Coast Artillery Victory

If a hostile airplane squadron took off from a sea carrier ten miles off shore, and moved forward to ravage the U. S. coast, would the responsibility for bringing it down fall to the Navy's fleet or to the Army's Coast Artillery Corps? Long have the two services wrangled in stuffy professionalism over this point, each claiming the sole privilege of repulsing such an aerial invasion. Quietly, almost casually, the Army last week won a victory over the Navy when, after months of conferences between Army and Navy Boards and a joint Congressional Committee, General Charles Pelot Summerall, Chief of Staff, announced that the whole assignment had been handed over to the Coast Artillery Corps.

To undertake the task efficiently, reorganization of the Coast Artillery was planned. Undermanned, undermonied, cuffed about as a useless military appendage, the service since the War has suffered from lack of facilities for training, practice. Corrective plans: to organize a new (69th) Coast Artillery anti-aircraft regiment ; to concentrate personnel for training and practice at five posts* where all facilities will be available; to leave skeletonized crews in other posts to oil unused armaments.

*Long Island Sound, Chesapeake Bay, Pensacola, San Francisco, Puget Sound.

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