WOODEN AIRPLANES IN WORLD WAR II:. NATIONAL COMPARISONS AND SYMBOLIC CULTURE

INTRODUCTION

Most histories of technology focus on single national contexts, and for good reason. The contextualist history of technology requires an intimate knowledge not only of technical history, but also of the institutional, political, and cultural context in which specific technologies are created and used. Such expertise is difficult enough to maintain for a single nation. Yet national specialization has real costs for the history of technology. While historians may respect national borders, technologies do not. Since the Industrial Revolution, technologists have self-consciously worked within an international context, insuring that no major technology has remained confined to a single national context.1

Airplane technology has always been strongly transnational, despite its dependence on government-funded aeronautical establishments. In fact, the military significance of the airplane helps explain its transnational characters, as every major power kept close watch on aeronautical developments abroad. In consequence, the similarities among nations have been more striking than their differences.2 But there have always been real differences too, differences that cannot be explained by variations in technological knowledge.

Such differences appear clearly in the use of wood as an alternative aircraft material during World War II. Britain, Canada and the United States all launched major programs in wooden aircraft construction early in the war. Despite close technical cooperation between these allies, the success of their national programs varied remarkably. Britain and Canada proved much more successful than the United States in designing, producing and using wooden aircraft. To explain national differences in the use of materials, historians of technology typically invoke variations in resource endowments, design traditions, or available skills. Yet such variations do not account for the American failure and the British and Canadian successes. These divergent outcomes resulted, rather, from differences in the symbolic meanings of airplane materials, meanings drawn from the culture of each nation.

The wooden airplanes of World War II are part of the lost history of failed technologies. The modernist ideology of technology looks resolutely forward, embracing innovation and novelty while disparaging unsuccessful alternatives

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P Galison and A. Roland (eds.), Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century, 183-205 © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

supposedly mired in tradition. Historians of technology have for some time rejected this vision of technology’s history, but the work of reconstruction has only just begun.3 Like most failed technologies, the history of the wooden airplane remains largely buried. This paper resurrects one chapter in its history.