharp to ask a friend at Wright Field about the air force plans. He learned that the center would probably be in the Rocky Mountains, would include five tunnels - one designed to reach mach 8 to 10 and would cost about $100 million. Sharp's friend reported that the air force was acting in good faith and did not intend to violate the NACA's area of fundamental research. He suggested that the Committee contact General Crawford, who would be happy to supply the latest information and who in any case was obliged by his membership on the NACA to be forthcoming on this matter. When the headquarters staff did contact the general, they discovered that his office was "not too enthusiastic" about prospects for the plan, feeling they had "not enough to go to bat with the [Bureau of the B]udget for the dough." Whether that was the truth or an evasion cannot be determined. On I March 1946, Hunsaker was still pleading for coordination. Telling the Guided Missiles Committee of the Research and Development Board of the NACA's plans for a supersonic research center, Hunsaker noted that the same facilities "obviously cannot be duplicated for all the services, and that the same tools must be used by all."³⁵

No evidence of the early cooperation Hunsaker sought has come to light. On the contrary, there is considerable evidence that the NACA and the Army Air Forces were in deep and surreptitious competition. In the NACA meeting room, all was harmony and seeming candor, but behind the scenes there was intense jockeying for position. At the NACA Executive Committee meeting of 21 March 1946, Hunsaker announced that the NACA staff believed there was need for a "National Supersonic Research Center . . . adequate to meet the needs of industry and of the military services." The army and navy representatives agreed that such a project should be large enough to meet future needs of the services, and joined in recommending that the staff prepare a supplemental estimate to be considered at the next meeting.³⁶

The very next day, however, just three weeks after Hunsaker's plea to the Research and Development Board, General Curtis LeMay, recently appointed to the new office of Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development, entered the offices of the Aircraft Industries Association (AIA) and presented what were later described by an informant as "beautifully prepared" booklets, one a "sales brochure" for a proposed Air Engineering Development Center, to cost more than half a billion dollars. Industry and AIA personnel who happened to be in the office that day "recognized the project as so large that it could be done only once," and they feared that the NACA, their first choice to run any such facility, was in danger of being forestalled. They were reluctant, however, "to take anything like a formal stand against [215] the army proposal," for they depended as much on the services for contracts as they did on the NACA for research. Though they would move "as slowly as possible," they were sure the army would "press them for speed."³⁷

The AIA suggested that the NACA quickly call a meeting with key government and industry representatives and present its own plan for providing supersonic facilities for the whole country. Presumably the industry was prepared to endorse a NACA plan so long as no reference was made to the army plan. Industry personnel feared that the army would "take development away from" them; they saw "little room in the area the Army has mapped out." The NACA could save the situation, but speed was of the essence, for "the high powered and high-pressure presentation of the Army's proposal [was] such as to lead laymen and congressmen to jump at it."³⁸

The NACA acted quickly. Two days later a headquarters conference decided to send out a NACA proposal for its own supersonic research center to key industry and government personnel for their evaluation before the next meeting of the Executive Committee on 25 April. A separate memo went to Edwin Hartman in the Western Coordination Office, tipping him off that "the army has ambitions along these lines" and asking him to get what response he could from the industry. Hartman replied on 29 April with news that the NACA neither anticipated nor desired. "The companies had agreed among themselves," reported Hartman, "to give out no information regarding their individual feelings toward the NACA proposal until a joint statement had been prepared and submitted to the NACA through the AIA." But the west coast manufacturers were unable to agree among themselves on how research should be divided between industry, the NACA, the military services, and educational institutions; on how to choose between the army and NACA proposals; on where new laboratories should be located; or on how to assure that the industry had adequate facilities for its own development work. The industry was critical of the amount of control the NACA had exerted over testing of prototypes during the war, and it found the overall NACA proposal "neither adequate nor wholly acceptable." Still, industry spokesmen did not want a new center to be controlled by the military, so they found themselves caught in the middle.³⁹

Without the clear endorsement of the industry, neither the NACA nor the army proposal would get far in Congress. Compromise became essential. Revealingly, an industry man was appointed to combine the two proposals into a single package acceptable to all concerned. At the 25 April 1946 meeting of the NACA, Arthur E. Raymond of Douglas Aircraft was appointed chairman of a special panel on supersonic laboratory requirements. In June 1946 the panel recommended a unitary [216] wind-tunnel plan incorporating the main features of the rival proposals, a national supersonic research center for the NACA and an air engineering development center for the Army Air Forces, at a total cost in excess of $2 billion. The principal change recommended by the Raymond panel was a provision for wind tunnels at universities, both to allow independent testing and research and to serve as training tools for the engineers of the future who would be needed to operate the tunnels contemplated in the new proposal. On the recommendation of the panel, an independent engineering firm, Sverdrup and Parcel, was contracted to conduct a preliminary design analysis of the two recommended laboratories. When the firm reported later in the summer, it estimated the total cost to be in excess of $3 billion.⁴⁰

