BRASS TRACKS

The U.S. Navy has just spent a very busy week. Tuesday, last, it assemble a task group including two of its three remaining largest carriers and run them up and down off the Virginia Capes for the benefit of visiting congressmen and other important dignitaries. Ice cream was served, and official cameramen projected Warner Brother's new movie "Task Force."

On Thursday a group of attack transports staged an amphibious landing at South Boston. It was a fine show, with Marises and jet planes and underwater demolition teams; it knocked hell out of a public bathhouse, wounded a couple of junior officers, and killed a newspaper photographer.

These varied enterprises marked the latest Navy moves in its increasingly difficult publicity fight for a "reasonable appropriation." Last year, a highbrass conference in Key West decided that the three armed services would divvy up the defense budget almost equally, but ever since then, naval officers have had an increasing suspicion that their service was being cased out of its hallowed position as the nation's "first line of defense."

There has been considerable evidence to back them up. At Key West the Navy had clinched an authorization for a flush-decked 63,000 ton carrier, in a swap for giving up strategic bombing to the Air Force. But Secretary of Defense Louis. Johnson ordered the ship off the ways soon after he took office.

The Navy retaliated with a concentrated campaign against the Army's present service bomber, the B-36. A civilian employee named Cedric Worth drafted an "anonymous" letter, with the help of some interested friends, denouncing the B-36 as a slow and eminently vulnerable airplane. The letter also hinted that the awarding of the B-36 contracts had involved political skulduggery. Worth's letter was picked up by Congressman James Van Vandt, Pennsylvania, a Navy man himself, and aired before an investigating committee this summer. Most of its charges were neatly shot down by the B-36 men. And the Navy found that its operating budget was squeezing things to a point where some of the big Naval Shipyards; essential to the fleet's war mobilization plans, would have to close up shop.

Other troubles appeared. When Capt. John Crommelin, rated one of the best naval aviators in the business, tried to defend the Worth letter a few weeks ago "at the peril of my naval career," he was promptly moved lout of Washington to a job with the fleet. the white House announcement of atomic explosions in Russia, coupled with persistent rumors of 5000 mile-ranged rockets coming out of the Russian experimental stations on the Baltic, stimulated a drive in Congress for a bigger Air Force. With the present limited defense budget, naval officers fretfully equated this against smaller fleet.

Most military experts are beginning to feel that this attenuated naval force would be less than unfortunate. They point out that the Navy's light fundamentally centers around the question of who is going to fly out bombers from where. The Navy wants to stage them from carriers, and points to the wonderful mobility and endurance of its carrier task forces in the Pacific during the last war. The Air Force feels that this admitted flexibility of the task force is outweighed by the size limitations inherent in carrier planes, and the expense and vulnerability of the ships handling them.

The experts are backing up the Air Force. Almost all of the Navy's operations in the Pacific were tactical--knock-out-a beachhead-or-a-fleet affairs the carriers brought short-ranged planes up to where they could thoroughly work over their targets. In flying off planes which still have to light two or three-thousand miles to their targets, the required job in a lot of strategic bombing work, the carrier's real value, its ability to bring an airfield near the target, is severely cut.

The Navy still has plenty to do. Airbases and beachheads and land-armies have to be put ashore and supplied. Russia has 200 old reasonably good submarines which may someday become quite a headache. The establishment of an offshore radar picket line for spotting and knocking down approaching aircraft is another neat little job in itself. There is an increasing feeling that the fleet ought to spend more time worrying about these tasks, building up its anti-submarine forces and turning out specific anti-aircraft units like the fine new fast-living cruiser Worcester. There is an equally increasing feeling that it ought to finally bow gracefully out of the field of strategic bombing, make a little less noise, and get to work.