Wilbur

Brig Gen Franklin Otis Carroll

Huffman Prairie 1904

 

Theodore von Karman recounted how in 1943 he was summoned to Wright Field to explain to senior officers there whether it was possible to design and build a plane that could fly 1,000 mph, or beyond the so-called “sound barrier.” Von Karman spent a weekend with associates doing calculations and drafting crude sketches. The following week he met with the chief of the Engineering Division and replied in the affirmative. The U.S. Air Force was on its way to the supersonic age.

 

The man who summoned the world-renowned aerodynamicist was Brigadier General Franklin Otis Carroll. Carroll was chief of the Engineering Division throughout World War II, a position that gave him the last—and often first—word on every major experimental and engineering project at the Field during the greatest war in American—and airpower—history. It was the premier assignment of Carroll’s long and eventful military career.

 

That career began in June 1916 when the 23-year-old Carroll graduated from the University of Illinois with a bachelor of science degree and immediately joined the horse cavalry of the Indiana National Guard. Like fellow cavalry officer Thurman Bane, Carroll did a stint of border patrol in Texas—and decided he would rather fly airplanes. In 1917 he enlisted as a flying cadet and was posted to Kelly Field. After serving as an instructor at Kelly and on the staff of the Chief of the Air Service, Washington, D.C., Carroll in 1920 entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completing its Air Service Course the following June.

 

Carroll’s next assignment was to be the most fateful in his life: on 6 July 1921, 1Lt Frank Carroll arrived at McCook Field, Dayton, Ohio. He initially served as an engineer in the Structures and Dynamics Branch of the Airplane Section. There he rubbed elbows with some of the top aeronautical engineers in the country, men who would later go on to head up the engineering departments of major airplane manufacturers or fill engineering professorships in academe. Others would make their careers in government service—some at the Langley Field research center of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), but most at McCook and later Wright Field in Dayton. These were all very important people for a young officer-engineer to get to know. Bonds of mutual regard and respect forged early at McCook often proved critical during the following decades.

 

Except for occasional assignments elsewhere, Carroll spent those decades at McCook and (after 1927) at Wright Field. By 1925, he rose to be assistant to the Chief Engineer. In 1929, he became chief of the Airplane Branch, perhaps the busiest engineering organization at Wright Field in those years. In 1931, he was assigned to France Field in the Panama Canal Zone. However, in 1934 he returned to Wright Field, resuming his earlier position as assistant chief of the Experimental Engineering Division. These were exciting times at Wright Field, times that witnessed a revolution in aircraft design, materials, manufacturing, and performance. When Carroll served his first stint as assistant chief of engineering, the Air Service was testing the biplane Keystone bomber for procurement. At the outset of his second stint—a bare ten years later—Wright Field had just undertaken “Project A” that ultimately resulted in the B-17, the warhorse of World War II.

 

As war clouds gathered over Europe and the Pacific, Carroll entered the Air Corps Tactical School, Maxwell Field, Alabama, graduating in June 1938. The Air Corps thereupon made him its representative to the Douglas Aircraft Company and North American Aviation, Inc., before assigning him once more to Wright Field in March 1939. Initially he was made chief of the Experimental Engineering Section’s Research and Development Branch. Following assignment as military attaché in London (March-June 1940), he received the ultimate accolade, becoming chief of the Engineering Section itself.

 

Throughout World War II, Brig Gen Carroll (he assumed general officer rank in 1942), was at the center of Wright Field’s experimental engineering operation. It was Carroll who made welcome the thousands of young engineers who came streaming to the Field, following Pearl Harbor, and saw that they were properly integrated with the “old hands.” He approved the creation of new laboratories for aero medical research, communications and navigation, and radar, among others. He oversaw the plans that expanded Wright Field’s experimental facilities, including the world’s most powerful wind tunnel, and other tunnels for vertical, transonic, and supersonic testing of aircraft and associated equipment and components. He oversaw the introduction of the first jet engine to Wright Field and a host of “Buck Rogers” type projects—ever insisting that “the ‘idea men’ must take care not to demand more than is possible of a designer.” He weighed Professor Von Karman’s enthusiasm for supersonic flight with the wartime materiel priorities of the Army Air Forces. In short, he made the hard-nosed engineering decisions that translated proposals and requirements into airplanes—some of the best airplanes in the world.

 

Before the end of the war, Carroll assumed, in addition to his other duties, the command of the Army Air Forces Engineering School at Wright Field—what later became the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT). Following the war, he served in a number of assignments, including commanding general of the Pacific Air Service Command, in 1946. In 1947 he returned briefly to Wright Field before receiving assignment as assistant to the Chief of the Air Staff for Materiel and as a representative on the National Inventors Council. (In the same year, he was promoted to major general.) By the end of the year, he once more returned to Wright Field as Director of Research and Development in the Air Materiel Command. In 1949, following assignment as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Materiel, Headquarters Air Force, he became commanding general of the Air Engineering Development Division, Tullahoma, Tennessee. In July 1951, the Division was redesignated the Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) with General Carroll its first commander. Finally, in 1952, Carroll was named Director of the Human Resources Research Institute, Maxwell AFB. He retired from active duty in January 1954.

 

General Carroll’s career spanned very nearly the first half century of military aeronautics. During this period he was at the center of that engineering activity at McCook and Wright Fields that saw the World War I biplane give way to the all-metal stressed skin cantilever monoplane of World War II, and the reciprocating engine of the 1920s and 1930s give way to the jet engine of the post World War II period. Not only was Carroll at the center of that activity; during the time of greatest need and crisis, he was in charge of that activity. If Wright Field was the critical linchpin of American materiel victory in World War II, Franklin O. Carroll was in no small way responsible.

 

An engineer who knew him in those pioneering days at Wright Field described him this way:  “He was courtly, fair, and firm. He was a gentleman. He was a great man.”

 

By James F. Aldridge, Ph.D., Historian, Wright Laboratory/ASC


Last Update: 22 Mar 04

Drawing of the Wright brothers copyrighted 1989 August Brunsman