"A Dim Religious World"

The Battle of the Atlantic was not waged solely by German U-boats and Allied sub-hunters. During the desperate winter of 1942-43, when Nazi wolf packs were sinking as much as 700,000 tons of shipping a month, the U.S. Navy and the Army Air Forces were locked in their own flaming battle. Poking up the dying embers this week, ex-Secretary of War Henry Stimson devoted the second installment of his memoirs in the Ladies' Home Journal to his own frankly partisan version of this feud.

"It was the conviction of the Navy," wrote Stimson, "that escort was not merely one way of defeating the submarine; it was the only way that gave any promise of success." The admirals felt that the airman's job was merely to help guard convoys. The airmen argued that planes were the most efficient sub killers. It was a squabble which was never finally settled.

Stimson made some effort to divide the blame. "To the Air Forces, the Navy was a backward service with no proper understanding of air power; to the Navy, the Air Forces was a loud-mouthed and ignorant branch which had not even mastered its own element."

But try as he would, old Armyman Stimson could not hide his real convictions. Though he found Navy Secretary Frank Knox "a man of robust integrity without any trace of pettiness," he could not say the same for the Navy as a whole. The whole trouble, he summed up acidly, was "the peculiar psychology of the Navy Department, which frequently seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet, and the United States Navy the only true Church."

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