Enter Oerlikon

In the flatlands along little Bee Tree Creek outside Asheville, N.C., last week, workmen put the finishing touches on 14 metal buildings, the first units in a new $3,500,000 ordnance plant and proving ground. In the nation's snail-paced arms buildup, North Carolina's new plant is good news of a special sort: it represents the first entry of private U.S. enterprise into the complicated business of developing guns for aircraft. The company that will try the job is the Oerlikon Tool & Arms Corp. of America, subsidiary of Switzerland's century-old Oerlikon Works.

The big trouble with U.S. aircraft armament, according to the planemakers, is that private enterprise has had no hand in its development. Instead, the job has been in the hands of Army Ordnance, an agency often entangled in red tape and horse-cavalry thinking. The result is that progress in plane armament has fallen far behind the improvement in planes. Said one planemaker: "We build an aircraft which is theoretically the best in the world, and the Army cripples it with World War II guns." (In Korea, the F-86 is armed with merely a jazzed-up version of the 50-year-old Browning machine gun.)

The Air Force has tried to get private industry into developing aircraft armament, but with little success; businessmen are fearful of being tagged with the "merchants of death" stigma that haunted Du Pont for years. With Oerlikon's arrival, the Air Force hopes that other U.S. manufacturers will get into ordnance development and provide U.S. planes with the heavier firepower they need.

Cannonballing. The man who brought Oerlikon to the U.S. is retired Lieut. General Kenneth Bonner Wolfe, 56, a bald-domed organizer who was in charge of B-29 production during the war, later plugged for huge forging and extrusion presses for the Air Force (TIME, March 3). As Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Materiel after the war, K. B. Wolfe was concerned over the backward state of U.S. aircraft armament. Convinced that private enterprise could do a better job than the Army, he talked to Emil Georg Buehrle, owner of Oerlikon and probably Switzerland's richest man.

Buehrle, who went to Oerlikon from Germany to run the company for its German owners in 1924, had proved that he knew as much about business as about guns. When he took over, Oerlikon was a machine-tool company with few tools, no liquid assets, a work force of 80, and no orders. Biihrle looked around for a new product, bought the patents on a 20-mm. cannon. Within five years, orders for it were pouring in from China, Finland, Japan and South America. By 1936, Buehrle bought up all the stock in the company.

During World War II, Oerlikon's guns were fired by both sides. For selling to the Nazis, the company was blacklisted (i.e., prevented from dealing with the U.S.). But the U.S. needed the guns too, and got the plans from the British, who had been licensed to manufacture them. By war's end the U.S. had turned out 300,000 20-mm. antiaircraft Oerlikons without the company's permission. On Navy combat ships, the potent 203 were often the last line of defense against low-flying planes. For all this, Buehrle collected nothing. He filed a $30 million royalty suit against the U.S., was turned down by a federal court for filing too late, and is now appealing the decision. Nevertheless, Buhrle agreed to set up a U.S. plant, and named Wolfe boss.

Answer to a Prayer? So far, Wolfe has landed no big defense contracts on his own hook. His company is in limited production of fire-control equipment for the Air Force. When it gets into full swing with some 4,000 workers later this year, it will probably turn out a 3.15-in. air-to-ground aircraft rocket which Oerlikon in Switzerland is already making for the U.S. Oerlikon is also developing a 30-mm. automatic cannon which it thinks may be the answer to Air Force prayers for more firepower if cannons, not rockets, are the answer. The Air Force is getting ready to give it a trial, though it suspects that it is too heavy (445 Ibs.).

If the new 30-mm. is not accepted, Wolfe will start working on something else. Says Wolfe: "If we build the best, the U.S. will have to buy it." And if Oerlikon proves that it can build the best, the Air Force in the future will be able to spell out what it wants in a gun--just as it now does for planes--and let private enterprise figure out a way to make it.

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