The exorbitant costs in these early proposals reflected the first response to a complex political problem. The NACA, the Army Air Forces, and the industry all wanted supersonic facilities adequate to their projected needs. The NACA believed that it had the necessary expertise as well as the responsibility for conducting all fundamental supersonic research for the entire nation. The military services, dominated on this issue by the air force, felt that they had to ensure their readiness for any military threat the United States might face, and they had the responsibility for providing whatever research might be necessary to meet that threat. They nominally agreed that their proper field was testing and evaluation, but the line between development and evaluation was no more distinct than the NACA's line between research and development. Squeezed between them was an industry that feared encroachment by two arms of government on the area it insisted on holding exclusively: development. Unable or unwilling to build expensive supersonic tunnels, industry wanted the government to pay for the tunnels and then make them available to industry - either at government laboratories or at universities, where tunnels might serve dual purposes of training and testing. The initial compromise, then, was to provide tunnels for all; the National Supersonic Research Center would have research tunnels for the NACA and development tunnels for industry, the Air Engineering Development Center would have evaluation tunnels for the military and development tunnels for the industry, and the existing NACA laboratories would get still more tunnels for the industry. The price of industry support, for both the NACA and the military, was to increase the size of the pie and give industry a large slice of its own without diminishing the share of the government agencies. Everyone understood that some NACA research would spill over into development as would some military evaluation, but there seemed to be more than enough facilities for everyone and plenty of latitude to work out boundaries and responsibilities.⁴¹

[217] The progress of these proposals from the grand scale of the Raymond panel in the summer of 1946 to the Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan Act of 1949 is a tale of Byzantine intricacy deserving a study of its own.⁴² A brief review of the interested parties and the hobbyhorses they were riding will suggest the complexity of the political and legislative maneuvering. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the defense establishment, which was changing during these years from the unsatisfactory National Military Establishment into the Department of Defense, were attempting to decide where air power and guided missiles would fit into American defense policy in the face of a worsening cold war. The chiefs made their own recommendations on aeronautical-research facilities, but they attached less importance to them than did the men whose sole responsibility was aeronautical development. Vannevar Bush found his allegiance divided again when he took over chairmanship of the Research and Development Board in 1947. He retained his NACA membership for one more year, but was hard put to reconcile the enormous expense of the Committee's NSRC with other worthy proposals that came before his board at the Pentagon. Within the air force, Hap Arnold and his successors agreed with Theodore von Karman and others on the Scientific Advisory Board that the continued supremacy of American air power (which they believed to have been the key to victory in World War II and the indispensable ingredient of national security in the future) would turn on the technical advances produced by intensive research and development. They could afford to be second to none, and they could entrust that responsibility to no one else. The navy, also alive to the importance of aeronautical technology (and increasingly concerned about its power within a defense establishment where an army-air force alliance seemed a real threat) fought to keep the air force from entirely dominating aeronautical research, even acting as something of a spoiler for air force plans. The Bureau of the Budget wanted to coordinate the various proposals, so as to prevent interservice and interagency rivalry from spilling into the congressional arena and to fit the plans generated by the aeronautic factions into the administration's overall budget. Congress gave off contradictory messages, on the one hand asking for early demobilization and major postwar cutbacks in defense spending and on the other chiding the NACA and the services for lagging behind the Germans. Congress would not stint on necessary defense expenditures, but failed to define what was necessary, and as always it kept an eagle eye out for duplication and waste. The NACA wanted to regain its role in fundamental research and dominate the new field of supersonic research. Industry wanted to protect its field of development against encroachment by government agencies and at the same time gain access to facilities built [218] at government expense. Out of this complex of wills emerged a result no one had willed.⁴³

That it took more than three years to get from the Raymond panel recommendations to the Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan Act suggests how fierce and complicated was the maneuvering. That the plan finally approved authorized less than a tenth of the amount recommended by the Raymond panel suggests how completely the principals worked at cross purposes. Had they formulated a truly "unitary" plan that compromised their disagreements, they might have received swifter and more generous results; instead, they simply awarded to each competitor everything requested. When pressed to reduce the enormous cost, they presented to Congress and the other reviewing agencies in the executive branch a picture of disagreement, duplication, inefficiency, and parochialism reminiscent of the shortcomings revealed by the Mead committee. The House Armed Services Committee noted in its report on the unitary plan bill that since the Raymond panel recommendations, "little, if anything, [had] been done during the intervening 2 or 3 years ..... to expedite their implementation," leading the committee to conclude that "some of the very same conditions which previously led to our taking second place in the race for more advanced aeronautical weapons may still be present today and that the existence of such conditions can lead to a repetition of our earlier experience - possibly with more disastrous consequences."⁴⁴ The skepticism and lack of confidence that permeate the committee report help to explain why the legislation finally passed was so stingy.

The National Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan Act of 1949 consisted of two titles.⁴⁵ Title I authorized $136 million for the NACA to build three supersonic wind tunnels, one at each of its existing laboratories, and $10 million to build tunnels at educational institutions. There was no National Supersonic Research Center. And, most devastating of all, the tunnels to be built at the NACA labs were earmarked for industry use. The House Armed Services Committee was adamant on this last point:

Inasmuch as the primary purpose of the facilities to be allocated to the NACA is to provide wind tunnels necessary for testing aircraft and guided missiles under development by industry, it is the sense of the committee that strong language should be incorporated in the bill which will insure that these facilities, although allocated to NACA on a so-called housekeeping basis and staffed by its personnel, shall be available to satisfy industry's requirements for the testing of experimental models in the course of development of new aircraft and missiles. It is absolutely essential that tests be scheduled and conducted in accordance with industry's requirements and the laboratory time be allocated with proper emphasis upon the requirements [219] of the various contractors engaged in the development of new types of military aircraft for the services.⁴⁶

From its original grand scheme to be the agency conducting all supersonic research in the United States, the NACA had been reduced to "housekeeping" for industry.

