Lest We Forget

World War II had caught the U.S. repeating many a blunder and folly from World War I. This week, in a summing-up report, the Senate's Mead Committee pointed to the worst of them, hoped they would not be repeated again.

The report spared no one. Its first bad example was an old favorite: the $135,000,000 Canol oil pipeline project in Canada and Alaska. The report charged that Lieut. General Brehon B. Somervell Army Supply Chief, had ordered the pipeline built on the basis of a "wholly inadequate study" and had continued its construction in "disregard of repeated warnings by experts." Then it laid into Fleet Admiral Ernest King. He had "used the high office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the claim of military secrecy for the purpose of preventing the Congress and the people from discontinuing a costly blunder by a fellow officer who was unwilling to admit his mistake."

Medal Winner. The committee went after other high officers. It cited "the decoration with the Legion of Merit of a colonel in the Engineer Corps who had so badly mismanaged the only source of replacement parts for engineers' equipment in the world that the War Department had to send in a special team to clean up the depot." And it ridiculed a general who explained that "he located a hospital in a swamp because he rode over the land on horseback in winter and didn't notice any mud."

The weaknesses of military administration, said the committee, were nowhere more apparent than in the procurement of new equipment. "When the Army decided to create a great tank plant on a wheatfield in the outskirts of Detroit to be operated by the Chrysler Corp., it was not even able to furnish worthwhile drawings of the tanks it wanted. . . ."

The committee was agreed that "more businesslike methods" in the armed forces would have ended the war sooner. But it put a goodly share of the blame on the Administration.

Control Loser. "The War Production Board in the early days had practically no control over the War Department and the Navy Department, both of which ran roughshod over the entire war production program. . . . Its Chairman [Donald Nelson] found himself beset . . . by an oil czar, a coal czar, a rubber czar, a manpower czar. . . . To correct this situation an Office of War Mobilization was created. . . . This Office failed to act as a directing and managing organization, but served rather as a referee waiting for disputes among various agencies to arise."

For U.S. industry in general the committee had words of praise. "With a few glaring exceptions, all of American industry put itself completely at the service of the Government . . . and even went far ahead of the Governmental agencies in showing its own initiative to produce the weapons of war."

To prevent more bungling and shortsightedness, the committee recommended a good dose of efficiency for the armed forces and the Government. Specifically, it called for: a national stockpile of vital raw materials, acquisition of strategic overseas bases now being abandoned, an expanded, more efficient intelligence agency, an up-to-date plan for the immediate mobilization of U.S. industry.

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