Army & Navy – COMMAND: Surface Victory

Naval airmen won a hollow triumph last week. A new, high-sounding job was created: Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Air. Its occupant: Vice Admiral (upped from Rear Admiral) John Sidney McCain, 58, for ten months Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, for seven years a naval aviator, for all his career a “battleship admiral” at heart.

The new job carries responsibility for plans, policy, personnel and logistics of naval aviation. It means official, though belated and only partial, acknowledgment of the airplane’s role in sea warfare. It still leaves the air arm’s influence in the Navy far less than that of the Air Forces’ in the Army.

Likable, leathery “Slutsie” McCain is a good officer; in the Bureau of Aeronautics he has done a good job of supervising pilot training and the design and delivery of planes. He has listened to the argument of younger officers that unfettered air attack can blast the Jap out of the sea. Sometimes he has taken their advice. But airmen point out that McCain was 51 and 30 years a Navy man before he won his wings, and that he has held air commands only since 1936. Not even the appointment as new Chief of BuAer of Rear Admiral DeWitt C. (“Duke”) Ramsey, an oldtime pilot now commanding a task force in the South Pacific, eased the disappointment of the Navy’s air zealots.