Roy Grumman's Iron Works
Roy Grumman's Iron Works
By Arthur Herman
If you want to know what innovation looks like, take this story about an engineer, a draft eraser, and a paper clip.
The date was early 1941: less than a year before Pearl Harbor. The United States Navy was realizing that its three new aircraft carriers—Lexington, Saratoga, and Yorktown—were carrying less than half the aircraft of Japan’s ten carriers. The Navy desperately needed a way for airplanes to take up less space on shipboard. It was Leroy Grumman, head of a Long Island-based aircraft firm who had already built two innovative aircraft for the Navy, who came up with the solution.
Author Richard Thruelson describes what happened:
“Many laborious hours were spent over sketches and with models trying to figure out a way to twist the wings to a vertical position and then fold them back along the fuselage. Finally, Roy Grumman… saw in all probability that the solution revolved around a pivot. So he took a soap eraser, such as those used in drafting, and used that to represent the fuselage of the plane. Then he took two paper clips for the wings and bent out the short end of each of the clips so that it was normal or perpendicular to the body of the clip. Then he began sticking these short ends into the eraser until he found the proper angle and position at which the clip, when twisted to a vertical position, would also fold back snugly against the eraser. Eureka! It was as simple as that.”
Simple, but also devastatingly effective. Grumman engineers then figured out how to make the Sto-Wing design, as it was called, effective and fail-safe for their newest Navy fighter, the F4F Wildcat, and their new torpedo bomber, the TBF Avenger. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the three aircraft carriers were all that stood between the US and a Japanese invasion, those beefed-up squadrons of Wildcats and Avengers, as well as Douglas Aircraft’s Dauntless dive bombers, turned the tide of the war in the Pacific, first at Coral Sea (May 4-8, 1942) and then at Midway (June 4, 1942).
But it was Leroy Grumman who stood at the center of a revolution in naval aviation that caught up to, and eventually more than surpassed, Japan’s lead in carrier-based strike power: a revolution based on innovation and imagination but also productivity and the ability to build faster, cheaper, and stronger than one’s competitors.
The Grumman revolution laid the foundation for America’s naval air supremacy for the next seventy years.
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Leroy (nicknamed Roy) Grumman was born in Huntington, New York in 1895. He attended college at Cornell University, where he wandered into an engineering class by mistake and became hooked. After Cornell he did a stint as a naval aviator during World War I, and afterwards landed a job as an aeronautical engineer with an aviation company headquartered in Manhattan. When that company merged with Loening Aircraft, Roy and two engineering pals, Jake Swirbul and Larry Schwendler, decided it was time to set up their own company, which they did in January 1930 in Baldwin, New York on Long Island, in time for Roy’s thirty-fifth birthday.
Together, they were the dynamic trio who would remake American naval aviation.
All the same, it was a terrible time to create a new business. The Wall Street crash had occurred just two months earlier, and the United States was on the cusp of the Great Depression. Getting new orders for the aircraft they were designing was next to impossible, so the partners took on work repairing wrecked airplanes. One of the first was a plane built by their former employer, a Loening Commuter, which they acquired for $450 and then resold for $20,000.
Eventually they moved their operations to Bethpage, where they acquired enough real estate to make their own landing field for testing aircraft. But even more important, from that first year they would make money every year they were in business, Great Depression or no Great Depression.
One key reason was their on-going work for the Navy. Although the orders they received in the 1930s were small—only a few dozen planes at a time—and although, like all companies doing business with the Navy, they had to build prototypes at their own expense, the Grumman team was able to meet the Navy’s need for new innovative designs. Their first big break were floats with retractable wheels for the Vought O2U observation plane, which meant the plane could land on land, water, or a carrier deck. Then came the FF-1 and FF-2, the first Navy fighters with retractable landing gear, which the Navy bought in small batches during the 1930s. In a moment of extreme shortsightedness, Washington initially turned down Roy’s Wildcat F4F fighter design. Fortunately, under Lend-Lease Roy was able to sell the craft first to the French and then to the British. When war came to America after Pearl Harbor, the Sto-Wing Wildcat finally came into its own, both for the Navy and the Marine Corps.
Although overpowered and outclassed by its rival, the Japanese Zero, aviators liked the Wildcat’s rugged construction, including the life-saving iron shield mounted behind the pilot seat and the sturdy plane’s ease of handling. It was a tough little plane that could take off from anywhere, even a mud-bound field in the jungle, and could take a lot of punishment—a quality it needed facing Japan’s best and brightest fighter pilots over the skies of Guadalcanal and then Midway.
By mid-1942 the Bethpage plant occupied five red brick buildings, with a workforce that would eventually expand to 20,000 employees, Grumman enjoyed the highest production per pound per man hour of any Navy plane maker (by June 1944 it stood at 60 percent above the industry average).
At the same time, the average price per Wildcat had come down to $33,500, or one-third under the original contract (by agreement Grumman was allowed to pocket one-fifth of the savings, while the rest went back to the Navy).
