Four Ring Circus

Japanese war lords viewed with hissing alarm the growing tonnages of high explosive dropped on the line from the Bonins to the Moluccas. Domei's military commentator read the tonnage figures, and concluded sagely that U.S. action against Davao "bears watching." Other Tokyo analysts foresaw huge operations against Formosa and the Bonins, as well as the Philippines, and a diversion from the Aleutians toward northern Japan. The U.S. Navy, patently getting set for its next blow, did nothing to cure the enemy's uncertainty.

But it was ready to jangle enemy nerves. Vice Admiral Aubrey Wray Fitch, new deputy chief of naval operations for air, surveyed the Pacific war scene last week and proclaimed: "Task Force 58, which scourged the Jap so effectively in the last eight months, was just a sweet, summer zephyr compared to the . . . weapons--old and new--which are ready to lash out now."

Typhoon Days. The typhoon was about to break against the next layer of Jap defenses. But by definition the typhoon moves in orderly fashion, always in the same counterclockwise direction,* about a single center. And U.S. Army authorities were uncomfortably aware that the United Nations effort against Japan still had four centers, largely unrelated.

If centralization under a single supreme command was urgently needed now, the need would become all the more pressing when MacArthur's drive met Admiral Nimitz at the Philippines or when it met General Stilwell's on the coast of China, or when any of the American commands was lapped in the Pacific by Admiral Mountbatten's long-predicted drive east from Ceylon.

Reputedly the U.S. Army was giving a lot of thought to the tangled Pacific command situation, and devoutly hoping an Army man would get the top place. Its "asking price" was that the job should go to MacArthur. But the Army knew that the Navy was likely to take a dim view of MacArthur as generalissimo.

The Navy professed to see no need for unification. It obviously hoped that, when unified command came, an admiral, probably able, steady Chester W. Nimitz, would become top dog. It was plain that if MacArthur got the Philippines back, and Stilwell got to the China coast, both would be stuck until the Navy ferried? them over to Japan. The Navy could afford to let the situation develop.

But if unification became inevitable before events rolled everything under one admiral's four-starred flag, there was no doubt who would be the most likely Army candidates. One was General Marshall, whom Navymen like and respect. The other and possibly even more acceptable was General Eisenhower, who had commanded U.S. and Royal Navy fleets in four amphibious attacks (North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France) and wrinkled not an inch of Navy braid.

*In the Northern Hemisphere, reversed in the Southern.

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