Read Online Chasing Icarus by Gavin Mortimer - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Gavin Mortimer
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dirigibles and 6 airplanes; Austria 2 dirigibles and 4 airplanes; England 2 dirigibles and 2 airplanes . . . the United States has just 1 dirigible and 2 airplanes.”
Taft had lent a sympathetic ear to the delegation but refused to accede to their request. Let’s wait and see how aviation develops in the next year or two was the gist of his demurral. A motivating factor in Taft’s decision was his wish to concentrate the United States’ energy and finances on Latin America and Eastern Asia, what he called his Dollar Diplomacy. The USA was heavily investing in both regions in an attempt to create stability, while at the same time promoting American commercial interests at the expense of European ones, and Taft saw no reason why he should divert money to the purchase of airplanes. That Europe was becoming increasingly unruly—what with Serbia recognizing Austria’s claim to Bosnia, Turkey suppressing unrest in Albania, and an arms race between Britain and Germany—was of little interest to Taft. In his opinion war in Europe would not affect the United States.
Yet a month later American papers reported that the French Senate had agreed to increase their military aviation budget by $145,000, and in June the Baltimore American carried a dispatch from Berlin stating that $3 million was being spent by the German military in preparation for large-scale aerial maneuvers later that year. The correspondent warned, “German military experts are visionaries . . . their imaginations teem with the dreams of the future in the air. They see the heavens crowded with aerial crafts of all sorts . . . [a] complete aerial navy consisting of big battleships with tubes for casting down explosives, swift clippers of the clouds, corresponding to the present high-speed naval cruisers, small torpedo craft and transport vessels.”
The army asked Glenn Curtiss to put on a display during an Atlantic City meet in July. Curtiss was happy to oblige, only too aware of the potential riches that lay in store for his airplane manufacturing company if the government’s head could be pried from the sand. On July 12 Curtiss climbed up onto the small, hard seat of his biplane and took off toward the Atlantic coast in search of the anchored yacht John E. Mehrer II , which, for the purposes of the demonstration, would be an enemy battleship. The oranges heavy in the pockets of Curtiss’s jacket were his bombs. Flying at 45 mph, he approached the yacht at three hundred feet and dropped the first orange. It landed three feet from the officials gathered on the deck. The remaining “bombs” were released with similar accuracy, and later Colo nel William Jones told the Chicago Daily Tribune , “The air machine has proved its efficacy.”
Emboldened by the success of Curtiss’s trial, Major General Leonard Wood, chief of staff of the army, announced that efforts to obtain funds from Congress “at the next session for an equipment of airplanes would be doubled.” Wood let it be known he was demanding nothing short of half a million dollars for what he called an urgent need.
Alarmed at the prospect of a cut in its funding, the U.S. navy launched an offensive against the airplane. Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans wrote a column for the Boston Sunday American in early September in which he ridiculed the idea that the airplane posed a threat to the navy. “A few oranges or confetti bombs have been dropped from a height of a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet [ sic ],” he wrote, “much to the amusement of the nursery maids and children who saw the experiment . . . Any good baseball player would have caught the oranges, and at the distance from which they were dropped the aviator would have been unseated by the return throw.” Rear Admiral Evans concluded that the experiments were “absolutely futile” and asserted to Americans that, provided they trusted his expertise, “they will not consider the danger to battleships very serious.”
Congress agreed
Taft had lent a sympathetic ear to the delegation but refused to accede to their request. Let’s wait and see how aviation develops in the next year or two was the gist of his demurral. A motivating factor in Taft’s decision was his wish to concentrate the United States’ energy and finances on Latin America and Eastern Asia, what he called his Dollar Diplomacy. The USA was heavily investing in both regions in an attempt to create stability, while at the same time promoting American commercial interests at the expense of European ones, and Taft saw no reason why he should divert money to the purchase of airplanes. That Europe was becoming increasingly unruly—what with Serbia recognizing Austria’s claim to Bosnia, Turkey suppressing unrest in Albania, and an arms race between Britain and Germany—was of little interest to Taft. In his opinion war in Europe would not affect the United States.
Yet a month later American papers reported that the French Senate had agreed to increase their military aviation budget by $145,000, and in June the Baltimore American carried a dispatch from Berlin stating that $3 million was being spent by the German military in preparation for large-scale aerial maneuvers later that year. The correspondent warned, “German military experts are visionaries . . . their imaginations teem with the dreams of the future in the air. They see the heavens crowded with aerial crafts of all sorts . . . [a] complete aerial navy consisting of big battleships with tubes for casting down explosives, swift clippers of the clouds, corresponding to the present high-speed naval cruisers, small torpedo craft and transport vessels.”
The army asked Glenn Curtiss to put on a display during an Atlantic City meet in July. Curtiss was happy to oblige, only too aware of the potential riches that lay in store for his airplane manufacturing company if the government’s head could be pried from the sand. On July 12 Curtiss climbed up onto the small, hard seat of his biplane and took off toward the Atlantic coast in search of the anchored yacht John E. Mehrer II , which, for the purposes of the demonstration, would be an enemy battleship. The oranges heavy in the pockets of Curtiss’s jacket were his bombs. Flying at 45 mph, he approached the yacht at three hundred feet and dropped the first orange. It landed three feet from the officials gathered on the deck. The remaining “bombs” were released with similar accuracy, and later Colo nel William Jones told the Chicago Daily Tribune , “The air machine has proved its efficacy.”
Emboldened by the success of Curtiss’s trial, Major General Leonard Wood, chief of staff of the army, announced that efforts to obtain funds from Congress “at the next session for an equipment of airplanes would be doubled.” Wood let it be known he was demanding nothing short of half a million dollars for what he called an urgent need.
Alarmed at the prospect of a cut in its funding, the U.S. navy launched an offensive against the airplane. Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans wrote a column for the Boston Sunday American in early September in which he ridiculed the idea that the airplane posed a threat to the navy. “A few oranges or confetti bombs have been dropped from a height of a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet [ sic ],” he wrote, “much to the amusement of the nursery maids and children who saw the experiment . . . Any good baseball player would have caught the oranges, and at the distance from which they were dropped the aviator would have been unseated by the return throw.” Rear Admiral Evans concluded that the experiments were “absolutely futile” and asserted to Americans that, provided they trusted his expertise, “they will not consider the danger to battleships very serious.”
Congress agreed
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