Doolittle v. the Navy

Interservice rivalry burst into visible flame last week when scrappy, articulate Lieut. General James Doolittle sat down before the Senate Military Affairs Committee to testify.

He had had dealings with committees before, and the memory still rankled in him. The Baker Board of eleven years ago, on which he had been a civilian member, had rejected his minority recommendation for 1) unity of command and 2) a separate air force. Airman Doolittle had had his knuckles rapped then. This time he hit first.

Said he: "I have seen the contention made that you can have effective unity of command in the field in wartime without having unity of control in peacetime. I believe that is wrong and I believe that, even worse, it is hypocrisy."

General Doolittle was full-out for the merger of the services recently proposed by a special committe appointed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The plan would 1) unify military command, 2) set up an independent air force. Reservist Doolittle, who does not have to worry about a postwar military career, went out of his way to blast the committee's one dissenting member, an "elderly retired Admiral" (67-year-old J. O. Richardson). Said Doolittle: "[His] is the type of retarded military thinking that held ... aviation back."

Every lesson of the war, said Doolittle, had demonstrated the primary importance of air power. "The Navy had the transport to make the invasion of Japan possible; the ground forces had the power to make it successful; and the B6-29s made it unnecessary." Alabama's Senator Hill was so struck by this statement that he had Doolittle repeat it.

The First Line. Did the U.S. want the most economical defense organization? Doolittle had the airman's answer ready: a "small, but adequate, ultramodern, highly mobile" establishment built around air power. He proposed a force of 5,000 combat planes standing always ready on airfields, manned and maintained by 400,000 men, backed by a reserve of 3,000 planes partly manned by National Guardsmen. The Army, he said, with a sidewise slap at Army control of the air forces, had not yet seen fit to submit the proposal.

With a look into the not-so-distant future, he saw atomic bombs flying through the skies aimed by radar, piloted by radio. (A.A.F.'s General of the Army Henry Arnold in a report this week predicted 3,000-m.p.h. projectiles launched from "true space ships, capable of operating outside the earth's atmosphere.")

Said Doolittle: "No ships can interpose their steel hulls and 16-in. guns between us and that attack. No force tied to the ground can counterbalance its threat. ... Air is now the first line of offense and defense."

In case anyone still misunderstood him, Jimmy Doolittle sent a few more rockets into the air: "The battleship . . . has been obsolescent for 20 years and obsolete for ten. The carrier has reached its highest state of development and is going into obsolescence."

To Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, who with brashness matching Doolittle's had claimed that sea power "ultimately compelled the Japs to ask for peace," Doolittle had an angry rejoinder: "The B-29 boys are probably resting uneasily in their graves as a result of those statements."

The End We Seek. This was too much for tight-lipped Navy Secretary Forrestal, who immediately wrote War Secretary Patterson. Doolittle's civilian boss:

"I question whether we should allow the discussion ... to lead us into impugning the good faith of people who disagree with us and I question especially whether death in any particular line of duty--and the resultant grief at home--should be appealed to in order to advance any individual point of view. . . ."

Such continued bickering would "do irreparable harm to the end which we all seek in the name of national security: the comradeship of all branches of the armed service. Once destroyed . . . that spirit cannot be revived by any legislative fiat or organizational chart."

Before it was destroyed, said Forrestal, the discussion should be "elevated" to the level of a special inquiry by a Presidential commission, an idea which the Navy has advocated for some time.

Irrepressible Jimmy Doolittle had a retort to that one too: "If delay is the objective, such a suggestion will attain it. If sound, prompt action is the objective, the experience of the Baker Board indicates that you may get something less than wisdom."

Senators were impressed. Navymen loaded their guns with heavier, angrier words.

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