ARMED FORCES: I Can’t Stand It Any Longer

All day long, the phone rang in the Pentagon office of Navy Captain John G. Crommelin Jr. To each caller, blond, 46-year-old Captain Crommelin replied abruptly: “This telephone is tapped—you know that.” The callers were fellow officers proffering him support. For John Crommelin had defiantly voiced what many of them thought, but had not dared to say: that the Navy’s aviation was being destroyed under the guise of unification.

An outstanding Navy aviator, the eldest of five Annapolis-bred brothers, Crommelin had had a distinguished airman’s career on Pacific carriers. Since last spring he has been serving in Washington as a naval-aviation expert on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last fortnight he had suddenly burst into print with charges that the Navy’s offensive power was “being nibbled to death.”

On the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he declared, the Navy was under the thumb of the two other services, who “may have a landlocked conception of national defense.” Unless “corrective action” was taken, Crommelin planned to resign and “fight this potential dictatorship from without the service.”

“He Deserves Help.” Crommelin admitted that he had encouraged Cedric Worth, then a civilian assistant to the

Navy Under Secretary, to draft the “anonymous” letter charging the Air Force— baselessly, as Worth had admitted—with corruption in the procurement of the B-36 (TIME, Sept. 5). He had hoped, he said, to set off an investigation that would let the Navy explain its opposition to the whole unification act.

Airman Crommelin knew what he was risking: “I’m finished,” he declared. “This means my naval career. But I hope this will blow the whole thing open. Up to now, I’ve felt like an accessory to a crime. I can’t stand it any longer.”

Crommelin got some hearty support. Five-star Admiral William F. (“Bull”) Halsey, after lunching with Crommelin in his Washington home, declared: “He deserves the help and respect of all naval officers.” In the Pentagon, there was stunned silence, then a rustle of conferring Navy brass. Hastily, Crommelin was yanked from his job with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but was plopped into a better billet: director of naval-aviation personnel. It was a rear admiral’s job.

Newsmen promptly concluded that Crommelin was getting a sly pat on the back from the top command. But Navy Secretary Francis Matthews hit the ceiling. In a matter of hours, he ordered Crommelin shifted to a captain’s billet in the air-warfare division.

“It’s the Law.” The whole dustup was hardly calculated to win much sympathy for the rebellious Navy. When the House Armed Services Committee re-opened its investigation of the B-36, Navymen would get their chance to make their case against the Air Force theories of strategic bombing. But there was not much point in blaming the unification law for their troubles. “It’s like shouting out against the abolition of slavery,” one vice admiral admitted. “Hell, it’s the law of the land.”

And like many another Navy airman, fighting Captain Crommelin was not quite facing facts. Though the Navy and its aviation had been cut down, as had all the services, from its wartime peak, it had lost none of its wartime missions. It had simply been denied a strategic-bombing role, which it had hoped to win with its 65,000 ton supercarrier. Long the nation’s first line of defense, the Navy had not yet gotten used to the fact that the Air Force, by the advance of the science of warfare, was moving in ahead of it.