Background
Gorrell was born on February 3, 1891, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Charles Edgar Gorrell, a carpenter and construction superintendent, and Pamelia Stevenson (Smith) Gorrell.
aviator historian military officer manufacturing entrepreneur
Gorrell was born on February 3, 1891, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Charles Edgar Gorrell, a carpenter and construction superintendent, and Pamelia Stevenson (Smith) Gorrell.
Gorrell was educated at Baltimore City College (1904-1907) and the United States Military Academy, from which he received a B. S. degree and an army commission (infantry) in 1912. While a cadet at West Point he was attracted to flying, and in 1915 he qualified as a military aviator at the Signal Corps flying school in Coronado, California. Assigned to the 1st Aero Squadron as a pilot, Gorrell accompanied it to Columbus, New Mexico, on March 13, 1916, and participated in the American punitive expedition into Mexico. In September 1916 he was transferred on student status to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received an M. S. degree in aeronautical engineering the following spring.
Shortly after United States entry into World War I and his promotion to captain, Gorrell was selected, on the basis of his training at M. I. T. , to accompany the technical mission being sent to Europe under Major (later Col. ) Raynal C. Bolling to secure information to be used in planning wartime aviation production in the United States. Landing in Great Britain on June 26, 1917, the Bolling Mission obtained technical data from British air leaders; several of its members, including Gorrell, also visited France and Italy. Its report, sent to Washington in August, recommended that all United States manufacturing capability above what was required to provide planes for flight training and for the support of ground forces be committed to the production of a powerful American bombing force. Gorrell was next assigned to the Paris headquarters of the Air Service, American Expeditionary Forces (Lines of Communication), as director of its technical section, with the duty of initiating purchases "of every article necessary for the Air Service. " Already attracted to Italian ideas about strategic bombing, Gorrell entered into a correspondence with the industrialist Count Caproni di Taliedo in October-November 1917 which seems to have reinforced his belief in the importance of strategic air power. Possibly as a result, Gorrell was named chief of Strategical Aviation, Air Service, A. E. F. (Zone of Advance), on December 3, 1917. Here he made detailed plans for the employment of an American bombing force, but the war ended before the planes were produced. Despite the pioneering nature of Gorrell's early advocacy of strategic air power, his concepts about the employment of aviation turned markedly conservative after January 21, 1918, when he was transferred to high staff duty, first as Air Officer, G-3 Division, General Staff, A. E. F. , and later as Assistant Chief of Staff, Air Service, A. E. F. In the latter duty, he was promoted to the rank of colonel, becoming at the age of twenty-seven one of the youngest to hold the rank since the American Civil War. Following the Armistice, Gorrell headed a project at Tours, France, which was charged to evaluate American air combat experience and to prepare an exhaustive record covering the narrative, statistical, technical, and tactical history of the Air Service. Upon his return to Washington later that year, Gorrell threw himself into the fight of the War Department's General Staff to prevent the establishment of a separate air force coequal with the army and the navy, one of his published arguments being that aircraft were incapable of decisive action against a hostile army. Gorrell resigned from the army on March 19, 1920, and devoted the rest of his life to business. He was associated with two automobile manufacturing companies, first Nordyke & Marmon (1920-1925) and then the Stutz Motor Car Company (1925-1939), rising in the Stutz company to president and chairman of the board. In 1934 he served as a civilian member of the War Department Special Committee on the Army Air Corps (Baker Board) and agreed with the majority view against the establishment of a separate air force. In 1936 he was the founding president of the Air Transport Association of America, and as such was often called the "czar" of the commercial airlines. In this position he worked vigorously to secure larger federal appropriations for civil airways and airports. He was a tireless speaker in the years 1938-1941 on the need for an expanded American aircraft production industry as a first line of military preparedness, but he continued to insist that aviation should be integrated with the army and navy. In his later years he maintained a home in Lake Forest, Illinois, and an office in Washington, D. C. He died in Washington of a heart ailment on March 5, 1945, at the age of fifty-four. As requested in his will, his body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the Military Academy at West Point by an Army Air Forces plane.
President of the Stutz Motor Company; President of the Air Transport Association of America
On December 10, 1921, Gorrell married Ruth Maurice of New York City; their children were Mary and Edgar Staley. Shortly before his death he married Mrs. Mary Frances (O'Dowd) Weidman, on February 22, 1945.