Wait Until March

Before he quit this week, Munitions Board Chairman Hubert E. Howard (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) gave a terse summary of the state of industrial mobilization. Said he: "We have programed practically every nickel that Congress has voted . . . [Out of] the $30 billion Congress is voting for defense, some $14 billion is going for hard goods--guns, tanks, planes, electronics, etc. . . . The guys who are going to have to make the stuff know what is expected of them."

Actually it was not quite that simple. Many a U.S. manufacturer was still in the dark last week about what was expected of him, chiefly because the Pentagon has not yet totted up a complete list of all the things it wants. As part of the Munitions Board's general mobilization plan (TIME, Sept. 4), thousands of sample contracts had been sent to companies, to go into effect when & if actual orders were placed. But many companies with such contracts did not yet know 1) whether they would get orders or 2) how much of their facilities would have to be used if they did. Meanwhile, many a businessman was going ahead with business as usual. Those who did get orders took them in their stride largely because they were for products they had been making only a few years ago. There was little waste of time and men, as in World War II.

Bazooka Boom. Thus with no fanfare last week, the Ford Motor Co., which made airplane engines in World War II, took on the job of making Pratt & Whitney Wasp Majors for B-36s in Chicago's vast onetime Tucker plant. To boost GR-S synthetic rubber production up to a maximum of 760,000 tons a year, Goodyear and Goodrich rubber companies were asked by RFC to reopen the last two idle rubber plants. And where quick action has been needed, U.S. industry has jumped to the job. Example: to fill the U.S. Army's need for 3-5-in. superbazookas to stop the Korean Reds' T-34 tanks, Ohio's Aeronca Mfg. Corp., which had been making tank killers for only four months, recently tripled production (see cut).

Despite the fact that most arms contracts were still in the planning stage, there were already ominous signs of production trouble, notably in the aircraft industry. Since it has the biggest batch of orders ($5 billion), the scramble for materials was already shooting prices up. Machine tools were up 10% and rubber goods 15%. Warned the planemakers: the appropriations for the planes now on order were no longer big enough to pay for them.

Hit Harder? The fast price rises and sudden shortages of materials made plain that the armament load would hit civilian production much harder than expected when the arms actually began to roll out in the next six months. (Nickel was already so short that some automakers were talking about going back to painted "chrome work" as in early World War II days.)

Last week, U.S. Steel's Ben Fairless cocked an eye at the growing shortage of steel, despite near-capacity production, and at the Administration estimates that only 4,000,000 tons would be needed for the military by next summer. Said Fairless: "Military demands might go as high as three times that figure by next July 1; so let's be pessimistic about it and put the Government down for 12 million tons."

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