Harbor, the new laboratory had published its first technical report and begun wind-tunnel research.2

In contrast to this rapid progress at Sunnyvale, the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory (AERL) at Cleveland experienced delays and setbacks that upset the early construction schedule and interfered with the successful completion of the first researches. There were several reasons for this weaker start at Cleveland. Congressional approval for this laboratory came later than that for Ames and brought the project into greater competition with other war-related activities for increasingly scarce resources of men and materials. The NACA lacked the expertise to plan and execute such a facility and had to rely on outside experts unaccustomed to its methods. The logical man from the Langley engine-research staff to head the new laboratory proved unacceptable to George Mead and others and was bypassed in favor of Edward Ray Sharp, who was recalled from Ames in 1941. A self-made man without benefit of a college degree, Sharp had joined the Langley laboratory in 1922 as an airplane rigger. Three years later he was administrative officer of the laboratory, a post he held until 1940 when he was sent to administer the building program at Sunnyvale. He was chosen for the Cleveland job because of his common sense and administrative ability, but he lacked the technical expertise that Smith DeFrance could call upon in establishing the Ames laboratory.3

When Sharp took over the Langley team working on the Cleveland laboratory in August 1941, more than a year after Congress approved funds for the project, not a single building had been completed. Caught up in the outbreak of war, the project soon fell even further behind. Drastic measures were required to get it back on schedule. The Langley team drafting plans for the laboratory was transferred to temporary quarters in Cleveland. Experts from the aircraft engine industry were brought in as consultants. Permission was sought and received to let new contracts for the laboratory on a cost-plus-fixed-fee basis rather than the lump-sum basis previously used. Pressure was put on contractors to meet their deadlines, and the Committee threatened them and their bonding companies with penalties if they failed to comply. The Army-Navy Munitions Board assigned the highest possible priority rating to the project, as did the Aircraft Division of the War Production Board, facilitating the purchase of critical supplies. And Congress granted additional funds to meet the escalating expenses incurred by these actions and by upward revision of the original estimates of what the laboratory should comprise and how much that would cost.

Because of these actions, the laboratory was able to begin research in June 1942 and formally opened in April 1943, nine months ahead of the originally predicted completion date. But the cost was more than twice the original estimate, and the results were not as sterling as many

had hoped. In September 1943 an informed army source reported that "the Army is very much discouraged by the lack of results at AERL," contrasting this with the "excellent results put out by AAL."5 In general he felt that AERL was not providing timely information, not providing the right information, and apparently not working quickly enough. No doubt many shortcomings could be attributed to the circumstances of the laboratory's planning and construction, but for whatever reason, the laboratory had gotten off on the wrong foot with the NACA's most important customer.

The beleaguered staff at Cleveland might have been comforted to know it was not alone: the Washington office was caught up in its own prewar scuffle for facilities and in many ways fared worse. In 1940 Victory asked for more space in the Navy Building, where the NACA had been housed since 1920, because, he said, "It is of vital importance that our activity remain . in immediate proximity to the air organizations of the Army and Navy." In reply, the navy shunted the Committee's offices to the eighth-wing penthouse, letting it be known that "if Mr. Victory does much kicking about this space assignment he may find himself kicked out of the Navy Building." Apparently Victory did kick-as was his wont-and the following year the navy pressured

the Bureau of Aeronautics to remove the Committee entirely. Victory reported to Ames that the office controlling government space in the capital had offered the NACA its choice of "a negro public school, a small apartment house in southwest, or a garage." The Committee settled instead on renting the Leiter mansion in an exclusive section of Washington, with the understanding that after the war it would return to quarters near the military services.6

The competition for adequate quarters and facilities was merely the most irritating of the NACA's activities in the two years before Pearl Harbor. After President Roosevelt's approval of the mobilization plan, the NACA had gone on a war footing. Although the plan formally placed the NACA under the joint Army-Navy Aeronautical Board in the event of national emergency, it did not really change the way the Committee did its business. The services gained a power over the NACA that they never had to invoke, for the Committee voluntarily did everything it could to meet the requests of the services and to defer its own programs in the interest of national security. Requests from the services received priority over other investigations. When the military asked the Committee's advice on a technical question, as it did in December 1940 on continuing the development of a Pratt and Whitney liquid-cooled engine, the NACA followed streamlined procedures for returning authoritative recommendations at the earliest possible moment. All this was a change in degree, but not in kind, from the service that the NACA had for years provided to the military.7

The problem of advice was tied inextricably to the problem of coordination, an issue that grew more complicated as government agencies multiplied in preparation for war. Two important tasks of coordination fell to key Committee members. Vannevar Bush resigned as chairman of the NACA to head the National Defense Research Committee (later expanded into the Office of Scientific Research and Development) but he retained his NACA membership and supervised coordination between the two agencies. The National Defense Research Committee was modeled on the NACA, and aeronautics was specifically excluded from its jurisdiction in deference to the NACA.8

