ARMY & NAVY: Daddy's Day

Thirty years ago a young War Department clerk named John Mullaney signed an order for a flying machine built by two brothers Wright, Orville and Wilbur, out in Dayton, Ohio. The contraption was specified to go 40 m.p.h. with a 25-h.p., four-cylinder engine.* This Wright machine was not only the first plane bought by the U S.: it was the winged germ of the world's first military flying force. At 54 Clerk Mullaney is still on the job and so is the force for which he bought Wright's ship. In celebrating August 2 as its 30th birthday, the U. S. Army Air Corps last week could boast, not only that it is now in process of becoming the equal of any nation's, but that it is already the daddy of them all.

The house where the Brothers Wright lived and worked no longer stands in Dayton. Henry Ford carted it away for his collection of Americana at Dearborn, Mich. But on Dayton's northern outskirts lies a long, lusciously green field named Wright, shaped like an arrowhead, flanked by a long row of hangars and shops and a broad cluster of brick laboratory buildings. This is the heart and brain of the Air Corps, the home base of its Matériel Division, where every item of equipment used, from a gauge needle to a 15-ton bomber, is examined and tested before purchase; where its advance thinking and performance (blind flight, stratosphere, automatic control, radio research) are done; where its medical studies are pursued. Here come all bids for the $337,000,000 expansion program voted in April and June by Congress, which is to bring the Air Corps up to 5,500 first-line planes by 1941. And here, last week on the Air Corps's birthday, was held the chief party in a celebration that spanned the nation.

That morning some 1,500 planes were taxied to the take-off lines at all the Corps's major fields—Virginia's Langley, Long Island's Mitchel, Michigan's Selfridge,* Louisiana's Barksdale, Alabama's Maxwell, Texas' Randolph, Kelly, Brooks and Duncan, Illinois's Chanute and Scott, Colorado's Lowry, Washington's Fort Lewis, California's March and Hamilton. At a radio signal from President Roosevelt in the White House, the planes at all these fields roared forward, swept aloft, joined each other in droning, hammering formations, swung in wide arcs over many cities to show U. S. civilians and taxpayers what their nation's wings look like and how they can fly. The length of the Pacific Coast, civilians were organized into a "listening network" to detect the approach of "enemy" planes which defenders from March and Hamilton fields flew up to "intercept."

General Henry H. Arnold, chief of the Corps, officiated at a luncheon for oldtime pilots, the air industry and the press in the administration building at Wright Field. He pinned Distinguished Flying Crosses on four officers,† after General George H. Brett, chief of the Matériel Division, had introduced distinguished guests. Among the latter, the men who must build-their nation's wings up to world war strength in two years eyed particularly a chunky Congressman from Akron, Chairman Dow Harter of the aviation subgroup of the House Military Affairs Committee. For he was trying to help get the expansion program through on time, and to spread its work and profits.