The government had either forgotten that the Army Reorganization Act of 1920 placed responsibility for industrial mobilization upon the Assistant Secretary of War, Louis Johnson, or, noting the controversy between him and his chief, Secretary Woodring, had changed its mind. In any event, Bill Knudsen was appointed Chairman of the National Defense Advisory Committee and George Mead took over the aircraft job. At the time, no one was able to enlighten us on the real meaning of the 50,000-plane program; it might be a yearly output, a war total, or anything else the fancy might suggest. Nor could anyone advise us what types of aircraft were contemplated. Scuttlebutt rumor had it that the President had first asked the Army and Navy to submit estimates of the maximum number of aircraft they could use but upon receipt of the figures had been disappointed at their lack of imagination. They couldn’t seem to add up to more than a few thousand. His own first figure, so the gossip went, had been a nice round 25,000, the very number, curiously enough, which had been hit upon back in 1917 as the number required to “darken the skies” over Germany. But later, so ran the story, the President had tried out his fireside chat on Lord Beaverbrook, the same “Beaver” who, not many weeks earlier, had snorted his scorn at the suggestion that England would ever have to look to America for aircraft production. And the Beaver, so we were told, had advised the President not to be a piker—100,000 airplanes would make better headlines—and the President had compromised on 50,000. In any event, BUAERO and Wright Field had now dubbed the announcement “the numbers racket,” so the fact that a fellow like George Mead, who not only knew the words and music of aviation but could actually sing the song, was now handling the aircraft program seemed to us an incredibly lucky break. And so it proved, for George got the two services to agree upon the reasonableness of some kind of program that seemed to add up to 50,000 and then passed the job back to them for execution. This put the ball back in play on a field where we knew the score and where the officials knew the rules and the game. It converted the war from a phony to a shooting war, and gave us the signal for take-off.