before from developments in military aviation, but it also prevented the manufacturers from freely exchanging information on their projects. In fact, the two sections of the General Electric Company working on the separate jet projects did not know that the other team existed, though of course rumors flew at a great rate. The “Buck Rogers” project for a jet airplane at Bell Aircraft was apparently unknown to some of the employees there. The full story of American jet development during the war has never been made public, but enough is known to suggest that it is a case history in the hazards of excessive secrecy.41

This general cloak of secrecy, however, does not fully explain the extent to which the Committee was excluded from its normally close and candid collaboration with the military services, as Hunsaker's letter to Warner suggests. What had really happened was the onset of a crisis of confidence, a suspicion on the part of the services that the NACA had let them down. Military men understood that they themselves were ultimately responsible for the state of military unpreparedness in which they found themselves. Depending on the NACA to tell them what was important had lulled them into a comfortable laxness in which they had left their own flanks unguarded. Now they were second-best in an important new technology, and they felt that their past reliance on the NACA had been a mistake. So they took to running this new technology by themselves, relying on their own judgment, their own sources of information. Since they wanted to keep the whole field as secret as possible, there was no reason to inform the NACA. The Committee had no "need to know"; keeping the NACA abreast of developments would serve only to multiply potential leaks of information without getting any assistance or advice in return, for the services expected

none.

None of this was explicit. There were no confrontations, no exchanges of acrimony, no pointing of fingers. Outwardly all went on as before, and the written record remained as polite, cordial, and sterile as ever. But beneath the surface and between the lines was a cooling of attachments and a keeping of distances such as the NACA had never known. When Jerome Hunsaker sent General Arnold a paper on "Aeronautical Research" in September 1942, he received in return the suggestion that he concern himself less with the possibility of “frozen designs" in American aircraft production and more with developing better aircraft engines for fighters. "I do not feel that progress made in the improvements of engines is keeping pace with that of the airplane,” wrote Arnold. Hunsaker derived from this letter the "impression that there is a feeling that American engine development has been outdistanced by that of foreign powers," and he asked for a meeting with the chief of the Army Materiel Command to clarify the army's position. He was told that the army expected to fight out the war with the aircraft

engines then in production (a reason given then and later by both the army and the NACA for delay in developing jet propulsion). The Committee should therefore occupy itself with refining the engines already in production, a role that effectively barred the NACA from the jet-propulsion development being pursued by the army. The Committee did become involved in testing such jet engines as reached prototype stage; but, when it attempted in the winter of 1942-1943 to penetrate army long-term councils, it was politely advised to stick to conventional engines. 42

General H.H. Arnold inspects the kind of work he wanted the NACA to do during World War II: a researcher at the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory points out ice buildup on a conventional propeller blade during the general's tour of the laboratory 9 November 1944. George Lewis and John Victory look on at left. (LeRC)

Sensing this new situation without ever being candidly apprised of it, the NACA tried to cut its losses by doing for jet propulsion what it was best at doing. It had been working on compressor design for years in connection with turbosuperchargers. The principles and problems in both fields were almost identical and the NACA could transfer its expertise to the newer field, as indeed it did. Furthermore, the Com

mittee could use its new laboratory at Cleveland for some of the testing required once the new engines reached prototype stage. Although the Cleveland laboratory had not been designed for research in jet propulsion, some of its equipment was suitable for testing both conventional and jet engines, and the Committee quickly sought appropriations for new equipment specifically suited to jet development.

43

And Eastman Jacobs, stung and dissatisfied with the services' rejection of his ducted-fan proposal, began a line of argument that he maintained through the war and into the era of practical jet aviation: too much emphasis was being put on engine development and not enough on the means of fitting these new engines to aircraft. The engine and the airframe must be matched to each other, he maintained, or the efficiency of both would be compromised. Essentially he was arguing for more attention to the aerodynamics of jet engines, and aerodynamics was the NACA's forte, a way for the Committee to make a real contribution to jet-aircraft development even if it was largely excluded from development of the engines.44

LOOKING BEYOND THE WAR

The NACA's failure to discover and develop jet propulsion should not be allowed to mask its real and significant contributions to American aerial victory in World War II. Though air power was not the sole,

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