How to Pronounce Edgar S. Gorrell
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Feb 03, 1891 Baltimore, Maryland, United States Died on 05 Mar 1945 (aged 54)
American military officer, aviation pioneer, historian, manufacturing entrepreneur
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About Edgar S. Gorrell
- Edgar Staley Gorrell (February 3, 1891—March 5, 1945) was an American military officer, aviation pioneer, historian, manufacturing entrepreneur, and advocate for the airline industry.
- He served eight years in the United States Army, most of it with the Air Service, becoming a colonel at the age of 27 during World War I.
- He left the army in 1920 to enter private business, first as an executive in the automotive industry, then briefly operating his own investment company to finance the mass construction of private homes.
- For the last nine years of his life he was the first president of the Air Transport Association of America (ATA), a trade association dedicated to airline safety and the economic growth of the industry. A 1912 graduate of the United States Military Academy, Gorrell served an obligatory two years in the infantry before volunteering for assignment to the Aviation Section, Signal Corps, in which he became a military aviator in 1915.
- His only flying assignment was with the 1st Aero Squadron, the Army's first aviation unit, which he accompanied to Mexico as part of the Punitive Expedition.
- Deficiencies in American military aviation exposed during the campaign led to Gorrell's assignment to MIT, where he earned an advanced degree in aeronautical engineering.
- His technical expertise led to his inclusion in the Bolling Mission in the opening months of U.S.
- participation in World War I, followed by staff duties with the American Expeditionary Force.
- He rose rapidly in rank as a wartime airman from first lieutenant to colonel between July 1916 and October 1918. Gorrell was an early advocate for the concept of strategic bombing, submitting a staff study in November 1917 proposing a sustained day-night campaign against the German munitions industry.
- The paper owed much to concepts earlier developed by British planners, but it was never implemented during the war.
- Described as the "earliest, clearest...statement of the American conception of the employment of airpower," it became the basis for the doctrine of strategic bombing adopted by the Air Corps 20 years later, and ultimately the rationale for creation of the United States Air Force as a separate military service.
- At the conclusion of hostilities Gorrell was made assistant chief of staff of the Air Service of the AEF with responsibility for compilation and completion of an official History of the Air Service, AEF, covering all its organizational, operational, and technical activities during the war.
- The history ultimately totaled 280 indexed volumes and became commonly known as "Gorrell's History." In his capacity as head of the ATA, Gorrell advocated regulation of the airline industry to promote sustained growth, and also developed a strategy for use of the airlines during wartime to supplement a military air transport effort.
- His ideas on the use of airlines under government contract to provide worldwide air transport were sufficient to dissuade President Franklin D.
- Roosevelt from nationalizing the nation's scheduled airlines at the start of America's participation in World War II.