Title II, which provided for an Air Engineering Development Center, was not nearly so harsh on the air force, though it allowed only $100 million to begin construction. The committee allotted this sum with the understanding that future construction would expand the center greatly. Although the committee was obviously wary of what it characterized as "Air Force plans for a huge new supersonic center patterned more or less along the lines of the vast German establishment at Peenemunde," it was not willing to eliminate the center altogether as it had done with the NSRC.⁴⁷

The wording of the Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan Act and the documents surrounding it foreshadows not only the future of wind-tunnel research in the United States but also the place of the NACA in the changed world of American aviation after World War II. First, at virtually every step of the review and authorization process between the Raymond panel and the final bill, the plan was cut back. This reduction was caused in part by the exaggerated response of the NACA and other agencies concerned with aeronautics to the revelation of German advances; but it also reflected a cynicism in Washington about how far the research and development enthusiasm of World War II should be carried, especially in a field where conventional wisdom had been shown in such a bad light by those same German advances.⁴⁸

Second, at almost every step along the way, industry enjoyed unprecedented influence and power. It seems to have emerged from the war with its reputation untarnished, and it won from both the executive and legislative branches of government concessions that would have been unthinkable in the days when the NACA was created. National concern about a military-industry complex would surface in less than a decade, but in these immediate postwar years the aircraft industry pretty much had its way with government.⁴⁹

What the industry won, the NACA lost, at least on paper. Technically it lost control over the few tunnels built for it under the Unitary Plan, though in practice industry use of these tunnels would never be sufficiently great to deprive the NACA staff of all the time it needed in supersonic tunnels. In fact, before the unitary plan was adopted, the NACA already had several supersonic tunnels of its own in operation, tunnels which it had been willing all along to share with industry once it had the National Supersonic Research Center. It was the center that was perceived to be the real loss to the NACA, for with it the Committee [220] lost an exclusive hold on one end of the aeronautical research spectrum. Nor was this new condition an inadvertent outcome of congressional oversight. The House Armed Services Committee made explicit what it was about:

It would be fruitless to criticize or to impute blame to the able and devoted scientific personnel employed by the NACA during the prewar years for their failure to keep pace with German aeronautical research.... But it would be the height of folly to close our eyes to the obvious lesson to be drawn from that experience - the lesson that we must not place the bulk of our aeronautical research eggs in one basket - the NACA basket. Even the most competent and best qualified scientists and research workers can always profit from the stimulating effects of healthy outside competition.⁵⁰

Finally, the air force ended up with pretty much what it asked for at the outset. Its new center, soon to be named the Arnold Engineering Development Center, was approved even though Congress was critical of the military services for their failures before the war, and even though Congress was deeply skeptical of air force plans for the center. "A serious question may very well be raised," noted the Armed Services Committee, "as to whether the military may not be stepping outside of its proper sphere when it enters into the arena of research as distinguished from development and evaluation." The committee then presented an informed commentary on "Differentiation between Research, Development, and Evaluation," assigning the first to the NACA and private institutions, the second to industry, and the third to the services, concluding that "the services, by their very nature and organization and the training of their personnel, are not well qualified to undertake activities in the fields of research and development as distinguished from evaluation."⁵¹ The committee nevertheless authorized facilities at AEDC that were clearly for development and conceivably for research.

So the NACA came out third in the battle for facilities after World War II. In some respects this was not as serious as the Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan Act made it look; later experience would show that the original plans for supersonic facilities were grandiose to a fault, the older tunnels were not as outdated as had been feared, and the workload in the supersonic tunnels never prevented the NACA from getting ample time in the tunnels it operated nominally for industry. Furthermore, there is a point (which the NACA may have already reached in the 1930s) when highly sophisticated research tools can lure the researcher into too much experimenting and not enough thinking. Hugh Dryden reported after a trip to England in 1948 that "their lack of money has forced them to make the best use of their brains."⁵² The [221] tyranny of the tunnel was real for the NACA, chaining the staff to a kind of problem-solving research that might well have been supplemented by more time spent at the blackboard or just staring out the window. The real tyranny of the tunnel is that it can lead to busy hands and idle minds. The defeat of the unitary wind tunnel plan was not in itself a fatal blow for the NACA, but it was a harbinger of the Committee's diminished standing with agencies and individuals who would control its destiny.

