or even the most, important ingredient of American victory in the war, it was a key ingredient; without the NACA, American aerial superiority would have been less complete, less early. Every American airplane that fought in the war, every aircraft engine, had been tested and improved in NACA facilities. Most of this cleanup and testing was incremental and anonymous, hard to trace to the NACA, and difficult to evaluate. With military officers, NACA engineers, and aircraft designers and manufacturers all poring over the same test results in an effort to improve the flying qualities of an aircraft, the credit for improvements must be spread widely. Some examples of NACA contributions can be isolated, as when the Committee predicted that the B-32 would fail and recommended that its development be abandoned. In some cases, the prescribed NACA fix for a problem aircraft was rejected by the manufacturer, as when Kelly Johnson of Lockheed ignored the first solution proposed by the NACA for the problems his P-38 was experiencing. 45 Two Committee achievements during the war were so obviously useful and noteworthy that the NACA took great pride in citing them. The first investigation undertaken at the new Ames laboratory—icing research-was so useful not only to military bombers operating at high altitudes and through all kinds of weather, but also to commercial operators, that it won for its principal investigator, Lewis A. Rodert, the Collier trophy of 1946. The low-drag wings of the P-51 Mustang, the result of years of NACA research on wing characteristics, became a hallmark of NACA achievement. Though some questioned that these laminar-flow wings (as they were often and incorrectly called) were responsible for the unparalleled performance of the Mustang, most agreed that they were a significant contribution to airfoil development and drag reduction. John Victory was pleased to report in later years that captured German documents revealed an inability by the Germans to account for the superior performance of the Mustang, even after they captured one intact and tested it, because their wind tunnels could not duplicate the low turbulence produced by the NACA.46 After the war the NACA got its share of medals and accolades in the general euphoria and self-congratulation that came with the peace. Quickly, the Committee began to make a case for a return to its prewar role. But doubt had been cast on the record, and the captured German documents, scientists, and aircraft did nothing to dispel the suspicion that the NACA had been bested in aeronautical research. Thus, what might have been a smooth reversion to the good old days became instead a period of serious questioning, even within the Committee itself.47 George Mead, the outside critic of prewar days who had led the march of industry into the NACA ranks, had undergone a full conversion and argued strongly for recapturing the old NACA independence. In 1948, Air Force Chief of Staff Carl Spaatz presents medals for World War II service to Jerome Hunsaker, [George Mead?], George Lewis, John Victory, H.J.E. Reid, Smith DeFrance, and Edward Sharp. (LaRC) As he saw it, the Committee had "been forced out of its role to wet nurse the designs of most companies, large and small," which had maintained neither "adequate scientific personnel nor proper tools for their use, such as wind tunnels." He also regretted that the NACA had been "dominated so completely by the military forces." He wanted the Committee to become once again "more truly 'national advisory'" instead of being "a service station for the Army and Navy." 48 Jerome Hunsaker, also a critic in prewar days, agreed "in principle" with Mead but did not know just where the Committee would fit in. "We have become, to a large degree," he said, "a service agency," and he felt that-in view of some of the unique equipment held by the NACA-it "must expect demands to test or 'perfect' existing designs" as it had done during the war. The choice was not really between total independence or total service, all fundamental research or all testing, for throughout its history the NACA had in fact combined the two. The question was what the mixture would be in the postwar world.49 An ominous sidelight on this question was the general relation of science to national defense as the war drew to a close. Numerous proposals were afoot to institutionalize scientific and technological advice in national defense. It would take several years to sort these out, but in 1944 several trends were already apparent. First, the military services would increasingly use contracts with universities and private institutions to obtain the research and development formerly done in their own laboratories or not at all. The contract freed the "scientists against time" who had come to Washington during the war to return to their home institutions and there conduct the research that would obviously be needed in the postwar world. 50 Second, military authorities were beginning to realize the need for standing mechanisms to provide scientific advice, and they embraced the general belief-perhaps to help explain away their own failuresthat the scientists had let them down in the prewar years and left them technologically inferior to the Germans in many areas. For their part, the scientists suspected that-once the war emergency was over-the services would no longer take their advice as seriously as they had during the war. Both sides were partially right, but the sum of their beliefs was a shared conviction that the best way to ensure the availability of technological sophistication in national defense for the future was to create permanent institutions through which the military could get advice and the scientists could make their voices heard. The NACA would be part of this effort, and in some respects a model.51 The NACA would not, however, be the model it wanted to be. The history of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which grew out of the National Defense Research Committee, shows how completely things had changed and how dated the NACA pattern was. As historian A. Hunter Dupree has pointed out, one of the reasons for the creation of the OSRD was that a wide gap existed between the weapons produced by NDRC research This trend posed a dilemma for the NACA. Traditionally, it had done fundamental research and left development to the military and the industry. If research and development were now becoming inseparable, as the World War II experience suggested, how was the NACA to return to its prewar status? If it combined research and development (as it had claimed to be doing during World War II), would it not be intruding on the territory of the military and the industry and creating that duplication of effort which Congress had always found intolerable? And if it did only basic research, could it hope to remain as useful as it had been in the past? When the NACA proposed a postwar National Defense Research Committee in 1944, to do for national security what it had done for aeronautics, the proposal went nowhere. The military services might establish their own advisory committees of outside experts, and they might contract with universities and private institutions Upon his retirement as NACA's director of aeronautical research, George W. Lewis receives a testimonial plaque from NACA Chairman Jerome C. Hunsaker; Vannevar Bush and General Carl Spaatz look on. (USAF photo) for basic research, but they would not permit a single body to perform both functions. In short, they would not endorse the NACA model. 53 These questions-the role of contracting out and the mix of basic research and development-were only the first of the uncertainties facing the NACA. What would be the NACA's relation to the aircraft industry, grown large and powerful during the war? Who would operate the new wind tunnels that would have to be built to study supersonic flight, now made possible by jet propulsion? Who would conduct high-speed flight research, and how? What would be the role of jets in military and commercial aviation? Were rockets and missiles a part of aeronautics? Where would NACA headquarters be located? How would wartime research results be declassified and distributed? Did the NACA favor an independent air force? Should Jack Ide be returned to his prewar post as the NACA's European representative? And-perhaps most important and most poignant-who was going to replace George Lewis? He suffered two heart attacks in November 1945 and could not thereafter resume the full duties he had performed for more than a quarter of a century. Lewis (said John Victory) did not take a day of vacation between Pearl Harbor and the armistice; his body seems to have held up only as long as it was needed. 54 9 The Writing on the Tunnel Wall, 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. THE NEW SCHEME OF THINGS 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 |