The other key coordination job was performed by George J. Mead, vice chairman of the NACA, who in 1940 became director of the Airplane and Engine Division of the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense (known as the National Defense Advisory Commission [NDAC], not to be confused with Bush's NDRC). Though Mead held the post for less than a year before resigning to devote his full efforts to NACA work, in that short time he helped set up the machinery with which the United States responded to President Roosevelt's dramatic call for 50,000 aircraft a year, established lines of communication between the NACA and the National Defense Advisory

Commission, and imposed upon the emerging system of cooperation his own strong views on the NACA's proper role in the war. Mead believed wholeheartedly that, as in World War I, the "proper function" of the NACA was to serve "as an unbiased technical adviser to any branch of the government on aeronautical matters." Both Vannevar Bush and Jerome Hunsaker agreed, ensuring acceptance of this policy throughout the war.9

Experience was to prove that formal arrangements for cooperation were not as important as the commitment to cooperation; although the structure of interagency committees and commissions changed with dizzying frequency, the NACA provided advice and services to all who needed them. Much the same was true of coordination of research. The NACA office of coordinator of research, established early in 1940 to integrate aeronautical research activities in the country, survived the outbreak of war by only two months, though its function continued for the duration. S. Paul Johnston resigned as coordinator in February 1942 to take a post with the National Defense Advisory Commission, partly because he had accomplished his initial task of gathering information on America's aeronautical research activities, partly because various NACA subcommittees could handle the letting of research contracts to educational institutions, partly because industry showed some resistance to the NACA's dictating all research programs throughout the country, and partly because Johnston's post had always encroached upon the prerogatives and territory of George Lewis. To fill Johnston's place, the NACA appointed an "assistant for coordination" to the director of aeronautical research, who continued (with less power and less visibility but equal effectiveness) to keep tabs on American aeronautical research and suggest to the NACA how duplication might be avoided and gaps in research filled. 10 As war approached in 1941 and Hunsaker took over from Bush the chairmanship of the NACA, his main concern was how completely the Committee would have to abandon fundamental research in favor of applied research for the services. In late 1940, George Lewis had told Hunsaker that about 50 percent of the Committee's fundamental research had already been displaced by pressing problems of military research. A year later, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the Committee reported to Congress that 71 percent of its work was on specific military projects. The NACA faced the real possibility of losing its identity in the war, but even Hunsaker was powerless to change things much.1

WARTIME OPERATIONS

"Never was life more interesting," wrote John Victory in 1944. "Never have I been so busy. I take a keen delight in getting work done

and we are rendering service of truly great value to the war program.' He had detected in himself the "symptoms of a breakdown," but considered a vacation “just out of the question" for the "volume of the work and even its urgency continue to increase." 12 Though Victory was wont to take himself too seriously, his comments reflect the pace and intensity of NACA activities during World War II, not only in the Washington headquarters but in the laboratories as well. In fact, the pace was even more hectic at the laboratories, for lack of gas rations kept Victory at home evenings and Sundays, while many of the facilities at the laboratories were running on two and even three shifts.

The NACA's work procedure during World War II was generally the same as it had been through the previous quarter century. Suggestions for research projects came into the headquarters from the military services, industry, the technical committees and subcommittees, and the laboratories. These were either referred to a technical committee for evaluation or (especially in the case of requests from the services) approved outright in George Lewis's office. The research was assigned to a laboratory, which in turn scheduled it for one of the wind tunnels or other test facilities, depending on its priority. As the work progressed, preliminary reports were prepared and referred where appropriate to the sponsoring or interested agency or party. When the entire investigation was completed, a final formal report was prepared and published and the research authorization was closed out.13

World War II changed some details of this procedure without altering the general sequence of events. For example, most of the Committee's war work was cleanup and testing of prototype models of military aircraft; before the war, the NACA had devoted little time to such engineering testing, for which the services themselves had been principally responsible. As an arm of the military services for the duration of the war, the NACA could not refuse such requests, though in practice it had seldom turned down military projects in the peacetime years. 14

The NACA's two principal technical publications before the war had been the Technical Report (containing major research conclusions, usually at the end of an investigation) and the Technical Note (containing interim and less important results). Both were generally unclassified and widely distributed, though some Technical Notes had only limited distribution if they contained proprietary information or results considered so advantageous to the United States that they should not yet be shared with other nations. During World War II, the TR and TN series were virtually suspended; they were replaced by a series of wartime reports, all classified and with limited distribution, usually within the military services and among industry contractors having a need to know. This change in policy meant that during the war the