George Lewis had seen the drift of things as soon as the war was over. Writing to an old friend of the Committee in 1945, he said:

Unfortunately, after a great war that has been overstrenuous both mentally and physically to everybody concerned, there is a general let-down; and unfortunately, this let-down is accompanied by a very critical mood. The dear old NACA is coming in for its share, so we will again have to depend on our friends for all the support they can give us.⁵³

The truly unfortunate aspect of this predicament for the NACA was that too many of its friends were disappearing from the scene just when the Committee needed them most. This was especially true on Capitol Hill. The NACA's best friend in the Senate, Hiram Bingham, had been defeated in 1933, and the NACA never found his like again. In the House the situation was worse still. Judge Woodrum retired in 1945, after 22 years of representing the 6th congressional district of Virginia and looking after the interests of the Langley laboratory. During 16 of those years lie had chaired the Independent Offices Appropriations Subcommittee that reviewed - one might say rubberstamped - the NACA budget. Victory confided to the congressman that his departure was a "calamity to the public interest" that left his "friends in the NACA heartbroken."⁵⁴

Part of the calamity for the NACA was that Woodrum's successor, after the Democrats regained control of Congress in 1949, was a young Texas congressman unfamiliar with the NACA's golden days and harboring no NACA laboratory in his home state. Albert Thomas inflicted on the NACA in 1950 a painful and unexpected blow by singlehandedly reducing the Committee's already shrunken share of the unitary wind-tunnel plan. The act had authorized the NACA to spend $136 million on its share of the tunnels, plus $10 million in university tunnels; Thomas tricked the Committee out of almost half when it came before his subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. As a Bureau of the Budget office explained it:

[222] The hearing, lasted about 15 minutes. After a very brief discussion of the purpose of the wind tunnels to be built, Mr. Thomas asked NACA how much of the total authorization of $146 million they expected would ultimately be required. When NACA hesitated to reply, he suggested a figure of $75 million. After hurried consultation NACA representatives estimated about $100 million.

 

Mr. Thomas then asked whether that meant that if a $100-million cash appropriation was made in 1950 to be available until expended, it would then be unnecessary for NACA to request further funds under the Unitary Plan program. NACA representatives had to agree, and that was the end of the hearing.⁵⁵

That was bad enough, but Thomas immediately followed up by appropriating only the $75 million he had suggested, maintaining that the NACA had agreed to this reduction. The NACA protested that it never made any such agreement, but it was powerless to deter the congressman.

This was no isolated instance of Thomas's hostility to the NACA. In later years Thomas would lead the campaign to make the Committee submit its budget annually to authorization hearings, a practice that the NACA had avoided in all its earlier years, claiming that its organic legislation provided a continuing authorization. Thomas would have none of that. In his book, any agency with a budget of more than $50 million a year (such as the NACA had enjoyed consistently after 1940) should justify itself annually to Congress. In fact Thomas had grave reservations about the wisdom of letting a committee administer a .budget that size in the first place, and he bluntly - as it turned out, prophetically - warned John Victory in 1950 that the Committee's days were numbered.⁵⁶

Nor was Thomas alone. Not only were many of the Committee's old friends gone, but many old enemies - and some new ones - were still very much around. In one of his last major acts of public service, Herbert Hoover took yet another swipe at the NACA. His Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government recommended (as he himself had recommended as president in 1932) absorption of the NACA into the Department of Commerce. The same old objection was at work: "This agency is not directly in the basic line of Presidential authority, and it is unsound organization for it to be governed by a committee. We doubt whether it is sufficiently important, despite its size, to warrant independent status."⁵⁷ Even the NACA's defenders, like Willis Shapley in the Bureau of the Budget, conceded that the Committee form of organization was undesirable, but the Hoover Commission recommendation was rejected for the time being because Congress had no enthusiasm for restructuring the Committee merely as a matter of principle. Furthermore, there was no [223] agreement on where the NACA should be put if it were incorporated into one of the executive departments." The NACA owed its independence in the late 1940s not so much to its record or its reputation as to general disagreement about where to put it. That could only be cold comfort to the loyal staff and friends who remembered the golden days and believed in the Committee's unique (and unappreciated) contributions to the advance of aeronautics.

1. See, for example, Jerome C. Hunsaker, "Statement of Aeronautical Research Policy," before the House Select Committee on Post-War Military Policy, 26 Jan. 1945, in which the chairman stated that "aviation is entering an era of revolutionary change resulting from the development of new methods of propulsion." [p. 5] In AR 1946, the Committee said:

The close of the war marked the end of one whole phase of development of the airplane as conceived by the Wright brothers. The airplane in its present form is no longer a sound basis for future planning for the national defense. The power available in jet propulsion systems brings flight through and above the speed of sound within reach. We now see no definite limit to the power that may become available for aircraft propulsion. Nor do we see a definite limit to the speed that may be attainable.

 

It is the immediate objective of the NACA w solve, as quickly as facilities and personnel permit, the most pressing problems attendant on high-speed flight, and to provide for the future development of knowledge in this seemingly endless new field of research. [p. 2]

2. In 1944 the $17 billion of business done by the aircraft industry accounted for 10 percent of the GNP (Research and Development Contributions to Aviation Progress (2 vols.; Washington: Department of the Air Force, 1972), vol. 1, p. 111-12). In 945 the annual research and development budget for the Army Air Forces alone was more than three times larger than the total NACA budget ("Some Statistics on Federal Aeronautical Funds, 1931-1953," typescript prepared by R.E. Littell, 26 Feb. 1953, in connection with NACA budget presentation).

3. A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 373.

4. Milton Lomask has counted 21 separate bills to create a national science foundation. Much of the following discussion is based on his A Small Miracle: An Informal History of the National Science Foundation (Washington: NSF [1976]), esp. chap. 3. The Vannevar Bush report is Science, the Endless Frontier A Report to the President on Postwar Scientific Research (Washington: Office of Scientific Research and Development, 1945).

