Happy Days in WPB

The War Production Board offices, where gloom has often been thick enough to cut with a machine tool, were aglow last week with broad smiles, good digestions, men humming in the halls.

Seven months--and some new men--had made a startling difference. In May, WPB had been forced to cancel war contracts right & left: the planning had got out of hand, the program was overexpanded, raw-material supply was in a black mess. WPB and the Army were in a knock-down fight for authority.

Last week WPB again began to cancel contracts--with a difference. This time WPB knew what it wanted and where it was going: the shifts were designed to balance the program, to smooth the flow of parts into finished armaments, to speed the offensive weapons the U.S. needs for the new kind of war it is fighting.

Vice Chairman Ferdinand M. Eberstadt, after three months on WPB, had his new "controlled materials plan," for allocating the nation's raw materials, well in hand. For the first time there was a concrete program of Army, Navy, Lend-Lease and civilian needs for 1943. Eberstadt also knew, better than ever before, how much material would be available. There was a good chance that supply and demand could be balanced.

Vice Chairman Charles Edward Wilson had emerged, through a "compromise" of the WPB-Army fight, as a bona fide production boss with the power to say yes and no. Under new authority he received last week he will survey Army & Navy production schedules, balance them against industrial capacity and materials supplies, make sure that they can and do get completed. These powers suited able Charles Wilson to a T.

Significantly, the Army also had what it chiefly wanted: the right to decide what materiel it needs and to deal directly with its contractors. Before a Senate Committee last week Lieut. General Brehon B. Somervell, the Army's aggressive Chief of the Services of Supply, was asked who had umpired the fight. "No one did," he replied. "It was just settled." Then how was it settled? "I don't know exactly," said General Somervell.

If the compromise worked as well as Washington hoped last week, men might soon have trouble saying exactly what the fight was even about. In retrospect, it may turn out to have been a quarrel over semantics.

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