New Leaders in Australia

General Douglas MacArthur got an entirely new top air command last week. His second in command, speechmaking Lieut. General George Howard Brett--an oldtimer of the Air Forces--was replaced by bristly-haired, tiny (5 ft. 6) Major General George C. Kenney.

Fact is that MacArthur's air force in Australia has had many obstacles to contend with--including deficiencies in the quality and number of planes available. But it also has by & large no outstanding record for getting results. Its most obvious failure was in not successfully interfering with the Jap landing at Buna (TIME, Aug. 3), the landing which resulted in last week's threat to Port Moresby.

In recent months many junior air commanders in Australia have been replaced so that their age level has fallen rapidly. General Brett and his three senior officers, all replaced, are aged 56, 52, 53, 58. General Kenney is 53 and his three new senior officers, Brigadier Generals Ennis Whitehead, Kenneth Walker and Emmett O'Donnell, are aged 47, 44, 35.

The official explanation that the experience of officers who had been through the tough school of real warfare in the east was needed at home (two of them have already been assigned to training commands in the south) is legitimate. But obviously General MacArthur will be better off trying an entirely new combination in place of a combination which did not get outstanding results.

The changes, although announced last week, were made a fortnight or more ago. Recent reports from Australia indicate that MacArthur's fighters and bombers have been hitting the Japs harder and oftener--and on the face of it, at least with better results (see p. 34).

General Kenney is relatively unknown --he is a former commander of the Air Corps Experimental Depot and Engineering School at Wright Field, Ohio, flew in World War I--has yet to prove that he can do what others did not. "Nobody's kidding me about this show," he declared last week.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.