5. 62 A 35 (40), 010 legislation (NSF). The quoted comment is on a copy of H.R. 6448, 79th Cong., 2d sess. In describing this bill to his colleagues on the NACA, Vannevar Bush said that it put "the director under the board, much the same as Dr. Lewis is to us. Victory," Discussion, Executive Committee, NACA, September 13, 1945, 2 pp., typescript, 23 Oct. 1945.

6. Harold D. Smith had been as responsible as anyone fox the failure of a plan to create a Research Board for National Security (RBNS). He played the same spoiler role in the early maneuvering for a national science foundation. Profoundly skeptical of claims that scientists needed more independence and autonomy than others who received government funds, he wanted government research brought under the same economic and organizational controls as other federal activities. In rejecting a NACA request f r supplemental appropriations in 1945, Smith wrote a subordinate:

We have authorized the building of wind tunnels all over the lot and in each case there has been advanced most logical reasons why the wind tunnels previously constructed did not meet the new requirements. I give the scientists credit for being more ingenious, especially if they are required to be. (Smith to M. Martin, BoB intra office memorandum, 1 Mar. 1945)

Commenting 30 Sept. 1943 on an earlier NACA supplemental, Smith had told the same addressee that "many murders are committed in the name of research." Though more extreme in this regard than his successors, Smith nevertheless voiced a sentiment that was to become increasingly dominant in the Bureau of the Budget: the government must be run on sound principles of management, organization, and economy, and scientific research was no exception. See also Keyles, "Scientists, the Military, and the Control of Postwar Defense Research: The Case of the Research Board for National Security...1944-1946," Technology and Culture, 16 Jan. 1975): 20-47.

7. Although Truman killed the first NSF bill with a pocket veto, he issued a "Memorandum of Disapproval" to make clear his reasons. In it he stated that "the bill would violate basic principles which make for responsible government." He explained in terms that should not have been lost on the NACA:

Full governmental authority and responsibility would be placed in 24 part time officers whom the President could not entirely hold responsible for proper administration. Neither could the Director be held responsible by the President, for he would be the appointee of the Foundation and would be insulated from the President by two layers of part time boards.

For a fuller discussion of the other controversies surrounding the creation of NSF, see Daniel J. Kevles, "The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942 1945: A Political Interpretation of Science-The Endless Frontier," ISIS, 68 (March 1977): 5-26.

8. Kevles, "Scientists, the Military and the Control of Postwar Defense Research." Hunsaker was on the committee that devised the RBNS plan. See 62 A 35 (73), "Committee on Postwar Research."

9. Thomas A. Sturm, The USAF Scientific Advisory Board: Its First Twenty Years, 1944-1964 (Washington: USAF Historical Division Liaison Office, 1967), chaps. 1-3.

10. "We have had our troubles," Lewis wrote in Sept. 1945, referring to congressional enthusiasm for demobilization, "and we are not out of the woods yet. . . .

"This reconversion is a most difficult period. Most everyone in the Government that I have talked with has had the same comment-the war was never like this." (Lewis to Lt.Col J.H. Belknap, 18 Sept. 1945, in 62 A 35 (15), 170.1 [semiofficial])

11. The creation of the Department of Defense is described in Borklund, The Department of Defense, chaps. 1 and 2.

12. The quotations are from Senate Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, Investigation of the National Defense Program: Additional Report of the Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, S. Rept. I 10, Pt. 7, 79th Cong., 2d sess., 3 Sept. 1946, pp. 147-48. Examples of industry criticism are in Senate special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, Investigation of the National Defense Program, Hearings pursuant to S. Res. 55, 79th Cong., 1st sess., part 31, July and Aug. 1945, pp. 15375-15459. Testifying the following year, Hunsaker told the committee that he was baffled by "relations with the industry which, strangely enough, have come to you as being not good and have come to me as being wonderful." Ibid., part 33, 27 Feb. 1946, p. 16862. Some manufacturers with comparatively mild criticisms of the NACA sent it copies of their statements to the Mead committee. See, for example, D. Roy Shoults to Hunsaker, 17 Jan. 1946, and Albert E. Lombard, Jr. to Hunsaker, 16 Jan. 1946.

13. Arnold's establishment of a Scientific Advisory Board w s an implied criticism of the NACA, as was the air force's recourse to the RBNS. Of the latter Hunsaker wrote in 1945, "the Army is asking the RBNS the same questions it asks NACA and will be sore if RBNS does not take them up actively. They say NACA has not 'solved' the problems and, therefore, more groups should be put on the job." (Hunsaker to Oswald Veblen, 21 May 1945.) When Arnold, in an article published in Air Affairs, criticized e NACA for limiting itself too narrowly to aircraft research instead of pursuing more broadly the "problems of flight," Lewis observed that this was "not a well considered statement." Robert McLarren to Lewis, "Extract from article by General Arnold," 7 Jan. 1947, with copy of Lewis's response.

14. Lewis to Edwin P. Hartman, 1 Aug. 1945, in 62 A 35 (65), 302.122; LMAL, "Appraisal of German Research during the War Relative to that of the NACA," 39 pp., typescript [ca. Oct. 1946]; copy with Hunsaker's comment is in 62 A 35 (24), 073 (1945-1949); Hunsaker to director, Bureau of the Budget, 2 Nov. 1945.

