BR Curtiss contractor jacket on the way

[dinomartino1]

BR Curtiss contractor jacket in the post.
I think buzz made these a while ago I've never seen one before.
Knowing my luck it won't fit.

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[dinomartino1]

This jogged my memory about something I read when reading a biography of Harry Truman and the Truman committee during ww2.

During World War II, Curtiss-Wright produced 142,840 aircraft engines, 146,468 electric propellers and 29,269 airplanes. Curtiss-Wright employed 180,000 workers, and ranked second among United States corporations in the value of wartime production contracts (behind only General Motors).

Defective engines sold to U.S. military in World War II
From 1941 to 1943, the Curtiss Aeronautical plant in Lockland, Ohio produced aircraft engines under wartime contract destined for installation in U.S. Army Air Forces aircraft.[8][9] Wright officials at Lockland insisted on high engine production levels, resulting in a significant percentage of engines that did not meet Army Air Forces (AAF) inspection standards. These defective engines were nevertheless approved by inspectors for shipment and installation in U.S. military aircraft. After investigation, it was later revealed that Wright company officials at Lockland had conspired with civilian technical advisers and Army inspection officers to approve substandard or defective aircraft engines for military use.Army Air Forces technical adviser Charles W. Bond was dismissed by the Army in 1943 for "gross irregularities in inspection procedure."[10] Bond would later testify that he had been "wined and dined" by Wright company officials; one of those occasions was the night before Bond fired four AAF engine inspectors another AAF inspector had described as "troublemakers."In 1944, three Army officers, Lt. Col. Frank Constantine Greulich of Detroit, former chief inspection officer for the material command, Major Walter A. Ryan of Detroit, former central states inspection officer, and Major William Bruckmann, a former Cincinnati brewer and resident Army inspections officer at the Wright plant in Lockland were charged with neglect of duty, conspiracy, and giving false testimony in a general court martial. All three men were later convicted of neglect of duty.The story of defective engines had reached investigators working for Sen. Harry Truman's congressional investigative board, the Truman Commission, after several Wright aircraft assembly workers informed on the company; they would later testify under oath before Congress. Arthur Miller's play All My Sons is based on this incident.

“Engines were built and sold to the government which were leaking gasoline ... Unsafe material has been discovered In completed engines ready for delivery. The company’s own reports from its field representatives indicate that these parts had failed in a substantial number of cases. A substantial number of airplanes using this engine have had crashes in which engine failures were involved ... More than 25% of the engines built at the plant have consistently failed in one or more major parts during a three-hour test run. Spare parts were shipped without proper inspection ...”

Accused of exaggerating the gravity of conditions at the Lockland plant, Truman retorted:

“The facts are that they were turning out phony engines and I have no doubt a lot of kids in training planes have been killed as a result. The Committee was conservative in its report, in order to prevent too much alarm over the situation.”

On Jan. 17, 1943 — more than a year after Pearl Harbor — the S.S. Schenectady snapped in half and sank off the West Coast, only a few hours after it had been delivered to the Maritime Commission. The American Bureau of Shipping reported the sinking was due to the steel plate on the ship which was “brittle” and “more like cast iron than steel.” The US Senate’s Truman Investigating Committee took over the case and at a hearing before this body in Washington on March 23, 1943, the truth came out: The defective steel had been supplied by the Carnegie-Illinois Corporation, subsidiary of the giant United States Steel Corporation, whose officials had willfully and consciously delivered faulty material to the Navy, Maritime Commission and Lend-Lease administration and had falsified the steel test records to cover up their tracks.

Equally indifferent to the murderous effects of its frauds was the Anaconda Wire and Cable Company whose Marion, Ind., plant (financed by the government) was indicted on Dec. 21, 1942 for conspiring to sell the government defective communication and other combat wire, although its officials “well knew at all times” that use of such wire would “endanger the lives of men in the military service of the USA.” The Pawtucket, R.I., plant of the company was indicted a month later on similar charges.

The company was shown to have gone to great lengths to devise ingenious machinery for escaping government tests of its defective wire and thus getting the wire accepted for use by the armed forces of the United States, Soviet Union and Britain. Senator Kilgore pointed out:

“The batteries on all our warships, including the anti-aircraft guns, are fired, controlled, aimed and ranges set, over this self-same cable, and if the cable is defective, the ship is helpless against aircraft attack. Also, the safety and success of the entire land combat forces are frequently dependent on messages sent overland by these self-same cables.”

The government charged that the conspiracy began about Nov. 1, 1940 and continued up to Oct. 1, 1942. Commenting on this, Senator Bone said:

“The fact that we were suddenly plunged into a deadly war did not in any wise induce the defendants to change the criminal practices outlined in the complaint. After Pearl Harbor, and while the boys were dying on the battlefields. Anaconda and its officials continued their sordid work of defrauding the government by furnishing faulty cable.”

Bone also declared the cable was “so defective that the persons deliberately creating the defects would be brought before a firing squad if they had done this in the war zones.” Attorney General Biddle called it “one of the most reprehensible cases of defrauding the government and endangering the lives of American soldiers and sailors ever to come to the attention of the Department of Justice.



Truman Committee
The Truman Committee, formally known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, was a United States Congressional investigative body, headed by SenatorHarry S. Truman. The bipartisanspecial committee was formed in March 1941 to find and correct problems in US war production with waste, inefficiency, and war profiteering. The Truman Committee proved to be one of the most successful investigative efforts ever mounted by the US government: an initial budget of $15,000 was expanded over three years to $360,000 to save an estimated $10–15 billion in military spending and thousands of lives of US servicemen. For comparison, the entire cost of the Manhattan Project was $2 billion, at the time.

 

[GyreneGreen]

Fascinating read.