ARMY: Chief for Ordnance

Last week President Roosevelt took back his appointment (TIME, April 13) of Major General James Henry Burns to be chief of Army Ordnance. Leaving General Burns as munitions man on the United Nations High Command,* the President chose sandy-haired, gimlet-eyed, rough-tongued Levin H. Campbell Jr., 55, to run Ordnance after June 1, when Major General Charles M. Wesson’s four-year term expires.

If General Campbell had not fallen in love and decided on a life ashore after his graduation from Annapolis in 1909, he wouldn’t be in the Army now. (That girl, he says, married somebody else. Campbell later married a “much more beautiful woman.”) After leaving the Navy he landed a commission in the Coast Artillery simply by asking General Leonard Wood, then Chief of Staff. Since 1918 he has been in the Ordnance Department, has been in charge of “Development of Facilities” in the Office of the Chief of Ordnance since October 1940.

There he was overseer of industrial production of guns, tanks, shot & shell, his eye on the balancing of production.

When General Campbell asks a man to do a job, he expects him to do it his own way, doesn’t want to hear any more about it. For instance, when he integrated seven companies into one for more efficient production, he made himself board chairman, made one of the companies’ executives the president. One day the new president called up Board Chairman Campbell for permission to make a change in plant methods. Campbell asked him what was stopping him. “Aren’t you Chairman of the Board?” the president wanted to know. Says Campbell: “I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, that’s eyewash. You run the job. I haven’t heard from him since, but we are getting the product in a stream you couldn’t believe.”

* This is the second time President Roosevelt has been prevented from getting General Burns away from Lend-Lease Administrator Hopkins. Last January he tried to make Burns Ambassador to Moscow.