15. Evolution of this policy can be traced in 62 A 35 (73); "Post-War Research Policy." See especially, Hunsaker, "Memorandum on Postwar Research Policy," 27 July 1944; "Notes on Discussion at Meeting of NACA, July 27, 1944," 8 Aug. 1944; minutes of Executive Committee meeting, 7 Sept. 1944; and Hunsaker, "Statement of Aeronautical Research Policy," presented to the Mead committee on 26 Jan. 1946.

16. See appendix H.

17. AR 1946, p. 38. By legislative fluke, the section of the Army Air Corps Act of 1926 (USC, Title 10, sec. 310.r) that appointed the NACA Aeronautical Patents and Design Board for the military was never repealed. Technically, this responsibility was transferred to NASA in 1958 and still exists. See C.W. Borklund, The Department of Defense, Praeger Library of U.S. Government Departments and Agencies (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), p. 20. See also appendix A.

18. Investigation of the National Defense Program, hearings, part 33, p. 16816; Research and Development Contributions to Aviation Process, vol. 2, p. 111-12.

19. See note 12 above. Mead suggested in part 33, pp. 16858-59, that the air force might in future do for itself the fundamental research that the NACA had performed for it in the past. The Mead committee was unimpressed with the NACA ploy of rolling out long lists of endorsements. When Hunsaker tried to introduce into the Mead committee hearings "a list of very grateful letters from chief engineers of airplane companies," Senator Hugh Mitchell (D, Wash.) demurred with the observation:

We would be glad to have those for the information of the committee but I don't think they should go into the printed record of this hearing. Of course, there are any number of people who will praise the work of the NACA and certainly we don't want to do anything to lessen that praise of the job you have done. Everybody agrees on that. I think the committee is interested in knowing the reasons why a greater job, a better job well, not a better job but a bigger job was not done in leading up to the war. (Ibid., pp. 16831-32.)

Industry criticisms of the NACA may be found in the Mead committee hearings, in direct correspondence with the NACA, and in a 2-page report Criticism of the NACA, 23 Oct. 1945, prepared at the request of the Bureau of the Budget by Grover Looning. E.E. Wilson wrote to Hunsaker on 14 Oct. 1941 that the NACA "as now administered, is a politico scientific organization, with the accent on the first syllable!" The suggestion that the NACA fold was made to Hunsaker at a May 1944 meeting in Cleveland with industry representatives and reported by him in "Notes on Discussion at Meeting of NACA, July 27, 1944," 8 Aug. 1944.

20. J.H. Kindelberger to Hunsaker, 10 Dec.; Hunsaker to Kindelberger, 21 Dec. 1945. For surveys of ICC activity, see "A Report to the Industry of the Work of the NACA Industry Consulting Committee," 30 Dec. 1949; and William Littlewood to L.S. Hobbs, 26 June 1956.

21. Hunsaker to Kindelberger, 21 Dec. 1945: "There is serious objection to a man of important commercial interests [on the Main Committee]....Littlewood was our first break with a simon-pure policy, and I believe his appointment has been well received." See appendix B and AR 1946, p. 41.

22. Bush to Hunsaker, 9 Dec. 1946.

23. Hunsaker to Bush, 24 Dec. 1946.

24. Hunsaker to Lewis, 26 Dec. 1946, with Lewis's notes. Hunsaker showed keener appreciation of this problem earlier in the year when he wrote to Kindelberger (13 Feb. 1946):

Another matter has to be watched out for. That is Congressional hostility to a suspicion of undue influence by "big Business". The Congressional Committees are strong for national defense and technical progress that makes for employment. Our estimates for next year were pared down by the Budget Bureau, but after strong representations of Dr. Lewis and myself the House restored some of the cut. There was, however, a period in the hearings when it had to be shown that these funds were to be used on research "in the public interest" and not for projects desired by particular contractors .

25. Hunsaker to Lewis, 1 Mar. 1947. This controversy can be traced through the records in 59 A 2112 (12).

26. The official NACA position appears in the policy paper "Functions and Responsibilities of Standing Committees and Subcommittees of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics," 11 Feb. 1948:

Members of technical subcommittees appointed by the NACA from outside the Government are appointed in their professional capacities as individuals and not as representatives of the employers. Minutes of subcommittee meetings and other reports and data sent to them as members are confidential documents, and are not to be made available to their employers and not to be published. The subcommittee members from the military services and from other Government agencies are representatives of the offices with which they are affiliated, but the members from private life are not representatives of any organizations.

