Army & Navy – COMMAND: Mr. Stimson Directs

ARMY & NAVY

Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War, last week telegraphed the following order to Colonel Hugh J. Knerr, a retired Army airman: “Articles written by you, quotations attributed to you in the writings of others, and the resulting comments and discussions, oral and printed, have been detrimental to the War Department’s efforts to foster an atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation between the Army and the Navy, which is essential to the successful prosecution of the war. You are therefore directed to refrain from all public, written and oral comment on the conduct of the war and on questions relating to the tactical use and organizational relationships of the armed forces of the U.S. or its allies.”

Said Mr. Stimson, explaining this stiff directive: “The U.S. Government does not pay the officers of its Army and Navy to fight with each other in time of war. It pays them to fight with the common enemy in full and harmonious cooperation with each other. Colonel Knerr, although retired, is still in the pay of the U.S.”

Outspoken Colonel Knerr had frequently declared that the Army and Navy were very far from “real and harmonious cooperation,” that the Navy was principally to blame, that the Navy was strangling the full use of air power (TIME, June 1). Last week he canceled a lecture at Milwaukee’s Town Hall, but later received permission from Secretary Stimson himself to resume his magazine writings and lectures within the limits of proper discretion. Whether these limits, as fixed by the War Department, left him anything to talk or write about, Colonel Knerr had yet to learn.

Mr. Stimson’s telegram and statement gave Army officers public notice of what some of them had already been told: that they were not to discuss Army-Navy relations in any way, anywhere, with anybody. That Army-Navy relations had reached a stage of noncooperation requiring such orders was an unhappy fact which Mr. Stimson had now officially written into the record.