ARMED FORCES: Asking for It

Few professional fighting men have sought martyrdom more insistently than gaunt, intense Captain John G. Crommelin, U.S.N. It was Airman Crommelin who set off the acrimonious Navy hearings last fall, encouraged an utterly unfounded charge of Air Force corruption in B-36 procurement, surreptitiously handed confidential Navy correspondence to the press, and obstreperously demanded a public court martial. Severely reprimanded and exiled to San Francisco last fall, Crommelin refused to be silent. Two or three times a week, from Reno to Los Angeles, before Rotary clubs and businessmen's luncheons, he defiantly reiterated his charges that the Navy was being "nibbled to death" by "Prussian Pentagon policies."

Last week Chief of Naval Operations Forrest Sherman brusquely ordered Crommelin to "refrain from public statements . . . which are critical of the Department of Defense." Defiantly, just one hour after receiving the order, he addressed the Park-Presidio Optimist Club; the next day, the San Francisco Business League. His pitch was the same but he had a new preamble to key passages: "I don't intend this as criticism . . . you can decide for yourselves."

Crommelin had the Navy in a spot. A disciplinary court martial would provide him with the rostrum and the martyrdom he seemed to want. But many once-sympathetic Navymen, embarrassed by his taunting evasion of discipline, heartily wished he would shut up—or get out.