http://www.dailypress.com/news/military/langley100/dp-langley-centeounnial-fnding-20160417-story.html:

Nearly 100 years after the first plane took off from Langley Field, it can be hard to see this busy stretch of land along Hampton’s Back River as anything other than one of the most important hubs of American air power on the planet.

Lightning-fast F-22 Raptors from the 1st Fighter Wing carve up the skies overhead, patrolling the air with a stealthy, all-weather fighter unmatched by any foreign aircraft.

Air Combat Command works tirelessly in many of the buildings below, managing a vast legion of battle-ready Air Force units with a lethal global reach.

But when the first officers from the fledgling Aviation Section of the Army Signal Corps came to evaluate what is now Langley Air Force Base in late 1916, what they saw was not a highly developed complex of airplane hangars and runways but rather a back-country expanse of fields, woods and old plantation homes.

Only in their imaginations could they envision the pioneering military aviation center that — despite almost closing following the turbulent days of World War I — would play an indispensable role in defining the potential of air power and the importance of a separate, wholly independent Air Force.

Few Army strategists of the day saw the promise of an invention still widely regarded as a novel reconnaissance tool rather than a combat weapon, however.

So when Lt. Col. George Owen Squier and his selection board — including the Army’s first rated pilot — recommended the 1,659-acre tract as the site of the service’s first purpose-built air field, they were betting their futures on a revolutionary gamble.

“Aviation was still so new that there was a lot of resistance— even from the chief of the Signal Corps,” Deputy Command Historian William M. Butler says.

“But Squier was very forward thinking when it came to the airplane’s potential. He saw them doing things that the planes of the day still couldn’t do.”

Driving force

An 1887 graduate of West Point, Squier was as much a scientist, engineer and inventor as a soldier.

So impressive was his grasp of mathematics, physics and ballistics that the Army sent him to Johns Hopkins University, where in 1893 he became the first officer to earn a Ph.D.

Following a tour of duty as an artillery instructor at Fort Monroe, Squier transferred to the Signal Corps, where he studied the emerging field of radio with pioneering Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi.

“Squier was this rare combination of scholar, soldier and visionary,” says aviation historian Amy Waters Yarsinske, author of “Flyboys Over Hampton Roads: Glenn Curtiss’s Southern Experiment.” “That made him a powerhouse in the early history of military aviation.”

After founding the Signal Corps School in 1905, Squier became a champion of aeronautics, spurring the creation of the Army’s first aviation entity — the “Aeronautical Division” — in 1907.

A year later he completed a nationally influential paper on the military potential of aircraft — then bought the Corps’ first airplane.

Soon Squier had allied with the Smithsonian Institution to propose a national advisory committee for aviation, historians Paul W. Clark and Lawrence A. Lyons note in their 2014 book “George Owen Squier: U.S. Army Major General, Inventor, Aviation Pioneer, Founder of Muzak.”

He was still pressing Congress for support when World War I broke out in Europe, leading him to a secret mission and a first-hand look at the revolutionary military aviation innovations cropping up with breathtaking speed on the Western Front.

Returning in May 1916, Squier’s report spurred approval for a “permanent experimental and inspection station” designed to help America catch up.

Such a place had never been built before, but it was “an absolute and immediate necessity for the proper and rapid development of Army aviation,” he wrote.

“Squier was a moving force,” Butler says, “a key figure in the Army’s aviation aspirations at a time when the program was still very undefined and very small.”

Mammoth deal

Exactly how some of Hampton’s first citizens discovered the Army’s plans may never be unraveled.

Among them was Clerk of Court Harry Holt Sr., who may have learned of the Signal Corps’ search for a likely site from his powerful patron — Virginia Sen. Thomas S. Martin — who chaired the Appropriations Committee.

Another leader was merchant Hunter R. Booker, whose niece had married an officer on the Corps’ selection committee, known as the Aerodrome Board.

The gregarious Holt may have known Squier previously, too, because of the frequent dinner invitations he extended to officers at Fort Monroe, his grandson Wythe Holt Jr. recalls.