Those savings, however, didn’t come out of Grumman employees’ salaries. They were the fourth highest-paid aircraft employees in the country. But the unique feature of being a Grumman employee was Roy’s “little green trucks.” These were delivery vans painted bright green that went out to do errands for Bethpage workers when they were on the job. The little green truck drivers would go out to do repairs on a flat tire or stalled car, fix a broken furnace, or even baby sit the kids—anything so long as employees could get to work on time and stay at work.
The close bond of trust between employer and employee bolstered the twin secrets of Grumman’s success: the sense of personal dedication, plus an office and plant atmosphere that fostered ideas and innovation.
Roy Grumman’s office consisted of a partner’s desk with Roy sitting on one side and Jake Swirbul on the other side. Employees were free to come in at any time without appointment, to discuss problems in the assembly line or bring ideas on how to work smarter or faster or cheaper. The unannounced drop-ins included Navy aviators, who would stop by to thank Grumman for saving their lives with the Wildcat’s durability and reliability—the qualities that would give Grumman its nickname as the Iron Works.
But the pilots were there for another reason. Their suggestions on how to make a Grumman plane better or more battle worthy were a crucial source of feedback for Roy and his engineers. They would help to inspire the plane that became the Grumman wartime masterpiece, the F6F Hellcat.
When the office got too crowded with visitors and employees, Jake and Roy would move down the hall to another office, where 160 different aircraft models hung from the ceiling. When a question or problem with a particular plane came up, Roy would jump up on the desk and pull down the model in question.
And when a problem developed on the flight line, Roy was not above taking the plane aloft himself—a clear violation of the company and the Navy’s technical rules, but no one at Bethpage was going to blow the whistle on their boss. Nonetheless, Roy insisted on paying the standard $1.00 fine for a flight infraction.
Roy put that sense of employee dedication to the test following heavy losses of Wildcats during the Guadalcanal campaign. Jake Swirbul convinced employees to come in over the weekend to make up the difference. They managed to produce 23 planes in 24 hours, although three a day had been the Grumman standard production figure.
Indeed, during the war the Grumman Bethpage plant made more airplanes than any other aircraft manufacturing plant in the United States.
To boost that number even more, in 1942 the Navy asked Grumman to partner with General Motors to co-produce first the ubiquitous Wildcat, and then the Avenger torpedo plane at GM’s converted plant in Trenton, New Jersey. An earlier example of an aircraft maker and automobile company partnering to make planes—Consolidated and Ford Motor Company making the B-24 bomber—had led to constant friction, headaches, and even fistfights for more than a year before key issues got sorted out. However, the GM-Grumman partnership ran smoothly from the start. Instead of being threatened by a car company taking control of his airplane, Grumman was delighted to see his Avenger design take shape as a mass-produced TBM version. More than 7,000 were built during the war — the most famous being the one Lt. George Herbert Walker Bush was piloting when he was shot down over Chichijima on September 2, 1944.
By 1943, the bulk of Roy’s attention was consumed with the successor to the Wildcat, the F6F Hellcat. It was the first combat plane to be designed around its power plant, the Pratt and Whitney 2800 Double Wasp, rather than the other way around. The prototype took off from the Bethpage field in June 1942, and the plane entered production for the Navy at the end of the year. By the end of 1943, the Bethpage plant had turned out 2,300 planes, enough to equip every fighter squadron on the “fast carrier” force.
The Hellcat became the workhorse of naval aviation for the rest of the war. It almost single-handedly destroyed Japan’s naval air power across the Pacific, including during the Marianas “Turkey Shoot” in 1944. By 1945, more than 12,000 Hellcats had been built, but Grumman had already moved on to its successors, the twin engine F7F Tigercat and the F8F Bearcat. Neither would be ready for combat in World War II, but they would see plenty of action in Korea. Grumman’s propensity to always think a working design forward, to the next technological innovation and the next set of Navy requirements, meant Grumman was well-positioned to enter the Jet Age with its F9F Panther, the first Navy jet to go to war. The Panther made the Navy’s first jet kill, a MiG-15 in November 1950.
The marriage of Grumman and naval aviation would reach its climax with the F-14A Tomcat. Grumman would live long enough to see the fighter that made “Top Gun” famous take to the skies in 1972. It was twelve years after his death on October 4, 1982 that the company he founded would be taken over by Northrop Corporation, creating the modern defense giant Northrop Grumman Corporation. But Roy’s legacy would remain powerful and lasting, not only in helping to produce American victory in World War Two, but in laying the foundation for American naval aviation until today.
Not to mention a legacy of production and innovation epitomized by an eraser and a paper clip.
Bibliography:
“Aviation: The Embattled Farmers [Roy Grumman and the Hellcat]” TIME, September 11, 1944.
“Wing Folding Mechanism of the Grumman Wildcat,” American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Kalamazoo MI, 2006.
Graff, Cory., F6F Hellcat at War. Zenith Press, 2009.
Herman, Arthur Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II. Random House, 2012.
Thruelsen, Richard, The Grumman Story. Praeger Publishers, 1976.
Yenne, Bill. The American Aircraft Factory in WWII. Zenith Press, 2006.