This NACA position was worked out in correspondence in 1945: T.P. Wright to William Littlewood, 30 Apr. 1945; Hunsaker to Lewis, "Industry" representation, , " 5 May 1945; and Littlewood to Lewis, 28 May 1945, with Hunsaker's notations. Hunsaker elaborated on the confidentiality of committee activities in a letter to H.M. Homer, 19 Nov. 1948. In another letter he wrote:

The subcommittees are appointed primarily to assist the NACA through making recommendations concerning the NACA research program and through the exchange of information which may be helpful in the formulation of such programs. Such exchange of information is intended entirely for the benefit of the government. (Hunsaker to W.M. Holaday, 14 Apr. 1947, in 59 A 2112 (12), 110 subcommittees (gen) (5) 1947)

27. Undated Notes of Discussions at Meeting of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, April 26, 1945, "on "Aircraft industry point of view regarding representation on NACA." One industry executive wrote bluntly to the NACA during World War II that, although his men were very busy, his understanding was that committee membership "doesn't call for a lot of meetings, and the prestige and associations are well worth the time and effort expended." Carl Breer to Hunsaker, 11 Mar. 1943, in 5 A 2112 (12), 110 subcommittees (gen) (2) 1943. Another industry executive came closer the NACA position when he suggested that "successful operation depends primarily one individual's understanding of his general responsibilities and his use of common sense in discharging them." Paul S. Baker to Milton B. Ames, 28 May 1948.

28. Hunsaker wrote to L.B. Richardson on 9 Feb. 1945: "We do....try to bring in men who are directly concerned with work in the various centers of engineering activity. In this way, the distribution of civilian membership sometimes looks fairly representative. In 59 A 2112 (31), 112.31, organization. The quotations are from undated Notes of Discussions at Meeting of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics April 26, 1945, on Aircraft industry point of view regarding representation on NACA.

29. Bruce E. Ayer to Lewis, 24 Apr. 1945.

30. Lewis to Ayer and Lewis to Sharp, both 15 May 1945; Edward R. Sharp to director of research, "Wind Tunnels," 7 Nov. 1945 (italics added). News of German research was also having its effect at headquarters; see R.G. Robinson to Lewis, "Effect of German aeronautical research information on NACA program," 5 July 1945.

31. Sharp to director of research, "Wind Tunnels," 14 Dec. 1945. By this time the Ames laboratory was also recommending new supersonic facilities, put, in contrast with the AERL proposal, Ames was promoting itself as the center to build and control them. See Smith J. DeFrance to NACA, "High-speed research facilities," 7 Dec. 1945.

32. Sharp to director of research, "Proposal for a Supersonic Research Center," 5 Feb. 1946.

33. Arnold Engineering Development Center, Chronology, ' n.d., 11 pp., typescript; Sturm, The USAF Scientific Advisory Board, p. 6; and Frank L. Watten to Gen. F. 0. Carroll, "Proposal for a New Air Forces Development Center," 19 June 1945, in which this member of the Also team wrote that "the scope of German plans make[s] it essential that our own plans be certainly not less ambitious in the light of our future security."

34. George F. Gray, Frontiers of Flight: The Story of NACA Research (New York: Knopf, 1948), began as an NACA contract to report on the committee's wartime achievements.

35. Minutes of NACA annual meeting, 25 Oct. 1945, p. 5; minutes of special meeting of Executive Committee, 17 Dec. 1945, pp. 2 4; Sharp to director of research, "Proposal for a Supersonic Research Center," 5 Feb. 1946; Sharp to director of research, "Telephone Conversation with Major Jay AuWerter December 20, 1945 Regarding Location for Wind Tunnels," 20 Dec. 1945, with note by Charles H. Helms; D.B. Langmuir, "Extract of Remarks by Dr. Hunsaker Made at the 15th Meeting of the [Joint Committee on New Weapons and Equipment] Guided Missiles Committee on 1 March 1946," attached to R.G. Robinson to Hunsaker, 20 Mar. 1946.

36. Minutes of Executive Committee meeting, 21 Mar. 1946, p. 4.

37. R.G. Robinson, "Army Air Force plan for Air Engineering Development Center," memo for file, 25 Mar. 1946, handwritten, marked "Secret Limited Internal Distribution."

38. LeMay actually revealed the plan to the press on 20 Apr. 1946, but apparently did not publish the plan at that time. See New York Herald Tribune, 21 Apr. 1946. The NACA received a copy of "Proposed Air Engineering Development Center Summary for Air Staff," undated, 12 pp., on 16 Apr. 1946, but there seems to have been no indication of the campaign that was about to begin to sell the plan. Roscoe C. Wilson to George Lewis, 16 Apr. 1946; Lewis to E.R. Sharp, 16 Apr. 1946.

39. "Notes on Conference with Dr. Lewis, Messrs. Crowley, Victory, Chamberlin, Ulmer, Helms, and Robinson," 27 Mar. 1947; Lewis to Reid, DeFrance, Sharp, "Proposed National Supersonic Research Center," 2 Apr. 1946, with enclosures; NACA, "A Proposal for the Construction of a National Supersonic Research Center," Apr. 1946; T.L.K. Smull to Hartman, 4 Apr. 1946; Hartman to chief of research coordination, "Industry Reaction to NACA Proposal for a National Supersonic Research Center," 29 Apr. 1946.

For examples of the studiously noncommittal replies from industry, see G.S. Schairer (Boeing) to Lewis, 19 Apr.; J.C. Miller (General Electric) to Lewis, 18 Apr.; J. Carlton Ward (Fairchild) to Lewis, 17 Apr.; and R.E. Hopper (Hughes) to Lewis, 16 Apr. 1946.

