"It May Be..."

In the U. S. armed forces, there are two chief services, the Army and the Navy. To suggest that there might or should be a third--a separate air force--is a private blasphemy rarely hazarded in public.

In the early '20s, Brigadier General Billy Mitchell let the blasphemy roll off his curly tongue--and wrecked a brilliant military career. Admiral Sims, who had a beard and a social background, uttered sacrilegious sentiments about air power and was not struck down, but the bodacious blurt did him no good with his brother Navy men. Since their brash days, no active service man has publicly peeped on the forbidden subject.

Germany has a separate air force, independent of Army and Navy. So has England. With these well-advertised examples daily in the news, many a U. S. citizen has wondered whether Messrs.

Mitchell & Sims might not have been right. Last week came a qualified answer. It came not from a little man in the U. S.'s armed forces but from an officer of the General Staff: Major General Henry H. Arnold, onetime head of the Army Air Corps, who learned his flying under the Wright Brothers in 1911, has gone on from there.

In a new book, Winged Warfare (Harper & Brothers; $3), West Pointer Arnold and his coauthor, Colonel Ira C. Eaker, were careful not to get out on the limb Billy Mitchell was sawed off on. In a 260-page discussion of the use of air power, closest Arnold-Eaker got to the limb were a few paragraphs carrying the unmistakable implication that a separate air force was inevitable, but not yet.

"Many feel that eventually the defensive air component of the nation will be given a status co-ordinate and commensurate with that of the army and navy," they wrote. "When that time will come, if it does come, is not yet clear. It came in some of the other nations of the world when the pressure of war was upon them.

We shall be fortunate if our time for that reorganization comes in the relative calm of peace, or at worst, in the preparatory and not in the fighting stage.

"It may be that there are intermediate steps between the present organization and the ultimate which it would be wiser to take than to spring at once to a complete separation of the air arm. . . ." "It may be that eventually air forces for all countries will be separated from land and sea forces for the same reasons that sea and land forces were separated more than a century ago."

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