ARMY & NAVY: New Chief

Major-General Malin Craig, Commandant of the War College at Washington, was out playing golf with his aide and two instructors on the Indian Spring course one day last week when the most important event of his life occurred. Three thousand miles away in Coronado,. Calif, a gentleman who likes the Navy better than the Army suddenly took it into his head to send a telegram before sailing off for the Panama Canal. When the General returned to his red brick quarters on the banks of the Potomac, his wife danced up to tell him that Commander-in-Chief Franklin Delano Roosevelt had appointed General Craig Chief-of-Staff of the U. S. Army, vice General Douglas MacArthur, who was on his way to the Philippines as that Commonwealth’s new Military Adviser. General Craig jumped out of his golf clothes, pulled on mufti, hopped into his Packard cabriolet, sped off to the War Department to report for duty to slightly startled Acting Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring. That the President had decided to waste no time inducting a new Chief-of-Staff, had made his decision in so informal a fashion, was attributed to the general world-wide war scare. No one in the Army today was surprised at his selection. But in April 1898, one would have got you a thousand that Malin (pronounced Maylin) Craig would never emerge at the Army’s top. That was the month and year that Cadet Craig was graduated from the Military Academy at the bottom of his class. Chances are that he might not even have graduated from West Point had not the No. 1 man of his class admired the heady way he played football, offered to coach him through. Malin Craig’s progress after he left the Academy should give hope to West Point’s dullards. He saw active service in Cuba, in the Boxer Rebellion, in the Philippine Pacification. Son of a cavalryman, with a boyhood spent on the Western Plains, he made up for a lack of scholarship with plenty of resource, winning thanks from the entire Chinese population of San Francisco for stowing away and keeping straight a squalling horde of Chinese babies after the 1906 earthquake. During the War he was a corps chief-of-staff in France, later commanded all U. S. troops in Germany. Back home he got his second star in 1924, was later appointed commander of the Ninth Corps Area (Far West) where he handled with minimum red tape more CCCampers than there were soldiers in the U. S. Army (116,000). General Craig of St. Joseph, Mo. and Mrs. Craig of Berkeley, Calif, might have posed for the purposeful pair in Artist Grant Wood’s American Gothic. The Army could not expect the amount of flair from spectacled 60-year-old Chief-of-Staff Craig that it witnessed during the extraordinary term of extraordinary Chief-of-Staff MacArthur. But the Army knew it had a leader who would carry on with minimum nonsense, get things done.