40. The Raymond panel did not resolve all the questions surrounding the need for new tunnels, so it was succeeded by a special committee on supersonic facilities, chaired by Hunsaker. That committee met 21, 22, and 24 Oct. to iron out differences. The minutes reveal that one of the major problems was Hunsaker's hostility toward the Army Air Forces, which he claimed "have arrived at the point of wanting to duplicate NACA equipment." The air force representatives denied this, but they seem to have done nothing to allay Hunsaker's concern. The harsh tone of this exchange was edited out of the final version of the minutes, but the source of contention remained. See also "Report of Special Committee on Supersonic Facilities," 24 Oct. 1946.

41. These differing perceptions can be seen in the summary of proceedings of the "NACA Industry Conference on Unitary Plan," held in Los Angeles 14 Nov. 1949, where NACA industry suspicion of air force intentions is especially evident. The NACA's own ambitions appear most clearly in a staff memorandum for Lewis, "Analysis of Supersonic Facilities," 18 Oct. 1949.

42. The key events can be traced in "Short History of Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan," 4 p. typescript, 7 Nov. 1949; "Addendum to Short Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan," 6 p. typescript, 31 July 1950; and Arnold Engineering Development Center chronology, 11 p. typescript, n.d.

43. These generalizations are distilled from a 6 inch stack of documentation extracted from the NACA files, now to be found with the other documentation for this chapter. There is not room in this study to pursue all the intricacies of this story or to cite all the relevant documents, but these materials could well serve as the basis for a monograph.

44. House Committee on Armed Services, Report to Accompany S. 1267, 81st Cong., 1st sess., H. Rept. 1376, p. 4.

45. See appendix A.

46. House Armed Services Committee, Report to Accompany S. 1267, p. 10.

47. Ibid., p. 13.

48. Only one member of the aeronautical fraternity in the U.S. seems to have recommended an approach to supersonic facilities less extensive than those advocated by the NACA and the Army Air Forces. Commenting on the unitary plan and to be recommended by the Raymond panel in 1946, Hugh L. Dryden of the national bureau of Standards said:

I believe that this plan answers any demands of the next twenty years, but there are some doubts in my mind as to whether the 8 ft and 15 ft supersonic and the large hypersonic facilities should be built on the time schedules proposed. If our diplomatic and military leaders feel that a new war is so imminent that active technical preparations should be expedited, the whole program should be prosecuted vigorously. If 'his is not the case, ordinary engineering prudence would dictate that some operating experience be accumulated in the five large supersonic tunnels now under construct on before building facilities of a different order of magnitude. The facts that no other nation has facilities or so far as known is even contemplating facilities remotely approaching those already under construction in this country and that the Germans designed the V 2 and other supersonic missiles on the basis of tests in 1.3 ft intermittent supersonic wind tunnel appear to me to justify some degree of conservatism. (Dryden to Raymond, 29 May 1946)

The following year Dryden became the NACA's aeronautical research.

49. Industry influence was evident throughout the Mead committee hearings; see note 12. The House Armed Services Committee stated in its Report to Accompany S. 1267:

While the committee is fully aware of the gratifications of the NACA system of committees and subcommittees and the fact that provision is made for industry representation among these various groups, it would appear notwithstanding that there is considerable room for the development of adequate procedures which will insure at all times that basic scientific information is circulated freely and made available to all research groups and technical workers having an interest in the subject matter, except in those cases where there is a very clear and unquestionable need for placing the information in a classified category on grounds of military security alone and for no other reason. (p. 8.)

50 Ibid., p. 5. Appendix E contains a description of the NACA's supersonic tunnels. John V. Becker writes:

NACA was fortunate it never had to take on the enormous chores of building the NSRC. Most of its grandiose facilities were too huge and unwieldy for research useful only for hardware testing. NSRC was NACA's gross over reaction to reports from Germany and to competition from the Air Force. (Becker to Monte Wright, 30 May 1980, encl.)

51. Ibid., pp. 10 11. 52 Edwin P. Hartman, Adventures in Research: A History of A Research Center, 1940-1965 (Washington: NASA, 1970), pp. 150.

52. Dryden's comment appear in the minutes of Executive Committee meeting, 24 Sept. 1948.

53. Lewis to Reginald M. Cleveland, 18 Sept. 1945, in 62 A 35 (15), 170.1 (semiofficial).

54. Victory to Woodrum, 23 Aug. 1945, in 62 A 35 (16), 1 0.2(a).

55. W.H. Shapley to "Mr. Ramsey," Bureau of the Budge memo, "NACA Hearing on Supplemental Estimate for Construction under Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan," 24 Mar. 1950. See also Shapley to "Mr. McCandless," "House Action on Supplemental Estimate for the National "Advisory Committee Aeronautics," of NACA Funds for Construction of Unitary Plan Wind Tunnels," 7 Aug. 1950.

56. J.F. Victory, A Full Time Paid Chairman for NACA, memo for files, 15 Apr. 1949; Congressional Record, 8/11, 1949, vol. 95, pt. 4, pp. 4645-46. See also chap. 11, pp.

57. Quoted in minutes of Executive Committee meeting, 17 Mar. 1949, p. 5.

58. Transcript of interview with Willis Shapley, 30 Dec. 1948; Shapley to "Mr. Alger," Bureau of the Budget memo, "Your Draft Memo on Proposed Transfer of NACA to Department of Commerce," 25 Nov. 1949.

 

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