When V-E Day Comes

Since the overoptimistic plans made after the U.S. Army's dash to Paris, Home Front Czar Jimmy Byrnes has determinedly kept the lid on talk of reconversion after V-E day. But last week, as U.S. soldiers whisked across the Rhine, the lid popped off. Out boiled a spate of reports that simmered down to one fact: if the war in Europe should end soon, reconversion would be confusion.

One reason was that when Jimmy Byrnes scotched all reconversion talk, he also scotched a lot of reconversion planning. Today the War Production Board is still in the dark about how many and what kinds of weapons the Army & Navy will need to lick Japan.

Last week the armed services were making an appraisal of their Pacific war needs and in the process trying to draw up a list of plants which can be freed for civilian manufacture after V-E day. Not until he has this information can Jimmy Byrnes draft an overall reconversion plan, a job that may well take another month.

Only then will U.S. industry get a substantial hint of how much its war production can be cut back on V-E day.

High Estimate. Lacking an overall plan, WPBsters fell back on private figures of their own. They estimated that U.S. war production may be cut back as much as 35% in the first year after Germany quits.

This was far higher than the gloomy estimates -- some as low as 10% -- which have floated about Washington.

The cutbacks would come slowly. Once WPB had believed that big-scale reconversion would get under way within three months after the war ended in Europe.

Now WPB put the time at six months or longer. Once WPB had tacitly agreed to new cars -- 2,000,000 a year -- after V-E day. Now it was significantly silent on any carmaking.

The fact was that WPB had no intention of freeing industry at one sweep from its tight web of controls. Instead the controls will be lifted a strand at a time. This decision was made when it became plain that no one man knew how many U.S. soldiers in Europe would have to be completely re-equipped before they were transferred to the war in the Pacific.

High Production. The Army, which had considered leaving all of its equipment in Europe and sending out new tanks and guns to the Pacific, quietly dropped that plan; the Senate's Mead Committee sharply reminded the Army that Congress would not stand for it.

Nevertheless, much of the equipment in Europe will be of little help against Japan.

Before it can be shipped, it must be inventoried and repaired, which will take months. Meanwhile, troops sent to the Pacific from the U.S. and Europe will have to be supplied with new weapons. Thus, most U.S. factories may be kept running full blast until the Army can start supplies flowing from Europe.

Home-Front Conscience. The man who may well have a deciding vote on reconversion is Major General Lucius du Bignon Clay, 47, the bushy-browed Grey Eminence of Jimmy Byrnes's office. A West Pointer, General Clay was one of the Army's top engineers when World War II came.

Named director of materiel in the Army

Service Forces, he soon became its prize troubleshooter. Example: when the Army's supply lines kinked at Cherbourg, Clay crossed the Atlantic to unkink them. In one day he doubled the supplies shipped to the front, quintupled them before he left. In the production "crisis" last December, the White House moved General Clay into Jimmy Byrnes's office, gave him vast, if vague, powers to make sure that the armed forces get what they want.

General Clay has become the military's conscience pricker of the Home Front. In any decision on reconversion, General Clay will probably be on the side of such Cromwellians as Under Secretary of War Bob Patterson and Lieut. General Somervell. They want a tough, all-out war against Japan with a minimum of reconversion. Last week theirs were the voices WPB had to hear as it prepared for the fearsome job of refitting the U.S. production machine for the knockout blow against Japan. That blow would not be delivered in one swift assault; it might be many long months before it was struck. Meanwhile, the U.S. would go on living in a war economy that would be eased only a little after Germany ran up the white flag.

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