The Navy Looks Ahead

Few civilians have ever heard of Rear Admiral Harold Gardiner Bowen, but the U.S. Navy knows him very well indeed. Stocky and bald, the fiery Admiral possesses a quality much rarer than courage in battle: an absolute fearlessness of superior rank when one of his pet projects is involved. His scrappy perseverance is a departmental legend. Over strong brass-hat opposition, he helped browbeat the Navy into adopting new high-pressure, high-temperature steam turbines, which have proved invaluable in World War II's ships (TIME, July 12, 1943). He has been officially cited as the spark plug behind the Navy's development of radar. Last fortnight the Navy showed that it likes the Admiral's spirit. It gave him a big new job: boss of all research on new naval weapons and techniques.

For the brassbound Navy, this was quite a concession. Secretary Forrestal merged four separate Navy research agencies into one Office of Research and Inventions and gave Admiral Bowen, as chief, virtually a blank check to push the development and production of new devices for all branches of the Navy including its air forces.

A shrewd, witty New Englander, the ninth of ten children, Harold Bowen has had a long and lively career in the Navy. He was chief of its Bureau of Engineering and director of the Naval Research Laboratory before Pearl Harbor. Since then he has been a special assistant and troubleshooter for the Secretary of the Navy, specializing in operating seized, strikebound plants. At 61 he is still one of the youngest, most energetic men in the Navy. Each evening he and his equally energetic wife walk a "fourmile loop in Washington's streets. The Admiral, whose enthusiasms are never halfhearted, has two granddaughters for whom he flatly claims the title of "best-looking women in the country in their class--aged four and six."

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