EXPLAINING THE DIFFERENCES

How does one explain these national differences, especially considering the active exchange of technical information between the Allies?65 In part, the differences may have resulted from historical contingencies, such as Britain’s earlier mobilization date, which gave the British aircraft industry more time to develop new wooden airplanes. Perhaps resource endowments were a key factor, given the ability of the United States to expand aluminum capacity rapidly. But the sharp contrast in attitudes towards wood suggests a more systemic cause. Where this contrast was most stark, namely between the United States and Canada, national culture provides the key explanatory resource through its influence on the symbolic meanings of airplane materials.66 In Britain, where these symbolic meanings carried less ideological weight, the effective use of wood depended more on organizational structures, structures that effectively mobilized British technical talent for the war in the air.

Resource endowments fail to provide a sufficient explanation. In terms of price differentials, there is little evidence that the relative costs of aircraft timber and aluminum alloy varied much between the three countries. Military planners, however, were less concerned about relative prices than absolute availability of materials in wartime. The British had little reason to prefer one material or the other, being heavily dependent on imports for both aluminum and timber. Even Canada’s enthusiasm for wood cannot be explained by that country’s vast reserves of virgin timber. Indeed, Canada was a timber-rich country, but so was the United States, while both were equally dependent on imported bauxite. In terms of resource endowments, Canada had one of the most important ingredients for aluminum – hydropower. Although Canada experienced aluminum shortages early in the war, production expanded quickly, and by 1942 Canada had surpassed Germany to become the second largest producer of aluminum in the world. From 1941 through 1944, Britain’s metal aircraft industry was almost entirely dependent on imports of Canadian aluminum, which also supplied a sizable percentage of American consumption. In 1941 alone, Britain imported six times more Canadian aluminum than it produced domestically.67

Historical contingencies also fail to explain the systemic differences in the utilization of wood. British military planners had taken only limited steps to insure adequate wartime supplies of aluminum when the war started in 1939. As soon as the war began, however, they faced clear shortages of aluminum, machine tools, and skilled aircraft workers. These shortages convinced the Air Ministry to support wooden airplane projects like the Mosquito, which was approved in December 1939. In the United States, the extent of the aluminum shortage did not become apparent until late in 1940, in part due to an amazing lack of foresight by defense planners. Only in the spring of 1941 did the Army begin a major program to develop new wooden airplanes; by the time these new models were ready for quantity production, the aluminum shortage was over.68

But on closer examination, these accidents of timing support little explanatory weight. Production deliveries of the Mosquito began a mere 19 months after the project was approved, demonstrating that wooden airplanes could reach production rapidly if given sufficient priority. In addition, increased supplies of aluminum prompted neither the Canadians nor the British to cancel wooden airplanes when those designs fulfilled expectations. Most of the Canadian Anson 5’s and Mosquitos were built between 1943 and 1945, when aluminum supplies were adequate. In the United States, the increased aluminum supply made it easier for Wright Field to justify canceling wooden airplane projects, but most of these projects were already in trouble.69

The failure of the United States to produce any satisfactory new wooden airplanes, and the clear contrast in attitudes towards wood, suggests more systemic causes, most significantly differences in the symbolic meanings of airplane materials rooted in the national culture of each country. These differences are most clear between the United States and Canada. In the United States, the aeronautical community continued to view wood as an unscientific, preindustrial material fundamentally unsuited to aircraft. In Canada, wood benefited strongly from its link to Canadian nationalism. In Britain, however, symbolic meanings generated no strong passions either for or against wood.

As I have argued above, in the United States the development of metal airplanes was driven by the symbolic connection between metal and technological progress. Americans were quite vocal in expressing these symbolic meanings, but not especially more so than the French, Germans or British.70 British engineers were among the first to publicly endorse metal construction after the Armistice, using a rhetoric of technological progress that was repeated in French, German and American publications.71 By 1940, the negative associations of wood appeared to be fading in the United States. From 1940 to 1943, the American aviation press was filled with articles praising the potential contributions of wooden airplanes to the war effort. This public shift was not accepted by Wright Field engineers, however, nor by most of the larger aircraft firms. Wright Field engineers simply could not reconcile the use of wood with their vision of aviation progress, as their private comments so clearly demonstrate.

The Canadians were no less committed to technological progress than the Americans, but in Canada wooden airplanes took on quite a different meaning because of their connection with Canadian nationalism. World War II provided an important stimulus to Canadian nationalism. After the fall of France, anglophone Canada gave whole-hearted support to Britain, but the Canadians insisted on giving this support as an ally, not a colony.72 Within the context of Canadian nationalism, wooden airplanes became a symbol of self-reliance, potentially freeing Canada from the technological domination of the U. S. and Britain.

