Read Ebook: Memoiren einer Sozialistin: Kampfjahre by Braun Lily

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Ebook has 2312 lines and 154475 words, and 47 pages

PREFACE. vii

CHAPTER

ONE. It's Anybody's Fight 1

TWO. The Power Plant, the Heart of an Airplane 12

THREE. Its Vital Spark 19

FOUR. A Backward Art 28

FIVE. Toil and Trouble 38

SEVEN. Calvin Coolidge's Town Meeting 58

EIGHT. Dwight Morrow Advances the Throttle 71

NINE. The Gospel According to Aunt Lucy 82

TEN. The Take-off 93

ELEVEN. A Lone Eagle Sets the Standard 102

TWELVE. A Change in Status 109

THIRTEEN. A Salt's Solution 115

FOURTEEN. Germ of a Big Idea 121

FIFTEEN. Creation of Strategic Concept 129

SEVENTEEN. Frigate Birds 144

EIGHTEEN. Another Turning 149

NINETEEN. Necessity, the Mother of Creation 160

TWENTY. Igor Sikorsky Spans Two Gaps 172

TWENTY-ONE. The Courage of Conviction 185

TWENTY-TWO. Review of Some Fundamentals 196

TWENTY-THREE. A Yankee Peddler 204

TWENTY-FOUR. A Chill Sets In 213

TWENTY-FIVE. An Unfavorable Climate 224

TWENTY-SEVEN. For What Is a Man Profited? 237

TWENTY-EIGHT. Off the Beam 247

TWENTY-NINE. For Survival 260

THIRTY. Toward Public Inquiry 271

THIRTY-ONE. Before the Bar of Public Opinion 290

THIRTY-TWO. The Hand on the Stick 296

SLIPSTREAM

It's Anybody's Fight

It was a day in March of 1924 when I first stepped across the threshold of the anteroom to the office of Rear Adm. William Adger Moffett, Chief of the new Bureau of Aeronautics in the Navy Department at Washington. The anteroom lay at the center of the extreme after end of the top deck of the third wing of the temporary frame structure which then housed, and in fact still houses, the Navy Department. Through the windows I could see the greening lawns of the Mall and the budding cherry blossoms along the rim of the Tidal Basin. Directly below, the Reflecting Pool, a square-cut sapphire, mirrored the tip of the Washington Monument and the cottony clouds of a blustery day. I handed my orders to the admiral's secretary and, as she disappeared through a door to the left, I glanced around.

To the right of the secretary's desk, a latticed, swinging half door of the type once common to saloons of the preprohibition era bore a gilt-lettered sign reading "Assistant Chief of Bureau." To the left, on a similar door, the letters spelled "Chief of Bureau." As it swung open, the secretary waved me toward a stiff-backed chair and said, "The admiral will see you in a few minutes, sir."

Lifting my sword off its hook, I stripped the white lisle gloves from my hands, dusted a bit of lint off my two and a half gilt stripes, and sat down in the chair. Most young officers bearing such orders as mine would have thrilled at the thought of duty in Washington, but I was vaguely uneasy. That sword, standing on the tip of its scabbard between my knees, seemed, in a way, to point up my doubts. Forged into its blade was a quotation from one of Teddy Roosevelt's slogans, "The only shots that count are the shots that hit." Judged by that standard, I had not scored too well since graduation from Annapolis in 1908. Having set out on a career in gunnery, I had let myself be diverted from it.

I had been appointed to the Naval Academy from the state of Washington and had been admitted at the age of sixteen. Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, where I enjoyed the great outdoors, hunting and fishing with my father, I had drifted onto the Naval Academy rifle team, where I found fun in competition that made a sport out of a branch of my profession. Rifle shooting had intensified my interest in gunnery and had helped me to win my sword. The opposite side of its blade carried the words, "Class of 1871 prize for excellence in practical and theoretical ordnance and gunnery." It was out of this background that I had determined to specialize in gunnery, but circumstances had deflected me into engineering.

Early in 1911, my Annapolis June Week Girl, Genevieve Speer, and I had been married at her home in Joliet, Illinois. We had later commuted between the Hotel del Coronado and less commodious accommodations in the Navy Yard town of Vallejo, California, until the summer of 1913, when we had been ordered back to our beloved Annapolis for duty, in compliance with my request for instruction in the new postgraduate engineering school, which had just been opened. The course included a year at Annapolis and another in New York at Columbia University, and was directed by Dr. Charles Edward Lucke, Dean of Mechanical Engineering and a pioneer in his profession.

This was an era in which college professors made a mystery of science; it gave them a feeling of superiority over the practical man. The latter similarly looked down their noses at the theorists. The term "engineer" was used to designate the driver of a railway locomotive or, in New York City, the superintendent of an apartment house. Dr. Lucke was of the opinion that, if the time ever came when the practical man and the theorist combined their talents as professional engineers, they would set the world on fire.

"As engineers," he stated for the opening gun of his new approach, "we deal with the application of combustion to industrial purposes."

And having thus stated the role of the engineer he went on to develop the fundamental requirements for combustion:

"The fuel and oxygen," he advised, "must be present in the proportions necessary to chemical combination; they must be intimately mixed; they must be brought to the ignition temperature and retained there until combustion is complete."

And having expounded this truth he went on into one of his excursions into philosophy:

"That," he said, "might be taken as a prescription for life. And remember," he warned, "that whereas material things respond always in the same way to the same stimuli, that is not true of the human spirit. As engineers you will deal quite as frequently with the spiritual as with the material and must understand both."

FROM: COMMANDER IN CHIEF GRAND FLEET

TO: BRITISH EMPIRE

BRITAIN HAS THIS DAY WITNESSED A DEMONSTRATION OF SEA POWER WHICH SHE WILL FORGET AT HER PERIL

When, after the Armistice, Dr. Lucke had sought a regular officer as his relief, he had recommended me to the Navy Department. I had accepted the appointment with enthusiasm because the station was near my wife's former home in Joliet. After we had been there on duty a year or so, Captain Moffett had returned for a visit with his friends and had surprised me one morning by calling on me in my office.

Our first "cruise," nominally to Guant?namo Bay, Cuba, strewed aircraft all along the Atlantic Coast after forced landings, with dense concentrations at Palm Beach. All failures in this outfit were classified as "mechanical"; the term "cockpit failure" had not yet been created. On analysis, I had discovered that practically all forced landings and delayed starts were chargeable to a few pilots. But when I posted the figures on the wardroom bulletin board, this act had been considered hardly cricket. Fed up with the vagaries of this school of aviation thought, I had looked around for a change of duty, and found it during the summer of 1922.

We had been billeted in the home of Antone Lang, the Christus of the play, and had been stirred by the devout spirit shining in the faces of the villagers. The play, too, had moved us deeply as a revelation of the fundamental tenets of our Christian faith. Though spoken wholly in German it had remained for us a vital religious experience.

During the evening following the performance we had talked with Antone Lang in his parlor and obtained his autograph on a photograph of himself in his role. And when we had come to settle with Frau Lang for our lodgings, we had been astonished to find them so absurdly cheap. Upon our offer to contribute to a local charity--this at a time when inflation had put the exchange rate up to several thousand marks to the dollar--Frau Lang had set a limit of twenty-five marks. At my exclamation of surprise she had hurried to explain, "We need honest work, not charity. Today there is nothing that money can buy!" I had left with a deep impression of the disaster of inflation and the folly of war.

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