Word: stimson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...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...
...Stimson, every decision could be measured by a single yardstick: did it help knock Germany out of the war? The best news he had heard after two years of war was the message Franklin Roosevelt carried home from Teheran in 1943: "I have thus brought OVERLORD (the Normandy landings plan) back to you safe and sound on the ways for accomplishment...
...Apologies. Single-minded Henry Stimson makes no apologies for his yardstick, which actually was big enough to measure only one phase of the global war, and inadequate for calculating the political possibilities. Thus he scorns Churchill's preference for "the right hook," which Stimson contends was intended only as a war of attrition in Italy and the Balkans, but which could actually have changed the course of history in Central Europe...