Wooden airplanes gained this significance after the Dunkirk evacuation, when Britain cut off supplies of airplanes and engines to Canada. One manifestation of this new significance was Parkin’s proposal in May 1940 for the design and production of wooden airplanes in Canada. Parkin’s proposal was followed in July by an even more remarkable document conveyed to the Ministry of Defence by L. W. Brockington, a top advisor to Prime Minister MacKenzie King. This report echoed Parkin’s technical arguments, but added another crucial element – the need for Canadian technological autonomy. The report rejected the “optimistic delusion” that Canada could depend on Britain and the United States for war materiel. Given the current situation, “Canada has now got to stand on her own feet, and utilize the resources she has for her own defence,” namely Canada’s ample timber supplies. In a subsequent report, Brockington proposed creating a Canadian institute to design wooden airplanes with an annual budget of $450,000.73

The idea of Canada as a forest nation has deep roots in Canadian national consciousness. “In Canada, the forest is always with us,” wrote Arthur Lower, a leading Canadian intellectual, in 1963. Canadian pioneers viewed these timber resources as inexhaustible, and the timber industry remains a vital part of the Canadian economy. Despite Canada’s huge aluminum industry, aluminum played no role in Canadian national identity.74 Canadians shared the faith in technological progress that was behind American antipathy to wooden aircraft. But within the context of Canadian nationalism, wooden aircraft became a symbol of national autonomy rather than a slap in the face of progress. It was this official commitment to wood, in sharp contrast to the United States, that allowed Canada to achieve success with the same plywood molding technology that failed in the United States.

While symbolic meanings help explain the divergent histories of the Canadian and American wooden airplane programs, they played a more neutral role in Britain. It is, in fact, rather surprising that the British did not share the American antipathy to wood. Britain provided the prototype of industrialization based on the shift from organic to inorganic materials, a shift that Werner Sombart regarded as the essence of modern industry. The Air Ministry had long justified support for metal construction because of Britain’s lack of suitable supplies of aircraft timber, even though the British aircraft industry at first emphasized domestic steel over aluminum, which required foreign bauxite. Much has been made in recent years of Britain’s supposed lack of “industrial spirit,” but when it came to military aviation, Britain was as militantly technological as any nation, to use David Edgerton’s terminology. In performance, British military aircraft maintained their parity with German equipment, and the British found a much better balance than the Germans between quality and quantity.75 Nevertheless, when World War II arrived, the British aeronautical community quite willingly embraced a material that Americans regarded as hopelessly outdated.

In part, Britain’s lack of antipathy to wooden airplanes may stem from that country’s more ambivalent cultural attitude to the airplane. As Joseph Com has documented, American popular enthusiasm for the airplane was almost boundless, an enthusiasm that was shared by the American aviation community.76 Britain embraced the airplane as fervently as the Americans, but in Britain this enthusiasm was tempered by a strain of pessimism largely absent in the United States. In Britain, the immediacy of the airplane as a military threat helped emphasize the airplane’s military over civilian uses, making it easier to contest the symbolic link between the airplane and progress.77 With this link to progress contested, the wooden airplane did not present such a symbolic clash between tradition and modernity as it did in the United States. Without this symbolic baggage, the British were able to take a much more factual approach to wood, recognizing its utility in wartime, taking advantage of its technical characteristics, and treating maintenance problems as difficulties to be overcome through engineering research. This attitude, aided by the close coordination between the industry and wood researchers in the government, allowed the British to use wood much more successfully than the United States.

The idea that national cultures can influence technological change is common in history of technology, but it should be employed with some caution. A national culture is not a rigid structure that defines the essence of a people, but rather a human invention that is polysemic, contested and mutable. Essentialist notions of national cultures can easily degenerate into ethnic stereotypes. National cultures do shape technological choice, but not in the form of causal structures that rigidly determine human action. Rather, national cultures function more like sets of tools that human agents deploy in various ways to define and solve problems, tools that consist largely of prior symbolic meanings. When creating and adopting a new technology, producers and users also form a new culture for it, a set of meanings and practices associated with the artifact and its use. While the Americans, Canadians and British all shared similar technological tools with regard to wooden airplanes, their symbolic tools differed. The result was variations in both the physical artifacts produced and in the meanings attributed to them.78

1 , London, Aug. 4, 1996.