Then there’s the link with the Curtiss Flying School in nearby Newport News, where aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss and his manager — famed balloonist Thomas Baldwin — were not only exploring property near Hampton to expand but also past instructors at the Corps’ aviation school.

Another possible source is Maj. Billy Mitchell — a former Signal Corps instructor and a member of Squier’s Washington, D.C. staff.

Every weekend during the fall of 1916 he traveled to the Curtiss School in order to take flying lessons and earn his pilot’s license.

He also went gunning for ducks on the local rivers, the Daily Press reported.

“This was a very tight group. They all gravitated to each other and knew each other’s business — and they knew this was the place to be,” Yarsinske says, citing Curtiss’ previous choice of Newport News and his participation in the Army’s visits to the Back River.

“The climate was great for flying. It was in the middle of the East Coast. It was right on the water. It was close to Washington. It had everything they needed and wanted.”

Still, spurred by worries over Virginia’s looming prohibition law and its impact on the Old Point Comfort resort business, the Hampton men sweetened what became an irresistible offer.

In addition to obtaining options on more than 1,650 acres of relatively flat waterfront land, they secured the right of way to build a bridge and a street car line from Hampton.

They also promised electricity and water.

Though the property appears to have been favored from the start, the Army inspected it several times, including a Nov. 18 visit in which Squier brought the Secretary of the Navy, the head of the Smithsonian and other members of the newly formed National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, who had agreed to share the site.

“Mammoth Army aviation school and experimental station will be located on Back River near Hampton,” the Dec. 17, 1916 Daily Press reported after the $290,000 deal was announced. “The people of Hampton, Phoebus and Elizabeth City County have been given a wonderful Christmas gift.”

Visionary plan

Even before the contract was signed on Dec. 30, 1916, Squier and his partners at NACA — which later became NASA — had big ideas for the new complex.

“This was going to be the first place built expressly as a military airfield — and they wanted to make a statement,” retired Air Force historian Edward G. Longacre says.

“They wanted it to be the end-all and be-all of military bases. They wanted it to be a place like no other.”

Traveling to Squier’s home state of Michigan in November, the group met with automobile magnate Henry Ford, who recommended Albert Kahn of Detroit as the architect.

As seen in such landmark industrial structures as the 1903 Packard Motor Car plant and the giant Ford assembly plant started in Highland Park in 1909, Kahn had made a name for himself by taking on commissions for buildings that were the first of their kind.

So he seemed like the perfect choice for the ground-breaking aviation station that — as early as a Dec. 17 editorial in the Daily Press — was already being referred to as the namesake of the late Smithsonian president and flight pioneer Samuel P. Langley.

“This was the sort of thing Kahn had cut his teeth on,” University of Michigan architectural historian Claire Zimmerman says. “From the master plan to the smallest details, he did these sorts of unprecedented projects really well.”

Setting to work in February 1917 — the same month the Army opened Langley’s first offices in a downtown Hampton bank building — Kahn and his staff quickly confirmed their reputations, sketching out ideas for an innovative complex that was part college campus and aeronautical village as well as a model airfield.

But in addition to laying out the master plan, buildings and roads, they went far beyond the utilitarian requirements of the project, paying close attention to how the structures articulated their founders’ ambitions for aviation’s future.

Decorative brickwork and iconographical emblems abounded, including such tell-tale touches as the shields, stars, propellers, gears, winged eagles and pilot’s badges that embellished the most prominent facades and entryways.

But even such inconspicuous features as the manhole covers — which bore the crossed-flag insignia of the Signal Corps — were recruited as heralds of Langley’s higher purpose.
“Squier gave Kahn carte blanche — and he threw his whole heart and soul into the project.” Longacre says. “You have to marvel at how much work he put into these grandiose buildings. But everything changed when the war started.”

Thwarted goals

Two months after Kahn began, the United States entered World War I, creating an immediate clash between the urgency of the war effort and his design and construction timeline of three to four years.

