The Great War in the Big Woods
A few chilly days after Christmas 1917, the men of the U.S. Army’s 415th Aero Construction Squadron crept through foggy woods, all eyes out for their elusive enemy’s signature dull-gray uniform. The United States had entered the Great War eight months before. Most of these soldiers had enlisted because they were eager to fight in France. Instead, fate and bureaucracy had landed them 5,000 miles west, pioneers in a strange assault on the quiet coast of Washington state.
After hours wandering the profusion of Western hemlocks whose deeply grooved brown bark dominated the Olympic Peninsula rainforest, an eagle-eyed timber scout spotted the scaly gray skin of a 200-foot Sitka spruce. Unsheathing axes and crosscut saws, soldiers hacked steps a dozen feet up the tree’s 12-foot-diameter trunk and precisely carved notches into which the men wedged a pair of boards.
On each platform, a sawyer planted mud-caked boots and went at it with an ax, swinging from the shoulders to start the task of felling a giant that had towered over those soggy woods for three centuries. Soon the spruce’s sturdy wood would be dropped, milled, and lumbered to build the frames of 150 airplanes carrying Allied aviators above the Western Front.
The United States joined the Allied side of the Great War in 1917 during “Bloody April,” a month in which the Imperial German Army shot down five British aircraft for every German plane lost. After three years defending stagnant lines, the exhausted Allies felt relief. Besides sending an army, the Americans pledged that by early 1918 they would be delivering at least 2,000 expertly piloted airplanes a month.
Washington was nowhere near ready to make good on that promise. The country that 14 years earlier had been the scene of the world’s first powered human flight entered the first war of the air age with fewer than 300 military aircraft, not one of which was fit for battle. The U.S. Council of National Defense reasoned that America could catch up by repurposing
