One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power (15 page)

The Bureau of Aeronautics wasted no time:

The first class of fifty-five cadets reported to Pensacola on July 20, 1935, and by September, there were 192 aviation cadets undergoing training, with an additional 201 potential cadets undergoing elimination training to determine their adaptability to flight before going to Pensacola.

By September 1936, the first cadets were at sea, and, two years later, 614 aviation cadets were on active Naval Aviator duty.
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Notwithstanding initial ambivalence about the aviation cadets, they soon became integral to fleet operations, and by 1939, when the first cadets were due to leave active duty for commissions as Ensigns in the Naval Reserve, at least some senior officers recognized that their release would seriously hamper fleet operations.
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Throughout the mid-1930s the problem of numbers was accompanied by the persistent difficulty of maintaining sufficient training time for Reserve aviators. As part of broader cost-cutting policies, all Reserve training was reduced. For the 1934 fiscal year, annual flying hours for the reservists were reduced from forty-five to thirty and drills from forty-eight to twenty-four, while flying hours for the Volunteer Reserve were entirely eliminated.
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The Bureau of Aeronautics contended that fewer
than forty-eight flying hours per aviator annually raised the probability of accidents due to poor flying proficiency to an unacceptable level. It pointed out that if aviators in the Volunteer Reserve were “not provided with flight training from time to time, they would soon cease to be Naval Aviators.”
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The problem of training time also affected surface and submarine Reserve officers, but the relatively greater combined complexity and perishability of flying skills rendered the problem more acute for naval aviation.
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The Act of 22 July 1935 partially redressed the problem of numbers by increasing the number of officers as a percentage of enlisted personnel from 4 percent to 4.75 percent. This translated to increasing the authorized strength to 6,531 officers, well short of the 7,102 officers required to maintain the fleet in readiness for war, and the 7,941 officers required for the treaty-strength Navy that was authorized and building. It capped the numbers of Rear Admirals, Captains, and Commanders, except in wartime, and specified that the Lieutenant Commanders could be increased up to 15 percent when required. Lengths of service for Lieutenants and junior Lieutenants were extended, while lifting restrictions on involuntary retirements of officers in those grades. These provisions aimed to supply the minimum officer needs while eliminating overage officers who clearly were not going to be promoted. Meanwhile, Naval Academy appointments had been reduced to three per member of Congress annually, which would not even cover normal attrition let alone any increase in strength.

Three years later, the Act of 22 June 1938 increased authorized strength of the line to 5.5 percent of enlisted strength along with reorganizing the system of promotion more extensively than any time since the Act of 29 August 1916 (discussed below). But authorized and actual strength remained two different numbers. With the graduation of the Naval Academy class of 1938, the actual strength increased to 6,565 officers, still well short of the 7,211 (excluding 730 naval aviation cadets) required for the treaty Navy and short of the additional 1,200 officers necessary for the expansion Congress had just provided. At about the same time, Congress was working through what would become the Act of 22 June 1938, which fundamentally reorganized the Naval Reserve as it had been established by the Act of 1925.

With the clouds of war gathering, President Roosevelt signed the Naval Aviation Reserve Act on 13 June 1939. This law amended the Act of 15 April 1935 that had created naval aviation cadets. They were no longer to dwell in the nether world between enlisted and commissioned status, and the Navy would gain their services for longer periods, relieving pressure on the line from fleet expansion and aviation's growth. Once graduated from Pensacola, they would immediately be commissioned Reserve Ensigns, and after three years' active service become eligible for promotion to Reserve junior Lieutenants. They might be required to perform active duty for up to four years; they were allowed to serve up to seven years. Meanwhile Congress again increased the authorized strength of the line to 7,562 officers, but this remained short
of the 8,671 needed to man the fleet to peacetime complements, and in any case the actual number of active list officers amounted to only 6,877 on 30 June 1939. The September 1939 German invasion of Poland had a positive effect on the Navy—President Franklin D. Roosevelt immediately issued an executive order increasing the actual enlisted strength and authorizing active duty for retired and Reserve officers. By June 1940, 539 retired and 1,806 Reserve officers were on active duty.

In August, September, and October 1940, three more laws aimed to increase the numbers of officers in order to accommodate the vastly increased requirements created by laws signed in June and July (following the fall of France to the Nazis). These acts expanded the fleet by 1,325,000 tons of combatants and boosted naval aviation to an unbelievable
15,000 aircraft
. They alone augmented ships and aircraft by more than 80 percent; the fleet expansion acts called for 2,200 additional short-term naval aviators. That magnitude of increase rendered previous mechanisms for accessing officers, especially aviators, inadequate and incomplete.

To quickly address these vast new requirements, the Act of 27 August 1940 “Naval Aviation Personnel Act,” based largely on the recommendations of the Horne Board, whose establishment had been mandated by the Act of 13 June 1939, authorized appointment of as many Naval Reserve aviators (essentially, those officers commissioned from the naval aviation cadet program) to the regular line as necessary.
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Authorized officers would be increased automatically.
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Almost incidentally, one week later, the Act of 4 September 1940 authorized the president to commission Naval Academy graduates who were qualified but had not been previously commissioned (due to earlier limits on authorized strengths).

The Act of 8 October 1940 provided still more officers for the regular line by mechanisms that would admit NROTC commissioned Reserve officers. Since the first NROTC class in 1930, 2,154 students had graduated and been commissioned, making a large pool of college-educated officers deemed the next best source after Naval Academy graduates for regular officers. The numbers to be so transferred were left to presidential discretion. The law did not increase authorized officers because the actual number remained so far below existing authorized strength.

