Chaos is disturbing to most folks. To others chaos provides unusual opportunity. We had plenty of chaos at BAD 2, you can believe. To begin with, the facilities were put together by the Air Ministry Works and Bricks Department, with precious little help from the USAAF. How could they plan that vast complex properly without knowing exactly what was going to be done there? How could the 8th Air Force Service Command have told them what was to be done there when I doubt the Command existed at the time of the initial planning and they really didn't know what we were going to do until we started doing "it"? The result was that we had facilities planned that we didn't ever need and lacked much of what WAS subsequently needed. A green engineering officer at age 24, 1 was labelled by my seniors as an "expert" in machine shop practice. This came about as a result of having been employed by Brown and Sharp, following my graduation from engineering college in 1939. That I stayed in the job for three or four months sorting job cards before quitting in disgust did not appear to bear upon my reputation as much as the fact that I had demonstrated a knowledge of the dif f erence between a lathe and a drill press, and seemed to be able to find useful tasks for our machinists
Anyhow I found myself tasked with assembling what was to become the Manufacturing Branch of BAD 2 sometime in February, 1943. About the only problem I did not face was meeting the payroll and showing a profit!
There were, however, a host of other problems, both material and human. on the human side was one awesome burden associated with the fact that all of the Branch's personnel arrived in bits and pieces with the addition of each Air Depot Group to the Depot I s roster. Every bit and piece lived at a different site and reported to a different CO., whose administrative concern for KP, Guard Duty, Mail Censorship, Sick Call, The Morning Report and the Commanding Officer's Ego took precedence over dispatching his collection of machinists and welders to work at productive tasks.
The second human engineering challenge derived from the fact that NCO ratings were parcelled out based upon the perceived relative capabilities of the group itself. In additon, those worthies who applied the ratings didn't know a thing about machine or welding shop practice. We thus had a PFC who was brought up in his father's tool making company and a Master Sergeant who was recently graduated from an Air Corps machinist school. The PFC was usually on KP or Guard Duty but the untested Master Sergeant was usually present for duty at our shop. On the material side of things we had three lovely new buildings. one was a huge wood workking shop fully equipped to produce almost anything out of wood... a material I despise and distrust and for which an organization dealing with metal aircraft had no discernable use.
The second was a gray iron foundry complete with a brand new, but unlined cupola. If only I had acquired foundry experience maybe we could have produced some cast iron aircraft. Now THAT would have confused the Luftwaffe! Finally, we had a building designed to house machine tools and welding equipment that had already acquired some British machines and was, almost daily, receiving machine tools from the States. What was due to arrive must have been Top Secret as I was never able to find out what was in the pipe line. Anyhow, in time we acquired a noteworthy collection of machine tools, although connecting them to the electrical system and providing cutting and measuring tools was something extremely else! Machine tools without drills, taps, dies, reamers, milling cutters, measuring instruments are about as useful as a 155mm Howitzer without ammunition. What to do? Ed Hall was applied to the task of developing an idea for simplifying the repair of B-17 wing spars ... a daunting task. Most B- 17 s that returned from combat with serious flak damage blessed us with the need to make complicated repairs requiring very accurate fitting of shear loaded "drive fit" precision bolts to replace the blind DD rivets used in the assembly of wing spars.
I had dreamed up the concept of passing tubular pins of 1430 steel into undersized holes, literally swaging the pin into a firm interference fit. I assigned two hand-picked machinists to help Ed, Henry Bugatto and John McCormack. Ed, naturally shared my anguish over the lack of tools and we plotted a course of action. In those days small tools were categorized "17- B". The appropriate procedure was to select items from the 17-B catalogue and submit a requisition form through channels. Typically, if one was looking for, say, a one-inch 0. D. micrometer, one would find six or eight items listed.
Black frame, satin finished chrome frame, one equipped with vernier scale for reading "tenths"., etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum. The system had not yet developed the necessary intelligence to make reasonable substitutions so that it became obvious that for every successful, though time-consuming requisition there might be eight or ten rejections boldly rubber-stamped "NOT IN STOCK". Clearly forceful action was indicated.
We established that the main U. K 17-B warehouse was in a hangar at Burtonwood, aka BAD 1. (And as far as we were concerned it really was a bad 'un) Ed' s fertile mind contrived a plan. We would appear at the target site early the coming Sunday morning in Class "A" uniform. Certain that no self- respecting officer of theirs would be present at that hour and that the NCO in charge would assuredly be nursing a hangover, we would engage him in conversation and convince him that all we wanted was to see what goods were present so that we could requisition them accordingly. Having thus gained access to the sanctum sanctorum we would manage to fill our pockets with as much select goods as we could "borrow". The plan worked perfectly and with nostalgia I recalll Hall whispering to me as we stepped over the hangar door rail, "Commanday, quit jingling"! Thus we started making chips at Warton.
There wasn't much I could do about the personnel problem. I couldn't compete with the various COs for the productive use of their men, (so badly needed for KP and guard duty!) but I simply had to make best use of those with real shop experience versus those first three graders who had little or none. It happened that Buck Sergeant Meeks had come too late to his outfit to acquire much grade but he had a lot of shop management experience and a lot of shop wisdom. Not being very much concerned with U. S. Army Regulations, I rounded up all hands one morning, explained the situation and announced that from that day forward Meeks was the "Boss " and spoke with my authority. I didn't hear much of a scream from HQ but fairly rapid action was taken to de-bug the situation - Meeks soon became a Master Sergeant, much to the relief of harder nosed folks.
In time the "Bradley Plan" was put into effect. That put all the personnel into site organizations based on function and things improved on that front. The same plan was affected at Burtonwood but it must have been poorly organized because I learned that things became so snafued there that a massive poll was taken with forms handed out to one and all to report their name, rank, serial number, where they were currently housed, where they worked and to what outfit they belonged. Yup! It was a BAD ‘un!