The Blind Eye

Before the war, Johnny Littler was a China coaster, sailing offshore and threading the tricky passages of the Yangtze. Through the war, he was one of the Royal Canadian Navy's ace navigators. On Atlantic convoy duty, said he, "the Admiral thought nothing of going to sleep while I took the squadron through the Smalls" (reefs at the entrance to Bristol Channel). With Littler as navigator, Canada's first cruiser, the Uganda, steamed 80,000 miles and never missed a rendezvous. Littler gave radar much of the credit, called it the most valuable aid he had.

Last week, Commander John Caldecott Littler sat in a naval courtroom at Halifax, an empty scabbard at his side, his sword lying crosswise on a table before the president of the court. As a result of last summer's collision between his destroyer Micmac and the freighter Yarmouth County (TIME, July 28), half a dozen charges had been brought against him. The most serious: he had hazarded his ship.

Almost to a man, officers and seamen of the Micmac stood by their short, wiry skipper. The fog into which he had raced at 26 knots, they said, had seemed like a mere wisp. Littler had used radar for eyes, and for once radar had proved to be blind. Radarmen said the fog might have caused an extremely rare phenomenon, shooting the radar waves upward so that a nearby target would be undetected. Pleaded Defense Counsel Roland Ritchie: "Is this man to be a martyr to this triumph of nature over science?"

One by one the lesser charges were thrown out, but the court would have no truck with the nature-over-science argument. Stiffly it found that radar was only "an additional aid to navigation." Littler's sword now pointed directly at him: "Guilty." He was removed from his command, reprimanded. Said a brother officer: "Johnny's had his chips."

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