Rapidly changing conditions soon made it obvious that even these novel methods for increasing the line were inadequate. The earlier Horne Board was reprised, and it recommended reducing the Naval Academy course to three years (the Navy had already graduated the 1940 and 1941 classes after completing three and one-half years—by interpreting the law to mean four
academic
years) on the five-appointment regimen. This was the same mechanism employed during World War I. The recommendation became law on 3 June 1941. This avenue was soon supplemented on 11 July 1941 by a law providing for the appointment of temporary officers and for the temporary promotion of officers as required, but not more than six months after the termination of war.

Thus, by the time of U.S. entry into the war, the Navy had adopted a solution to securing officers, one that institutionalized a two-tier personnel system in which there were, first, officers of the regular line, and, second, everyone else. Expansion of the officer corps had been transformed from gaining approval for an increase in the regular line to devising methods to enlarge it temporarily, and to populate it, even during peacetime, with second-class citizens in the form of Reserve officers, reactivated retired officers, and retained fitted officers no longer in the running for promotion.
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The problem of distribution was addressed by temporary promotions of both regular and Reserve officers. These personnel policies especially helped to supply the vast number of junior officers necessary to fly the Navy's burgeoning fleet of aircraft. Of course, the realities of the war's requirements soon also outstripped these several devices for expanding the line. However, these mechanisms had established a solid institutional foundation for growing the line, and the subsequent wartime commissioning programs were extensions of and variants upon them. Naval aviation would have its own versions of wartime Reserve commissioning programs.

PROMOTION

Although necessary, an adequate number of aviator officers was not in itself sufficient to put naval aviation on the right track: such required the proper distribution of officers into the several grades. In all organizations, but especially the military, rank is the currency of the realm. With it, all things are possible, without, very little. This was another principal lesson of the conflict between the engineers and the line. Unlike most large organizations, in closed institutions such as the military, entry into executive positions is secured only through advancement from one grade to another, after having been commissioned at the lowest grade. There are, with few exceptions, no lateral entries into the higher grades from without. This renders technological innovation, such as the introduction of aviation into the Navy, profoundly difficult.

Closely tied to promotion is the matter of specialization and defining what it means to be an officer. This is of lesser moment in a Service in which promotion is decided strictly through seniority. Promotion by seniority had been virtually sacrosanct in the Navy until 1899.
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Promotion by selection up, based on comparative fitness of an officer for the duties of the next higher grade—to Rear Admiral, Captain, and Commander—was established by the Act of 29 August 1916. Thus it was that aviation arrived just as the Navy shifted to a promotion mechanism that (1) did not assume that competence in the junior grades necessarily meant competence in the duties of the senior grades and (2) required a formal complex representation of each grade's duties and the skills required to perform them.

Because its officers would not be organized into a separate corps, but remain within the line, the practical challenge for Navy aviation was to obtain the inclusion
of promotion criteria that managed to balance the competing demands of the specialized duties of aviation with the duties of a general line officer. Having redefined line officer to include engineering expertise only a short while before, line officers (read: “battleship sailors”) were loath to alter it again so soon. Moreover, maintaining the existing definition of officer served the purposes of non-aviators in fending off what they perceived as the threat of aviation to the battle line's dominance. However, selection boards were unlikely to entertain multiple concepts of career paths as legitimate for promotion.
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Compounding these difficulties was the initial absence of aviators in the flag grades. For the first decade or so, Navy aviation would have to rely on selection boards composed of battleship admirals, some of whom were actively opposed to any significant role for aviation in the Navy, to promote aviators whose career paths did not look familiar to them. Two methods were adopted to address this problem. Aviators worked to insert language by law and administrative direction in the instructions to selection boards about criteria for evaluating officers. Simultaneously, as noted above, aviators sought sympathetic battleship officers who might be formally grandfathered in as naval aviation observers. In turn, aviators lobbied within the Navy to see that at least one such formally designated officer (and subsequently naval aviators) would be included on every selection board.

Analysis of line selection board membership over the 1916–1941 period reveals that their efforts were successful. Although never part of administrative regulations, let alone law during this period, aviators appear to have gained an informal “quota” for selection board membership. Beginning with the June 1926 board, at least one aviator (and occasionally two) was included among the nine members. This started with the senior officers qualified as naval aviation observers and continued until enough naval aviators had reached flag rank to serve. The overwhelming majority of non-aviator board members were drawn from officers stationed in or near Washington, D.C.; for example, Boston, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Philadelphia. By contrast, the aviator members came a great distance to serve on the boards.
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Support for extending promotion by selection to Lieutenant Commander and Lieutenant grew as a way to address the “hump,” as we saw above. Although ostensibly a neutral mechanism functioning solely to promote the officers comparatively best fitted for the duties of the next higher grade, another agenda was also at work, namely, the place of aviation officers and the larger problem of generalists versus specialists. The comments of Rear Admiral J. Raby, following his tenure on the December 1932 selection board, are instructive:

If you look over the list today you will find that there are a good many men who are able to pass their examinations,
not necessarily Naval Academy graduates, but men who came up from the ranks or temporary Officers during the war and
many who are aviators
. They followed one line all their lives and it does not look to me that they are qualified to perform their duty as Lieutenant Commander aboard ship, and for that reason . . . we ought to have some way of eliminating those men that would probably be a drag on that grade. They eventually . . . will fail in selection when they get to the next higher grade.
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