Even before then the project had bogged down, however, because of the unexpected difficulty of clearing, filling and grading the mostly wooded, low-lying site.

“Look at the photos of the surveyors. Look at their feet,” says John V. Quarstein, author of “World War I on the Virginia Peninsula.” “Two guys have waders on. The others have tall boots. And all of them are covered with mud.”

So demanding was the job of remaking the land that — over the course of a year — the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific Co. deposited 1.8-million cubic meters of fill dredged from the Back River at a cost of $500,000, writes James R. Hansen in “Engineer in Charge: A History of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory.”

But the water table was still so high and land so susceptible to flooding during heavy rain and high tides that the J.G. White Engineering Corp. had to construct a subsoil drainage system using ceramic tiles.

“Nature’s greatest ambition was to produce in this, her cesspool, the muddiest mud, the weediest weeds, the dustiest dust and the most ferocious mosquitoes the world has ever known,” wrote one of the first soldiers assigned to the field.

“Her plans were so well formulated and adhered to that she far surpassed her wildest hopes and desires.”

Wartime labor and material shortages slowed the work still more, Longacre says, forcing the Army to begin erecting temporary corrugated-metal aircraft hangars and tarpaper barracks while waiting for Kahn to finish designing the permanent structures.

The officers in charge brought in prefabricated bungalows as a stopgap measure, too, providing the growing number of soldiers with not only housing but also offices and storage.

Adding to the confusion was the arrival of scores of British, French and Italian airmen, as well as boatloads of Allied planes sent to Langley for testing.

Then there was the mounting friction between the contractor and the Quartermaster Corps’ superintendent of construction — who also clashed continuously with the field’s commander.

By late fall, Squier was ready to write Langley off as “the bottleneck of the aircraft program.”

That’s when the Army moved its experimental aviation mission to McCook Field in Ohio, which had already installed the dynamometer needed to test the new Liberty engine.

“That should have been one of the first things Langley did,” Longacre says, “but due to the war they were trying to make the field operational at the same time they were building it. It was chaos.”

This was going to be the first place built expressly as a military airfield -- and they wanted to make a statement. — Retired Air Force historian Edward G. Longacre

New mission

Though stripped of one of its primary reasons for being, Langley served throughout the war as one of the principal fields for evaluating both foreign and domestic planes.

So numerous were the flights of British de Havillands, French Nieuports and Italian Capronis over Hampton that the Daily Press regularly covered the exploits of the “foreign colony,” who vied to set the latest speed, endurance and altitude records.

“The Europeans were far more advanced than us when it came to aircraft,” Yarsinske says. “We brought them here to teach us.”

The pressing need for aerial reconnaissance filled Langley’s hangars and barracks, too, after the School of Aerial Photography opened in October 1917.

By January it had sent its first graduates to the front, and it continued to oversee the final stages of training after the bulk of instruction moved to the Eastman Kodak Co. in New York.

Still, after spending more than $4 million, Langley had only one complete permanent structure.

And though two others were finished by the war’s end on Nov. 11, 1918, the Army seemed ready to retrench.

“Everything was half-finished. It was a mess,” Longacre says, “and it looked like it all was going to come to a stop.”

With hundreds of wartime bases being shuttered, Langley nearly closed, too.

But by early 1919, the stop-work order had been lifted — and the Army was spending nearly $1 million to finish what it had started.

Many factors contributed to this new lease on life, including new peacetime missions housing lighter-than-air dirigibles as well as aerial coastal defense and observation units linked closely to the artillery command at Fort Monroe.

The bombing range at nearby Plumtree Island also gave the newly arrived 2nd Bombardment Group a vast and virtually unrestricted place in which to conduct training that would later prove historic.
“In the end, Langley not only survived but grew,” Butler says.

“And that’s because the things that made it so attractive in the first place still applied.”

Erickson can be reached at 757-247-4783.


"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like law, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property … for while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong.” Thomas Paine, 1775

Wayne

    WOWZERONI! Thank you, Wayne!