NOTES ON BRASS & BRAID

...But to get back to the splendid isolationism of Gen...

...Thus the message would go, but it would be marked "Confidential," so the*, lads in what is jocosely called "Army Intelligence," being officers and gentlemen would keep all this to themselves, just whispering it around their Washington clubs at the cocktail hour...

...I see that a committee to save the Navy from the Army has just been organized to fight unification of the armed forces...

...Please tell us all about where the ships are docked, and how many men they have aboard and have they any nets down in the harbor, as we are planning a sneak attack on them around the first part of December...

...It was a pip...

...A case of local lad making good...

...Of course if they wish peacetime conscription on us, and we let the Big Shots play around with the atomic bombs much longer, we are as surely headed for a dictatorship of some kind as we are for another war...

...They were stuck off there on an island, with nobody much but boresome sugar tycoons and tycoonesses to play with, and nobody from home was telling them anything...

...If you have ever depended for your news upon a Boston paper, you will realize in what complete ignorance of current events we are sweating out this prolonged Noreaster...

...who was in charge of decoding the messages of the Japanese about their plans for sneaking up on us, as our military boss for this area...

...The rest is silence...

...I'm here on an island too, and nobody tells me anything either...

...I hasten to say that my reason for not joining is not because I want a military dictatorship...

...Now and then, to be sure, a boat does manage to get across five miles of storm-lashed waters which separate us from Cape Cod, bringing Boston papers...

...And we are in close touch with the opinions of the Boston editors that all unions are composed of goons, racketeers and panders...

...Sherman Miles, (how come they left Grant and Pershing out, when they were naming him...

...Whatever else the Pearl Harbor investigation has done, besides providing the Republican Party with some top campaign material, it has thrown a clarifying light, into the dark and windy places of the professional military mind...

...Kimmel must have felt out there in Pearl Harbor...

...My last contact with said minds was when I was a buck private (later a top sergeant) in the U. S. Engineers, sneaking up on the Hindenberg Line, via Camp Humphreys (now Camp Belvoir) in World War I. After spending a day with a pick and shovel engineering some dandy latrines, I would totter back to my tent to be summoned by the captain of our company to do his paper work for him on a Corona typewriter with the "e" key missing...

...Besides they apparently didn't get to know each other and if, by chance, one of them heard something, he wouldn't tell the other about it...

...It gave all the instructions for blowing up the Pacific fleet, but keep this under your brass hat, won't you ?" There was a sort of a leak to Hawaii from Washington, but Adm...

...THE committee I would like to join would be a Committee for Giving the Country Back to the People...

...As all the paper work he had ever done consisted of writing down orders for Old Grand Dad, the elaborate blanks which he had to fill out at the end of each day got him so depressed that he was more bait for a psychiatrist than a symbol of martial grandeur...

...So I can well imagine the sense of isolation which Gen...

...Short and the Adm...

...It's about time we put our oar in and announced with Jefferson who echoed the words of Richard Humbold on the scaffold: "I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden...

...Besides which we have had a.four-day baby hurricane that has cut us pretty well off from all communication with what the islanders call "the continent...

...Miles, so he kept his eye out for spies, never letting Gen...

...SOME smart cookie in Miles's Army Intelligence office in Washington was busy reading the code messages from the Japanese military to their agents in' Honolulu...

...And it was nonsense that he was losing his mind, even his military mind...

...Hello, General, you should see the last Japanese message we decoded...

...Short in on the secret...

...I am a sucker for joining committees, but this is one committee I am going to duck, provided of course, I get an invitation...

...Of course we can find out the details about the trial for using the mails to defraud in which the just triumphantly elected Mayor of Boston is defendant, and we do know that we had Gen...

...Especially since they weren't on speaking terms...

...So when I wasn't typing out his reports, I was giving him'pep talks about not worrying over these nasty old reports, and how everyone gets low in his mind every now and then...

...The captain had somehow struggled through the eighth grade when he quit school to become a whiskey salesman, but he had high ranking relatives in the Army and when the war broke out, he sprang to arms full-panoplied as a captain...

...There's just a chance that we might stagger along for a few years with neither a military nor a naval dictatorship...

...One Roger Cutler, who is getting up the committee, has been sending telegrams to prominent folk asking them "to save the Navy and prevent military dictatorship...

...As a retired military character, may I suggest that before the next war we arrange a big cocktail party on some neutral ground at which the host will introduce the Admirals to the Generals, and the Intelligence Departments of both branches of the service to the brass ?I know that it will take the finesse of an Emily Post and the genius of an Elsa Maxwell to arrange such an affair, but it will be worth the trouble, if we can only persuade the boys to talk to one another, instead of singing under their breaths, "We know something you don't know, yah, yah, yah...

...Kimmel figured it was about sabotage, that is according to Gen...