Still Stooging

Younger naval airmen rejoiced tepidly last week when they heard that Vice Admiral John Sidney McCain had been relieved of his job as the Navy's No. 1 Airman: deputy chief of naval operations for air.

They had nothing personal against weathered, likable Admiral McCain. But he was a Johnny-come-lately in aviation who did not learn to fly until he was 52.

To naval air zealots' way of thinking, the only choice for the Navy's top air job is a top-flight airman. Anything else is just "stooging," which is flyers' slang for pooping around. That was the reason joy was only tepid. The man picked to fill McCain's shoes was another naval officer belatedly made into an airman: genial, 60-year-old Vice Admiral Aubrey Wray Fitch.

The Good Side. On Jake Fitch's credit side, naval aviators found this to say: although he was 46 when he went to Pensacola and won his wings, he caught on fast, for an aviation ancient. Since then barrel-chested, rough-&-ready Jake Fitch has served only in aviation jobs: he commanded the seaplane tenders Wright, Langley, served in the carrier Saratoga; commanded the carrier Lexington, and was aboard her as a Rear Admiral when she was torpedoed in the Coral Sea.

Later, as commander of Aircraft, South Pacific Fleet, he bossed the Army, Navy, Marine and New Zealand flyers who turned back the Jap air fleets in the Solomons.

The Uneasy Side. But the off-record remarks were more hopeful than assured. They remembered that Jake Fitch was still commanding minelayers and destroyers when early birdmen like Jack Towers (now deputy commander in the Pacific under Admiral Chester Nimitz) and Marc Mitscher (the Navy's No. 1 carrier task-force commander in the Pacific) were briskly testing the wings of the weapon destined to revolutionize naval warfare.

Without maligning Jake Fitch, they were certain that his appointment indicated that the Navy was still sticking to sacred seniority. It looked as if the generally younger admirals who had been airmen from the start would have to wait their turns--at least so long as the battleship admirals hold the reins.

Said one airman, thoroughly mindful of the Navy's crack job in the Pacific: "It is still a fact that they have never quite forgiven the Wright brothers for inventing the airplane."

This week naval airmen heard a rumor about Marc Mitscher that had them quietly simmering. Wizened, solemn little Admiral Mitscher, who has been a naval airman since 1916, who commanded the carrier Hornet, "Shangrila" of the Tokyo raid, who commanded the carrier task forces which spectacularly raided Truk, Guam, Palau, is due--said the rumor--to be yanked out of the Pacific.

A new kind of chairwarming job-said rumor--is being prepared for him.

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