ARMED FORCES: Change at NATO

Retiring next March as U.S. representative to the Military Committee and the Standing Group of NATO: Army General J. Lawton ("Lightning Joe") Collins, 59, successful as a combat com mander in Guadalcanal and Western Europe, less successful as Army Chief of Staff (1949-53) and as special U.S. representative to strife-torn South Viet Nam (1954-55).

Slated to succeed Collins at NATO: Air Force Lieut. General Leon W. Johnson, 51, until recently head of the Continental Air Command. Johnson was born in Columbia, Mo., graduated from West Point ('26). He was one of the first four flying officers of the famed U.S. Eighth Air Force in World War II, rising by January 1943 to command the 44th Bomb Group ("The Flying Eightball") of Liberators in the first (August 1943) attack against the Rumanian oil refineries at Ploesti. Despite alerted antiaircraft and fighter defenses, the Liberators pressed home low-level attack through oil fires and intense smoke, wrecking the refineries. Johnson got the Congressional Medal of Honor for his "gallant courage, brilliant leadership and superior flying skill." Thickset and mustachioed, Johnson has served seven years of his career in Britain ("Almost long enough to get my first papers''), commanding the U.S. Third Air Force. His quiet demeanor impressed the British, as it did his own men. One of them made a comparison: "LeMay scares the hell out of you when he finds you're not doing something right, but Johnson is so fatherly that you sometimes feel even worse—as though you've stolen a quarter from a church plate."